A Million Songs That Never get Sung
Rocksey is always writing songs, scraps of tunes and one liners litter the house or wherever he is. Some of these snippets make it into songs which may or not make it onto a set, some get changed, some get shelved and some get binned.
When Rocksey is seriously writing music he spends a long time alone, strumming his guitar in obscure places, usually if the weather is good, I can find him outside somewhere, hidden behind a tree, by the lake, in the orchard or sometimes serenading the chickens ( who never complain of company, especially if there are apples or bananas hidden in Rockseys bag).
A song can take 5 minutes, an hour, a day or months to write and then perfect. The guys take a line, or a chord and can turn it into something magical, or danceable or shoutable. They have written a few Rock Anthems between them, songs which get every one singing at a gig which in itself is pretty awesome.
My favourites are those that Rocksey sings softly to himself on his acoustic guitar , those songs that he hums into my hair at sunset on summer evenings or taps out on the kitchen counter when we are preparing dinner. Even so there must be a million songs in Rockseys head, many of which don't make it out of his mouth.
Sometimes we discover old songs by those 70's Rock bands that we are into. Songs that appear on an old vinyl record, or songs that were recorded before those bands had their rock anthem hits which we grew up to dancing at the youth club disco on a Friday night.
Last Sunday we happened across a car boot sale deep in the Countryside. A farmers field stuffed full of peoples junk like a big open air thrift shop has to be one of my all time favourite past times especially if I spy an old cardboard box full of someones old vinyl records.
Mostly the good stuff has gone by the time we drop by but last weekend, the sun shining into our bedroom early on had Rocksey awake and raring to go. Now you would think it would be Rocksey who would spend hours rummaging though other peoples memorabilia but no, he will stand and chat for hours to the stallholder whilst I sift through old 'top of the pops' albums, musicals from the 1960's and endless Mantovani recordings ( who bought these? and in such quantities!!!!) in search of some inspiration and youthful memories. This is the beauty of the record player, that scratchy sound at the beginning and 4 ( or 5 songs of your lucky) before you have to 'listen to the other side!!).
Saturday morning brought me a gem of an album bought for £1 which was released in 1971 which has on it a couple of tracks which both Rocksey and I exchange glances at first play and wondered aloud how we had managed to spend most of our musical lives not knowing these 2 songs.
Several days and many plays later, Rocksey now plays the rhythms and I join in with the words, words of a couple of songs that have not been sung perhaps in 40 years which have lyrics which could have been written yesterday! We spend many a happy hour singing together (even though Rocksey maintains I can't hold a tune whilst I think I sing like an angel!!) and finding songs we can sing together holds a lot of joy.
Rocksey has spent the last week going through his old song books finding those long forgotten snippets of songs and re-working them into something more usable for the bands current audience. Some of the old songs remain in the set and one or two, like those beautifully crafted tunes from 1971, will be sung and possibly re-recorded sometime in the future in the hope that someone will listen and wonder why they have not had that particular song in their life.
