November 22nd 2013

 

It's a funny old world. And the funnier it becomes the more I like it. Laura Rawlings is a colleague from BBC Somerset and by chance on Twitter on Monday we had a brief chat about her forthcoming interview with Ray Davies of the Kinks, who was in town, as they say. Ray is a great proponent of the weird and bizarre and observes the unusual in his writing. I was never a huge fan of the Kinks but they were pretty good and I think much overlooked with their complex passages. One track they did record however which is rarer than hens teeth is Berkeley Mews.

 

Here is a link to the song itself on you-tube : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sg84eWNMNUs

 

I mentioned this track to Laura before she met Ray and how it blew me away when I first heard it as a teenager. I actually heard it at a friend called Christopher Dodds house as we rifled through his older sisters 45 records one sunny summers day in the 1970's. I can still remember placing it on the record player turntable and those first chords just mesmerised me, I was hooked and by the end with its big rift, knew that was a song of genius.

 

I then forgot about my conversation with Laura until I looked at Twitter late last night when Laura posted a message saying listen....Berkeley Mews has a connection with Somerset. So I did, and at 44 minutes into her interview Laura reads out my 'blown away' by this track to Ray Davies himself. It turns out Berkeley Mews was written as a tribute to Ray's good friend Ned Sherrin (who hosted some superb arts programmes in his time and whom I loved hosting Loose Ends until his death). Because of my conversation with Laura I discovered Ned came from Somerset, a farmers son from Low Ham and there closed the bizarre circle of life. As a teenager in County Durham I heard a song which has stayed with me through all these years and so as I approach 50, that memory triggered a conversation with the composer of the song and a 4 minute long piece of the programme. The circle was squared. I listened in Somerset to a connection to my past, my own connection with farming, my life in Somerset and a song which took me right back to that sunny summers day when I first hear that opening chord, which never forgotten then emanated across the BBC Somerset airwaves.

 

Now that's rock and roll!!