Music… Makes the people… come together… yeah.

Emu hangs out with the natives.

Now I’m in Canada I miss people that I could’ve made a better effort for in the past –mostly friends who live in the south who I regularly dragged up to my parties but never actually got around to visiting them. It was the traffic you see, I hate traffic. But one of those friends lived a long way from the grizzly metropolis that is Lond….well, the South East. Emu spent many of her days in Cornwall, eventually moving on to the bright lights of Brighton. Even when I was working on yonder Sout coast, I never made it across to see her. Nor did she come up Nort. So I can’t really say I miss her – so much – but I used to write and frequently make her feel guilty about not writing back. Then, all of a sudden outta the blue I’d get this humongous book of a letter because she’d finally set herself aside half a day. It continues today with e-mail as she is in Australia and email is way more convenient than waiting for two colonial postal services to get-it-together.

Emu sings. She’s got the voice of an angel – one that’s smoked 20-a-day for 15 years, it’s husky gravely voice that she does amazing things with. It has the depths of Alana Miles and the zenith of Bjork. Add to that the fact that she’s a sassy redhead with the temperament of a clawless, toothless kitten on speed. There’s no fiery to her, she’s all cuddles and fluffy love. The only child I’ve ever known who wouldn’t stand on a fly, though she’s probably spitting feathers at me for disclosing her redheadedness since she’s now a simmering blonde.

She is another of my proxy siblings – being my god-sister, I guess. Her mum is my godmother. In 2002 she came and sang at my wedding and crushed the hearts of all my single male friends when she left for Australia to find fun, sun, work and eventually true love in the form of Steve, who she’ll be marrying in 2007 – that’ll be another trip back to the old country then.

Footnote: Not Steve Astley

Prior to that, the last time I actually saw Emu in the flesh was when I was 18. We went to visit her, her mum, Gill, and big Steve, her step-dad who is a lovely man. The Cornish sense of fun and humour is overwhelming chez eux and with countless dogs, cats, ducks and other wildlife from various RSPCA rescue escapades there’s ne’er a dull moment. On one of the last nights of our visit we all traipsed down to a seedy pub / club to watch Emu sing with Ted and Dave (not people from the kids TV show “Rainbow”, I promise).

That night was probably the best night out I’ve ever had with my parents. They got drunk, I got drunk, Emu sang like a diva, we danced, we sneaked smokes into the toilets and hoped our parents wouldn’t come in. IT WASN’T ME MUM, HONEST. I didn’t even pull but we laughed and laughed. At the end of the night, my mum grabbed Emu’s face in her hands and with tear in her eyes cried, “You’re beautiful and you’re wonderful. Do you know that? Fabulous, fabulous.” We all giggled. Sandwiched between my mum and dad on the drive home through country lanes, sit-dancing to “Tiger Feet” on the car stereo, we could’ve crashed had it not been for someone – big-Steve I think – being sober. We went to bed, in Emu’s attic room, our ears pounding and whistling from the volume of the music, brains swimming in Cornish bitter and Guiness, staring at the clear Cornish night sky full of stars through the roof-window.

I seem to remember spending a part of the night sitting on the bathroom floor, which is always a sign of a good night out.

This weekend, two cassettes appeared on the coffee table. Somewhere, Hubby had found a little black cassette with “Emu” written on it and another cassette with pictures of tractors and farmers drawn on the spine of the cover and two words written on the back in neat green and black AGGS handwriting, “The Levellers”.

This has caused me much excitement. I have so far half played Emu through in my car, as Ted screwed up the recording, gave me one song of Emu, 4 from another girl (fast forward), two songs of Emu then on side B, one song of Emu and an annoyingly dull section of fast forwarding through accompaniment tracks that I can’t even recognise so I can’t fill in the words. But how it makes me smile! There’s an archipelago version of “Stand by me”, three of Dave’s songs – which are pretty good – and all sung with no more accompaniment than his acoustic guitar and Emu’s tambourine. Then there’s Black Velvet, exclusively devoted to me and my black corduroy shirt that I was sporting and then, the cream of the crop, Bohemian Rhapsody – yes it was a silly kinda night. Which, thinking back now involved me moshing whilst dancing with my dad! Ahhh the days of VERY long hair.

Once I have got through Emu’s version of Bohemian Rhapsody again tonight I will play the Levellers a few times. That will remind me of Tanya, who kindly organised tickets for me to see them in Leeds and then, also very kindly, posted me a copy of the album when I was working in Paris, having a whale of a time but, again, missing my friends and things familiar to me. It will make me think of the concert and it will make me think about how I laughed when I saw her little doodles of farmers on the tape, when I was stuck in the big city, missing the countryside. The big black Martiniquais, Pierrot, that I was working with, kindly found a cassette player and we all listened to the Levellers for the rest of the working day.

Well, a day on since I started this post and I have been through the whole of the Emu tape including a LOL moment when I discovered it was recorded on new years eve in 1995. I was 22 – not 18! It was 10 years ago! It also had a small snippet of a little girl singing “Happy birthday to me” on it, which I’m not convinced was Emu. She then continued to murmur to herself, which sounded like she was trying to stop the cassette recording, reading the manual. Cute! Some parent would probably love to have this tape back.

The Levellers are now juicing up my drive to work with their own folk rock style, making for much jumping around and bouncing off walls at work. It doesn’t matter how depressing their lyrics are, I can’t help but dance. All together a very happy week.

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