Musical Dearloves

Himself discovered the missing photo of the jazz band about five minutes before we left to go to Penzance. He stood rather sheepishly in the door holding it, waiting for me to look up from the article I was reading.

‘It was on top of the wardrobe,’ he said. (This is the only storage in our one bedroom flat so I was a little surprised he hadn’t looked there already.) He smiled his I’m-just-a-lovable-little-boy-smile and those blue eyes glinted. ‘You’re exonerated.’ At which point I threw the newspaper at him.

We finally made it to the Musical Evening after a few false starts. First we forgot the strawberries, then, half way to Penryn, he said, ‘have you got the phone?’ Note The Phone. Not Your phone, or My phone.
It turned out that we had to ring them five minutes before arriving as Penzance was very busy and they’d kept us a parking space. In fact I did have My Phone but I didn’t have our cousins number on it, so that meant another U turn to get our address book.

Finally we got there on a sunny June evening with St Michael’s Mount looking like the castle in Sleeping Beauty, all gracious and sun kissed, instead of being wrapped in the usual clouds of rain. Our cousins have a house in the middle of the town, in one of the oldest squares with houses overlooking Mounts Bay. It’s pure magic, right out of an Elizabeth Goudge book (just to mix metaphors).

Having fed and watered us (or wined us in my case: Himself volunteered to drive), we settled down to listen to some of David’s recordings from the last sixty odd years. I can shamelessly namedrop now, on his behalf, for he has written music and lyrics with the likes of John Dankworth, Dudley Moore, Ralph McTell and many others. In fact, he gave Ralph McTell the contacts to get going in the music business.

So we had several hours of listening to some very old recordings of a very young John Dankworth and Cleo Laine performing and singing some of David’s songs, with Dudley on the piano and Ralph accompanying some other songs. What an incredible talent. I can string a few words together, but how you do that to music is utterly beyond me. Even more difficult – how do you write the lyrics and then write the music?

I take my hat off to David. To have produced such a consistently high standard of music, for so long, is one hell of an achievement. And to cap it all, he has the most wonderful surname. Dearlove. I’d love a name like that.