When I was a kid I’d ask my mum what was for tea and she’d sometimes jokingly reply “Air Pie and Windy Pudding, with a cup of Fresh Air.” Apparently this was something her mother used to say to her when she was young but I was wondering if anyone else knew this expression or if it was just peculiar to my family.

Download: Life Is A Minestrone – 10cc (mp3)

Only a vaguely related song but it has a “food” theme which will do. One of their best singles I think, despite the rampant clever-dickery of the lyrics.

I’ve written a lot here about my mother’s record collection and had been working on one about Cat Stevens’ 1971 album “Teaser and The Firecat” before I left for London to see her. It was one of those albums you’d always find sitting next to “Bridge Over Troubled Water” and “Tapestry” in the homes of over-30s like my mother, offering a little taste of folky counter-culture bohemia in a nice, gentle package for those who were too old for Woodstock but too young for Val Doonican and James Last.

The album contained Stevens’ beautiful version of the old English hymn “Morning Has Broken” which, coincidentally, was played by the church organist at the end of my mother’s funeral ceremony. Well, not all that coincidentally really, my sister asked them to play it because it’s a lovely tune and was on one of my mother’s favourite albums.

Download: Morning Has Broken – Cat Stevens (mp3)

PS: I’d like to thank everyone for their kind thoughts and best wishes, it’s much appreciated.

I wish there was an easier or less painfully abrupt way of beginning this post but for the life of me I don’t know what it is.

My mother died last week.

She’d been suffering from cancer for the past three years, it was detected early and for a while it looked as if the chemotherapy had “cured” it, but as is often the case it came back and eventually got to the point where there was nothing the doctors could do but make her comfortable.

I was in London the week before to see her because my sister told me she might not have long left, but while I was there it seemed her condition had stabilized and though she was obviously still very ill I half-hoped she would be around for a little while longer. She always seemed such a strong, healthy woman I found it hard to come to terms with the idea that she wouldn’t live forever, or at least longer than me. Even so, when I reluctantly left her to catch my flight back to America I had the awful, pit-of-the-stomach feeling it might be the last time I ever saw her which, sadly, it turned out to be. I just didn’t think it would be quite so soon.

The woman I left in that nursing home room was old and frail but that’s not how I want to remember her. In my mind my mother was, and always will be, the woman in the photo above: youthful, smart, funny, and vivacious. She was also a woman who raised two kids on her own without much money and the older I’ve gotten the more I’ve appreciated everything she did for me and admired her strength. Though she used to joke that I was “just like your bloody father” whenever I did or said something she didn’t like, I think everything I am today is because of her. I owe her so much.

This hasn’t really sunk in yet, the other day it hit me that I was never going to speak to her again (well, duh) which just left me feeling incredibly empty and wanting desperately to, at the very least, kiss her and tell her I love her just one more time.

It seems stupidly irrelevant to be including a song with this post, but music is often the nicest way to remember people and I can’t think about my mother for any length of time without the name Frank Sinatra coming up. This was her favourite record of his, and I’ve always thought of it as “her” song, so whenever I hear this I think of her in happier times.

Download: Witchcraft – Frank Sinatra (mp3)

I’m going to London again in a couple of days for her funeral but I will be back here at some point and try to pick up the pieces.

When I was about 14 my best mate at school told me that he thought my mother was good-looking. I don’t know if I should have thumped him for eyeing up my mum in that way (and maybe having secret Mrs. Robinson-style fantasies about her) but the truth is I was more chuffed than anything. I was rather proud that I had an attractive mother who got compliments — even from chubby schoolboys — and was wolf-whistled at when she walked past a building site, even though she had reached the shockingly ancient age of 40 that year. So while she might not have been able to afford to buy me the new Gola trainers with the lime green stripe that all my mates had at least I didn’t mind being seen in public with her.

Not that she was a Bond girl or anything but because she was a single woman with long blond hair who still dated men she seemed younger and more glamourous than my friend’s mothers who were more Woman’s Realm than Cosmopolitan if you know what I mean — “proper” mums like the ones you saw in Daz commercials on the telly. That’s how I remember them anyway, but when you’re that age most grown-ups seem old and boring. My mate Paul had parents called Stan and Winnie which not only sounds like two characters out of Andy Capp they looked like them too, the sort of people the 1960s seemed to have completely passed by and you can’t imagine ever being young or having sex — though Paul was proof that they must have done it at least once. Lovely people, mind.

As you can imagine, being a divorcee raising two kids on her own my mum had a thing for songs about strong, independent women battling against the odds (men, usually) so she loved the Country record “Harper Valley PTA” by Jeannie C. Riley. This 1968 hit was about a single parent (though widowed in this case) who scandalizes the other parents at her daughter’s school by wearing short skirts and being seen out on the town with men. The best part about it is she stands up for herself and gives them all a good verbal knee in the balls for their small-minded hypocrisy. When one-parent families were portrayed in the media back then it was usually as a “problem” — latchkey kids, “broken” homes and all that crap — so it was nice to hear a loud and proud single mum in a pop song. Not only that, but it also stands up for a mother’s right to look sexy which must have made mine pump her fist in the air and shout “right on sister!”

Download: Harper Valley PTA – Jeannie C. Riley (mp3)

This is so gorgeous it sends shivers up my spine. Not least because Dusty looks so much like my mother did back then. Her hair wasn’t quite so big though.

I put a question mark in the title above because I’m not sure which of my parents this record belonged to. Even though it always sat in the sideboard with the rest of my mother’s albums I’ve a feeling it actually belonged to my Dad and he left it behind when he buggered off. My old man was a big fan of elegant Jazz pianists like George Shearing, Oscar Peterson and Dave Brubeck so in my mind I always thought of it as one of his records, but I could be wrong. I supposed I could clear that up by asking my mum but she’d probably think it was a bit peculiar me asking her who bought some record over 40 years ago. Besides, I don’t want to ruin my cozy nostalgic impressions with inconvenient things like facts.

I used to think this was a 1950s album but it actually came out in December 1961 exactly one year after my parents got married so maybe the old man bought it as an anniversary present. It’s romantic mood makes it perfect for lovey-dovey young newlyweds though my parent’s marriage didn’t exactly get off to an ideal start because, to tell a family secret, my mother was pregnant with my sister when they got married — something we didn’t figure out until she turned 16 and the penny dropped that her birthday was only 6 months after their wedding anniversary. That was a bit of a shock I can tell you. Though I’m certain that wasn’t the only reason they got married it does all sound a bit like “A Kind of Loving” with my dad in the Alan Bates role, in those days any bloke who got a girl in the family way bought himself an express ticket to the altar. There was another alternative of course, mum told us some in the family hinted she could try the “drink a bottle of gin and sit in a hot bath” way out of the situation which sounds like the shabby subplot of another ‘kitchen sink’ movie.

Still, this would have been just the right thing to put on the record player after the baby had gone to sleep for the night and my parents wanted to relax in their little council flat. Cole had a warm, milk chocolatey voice that could charm any woman out of her girdle and with Shearing’s elegant piano and the silky strings it would make all your cares float away. I thought for a minute that I might have been conceived to this record but then I realized I was born only 8 months after it came out. That’s another question I won’t be asking my mother either.

Download: Let There Be Love – Nat King Cole with The George Shearing Quintet (mp3)
Download: Azure-Té – Nat King Cole with The George Shearing Quintet (mp3)
Buy: Nat King Cole Sings, George Shearing Plays (album)

PS: I wasn’t the only one whose parents had a copy of this album.

The hippies liked to sneer at the older generation for being too uptight and square to ever tune in, turn on, and get high. But just because they didn’t sit in a field with flowers in their hair didn’t mean they never got spaced out — they just did it with different drugs. My mother was very partial to the occasional Cinzano Bianco and popped a Valium or two whenever the pressure of raising two kids on her own got too much. And I don’t doubt that chilling out with The Sandpipers on the record player helped a lot too. This wispy Easy Listening vocal group were probably the complete opposite of what was hip and turned-on but their version of “Louie Louie” is as blissed-out and spacey as the most trippy psychedelia. Not only that but they sing the damn thing in Spanish — how far-out is that, man?

Download: Louie Louie – The Sandpipers (mp3)

I remember my mother coming back from the pictures one night in 1969 and telling us she’d been to see some film called “Midnight Cowboy.” She never told us what it was about (imagine telling a seven-year-old “well it’s about this man who goes to New York to sleep with women for money…”) and for years I literally thought it was a Western, and then somewhere along the line I also thought Glenn Campbell’s “Rhinestone Cowboy” had something to do with it. It wasn’t until the late 70s that I got to see it myself (on good old BBC2 most likely) and I think it was because it had been shrouded in mystery for so many years it became a sort of icon of the “adult” world to me, something I wouldn’t understand until I was older. Even though I’ve seen it a thousand times now it still has that cachet of adult sophistication about it, it’s not my film in the way that “Taxi Driver” is but it represents that mysterious place my mother went to without me and my sister: dates with other men, X-films, cocktail parties, Cosmopolitan magazine, and Erica Jong novels.

The film’s actual theme song was, of course, this beauty and not “Rhinestone Cowboy”.

Download: Everybody’s Talking – Nilsson (mp3)

One interesting nugget of trivia you might find handy to liven up boring dinner parties is that Jon Voight’s brother is the legendary pop composer Chip Taylor who wrote “Wild Thing.” Not only that, but the same year the film came out he produced the album “Any Way That You Want Me.” for the lovely Evie Sands which includes a song he wrote inspired by the film called “Crazy Annie.” The song is about Joe Buck’s hometown girlfriend Annie who only appears in the film in his daydreams and nightmares, including a particularly harrowing one where the two of them are gang-raped by local thugs and she gets carted off to a mental institution. It was a long while before I figured out exactly what happened in that scene, maybe I was just too innocent to believe those guys were actually shoving something up Joe Buck’s arse but it was all done in a trippy, hallucinatory style which was very late 60s and a little confusing to me at the time — I’d led such a sheltered life.

Download: Crazy Annie – Evie Sands (mp3)

It’s a beautiful song written from Annie’s point of view (well, you couldn’t expect Evie Sands to sing a song as Ratso Rizzo could you?) using her few lines of dialogue in the movie as lyrics and rescues her from being a mere phantom in Joe’s memory and turns her into a real person who wasn’t crazy and is still in love with him. I can’t think of another example of someone writing a song about a minor character in a movie (unless there’s a really obvious one I’ve forgotten), it’s like someone writing one about one of Alfie’s girlfriends.

PS: That Evie Sands album is well worth buying, glorious sunny pop-soul from the woman no less than Dusty Springfield said was her favourite singer.