(1530) Later than mid-afternoon.
21. We had a Seekers number earlier
I was planning not to run this one for specific reasons.
Firstly, it was Judith Durham leaving the group, which of course broke them up. There were the New Seekers and decades later, another farewell concert but it was really over this night below. Many of us thought it was just ambition on the part of JD but reading her tale, her Christian spirituality, which she said was in all her songs … I was thinking that with Another You … it made sense for her.
Second reason was the danger of tempting the metaphysical by playing a song with lyrics like these below … they’re intense and sad, they might portend, I’m hoping not. There’s too much finality for mine.
Thirdly, they were never really my style, that sort of Peter, Paul and Mary folk, a bit like straight country music … Southern country rock, yes, some of it was good. Yes, her voice was superb, no one’s arguing with that.
But the main reason I do not like listening to this song is it was from 1965 through to 1968 … it was mega but it included some incidents … one I’ve written about before. I’ve mentioned that for some decades, I was spending the middle of the decade in Oz, the ends in Britain. This was from a southern summer, maybe 66 or 67, maybe 68 and it involved a girl I restablished contact with a year ago now … we write to each other now … it was at the beach during the holidays somewhere then.
One evening, the beach was very quiet as usual … were this a landscape picture, it would look like this … the wide, sloping beach, with fairy lights would occupy the right third of the picture, the Bay filled the rest, bobbing boats. It’s dusk. Maybe 500 yards away, way over to the right, off picture up above the beach, is a carnival, an actual carnival with rides, a stage, the usual things.
Picture behind that a pier, one of the longest on that Bay, jutting out at rightangles to the shore, people on it, lights. The carnival is in a space near the start of the pier … across the main road behind that are the seaside entertainments, including the fish n chip shop I worked at.
We were trudging through the sand to get there … a few of us. The wind was fickle and every minute or so, the sound through the tannoys set up this side of the carnival but still distant was wafting back this way, then dying, then wafting back.
And yes … the song was the one below. It felt almost surreal even back then … total stillness apart from the fickle song. We had no idea whatever that the innocence of those days was also closing. It was also the end of our summertime … the whole thing was combining in a way I could not envisage that evening.
Yes we had fun at the carnival … my fave dodgem cars and the cha-cha ride … out in the wide world though, the ladylike innocence JD had given the world was about to be dirtied, drugged, the music far darker by 1968/9, so many sicko bands appearing, looking like something from a horror show. And this girl I correspond with now … she’d been there on that beach with me. That evening maybe not, maybe the following year. Her letter from that summer sits in a packet of letters two yards from me right now. Shan’t get it out again this evening.
Anyway, here tis:
20. Two points of view
19. Moosh revisited
18. The cost of supporting one’s people
17. Is he still alive?
16. The DT TR situation