TIN LEAVES ON A DREICH DAY

I got up and looked out of the window.  It was Thursday, though it might just as well have been Tuesday.  As usual, the cloud was low enough to reach out and touch, and the front street was a mass of sodden leaves.  Across the road, a joiner was busily sawing away at another fitted kitchen.  At the top of the street, workmen were erecting traffic lights for yet another assault on the tarmac.  What was it Alan Price sang about ‘the shivering sparrows on smoking chimney tops?’  A torrent of wood smoke from the grotesque stainless steel moon-rocket chimney next door completed Price’s word picture perfectly.  ‘Welcome to another winter’s day in Scotland,’ I said to myself.  On a dreich day such as this my spirits had already sunk lower than the Great Detective’s parsley into the butter, and my cereal and toast hardly improved matters.  I went into my study to get on with the business of the day – i.e. staring out of the window and trying to think of something constructive to do.  The oak leaves were pitter-pattering down like huge rusty confetti, as if the gnarled old tree in the back garden had said ‘Enough – get out of my light’ and had shaken its wizened arms to free itself of its leafy burden.  All I knew was that I would have to scoop them up later and the oak leaves are the worst of the lot – the consistency of tin, but clinging to the ground like limpets.  I switched on the radio.  I wasn’t in the mood for dastardly deeds and derring-do down on the farm at Ambridge and Radio Five Live had nothing but bad news, as usual.  They must deliberately suppress any good news stories, that mob. In desperation, I turned the dial to Radio Six Music.  It’s not something to which I would normally listen, being aimed at the Gothic under-fifteens and being somewhat light on The Brotherhood of Man and Buck’s Fizz, but I stuck with it.  I was about to switch it off after I had endured a catawauling ditty by a group called the Flying Salamanders or some such, when something caused me to hesitate.  It was the sound of strings, swelling in volume through the wireless speakers into a tuneful crescendo.  Then, over the airwaves, came a voice so broken, so reedy, so tremulous, that it sounded as if old Methuselah himself, with all the cares of his 999 years, had picked up a microphone and started to warble.  There was only one line in the song, and it was repeated again and again as the orchestra swirled away in harmony behind the singer.  The line was ‘Jesus’s blood never failed me yet.’  As the song reached its climax, a second singer joined old Methuselah.  He sounded as if he had swallowed a pan-scourer.  He had an off-key baritone growl the likes of which I had only heard in the lion’s cage at the zoo.  This astonishing and wholly unbelievable song finished and I stood transfixed.  Sometimes, music does that to you.  The female DJ started to give out the names of the singers.  ‘For Heaven’s sake, hold on till I get a pencil,’ I yelled at the wireless, but the DJ had moved on to the next act, a garage group (meaning, I presume, a bunch of ex-mechanics) called the Death-Ray Onions, before I could write anything down.  “I’m sure she said ‘Terry Waite and Giles Brandreth’”, I murmured to myself.  The kidnapped vicar and the former Tory MP singing a song together?  Surely not, unless it was for Children In Need.  I supposed that stranger things have happened.  Luckily, I had the song title, which, imaginatively, was the same as the one line in the song.  I googled it.  It turned out it was by two chaps by the names of Tom Waits and Gavin Bryars.  When I read the accompanying narrative, the pieces finally fell into place.  In the early 1970s, when my hair was long and my trousers flared from the knees, there was a homeless old man who sang this song on park benches and street corners in and around Marylebone.  One day, Waits and/or Bryars heard him.  They joined him later, bringing a couple of cushions to make the park bench more comfortable, and recorded him singing it.  Afterwards, in the studio, they added the lush orchestral arrangement. I presume it was Waits who coughed his way into the song near the end.  It turned out that, once they had recorded the song, the pair had taken the finished article and searched all over Marylebone for the old homeless man to let him hear it, but he had died in the meantime.  It seemed a fitting epitaph.  I had heard nothing like that piece of music in my life, and it lifted my mood on that bleak, dank day so much that I was once more able to rejoin the human race.