Don’t it make my Brown Eyes Blue

They say you should never meet you heroes. For the same reason you should never analyse too deeply the things you love. I made this mistake when preparing to post on another of my favourite love songs, ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ by the Pouges. I’m not a proper Pogues fan, but I have always loved that song. I respect them as genuine musicians, admire Mr McGowan’s dedication to dereliction, and thank them from the depth of my heart that there is at least one Christmas record (their ‘Fairy Tale of New York’), that doesn’t send me screaming from the shop after having heard it a zillion times that week. And yet, there was always something troubling me about the Pogues, and I’m sure the fault is mine. But, try as I might, I couldn’t help associating them with those sham(rock) Irish bars that sprung up a few years ago, and are now found a very way long way from Tipperary the length and breadth of Europe. (The fact that he attended a major English public school adds one final chip to my shoulder). ‘A Pair of Brown Eyes’ is, however, a beautiful song, especially when I remained in blissful ignorance of what it was quite about. The opening set the scene for me, and I didn’t think much beyond that:

One summer evening drunk to hell
I stood there nearly lifeless
An old man in the corner sang
Where the water lilies grow
And on the jukebox Johnny sang
About a thing called love.

I loved the melody, I revelled in the sweet melancholy of the sentiment, and assumed plenty. I vaguely thought it was an old Irish folk standard, that they had brought to my attention. Not fooled by ‘Molly Blooms’, Bloomsbury, I was more than ready to believe this was the real McCoy. Well, so it is, but it’s all a bit complicated, and I thought folk was simple. I had formed the idea that it was simply about a young man, who found himself blind drunk one summer evening. So drunk that he either imagines, or is unable to get to, a beautiful woman who throws him a haunting glance across the room. On sobering she is gone,

And the only thing that I could see
Was a pair of brown eyes that was looking at me
But when we got back, labelled parts one to three
There was no pair of brown eyes waiting for me.
And a rovin' a rovin' a rovin' I'll go
For a pair of brown eyes
For a pair of brown eyes.

I imagined it a drunkard’s version of Yeats’s ‘The Song of Wandering Aegnus’, another one of those lost opportunity love lyrics so dear to my heart. Dear me no. I googled it simply to learn who wrote it, and got sucked into reading McGowan’s own semi-coherent account of what is in truth a Chinese Box of narrative complexity (drunken anecdote by an old drunk about the first or second world war, gets somehow mixed up with the singer’s own lament for lost love), and every reference tells a specific tale. This might all enrich the true fan’s enjoyment, but it’s rather throttled this fair-weather folkist’s elusive dreams. I’ll have to go rovin for another brown-eyed ballad, or refrain from killing the things I love with a little learning.

Every body's gotta learn sometime (or do they?)

“Random thoughts for Valentine's day, 2004. Today is a holiday invented by greeting card companies to make people feel like crap”.

The first lines (in voice over) of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Spoken by Jim Carey’s character, and if you haven't seen the film simply because that gurning goon is in it, then relent. It is one of the most original, perceptive, and, possibly depressing films of recent years. See it with someone you love tonight.

It paints a pretty bleak picture of humanity and of love in particular, centred around Valentine’s Day. "It’s our busiest time", declares the receptionist at Lacuna Inc., explaining why a desperate patient cannot get an appointment to have all memory of an unhappy relationship removed from her mind. This is the conceit of the film, using a far-fetched idea to probe some pretty accurate truths. Starting with the hype associated with this very day.

There is nothing remotely ‘romantic’ about St Valentine’s Day. If you’re single, you’re made to feel like an even bigger loser, and modern technology simply compounds the misery. Where once there was only an empty doormat, there are now so many channels, offering myriad possibilities for self-pity on this joyous day. Or if you’re a couple, you’re coerced into dutiful observance. ‘Romance’, by edict, whether you feel romantic or not. Which means, in my limited experience, being rushed through a rota system of dining out surrounded by other happy couples feeling they have to look especially soppy at each other all night to somehow feel the magic of the day. ‘McRomance’ indeed. Do you want fries with those sentiments?

The slick, unsentimental professionalism of Lacuna Inc erasing memories of love is a fitting counterpart of those cynical swine responsible for exploiting expectations of it on that day. A perfect arrangement, and so Valentine’s Day is Lacuna's busiest season. The bleakness continues. We scarcely encounter a happy couple in the film, but instead legions of the broken, desperate to recover from their experience by erasing their pasts. Andre Gide once said ‘Nothing prevents happiness like the memory of happiness.’ Lacuna Inc is there to sort this out.

The receptionist tells another disappointed patient, "I’m afraid you can’t have the procedure more than three times in a month. Those are our rules". It suggests a relentless and inexorable gravity of unhappiness in every love. Joel (Carey), surveying the fellow diners in a restaurant, wonders: "Are we like couples you see in restaurants? Are we the dining dead?". By that stage they were. Few of the flashback memories being erased suggest a happy, fulfilling relationship. They are both annoying. He is drippy and morose (and Jim Carey). She flighty, high-maintenance, and with a puerile penchant for trashy hair dyes. I'm not sure you can really fully identify with either. Which somehow makes them more Everyman and Woman, rather than shiny plastic Hollywood Rom-Com lovers. Which pushes the point home harder and more plausibly.

And so it breaks up, just before Valentines Day, and Clementine (Kate Winslet) has the operation. "Our files are confidential Mr. Barish so we can't show you any evidence. Suffice it to say, Miss Kruczynski was not happy and she wanted to move on. We provide that possibility". In revenge, Joel follows suit. "Will it give me brain damage", he asks. "Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but it's on a par with a night of heavy drinking. Nothing you'll miss". Nothing you’ll miss, and so a whole relationship, what he might ‘miss’ so painfully or desperately, is wiped away. But what’s so depressing in all this is the suggestion that love is doomed to follow a pattern, and that mistakes are destined to be repeated. The burned child is supposed to fear the fire. Not with love. The clinical procedure of erasure uses Sci-Fi ingenuity to explore a lamentable near universal truth.

This is the half empty perspective on the repetition pattern the film invokes. An optimist might look at it differently. If I could find one today (he's probably reading all his Valentine cards) he might discover more hope in the fact that, once they’ve had each other erased, Clementine and Joel meet again, and fall for each other again. This might give a more hopeful gloss to a very bleak picture. The new couple learn about what they have both done, and how they both felt about each other when they broke up and wanted to forget. They have all this information before them, and yet this is how the film ends (look away if you haven't seen it):

Joel: I can't see anything that I don't like about you.

Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I'll get bored with you and feel trapped because that's what happens with me.

Joel: Okay

Clementine: [pauses] Okay.

Hope or despair? Your view may very well depend on what kind of Valentine’s Day you're having.

Truly a great love song

Buddy Holly died fifty years ago this month, so I thought I would feature one of the first love songs to touch me, and one that stands out from its times, 'True Love Ways'.

My first real enthusiasm was Rock 'n' Roll, the early stuff. Once I'd acknowledged that being a streaker wasn't a serious career option (http://helioholic.blogspot.com/search/label/vocation), I put all my energy into collecting old records, combing my hair and curling my lip. It's a good job the wind didn't turn, or I'd have been stuck like I was here, aged 9 and obsessed with the 1950s.

But I didn't go for Elvis, for the same reason I don't like the Beatles - because everyone else did and does. Buddy was the rocker for me. He was the thinking man's Rock 'n' Roller. Sensitive and bespectacled, he smiled rather than snarled, and was obviously a genuinely nice guy. He proposed marriage to his wife on their first date. Buddy was the true romantic of the Rock 'n' Roll era.

And I think this shows in his love songs, especially 'True Love Ways'. What distinguishes it mostly is something decidedly lacking from love songs from the epoch - sincerity. Maybe it's me, but I think I just bought into the whole rebel rocker image, and then was surprised to find this snarling, hip-thrusting animal suddenly getting all doe-eyed and gooey, simpering teen love platitudes according to record label diktat. Rock 'n' Roll love is either pure bubble gum, or really about sex. When Eddie Cochran sang 'Three Steps to Heaven', you knew what he was really talking about. It's almost an instruction manual into getting into a bobby soxer's silky boxers, and he even chuckles dirtily when he growls 'That sure sounds like heaven to me'. Good Golly Miss Molly sure liked to ball, and you can bet Little Richard didn't waste much time buying her flowers.

But Buddy was different. 'True Love Ways' is a grown up love song. He doesn't even call her 'baby', while acknowledging the full reality of love's wilful repertoire: 'Sometimes we'll sigh,

Sometimes we'll cry'. In short, it is true about love's little ways. The song's arrangement seems to straddle both the swing and the pop era, with Buddy crooning over harp, strings and a spine-curdling clarinet. It is goose-bumpy stuff that positively wrenches your heart-strings. You just know he was singing to his wife, soon to be widow. It was his wife's favourite song, and one of the last songs he ever recorded. All this sings out in 2.5 minutes of pure pop perfection. They sure don't make 'em like that any more.

The song of love is a sad sad song (etc.)

Given my speculations on the possible superiority of love songs over the thing itself, I feel duty bound to volunteer a few of my favourites in the genre. Love songs, that is, not loves. Although, not surprisingly, the songs that see us through assert their claims through association. Certain songs absorb as much as they impart, like sponges of sentiment. It’s time I gave them a squeeze.

Not surprisingly, most of the songs I value most are of the melancholy kind, for, as I never tire of asserting, or letting Nick Cave assert for me, “I believe the Love Song to be a sad song. It is the noise of sorrow itself”. Or, as he more melodramatically puts it, with reference to his own clutch of such, “lifelines thrown into the galaxies by a drowning man”.

And yet, not all love songs are obviously sad, and not all are ballads. A few manage to cover up the tracks of the tears with a convincing ecstatic mask. As we’re just setting out, I should fill the floor not your hankies, so let’s start with some of the very few happy, toe-tappy love songs in the Helioholic’s hit parade. In no particular order, and in sporadic instalments here’s some of my favourite love songs.

Just to spite him, I’ll start with a rare instance of up-beat love lyricism from Mr Cave himself. Now, generally, love is a fairly anguished business for our old Nick, and I’ll have a few choice examples of this more characteristic mode in good time. Love is more likely to have him reaching for a handy rock – “for all beauty must die” (‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, from Murder Ballads) – than standard sentimental endearments. Which is why ‘Breathless’ from The Lyre of Orpheus is a surprising little gem. Nick, happily married Nick, doesn’t sing about love much these days, because contentment doesn’t suit his muse. But this finds his satanic majesty full of the joys of spring, with nature chorusing his happiness.

“It's up in the morning and on the downs
Little white clouds like gambolling lambs
And I am breathless over you”.

(The heavy smoking Cave, getting up early and striding across the Sussex Downs, might have something to do with this condition, but I won’t spoil the moment for him). There’s a plaintive flute weaving in and out of the simple acoustic accompaniment, suggesting a merry troupe of minstrels prancing along behind the besotted Bad Seed whose let love in. And how.

“The happy hooded bluebells bow
And bend their heads all a-down
Heavied by the early morning dew
At the whispering stream, at the bubbling brook
The fishes leap up to take a look
For they are breathless over you”.

It’s surely the mark of genius when an artist can go so far left-field of his usual patch so convincingly. And yet, he’s changed the tempo, changed the tone, but the anguish is still just beneath the surface and between the lines. This is still a lifeline from a drowning man. The clue’s in the title.

"I listen to my juddering bones
The blood in my veins and the wind in my lungs
And I am breathless without you".

He kinda means it, somehow turning a rather sweet little ditty into a visceral immolation before the beloved. You just can’t keep a good Goth down.

And this applies equally to one of the most perfect Emo-anthems to love, ‘Just Like Heaven’ by The Cure. Big sounds, Big hair, are usually a Big turnoff for me, symbolised by one of the aural nadirs of a dodgy decade: The Alarm. But it’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration for Robert Smith, who found a look and stuck with it, long after the backcombed bandwagon left town. Dear Robert is just a bit too cuddly to be a scary Goth, or convince us with the shadow puppet diablerie of his suburban psychodramas. Bless, this Creepy from Crawley can’t even put his lipstick on properly, and you can almost imagine a fussy aunt giving him a spit wash with a hankie to clean up the proper mess he’s made of it while he wriggles teetchily from her grasp. Michael Bracewell clinched it in his brilliant book, England is Mine, when he said in Smith’s songs “the soul is not so much bared as reduced to wandering around in its dressing gown all day”.

But that’s just why a song such as ‘Just like Heaven’ is so perfect, and speaks to tortured suburban romantics everywhere. Boys do Cry. Love is big, and its emotions are big, even when worn moochily by gauche adolescent suburbanites. It captures something of the child-like glee of love. Partly through the tumbling jangle of heart-catchy guitars (making Altered Images sound like Slipknot), and partly through the wide-eyed love-stoked wonder of Smith’s lyrics:

“Show me show me show me how you do that trick
The one that makes me scream" she said
"The one that makes me laugh" she said
And threw her arms around my neck
"Show me how you do it
And I promise you I promise that
I'll run away with you
I'll run away with you"

It should be fey, but somehow it isn’t. (A grown man with a thatched head and fright slap gushing thus). But twee soon turns Wagnerian, as Wuthering Heights comes to Worthing on Sea.

"Daylight licked me into shape
I must have been asleep for days
And moving lips to breathe her name
I opened up my eyes
And found myself alone alone
Alone above a raging sea
That stole the only girl I loved
And drowned her deep inside of me".

In other words, I woke up and it was all a dream. Too much Merrydown on a Sussex cliff and this is bound to happen. Yet it has everything in this song to delight the sensitive suburban soul. Soaring from glee to Goth gloom in 3 perfect minutes. A soaring love anthem for the eternally lost and lonely.

Finally, and this might surprise you, but what romp through the vinal vales of lyrical loves past would be complete without ‘Come on Eileen’? Yes, I know it’s been tarnished by overexposure, with faux school discos flogging the dead horse of popular nostalgia, but I still really love this song. It is a landmark for me, as one of the very rare instances when I like what everyone else likes and join in a national enthusiasm. I usually go the other way in principle, but not this time. Few people don’t like ‘Come on Eileen’, and everyone loved it when it reached no. 1 in the summer of 1982. It floated from countless open windows, capturing the youthful mood of summer. Agreed, it’s rather pompous, Rowland is a plonker, and their charity shop Romany Romanticism fooled no one. But sometimes you’ve just got to go with it. It was the year of my first proper love, and my first broken heart. But not yet, when Dexys topped the charts and stomped the boards, that love was at its height. It was the very sound of love, and I was happy to stomp along to its tune, forgetting all in adolescent abandon. An instant exit from Croydon. For that is what it is about. Escaping, the destined drudgery of background:

"These people round here wear beaten down eyes
Sunk in smoke dried faces they're so resigned to what their fate is,
But not us, no not us we are far too young and clever.
Remember Toora Loora Toora Loo-Rye-Aye
Eileen I'll hum this tune forever".

He’s right. We have. Forever 15 and in first love, restored by a record.

(I've no idea how to embed Youtube widgets like the clever blogs do, but here are the links. Enjoy.)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb45RkfWjV0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ThWaMnlSZM&feature=PlayList&p=1598BC8EB2044468&playnext=1&index=57

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y5StFADI9NM