Sunday Morning Coming Down

You’ll excuse me, I hope, if this morning’s post is not quite the usual fare you get here of a Sunday morning. It’s a lot longer than usual, for a start. I’d recommend you get comfy and a cuppa before you emark on reading this.

Any of you who have visited these shores over the past few weeks will know the reason for the absence of any new posts, until I popped my head above the parapet on Friday, and so the first thing I want to do is to thank each and every one of you who were kind enough to send me messages of condolence and sympathy. They were massively appreciated not just by me, but by my family, especially my Mum who, just like my Dad when you all previously wished him well on his birthday, was blown away by the kindness of – let’s face it – strangers. It just goes to prove that, whatever else is going on in the world, this little corner of the internet, which we’ve cultivated for so many years, is a place where kind people interact and support each other through tough times. So, thank you all.

So. Dad. Where do you start writing about someone who, until 23rd May 2024, had been an ever-present in your life? Someone who played a pretty large part in bringing you into the world? And brought you up, with all of the gravitas that brings, teaching you right from wrong?

Here. 15:00 on Thursday 23rd May 2024. I’m working from home, and I go into a video meeting with my line manager. I have my phone close to hand; usually on silent during the day, but today I have the sound on. This is normally frowned upon in the working environment, even if that working environment doubles up as one of the rooms I live in. I explain to my boss that I’m waiting for an update from my Mum, about my Dad, who has been in hospital for two or three weeks, but in the past week alone the news had veered from “He’s doing really well, and we think he can be discharged soon”, to “He’s complaining of stomach pains, hasn’t got any appetite, and what little we’ve managed to get him to eat is coming straight back up again, so we’re going to keep him in while we do a few checks” back to “We’ve done some scans and an X-ray, can’t find anything wrong with him, so we’ll be discharging him at the end of the week.” And so it was when my Mum rocked up at the hospital that day.

At 15:22, a notification flashes up on my phone, a message sent to the family’s WhatsApp group from my Dad’s phone. Even if I hadn’t been waiting for a message, this would have piqued my interest, as Dad never used WhatsApp, I think put off by the time he thought he was messaging just me to ask me when his wedding anniversary was, but accidentally sent it to the family’s group, which pleased my Mum no end.

I open the message, which reads: “Mum calling from Dad’s bed. I have no Wifi signal on my phone. I think you should start preparing for the worst.”

I tell my boss I have to go. He tells me not to worry and to do what I have to do.

What I do is send a message to my brother; he lives further away from the hospital than I do: “Not sure if you’ve seen Mum’s message. If we need to get there asap, are you able to pick me up en route?”

Logistics sorted, I call my Mum, try to reassure her that we’ll be there as soon as we can. I throw some bits into an overnight bag and wait, trying to think of something constructive I can do, other than checking the FindMe app on my phone to see how far away my brother is.

Mum is also tracking our progress. At 17:08, a text from Mum: “I see your lift is almost with you. Thought you were going to be too late but Dad is hanging in there.”

“Tell him we said not to go anywhere just yet…or he won’t get a favourable tribute on the blog!”

Minutes later, my brother has collected me, and we’re hurtling towards the hospital. We have 6Music playing loud in the car. My brother explains that it was a good job I messaged him straight after Mum had, as he’d seen Mum’s message flash up but hadn’t read it, but when I messaged him too, he realised something was up.

We’re about half way there, about 20 minutes away, when I get a text from Mum. For some reason, the time of the text has not been recorded on my phone. I read it to my brother. It doesn’t take long. There are just two words to relay.

“Too late.”

6Music is swiftly turned off. I reply to my Mum: “Ah shit. We’ll be there for you asap.”

We drive in silence for a while. Eventually, I venture: “Shall we listen to some Kris Kristofferson…?”

“I was just about to say the same thing,” my brother replies, locating a Best of… album and pressing shuffle.

Within moments, KK’s growly tones are reverborating around the car, we’re both singing along. I can’t speak for my brother, but I know that I’m hoping the super-loud volume and stirring singing are masking the tears.

******

Regular readers will know that Dad loved Kris Kristofferson, and that love has been passed on to my brother and I. Mum and Dad went to see him a few years ago. I say a few, this would have been when they lived in Ireland, from whence they returned a little over 10 years ago, so y’know, more than just a few years, I guess. They’d moved back to the sleepy little market town where they had grown up, met, and got married.

I’d seen KK a year or two earlier than they did, and both Dad and I were of the same view: go see him whilst he can still remember the songs we love, and is capable of performing them properly. If you’ve ever seen the footage of KK playing Glastonbury in 2017, you may recall what a sad sight it was: if he could remember how a song started, he couldn’t remember how it ended, and vice versa. The middle bits were, well, fine. Johnny Depp had joined him on stage for a song, you can see from KK’s face that he had no idea who he was.

He wasn’t quite as bad as that on the occasions that we saw him, but you could see how things were progressing. One of Dad’s favourite anecdotes was how, when KK stopped mid-song, words lost, my Dad shouted out the next line – “…someone frying chicken!…” – which prompted KK to pick the song up from the right point, but not before he offered a “Thanks, man” in my Dad’s direction.

You’ll know the song from that lyric, I think. It’s the song which this series is named after. Here, appropriately, is a live version, recorded in 2013, at my favourite venue for live music, Union Chapel, Islington, That London:

Kris Kristofferson – Sunday Morning Coming Down (Live at Union Chapel)

And, that, believe it or not, even though my brother had put the album on shuffle as we drove, was the first song that came on. He always liked to have control of the music, did Dad. As far as he was concerned, if he was in control of the car, it was only right that he was also in charge of the car stereo. It seemed he wasn’t ready to relinquish that just yet.

He loved cars and he loved driving – here’s a photo of him from the late 70s/early 80s with his first ever company car:

My brother and I love that photo, but Dad could never understand the appeal. I’m not sure I can explain it either – maybe it’s how proud he looks, despite his efforts to look casual and cool in his pose; maybe it’s because the object of his affection is a Vauxhall Cavalier; maybe it’s the fact he’s got a fag on the go, I dunno.

Anyway, after he took early retirement from his job as an engineer around 1992, he set up a driving school. He taught me to drive after I’d (finally) graduated, whilst he was still training for the necessary qualifications to permit him to teach. It was a reciprocal deal: he was teaching me, and in return I was teaching him how to teach utter incompetants. As it turned out, I was his first pupil to take their test; when I passed, I told him to take out an advert in the local paper, boasting about his 100% pass record. “But what if someone rings up, asks me how many people have taken their test, and I have to say ‘one’?” he asked me. “It doesn’t matter,” I told him, “you’ve already got them on the phone, just tell them you want to maintain your record for as long as possible!” He never took out that ad, but he did run his driving school for several years, very succesfully.

Before he got really ill, Dad liked little better to while away the time by shutting himself in his office, where he would sit at his PC, playing Spider Solitaire and listening to tunes on Windows Media Player. My brother and I would often try to explain to him what a rubbish way to listen to songs Media Player was, encouraged him to try iTunes, but he was having none of it. Media Player was what was on his PC when he bought it, so it must be good, he reasoned. Plus, it was free (we always suspected, but he never vocalised). He stuck with it, regardless.

But over the past few years, he’d discovered the delights of making playlists on Spotify, which he’d found he could play in the car, via his phone. Whenever I was a passenger, one would be playing, and he’d try to test me, see if I could work out who a certain song was by, or what the subject matter was. More recently, illness meant that he had to stop driving, give up his driving licence, and although I knew that was probably the thing about his illness which annoyed him the most, he didn’t wait until the DVLA contacted him to renew his licence, he just knew the gig was up and didn’t bother attempting to renew it.

Now, with Mum driving and me relegated to the back seat (despite that prestigious first-to-pass honour, I rarely drive, have never owned a car, and my arthiritis means it’s probably not safe for me to be in charge of a hefty chunk of metal capable of doing 0-60 in seconds), he would clutch his iPhone, linked to the car stereo, Spotify playlist ticking along. Always the same sodding playlist, it seemed to me, starting from the same point, never on shuffle to offer up some semblance of variety. Either my Mum was so focused on driving (which she dislikes doing) or she had gotten so used to the same songs coming on in the same order she didn’t notice any more.

A few times recently, I’d accompanied them to some hospital appointments. Dad’s movement had become exceedingly difficult, and he needed help getting in and out of the car, which is where I came in. But it wasn’t just movement that Dad found difficult; he was also struggling with remembering things. Regular readers may recall that a short while ago I wrote a piece here about my Dad’s musical influence upon my brother and I, talking about Saturday drives to visit relatives and the music that accompanied them. You can read that here, should you so wish.

I wrote that because I wanted to write something which might jog his memory a little, and also to let him know what high esteem my brother and I held him in. He was in hospital when I published that, never to leave, but Mum reported that he’d read it and loved it. Job done.

Anyway: car playlists. On the first trip to hospital, this next song came on. And then it came on again. When it started playing for a third time in a row, I had to step in. “Dad, we’ve just had this one. Twice. Can you skip to the next track..?”

Bearing in mind what I’ve just said about memory, it now seems rather apt:

Willie Nelson – Always On My Mind

Prompted by my complaint, Dad sprang to life – “Sorry!” – skipped to the next song, which was this:

Don Williams – Amanda

Which was most welcome. Problem was, the next song was also Amanda by Don Williams. “Dad…” – “Sorry..!”

******

I think it’s essential, when trying to cope with tragedy, death and loss, that you try to find the light amongst the darkness, something or some things to make you smile no matter how sad you feel.

When we finally got to the hospital, my brother came up with two absolute zingers.

Zinger 1: Dad died the day after Rishi Sunak announced from his rain-sodden lectern that the General Election would be on July 4th. Brother: “Dad would do anything to avoid living under a Labour government.”

Zinger 2: As the three of us emerged from Dad’s room in the hospital, the staff, very sweetly, all came to us to offer their condolences. One said to me “You really look like your Dad”, to which my brother chipped in “I hope he doesn’t look like him right now….”

It wasn’t until I got embroiled in the admin of death that I had a proper chance to contribute to finding the light. Mum had printed off the direct debits and standing orders Dad had set up on his credit card. My job: go onto Dad’s laptop and cancel all of them. Don’t worry, there was nothing sinister or concerning. just Spotify, Microsoft 360, etc etc etc.

When you cancel your Spotify account, you’re asked why you’re leaving, and I couldn’t resist having a little fun:

Like I said, find the light in the darkness.

******

But, as both my brother and my cousin (Dad’s younger sister’s daughter, about 2 years my junior) beautifully said in their eulogies at the funeral: that’s not how I want to remember him. In case you were wondering, I chose not to speak at the funeral: my roles were 1) putting together a montage of photos of Dad to be shown mid-way through the service; 2) sourcing the music we, as a family, agreed to have playing at the service (more of this later); 3) sorting the images which were to appear on the screen during the eulogies; 4) preparing a playlist of songs which either Dad loved, or which reminded me/us of Dad, to be played at the reception. The venue for the reception was booked from 14:00 – 17:30; you will not be surprised to learn that, to fill those 3.5 hours, I had prepared a playlist which lasted 9 hours and 55 minutes. I’m listening to it as I write this. Still not heard Always On My Mind, not even once. All of the songs which feature in this post are on there though. Somewhere.

Both brother and cousin wanted to remember Dad how he was before he got ill, and so do I.

We never saw eye-to-eye on politics, me and my old man, although he was blissfully unaware of this for many years. I remember how horrified he was when I told him that I could never imagine a scenario where I would even consider voting Conservative. Discussing politics was subsequently banned in our house, although when the four of us met up at Christmas every year, sat round the kitchen table chatting and drinking after the food had been demolished, my brother and I would often get mischeivous and say something vaguely contentious (“Boris is a twat, isn’t he?”, for example), just to see if we could get a reaction out of him. It never worked: Mum would always step in and remind us of the House Rule.

But I don’t think that Dad ever realised that some of the records he owned when we were kids had shaped my polticial view. Records like this, as anti-capitalist as they come, which Dad had on a 7″ single:

Pete Seeger – Little Boxes

Or this, for my money the most heart-breaking anti-war record ever, which he also owned on 7″:

Kenny Rogers & The First Edition – Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love To Town

******

Back to those Saturday drives to visit the older relatives referred to in that previous post, which I’m not going to post a link to a second time, I’m not that vain). Whilst it’s true that they were soundtracked by my Dad’s cassette recordings of his albums, as the years passed, this changed, and my role in the production of the tapes developed. Come Sunday evening, when the Top 40 rundown was on the radio, I could be found hunched over a cassette recorder, fingers poised over the Record and Play buttons, C90 in situ, ready to capture any pop record which I liked that had made it into the charts (pretty much exclusively Shakin’ Stevens and Bucks Fizz, at the time). Dad must have spotted that and decided to utilise my talents to create a soundtrack for our Saturday jaunts. And so it was that on a Sunday, I would assume the position, as we listened to Family Favourites on Radio 2, and every now and then, Dad would look up from his Sunday newspaper and holler “This one!” in my direction. And so it was that I compiled mixtapes which included songs like this little oddity:

The Singing Postman – Have Yew Gotta Loight, Boy?

It wasn’t just whimsical Norfolk-based novelty records I was instructed to record, oh no. He also loved a bit of jazz. Not your John Coltrane or Miles Davis types. No – Dad liked Benny Goodman, Dave Brubeck, and this chap (and this song was a family favourite):

Fats Waller – Your Feet’s Too Big

There was also this, which Dad absolutely loved, and is probably the reason I don’t subscribe to the popular view that Andrew Lloyd-Webber – sorry, Sir Andrew Lloyd-Webber – is a talentless stain on the arse end of popular music. That said, ask me to name anything good he’s done in the post-Tim Rice collaboration years and I’ll struggle.

Anyway, this is magestic:

Julie Covington – Don’t Cry For Me Argentina

I could go on: there were other songs and artists I first heard because of this practice – Edith Piaf, some weird Hawaiian welcome song I’ve never managed to track down, Slim Dusty, loads more, far too many to mention in a post which has already gone on for long enough. But the point is this: emboldened, I once produced a mixtape to be played in the family car, where I has recorded links between songs, introductions. They were absolutely excrutiatingly bad (“And now ‘Any Dream Will Dooooo….”) and I thank God that no physical record of them still exists. But: emboldened I was. And here we are, me doing this, and you reading it,

******

Those Saturdays are an integral part of my memories of Dad. On the occasions where we remained at home, we would often sit and eat our Saturday night tea from trays on our laps in front of the telly – The Generation Game and The Two Ronnies, which dates this; if neither of these were on, we’d eat at the dining table, which the stereo lived near, along with all of Dad’s records (which I’ve now inherited and have been integrated into my own collection). Post-dessert, we’d all choose songs to play: 99.9% of these were from Dad’s collection. This soon developed into a contest between Dad and I, where I kept score about which song had got played the most.

The source of this contest was my Dad playing a record by Lonnie Donegan two weeks in a row. Without question, not just his favourite Donegan records, but one of his favourite records ever. This one (and I warn you, it’s not the usual skiffle tune associated with the name):

Lonnie Donegan – Seven Golden Daffodils

Every week, I would pick a different record by Lonnie, the same one every time, convinced I would overtake my Dad’s plays of Seven Golden Daffodils, not realising the foolishness of my quest, a bit like when the person charged with drying the dishes thinks they can finish before the one washing them. For every night, after I played the next song, Dad would – perhaps not immediately, often leaving it a goodly while to make me think I’d won, sometimes until the very last record of the night – play the daffodils record.

Lonnie Donegan – Puttin’ On The Style

I said 99.9% of the records that got played were from Dad’s stash, for every now and then he’d allow either me or my brother to bring a record down from our bedrooms. I remember throwing a proper tantrum when Dad accepted my brother’s submission – Rainbow’s Difficult to Cure (the track, not the album, which is basically Richie Blackmore playing Beethoven’s 9th). I needn’t have got so upset, it never got played again.

As the evening progressed and the wine flowed, if we were lucky, Dad would treat us to his Mick Jagger impression; he owned (I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction on 7″, but it was the B-side which would get played:

The Rolling Stones – The Spider and The Fly

For years he denied doing this impression, until one day we uncovered photgraphic evidence of it:

I didn’t say it was a particularly good impression….

******

Right, I’ve gone on for quite enough time for now. You can understand why I elected not to say anything at the funeral, right? They’d have had to drag me from the lectern, shouting “Wait! I haven’t told you about Neil Diamond’s Stones album yet…!”

So I’ll leave you with this: when my Mum, brother and I discussed and agreed which songs would be played at the funeral, both my brother and I found ourselves surprised that neither Kristofferson nor Johnny Cash made the cut. So here’s the Cash song we both just kind of assumed would be played (and no, given it was a cremation, it isn’t Ring of Fire):

Johnny Cash – Daddy Sang Bass

What songs did feature at the funeral, I hear you ask? Ok, well if you insist.

When they moved back to that sleepy market town I mentioned what seems like hours ago now, Dad joined a ukelele group. He couldn’t play, but bought one and learned.

One day, I got into the car and the playlist arrived at the song we ultimately chose to have played as the coffin was brought in. Dad had learned to play it in his ukelele group, and they had performed it at a couple of gigs (I say gigs, I mean performances at care homes). The original idea was that I’d source a ukelele band playing it, and that would be the ‘intro’ music, but having done so and shared it with Mum and my brother, the consensus was that they didn’t like the version I found (Brother: “Be better if you could have found a version without them singing along…”. Me: “You think? I thought that helped identify what song it is…”). And so it was decided that we’d go for the original, which may seem an odd choice, but when you listen to the words, and consider that everyone stands when the coffin is brought in, is actually pretty bloody perfect:

James – Sit Down

What really makes me laugh about this is that both Mum and Dad, at different times, were suprised to find that I knew the song. That time it came on in the car, Dad thought he’d catch me out:

Dad: “I bet you don’t know who this is…?”

Me: “Of course I do. It’s Sit Down by James. It was a massive hit in 1991, when I was DJ’ing at Uni. We used to play it, and instruct everyone to kick anybody who sat down on the dance floor when we played it, as students were wont to do at the time.”

Years later, on a trip to hospital, it came up on Dad’s playlist again, and Mum heard me singing along in the back seat.

Mum: How do you know this song??

Me: It’s Sit Down by James.

Mum: Yes, but how do you know it? Me and your Dad had never heard it until he learned it in the ukelele group.

Me: It’s Sit Down by James. It was a massive hit in 1991. I don’t know how you managed to avoid hearing it for 30 years.

Anyway, as we followed the coffin in to the service, and Sit Down was booming out, I had a bit of a wobble.

The next piece of music to be played was to accompany the photo montage I had prepared. Now, it’s important to note at this point that Dad had made no preperations for his funeral, made no demands or specifications about what should happen, when, or to what music. The only thing he had stipulated was that it should not be religious. His position was this: I’m not going to be there, so what do I care? I was blissfully unaware of this until he passed away; if he had ever voiced this to me, then I think I would have pointed out that he was very much going to be there, but just not exactly taking an active part in proceedings.

Mum told me there was a song which she wanted playing at her funeral: I was grateful for the steer, but one funeral at a time, eh? Turns out, she wanted the same song played at both, and so this was chosen to soundtrack the photo montage:

Joe Brown – I’ll See You In My Dreams

Next up: although it was a non-religious ceremony, it was recommended that we had a few moments where the congregation had the chance to pause, reflect and offer silent prayers, soundtracked by a song of our choise. This one took a while to choose, but ultimately Mum came up trumps, texting me after she’d heard a song on the radio that Dad loved, but she struggled with the artiste’s name, understandably so:

Israel Kamakawiwo’ole – Somewhere Over the Rainbow

And then, the closing song, and it’s at this point that I realise I’ve turned into Monica from Friends, when she is determined to do a speech which makes every one cry at her parents’ wedding anniversary party. Mum floats the idea of a song Dad loved, it features Emmylou Harris and “that man from that band you like”, and I know exactly which man and which song she means. This one:

Mark Knopfler & Emmylou Harris – If This Is Goodbye

I mean, who wouldn’t want Emmylou singing at their funeral?

When we told the Celebrant we wanted that song at the end, she professed that she didn’t know it. But at the service, she introduced it by telling the congregation to sit and listen to the words. Result: not a dry eye in the house (I imagine, no idea, was too busy trying to stay composed as we left). I am Monica.

******

One last song, and it’s a predicable one.

After we found out we were to late to say goodbye to Dad, once the KK Best Of… album had been slapped on to shuffle, this is the song which my brother and I sang loudest too, the song that binds our family together:

Kris Kristofferson – Me and Bobby McGee

And I include it here not just for the reasons I just listed, but for one line in that song, which really hit home as we drove that day.

I’d trade all my tomorrows for a single yesterday.

Pardon my language, but fucking right I would.

And any of you stll reading this (and if you have, then thank you for sticking with it) who has ever lost anyone, will get that line, 100%.

Goodbye Dad. Thanks for all the good times. I – we – may not have grasped with both hands the chances we had to tell you, but I – we – loved you, and will miss you like nothing and nobody else.

And breathe…

More soon.