tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-552611225113381497.post9106850350229875882..comments2023-09-06T02:38:57.320-07:00Comments on Music Sounds Better With Two: Psychedelia Has A Right To Children: Keith West: " Excerpt From 'A Teenage Opera'"Lenahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04912525192415808946noreply@blogger.comBlogger1125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-552611225113381497.post-10433663609400728262014-10-03T21:19:35.461-07:002014-10-03T21:19:35.461-07:00Nice write-up.
This song has always dug away righ...Nice write-up.<br /><br />This song has always dug away right to my heart: something of the same melancholy as the late-period Look at Lifes (disappearing butterflies, amassing litter). Or the shot in a location I've known all my life, of a steam train on regular service next to a modern-style road sign. The "first jukebox" Dennis Potter saw in 1961 now - as a cypher, as a messenger - having conquered its entire space. The sense of escape felt by the younger residents of Akenfield (an oral history taken exactly as this song was charting).<br /><br />There's a sense that this period marks the long tail of 1914 and its immediate aftermath (a sense shared, interestingly, by someone who had just burnt his Bible at his Cambridge boarding school, and now cannot let anyone forget his shame); the final chapter in a much older flight (I think of Henry Williamson, permanently damaged by that war and driven by it into terrible, destructive politics, responding somehow despite himself to Mike Heron's "subjective, wild, poetic songs" played to him by a young admirer: there are twin romanticisms here).<br /><br />Part of the reason why Mark Wirtz could do such a thing was precisely his foreignness, his non-Britishness; he could, as has so often been the case, sense a romance and beauty in what British pop audiences were rushing to escape (few at this point could see anything but excitement and release in the concept of the supermarket: things which now cause deep anguish and fear were unequivocally celebrated by the 1960s' mass mainstream - and what did Ian MacDonald say about that mainstream being the real avant-garde of the period, a far deeper break from the past than the counterculture which spoke back to Williamson - Henry, not Robin or Harry - and Richard Jefferies?). But at the same time, that outsider's eye stops it being too mawkish, too Mailish.<br /><br />A useful comparison, from your double use of the word "going", might be with Philip Larkin's soon-come poem 'Going Going', whose mean-spirited melancholy this song very cleverly avoids by putting its faith in the future, in the idea that whatever replaces this world will have its own merits, its own virtues. It may actually have been an influence (though not one I'd have acknowledged as such, in my callow youth) on my own *interpretation* of ruralism, in that respect - as much so as the stuff which came a couple of years later which consciously *tried* to do that, and didn't really do hit singles.Robin Carmodyhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05825645880870474801noreply@blogger.com