When you’re Smile-ing; listening to The Beach Boys…..

Trying to get back into the normal run of life after all the emotional disruption of the last few months, so catching up with some music seemed as good a way as any of doing so.  Had a pile of things stacked up and decided to start with one of the longest-running sagas in the annals of post-Beatles recorded music – the finally-released ‘Smile’, the epic Beach Boys album from 1966-1967.  This has now been made available as a 5 CD Box Set,  a 2 CD ‘Highlights’ package,  on vinyl, double vinyl and (doubtless) every other format and permutation imaginable .  Being a sucker for punishment and a long-time fan, I have inevitably opted for the Box Set 5 CD version.

Books will be - in fact they probably already have been - written about the whole  ‘Smile’  saga – and herein lies the problem, because it would be impossible for this album to ever live up to the hype that surrounds it.  Not that what we have here is at all unfamiliar.  Many of the songs from ‘Smile’  – ‘Wind Chimes’, ‘Vegetables’, ‘Surf’s Up’ , ‘Heroes & Villains’ and others  - were released in one form or another by The Beach Boys during the late 1960′s or early 1970′s and in any case, Brian Wilson has already issued his own version of ‘Smile’,  released 7 years ago.   And that’s to say nothing of bootlegged versions of the ‘original’ album, one of which I bought from a stall on St Albans Market at least 10 years ago.

So, it would be reasonable to ask why this after-the -Lord -Mayor’s-Ball  official release has created even a moderate stir, and to explain that requires a look at the whole Beach Boys story – especially the crucial period from 1965-1971.

The thing about The Beach Boys is that  they were both naff and cool at the same time.  In the early days, there was always something geeky and awkward about the band as individuals, with the sole exception of drummer Dennis Wilson, who seemed a conventionally good-looking Californian scruff.  The other Wilsons, Carl and Brian, always tended towards porkiness even as young men.  Al Jardine was scrawny and Mike Love was rapidly losing his hair, something that he tried – fruitlessly – to disguise with various hats and elaborate comb-overs.  On stage, they affected camp candy-stripe shirts and white trousers and seemed to borrow heavily from the rock and roll traditions of the 50′s.  Judged on image alone, they weren’t in the same ballpark as The Beatles or The Stones and over and above all that, multiple songs about fast cars and surfing were never likely to resonate overmuch with a young teenager growing up in the East Midlands.

This being the case, everything hinged on the quality of the band’s music and that was always special.  Even the early rock & roll inspired romps like ‘I Get Around’ were a cut above the norm because of their superbly arranged vocal harmonies.  These suggested a level of musical sophistication that was well in excess of the requirements of the material the band  were churning out. Subsequently, once Brian Wilson began to flex his compositional muscles with songs like ‘The Warmth of the Sun’ or ‘In my room’, what rapidly became clear was that  in musical terms The Beach Boys were a substantial cut above most of their contemporaries. 

Even so, whilst Wilson’s compositional chops were a decided asset, the band’s influences were not exactly what you might expect.  If The Beatles were inspired by early Motown and the Stones by post-war Chicago blues, then The Beach Boys’ influences, Elvis and Chuck Berry aside,  were straight out of white Norman Rockwell suburban Americana.  On one level, whilst that meant Gershwin and Sinatra, it also meant preppy favourites like Doris Day and The Four Freshmen, all  growing out of  the  gauche, crewcut, bobby-sox awkwardness of post-war white American teen culture.  Years later, the band would release Bruce Johnston’s  open love letter to this whole era – ‘Disney Girls (1957)’ on 1971′s ‘Surf’s Up’.  They did so without any apparent sense of irony  or regard for the prevalent counter-cultural zeitgeist.

 ”She’s really swell
Cause she likes
Church, bingo chances and old-time dances”

Well, gee whizz, fellas……it’s a long way from there to Woodstock nation, but the same album also featured eco-anthems like ‘Don’t go near the water’ and openly experimental songs like ‘Feel flows’…..would the real Beach Boys please stand up?  By this point, it seemed that not even the band knew who they were or what they wanted to be.  However, I’m getting ahead of myself here….

As mentioned,  what set The Beach Boys apart from Jan & Dean and the other surf groups of the mid-60′s  was Brian Wilson.  It was Brian who, as a child, had led the way in teaching his brothers to sing harmonies.  It was Brian who, throughout his stellar career as a high school quarterback had continued with his musical studies, it was Brian who drove The Beach Boys on to greater and more ambitious projects despite growing unease among other band members – particularly Mike Love.  Finally, it was Brian who led the band out of their collective comfort zone and into uncharted waters like ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’.

The Beach Boys in one of their stage outfits; probably around 1964

Brian stopped performing regularly on stage with the band in 1965, with first Glen Campbell and then Bruce Johnston taking his place.  Fear of flying seemed to be the immediate cause of this, but whereas The Byrds used a similar problem as a lever to force Gene Clark out of the band at around the same time, The Beach Boys were savvy enough to realise Brian’s value to the band.  He had swiftly moved on from niche songs about surfing and hot rods to a growing collection of more personal songs that revealed his vulnerability and sensitivity and it was these songs – ‘In my room’, ‘The Warmth of the Sun’, ‘Help me Rhonda’ and the like – that were turning heads around the world.

So Brian stayed home with his piano and his thoughts whilst the rest of the guys headed off round the world to fly the Beach Boys flag.  In many ways, the removal of the pressure of live performance released the brakes on Brian’s talents and the work he did at this time took the band’s music to a whole new level of sophistication.  They had by this stage already recorded basic tracks for an intended new single, a version of an old folk tune called ‘Sloop John B’.  Careful listening reveals a broadening of the band’s instrumental textures - now it wasn’t all Phil Spector-ish organ and guitar; there were glockenspiels and piccolos and other less discernible sounds lurking in the mix and the overall quality of the production had been cranked up a notch or two.

It was always said of Duke Ellington that although he played very good piano, his real instrument was his Orchestra and with Brian Wilson, it would probably be fair to say that although he played piano and sang well, his real instrument was the recording studio.  Brian wasn’t a great instrumentalist per se, but he had a great ear for innovative arrangements and a vivid imagination.  With the band away touring, Brian began a collaboration with lyricist Tony Asher early in 1966  and around the same time also went into the studios with ‘The Wrecking Crew’, an assemblage of L.A.’s finest session players, to lay down the backing tracks for ‘Pet Sounds’.   

A previous Beach Boys box set ( Good Vibrations – Thirty Years of The Beach Boys)  included a ‘bonus disc’ of some of the sessions (and the between-takes studio chat) that created ‘Pet Sounds’ and they offer a fascinating glimpse of  a confident Brian deploying an astonishing range of musical instruments including oddities like bass harmonica, ocarina, contra-bassoon and harpsichord.  The impression you are left with is that the use of such a wide palette of instrumental colouration was no accident, nor was it a wilful embrace of novelty for the sake of novelty.  Yes, Brian Wilson comes across as a kid let loose in a toyshop, but this kid seemed to know exactly what he wanted and exactly what he was doing.  Even if he didn’t, the results - when ‘Pet Sounds’ finally came out later in 1966 – justified all the complexities of instrumentation and arrangement.

The full story of ‘Pet Sounds’ could detain me here for hours, but it’s ‘Smile’ that I’ve been listening to, so I’d better restrict myself to observing that  ‘Pet Sounds’ marked a sea change in Brian Wilson’s development as a composer/arranger and also in his relationship with the rest of the band.

They returned from an Asian tour to be presented with a ‘fait accompli’ of six backing tracks for the new album with Tony Asher’s lyrics ready to be sung and only the vocal harmonies to be worked out.  This did not go down well with some of the other members, notably Mike Love, whose musical conservatism led him to question why the band should abandon the successful formula of surfing & car songs that had propelled them to worldwide success.  From ‘Pet Sounds’ onwards, Brian was effectively ’on probation’ as far as Love was concerned and though the band would continue to follow their Pied Piper, they would do so only as long as the hit singles continued to flow.  From hereon, Brian was part of the band but was also apart from the band, his growing use of drugs was starting to have an impact and the mental unravelling that would blight his career was only just around the corner.

In some respects, by 1966, Brian Wilson was no longer looking to his fellow Beach Boys for inspiration – they probably didn’t understand what he was trying to achieve and in some cases (Love) were openly hostile to it.  His peers were now the likes of The Beatles and if ‘Pet Sounds’ was directly fuelled by Brian’s response to ‘Rubber Soul’, then ‘Smile’ was probably Brian’s attempt to match ‘Revolver’.    Subsequently, the fact that ‘Smile’ was shelved was partly because of Brian’s sense of insecurity about his own work when confronted  with ’Revolver‘ and ‘Sgt Pepper‘ .  One of the problems here was that unlike Lennon and McCartney, Brian had no-one to compete with or to bounce his ideas off.  The ‘guys in the band’ had just become his ‘voices’ as The Wrecking Crew had become his orchestra.   As late as 1968, The Beatles would still audition one another’s songs by getting together with acoustic guitars and sitting round playing their new songs for the rest of the band.  For Brian Wilson, it was a much more solitary path and he was way ahead of virtually everyone else in his field.  The Beatles had George Martin to lean on, Smokey Robinson’s arrangements were taken care of by in-house Motown arrangers but with The Beach Boys, the songs, the production and the arrangements were all down to Brian.  No wonder he cracked in the end.

Brian plays his new stuff for the rest of the band….

The link between ‘Pet Sounds’ and ‘Smile’ was ‘Good Vibrations’.  Originally slated for inclusion on ‘Pet Sounds’, Brian decided that he wanted to do more work on it, so it was held back…and held back….and….

Early sessions for the song date back to February of 1966, fully 8 months before it was finally released.  It has been estimated that it cost 50, 000 dollars to make – a colossal sum at the time for just one song - and involved no less than seventeen recording sessions in four separate studios during the spring and summer of 1966.  Tony Asher supplied the original lyrics but these were later replaced.  Mike Love gets a co-writer’s credit but given his generally negative attitude to ‘Brian’s New Direction’, it beggars belief that he could have authored some of the song’s wilder flights of lyrical fancy.  At one point, Love allegedly dismissed the song as ‘avant-garde shit’ and as the passing years have revealed him to be – amongst other things - a man who has an over-developed sense of his own importance, it hardly seems likely that he would pour such scorn on anything for which he might be held partially responsible.

Whatever the case, ‘Good Vibrations’ was released in October of 1966 and probably changed perceptions of The Beach Boys forever.  In the UK, it was received with reverence by BBC and Pirate DJ’s alike – I can recall one informing us that this was ‘what the future will sound like.’  For all its innovative stylings, it was still recognisably a Beach Boys single and it fairly  hurtled up the UK singles chart to give the band their first British # 1.

Some-time Beatles and Byrds publicist Derek Taylor described  ’Good Vibrations’  as a ‘pocket symphony’; an apt description, especially as it hints at an internal structure of different ‘movements’ with differing moods.  The song was certainly a landmark on many levels – for one thing, it was probably the first truly ‘psychedelic’ hit record but more significantly in the light of what was to come, it represented a new way of making records for Brian Wilson.  ‘Good Vibrations’ was recorded in sections which Brian then assembled, rather as you might put together a pre-fabricated building.  This was not necessarily ground-breaking, but what changed with ‘Good Vibrations’  was that rather than being edited out to create the impression of a seamless performance, the ‘joins’ between the different sections were not only left in but were almost exaggerated.  The classic example here is the section where the band softly sing “Gotta keep those lovin’ good vibrations / A happenin’ with her” and repeat it several times before plunging back into the main chorus.  This section begins abruptly with only a quiet organ and softly plucked bass before the voices come in.  At the end of 2011, it doesn’t sound like much, but in 1966, it was.  

‘Good Vibrations’ was a huge success for the band all over the world and it gave Brian Wilson the license to pursue this approach with his next project, which was to be called ‘Smile‘.  For this project, he enlisted the support of Van Dyke Parks, a Los Angeles session musician who had recorded with The Byrds and written songs for bands like Harper’s Bizarre.  Parks had a reputation for witty and literate lyrics and Brian Wilson decided that he was the man to help him with ‘Smile’.

Brian Wilson in the studio with Van Dyke Parks, 1966

In the loosest terms, ‘Smile‘ is  that dreaded beast, a ‘concept album’, but only in the same way that ‘Sgt Pepper’ is.  Both albums are really just an umbrella for a group of songs that (in the case of ‘Sgt Pepper’) we have grown used to hearing run together in a sequence  - the lack of tracking between the songs on ‘SPLHCB’ creates the illusion of a unified structure, but there is actually little connection between the suburban angst of ‘She’s leaving home’ and the ensuing acid-fuelled whimsy of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ .  It’s the same with ‘Smile’; not much connection between ‘Heroes & Villains’ and ‘Wind Chimes’, except that they were both part of the ‘Smile’ project.

What makes ‘Smile’ interesting in 2011 is not so much the flimsiness of its over-arching concept as its massive grab-bag of influences,  the continuation of Brian’s ‘cut & paste’ approach to recording, the way in which it drove a wedge between Brian and the rest of the band and his eventual decision to relinquish not only the album but his role as The Beach Boys pioneering leader.  What’s interesting about the 5 CD Box is that a whole CD is given over to version after version of ‘Good Vibrations’ (or parts of it), whilst another disc is mainly taken up with multiple versions (or part-versions) of ‘Heroes & Villains’.  Both of these discs are – in my view – for serious ‘anoraks’ only. 

After ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian Wilson’s next big project was indeed the epic ‘Heroes & Villains’, a song that to my ears is every bit as awe-inspiring as its predecessor, but which was ultimately ditched in its original ‘expanded’ format and  released as a stripped down and re-recorded single later in 1967 after ‘Smile’ had been shelved.  Brian spent just as much time noodling with this  one as he had with ‘Good Vibrations’ , but the ‘finished’ version available to us on ‘Smile’ has extra sections which render it disjointed amid an already slightly chaotic soundscape.  More than anything else it was Brian’s failure to produce a version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ that satisfied him for a single release that led to the release of ‘Smile’ being put back and ultimately cancelled.  You have to ask, what was Brian doing messing with these 2 songs for so long?  Here is the point at which an experienced ‘outside’ producer could maybe have had a positive impact on a fraught situation in which arguments between Brian and the rest of the band were becoming commonplace.  Whether an ‘outside voice’ could have helped or not, we’ll never know. After the re-recorded single version of ‘Heroes & Villains’ failed to match the success of ‘Good Vibrations’, Brian effectively gave up his attempts to emulate The Beatles and began his long retreat from the public eye.

So, apart from ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ what is there to excite us about ‘Smile’?  Sure, there are some other fine songs – especially  the luminous masterpiece of  ‘Surf’s Up’, but my own history forces me to see that as being part of the wonderful 1971 album of the same name, which featured a partially re-recorded version of what is one of Brian Wilson’s greatest songs.  The original version of ‘Wind Chimes’ certainly knocks spots off the weird, revamped version that eventually came out on the late ’67 ‘Smiley Smile’ album.  However, what has to be said about ‘Smile’ is that it signally fails to leap out of the CD drive as a full-blown classic as Brian Wilson intended.  It comes across as more of a curio, a fragmented collection of  toytown whimsy,  half-songs and embryonic ideas that actually reflected the collective state of the whole band in 1967. Wilson would no doubt argue that he never properly completed the project and that this new release has been assembled from a series of unfinished fragments that don’t really do the material justice.  Well, maybe….

Whilst those of us who were old enough were out enjoying 1967′s  ’Summer of Love’, The Beach Boys – and Brian Wilson especially - were falling apart.  Brian had (consciously or inadvertently) excluded his bandmates from the creative process and was clearly happier in the studio dealing with the likes of Van Dyke Parks and The Wrecking Crew.  The rest of the band, with Bruce Johnston aboard as Brian’s doppelgänger had, meanwhile,  effectively become their own tribute band, long before such things were ever thought of.  A stronger, braver Brian Wilson would have officially parted company with the band at this point, leaving them to their surfing and car songs, whilst pursuing his own star as a solo artist.  However, Brian wasn’t strong – his mental health was already poor and for whatever reasons he was unable to sever the umbilicus connecting him to his brothers.

Drugs may have been another contributory factor in Brian over-reaching himself but the rift between himself and the other band members was at least partly down to poor judgement on his part.  The hours he spent fine-tuning endless versions of ‘Good Vibrations’ and ‘Heroes & Villains’ was a strategy that was never going to play particularly well with a group who were slogging their way round the world and had fundamental concerns about where Brian’s new conceits were taking them.

The received wisdom about ‘Smile’ was that Brian wanted it released but the others wouldn’t agree – after all, he eventually recorded it and toured with his own version in 2004.  Having now heard what will be seen as the ‘official version’, no matter its unfinished nature, I would have to say that I have some sympathy with their reluctance and it really doesn’t matter which of them blackballed it up until now..  As I said at the outset of this piece, no matter how good it was, ‘Smile’ was never going to live up to all the hype that has slowly built around it over the intervening 40-0dd years.  More than anything else it reveals a band in the process of disintegration. 

It cannot be a time that any of The Beach Boys remember with much affection; after all, the mid-60′s is littered with the carcasses of post-Beatles bands who never made the transition from pop to rock.  Seen from a 1967 standpoint, The Beach Boys must have feared that they were about to be eclipsed by all these new young bands who were coming through with their long hair and outlandish names – The Grateful Dead, Buffalo Springfield, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Spirit – and that was just in California.  None of them could have foreseen the way in which the band would rehabilitate themselves in the 1970′s with albums like ‘Surf’s Up’ and ‘Holland’ , let alone a series of triumphant live shows such as the one I witnessed them give at a packed and sunny Wembley Stadium in June of 1975.

Last year I wrote about the best gig I have ever attended – The Blue Nile at Birmingham Town Hall in 1990, as you asked – but The Beach Boys at Wembley is # 2 on that list and though Brian Wilson was not there, his songs were and a band I had never considered to be a top live act produced a show for the ages.  Not only that but they did so amidst some pretty serious company – great sets by Stackridge, Rufus, Joe Walsh and The Eagles (aided and abetted by both Walsh and Jackson Browne) had already established a buzz among the capacity crowd.  The sun beat down; it was perfect weather for a Beach Boys gig and – augmented by some seriously good session players (including Chicago’s early producer, James William Guercio) - Carl & Dennis Wilson, Mike Love and Al Jardine came out and set the place on fire.  What’s more, Brian Wilson’s absence didn’t mean that Mike Love’s greasy MC routine was allowed to dictate the setlist – they played ‘Sail on Sailor’, they played ‘Surf’s Up’.  they even played some avant-garde shit called ‘Good Vibrations’.  Summed up, they were little short of sensational and it must have warmed the cockles of their Californian hearts to hear 100,000 sunburned kids bellowing the chorus to ‘California Girls’ into the London skies.

Carl Wilson at Wembley Stadium in 1975

As a footnote, I should probably point out that The Beach Boys were actually a last-minute replacement for Stevie Wonder, who had been taken ill.   I wonder how much top-of-the-bill Elton John regretted the decision to book The Beach Boys as he had to follow them on stage. Poor dear didn’t stand a chance.  In the years since, I must have spoken with 100 people who were also at that gig and I have yet to meet one that stayed to the end of Reg’s set, even though he had Steely Dan’s Jeff Baxter playing guitar for him that day. 

That glorious day at Wembley is the way that I would like to remember  The Beach Boys.  Listening to ‘Smile’  in 2011 is, by contrast,  like wandering through the rooms of a dusty old house where no-one has lived for 45 years;  it’s fascinating and exhibits moments of brilliance to match anything that had come before, but whether it’s the ‘unfinished’ nature of the songs or some other factor, it just doesn’t cut it as an overall project.  In the end , it remains for me just an interesting peek into Brian Wilson’s world shortly before all his dreams came crashing down, denying him his health and denying us the work of a true genius.  Sure, it’s been great to see him back in recent years performing and playing the old hits, but you do wonder about what might have been….

The Long Goodbye

‘Closure’; a much abused and overused word in these days of celebrity mag confessionals and all-too-public grief.  Even so, if the cap fits, I guess even an old curmudgeon like me has to wear it and closure was what my Dad’s funeral was supposed to bring me yesterday.  I’m not sure when this was supposed to happen or whether I was supposed to hear a thunderous cosmic slam as the portals of my Dad’s life closed for a final time, but whatever the case it didn’t happen.

I’m able to believe that for those more peripherally involved,  yesterday was a perfect opportunity to say goodbye to an old friend and I’m happy for that to be the case.  For myself, though, I am still faced with a house full of memories and photos and junk that will have to be cleared once Christmas and New Year are over and done with.  Whether or not I am able to put it all behind me once that is done remains to be seen.  Maybe my closure will come when I have cleared the house and walk away from it for the last time. Or not, as the case may be.

Saying goodbye to my Dad is proving to be an elastic process.  In most respects, I was saying goodbye when I last visited him in hospital on December 1st, just an hour or so before he died, and although the subsequent shenanigans with the Coroner’s Office, the post-mortem and the ensuing tests on tissue samples were irritating, they caused me stress mainly because I was starting to think that I wouldn’t be able to get my Dad buried before Christmas rather than due to any squeamishness about them carving lumps from his internal organs to try to ascertain what actually killed him in the end.

I wrote here last time about him dying of old age; his body just giving up on him after 87 years of reasonably faithful service.  Unsurprisingly, the post-mortem tests revealed a plethora of ailments that could have or did kill him – hypertensive heart disease, ischaemic colitis and so on, but by sheer chance, when I returned to the hospital where Dad died to collect his belongings, I ran into the very Doctor who had refused to sign off on cause of death, triggering the whole post-mortem farrago.  He had the good grace to shake my hand and express  his sympathies, so I quickly reconsidered my initial instinct which was to offer him a sarcastic ‘thank you’ for all the ludicrous delays I was now contending with.  I asked him if he knew of the post-mortem test results and he didn’t, so I told him.

When I mentioned the colitis, he nodded his head rapidly and expressed the view that this was what had probably killed Dad.  Ischaemic colitis is a condition that arises when the heart is not getting enough blood to the bowel and the whole colon essentially starts to disintegrate. This, he said, would also explain the chronic diarrhoea that plagued my Dad for the last 4 months of his life.

Well, gee Doc, glad that your curiosity has been satisfied and don’t worry about holding the whole process up for a week.  Oh well….

In the end, because of all the delays, there was something of an unseemly scramble to get my Dad buried before everyone disappeared into a blizzard of tinsel & turkey.  After problems with the medics and the  bureaucrats, it was time for problems with the parish priest.  This elderly gentleman is almost a stereotype of the  old-school, high church, aloof and slightly batty Church of England vicar.  Local rumours of ‘problems with the Diocese’ seem to indicate that he has been banished to this remote corner of Northamptonshire just to keep him out of the way.  Whether that’s the case or not, he presides over churches in two adjacent villages and nothing happens in those churches without his say-so.  In any case, my Dad had been on the Church Committee with Father W. (he’s very ‘high church’ and  likes to be called ‘Father’) and wouldn’t have wanted anyone else to conduct his funeral.

I have a bit of ‘previous’ with Father W.  He conducted my Mother’s funeral some 7 years ago and outraged me (though not my Dad) by treating it as an opportunity to deliver an extended commercial for the Church of England.  That day, his opening remark was ‘We are gathered here today to celebrate the life of Jesus Christ’ – guaranteed to raise my hackles – and it sort of meandered downhill from there.  I was torn between grief and anger and though I had ‘kept things together’ up until that point, I just broke down in floods of angry tears in the churchyard as my Mum’s coffin was lowered into the ground.  Of course, I understood even through my anger that Father W’s problem was that he didn’t know my Mother at all.    My parents had been commuters who worked in a neighbouring town and only spent weekends in the village. What’s more, they were off caravanning as soon as holiday time came around – and even more so once they retired.  More significantly still, they were not churchgoers,  so Father W. was always going to struggle to  say anything of consequence about my Mum or her life. Even so, all the dreary cant and endless invocations of various parts of the Holy Trinity just left me suffused with a cold rage and the whole thing just felt impersonal in the extreme.

Anyway, once my Mum died, Dad became much more involved with village life and especially with the Church.  His time serving on the Committee meant that he’d got to know Father W. pretty well, so I was more optimistic that we might get some personal reflections in amongst the usual ecclesiastical waffle.

However in order for any kind of service to take place, the funeral directors had to get hold of Father W. and this was easier said than done.  This is a man who is renowned for not answering his phone unless he’s so inclined, doesn’t have an answerphone and doesn’t use a mobile.  It took the funeral directors nearly 36 hours to track him down, but I have to say that when I finally did get to discuss the details of the service with him, he was sweetness and light personified.  Couldn’t have been more helpful and clearly had a warm regard for my Dad, so I approached the day of the funeral with a little less trepidation than had originally been the case.

My Dad organised my Mum’s funeral, so I’ve never been so intimately involved in the process before.  I spent the night beforehand alone at my Dad’s bungalow, partly to get a head start on any urgent administrative issues  that I would need to deal with before Christmas and partly to be on hand in case anyone rang about the funeral.  During Dad’s final illness, I spent quite a lot of time on my own in the house and I have to say I found it a very spooky experience.  Not spooky as in ghosts, just uncomfortable and too solitary for the way I was feeling.  It’s never been a house for which I had any particular fondness – I didn’t grow up there and was living in Copenhagen when my parents moved to the village in 1976.  The house is an anodyne 1970′s bungalow with small rooms, thin walls and woeful decor that my folks somehow never got around to changing.  This was a sign of their use of it more or less as a ‘pied-à-terre’  – somewhere they could just dump the accumulated detritus of their lives whilst they got on with work or with holidaying,  and it really remained that way until my Mum died in 2004. 

By that point,  Dad was too old to make any major changes, though as part of his ‘moving on’ process, he did at least have the hopelessly dilapidated kitchen replaced with one of the usual identikit modern versions.  However, for him, the kitchen was the room in which he felt least comfortable.  That had been my Mother’s domain and until she died,  I would doubt if he cooked more than a handful of meals for himself in nearly 40 years – no wonder he came to rely so completely on microwaveable ‘ready meals’ from the supermarket.

The part of the house in which my Dad felt most comfortable after Mum died wasn’t actually in the house at all, but was the garden.  Except in the dead of winter, Dad would spend hours out there every day and he loved it dearly.  I arrived in fading daylight and looked out on to a bleak and chilly landscape in which some of his gardening tools still lay out on the patio where he had left them.  The bird table and its associated feeders looked empty and forlorn – the garden itself seemed to be in mourning.  A pot on the patio had been blown over by the wind and a random impulse sent me out into the fading winter light to set it upright again.  As I did so, the phone began ringing in the house and before I could get to it, the answerphone kicked in.  I stood, transfixed, as my Dad’s familiar baritone voice echoed along the empty hallway; a proverbial ‘shivers up the spine’ moment for me.  One of my first tasks that evening was to re-record the outgoing message – I just didn’t want to hear that (literally) disembodied voice again.

Overnight storms matched my mood as winds buffeted the house throughout the night.  However, the morning of the funeral dawned cloudless and calm with a watery sun struggling to offer some warmth in the December chill.

The Partner & the Princess were travelling down from Birmingham and other friends were coming from even further afield.  Two of my closest friends flew down to Luton from Glasgow and  were the first to arrive.  Soon the house began to fill up with friends and I was kept busy making cups of tea and coffee and climbing into a suit and tie – never my attire of choice, but there was never any other option here.

Soon enough it was time to take the short stroll down to the village church.  It’s a stocky building with a square tower, built from the honey-coloured local stone and can be seen from pretty much anywhere in the village.  Various people were milling about outside including – extraordinarily – my half-Danish ex-girlfriend with whom I’d been living in Copenhagen when Mum and Dad first moved into their bungalow.  I hadn’t seen her for well over ten years and although she had mailed me to say that she was coming,  it was still slightly astonishing to see her chatting to the Princess as though they’d known one another for years.

There was a surprisingly large ‘walk-up’ attendance from the village – people who my Dad had known from Church and other social events.  I predicted an attendance of about 30 and it was instead nearly 50.  Father W. was dressed for the weather in a voluminous black cape and biretta.  We shook hands as we waited outside for the coffin to be brought into the church, then followed it in.

As the first hymn ended, I was wondering what kind of show we were going to get from Father W. and to begin with the portents were not good.  In the most reasonable and mellifluous of sing-song tones, he worked his way through what seemed like a series of interconnected prayers and homilies that appeared to make some sense to him, though I soon tuned out and waited patiently for him to finish.

In the end,  I decided that his approach was akin to the improvisations of a jazz musician;  someone like John Coltrane would carry round in his head a repertoire of stock riffs and phrases that he would mix up and weave together into apparently seamless solos and it occurred to me that Father W. was essentially doing the same thing.  Here he was with his soft, gentle voice and his  cut-glass accent, spinning together random sections of  comforting doggerel into what he obviously hoped would be  a message of faith and hope and salvation via Mother Church.

Eventually, he finished and gave an offhand introduction to ‘ a member of the family.’  The  Partner got up to read the Eulogy that I had written to deliver myself until I was persuaded otherwise by a number of people.  They were right because I’m fairly sure that I would have been unable to get through it without breaking down.  The Partner did a magnificent job, telling the story of a few select episodes from my Dad’s life; there was a little sadness, a little humour and a lot of pride for a life well lived. 

The Partner sat down – no applause; it’s too traditional a church for that - and we waited.  Father W. had retreated to a seat near the choir-stalls and though we couldn’t see his face, there was the unmistakable feeling around the church that the old bugger had dropped off.  The Princess wasn’t about to wait, so she got up and launched into a Victor Hugo poem, which is essentially an extended metaphor about watching a ship recede from the shoreline towards the horizon, before finally making the point that on another shoreline, someone else is watching it arrive.  Simple, but effective and she read it very clearly in a strong enough voice to guarantee that Father W. would be woken from his nap.

As indeed he was.  Thankfully, at this point, he launched into some warm and seemingly heartfelt comments about my Dad that seemed to reflect the person we had all known.  After that, it was more holy-rolling extemporisation from him, a New Testament reading that passed me by completely and a second hymn, then the organist struck  up ‘Nimrod‘ from Elgar’s ‘Enigma Variations’, which was the music to which my parents left the church at their wedding back in 1948 and to which my Dad left it now. 

Quite a few of the village folks left at this point, but there were still about 30 at the graveside for the interment.   This is the point at which I lost it at my Mum’s funeral and pretty much the same thing happened here.  What I realised is that I am fine until I see someone else breaking up and then I can’t hold back the tears.  This time it didn’t happen until the coffin was in the grave and people were scattering dried rose petals on top of the coffin.  My friend Jenifer came walking towards me and I could see her face crumpling into tears as she got to me.  Before we knew it, we were hanging on to each other for dear life and the tears were flowing. 

Holcot Church – journey’s end for both of my parents.

Afterwards, everyone convened at ‘The George’, an old coaching inn in the nearby village of Brixworth - well, I say ‘everyone’, but Father W. never showed and there were hardly any of the villagers there either.   They’d been at the church for my Dad but really had no interest in the incoming mob from ‘furren parts’ , so didn’t show up at the pub, which is actually fair enough as far as I’m concerned.  The rest of us – Birmingham friends, Glasgow friends,  the partner’s relatives, my old school friend John who now lives in Shropshire and my ex-flame from Copenhagen – made the best of things on a freezing day and as is often the case, the mood was cheery – and the home-made Leek & Potato Soup was terrific.

As for closure….we went back to the house after the ‘reception’ and Jenifer remarked on how full of memories and photos and a lifetime of accumulated ‘stuff’ the house is.  My Dad’s presence fairly screams from the walls. 

So, no closure yet and not for a good while I suspect.  For now, because I face an immense task in sorting and clearing the house and dealing with Dad’s affairs, I decided that in order to have any kind of Christmas at all, the best thing to do was simply to shut everything non-essential down and lock up the house until the New Year.  As I’ve said here previously, my feeling is that there will be precious little of the accumulated stuff of my parents’  lives that I will take away with me, but who knows what I will find once I start delving?  I plan to clear the house over an extended period – for one thing I haven’t yet decided whether to sell or rent it – and I want to do it in a considered fashion, rather than treat it as an exercise in clearance on an industrial scale.

When I finally walk away, that will be all that I take into the future for the benefit of any grandchildren I may yet have and for their descendants.  At that point, there just might be some closure, but I suspect that there will be none until then.

Moving into the undiscovered country…..

Not much blogging of late as I have been somewhat preoccupied with my ailing 87-year old Father, who finally died a couple of days ago.  It was nearly 7 weeks since he had gone into hospital, so I had plenty of time to prepare myself for what eventually became an inevitability.  Ultimately, what my Dad died from was really just old age; different parts of his body were wearing out at the same time and it was this ‘cocktail’ of  bodily exhaustion that gradually ground down his resistance.  However, this vaguely holistic view of his eventual demise cuts no ice with the bureaucrats who staff our National Health Service, as you will hear in due course….

Before I get into that, I want to digress sufficiently to tell you about my Father’s final day – in fact I should probably start at the beginning of his ‘final act’. 

Briefly, he had languished in Northampton’s busy General Hospital for 5 weeks.  He was admitted having vomited blood, something that was seemingly triggered by an oesophageal tear just above the stomach.  That was fixed quite quickly and  after a week he was moved from a High-Dependency Unit on to a General Surgical Ward and appeared to be getting better.  However, he then suffered a major setback, contracting  a ‘c.difficile’-type bug which created huge amounts of an infectious diarrhoea that triggered my gag reflex every time I went into his room.  Knowing what I do now, I understand that he was actually ill with multiple ailments; swollen kidney due to a blocked urethra, progressive deterioration of his heart, to say nothing of the problems he was suffering throughout his alimentary tract.  What the bug did was to weaken him appreciably, making it very difficult for a man of his advanced age to recover and making it more likely that any kind of innocuous ‘event’ could tip him over the edge. 

According to the Consultant overseeing his case, he then entered a period where he neither improved or deteriorated – in the words of the doctors treating him, he had ‘plateaued’.  The diarrhoea abated but never stopped and in searching for the cause, they duly discovered a raft of other problems, as mentioned.  After 5 weeks, the staff in Northampton clearly felt that they had done all they could for him medically.  He just lay there, day after day, usually lucid, occasionally confused but always weak.  With the pressure on beds in NHS hospitals, they are clearly under greater pressure than ever to produce tangible results.  Wheel ‘em in, get ‘em better and wheel ‘em out would seem to be their modus operandi.  My Dad’s case just didn’t fit their ‘template’ at all, but on the other hand, he was far too ill to go home. 

What they did was to move him ‘sideways’ to Danetre Hospital in Daventry.  It’s a bright, modern facility that was only built in 2006.  Their real job is to rehab stroke victims and those recovering from serious surgery, ready for a return home.  They also have a small ‘wing’ dedicated to palliative care for terminal cancer patients and it was to a room on this wing that my Dad made his last journey.   I must pause long enough to pay tribute to the dedicated men and women in both hospitals who tried in vain to get my Father back to health.  We are hugely lucky to have the NHS in this country, but the reality of my Dad’s situation was that no-one could really work out what to do about or with him. 

The staff at Danetre were great and he certainly got better care there than in Northampton.  He was warm, comfortable and well cared for.  On the other hand, the Palliative Unit at Danetre is specifically designed to be an oasis of calm, whereas the wards at Northampton are much busier and the staff consequently more overworked.  Despite the peaceful surroundings, my Dad didn’t fit Danetre’s ‘template’ either and one of the doctors there told me that they would review his case in a couple of weeks and that if there was no significant improvement, he would have to be ‘placed’ in a nursing home.  I was loath to discuss this with him as I knew such a move would crush what was left of his spirit.

As mentioned in a previous piece, I was advised by the hospital to stay away from Danetre for most of the first week my Dad was in there as I was suffering from a heavy cold, which, had he picked it up, would in all probability have rapidly morphed into pneumonia or something far more serious.  Having been ‘thus ‘quarantined’ for the best part of a week, I could immediately see, when I did get back to visiting,  that he was now ’sinking’ and that he didn’t have much time left.

And so to his final day.  I got a phone call from the hospital in the late morning to say that his condition had deteriorated.  They would give me no ‘hard information’ over the phone (as it transpired, they didn’t really have any) but did at least concede that this latest downturn was potentially life-threatening.

Fortuitously, the Princess was off work that day and equally fortuitously, the Partner managed to find a hole in her busy schedule, so we travelled to Danetre ‘en famille’, arriving in mid-afternoon.  When we got up to the Inpatients Unit, the nurse met us and told us that his condition had improved since the morning and that he had both drunk and eaten a little and was quite lucid.  When we went in, he was dozing but soon woke up and became as ‘engaged’ as I had seen him since his early days in Northampton General.

He seemed keen to check on a few tasks that he had asked me to carry out some weeks beforehand.  He wanted to know about the state of his house.  He wanted to tell the Partner that he wanted her to have his car.  We assured him that everything was OK and that he shouldn’t worry.  Looking back it now feels like he was checking off items on a final list.  Looking back it seems like we were giving him permission to go.

The Princess even managed to persuade him to eat some mashed-up peaches and whilst she was feeding them to him, I slipped out to question the nurse about what had happened to him that was serious enough for her to call me.  She told me (a sign of things to come) that she wasn’t sure, but that they thought it might have been ‘some kind of cardiac incident’.  There would be a review in the morning she told me, after which someone would call me to let me know their thoughts.

We left shortly afterwards and stood in the corridor outside the room chatting with one of the staff.  I looked back in and saw my Dad lying there peacefully with his eyes closed and still clutching the bottle of  spring water I had left him with.  Quite on impulse, I walked back into the room, kissed him on the forehead and told him I loved him, then left.  At the time, I couldn’t have told you why I did it, but it seemed absolutely necessary to me then and I am so glad I trusted my instincts.

It had been a really positive visit and though I had no expectations of a Lazarus-type recovery, I was glad that we had all been there to catch him on what had seemed to be a good day. We drove home along the A45 through Coventry’s rush-hour traffic and finally got back  here at about 6:20.   At 6:30, the phone rang and the same nurse I’d spoken to about an hour beforehand told me that Dad had died about ten minutes earlier.  My main sensation was astonishment that he had been chatting away to us  quite animatedly only just over an hour previously and now he was gone for good.  At that moment, my main feelings were relief that his travails were over and that he died with dignity in a caring environment where he felt comfortable with the staff and the place, rather than in some anonymous ‘Care Home’ where he knew no-one and could not expect the same degree of professionalism or competence from those looking after him.

In the light of what has happened since, the only ominous note was that the nurse could offer no insights about what it was that had finally killed him.

I rang the Funeral Directors that same evening and set the wheels rolling for the formalities.  Danetre has no facility to store bodies so Dad was taken to an undertaker in the town and I was told that he would be collected and brought back to Northampton the following day.

The following morning (Friday), I  rang the Registrar’s Office and booked an appointment to register the death on the following Monday as they couldn’t find me an appointment slot that day.   I spoke to a woman in my Dad’s village with whom he served on the  Church committee who promised to contact the local Rector with a view to officiating at my Dad’s funeral.  I rang his few surviving friends and broke the news to them.  I spoke with several of my own friends as well, who were quick to offer condolences and help.  The most difficult call was to Dad’s sister who lives in the north-east of Scotland and with whom he had a major falling-out last year.  They were never reconciled and she was devastated by the news.  Still, as I pointed out to her, he was a churchgoer and so is she, so if what they profess to believe in is true, she would have a chance to patch things up with him in the Great Hereafter.  Don’t think she was much consoled by my crude amateur metaphysics, somehow.  Still, as I told her, they were both a couple of stubborn old curmudgeons and therefore equally to blame.

By mid-afternoon, things were coming together nicely.    I had arranged to drop into Danetre, en route to Northampton,  to collect Dad’s belongings and the Death Certificate, the Rector – an elderly, Runyonesque, old school  Church of England  windbag (to be quite honest) - was on board, Dad’s body had been retrieved from Daventry and a day and time had been tentatively set for the funeral.  Sorting this out, followed by Dad’s ‘affairs’ and then, finally, his house is going to be a mammoth task and there’s only me to do it, but I was feeling quite pleased about how smoothly this first bit had gone.  I should have known better.

About 3 pm, the phone went and it was one of the doctors who had been treating Dad at Danetre.  I told him that I had spoken with the Ward Clerk earlier to arrange to pick up my Dad’s personal effects and the Death Certificate, at which point he informed me that there would be no such Certificate for me to collect.  This was, he informed me, because he was not in a position to definitively identify the cause of my Dad’s death, which, under English law, automatically triggers a post-mortem, to be carried out, in this case, by doctors acting under the direction of the Office of the Coroner for Northamptonshire.

In immediate terms, this was a major irritation as any and all funeral arrangements have now had to be put on hold and I am currently in a limbo from which only the Coroner can release me.  Until the body is released back to the Funeral Directors and a Death Certificate issued, I am unable to do anything at all and I have no legal right to challenge this decision.  The various Coroners around the country are apparently answerable only to the Queen. 

The man responsible for this wretched state of affairs is, of course, not the doctor at Danetre, but the late Harold Shipman who faked numerous death certificates he issued whilst practising as a G.P. in Todmorden and Hyde.  The full extent of Shipman’s killing spree has never been fully revealed, but it is thought that he was probably responsible for the murder of around 250 people between 1971 and 1998.  Since the Shipman case, the rules governing doctors issuing death certificates have been tightened up considerably and to set down ‘Old Age’ as a cause of death is no longer a viable option.

And so, my Dad, who spent 7 weeks in hospital being poked, prodded and pummelled, scanned, screened and scraped is now set to be sliced and diced in order to find out probably not very much at all.  I  know that some people would find it traumatic to think of their father’s body being treated in such a fashion, but I will confess to feeling fairly unsentimental about the empty shell that remains after my Dad’s essential spirit had departed.  Even so, I think it only goes to show something that we all know full well; which is that the law is an ass at times and that sometimes a bit of common sense has to prevail.  I have not quite abandoned all hope that this will be the case with my Dad and that over the weekend the Northamptonshire Coroner (in her infinite wisdom) will have an attack of the aforementioned common sense. 

Dad was 87 years old  after all and it’s not exactly rocket science to know that he was weak and suffering from a range of quite serious ailments (for a man of his age and medical history).  His poor body was just worn out and I fail to see that the cause of medical science is going to be much advanced by this farcical piece of posthumous butchery.  Aside from anything else, it places an unreasonable delay on the process by which  myself, my family and my Dad’s friends have  the opportunity to say a final goodbye to the old fella and achieve a little peace ourselves.  No prizes for guessing who I’ll be calling first thing on Monday, though as is the case with bureaucrats all over the world, I doubt that the troubles of a handful of ordinary people will perturb their pressing need to get their paperwork in order.