The Owl Song
Recently Phil Widdows did me the great honour of selecting this song to be one of the very
first played on his new FolkCast radio style programme. Of course I was pleasantly surprised that he should choose one of my songs, but his choice of The Owl Song had me puzzled.
It is a song I have never performed in public – it is a private song. And not altogether successful – songs are basically verse, set to music – that is to say the
thoughts expressed have to be linear, and tell a simple graphic story. The Owl
Song on the other hand, is very definitely an attempt to write a poem about virtually everything that was going on in my head
at a certain time. As such it full of conceits and the thoughts leap
around like fireworks, in the song in the best tradition of John Donne at his most obscure.
When I recorded The Owl Song, Willy Jackson who has recorded all my albums in the last nearly
twenty years, said to me, My God Al! – that was an intense performance. Apparently
some of this intensity communicates itself to the listener, and so I am writing this little essay to explain some of the references
and from whence comes the intensity..
Ezra Pound once said, if he knew what a poem was about – there would have been no need
to write it in the first place. Whilst I can sympathise with Pound, I personally
feel the need to explain and justify what I write.
Very simply the song deals with my state of mind one night as
I drove home after doing a gig in an Irish bar in Manchester. Probably
my roadie Tony Martin was with me in actual fact, but for the purposes of the song the driver is alone in his car driving
through the darkness – alone with his thoughts. Sometimes the radio is on, but sometimes it irritates him, and he switches it off and he sings to himself – and then before long his own thoughts and feelings irritate him and he switches the radio
back on. And so on.
The road he is travelling is the A6, east out of Manchester and it goes through outer Manchester, then Stockport.
By one o’clock
a.m. there are only gangs of drunken kids spilling out of pubs and clubs and periodically jumping out in front of his car,
trying to flag him down thinking he is a taxi. Beautiful urban foxes (plumper
and more affluent than their stringy country cousins) are now fully alive and awake and
strut disdainfully across the road on their tour of dustbins outside hotels and fast food places. Sometimes they turn and stare directly at him with cold arrogance – this is their time.
Then after Chapel en le Frith, the road is clear – he is on his own, and the song starts. His
headlights of his car cut into the darkness of the unlit Pennine road before him, which twists and turns before him, ‘like
a lifetime time of sadness never bending to his will’. Like it says in The Clockwork Orange – real country dark!
On the stretch of road leading out of Buxton,
an owl swoops down into his headlights beam. The owl banks and turns skilfully before him, and when the driver looks in his side mirror, it is still there riding in the
slipstream. For longer than he thought possible the two creatures are fellow
travellers through the darkness. But the owl unlike himself has a pure and simple
relationship with this time of night.
And then almost as though it feels naked and inhibited in his company – the owl slides off into the darkness – and it leaves him amongst his lonely thoughts and obsessions.
Without saying a word of reproof, the owl by its mere existence has asked him the question every 20th
century person has asked himself – why the hell are we living like this? By
what authority does the owl speak? Owls were of course sacred birds in the temple of ancient Athens. The song is a guess at the ancient knowledge that the owl possesses.
Firstly he thinks of his relationship:-
Her finger my ring encircles, so does her breast enfold my heart
These are virtually the same words that Richard III uses to seduce Lady Ann in Shakespeare’s.
play Richard III They are the words
of a liar and a scoundrel. So there
is some dishonesty hinted at here. The phrase is so like the similes that litter
the vapid songs that are this man’s stock in trade. However the man can
do no other than think of love in these simplistic and dishonest terms, that
are inadequate for the reality in which he finds himself .
There is a further Shakespearian reference, this time in the chorus of the song. In The Merchant of Venice, Lorenzo
woos Shylock’s daughter Jessica and persuades her to elope with him away from Shylock’s money dominated world. Lorenzo says:-
Look how the floor of heaven
Is thick inlaid with pattens of bright gold.
The owl is talking to man who plies his trade for about fifty quid a night. The ‘alien words in a subject tongue’ are the endless catalogue of miseries – deportation,
poverty, random torture and murder visited on the Irish by the English. Similarly
they could be the English folksongs with their armies of victims – luckless poachers, factory workers, revolutionaries,
etc.
But sad as these things are – bloody tragic for his forefathers caught up in this -
they are not his battlefield. He lives in world where no one is happy with their
lot. People are always in a state of stress from what society expects. And this guy has given his life to an art form which never addresses any of this – it prefers indulging
in maudlin regret about the kids killed in the First world war, the sailors flogged on Nelson’s ships, the witches burned
at the stake in the 15th century – anything but today!
The owl sits above all this on the sky of midnight blue.
It says, I fall down from the sky and I take what I need - and you must
do the same with your talent. This is the only world you know, but its well worth
walking away from, because the only involvement it offers you is defeat . Why
not…….?
All the floors of heaven are lined with gold……
Leonard Cohen’s song about the limits of human freedom bursts upon his consciousness
and he snaps off the car radio, because it cuts too deeply. And this flawed human being carries on his journey into the darkness.
