The man that hath no music in himself,
Nor is not mov’d with concord of sweet sounds,
Is fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils.

The motions of his spirit are dull as night
And his affections dark as Erebus:
Let no such man be trusted.

So said the Bard via the voice of Lorenzo in The Merchant of Venice. One of my favourite quotations.

I’ve always loved music, and tend to have a song playing in my head much of the time, whatever I’m doing. Which may sound strange, especially since neither me, nor my siblings (or for that matter our parents) showed any significant sign of being “musical”. Other than the usual teenage-angst thing of playing guitar, I can’t remember any of us actually picking up a musical instrument.

But we had relatives and friends aplenty who made up for our shortcomings in this respect, and the house I grew up in reverberated much of the day (and possibly even more of the night) with music. There was music everywhere.

This, despite growing up before television, and before the video recorder had made its messy inroads into our lives. This, despite the frequent paucity of electrical power and the relative absence of battery-driven solid-state radios.

For the most part, the music we listened to was based on vinyl, sometimes lacquer, and the sounds scratched their way through turntables and valve amplifiers through simple sturdy speakers. In later years the cassette player became the norm, given its then-unprecedented capacity to work on mains power as well as on battery. And we listened and swayed and sang along. And we even learnt to dance…. to Leonard Cohen…

Wonderful times. We were very privileged, there were some very talented musicians around then. And I’ve considered myself incredibly lucky to have been able to watch many of them “live” in later years, a trend that continues to this day. So for example in the last few years I’ve seen Steve Winwood, Neil Young, Eric Clapton, Crosby Stills and Nash, Donovan, Don McLean, Cat Stevens, just to name a few.

I still have a bunch of their vinyl albums (and, thankfully, the ability to add to that collection as the vinyl gets retro-reissued).

I still have a bunch of their works on pre-recorded cassette tape (though I no longer have a cassette tape recorder in the house).

I still have a few thousand CDs of their works.

And I still go to watch them in concert. [Those that are still alive, that is].

If you’ve followed me on twitter (where I exist as @jobsworth) or directly at blip.fm/jobsworth, you’ve probably noticed that I tend to listen to a very narrow band of music, deeply engrossed in the period 1966-73, with occasional forays into the world that existed before and after. This is for a number of reasons.

Time. I can only listen to so much music.

Familiarity. It’s the music I grew up with, music that I’ve heard many many times.

Preference. I happen to like the styles, the genres, the whole nine yards. Everything about the music of the time.

But there’s one more reason.

An important reason.

The music was *brilliant*. And continues to be brilliant. From a time when singer-songwriters were the norm, when musicians actually played musical instruments, when the word harmony was to do with voices and not perfume, when lyrics were worth learning.

Now I’m showing my age. Every age is entitled to its music. I’m just glad my age had the music it did.

Why?

Here are a bunch of reasons why. And you know something? I could write a hundred posts like this, and still not run out of songs. So if you haven’t heard of them, do listen. And run to your favourite download site. And buy the ones you like. [And for those of you familiar with the music already, I hope I've contributed to your lazy Sunday.]

I wasn’t really that much into clothes; anyway, I didn’t have much that was suitable for English weather. There wasn’t much else: all I had room for was a few copies of the family magazine, my references and education certificates, a handful of photographs, a few keepsakes. That was it.

That meant that I left behind all the books I grew up with, all the music I grew up with. It was a real wrench, but nowhere near as much as leaving everything I called home, my family, my friends, the neighbourhoods I grew up in, my school, my college.

Since coming to the UK, I’ve been gently building a decent book collection, so much so I’ve had to move home a couple of times just to make space for the books. Right now I’m waiting for a time when I have enough money to build a proper library … I have the vision, the space, the planning permission, even the books. But the time is not right, I just don’t have the spare money.

I’ve tried to do the same with music, but I’ve cheated: instead of collecting vinyl, I moved to CD. So I now have maybe 1700 CDs, pretty much everything I’m interested in. 90% of the CDs relate to recordings made in the 60s and early 70s. In fact over 80% of my collection is between 1966 and 1972, focused heavily on that wonderful space where the folk and folk-rock of the mid-to-late 60s merge with the heavier stuff of the late 60s and early 70s, creating a sound and feel best exemplified by Grateful Dead, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, The Who, Traffic and Blind Faith, by the Doobie Brothers, by Loggins and Messina.

Someone else didn’t cheat. Paul Mawhinney. Read his story here, go watch the video. [My thanks to Daniel Edlen for tipping me off. He's got a good blog, worth a regular visit.]

Paul has built up a unique collection of over 1 million pieces of vinyl; at its peak the collection is priceless, he thinks it would be valued at $50m. Right now he’s aging (nearly 70), ill (he has diabetes and is nearly blind) and has been desperately trying to sell the collection for some time now. The price has come down, he’s looking for a paltry $3m now.

If I were a rich man, I’d buy the whole collection. Today. Not just for personal enjoyment, but to leave as a legacy. It’s not a collection, it’s a piece of history. The man that hath no music in himself….

So. Is there anyone out there with the spondulicks? [In fact, is there anyone out there who even understands what a spondulick is? Sometimes I wonder.]

Maybe it’s time for us to club together, set up a twitter fund to acquire the collection, use social tools to find a place to store the collection, digitise it, do a Google Books on it. Anyone from Google listening?

In the past it’s been about a Getty or a Gates stepping in. But surely that’s the old model? Surely today is about the way Barack Obama raised his funds, small pieces loosely joined?

Anyone interested?

• Carroms (played in fours lying at odd angles on the floor)
• Table-tennis (on the dining table, using books to form the net
• Card games aplenty (from “56″ to Memorial Power, finding pairs, to Canasta, to TwoToTheLeft)
• Chess (not as many takers though
• Categories (which we called NamePlaceAnimalThing and played with real gusto).
• Scrabble (played with an incredible intensity)
• Board games in general, particularly Cluedo, but including Ludo, Chinese Checkers and Snakes & Ladders

That’s when it was too hot to play outside. Participant ages ranged from 6 to 60 (really) and everything was played with ferocious yet humorous spirit. Wonderful times. Usually half the people present were friends of one family member or the other, the rest were family or neighbours.

Sure we fought. It wasn’t always all sweetness and light. But in the main we played, played as close family and close friends, and we’ve stayed close ever since.

What I described above  was a daytime and weekend and holiday thing for the most part. Weekday evenings were all about hanging around together and listening to music; when it got late the scene shifted to playing duplicate bridge. And we read. We read by the shelf-load, by the truck-load. Draped in strange positions all over the place, usually munching on the food that would materialise by magic.

And one more thing. We were trivia freaks, but we didn’t call it trivia. We called it quizzing. It was perfectly normal for any one person to pull a dictionary, a book of quotations or a volume of an encyclopaedia off a shelf and then start asking passers-by questions. Calcutta had a brilliant quiz scene in those days, probably still has.

[Strangely enough, I don't remember seeing anyone study. Or do homework. I can't imagine where they could have, every room was packed with other, ultimately distracting, activity].

Anyway. As I was saying. We loved trivia. And we didn’t treat trivia so much as a test of knowledge but as a test of recall. More importantly, quizzing was a team sport and individual machismo was of no value.  Sure, “golden” answers were appreciated and respected, where you knew something that no one else on the team knew. But the important thing was the team.

These values made their way into the DNA of the quiz scene in Calcutta, particularly the “recall not knowledge” principle. Any fool could come up with a question that no one could answer. The challenge was to come up with a question that every team could answer, but not necessarily within 30 seconds while under competitive pressure.

It became a fine art, setting questions that danced teasingly on the tips of tongues. Those were the days Before Google. Nowadays it is actually quite hard to set a question that’s unGoogleable, and as a result the “recall versus knowledge” principle must be under severe attack. Particularly in today’s age of ubiquitous communication. I lost interest in the UK quiz scene once mobile phones with Web browsers and Shazam entered the scene; too many people resorted to, shall we say, alternate and assisted modes of recall.

Since then, just for fun, I’ve been quietly compiling lists of questions that can’t be Googled. Which means I look at many things with an unusual perspective. Take today for example. I was “watching” the cricket in Dhaka, and when I ran down the names of the Indian team, I noticed something:

The average surname-length of the team was below 6 letters, just 63 letters across the eleven people. Very unusual. [Incidentally, I also noticed that I have children older than half the team, a sure sign of my age].

So. Cricket fiends amongst you. What’s the shortest team you can come up with, the one that would trouble the scorers the least to put up. 63 is the target to beat. Sehwag Gambhir Sharma Singh Pathan Dhoni Raina Pathan Chawla Kumar Sharma. [I remember some Leicestershire and Northamptonshire teams in the early 1980s that had quite a few short-named players, must check].

Incidentally, the full name letter count could also be a record. 68 plus 63 makes 131. That’s low. That is very low … for a country that has had a President named Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan, a singer called Madurai “MS” Subbulakshmi, a composer named Laxmikant Kudalkar;  and cricketers named Srinivasa Venkataraghavan and Bhagwat Chandrashekhar. [My own name and surname take up 21 letters].

I made sure there were no mice involved, but that didn’t stop the ganging of my plans agley (and keeping the aftness average high). And so it was that I found myself with a few hours to kill. Once I’d finished checking my mac mail, my facebook, my twitter; once I’d finished reading my feeds and checked the blog comment/spam queue; once I’d freshened up from the day’s travel….. I went fossil surfing.

Fossil surfing is the term I use to describe the time I spend looking for things on the web that are themselves older than the web. Like the time I found a description of mealtimes at my grandfather’s house in the mid 1940s a few weeks ago.

This time around I found another gem:

 

 

The photograph above is of a number of Jesuit priests that formed the St Xavier’s community in the 1960s and 1970s. I spent fifteen years with them while at school and college, years I remember with intense pleasure.

The debt is to many, but for me there was a giant amongst them: Father Camille Bouche (fifth from left, second row from the front). I owe him a huge debt of gratitude. 

Looking back more than three decades later, catalysed by the photograph, I realised just how much the whole community affected me:

Fr Goreux, who was rumoured to be a very early pupil of Einstein’s, and who kindled some of my early interest in mathematics; Fr Bonhome, who interviewed me in 1965; Fr Cordeiro, who was headmaster for a while; Mr Joris, who made sure the B.Com morning classes worked like clockwork (and who belied his size and age when he came after school students creating a ruckus near his classes at 7am); Fr Desbrulais, who epitomised kindness and fatherly advice to all and sundry; Fr Verstraeten, who could be seen reading at all hours, part priest, part academic; Fr Leeming, who towered over us when we needed towering over; and Fr Huart, who shepherded me through college; Fr Vetticad, whom I shall say nothing about other than to record that he was headmaster for a time; and Fr Mairlot, of course, with his wry humour.

Sadly, the photo does not have Fr Sassel, who was a key influence on me between 1966 and 1969.

 

 

 

Fr Bouche (first from left, above) was my Prefect of Discipline from 1970 to 1975, critical years that fashioned the person who later became me; I was 12 when I met him and 18 when I left his care. Besides the discipling role, he also took our “moral science” classes in senior school, classes that influenced me greatly. I can remember them with surprising clarity even today.

Here’s an example of Fr Bouche’s amazing humanity and wisdom. In 1971, when I was in Patrick Vianna’s class, one of my classmates brought in a hundred rupee note to pay his school fees. Now this was a class of 12 and 13 year olds, most of us had rarely seen a 100 rupee note much less touched one. So the note became a major object of attention, passed on from hand to hand, scrutinised from every angle, metamorphosed into airplane and tennis ball, you get my drift.

Sometime in the afternoon, it all went horribly wrong. The note went missing. The boy who’d brought it in was obviously distraught (I remember very clearly who he was, but his name is not germane to the story. I last met him in Calcutta less than a decade ago, he’s still there!).

I think the teacher at the time was our class teacher, Mr Vianna. He did the only thing he could; he sealed the classroom (7A on the ground floor) with all of us in it, and called for Fr Bouche.

When he came in, you could see the sadness in his eyes. He looked at all of us, and then proceeded to give us some very simple instructions. Each of us was to walk to the window nearest the front of the class (which looked on to what we called the Hostel field in those days); when reaching the window, each of us was to put his hand in his pocket, come out with a clenched fist, extend that fist out the window, drop the fist below the line of visibility, and bring the fist back unclenched.

We did it, one by one. 

When we had finished, he poked his head through the window, and the 100 rupee note was on the grass outside.

Years later I came to know who took that money; the boy confessed to me shortly after we finished our Senior Cambridge.

His name is irrelevant. What is relevant is the soft-touch discipline, the humaneness and humanity of Camille Bouche.

My thanks to John De Ridder for providing me with the excuse to be nostalgic about my school. I’ve linked to his site, that’s where I found these amazing photographs.