Waves of Nightingales - a Solstice collaboration

On November 6 I delivered my first Boozer Cruiser performance at the Light Up Festival in Milton Keynes. It couldn’t have gone better, thanks to the support of Andy Glass, leader of headline act Solstice, and the genuine feeling of community among the artists and audience.

Trying to maximise the occasion, I’d begged Andy for a scrap off his table in the form of a piece of music I might write for. He provided me with a beautiful composition on the exotic bulbul tarang (a kind of hurdy-gurdy kind of thing – I don’t know; I call it a psychedelic typewriter). 

It was called Waves of Nightingales… a great title for a Solstice vibe, but less so for my stuff, I thought. But I’d been heavily considering the concept of elegance at the time. I asked Robert Fripp (I sometimes get to) for his thoughts and he said elegance was a signal of “inner grace;” and as I considered that, I became certain it would be more elegant to pursue Andy’s nightingales vibe than come up with my own. 

One day, while cruising on the Grand Union Canal during the height of summer, I overheard someone talking about the “lions of longing.” What on earth, I wondered, were the “lions of longing?” Turned it the overheard conversation had been about the lions of Longleat Zoo… but that’s how this poetry malarkey works, and I was off! I had soft, gentle nightingales and ferocious, fighting lions; and I had the new-wave hippie vibe of Solstice at the back of my mind. With two new George RR Tolkien TV shows being heavily discussed (I watched neither) the idea of a general dismissing his soldiers after the final battle came into my mind.

As he instructs his faithful men to abandon their weapons and look for the places their lives would have taken them if they’d never had to fight, it became an analysis of how we sometimes forget that parts of our lives are means of getting to another point, rather than ends within themselves – it can be failure to stay somewhere too long, and yet our search for security and comfort means we might rather keep fighting the battles we know than accept the battles are over, and to remember why we’d started fighting in the first place.

Hence, bears wolves and lions – then, finally, nightingales carrying us gently to wherever we were meant to be.

A studio version will follow at some point, but the live version – performed without Andy having heard the construction I’d settled on, which made it even more fun – is pretty sweet. I can’t thank him enough for his support over the past two years, and I hope for a few most scraps off his table if and when they become available.