As Dom notes: 'Sometimes you badly need to hear again something you listened
to for a while a long time ago....'
Last month, from the bottom of the world in New Zealand, I ordered a copy of
Ray Fenwick's 1971 album 'Keep America Beautiful, Get A Haircut' from a
specialist bookseller (yes, bookseller) in England. While AMG's Richie
Unterberger describes it as "a run-of-the-mill mix of the era's popular hard
rock/progressive-rock styles", the grooves of my original copy (bought when
I was fourteen) were worn through over twenty-five years ago.
It arrived last week, I put it on the stereo in trepidation. Was this going
to be a 'school reunion' experience, where the girl who tormented every boy
when she walked along the edge of the swimming pool, entering not only
impossibly blue water but also his coarsely green memory forever, turns out
to be 130 kilos and mentally incapacitated through brutal exposure to
triplets? [As is typical with middle-aged males, I'll conveniently step
outside that sentence, eschewing mention of my own aging.]
A Utopian no - the same 'no' I uttered, disbelieving, when I re-read
Ingeborg Bachmann after a two-decade lay-off: unlike me and mine, this
offers the illusion of timelessness.
David Howard
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