hacienda view

I go out walking daily, regardless of the weather. I walk by the sea, mostly, but do have a shorter more local walk, through the park, if the weather is especially inclement. I walk for exercise, for the fresh air, to clear my head, to give myself thinking time, creative energy, and to just 'be' in nature and monitor the seasonal changes that can easily be missed during a fast walk to the station, or a struggle back from the supermarket with an overladen bag. And while I walk I sing to myself, under my breath, sometimes more loudly if I've checked behind and know that no one else will hear me. Sometimes one song will lodge in my head for weeks and become the oft repeated soundtrack to my walks. Often that can be just a snatch of verse and the chorus of a song, stuck on repeat, which, after a while becomes annoying, as any song stuck on repeat would annoy, and I have to make a conscious effort to shift it. Mostly this can be achieved by simply replacing it with another song, with a stronger hook. Sometimes though, this repetition of a song is a deliberate move on my part to fix the words and tune in my head, 

Recently, to avoid the attack of the partial soundbite, I decided to make a list of all the songs that I know all the words to, and hang the list inside the coat cupboard, so as I'm dressing to leave the flat I can scan said list and pick a song to sing en route to wherever I'm going. I have to say that I surprised myself that I could note down the titles of 38 songs that I can sing in their entirety. And this especially pleased me for two reasons.

Firstly, variety. I can now change up my walking playlist more often, every day if I wish. Secondly, I have proof(ish) that my mind hasn't entirely turned to porridge. If I can remember the lyrics to that many songs then I can't have creeping dementia, can I? I do have a slight misgiving that might prove that last point untrue, and that is the fact that almost all the songs date from my adolescence. On the one hand, I might argue, I've retained the lyrics, twinned with the melodies, for up to 50 years in some cases, which I tell myself is quite an achievement, especially when I consider that trying to recall other facts from that era can have very patchy results. But I'm aware, because I knew someone who did the work, that care homes will invite musicians and singers in to entertain their old folk by specifically leading them in songs from the old days with surprisingly positive results. It seems as though music and lyrics have a way of lodging in our brains, regardless of how foggy they become, and can be recalled when other memories cannot.  So, perhaps remembering songs from the 'old days' isn't the concrete proof of alertness that I'm hoping for, and in future I need to try harder to learn some new (to me) tracks.

But things being what they are currently, when I scan the 'Songs I Can Sing' list, I realise that almost without exception the songs are ballads, nearly half the list are from film soundtracks, and also several artists have scored several titles on the list including Patsy Cline, Elton John, David Essex (don't judge), and Linda Lewis. Who? I'm glad you asked. Back in the early 1970s Linda Lewis scored several chart hits with songs like Rock-a-Doodle-Doo, and It's In His Kiss (later a hit for Cher as the Shoop Shoop Song). She had an incredible voice, it was sweet and often sounded like a young girl's - which is perhaps why one of her albums was titled Not a Little Girl Anymore, just so that everyone would get the message. She could also hit some seriously high notes, she had a five octave vocal range. I was a big fan of her music, and always thought she was incredibly underrated. Now, imagine how thrilled I was when she, one day, walked into my place of work. I was maybe 18 at the time and a sales assistant in a hi-fi store and she came in to buy some cassette tapes, and I managed to serve her without embarrassing myself by gibbering or blushing, and then I asked a colleague to ask her for her autograph before she left. Apparently she was really surprised and touched that someone had recognised her, and happily signed her name for me. So she was both sweet and humble too. Her appearance that day was a big deal for me at the time. It was back in the day when people who appeared on television were considered real stars. They were rare and glamorous beings, and didn't usually just turn up on the high street. She was a bona-fide pop-star too. I'd heard her on the radio a lot, she often appeared on Top Of The Pops,  for heaven's sake, the gold-standard proof she was a star, at least in my eyes. And if none of this is impressing you then I'll just mention that she sang vocals on Bowie's Aladdin Sane album, and also worked with Cat Stevens, Cockney Rebel, and Joan Armatrading. So she certainly had credibility in the music business.

I owned a couple of (vinyl) albums by Lewis, but her autograph, on a folded slip of paper, lived inside my copy of my favourite of her albums, Hacienda View ('79). This was that rarity for me, an album on which I loved every single track, and she covered a lot of musical genres on it from opera to ballad, show tune, 40s chanteuse, some contemporary covers, and a self-penned song. There was a lot going on, but the stand out track for me was one called Beggars and Kings, a moody, atmospheric ballad that opens at a funeral, and talks of murder and revenge, and how death catches up with us all in the end, regardless. Not the most cheery song then, but it is haunting and Lewis sings it beautifully. I listened to that song until I wore the grooves thin, and of course it lodged in my brain. And while I still know several of the songs from that album by heart, it's Beggars that I sing, to myself, most often. But I have sung it publicly too, a few times, to audiences. It really lends itself to being sung a cappella. I tell myself that when I, one day, get the call for that big audition, this is the song that I'll choose to perform.

I wax lyrical about this album and yet I haven't owned a copy of it since about 1990. That's the approximate year that I parted company with all my vinyl albums. Their sleeves had become increasingly tatty and worn, as I'd moved home many times by that point, and I'd long since ceased to be able to play vinyl albums anyway since I longer owned a turntable. I'd moved, as most people had, through owning cassette tapes and on to listening to my music on CDs by that point. And I'd long stopped listening to many of the artists that had earlier been my favourites anyway; musical tastes had changed, generally, and my tastes had changed along with them.

It's only as I've gotten older that I've returned to listening to some of the music of my youth, though not all of it. Much of the stuff I'd bought back then was crap, embarrassing rubbish that I'd never admit to having owned, but some of the music has endured, and certain tracks have gone on to be considered classic. Also, some of the artists who I loved in my teenage years are, remarkably, still making music to this day. Linda Lewis amongst them, I'm pleased to say.

Over the years, I've slowly spent time rebuilding my music collection, most now, of course, bought as digital tracks and albums. I might not buy the whole album, if I'm no longer that keen to own it, but may just cherry pick a couple of favourite tracks from it to download. Recently I went in search of Hacienda View online. I can't really believe that I hadn't made a concerted effort to do this previously. I think that I maybe kept an eye out for it, along with certain others, when I rummaged through the CD section in a music store or charity shop, but it had never turned up, and it wasn't until I was compiling my list of 'Songs I Can Sing' that I decided that it would be great to hear the whole album again, so I tried to stream it. And I couldn't. It doesn't exist on any streaming service. And neither does it exist on CD, I discovered, except in Japan, the only region where it was ever released in that format. This would certainly explain why I'd never turned it up in a car boot sale.

I'm genuinely surprised. I thought that pretty much everything was available on the internet, and I certainly imagined any music that you might want to listen to is available at the click of a button, on Spotify or Apple Music or any one of a number of other streaming services. I mean, it must have been a major undertaking to transfer music previously recorded on vinyl onto a compact disc and press ten thousand copies, create new artwork, and physically distribute those discs to thousands of shops, but I'm not sure what, technically, would be now so difficult about transferring music from master tapes into a digital format for distribution across the internet. But then I'm not a music producer/engineer, or the boss of a major record label.

I've made it sound as though all the music that made up Hacienda View has disappeared from the world, never to be heard again, and of course that's not the case. All the tracks that appeared on the album are available to stream as part of Best Of or Essential collections, but they are dispersed across several playlists, so there's no easy way to approximate the original album experience by listening to the songs in sequence, and besides I still wouldn't get the original artwork. I could buy the vinyl album on eBay, but that's a pointless exercise since I couldn't play it, although I would have the artwork. I could maybe look into buying the CD as an import from Japan, but whenever I think to search for it there is never a copy available, and imports tend to be hellish expensive. I think it's certainly a shame that the album, as it once existed, isn't available anymore. I think it deserves an audience; original fans like myself would return to it and new fans could discover it and enjoy the music and Linda's performances.

This post started with some thoughts on how I employ music to help protect against fading memory, and ended with the realisation that one of my favourite ever albums exists (with some dramatic licence) only in my memory at the moment as I'm unable to source a physical copy of it. But I do still retain the words and tunes to several of the songs it contains and will continue to sing them to myself on my daily walk, and that will help to keep the songs alive for me, and hopefully keep my memory sharp.