Darlin' Be Home Soon
up from the skies
Someone's thinking of her
A fifteen hour trip away
Life is so much slower
Than a charter trip delay
Tomorrow, she won't feel half of this
Tomorrow morning is a sugar kiss
Tomorrow, heavenly no sorrow
She will lose gravity
‘Tomorrow’, The Cardigans
It so happened that Hayley, the brains behind the INVOCATION video, needed to go to Europe on family business this past month, the longest and the furtherest that we two have been apart in decades. While there, she’s been photographing and filming the treasures of antiquity for use in her art, being inspired and learning new techniques - you’ve seen Hayley’s picture of Dracula’s castle in Transylvania if you’ve read my last dispatch. And I’ve missed her.
It just so happened that, before Hayley, and Poppy who accompanied her, went on their little OE, Hayley and I were playing frisbee in our special spot, while listening to The Lovin’ Spoonful on the boombox/phone combo that’s all you really need these days unless you’re into stereo effects. The Lovin’ Spoonful were an interesting group and an example of something I need to write about one day, modern American music as the nostalgic recreation of an imagined past, the US equivalent of those music hall touches in The Beatle’s oeuvre, and ‘Darlin’ Be Home Soon’ is a beautiful example of the skill that made John Sebastian a songwriter not only of pop hits but of the modern standards that Bobby Darin wanted to record and to sing in ballrooms.
There’s a Dylanesque strum to this song and a sense of space; 3.56 was long for a single in 1967, but ‘Darlin Be Home Soon’ - written on commission for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1966 film You’re A Big Boy Now (the brief was to match the feel of The Mammas and The Pappas’ ‘Monday Monday’) - contains worlds.
Note the causal carry-over of “here” from the start of the first line (“come here and”) to the start of the second; genius is doing this and no-one noticing, because you’ve also rhymed “dawdled” with “toddled”.
Come and talk of all the things we did today
Here and laugh about our funny little ways
While we have a few minutes to breathe
And I know that it's time you must leave
But darling be home soon
I couldn't bear to wait an extra minute if you dawdled
My darling be home soon
It's not just these few hours but I've been waiting since I toddled
For the great relief of having you to talk to
Listening to The Lovin’ Spoonful sing ‘Darlin’ Be Home Soon’ reminded me of the first time I heard the song. It’s 1972 and I’m dawdling in the playground (or whatever the tarmac outside class is called at high school) and hearing music come from the prefects’ room upstairs (prefects were a type of licensed thug teachers got to do their enforcement work for them, the trusties of schools following the English model). Pop music was rare in high school, it was a privilege to be able to play vinyl, I never did, and these yobs loved two yobby bands - The Faces, the brilliant mess Rod Stewart and Ron Wood had made of The Small Faces after Steve Marriot left, and Slade.1 Specifically, Slade Alive, the highlight of which was this, the definitive, version of Sebastian’s song.
Note that Noddy Holder holds off singing at one point to give us instead a beery belch, which the audience loves.2 And yet this loutish mockery of his own emotional delivery only reinforces its impact, if you don’t cry now you’re never going to. This arrangement, more complex than The Lovin’ Spoonful’s with its fluttering metal bass and orchestrated lead section, is something Slade have worked over and perfected. We listened to this a lot before we parted.
’Darlin’ Be Home Soon’ is a rarity in 60’s music, a song where the man seems to be waiting for the travelling woman to return, reversing the natural order of things. In fact, it was inspired by Sebastian’s own feelings about going away on tour, and wanting to enjoy as much connection as he could get with his girlfriend first, and the magic thing he’s done is to put himself in her place without writing another torch song for a girl to sing, indeed, he’s revaluated gender expectations so subtly and naturally here that he’s written a song Noddy Holder wants to sing.
These ambiguous lines probably expressed his original idea, defending his own desertion, but now add a layer of surrealist mystery because we can only hear them as describing his absent lover.
Go and beat your crazy head against the sky
Try and see beyond the houses and your eyes
It's ok to shoot the moon
Listenable songs where the man waits for the woman seem to be rare as hen’s teeth in pop and rock. Bill Wither’s ‘Ain’t No Sunshine’ is another masterpiece, written in a factory making toilet seats for 747s after watching the melancholy Days of Wine and Roses. Yes, that’s how great songs are made.
Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
It’s not warm when she’s away.
Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
And she’s always gone too long
Anytime she goes away.
Wonder this time where she’s gone
Wonder if she’s gone to stay
Ain’t no sunshine when she’s gone
And this house just ain’t no home
Anytime she goes away.
Here’s Carole King’s ‘So Far Away’, from her best-selling, and very influential in its day, album Tapestry (1971). Read the comments underneath - “this song saved my marriage and my life”. No-one writes a song trying to do that, except for themselves sometimes (more often it’ll be the toilet seats you’ve been making and the old movies you’ve been watching that inspire you). Again, it’s a miracle.
Perhaps the most perfect expression for my purposes, given Hayley is as great a Kevin Ayers fan as I am, is ‘Baby Come Home’ from The Unfairground. There’s not a lot to the lyric, Kevin claiming, as he often has, that even his fluency is barely adequate to the task, so the gentle Tex-Mex changes are made lush, painting the comforts of home and the longed-for security of having the missed one close; the very guitar picking pattern here is a warm and loving gesture.
Couldn't get to sleep last night
Missing you so much, it hurts
Missing your company
All the things you mean to me, girl
Baby, won't you please come home
Don't have very much to say
Never was so good with words
It's only that I'm missing you
Wishing I was kissing you now
Baby, won't you please come home
Bacharach and David’s ‘Trains and Boats and Plains’ is a good one, because Hayley, who sold me on the charms of easy-listening Bacharach compilations early on, has recently used all these forms of transport; the boat in her song was an air B&B moored at Constanta, but still.
You are from another part of the world
You had to go back awhile and then
You said you soon would return again
I'm waiting here like I promised to
I'm waiting here, but where are you
The version by Billy J Kramer and The Dakotas can represent me, but have you heard Kirsty MacColl’s performance with Raw Sex on the French & Saunders show?
The weird thing is, my travelers are losing a day by flying forwards away and then backwards again to me, as it were. There’s a calendar date that won’t exist for them. It’ll vanish slowly, sucked into other days, while they’re watching the in-flight entertainments. And there’s a song about that, Roy Harper’s lovely ‘Twelve Hours of Sunset’ from Valentine, probably his sweetest sounding and best selling album.
Twelve hours of sunset
Six thousand miles
Illusions and movies
Far away smiles
Twelve hours of sunset
Half a day in the skies
I'll see you tomorrow
As the steel crow flies
Oh how time flies
I used to think I wasn't mad
But now I know its all I had
Can hope be lost or only seeming?
Now that time's turned into space
And there's no time to check the pace
And no-one cares, can I be dreaming
Dreams?
Twelve hours of sunset
Twilight sublime
Be with you tomorrow
Backwards in time
Oh how time flies3
When I first heard this song and related to the romantic longing it expressed I was approximately sixteen and had no-one to wait for, or rather I was waiting for someone like Hayley, who would turn up on Radio One (91FM) celebrating Hendrix’s birthday, a dream come true. 4 When she returns, we’ll eat a leg of roast lamb, play frisbee again, and watch You’re A Big Boy Now to score it out of 10 in the book where we score the quality of the films we watch.
And
”Come and talk of all the things we did today
Here and laugh about our funny little ways”
Algorithmic Groovyness - 'Jimi Hendrix, ‘Up From The Skies’
Slade song titles like ‘Mama Weer All Crazee Now’ and ‘Gudbuy T'Jane’ exploited the same memetic trick as MAGA memes (“HE’ll YEAH!”) do today, making educated fools like teachers, parents, and newspaper columnists draw the attention of the young to the idiocy of the people making the music they found alarming and despicable - “they can’t even spell!”
Which of course was not only good publicity but forged a deeper connection between the kids, regularly humiliated, like the rural poor, for their errors, and the band.
In 2000, Holder told Frank Skinner that the belch was accidental but, from then on, he had to keep belching whenever the song was performed otherwise the audience would be disappointed
While we’re at it, I love the original ‘8 Miles High’, especially Michael Clarke’s drumming, which keeps things moving with a series of jazzy crescendo rolls. Wikipedia tells me that commercial airliners fly at an altitude of six to seven miles, but eight scanned better and brought to mind the recent Beatle’s hit ‘Eight Days a Week’. Be that as it may, kudos to Roxy Music for covering ‘Eight Miles High. in their tasteful Eurodisco style.
The date was 27 November 1991, and Hendrix, had he lived, would have been 49.