It'll Never Be Over For Me

It happens more often than you might think that a cover version is better than the original. It's not out of the question that someone else giving a song an alternative arrangement and performance could make something in which one finds better things. But unless you were there at the time or are thriving on a later discovery of relatively rare things, you might not be aware of which came first.
It is many years now since I found Timi Yuro's It'll Never Be Over For Me on yet another Northern Soul compilation, it has remained a massive favourite and still is only likely to go further up my chart. But then I subsequently found a version of it on my Baby Washington CD. For some reason, one instinctively assumes that the version one heard first was the original but it isn't necessarily so. And it wasn't until today that I found out that Baby Washington's was the original and Timi Yuro came to it later.
I'm not saying that Timi Yuro was a better singer than Baby Washington, I don't think she was. But her rendering of this song is the best, even given that Baby's is still a fine thing. I just wonder what would have happened if I had discovered them in the right order.
Baby Washington is powerful enough but more relaxed with its Walk on By guitar accompaniment. I did just have to check if it was written by Burt Bacharach but it wasn't. It was Bobrick/Blagman. It also has a sad harmonica, plenty if not plenty enough, but would surely be a classic song in this account if Timi hadn't come along in 1968 to remake Baby's 1964 (it says here) release.
Rather than the gentler orchestration of that, Timi Yuro's cover comes in with the brass section, her muscular, passionate voice and strings giving it all of the abandon of the best Northern Soul masterpieces in which the only motivation seemed to be to dance through the idea of heartbreak in the most audacious and athletic way one could.
I partly regret never having gone to the Wigan Casino and am partly grateful I never did so that my dance floor limitations were never quite so cruelly found out but Stuart Maconie did live in Wigan at exactly the right time and I am grateful for his account of it in the chapter in his book, Cider with Roadies.
It doesn't matter, does it. Having both Timi Yuro and Baby Washington is more than twice as good as having had only one of them. It looks as if this song is 50 years old. I find that Sam Bobrick has a website, that he wrote some of The Girl of My Best Friend, http://www.sambobrick.com/music.php but wasn't really an ongoing commercial success as a songwriter. That is awful but I can sympathize with him on that. On the other hand, I'd still rather have had a hand in a masterpiece than be a millionaire on the back of doggerel.

Free Kindle - Walking on Water

The kindle edition of Walking on Water will be free to download for the next five days from Amazon, as per the Author Page link above.

Cheltenham Festival Preview 2014

Tuesday 

My week will be a happy and profitable one if The New One wins the Champion Hurdle on day one, having already backed him at 10/1, 5/1 and 3/1. He is currently joint favourite or second favourite at around 3/1.

He has every right to finish in front of most of the opposition around Cheltenham, including the likelihood that he should reverse the form with My Tent or Yours in Kempton’s Christmas Hurdle because this is over a stiffer track and The New One is probably an even better horse over two and a half miles.

The one that you have to worry about is the prolific winner and reigning champion, Hurricane Fly. The worry is that The New One has made occasional jumping mistakes when racing at speed.

Most bookmakers were reasonably impressed when Hurricane Fly won the Irish Champion Hurdle but beating Captain Cee Bee only three lengths with Jezki and Our Conor even closer behind in a 4 runner race left a few questions about whether he is quite as good as he was.

I’m happy to be on The New One, though, because he has put in his best performances at Cheltenham and a recent interview with the jockey sounded encouraging. 

Wednesday  

We missed the boat in the Champion Chase by not taking the chance against the well-being of Sprinter Sacre when he was still favourite. He is probably the best jumps horse I have ever seen in the flesh (and that includes Desert Orchid) but now he is not taking part after being pulled up in his only race this season and Nicky Henderson prefers to keep him for next year.

And so, Sire de Grugy is 6/4  favourite and that looks fair enough. Possibly good enough to make him almost the best bet of the week. 

Thursday 

Wonderful Charm is one of my favourite horses and has done nothing wrong so far, including getting beaten narrowly by Oscar Whisky in December when giving him weight. The novice chase here is where he hopefully will prove to be as good as we thought he would be.

Another favourite horse is At Fisher’s Cross but it hasn’t gone well for him so far this season, jumping badly and being inexplicably worse than he should have been. But he put in an improved performance in the trial for the World Hurdle in which the legendary Big Bucks returned from a long lay off through injury but it was an odd race, won by a 66/1 outsider who has been beaten round Cheltenham any number of times, and so it’s hard to know what we were supposed to learn from it.

But we can avoid all of those difficult decisions if we think that Annie Power, if she takes part in this race, would be the answer in any case. She could run in the mares race on Tuesday or the Champion Hurdle but this is where we are most likely to see her for various reasons. She hasn’t really been tested yet but if there are question marks over the other main contenders here, the only question about her is how good she is. If she does run in an alternative race, I’d want More of That on my side.

But Wonderful Charm will be the tip for Thursday at about 6/1 currently which is preferable to a shorter or similar price about those in the World Hurdle when , quite honestly, you are afraid of so many others.

Friday 

If you still have any money left by Friday, don’t worry- there are still plenty of remaining opportunities to dispose of it.

If you like betting on the County Hurdle then I’m afraid you are beyond redemption and there is nothing I can do for you.

But Guitar Pete impressed in his latest race in Ireland, being one of those proven types who has solid form in the book and turns up and ruins the reputations of those flashy types who have been talked up but not proved much yet. He’s done it at least twice and it could happen again here.

I backed Kings Palace for the novice hurdle after he was massively impressive when winning here before Christmas and I’m not going to change my mind about that. 

But the Gold Cup is the big one if you have lasted this long. Bobsworth has shortened up from 9/4 to 2/1 with Paddy Power and he’s put Silvianiaco Conti out from 3/1 to 7/2.

Personally, I much prefer market moves to the form book as an indicator but market moves in the 12 hours before the race are more significant than those a month before.

It is a classic face off between the two big stables of Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson. I backed Silviniaco Conti last year and was feeling confident until he fell when in a nice position and going well just before it got serious. Subsequently he has won the King George impressively while Bobsworth got run off his feet and finished nowhere at Haydock in the Autumn before reasserting his credentials in Ireland at Christmas.

I’m not deserting Silviniaco now, not least because it is very hard for a Gold Cup winner to return and win it again. Bobsworth is a tough little fighter and is likely to be very hard to beat, though, and there’ll be not a dry eye in my house if he wins. There will just be a bit less money. 

And, having said all that, if anyone is still awake, I’ll make Kings Palace (nap) the best bet of the week. If you see the trainer, David Pipe, interviewed and he says it’s his best of the week- and I dare say it will be- then back it. He said that about Salut Flo two years ago and he saved my bacon. Mind you, if he nominates something else then perhaps we had better beware. 

The Grand National 

The National is timed just so that once one has recovered from Cheltenham, it feels like time to try again.

Tidal Bay is 13 years old now but continues to defy his age and keeps on producing admirable efforts. If they were both to run, I’d expect him to have to give weight to ex-Gold Cup winner, Long Run, but I’d also think it worth backing him to do so. 3 miles doesn’t look far enough for him these days and Aintree would be a fine place for him to end his career in the winner’s enclosure.

A 13 year old winner would defy all the workmanlike logic of those who use profiles to find winners.

At the other end of the age and experience scale is Rocky Creek,
currently 25/1.

John Burnside - All One Breath

John Burnside, All One Breath (Cape)

One of the many ways that poets can be differentiated is on a scale between frugal and prolific. That this book is John Burnside's 13th collection and comes only two and a half years after Black Cat Bone puts him high on the prolific scale but only apparently as his books get better and better.
He is also one for using epigraphs and two, from Ecclesiates and Shakespeare, introduce the book and another introduces its first section before we arrive at any poems. But they set out some themes of the poems in advance, about life shared between humanity and animals and harmony in human relations. And then the first part, Self Portrait as Funhouse Mirror, concerns itself with identity, self and reflections of self.
There are disparities between the individual and their mirror image, how they see themselves or how they are made to see themselves,
                                       we're always
fearful of the image in the glass
that might, in some far nightmare, find us out
as mine does me

and elsewhere, he thinks of his father's borrowed understanding of love,

and though the words he speaks are learned
from radio and 50s musicals

he isn't that far wrong in thinking
love is like a story he has longed

for years to tell.

But the book meditates a lot on the deaths of his father and other family relations. The deceased are still somehow present but need to be helped to depart. In The Wake, mirrors are covered so that they are not brought back by them. And At My Father's Funeral  considers ways of making sure he can't return as older cultures did.
Throughout these poems, extinction or its eventual inevitability are never far from our thoughts. In Nocturne, Christmas 2012, there are,

the otters and the sunbirds straggling towards extinction
while, lodged inside the covers of our books
their images persist

which is only one of any number of examples of Burnside's great phrase-making within his framework of long, ongoing sentences draped artfully across his line endings.. For his elderly
grandmother it was 'the world/ all guesswork'; urban development has meant 'the steady delete/ of anything that tells us what we are' and as a child he might have become 'an expert on fog'.
Each sentence is filled with more thought than you might have thought necessary or that it might comfortably contain,

if moths know anything of love

it has nothing to do with the beautiful doom
we long for;   

But if Burnside's subject matter sounds bleak, brooding on mortality and loss, it really isn't. By some act of almost exhilarating humanist transcendance, he makes of it a resilient and sustaining attitude in which strangeness and familiarity, being and non-being, contain each other.
The last poem, Choir, tells of his voice breaking at the age of 12 and how he took himself to the back of the choir in shame to hide but he knew the choirmaster was complicit in the subterfuge. It is one small detail that grows from a secret to encompass a far greater communal understanding, a shared experience,
                       back then it seemed
that, like as not, most everything runs on
as choir: all one; the living and the dead:
first catch, then canon; fugal; all one breath.

It's rare for the best poetry book of the year to appear in February, the industry being organized as it is, but it is going to take an enormous performance from anybody else to impress more than this does in the rest of 2014  John Burnside has sprung to the forefront of my most admired contemporary poets and this book readily stands alongside the best of anything I've seen in the last decade.

Lists

I hope I was never quite as bad as a list addict but I have to admit that I did always like a list.

Not only things like Top 20 Situation Comedies, Favourite 50 Painters or The Best Places I've Ever Been but also perhaps shopping lists although I rarely make them and if I do I've lost them before I get to the shop. And recently I forgot to get teabags twice.

But the other day I did feel that I ought to compile my own Top 100 Novels and Top 100 Music (by which will be meant 'not pop or jazz'). I found with my Pop 100 that it is best constructed by adding one item a day, something that you are sure belongs in the Top 100, so that when you reach the end, everything has passed the test and if one hasn't thought of it by then, it has had 100 chances and can't be important enough.

And so I began by nominating two choices in both categories and undertook to add one more each night. But I forgot to do it last night and didn't do it the night before, either. And so, it's good either way. Either I'll produce the requisite lists or I will have proved that I've grown beyond it, that there is more to it than classification, gradation and asserting one's own identity by claiming that such a list defines oneself.

Why would one want to do that.

But tonight, both lists are asking for a third item. It could be Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony, The Well-Tempered Klavier or Couperin's Lecons de Tenebres. And it could be Andre Gide's Symphony Pastorale or La Peste or The Woodlanders. It is easy enough for the first few weeks with so many obvious choices to pick from. But it doesn't matter does it. It is much more the point that one needs to find time to enjoy all these things rather than put them in order.
The music list could easily make 500 whereas the list of novels might stall before making a hundred. And what I'd ever do about poems is hard to imagine.

Don't expect to see these lists any time soon.  

Argerich/Abbado Mozart

Mozart Piano Concertos K 503, K466, Martha Argerich, Orchestra Mozart/ Claudio Abbado (Deutsche Grammophon)

Martha Argerich is selective about what she plays and who she plays it with nowadays and so this reunion with Claudio Abbado at the Lucerne Festival last year was a 'hot ticket'.
We are reminded of them in their previous collaborations by some vintage photographs, two young and glamorous musicians from a time gone by.
They begin with Concerto no. 25, its 14 minute opening Allegro a sparkling journey through one of Mozart's exuberant moods. Abbado's performances always have a precision about them, a clarity that this live recording captures superbly. If sometimes I wonder if the contrast between the delicate passages and the bursts of sound is made more of than necessary, one can only reflect that we can't be sure how Mozart heard it. I daresay he might have been open-minded and interested in whatever other musicians did with his compositions.
Something that seems to happen more in concert notes and on recordings these days is that we are told the composer of the cadenzas. Those in Concerto no. 20 here are by Beethoven. And I'm glad to know that.
I spent a lot of time as a teenager with some of Barenboim's recordings and so feel familiar with the territory. It's easy to take it for granted and impossible to imagine what music would be like without Mozart. Never far below the playfulness is the possibility of a darker sub-text and beauty is tainted by sadness. Martha Argerich has all of that and, it seems to me, an ideal touch with which to find the right measure of lightness or assertiveness between which these concertos move.
This is a tremendous new addition to her catalogue and a fitting memorial to Claudio Abbado, an ideal and hugely enjoyable 62 minutes that is now happily available to everyone.

View from the Boundary

The re-habilitation of Jim Davidson on Celebrity Big Brother was nothing of the sort to me. He had never been habilitated in the first place as far as I was concerned but in the end I was glad, as well as very surprised, to see him win that event for what it was worth.
I couldn't watch Big Brother for more than five minutes at a stretch but kept an eye on it to monitor the progress of the old guard, which also included Lionel Blair and Linda Nolan, against the disparate selection of identikit young people who spend all their time hugging and agonizing over shallow personal relationships. But from what I saw Jim seemed to move from a state of unreconstructed serial divorcee to something approaching hard-earned wisdom. And so when I saw this book on Sainsburys' charity book table, I donated an Irish sixpence to the good cause and took it in the hope that it might offer further insight into the thoughts of this shaman or soothsayer.
It doesn't. It drops names, relates adventures in showbiz and re-establishes that whatever new-found affection one might have for Jim, it was never due to his refined sense of humour. But it is by no means the worst book I've ever read. That honour remains unchallengeably with Les Dawson's novel, A Card for the Clubs.
All of which I only tell you by way of saying that not all reading has to be highbrow, or poetry or self-improving. If ever I thought anything was intended to improve me, I'd avoid it.
---
But, with no other immediately pressing reading to do over the weekend and Middlemarch given a good write up in The Observer's 100 Greatest Novels of All-Time, I got that out and read the first three chapters.
I remember very little about it from 35 years ago. Prof. David Carroll was our tutor at Lancaster and had edited the variorum edition when we did Victorian Literature but although I could concede that it was by no means the dullest C19th novel I'd ever read, I did struggle with the 900 pages, what it all amounted to and I wonder now how much of it I read and how much I gazed at it while turning the pages. But the early indications are good and I might appreciate it more now. Some parts of education are wasted on a 19 year old and are not likely to be appreciated for a long time afterwards.
---
And, in no way wanting to make this look like an exercise in eclecticism for eclectic's sake, the other book I have ordered is the Poems of Francois Villon. His name was referenced in a poem by William Carlos Williams that we looked at last week at Portsmouth Poetry Society. I had to admit I didn't know who he was beyond probably being a medieval French poet and so I looked him up afterwards.
And he looks well worth investigation. One day perhaps there will be a piece on him here that will be my introduction to an evening on him at PPS.
---
But it should be a good year for PPS whether that happens or not. Bigger ideas gradually being brought forward are a reading by PPS and Friends on National Poetry Day, October 2nd, probably at a venue in the University, which will be accompanied by a booklet of poems, Calliope, which has traditionally been the title of previous such editions.
And, ahead of that, we are likely to fulfil an invitation to read at the university in their arts cafe. This will be on a Wednesday afternoon in the near future. I'd prefer it didn't drag me away from the Champion Chase at Cheltenham but sometimes needs must.
---
Which only leaves me to tell you which new records I've been ordering.
Deutsche Grammophon have made available a live recording of two Mozart Piano Concertos by Martha Argerich, Orchestra Mozart and Claudio Abbado which seems unmissable and will be reviewed here as soon as possible, probably next week.
I heard a gorgeous piece early on Sunday while in that transcendent state of semi-consciousness between waking and sleep. Music heard like that is often particularly vivid. It turned out to be a song by Purcell that is on a bargain-priced 3-CD set by Barbara Bonney with James Bowman and others, of Secular Songs.
And I couldn't help but order myself a compilation of Barry White's great 1970's project, Love Unlimited. I'm ashamed to admit I don't have that already and will soon be pretending that I bought it the day it was released.
---
And, oh yes, Come on the Football !!! It was with twisted blood that I listened to Fulham go 1-0 up away at Old Trafford yesterday and then repel waves and waves of Manchester United pressure for an hour before inevitably succumbing to two quick goals. But, more was still to come as Darren Bent somehow nicked a 95th minute equalizer to claim a point.
I didn't know which side I was on, really. It was great to have Fulham so bravely resist having been so inept recently. The club is in exactly the same league position as when I began supporting them in 1966. But that same recent ineptitude has lead me to invest quite heavily on them being relegated this season.
And so, am I torn between the survival in the top division of a team of journeyman professionals who neither know nor care about me, my poems or what books and records I've bought and then the financial interest I have in them failing to do so.
No, I'm not. I hope my favourite football club gets relegated.

Today's Times Crossword Solution

Channel 4 Racing, Oh, so there you are then

It is a sad day when The Observer's horse racing coverage, such as it ever is, didn't mention any horses but was a media-related item detailing a significant drop in the audience for Channel 4's racing coverage since their revamp and change of personnel.
In the week that the world lost Pete Seeger, it is an appropriate time to ask of executives who know nothing about what they are doing 'when will they ever learn'. Having taken all the terrestrial television rights to horse racing, Channel 4 hand it over to some theorists who promptly ruin it.
Yes, the 'hardcore', as The Observer call them, probably do watch on At the Races and Racing UK but horse racing has long been divorced from other sports ever since a trip to Haydock or Catterick was not included in Grandstand, in among the rally car races or indoor athletics with Ray Smedley gradually disappearing off the pace, or with John Rickman, doffing his trilby, and Lord Oaksey, when he was sober enough, introducing the ITV Seven.
The world has certainly moved on and horse racing has become more of a niche but the audience have voted with their remote control buttons against the soi-disant 'slick' Nick Luck and the eminently dull form book student, Jim McGrath. Personally, I like Graham Cunningham but there is too much of a feel of bland seriousness about the enterprise now and although I'm sure Claire Balding knows a lot about horses and is a consummate broadcaster, she fails to say much that I need to know.
Oh, where are they now. John Francome was 'the greatest jockey', the gifted and knowledgeable horseman, and McCririck was the modern age buffoon redolent of racecourse weirdos like old Prince Monolulu. But you win some and you ose some. At least we lost Derek Thomson.
I watched a race in a betting shop last year, it might have been the year before. Tommo had been allowed to commentate on Musselburgh on a quiet Tuesday. The odds on favourite had been waited with at the back before coming to join the leader at the last, quite clearly on the bridle and due to win by ten lengths or more, while the pacemaker's jockey was reduced to throwing everything at his tiring mount.
And Tommo raises excitement to fever pitch by exclaiming, 'It's neck and neck!'
And the bloke next to me turns round and says, 'that wasn't really neck and neck, was it.'
And I said, 'no, but Tommo hasn't had a clue about horse racing ever since I can remember.'

And so all it is, really, is another modern day fable of failure by consultants, marketing people and executives to understand what it is they are in charge of. It is the X Factor factor, the reductio ad mediocritem, the downgrading of something that didn't need messing with by people who didn't know.
You can turn to At the Races if you want but on a quiet night even that can be more about Jason Weaver bickering with Luke Harvey while a floodlit programme of low grade handicaps from Wolverhampton doesn't give them enough to talk about. Some of us remember when the England cricket team thought it might be a good idea to bring back Colin Cowdrey and Brian Close to face the West Indies. So perhaps we should ask Peter O'Sullevan, soon to be 96 years old, and posh spiv, Old Harrovian, Julian Wilson to come back and save horse racing on television.

Dubliners

Radio 4's Book at Bedtime from tonight is Joyce's Dubliners. I call it Dubliners here because that is what I think its true title is. For some reason, Prof. Norman Sherry's notes on my essay on it at Lancaster in 1980/1 called it The Dubliners but the only other authority for that on the first page of a Google search is the Wordsworth Classics edition.
I have long regarded it as the best prose fiction in the language and so, in a hiatus in available new books to read this weekend just gone I read The Dead, amongst other things, and found no reason to revise that opinion.
In forty pages it is paced through a calmly observed and beautifully captured social occasion of some awkwardness through some first pangs of anxiety and discomfiture and growing alarm to the most beautiful elegiac and very famous ending. Understatement and the assured measure of every phrase and sentence, one after the other, allows a devastating, quiet bomb to go off in the final paragraphs.
The whole book has built towards it as the stories get longer and more involved but in the end the appetite for escape from Ireland, the need for release, implodes back westwards to the snow covered grave of the lost teenager, Gabriel Conroy's wife's first love, who 'died for her' and who he realizes he can never replace.
Of course, Joyce went on to bigger, more iconic things and in fact reached an impasse from which literature probably couldn't proceed. I have read that his next book, after Finnegan's Wake, would have been a return to something more traditional but whether it would have been better than this, written in his early twenties, must remain open to doubt.
It's a great shame we never found out.