The Haunted Innocence Of Childhood: “Clair” by Gilbert O’Sullivan

How nostalgia works is quite simple, other than involving a great deal of selective amnesia. We hark back to what we saw, heard and felt as children because that was the time when we were safe and cared for. Certainly by the time we become teenagers, we begin to discover things for ourselves, things that we feel belong to no one but us, things which help mark us out from everybody else. But the deepest nostalgia remains for that early period in our lives when we didn’t have to worry about anything.

For me that would be the early-mid seventies, and I am aware that I am consciously ironing out a lot of unpleasant and even horrific experiences from those days. In order to remain sane, however, that is how our memory facility generally functions. Hence I recall everything I saw on television or heard on the radio or from my parents’ record collections with an undue and perhaps in part unearned fondness, even things which today wouldn’t come across as being that great; mainstream evening television, for example. I am sure that Bruce Forsyth’s original Generation Game or programmes like The Two Ronnies, if seen today, would come across as flimsy and dated. But you only remember what they meant to you at the time you first watched them. Ronnie Hazlehurst’s theme for Are You Being Served?, for example, I find immensely moving because it promises a future which never came to pass, and its futurism is in any case compromised by the fact that almost all of the leading performers in that programme are no longer with us.

That is one definition of what it means to get old.

But the music, the music. “Clair” pushes all the cosiest buttons, with its jaunty whistling introduction, the harmonica, the closing gentle swell of the arrangement, the characteristic early seventies recording studio echo, or resonance. And perhaps, at the close of 1972 – and remember that in the States this was almost the Christmas number one – “Clair” represented the most innocent of pop records. Consider that it followed directly from the year’s biggest seller, “Alone Again (Naturally),” which meditates with sardonic/stoic sentimentality about being jilted at the altar, committing suicide and parental bereavement and it must have felt like the coolest breath of relief.

Innocent, because that is exactly what “Clair” is; a nice, innocent song whose modest twist is that it is about babysitting – to be precise, it is about O’Sullivan (“Uncle Ray” refers to his real first name of Raymond) babysitting for the daughter of his then manager Gordon Mills, in the days before he became famous and was happy to earn a few extra quid. It truly is a family affair - Mills himself plays the harmonica and Clair herself appears, giggling, at the song’s end.

And that really is all there is to the song and the record – except O’Sullivan himself is highly dubious about whether such a song could be written and pass controversy-free muster today. I am determined not to blot out everything uncomfortable from the memories described above. You and I now know that there were a lot of extremely dubious people on the television and the radio in those days, and that evil things were allowed to happen which should never have passed. From a 2018 perspective, I suspect that “Clair” would cause a minor furore now; the lyrical turnaround comes a little too late in the song to ward off pre-emptive distress. But Gilbert O’Sullivan was, and is, one of the good guys, and it is not his fault that history and perspective have, in retrospect, altered or been clarified, leaving such innocence stranded. Nostalgia’s fine if you can’t, or won’t, think about now, and how “now” shapes everything we have ever experienced.

Date Record Made Number Two: 30 December 1972

Number Of Weeks At Number Two: 2

Records At Number One: “Me And Mrs. Jones” by Billy Paul and “You’re So Vain” by Carly Simon

UK Chart Position: 1