“We ask for solution
Did anyone hear?”
You can hear an audio version of this post here.
Today’s song is Fallen Soldier, written by Beverley Knight and A Clark. Beverley is a very well-known English singer, less well known, perhaps, as a songwriter. I'm sorry, I can’t tell you much about the other songwriter. Maybe someone reading this knows more and can add a comment. Hear Beverley singing this song here.
Although ‘songs I heard at a folk club’ was my starting point for this project, Fallen Soldier is one of the songs I’m writing about this month that I didn’t get to know that way. I heard this song on Beverley’s 2002 album Who I Am. I picked it for this month’s project because: (a) it has stuck with me over the years as it’s very powerful, (b) I am a big Beverley fan – she is an amazing singer and (c) the song does what many a folk song has tried to do – record history. Fallen Soldier wants to make sure something (and in this case someone) important is remembered. This song is about Stephen Lawrence, the teenager who was murdered by racists in Eltham, London in 1993. It was one of the songs chosen by his mother Doreen Lawrence when she guested on the radio programme Desert Island Discs in 2012 (that edition is still available here) and it was also the song she selected ‘to keep’ at the end of the interview. I listened to that show when it was first broadcast and again when writing this – it is such a great interview and I urge you to have a listen if you don’t know it. You can also see how much work has been done, and is still being done, in Stephen’s name by heading here and here.
You may well have come across Beverley Knight on radio, TV or at the theatre. She had an early start in church and then some time in the pop charts, but these days Beverley’s magnificent vocals can mainly be heard in stage musicals (her most recent project being the show The Drifters Girl where she plays the starring role of Faye Treadwell, manager of The Drifters). There’s a recent interview here that will bring you right up to date with Beverley’s career. She has also appeared at many a significant event (I loved her version of I am what I am at the opening ceremony of the London 2012 Paralympics), she has sung with Prince, she’s had some highs! Fallen Soldier is on Beverley’s third album Who I am (2002) which I probably bought when it came out (I wasn’t doing music journalism by then so no more free promotional copies). As a club/pirate DJ and record shop worker in the 1990s and a long-time soul fan, I had been aware of her from her earliest releases (her first single was in 1995) but nothing had really grabbed me till this 2002 album which is packed full of powerful tracks (Get up!, Shoulda Woulda Coulda, Gold). With her name on the credits for every song (though again, apologies, I can’t tell you much about any of the co-writers), Who I Am took Beverley’s music to a bigger audience, and earned her a Mercury nomination, and a couple of successful singles. As her career progressed I think some people in the UK struggled a little with how to view her music (her output was too mainstream for some, not mainstream enough for others). On the whole I think Beverley is just a really talented artist and vocalist who doesn’t want to be trapped by genre and who has done something slightly different with all of her albums, and indeed with every new step on her career path. She has an amazing voice, whatever she does with it. I like her work so much I can even forgive her for supporting my least favourite band in the world (Take That, thanks for asking) in 2006. Who I am is an album I like very much – I still listen to it – and it’s also worth getting for Fallen Soldier alone.
The case of Stephen Lawrence – his murder by racist thugs, the trials, the family’s fights for justice, changes to the law, investigations into the police’s handling of the case and corruption – is well known in the UK. It has been in the public consciousness for so long that looking into the details again to write this I was shocked to realise that Stephen died nearly 30 years ago (though no one was sentenced for the crime until 2012). There have been both drama and documentary series about what happened and at least one other song about him (You Are Loved by Garth Hewitt also featured in the Desert Island Discs mentioned earlier).
I think many writers consider tackling hugely affecting real-life stories like this now and then. We want to write about significant stories but how best to do it? How to not actually make things seem worse by churning out leaden sentiment or predictable phrases? My experience closest to this kind of writing is a poem that almost wrote itself in 2016, just after the MP Jo Cox was murdered. I wrote it very quickly, felt I had to, and I think that’s because I had a small amount of insight into that particular incident. I had lived in the area where she worked and was killed, I knew the places they showed on the news, I had one or two things in common with her. I think that poem is more about her killer than her (I had never met her, had no direct connections) and it’s not very positive (unlike so much that has been done in her name since). It’s more about the negativity that killed her, about the politics and news at that time. Writing a poem about it doesn’t stop it of course. So why do we still write these things? Maybe because it is important to think, to remember, to process …
But back to songs – another song of this kind (that does come from the genre we call folk) is Chris Wood’s Hollow Point (hear it here). Interestingly you do see reference to this English musician and songwriter using terms like folk-soul and English soul. Chris Wood, like Beverley, started his singing in holy places (Canterbury Cathedral in his case, he talked about it in a radio programme here). The song Hollow Point is about the shooting of 27-year-old Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes by police officers in London in 2005. It’s on Chris’s 2010 album The Handmade Life and it won Song of the Year at the 2011 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. You won’t see the word ‘murder’ used about this particular killing in most of the articles about it but I don’t really see what else you can call it. The song uses simple language to describe this young man’s ordinary morning (‘his Oyster Card is in his pocket’, ‘his cotton jacket was all he carried’) and, like Fallen Soldier, it is a song of remembrance, a song of protest, a song of anger and of love.
We are big Chris Wood fans in this house, have most, if not all, of his albums and have seen him live in Glasgow (Celtic Connections 2016) and Arbroath (Hypercoaster Music at Hospitalfield 2019). The Glasgow gig at The Art Club was one of the best gigs I’ve ever been to (Chris is a real artist, a fantastic musician, a storyteller…). I could have chosen to write about Hollow Point this month (at least one songwriter interviewed for this project has already mentioned the song, back on Day 4) but I suppose partly what I wanted to do today was show links between genres. Soul-folk? Folk-soul? I love songs from them both parts of the record shop and these two songs have a big crossover for me. They are doing very similar jobs, both helping us to remember terrible things in critical, emotional and meaningful ways. They are great pieces of work, so important.
Tomorrow we head to Canada, for a song of togetherness. Hope to see you there.
This post is part of my Songs That Stick project for 2022's Fun A Day Dundee (a community arts project that takes place every January). Anyone can take part (you don’t even have to be local to Dundee) and much of the work can be found on Instagram during January (use #FADD2022). There is usually a real-life exhibition later in the year (though this has been online for the past 2 years). The full list of songs I am writing about this year is here. My first post about why I picked this project this time is here.
If you are interested in my Fun A Day Dundee projects for 2020 and 2021 you can start here and here. They are quite different to this one (a short poem and drawings in 2020 and lots of poems and writing in 2021).
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