Julie Andrews, Star Soundtrack

Oh how I love this. This is the soundtrack to one of the films I grew up watching my mother watching. The story of Gertrude Lawrence, the muse to Noel Coward and early diva-style super-star. Songs, the roaring 20s and all that with Julie Andrews stomping around in a variety of outfits and saying “Bloody” with amazing Cole Porter, Kurt Weill and George Gershwin songs. This is one of the few completely perfect things in life. Alright, it goes on and on for about three hours but it’s completely worth it. I watched A Star is born the other day, with Judy garland and James Mason, which similarly is bloody over-long but still feels amazing to watch.

Some of these songs are ones I’ve grown up with forever… One which goes “she’s got a pair of eyes that speak of love, n’ everything…” was apparently one of my many baby songs. I like the fact I had these very old-time-y songs (as Holden Caulfield would say). They’ve followed me too, I’ve sung any number of the songs from Star at gigs, both University-based and café-based…with strings quartets, pianos, guitars…

It’s odd writing about something I love as unreservedly and completely as this…I have nothing critical (in the reflexive sense) to say. There’s something relaxed about these songs, as if there’s all the time in the world for it to unfold, that the listener will bear the patience to sit with the song as it gently reveals itself, that the song doesn’t have to audition itself and prove itself in front of a jaded and mistrusting listener, searching for hooks, samples and recognition, searching for an hour of their life that the song will fit into, wondering what shoes and perfume will fit the mood of the song, which page it would go into on a Britannia music catalogue, and most of all, what listening (or not listening) to the song will “say” about their personality.

Oh God, The Physician. One of the funniest songs in existence. I’d love to do it again (better) with a full string quartet. I did it in York to piano accompaniment with some friends of mine filling in the “chorus” parts. I wonder why we want to cover songs we love…I imagine somewhere in my head I’d love to be Julie Andrews leaping around in her turban and pointy-toed shoes, winding wool from an orange sheep and kicking the gong at the end with a smirk on her face.

Jenny, the Kurt Weill song. When I got this on vinyl I played it to Jack and Heppell. We’d all bought records that day and were taking it in turns to choose (fuelled by red wine, I had to listen to the Top Gear theme played on acoustic guitars for seemingly an age…). They complained at first when I excitedly said “Ooh, Julie Andrews!” but quickly learned to be quiet and take it. When Jenny was over, and alter when I played them Limehouse Blues, I think one of them said something like “Yes, but that’s like…real music, ours is silliness”…drawing some distinction between real jazz and silly jazz. Jazz. A silly term. This isn’t jazz at all. That’s not a criticism of them. They were impressed by Julie Andrews which earns them a place in heaven forever.

But anyway, the story of getting and losing and losing and getting is tightly wound up in this album for me. We’d ALWAYS had it on tape, ALWAYS. My mother’s mother died on December 27th 2001. I’d had a horrific panic attack on Christmas Eve that year, an accumulation of months of terror and whisky in Edinburgh where I’d gone days without sleep, wandering the streets of a new city till the sun came up and relying on the orange streetlights until then. Anyway. The events of Christmas Eve that year were, essentially a nervous breakdown. With the news that her mother was dying, my mother had gone up/across to Bradford where the rest of her family were. I sat up with my friend Tim on the other side of Bolton, breathing unsteadily into a paper bag. Nightmarish time. Her mother died. My mother came home and found out she’d taped over this precious video and wept. A weird night. I found it on DVD for her in Bristol a few years later. No harm done. I think we had the soundtrack on vinyl but I believe my father took that when he left. I found the soundtrack in Plastic Wax in Bristol, where I found so many amazing records the summer I was kind of homeless and my plans to study Music Therapy were sucked away by an ex-boyfriend. I bought a record player off Heppell. Jon put it onto CD for me along with some others. I didn’t intend a personal diary to appear out of writing about Star, but it seemed like that’s what happened.

This is what they mean about music as a soundtrack to one’s life. This album takes in my childhood, my traumatic transition out of University, my mother’s mother’s death, the end of one boyfriend, the end of particular career plans and hopes, all those promising possibilities of another boyfriend. It’s New Years Day.