I wrote a song when Diana was
killed. I had to; I had written the
first verse almost eighteen months
earlier, and recorded it on tape, and
I was a bit shaken when the news
broke. I spent hours digging out the
tape to see if I remembered what
I had come out with. I normally write
songs by 'channelling'; I just
sit and play, and if anything comes out,
it comes out. Sometimes it comes
out very complete. What I had recorded
on my tape was this:
I'll tell you a story
Which must not be forgotten
Of a girl who would marry
The heir to a throne
And those who observed her
Said surely this can never be
She looks like any other girl
From a middle-class home
But her heart was a legend,
Her body a monument
Immortalised by her sacrifice
On the altar of the Press
With her face to the sun
And her back to the camera
Forever a princess
In (a Versace*) (that see-through*) dress
*the tape says 'square-shouldered' but this was a bit strange in sound. The notorious photograph showed her in a see-through skirt, with the light behind. I use 'that see through dress' when singing. But I might use Versace if I felt the audience was a bit thick or would misunderstand.
A few years before that, I
had written two lines as an epitaph for Tim
Page and other photographers in
war zones:
They fought our wars with guns
of glass
Their bullets made of silver
So I took those lines and worked them round. Believe it or not, these lines fit exactly the same tune - there may be more syllables, but it scans to the melody in a certain way:
When she was just a girl, out
there in Vietnam
Men with cameras, they could be
heroes
They fought our wars for us with
silver bullets
And guns made of glass
But as she grew older
The guns kept getting closer
They were there at the beginning
They were with her till the last
After both these two sections (the double-length intro, and the second 'verse') I put a chorus, or rather a refrain:
Midnight in Paris, they dined
by candlelight
Till we put out the flame
Midnight in Paris will never be
the same
We were driving route 66 from
Santa Fe to Flagstaff, searching for
silver things for our 25th anniversary;
we flew over a day or so after
Di's funeral. I had got this far
with the song, but I needed a middle
bridge. A convertible passed us,
and suddenly I remembered some
completely unassociated lines
which I had written down maybe two years
before, just the first four of
this break. These had no connection with
anything. They were just something
which came into my head one day after
I'd been telling my daughter about
the death of Isadora Duncan, and we'd
talked about whether famous people
die tragically, or people who die
tragically become famous (etc).
She could dance like Isadora
She could act like Jimmy Dean
She could charm like any Kennedy
She could pose like Norma Jean
But there was one thing she would
never be
She'd never be a queen
Midnight in Paris
Was all there's ever been
I finished the song while driving
toward Gallup, great for buying Indian
silver, but one hell of a place
not to stay overnight if you can manage it:
One hundred years from now
a man is walking
Down the broken-down underpass
Where the old road used to run
By the banks of the Seine
He feels a chill wind running
through him
Like a flash of black lightning
The cry of brakes, the crash of
metal
And a deep rush of pain
Back to the bridge tune:
And when the play was over
When the last act was done
When the day grew too late
The right all the wrongs
The best that we could offer
To let her memory live on
Words written in haste
To a second-hand song
Midnight in Paris is over and
gone
And then the refrain and the first verse repeated to end.
Now my reason for writing what
looks like a green-eyed poke at Elton
John in the last verse isn't that
at all. I was incredibly angry. No
matter whether Princess Di had
liked 'Candle in the Wind' or not, you
can't steal a song written in
memory of one person and rededicate it
overnight; not even a new tune,
not even the effort of something unique.
I thought it was the cheapest
and most embarassingly shallow thing to
do. It just made me sad that we
had all lost a song which was an
all-time great, and in the process
the memory of Diana (for whom I hold
no special regard, beyond that
due to any human being) was cheapened.
I do these songs to play just
locally, for whoever might be there, and
when we got back I did 'Midnight
in Paris' half a dozen times at
different venues. Generally, it's
a song which is inappopriate to
applaude, so it produces an odd
reaction (as does another of my songs,
The Snowdrops of Dunblane). I got a sort of silence filled with
quiet
murmurs, then people coming up
and talking about it. Most musicians say
something about the reference
to 'Candle in the Wind'; turns out nearly
everyone feels the way I did.
Obviously, the public is less sensitive
about context and appropriateness.
This is a song which, inevitably,
is only ever going to get played around
the end of August each year. To
a point, though, that's what folk song is
about - marking things which happen.
Too few songs are about real life
events these days. Exceptions
- recent songs by Stereophonics, for example,
and well known stuff from Don
McLean through Elton John etc.