CHAPTER 77

 

 

#24: AIR with BETH HIRSCH

“All I Need”

from the album Moon Safari

Released: January 1998

 

 

For perhaps too many years I commuted between home in Oxford and work in London. In early 1998 London meant Camberwell, where I was working at King’s College Hospital. It was quite a shift between the decaying urbanism of Denmark Hill and the bucolic streams of Port Meadow, five minutes’ walk from our house.

 

The 52-mile (each way) journey typically necessitated a long and tiring day, and in October of that year I paid for it. Nevertheless I was able to get off work a little early and head back up the A40 on the Oxford Tube coach. This was useful because I could just about avoid the endless tailback of rush hour traffic from the Westway towards Park Royal and Hangar Lane.

 

Sometimes, however, I still had to be patient, and to alleviate the traffic tedium I listened to my radio Walkman and CD Discman. One Monday afternoon in early January 1998, I was somewhere around the East Acton junction leading to Western Avenue. The sun was lowering in the sky but still shining. The aura was all very pleasant.

 

On the radio at around 4:30 that afternoon – Peter Curran’s show on Greater London Radio, as the BBC station was then called – I heard a sound which hadn’t really come my way since the days of “Walk On The Wild Side,” idling and meditating at the school goalposts. It was patient, expansive, embracing and completely alluring.

 

It sounded like a seventies that had never existed, other than in dreams, creamier and more giving than what I knew the seventies were actually like. But it also sounded like tomorrow today. The singer’s words were haiku-like, more concerned with conveying a mood, an emotion, than making rational sense. You drifted with it like a swallow. The electric piano leitmotif was akin to being kissed away from the slept-on sofa. That high, monotonal string drone (I did mention “Walk On The Wild Side”), the promise of jetpack eternity.

 

It was about a week before the record actually came out. I bought it in Denmark Hill Woolworths first thing next Monday morning. I still own that copy. I haven’t managed to drag myself away from it, nor would I ever wish to do so. I simply recall crouching down in the upstairs front seat of the Oxford Tube, gazing at the sun taking its time to set over East Acton, viewing a world, to my right, of the Cheery Chums Café Bar. I thought, gosh that’s absolutely it, I want to live in a world of Cheery Chums Café Bars. It closed some considerable number of years ago. But the memory, the transcending, the experience, is unclosable.