A Lyrical Memoir

What motivated me to publish them was my realisation that writing lyrics has, for fifty years of my life (age 20 to 70) been my way of expressing myself as a poet. Since 70 I have mostly written straight poems/verses - as in my two volumes Sketches and Landscapes and (most recently) Sour Wine. I initially thought of publishing the lyrics as if they were poetry on the page but decided that they are essentially lyrics, and that does not lower their status as poems. If anything (certainly for some) it may enhance it. Thus the verse numbers are given, the choruses identified, and the pattern of repetition for each.

About a third were written for successive bands CMU, Trident and Eucalyptus, or are personal/general or about my family. These include four recorded on Spotify in 2017 (for my wife Anne, performed at her 70th) entitled 'I am Your Man', and 'The Birthday Man' recorded on my own 70th. Twelve are songs performed and recorded by my son Alex's first ever band, the Young Equals, formed in response to the Commission for Racial Equality's campaign 'All Different All Equal' in 1996. Earlier, in the 1980s I was a member of CND, and wrote a number of songs for local campaigning in Cambridge and later in Greenwich. I was also elected to Cambridgeshire County Council in 1981. All of the 'political' songs are strictly historical, relating to issues in the 1980s when Labour was in opposition, in the county as in the country.

Finally, nearly a quarter of the songs are broadly spiritual, some reflecting my fifty years of being a Quaker, others to periods when I took time off from Friends to explore other styles of Christianity, and indeed other faiths.

It's a mixed bag, rather like a mosaic of experiences and attitudes during my 76 years so far on this planet. I felt it could be read as a sort of memoir, even though there are swathes of my life in which I did not write many, sometimes even any songs. And if the opportunity presents for me to record the 75 or so of them that have never yet been recorded, I shall be happy to do so, though my voice at 76 is not what it was, and I haven't picked up a guitar for a while!