A Night At The Opera

No, not that one

Hello Dear Reader

It is, I believe, another Bank Holiday Weekend. When I am Prime Minister - a post I’ve been giving some serious consideration to of late given that the current one isn’t up to much - one of my first orders of business will be to sort out an even distribution of Bank Holidays. What madness is this, having a Bank Holiday every other weekend for a month and then absolute tumbleweed until the end of the summer? Stagger them, I say, so that we might make the most of the long daylight hours and such. And then pop one in at the end of January to make the winter less interminable; when the weather is terrible and we are not tempted to waste it on garden centres or ill-fated DIY projects. I will personally state sanction a long weekend where you can just sit in your underpants and binge-watch telly eating Ferrero Rocher and only Ferrero Rocher, and drink wine from a mug.

Whatever it is you are doing this weekend, I hope you are enjoying yourself. Unusually, this newsletter actually contains news, in the form of a gig just added to the All Roads Lead To… tour in the autumn. It has been almost a decade since I last played a show on my home island of Jersey, and this has largely been because the Jersey Opera House was closed for many years for much needed refurbishment. At last it is open, and I am thrilled to tell you that I am coming home to play a show on Saturday November 8th. The Opera House was the first stage on which I performed, at the tender age of, oh, seven or eight, in the local Eisteddfod, singing Memory from Cats like a Poundland Bonnie Langford. That same year, I wrote a three act modernist version of Cinderella in primary school and proudly told my teacher that not only was Buttons going to be played by a woman for a change, but that it was so good we’d almost certainly be able to put it on at the Opera House.

‘You might want to learn how to spell Cinderella first,’ she said. ‘Then we’ll see about the Opera House.’

The Queen fans among you might have been momentarily hopeful when you saw the title of this newsletter arrive in your inbox. Technically, I could include a Queen cover for this ridiculous project I accidentally started doing without thinking it through, given that Brian May is almost from Twickenham. Maybe I will. But not this week.

This week, I cast my gaze across the Irish Sea and looked to Dublin for inspiration. Dublin provided an embarrassment of songwriting riches and I spent a long afternoon trying out various options. I was hoping to avoid doing the obvious thing - a U2 cover - and yet here we are. I am doing a U2 cover.

It’s not the U2 cover I intended to do. I was fiddling around with Beautiful Day for a bit but wasn’t getting anywhere. It’s because I really wanted to do the song I am doing - One - but I was still too intimidated, thirty years on, by Mica Paris’s version that became, as far as I was concerned, the definitive cover of what I consider to be the band’s finest song.

It’s an extraordinary lyric. I could never figure out who Bono was talking to. Was it a lover? Was it God? It is a song of both reproach and reconciliation. When I researched the history of the song, it made complete sense that it was written in Hansa Studios in Berlin on the eve of German Reunification in 1990. By now bona fide Global Superstars, relations in the band were somewhat fractured, and at the start of recording what was to become Achtung Baby it wasn’t clear how these tensions might be overcome.

I think One could only have been written in a soon to be reunified Berlin by a band who grew up at the height of the troubles in a still divided Ireland. I was fifteen when the Wall came down. Years later, during a period when we lived briefly in Berlin, I was working in a studio on the banks of the Spree and the view from the window was of the Oberbaum bridge, which had acted as a crossing between the American and Soviet sectors. I asked the studio engineer, a chap the same age as me who was the son of a West German and an American soldier stationed in Berlin, what it was like when the Wall came down. He described scrambling onto the broken wall with his mates and meeting other kids of the same age from the East.

‘We were all just kids,’ he said. ‘And they just wanted to know about music, and share cigarettes and admire our sneakers. Just kids, hanging out with other kids.’

I can’t emphasise enough how important U2 were in gently politicising a whole generation. People might roll their eyes at Bono these days - but that cynicism is, I feel, misplaced. U2 put their money where their mouth was. The proceeds of One were donated to AIDS research, at a time when the gay community was being decimated and the stigma around the disease reprehensible. Young people will always look to their heroes for this kind of guidance - U2 did not let my generation down.

I have not been particularly faithful to the original apart from staying in the same key, and wanting to emulate some of the swampy guitar sounds that Daniel Lanois, One’s co-producer, is so famous for.

Like Cohen’s Hallelujah or Dylan’s Make You Feel My Love, it is a perfect lyric. A gift of a song, to the singer, and to the world.

‘We’re one / But we’re not the same / We get to carry each other / Carry each other.’

I don’t think these words will ever go out of fashion, nor has the world needed to hear them more than it does right now.

Have a great long weekend, all.

With love as ever,

Nerina xxx

P.S. Sheffield and Brighton are now SOLD OUT but tickets are still available for the remaining towns and cities on my forthcoming UK & Ireland tour here: https://nerinapallot.com/live/