I've long intended to give my songs some space in here, thinking they might fit as a short interlude in the story or as an appendix at its end. But here they are, getting their own full and proper chapter where they're not being shoved in any kind of corner. Because the writing I’ve done so far has reminded me how important a part of my life the songs once were, and for quite a long time. So I’ve decided to bring them in and talk about them. Let me explain.
At first the songs were just the other thing I wanted to earn my living at, along with the housing work. So I'd do what hopeful songwriters did in the early 1970s and send off demo cassettes to record and publishing companies. As well as to other music business types asking for their opinions and help. And it was the help of a particular two of these others that sorted out the part songwriting was going to play in my life. Which was significant, though never in an earning my living from it way. Here, to begin with, is the story of how that happened.
I got to know a songwriter called Clifford T.Ward, even went and stayed with him and his friendly family a good few times. He'd had some success with his own records, but by the time I was getting to know him his albums were mainly a way of getting his songs placed with more established performers, such as Judy Collins and Art Garfunkel, who mostly didn't write their own material. It earned him a reasonable living I think, and he was very well respected. Then through Cliff I met Jeff Lynne of the Electric Light Orchestra. Getting to know him nowhere near as well as Cliff, but we did have a couple of long conversations about how he worked. Before Jeff's own career went from its own respected but lower selling early days to “absolutely poptastic” as Alan Freeman might have said.
And my big learning from the two of them? Was that if I was really going to earn my living from being a songwriter then I only wanted to be Jeff. Because being Cliff, real and respectable a career as it was, looked too much like hard and worrisome work. Waiting for the phone to ring and his manager to let him know if someone might be interested in covering one of his carefully crafted, long worked on creations. Whereas Jeff at least appeared to knock off his brilliant and apparently more lightweight songs easily, and for fun. While Cliff's songs weren't for fun and neither, crucially, were mine. Meaning I didn't have a "Livin' Thing" or a "Rock Aria," never mind a "Mr Blue Sky" in me.
And so it was that I gradually gave up on the idea of a nervy future waiting for my own phone to go and tell me Judy Collins, Sandy Denny, or anyone else ever would be wanting to record one of my songs. Because, in fact, they were going to have a more crucial role in my future than that first idea of making it in the music business.
And I've been thinking while I've put the songs together for this chapter, songs not listened to for decades, how it is I carried on writing them for so long. After I knew I wasn't going to be a professional songwriter because I couldn't amount to a Jeff Lynne, never mind one of my own real favourites: David Bowie, Joni Mitchell, Kate Bush and Jimmy Webb; the people whose records I'd automatically buy whenever they came out. Though I was never going to be anything like the equal of any of them I carried on. So I've been thinking about why?
The why being, I think, because songwriting was a real and regular practice for me then, the same way that writing like this is my regular practice of now. How I’ll habitually think about my days, my life and what I'd like to make of it all. Songwriting was simply how that happened in the years before I started writing in joined up sentences like this. I liked the putting together of the songs as well. Making up their words and tunes then recording them. I loved the craft of all that. And would occasionally, even after I'd given up on fame and income, send off a speculative demo of something new I was especially pleased with. Sometimes getting mildly interested responses, that only and mainly reminded me how little I wanted that kind of hanging on the whims of other people kind of life. So mostly I'd just give the songs to a few friends, in a sequence of C60 cassette albums that I liked the making, sequencing, drawing the covers and production of. And couldn't have not done. Because in those years of stuck in the wrong job and generally trying to find my way, the songs were what I thought about in my quiet times. And then, significantly, what I’d go on and make into real things, the cassettes of songs, from those thoughts. All that kept me going. Kept me pushing towards I didn't know quite what. “More than this” I'd think, better than the “not quite the right” life of the time.
That’s why I wrote the songs.
And eventually they'd be an essential part of what led me to the better sort of life I’ll be writing about, as this story moves on into its second half. Without the songs this book, this story, if it existed, and my life as a whole would be very different I think. The songs mattered. Even from the previous chapter, to give one example, the songs were mostly what I was doing when I wouldn't take part in all those family events. Time to do them was fiercely defended against all incursions.
Time for some actual songs then.
In the years when I wrote them, late 70s to mid 90s, there were about 200 of them. Reduced years ago, after I’d stopped writing, to the 90 or so I wanted to keep, Those sorted this week into the 17 of them in the list below, that you can hear right now if you'd like.
How to listen
The songs are all in their own “A Life” playlist on SoundCloud. And you can listen to all of them at this link. Alternatively you can listen to them one by one, or pick out particular songs at all the individual links below.
On SoundCloud by the way you can click through any suggestions that you subscribe or open your own account. Access to my songs on SoundCloud is free.
The same playlist is also on Apple Music, just search on there @ronniewriting - where you’ll also find a few other playlists of what I’ve been listening to lately in various styles of music.
So to take you through them one by one and tell the shadow story of my life in those years, here are my songs, this story’s soundtrack:
Days in Public
This one's already been in the story a couple of chapters ago. Back in 1978 it's the sound of disillusion already setting in with the housing job. But underneath it all the other job of my songs, the dreaming of dreams in stolen moments, has begun.
A Prayer
By 1980 and stuck in the computer job, my dreaming has moved upfront and and is praying to a God I no longer believed in to "Let me spend my time on things that light sparks in me." With me as close as I ever got to imitiating a full gospel choir by the end here, on my new 4-track Portastudio. A joy to remember.
Lovers’ Laughter
This and the following four songs are from deep inside the longest period of depression I ever had, over several years in the early 80s. In this one I'm remembering a Sunday morning walking along the high path above the lake in Sefton Park when I see this young couple walking towards me, an ancient feeling 26 year old that day. Who’s envious of their infectious joy, their "no make up and a whole day left to be happy in." Those feelings wrapped up later, in this moment’s sunlight of a song.
Disguises
A song I'd completely forgotten about until this past week. And a sort of key to many of the others from around this early to mid1980s time. I'd write in disguises. Mixing characters and genders so the songs could sound like stories, like bits of novels or even films. And certainly not like commentaries on my own life, though most of them were, as this one makes clear. Until in its last two lines it slips back into its " but everything’s all right really" disguise.
A January Life
An archetypal disguise song. Where it's definitely me staring out of the front window of the flat in Walton while I'm "picking out the black notes" on the same piano that's on Disguises. I'd got it for free from a woman who was having to empty out her house at the Lodge Lane end of Falkner Street. Before it was demolished for the motorway that never came.
When I Was Your Friend
An imaginary song set in some some future winter, where I'm living on my own and ok with that, but looking forward to the kind of "buying new clothes, two baths a day" future time a friend, who's in a new relationship, had been telling me about. So I borrowed her happiness, as a contrast.
Autumn Song
The sounds of peace breaking out and a hymn of praise, not just to walking through an autumnal Sefton Park, but also in praise of the compilation tape of "Autumn Songs" I've made for the walk. I remember stopping the tape one Saturday, sitting down by the fountain there, and making up my own extra song to add to the tape. This is it.
Clare
She arrives. We go up in the lift to that ward in Oxford Street Maternity Hospital I wrote about in the last chapter...
High Summer
And our lives are a river of light.
Two songs for Clare, of course. And also for Diana.
A high point on this compilation and almost where the story of "Seventy: A Life" has got up to. After this there were several divorce songs that aren't coming anywhere near a "Best Of" like this. Before my life moves on, to parts of the story yet to be told.
Books and Tea
I’m sitting at a table outside a tea shop somewhere in the Cotswolds one late summer evening. Reading a T.S. Eliot biography I’ve just bought and pausing now and then to think about what might be next.
Ellesmere Port
Back in Liverpool, living on my own with frequent visits from Clare, in a flat by the river. I’m spending evenings looking across at "the brilliant lights of Ellesmere Port.” In deep peace.
A Sense of Place
Time passes and the future begins. Years before we'd turn this song into the idea that would get us out of our day jobs this is Sarah and I, “the hands across the table, the look upon a face” having on our first holiday together, in Northumberland.
The Things We Like
A list song of the weekend things we liked, “the things that coloured in our lives” during our gradual coming together. Often at Sarah’s flat in Manchester, until…
Why Don’t You Entertain Me
“I could stay for the evening. Or I could stay al my life?” or we could move in together?
After which the time of the songs is nearly over. Except for these final three.
Racing Cars
The first of two looking back at being a boy songs. This one remembering days in Maghull, back in 1961 and 62, when we could hear the Formula 1 cars doing qualifying laps over at Aintree for successive British Grands Prix, the last to be run there. Then going to the races themselves, with my dad and my brother Colin, “with lemonade, sandwiches and battenburg cake.” Golden days.
When We Were Boys
Written in 1994 for my friend Paul Du Noyer’s 40th birthday and a full on celebration of when “everything was always getting better.” All sorts make guest appearances. Our other lifelong friend Barry Ward, his sister Hilary and her Beatles LP, the Hollies, various Liverpool and Everton FC players and “the girls in our class.” The last and best song I ever wrote. If I could only take one with me to whatever’s next this would be it.
But before we’re done two very special guests, Clare and her friend Francie, join in on one more to finish:
Haematite Ring
And those are my songs.