Vera Lynn is 92 and has just re-entered the pop-charts:
Dame Vera, who kept up the spirits of millions with her songs and personality during the darkest days of the Second World War, entered the album chart at number 20, at the age of 92.
Her album, We'll Meet Again - The Very Best of Vera Lynn, returned her to the charts almost six decades after she topped them in the 1950s.
It overtook those of comparative spring chickens U2, the Stone Roses, Green Day and Eminem.
Dame Vera said: ''I am extremely excited and delighted to be back in the charts after all these years.''
The album was released to coincide with this week's 70-year anniversary of the declaration of war, which falls this Thursday.
About which we'll have more on the 3rd. Born just before the Battle of Vimy Ridge, Dame Lynn is more than a link to the past, she's a reminder of better musical taste. The nearly seven decades that have passed since she made a hit of We'll Meet Again has seen the decline of such hum-drum things as melody and tone. Sometime in the twentieth century music acquired a best-before date. Tell me what music you listen to and a reasonable guess can be made of when you were born. This doesn't apply to literature or even movies. I know many people who have substantial collections of classic movies, yet recoil from all but a handful of classical or jazz pieces. They can quote Rick in Casablanca, or Joseph Cotton in Citizen Kane, but can't tell Handel from Beethoven. I was once speaking to a director at my firm, a woman in her late thirties. She admitted to liking the Irish Rovers but felt afraid of admitting it. "It makes me feel so old when I say that." In an era that boasts of having no barriers, of being free of petty constraints of genre and type, we run up against one insuperable barrier: time. A present tense culture requires present tense music.
When I was a teenager I was always out of step because I held on to the pop tunes I liked for years. Once I asked a classmate, "Do you know who recorded this song?" and sang a little of it; it had been popular about six months before and I wanted to buy the album. She said accusingly, "That's old."
ReplyDeleteThen a few years later I played one of my favorite songs for my boyfriend. He admitted grudgingly, "It's a good song... but it's the kind of music you listen to when you're thirteen."
"That's because this album was released three years ago. When we were thirteen."
It was bad enough when I liked last year's pop tunes. Nowadays, of course, I listen to music that was popular when my grandmother was first married.
"They'll be bluebirds over,
ReplyDeleteThe White Cliffs of Dover."
Are there bluebirds at Dover?
I can't say I've seen any.
Anyway, I'm a jackboot wearing Ted Heath Europhile.
I listen to Bach, play Beethoven's Symphony Number Nine on my piano, and was born in 1674.