Category: Music

I’m a Believer: Musings about cricket on the eve of the 3rd Test in Perth

…..Now I’m a believer

Not a trace

Of doubt

In my mind

I’m in love

I’m a believer

 

I’m a Believer. I love that song. Written by Neil Diamond (one of my favourite singer-songwriters, however unfashionable that statement may be) … I hope to see him live this summer, although it won’t rank with seeing Winwood and Clapton play together in New York next month (possibly for the first time since Blind Faith, I can’t remember another instance offhand). Performed by the Monkees.

I’m a believer. A song that got to Number 1 on 31st December 1966, and stayed there for seven weeks.

31st December 1966. The day I watched my first-ever day of Test cricket, and became a Believer. A Believer in the game of cricket.

I’m a Believer. And I’ve been a Believer from that day, even though my first taste of cricket was unusual, to say the least.

 

Let me start at the beginning. It was 30th December 1966, and my father offered to take me to the “net practice day” at Eden Gardens in Calcutta, the oldest cricket ground in India, and, in my opinion, the most beautiful in the world. But then I’m biased.

The West Indies were touring India, and the Second Test was due to start the next day, New Year’s Eve. And I’d never ever watched even a minute of cricket, so I jumped at the chance. I was a little over 9 years old.

It was a special day. I’d wanted to go to a test match for many years, and even though I was just being offered a “nets” day, that was special for me. To get the chance to see the magnificence of Sobers, the flair of Pataudi, the style of Kanhai, the menace of Hall and Griffith. The debut of Bishen Bedi, and the second-ever Test of Clive Lloyd (who’d just scored 160 runs while getting out only once in his previous Test).

It was a magic morning. And on the way back, I watched my father get lathi-charged. For some reason the crowd stampeded on the way back, and policemen on horseback decided to get us sorted out; which meant charging us while on horseback and wielding their thick batons (called lathis) while doing it. My father was hurt, albeit not very badly, we were tumbled into a ditch, and I was upset. I’d never seen anything like it, and it somehow took the gloss off what had been a fantastic day.

Sometimes clouds do have silver linings. In order to make up for the lathi-charge, my father offered to take me to the 1st day’s play. I went. And I was hooked. I became a lifelong lover of cricket.

This, despite what happened. On that day, 31st December, sometime in the afternoon, there was a riot at Eden Gardens. [Rumours abounded about the root cause, ranging from disputed umpiring decisions through to duels of honour, but I believe the reality was much more mundane: counterfeit tickets leading to overcrowding]. What is certain is that there was a riot. Which meant the usual thing. Chairs ripped up, bonfires made, stadium set on fire. I was forced to climb to the highest part of the stadium, away from the fire, and cajoled to jump into my father’s waiting arms at ground level. I have no idea of the height I jumped from, it felt like 40 feet, was probably half that.

The next day, New Year’s Day, the newspaper headlines read “Hell At Eden”. That I remember. So. Let me summarise:

My first experience of watching Test cricket was preceded by a lathi-charge; my first day of Test cricket was punctuated by a riot and the stadium was set on fire; I then had to jump a zillion feet and hope that my dad caught me; by then he wasn’t the world’s most athletic dad.

Oh yes, and the cricket. I was watching the world’s greatest player at the time, Gary Sobers, the world’s fastest bowlers, Hall and Griffiths, and the world’s suavest captain, The Nawab of Pataudi.

And India lost. Badly. An innings defeat. This, despite losing a day’s play to the aftermath of the riot.

That was my baptism into Test cricket. And it was going to be a long time before I saw India actually win a Test. But I loved my first taste of the game, and haven’t stopped loving it since. I wake up at strange times to listen to commentary, to watch it on television, even to “watch” the scores change on the web. In the past, I’ve even been known to “watch” the game on teletext!

I will go into watching the Third Test at Perth with the same fervour. Despite everything that has gone on in the Second Test. I hope that India does well. But.

This time around, I no longer really care who wins. As long as cricket wins.

That’s important. Cricket must win. So that there are more generations of Believers.

 

Old Man’s River: Genghis Blues

Richard Feynman was a genius. He did many amazing things. One of the more unusual things he did in his life was to make gargantuan efforts to visit the Soviet republic of Tuva. Even more unusually, he failed to do this, held up by the politics and bureaucracy of the Cold War; papers permitting him to visit Tuva arrived the day after he died.

His attempts to visit Tuva are chronicled in the book Tuva or Bust. But that’s not all.

Recommendation 7: (film)

Genghis Blues. A film that won the Sundance Audience Award, was even nominated for an Oscar. The story of blind blues musician Paul Pena’s travels and travails en route Tuva, seeking to discover and sustain the mysterious art of “throat-singing”, otherwise called overtone singing or Khoomei. Done as a documentary, with real footage of Pena. And Feynman. And B.B.King.

Fascinating.

Old Man’s River: On The Road To Freedom

One of the things I’ve been trying to do with Old Man’s River is to stay away from the big hits, try and introduce people to stuff they wouldn’t have come across easily.

So, today:

Recommendation 3: (Album)

On The Road to Freedom. Alvin Lee and Mylon Lefevre and some very interesting sessions men.

When I was in my mid-to-late teens, one of my favourite pastimes was to take a gentle wander down Free School St, stopping at the second-hand shops, loitering with intent and going through each shop’s stock of used books, comics and, occasionally, vinyl.

An aside. For people like me, “Western” music was limited in supply those days: there were only four ways of getting it. One, you waited for the then local monopoly, Gramophone Company of India, to issue it. Because they believed in traditional forms of marketing and distribution, they were driven towards a hit culture, which meant I could buy Boney M but not Blind Faith. So if you waited for them you could be waiting a long time. A second route was to go to the Kidderpore Docks, where there was an active and open smuggler’s market straight out of Dickens. Dark and dank, ill-lit and illicit. There, amongst the t-shirts and the watches and colognes, you would occasionally come across a “Japanese” or “Singapore” copy: these had covers which were obvious photocopies of the originals, with a poor cut-and-paste of the vernacular titles over the English original, laminated in thin polythene. A third way was “taping”, when you made a copy of someone else’s album (something I didn’t like doing even then). And the fourth was the most productive: you waited for some passing hippie to sell his stash of records for drugs, and, if you were lucky, you had first dibs on his erstwhile possessions….. the Calcutta 1970s variant of the pawnshop.

Actually there was a fifth way: you had someone go abroad and bring something back for you. But in those days this was so rare it wasn’t worth counting: the number of people you knew who were going abroad roughly equalled the number of divorced people you knew. Counted on the fingers of one hand.

I digress. On the Road to Freedom. An album I bought in a second-hand store, probably as a result of hippie bartering. Absolutely fantastic. A soft and gentle album, one that grows on you the first time you listen to it. Guest musicians include Steve Winwood, George Harrison, Jim Capaldi, “Rebop” Kwaku Baah, Mick Fleetwood, Ron Wood and Boz Burrell.

By the time I heard the first four tracks I was toast. This is such a one-off album; it’s not a supergroup, it’s not cult, it’s not anything I can describe easily. Alvin Love-Like-A-Man Ten Years After Lee meets Mylon Holy Smoke Doo Dah Lefevre; friends join in, and some wonderful music was made.

It’s only recently been released on CD, four or five years ago. One of my favourite albums.

Lyrical ballads 2.0

My 15-year old son told me about this site, SongMeanings. Love the idea. People commenting on lyrics and making connections that way. Just take a look at the discussions around A Day in The Life.

As with anything else 2.0, these things improve with time and increased “liquidity”, as people learn about the subtlety of the mashup. I can see so many ways to vary what I see at SongMeanings, having people come together with comments and views and ratings around a catalogue of “things”. And I am sure that most of them are being done already.

Musing about music and politics

Over the last couple of days I’ve been reading quite a lot about the role of social networks as a key influence in voting patterns. Not surprisingly, people have begun to work out that recommendations and collaborative filters mean something for the ballot box as well.

It is in this context that I began to think of strange mashups. If I had a map of, say, the music people listened to, a geographical breakdown of musical taste, and then I overlaid it with a map of voting patterns, what would it look like? Would I find that red and blue voters in the US had the same disparity in musical taste as in everything else? Or was the disparity a lie, a facade?

Ironic then that I should find the following Gracenote maps while in this mood, thanks to Mark O’Neill, a Facebook friend and fellow IT professional. Gracenote has gone to the trouble of mapping musical taste for a reasonable slice of the world, with some unusual outcomes. For one thing, I learnt how out of touch I was; I didn’t even recognise the names of some of the Top 10 in “developed world” countries. Only goes to show.