Moody Blues

The whole trouble with a folk song is that once you’ve played it through there is nothing much you can do except play it over again and play it rather louder. [Constant Lambert 1905-51]

I’ve been putting aside some time each day to catalogue my current music collection. ‘Current’ because my peripatetic lifestyle has resulted in my entrusting dozens of albums to friends’ safekeeping in various towns over the decades. Disturbances in the north-east in the mid-eighties meant that I left a collection of some 50 albums with a good friend in Shillong – quite a few are tucked away in a corner of a little house in Sikkim -- music that may be difficult to lay hands on easily: The Who, Conway Twitty, Jim Croce, Crosby Stills Nash and Young, Alabama, Gentleman Jim Reeves, The incomparable Dusty Springfield, The scorpions, AC/DC, several Joan Baez and Bob Dylan albums, The wonderful Ray Charles and the elusive Cat Stevens, among others.

My decade in Patna – certainly not the place to find intelligent music in the dark decades of Lalooism – was made bearable by recourse to the music I carried along with me … and the music I picked up whenever I visited Calcutta, Bombay or Delhi.

Last year, I picked up Harry Belafonte’s Carnegie hall concert for the THIRD time: my first set was purloined in 1986, the second was borrowed by the librarian of the erstwhile British library in Patna in 1994, which he forgot to return when he left Patna some years ago.

Just listening to Harry Belafonte belting out ‘Man Smart, woman smarter’, Mama , look a Booboo, and Ma-til-da is more than enough to drive the monsoon blues away…..