{"id":572,"date":"2019-11-22T09:39:41","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T09:39:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/?p=572"},"modified":"2019-11-22T10:34:48","modified_gmt":"2019-11-22T10:34:48","slug":"572","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/2019\/11\/22\/572\/","title":{"rendered":"LENDANEAR TO MUSIC"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

LENDANEAR: NOW AND THEN<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I fell in love with poetry through\nlistening to the lyrics of old songs my dad would sing as he drove the family\non weekend trips throughout my childhood such as On The Street Where You Live,\nUnforgettable and A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square. In one of my early\njobs as a young man, my employer\u2019s head office was in Berkeley Square, which\nseemed a strange bit of serendipity at the time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I had started writing poetry at the\nsecondary-not-very-modern Heys Road School For Boys in Prestwich. I was\ninspired, in an almost Dead Poets Society manner, by a teacher called Noel\nDrury who was prepared to read my non-curricular efforts and offer patient\nadvice and encouragement. Standing at over six feet tall, or so it seemed to me\nthen, and bald but with a halo of red hair around the perimeter of his head, he\nlooked like an angel, but he could be a devil of a teacher. In those nineteen\nsixties days when \u2018whacking\u2019 was allowed he would call miscreants out in front\nof the class to his desk, and tell them to bend over. From the top of his desk\nhe would lift the largest, heaviest leather-bound bible you could imagine. He\nwould then hoist it, two handed, and deliver thumping blows to the pupil\u2019s\nbottom.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018You have been smote by the wrath of\nGod,\u2019 Drury would remind us as we limped, pained and embarrassed, back to our\nplace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I still have some of the poems I wrote\nthen and asked him to read and I still love all the canonical poetry he introduced\nme to during class time and in his own extra, and unpaid, time after school.\nMr. Drury didn\u2019t tell me to \u2018learn them off by heart\u2019 but instead taught me how\nto interrogate them, how to evaluate them and to understand them. He must have\nnoticed, but seemed not to mind, that my poetry edged more towards the\ncontemporary lyrics of folk-pop than to Alexander Pope. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Sir\u2019 ensured, though, that I gave very\ncareful consideration to the selection of the precise, or deliberately\nimprecise, word and that I learned how to plot a narrative. In short, he taught\nme to have fun as I learned, and that surely, is the art of teaching.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Some years later, I was a married young\nbuck with a wife, living in our first house, on Kirkstall Avenue, in Heywood,\nonly half a mile from my parents and brother, enjoying the freedoms and fears\nof manhood. I feared more than anything that the day might come, and it seemed\nthen as if it could arrive very soon, and indeed it did, when I would feel\ntrapped in a dead end job that I hated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I could well have been fretting on that notion on the evening I stood outside, in our still uncultivated garden, (Dee just hadn\u2019t got round to it yet and wasn\u2019t much good with a rotavator) when I heard guitar and vocals floating gently through the evening air. Following the sound, I found a lad of about my age, a few houses away, sitting on his back door-step, singing a lovely song and picking some neat guitar behind it, with a chorus of something to do with fishes and coal<\/em>. A life-long friendship was formed in a couple of laconic sentences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018s\u2019a good song,\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
Lendanear\u00b4s Colin Lever<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I know.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018who wrote it?\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018I did.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Did y\u2019eck.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018Bloody did.\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u2018cobblers,\u2019<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Like all artists we talked to each\nother, already, in a kind of dismissive shorthand, and we still do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Within a few weeks we were writing\ntogether and the legendary song-writing duo of Lever and Warwick was born.\nDespite my music teacher, Mr Wilson, telling my folks at a parents\u2019 night that\nI was \u2018tone deaf\u2019, (they were worried sick, they thought he\u2019d said stone\n<\/em><\/strong>deaf!) I now found I had a knack of fitting words to anything Colin\nheard in his head and then played with his hands. Similarly, Colin could take\nany words I threw at him and put them to a tune, so suddenly we had a mutually\nbeneficial and equal partnership.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nevertheless, the first couple of times\nwe went to local folk clubs and dragged along my wife, Dee, and Colin\u2019s good\nlady, Elaine, we would perform our floor spots to a very unimpressed audience\nof friends and acquaintances. Colin would perform some his own earlier songs\nand I, in our shared spot, would read some of the \u2018poetry\u2019 Mr. Drury had\napproved of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For the next seven or eight years Dee\nhated those nights each week as she would feel obliged to accompany us to local\nfolk clubs. Although there was a choice of forty or fifty clubs within our\nreach she felt the songs were repetitive, the artists indistinguishable and the\nraffles expensive. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"
introducing the new folkie
Andrew Warwick on banjo<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Her point was perhaps best proved when,\na generation later, long after Colin and I had disbanded, our son Andrew came\nover for a holiday from his home in Seoul where he and his South Korean wife,\nSue, ran a private school and brought up their young daughter, Olivia. In the\nprevious fifteen years over there Andrew had pretty much replicated my\ncollection of folk, Americana and World Music and had taught himself to play\nJohn Stewart style banjo. He knew all the songs and came home desperate to go\nto a folk club. We, of course, accompanied him to a club Colin and I had played\nat least thirty years previously. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I kid you not, the same resident group\ncame in, the regulatory half hour late, and began to perform a set Dee and I\nimmediately recognised, to an audience of she and I and our son and his wife.\nThere was no one else in the pub and even the barman was watching the snooker\non the telly. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

After a few songs I loved, the group\nturned to Andrew, nodded at his banjo and asked if he could play. He muttered\nand mumbled something about a jam session maybe, and suddenly, we were off. Froggy Went A Courtin\u2019<\/em>, (which amazingly\nColin had occasionally thrown into Lendanear sets, performing it on guitar,)\nand Froggy was followed by more Pete Seger and Kingston Trio, and every banjo\nrun we had ever heard in the folk clubs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

There followed an interval of longer\nthan the first half had run for, during which a total of eight raffle tickets\nwere sold, including one to each of the resident group. There were three prizes\nand none of us in the \u2018audience\u2019 won one. I wouldn\u2019t have minded the third\nprize, which looked to me like an old Lendanear cassette !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second half had us not only\nremembering some of the songs word for word, but also saw us able to recite the\nwhole introduction to each one. All were indelibly stamped on our memories any\nway, and not a word had been changed all these years down the line.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, back to where it all began, as\nColin and I became very familiar with a song that seemed to be played\neverywhere we went. Ye Jacobites By Name<\/em>\nwas indeed a song that justified Dee\u2019s complaint, but we nevertheless chose its\nchorus of \u2018Lendanear\u2019 for the name of the new duo we had decided to become. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Lendanear, we implored, but no one ever\ndid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

However, re-masters of our albums are now available on the new Lendanear web site. and Colin has also recorded ten previously unreleased songs. We, of course, remember what Don McLean said, in Vincent, of those who disdained Van Gogh\u00b4s work. \u00b4They did not listen. They did not know how. Perhaps they\u00b4ll listen now.\u00b4<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Check out https:\/\/lendanearmusic.com\/<\/a> for full details of new albums, re-packaged collections, podcast commentaries and Colin\u00b4s You Tube performances. It\u00b4s great for us to have all our collection of work in one easy to find space, and it also opens up all sorts of avenues still to explore with these songs. Doesn\u00b4t Cup Finals Every Night lend itself to a film extending that famous scene in Kes, or warrant a place in the Football Museum and surely Mr. Cole is a demon barber worthy of his own sit com. Our several songs dealing with the coal industry might make a short documentary for the National Coal Board Museum, and even just writing this article has me thinking about a history of folk clubs we have known and loved in the UK since the nineteen sixties folk revival.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I\u00b4d also like to explore why it seems now to be a rite of passage that every generation first ignores the music of its parents and creates its own sounds instead, before going back to the music of previous generations and then quickly leaping forward in time to create and refine new soundscapes for their own generation. My son learned to play banjo largely by listening to my old Kingston Trio albums on which John Stewart played. Andrew found my old Bela Fleck albums, too, and listened to those, then learned from several later Flecktones\u00b4 albums that hadn\u00b4t made it on to my shelves. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Colin and I, Lendanear as was and is, owe a debt to our sons. Matthew Lever designed a web site that has dragged his dad, and me, into the twenty first century and his younger brother Aiden filmed the You Tube gigs for the site. My son, Andrew, from thousands of miles away in South Korea, is a constant source of new inspirations in the way of films, books, or music I might otherwise miss by being so stuck with my singer-writers from the last century ! <\/p>\n\n\n\n

So, it really is a case of Lendanear now and then, with our own sons sending us back to the future. Its alright, it\u00b4s only music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When asked why he wrote songs, John Stewart replied by quoting his own lyric saying that \u00b4some lonesome picker might find some healing in these songs.\u00b4 I think I write to explore rather than to explain though I know there are many who think I write simply because I like the sound of my own voice. These people know me too well. I think for Colin that writing helps him identify and consider what needs changing in this world. Why we write together<\/strong> is perhaps a much more interesting question. Nobody else finds the perfect soundscape for my hopes and fears and I think my words help Colin to sing to his audience what he might otherwise shout at them. Our forty year friendship started with music and continues with music. It is not always of perfect harmony and there have been fights along the way. But whenever either of us has something to say, in a world that doesn\u00b4t seem to care, we know that the other will always Lendanear !<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This morning, on the day he launches our new Lendanear web site I have received an e mail that is so typically Colin and that summarises the Lendanear, and I hope the Sidetracks And Detours) approach to life. Even before morning has broken, Colin talks about how \u00b4the cold light of day dampens expectations\u00b4 and that even though \u00b4we have a life\u00b4s work captured for posterity\u00b4 we, like Steve Earle, ain\u00b4t ever satisfied. So, now we start the hard work of contacting folk music radio, country music stations, publishers and bands who might be interested in these songs. You might think we\u00b4re mad, and perhaps we are, but these songs still have light years to travel.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

LENDANEAR: NOW AND THEN I fell in love with poetry through listening to the lyrics of old songs my dad would sing as he drove the family on weekend trips throughout my childhood such as On The Street Where You Live, Unforgettable and A Nightingale Sang In Berkeley Square. In one of my early jobs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":576,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-572","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-music"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=572"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/572\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/576"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=572"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=572"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/aata.dev\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=572"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}