My Mother's Records

Two

When I was a teenager in Paraparaumu it was all the rage to fill up old 1.5 litre soft drink bottles with water and leave them all over your front lawn. It was supposed to stop dogs doing their business on your property. It got to the point where every single lawn in Paraparaumu had these plastic bottle droppings on them (usually with dog droppings in between). There were various theories as to why this was supposed to work. The only one I remember was that the dogs were supposed to be frightened of their reflection in the water bottle. Of course it didn't work. In fact it was utterly ridiculous. Nevertheless, thousands of adults across New Zealand covered their lawns with old Coke bottles in the belief that it did work.

The past is a strange place. Even the past of twenty years ago can seem very odd indeed. The movement of time eradicates context and leaves you with objects. It’s hard to say why people in the 80’s thought neon coloured sweat bands were cool, but they were. The reasons things were done tend to be forgotten leaving only the objects behind like, well like a hundred soft drinks bottles filled with water on someone’s lawn, or a book dropping suddenly out of the sky.

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My mother first met my father at a wedding, and afterwards they went to a Joe Brown dance at Dunedin's town hall. My father was at the wedding because he worked on the family of the groom's farm shearing sheep. He sheared sheep to pay to go to university. My father didn't have a really great upbringing, he was brought up by a prickly Aunt, but he was decent at school, good at sport and a great ballroom dancer.When my mother first met my father he owned three records: two by a fellow called Mantovani (Immortal Classics and Tangos) and Belafonte’s debut record. They are still in the collection, and still treasured although Mantovani’s star has dipped so far below the horizon that it is hard to believe he was once so popular.

Mantovani Plays the Immortal Classics, Decca (1953). Mantovani released four other albums in 1953 including I suspect the less than immortal An Album of Christmas Music. It's hard not to make fun of Mantovani. Even the fan website is defensive: Quality Light Orchestra Music is sometimes confused, with "background” music, or "easy listening" music, it surely is not.... Have you ever heard of a category of music called "Quality Light Orchestra Music"? A reviewer of the latest Mantovani biography cryptically comments: As years pass, we realize that art glows at different angles when and where it is examined and experienced. And generally the world is looked at differently afterwards.

Sure.

The thing is I rather like this record. I like it for two reasons:

Firstly, I love things that were once enormously popular and have now vanished off the radar. Mantovani fits the bill. He was the first person to sell a million stereo records, phenomenally popular in Britain and America, one of the recording stars of his era. Now he would be unknown to everyone under fifty.

Secondly, the little sticker my mother put on the album cover says: "Please keep this record. It is very old, but it takes me back to when I first met M. and contains two of my most loved pieces of music: Handel's Largo and Schubert's Ave Maria." When I was a kid my mother had a tape of something like the London Pops Orchestra playing classical tunes. It had, predictably, a version of Pachelbel's Canon on it. It was an "interpretation" of that piece and it ended with a French horn. The thing is I never knew until I was a lot older that it was an interpretation and I got rather attached to that French horn. Even now when I hear versions of Canon I am always listening for the surging horn at the end, and always disappointed when it doesn't happen. My point is, with some songs it doesn't matter if the first version you hear of something is a supposedly "inferior" - it will become the version that matters most for you.

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For years I had this memory of a book I had been made to read at school. It was about a boy living on an island and he was obsessed with Harry Belafonte. For a long time I had no idea who Harry Belafonte was (even though he was sitting in my mother's record collection). One day I dragged his record out, dusted it off and gave it a spin. Brilliant.


Belafonte’s debut album is wonderful. It was released in 1956 and it was the first LP to sell a million copies in the USA. It is very hard to be depressed and listen to this album. What a great cover.


Many years after I read that book I was talking about, still at school but now a teacher, I was leaving my classroom after the day was over. It was a windy, high-cloud day, rubbish blowing through the halls and across the field, and out of the sky dropped a book. Some student had thrown it on the classroom roof and it now flapped its way to my feet. It was called The Cay and I realised as I picked it up that this was the book I had read twenty years ago at school.