Don’t forget to Breathe.
Only ever two songs from the sea.
[And for anyone who just wants to dive straight into it the Immersion Music featured here, check out my Don’t Forget to Breathe Spotify Playlist for your pleasure!]
# 206 Mona Lisa
The exquisite surge of strings lifts us up and turns us towards the voice. A small breath and then he begins to sing. Heart wrenchingly beautiful
There is something so ridiculously Christmassy about this song — but I sense this is partially to do with the nostalgia that soaks through every pore of it, and the staggering velvet softness of the unfathomably cool voice of one Nat King Cole.
The man’s voice is simply a honey trap. If he sang in my ear, I’d be a garlanded, swooning ingenue in moments.
I am certain that it is a song that has tinkled away in the background of every Christmas movie I’ve ever loved. I’d love to believe that this song echoes arounf the edges ‘The Bishops’ s Wife.’ Not true of course — a patently a confected false memory.
The reason I feel this is probably more to do with Nat King Cole’s extensive back catalogue
The reality is that almost every other famous Cole song that orbits both this immersion song, and ‘When I fall in Love’, is a Christmas song.
Nat was a firm believer in a crooning Christmas. I would go further and say he is the voice of the kind of Christmas we all dream of. With songs like O Tannenbaum, The Christmas Song, Deck the Halls, Joy to the World, Oh Holy Night, no one man personifies the spirit of Christmas like Nat King Cole.
Bing may sing of White Christmases, but Nat’s version is of a distinctly black and more spiritual variety. His songs are like eyes brimming with joyful festive tears of joy.
His voice is the velvet wrapper of every cinematic memory of a 1950s American Christmas — a gentler and optimistic time between the horrors of WWII and the coming era of RealPolitik, endless wars in far off places, and the clattering greed of Wall Street.
There seemed to be a decency and shared goodness at work in the heart of this music that we’ve lost to narcissistic excesses.
Bar the niggling socio-cultural issues of segregation, rampant chauvanism, domestic violence and a creeping cancer of anti-red mania, the music at least spoke of kinder times.
There is a naïve beauty in what Nat King Cole sings, and in how he sings it. That his image, one of debonair, effortless and benevolent charm and style, only adds to the 50s dreamscape of all things reassuring and secure.
As to the deets of the song, the oracle of Wiki tells us the following
“Mona Lisa” is a popular song written by Ray Evans and Jay Livingston for the Paramount Pictures film Captain Carey, U.S.A. (1949). The title and lyrics refer to the renaissance portrait Mona Lisa painted by Leonardo da Vinci. The song won the Oscar for Best Original Song in 1950.
The cover version by Nat King Cole spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard singles chart in 1950. Cole’s version of the song was inducted into the Grammy Hall of Fame in 1992. Cole recorded this song again in a stereo version (with Ralph Carmichael and his Orchestra) on March 30, 1961. Cole described this song as one of his favorites among his recordings.
There is something quite beguiling [a very Nat King Cole word] about Nat King Cole. He was a curious looking man, his features feline and soft. His expressions as he sings seem to externalise every emotion that crosses him as he conjours the song for us.
It was no surprise that Natalie Coles touching and mellifluous duet cover of Unforgettable synthesised with her father’s original recording was stunning
For anyone who grew up in London in the 80s, teetering on the edges of a 50s reboot with Flip jackets and ties, and a tub of Black & White pomade, there was a lot of love for old 50s tracks from Ben E King to Sinatra et al.
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But it is Mona Lisa’s role as the theme tune to the Bob Hoskins’ movie of the same name, that really rocketed Nat King Cole back into our higher cultural consciousness.
The brilliant juxtaposition of the liquid honey of the song’s elegance against the grim, violent back-drop of London’s gangland and prostitution rackets was sublime.
The use of the song created a thread that led from the grim, dirty pavements of Kings Cross to the old clubland gangster cabarets and crooner clubs of the late 50s and 60s that Hoskins’ character would have known so well.
Genius.
# 207 Judy Teen
Steve Harley & Cockney Rebel were the perfect sharp-edged glammy, droogy band for the suede heads and mods who’d stumbled through the glam dressing-up box circa 1974.
In Judy Teen, a rushing white-noise leads us into a tip-toeing collection of guitar and violin plucks and picks, as Steve Harley flecks the vinyl with his sharp clipped lyrics and Ray Davies-like quirks of expression and inflection.
The tension that runs through Judy Teen before the strings fold in is palpable. The sparse, obtuse composition jarrs us into listening. We become brightly coloured fish caught on the hooks of their myriad musical lines.
Steve Harley seemed to exist somewhere in the never-land between musical theatre and the pop world — he was not alone, with acts like SAHB [The Sensational Alex Harvey Band] turning up much like a prog-rock bad that had run away to join the circus.
Mr Soft off the album Psychomondo, is a remarkable piece of compositional theatre, with its use of the much loved ‘character’ story- telling so beloved of The Kinks and the Beatles in their Polythene Pam era. The use of an almost stylophone keyboard sound, Cossak humming, and Berlin-Cabaret percussion topped off with a little hoe-down fiddle. It was a Bowie/Roxy/Kinks club-sandwich with a twist.
The outcome- a track that could sit proudly on any Scissor Sisters album.
But there is one song that inhabits a hallowed place in my music pantheon. The song Sebastian is an abstracted and poetic epic of a track, which feels more like it has been extracted from a hit west end show than the Hairy Cornflake’s singe stack.
Its expansive musical landscape, sweeping refrains and choral majesty are a quite surprising output when compared to the likes of singles like Judy Teen. With an almost mediaeval and divine melancholia at work in it, its success in Europe while the UK looked the other way is not so much of a surprise.
Speaking of looking: the interesting thing is, looked at sideways with a following wind, Harley seems to exist somewhere in between the physiognomic natures of George from Minder and Paul Weller’s glam uncle.
There was also something of the Gotham baddie meets Clockwork Orange about Steve Harley’s sartorial approach to life.
Part Riddler; part Droog — with the sequestering of a special One Eye mascara kit, he would have been away to the Kubrik races!
Stage Theatre was a big thing in the early to mid-seventies. Glam itself was a draggy dressing up box for anyone and everyone.
The theatrical characterisations of artists like Bowie and Roxy and musicals like Rocky Horror punching out good old-time rock-n-roll, gender bending with a fluffy boa and a stack wedge provided a rich musical buffet for every suburban kid siting in a faceless house in a faceless street dreaming of better things.
These were the fire-lighters under everything that was to become punk, New Wave and the New Romantic sound.
Danke, Herr Harley.
I’ll have me some of that!!
The Author: Julian Borra is a creative writer and strategist living in Lewes in the UK with a life-long love of music. A sometime drummer and percussionist in various bands, music is the sea he swims in when confined to dry land.
Julian’s commercial works can be found at thinairfactory.com or he can be found at linkedin.com/in/julianborra/
