the long and winding road
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i should have known better
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brits do it better
more than words
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this charming man
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sing your life
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lost(?)
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home
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in the pouring rain / very strange... "Penny Lane," the Beatles
I don't have any explanation why, but ever since I was 6 (or possibly much earlier, maybe whence teetering in the womb?) I have had this attraction to everything
British. From a young age I had an extraordinary affinity for Douglas Adams, Evelyn Waugh, "Jeeves and Wooster," "Monty Python," and "Are You Being Served" without ever really
knowing why. So sometimes I catch myself from saying "pence" instead of "cents," "unused to wine" instead of "not used to the wine," "the lift" instead of "elevator," and "are you free?" instead of "are you busy?"
I think I even managed to scare off a graduate student from London once when I started referring to the elevator as "the lift." Oops. I was only trying
to make her feel welcome. *shrug* But I'm a hopeless, hapless American, from the outskirts of the capital, who can only dream of old blighty and wonder what it's
like there. I still haven't made it across the pond, even though it's been 24 years and I keep thinking "London 2005!" (in my dreams, maybe, I'll be lucky
if I get to Heathrow for a visit even).
But this love also extends to singers and musicians who either were born in England, grew up there, or even those who only got famous there. Where this attraction to blighty-born
folk, I'm not sure, but there's more specific information about my musical journey over on the long and winding road. Long ago my uncle gave me a cassette tape (yes kids,
that's what we used before cable modems, iPods, and the internet) in which he'd copied all his Beatles U.S. singles and albums he owned. I still actually have this tape after all these
years, and I just listened to it last month and despite a little bit of tape decay, it doesn't sound that much different than the tape I had first heard nearly 2 decades
ago.
A couple years, in the more recent past, I started thinking about the bands and singers I liked, and realized that the majority of them were English. The Beatles.
Led Zeppelin. The Who. Fleetwood Mac (yeah, I know, they're only part English). Duran Duran. The Lilac Time. I couldn't help thinking
that it was just very peculiar. Around the same time, my thoughts shifted to thinking about my favorite actors and actresses. Cary Grant (he was born
in England, although he became as American as one can be without actually having been born here). Sean Connery (arguably the best James Bond). Maggie Smith. Judi Dench. Stephen Fry. Then of more
recent actors - Jude Law. Orlando Bloom. Emma Thompson. Kate Winslet. I remember having a discussion with my brother about why British movies tended
to have the same actors - and the same good actors! His response: "well, it's a small country remember, a lot less actors than in the U.S." For every interview
I've seen on that Bravo show "Inside the Actors Studio," the replies that the British actors and actresses inevitably are similar when asked about their
formal acting education - they've had quite a lot of it. A lot of the actors in America are often "discovered" because for their cuteness, if they've been
an underwear model, or for the "it" factor, not necessarily because they can deliver lines.
So I got to thinking...maybe this is true in British music as well. Not saying they've all been classically trained or anything, but the work ethic and
the persistence of working toward common goals - to be as good as you possibly can, and then break America, the biggest music market on the planet - seems to
be much more ingrained in the collective English musical psyche. When the Beatles were my world for about 6 or 7 years, I read every single book I could get my
hands on, trying to absorb as much as mentally possible. (Still to this day, I have a bunch of Beatles books, including Davies' biography on the band, Lewisohn's The Beatles Chronicle and the second edition of
Turner's Things We Said Today.)
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2004 - mlmchang