As I stride tentatively towards my 77th birthday, it’s beginning to look like I will live forever, which makes me wish I had stopped paying those crippling life insurance policy payments years ago.
The only sign of ageing that affects me so far is what used to be called Writer’s Cramp but I suppose must be referred to nowadays as Keyboard Fatigue or possibly QWERTY Arthritis. Which is why I have been trying my hand recently at an even shorter form of writing than these erratic jottings you are kind enough to decipher each week.
It started with a kiss — no, wait, that’s a Hot Chocolate 1982 classic written by lead singer Errol Brown, now regrettably late as well as great.
My own much more recent songwriting career started when I was peeling onions, which perhaps explains why the first lyric I ever composed began with the words “Men don’t like to talk about emotions, they run a mile when they see a tear in a woman’s eye.” Little touch of self-delusion there, because of course the tears were in my own eyes.
At almost four score years, I was coming to the slightly predictable end of long- (or even short-) form humorous journalism in newspapers ranging from my home town’s Dundee Courier in Scotland to Qatar’s Weekly Gulf Times and my retirement country’s Cyprus Weekly. With the odd foray into the Gisborne Herald in New Zealand, The Munich Eye in Germany and the South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, where I experienced the prelude to Covid known as SARS. Not a fun experience.
Recent years as a weekly columnist with The Leader have been much more leisurely, and musical fun was added when I got in touch with Rychey Music (UK) and its multi-talented owner Rich, a musician, singer, composer and producer. Being almost tone-deaf I am fortunate that he can use his musical inventiveness to turn my prose lyrics into something immeasurably easier on the ears. Onions mostly without tears.
Always a drifter, I seem to have drifted somehow into Country and Western lyrics with titles like ‘Saddle Sore’ — the cowboy equivalent of Writer’s Cramp — ‘Wagon Train’ (‘Elopin’ and Hopin’) and ‘Long Dreamer’ – how could I resist setting that in Dundee, Alabama? Sung by a real cowboy, Donny Sawyer!
More conventional songs, such as “Men Don’t Like to Talk about Emotions” and “The Ballad of Gare Saint-Lazare” (“Me and the girl with the Fender guitar, we were born at the Gare Saint-Lazare…”) now include a new release, ‘Old Amsterdam Dreams’ — “There’s nothing to match it, I defy any man, not to glory in Old Amsterdam.” I can never wait to hear the music, even if I am tone-deaf.
These songs can be found, plus videos, on YouTube or Bandcamp under Rychey Music, all a long way from listening to records in booths in music shops in 1957 before spending most of my ten shilling (50p) pocket money on a Bakelite disc of Elvis singing “All Shook Up” with a B-side rendition of “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin.” Which is more or less where we came in, isn’t it?
David Aitken
