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
.. To say nothing regarding a couple of years later where Gilbert and Gordon would have a massive falling out and suing and so forth. Happier times, indeed.
ReplyDelete