Surfing Sunday

 

Have been working through the day on the proposal for the new book – and on the latest round of six columns, with three CDs mainly in the background. Rufus Wainwright’s Poses was one, which I bought this week after reading of the death of his mother, Kate McGarrigle. Sam has often played his music when we are working late and I like it tremendously. Even more invigorating, though, have been two other CDs I bought at the same time – The Birth of Surf, a collection of early US surf music, and Board Boogie, accurately billed as “Surf ‘N’ Twang from Down Under”.

Bands I had never heard of, among them The Aztecs, The Joy Boys, The Nocturnes, The Surf Riders, The Resonets, The Vibratones, The Sunsets, Laurie Wade’s Cavaliers, The Dee Jays and The Playboys.  Could scarcely be more different from Poses, but found myself enjoying quite as much as Dick Dale & The Del-Tones, Duane Eddy & The Rebels, Link Wray & His Raymen, The Ventures and The Surfaris. Those really were the days, before Beatlemania struck like a musical tsunami, wiping out many of the surf music bands.

Thank heavens for recording technology, in all its infinite variety. One of the books I bought recently is Greg Milner’s Perfecting Sound Forever, the story of recorded music. One of the things that has always fascinated me is the difference between music as experienced live and as recorded and reproduced. The band that, for me, showed the difference most dramatically in the 1960s was Fairport Convention.

And, just maybe, the extraordinary volume of their concerts could have contributed to the hearing loss and tinnitus that took me to see a specialist in Harley Street this week. On the list of technology I have so far refused I can now add a hearing aid to a pacemaker. Which puts me in mind on another Sixties band of Liverpudlians.