To play the track: https://henrysparks.bandcamp.com/track/wind-and-fire-and-ashes
It feels like I have buried too many people this year. I suppose that that is what happens as people fall away from us. You turn round and suddenly they are gone. Death is final and there is no ‘Control-Z’ for that one. I have the feeling that time is running out both for myself and the future of our planet.
As a young man I assumed that life would go on for ever and so would that beautiful world that I lived in. But that has eroded as any student of geological time will tell you: ‘it will big time!’
My friends Mark and Luke (I call them the ‘Evangelists’) contacted me about a piece of music for documentary they were making. They had made a documentary a couple of years ago about the XR Canterbury Friday Climate Strike. In it they interviewed various participants and even had a go at handing out leaflets and talking with the public themselves. They were surprised by the public abuse at times.
They saw guitars around my house and asked if they could film me playing a song. I managed to make a rendering of ‘While we were building Jerusalem’ so when they were starting another documentary they asked me if I could do a tune for it. Of course I said yes! As Tony, my father in law, used to say: ‘If you don’t throw your hat into the ring the answer is always NO!’
The ‘Evangelist’s’ original idea was to make a documentary about a lady who lived in a tent by the sea in Folkestone. I started thinking about why someone might be living that close to the sea in less than comfortable conditions. I invented a life story for this lady (which does not appear on the track), and the chorus was:
‘The sound of loneliness is deafening
Every building burns and falls in pieces
Out by the sea I cannot hear it any more
It all goes to wind and fire and ashes‘
And then, as it happens, from many years earlier I remembered:
I was about 12
Peter was driving me to school
He explained about the dust
He tried to explain radiation and what it did
Which now I realise he did not understand
We drove past the new physics building
We were eating rum truffles
These were real rum truffles
Not the shoddy shadow that we find today
How he could afford them I do not know
We were in a little white ford van called ‘Chloe’
In fact the last time I ever saw Peter he confessed that
He had abandoned Chloe on the streets of Oxford for the police or Oxford City Council to take care of
He does not reply to letters so I think Peter is dead now
That day I did not yet know what ‘the holocaust’ was
That day I realised humans could do very bad things to each other
My view of the second world war was from comic books
It was plucky British soldiers in badly drawn black and white…
I had no concept of ‘The banality of evil’ as Hannah Arendt wrote
That was in my mind…
Whilst writing and recording I was thinking about how the music might sit in the context of a film. There are no lyrics except for at the end and they are mixed right down more as a texture than a leading part, like some one whispering in the next room. A friend who listened to the track thought it was a problem with her laptop speakers…no it isn’t, it is meant to be so. I asked some people I knew to submit ideas. Alan Prosser came up with a trumpet part and Danny Wood played some(!) electric guitar. Thanks guys, grand job! The rest is me.
The subject of the documentary later changed, but the ‘Evangelists’ were happy with the track, and I have yet to see the final result. Another day, another doughnut, and so long as we are all on the upside of the daisies; onward and upward to better world and a better future!
Wind and Fire and Ashes is released on streaming services 14/09/2024.