Take The Long Way Home

Hello Dear Reader

A very Happy Easter to you.

I’m not sure how you feel about James Corden - I personally think he is a wonderful writer and actor, although not everyone shares my opinion. But come with me for a moment on a little journey.

A few years ago, he made an episode of his Carpool Karaoke segment with Sir Paul McCartney, and I like to re-watch this from time to time. There is a moment in it where Corden is moved to tears singing along with McCartney to Let It Be.

‘I can remember my grandad who was a musician, and my dad, sitting me down and saying '“we’re gonna play you the best song you’ve ever heard”’ says Corden, ‘and I can remember him playing me that. (Let It Be). If my grandad was here he’d get an absolute kick out of this.’

‘He is,’ McCartney replies.

It’s not that I think McCartney’s going round all Sixth Sense like and seeing dead people or something. It’s that he knows, he really knows, in a way most of us can only understand intellectually, that nothing really dies. ‘That’s the power of music,’ he tells Corden in the same interview ‘it can do that to you.’

I’ve always thought that if I was alive at the time when people were scrawling Clapton is God on toilet walls, I’d have been going around the country with a Sharpie crossing that out and writing No, that’s McCartney. If Lennon said The Beatles were bigger than Jesus, then McCartney is at the very least the Pope.

You’d think with all this preamble I’d be telling you that I’ve done a Beatles cover, but no. But the song I am covering this week is by someone who once said in an interview that The Beatles changed his life. ‘They were my mentors in a way - and I took that into Supertramp.’

Songs give birth to songs that give birth to songs - and on and on it goes, this circle of song life. The eagle-eared among you may have spotted a moment near the end of If I Know You - the first song from my very first album - where I sing the lines:

‘So you think you’re a Romeo / Playing a part in a picture show / You take the long way home / Take the long way home.’

It’s a straight up nick - that I got permission for, don’t worry - from my favourite Supertramp song, Take The Long Way Home. It’s by no means the band’s biggest hit - because its writer, Roger Hodgson, is extravagantly gifted - but it is a song that has been keeping me company for most of my life, since I first heard it when a mate of mine (the purebred killing machine one) made me a C90 and put this at the start of side B. I can remember the feeling of the orange foamed headphones on my ears, and walking the long way back to my boarding house on a November morning, homesick and cold and desperate for my life to begin once the drudgery of exams and anxiety were finally done with, and then the high string of the intro creeping into my brain.

It blew my head off.

I don’t think there has ever been such a badly abused rewind button as the one on that put-upon Sony Walkman of mine.

When I sang along aged sixteen, it was the first verse I related to the most. Later - and today, still - it was those lines ‘when you’re up on the stage it’s so unbelievable, oh unforgettable!’ - and now all these years later, I think I truly understand these ones:

‘Does it feel that your life’s become a catastrophe? Oh it has to be, for you to grow, boy.’

It is a song of many meanings, and many lives.

It is a surprisingly complex record to re-create, however. I spent a couple of days doggedly watching YouTube teach-yourself-harmonica tutorials and remembering how kids at school would collapse in hysterics any time I tried to play Greensleeves on recorder. ‘But you’re so good at music!’ my mates sniggered. ‘How can you be so shit at recorder? Even a five year old can play recorder!’

Woodwinds, horns, brass - beyond me. You people who can do weird things with embouchure and bending remain a total enigma. I bow before you.

I kept thinking about Roger Hodgson (Portsmouth born, thus representing Havant for this tour covers endeavour in case you were wondering, tickets still available for my show) being so influenced by The Beatles, and what it must have been like to make music so soon after they had shown the world how incredible three minutes of music could actually be.

So incredible that the first time I heard The White Album, twenty five or so years after it first came out, I felt dizzy with euphoria, and then I think I had a little cry, and then set about spending a whole summer learning to play every song on it on as many instruments as I could figure out.

There are some amazing, incredibly faithful covers of Take The Long Way Home out there. But I have to work with what I have, and make the best of it, and so this could not be that kind of cover. My way in was to think of it as a Beatles song and not be too self-conscious; to remember the sheer dumb joy I felt discovering how the bass part went on Sexy Sadie after hours of wanting to give up, or the thrill of bashing away on the drums to Birthday.

The bad news is that there is no harmonica or soprano sax on my cover.

The good news is that there is no harmonica or soprano sax being played by me on my cover.

Easter - and you don’t need to celebrate it to understand this - is about everlasting life. And what are songs but everlasting little lives that bring joy and comfort, long after their initial act of creation, and long after the people who first ushered them into this world might have gone on to some other place?

See, nothing ever really dies, does it?

With love to you as ever,

Nerina xxxx