The Judge
RAVES!
Date: 20/01/14
Renaissance - "Northern Lights" (1978)
I'll keep on saying it, because it's perfectly true; music is the nearest we have to a working time machine.
A certain piece of music, a certain song, and within the first few bars you are cast back to a particular moment in your life, or a special or significant period of time from it.
Here's one more from my own treasury.
July 1978. I had just turned sixteen, and had also just left the bully-strewn dump of a school which I had somehow endured for the previous five years. I was looking forward to going to our local sixth-form college and from there to...well, what, exactly?
I didn't know, and didn't particularly care; the sense of freedom was so strong in those few weeks that I could taste it. The world seemed full of possibilities and potentialities; largely illusory in the end, to be sure, but the feeling of it was genuine enough. I'm pretty sure that I've never felt that way since; reality was always going to intrude jeeringly upon my hopes.
And here's the record which takes me right back there.
Renaissance - after a turbulent early history - had settled into being regarded as a rather pretentious prog-pop band, full of orchestral pomp, and totally out of phase with what was 'with-it' and au courant in popular music at the time.
Nonetheless, 1978 brought them their only chart hit with the delightful Northern Lights. It's a song which grabbed me right from that distinctive introductory combination of Michael Dunford's acoustic guitar and Jon Camp's bass. And then Annie Haslam starts to sing. And what a voice! Clear, melodic and expressive, putting lyricist Betty Thatcher's words right into your heart.
Both Thatcher and Dunford are now, alas, gone from us, and the band was unable to seize the momentum which might have been expected in the wake of a Top Ten single. But the brightest lights often burn but briefly, and this song illuminated a few weeks of a hopelessly immature and romantic post-adolescent's life, and hearing it again can still generate memories of the feelings of that time.
P.S.: I left this anecdote until after the video because I didn't want it to spoil the ambience. The tale must, however, be told.
When Renaissance were featured on Top Of The Pops doing Northern Lights, also on the bill was one Graham Fellows who - prior to his existence as John Shuttleworth - was inhabiting his persona as Jilted John, through which bizarre means he had achieved a Top Ten hit himself with a song complete with the classic line, "I was so upset that I cried all the way to the chip shop".
Fellows/John was watching Renaissance's performance on TOTP and - caught up in the song himself - started, completely unconsciously, to imitate Annie Haslam's on-stage stance of hands-on-hips and twisting gently left and right.
Haslam, glancing across and unfortunately mistaking Fellows' emulation as being a piss-take, glared at him and made what Fellows described in a radio interview shortly afterwards as "an unladylike gesture".
