Song at the bus shelter July 21, 2007
When one looks at a photograph, one can imagine all sorts of things. There is or was ‘a truth’, a set of circumstances in which the photo came to be made – but you may not know them, so you can guess, fantasise, install your own readings over the top.
The same goes for a song – even more so, because it’s less anchored to something you can touch and you are likely to hear it in many different situations when free to look up and at things around you.
I want in the next few weeks to go over a few songs that have caught my ear and imagination, and try and come up with some home truths about what they mean, even if I am making some of it up to suit me.
Let’s start with Ian Hunter and “Irene Wilde”.
One rainy day on holiday me and Bud listened to this song 63 times, repeatedly. Yes, for nearly four hours. And still it was raining on England’s south coast. I have listened to the song hundreds of times more, alone, and with friends – and even live in concert with Ian Hunter but metres from me, within touching distance.
As much as I allowed myself a hero, he was my hero when I grew up. He was a boy in the back bedroom, a backyard kind of hero. He talked and sung about a sort of repression – with him it wasn’t the slavery of a negro in the plantation fields finding a voice, although he liked ‘black music, it was rather as the son of a policeman growing up in a backwater town on the borders of England and Wales. Shrewsbury.
The jolly copper father of his did not like his song or much song of any sort and he made out he didn’t even like his son Ian.
Ian, with his mop of curly hair, awkward eyes and awkward confidence grew into the would-be rock singer and then the rock singer actual, hiding under a mass of curly hair, and shades. Whilst Roy Orbison and Ray Charles had more reason to wear black shades, Ian Hunter became synonomous with shades when emerging with Mott The Hoople, riding high in the charts with “All The Young Dudes (Carry the News)”, “All The Way From Memphis” as well as “Roll Away The Stone”.
Back then, a schoolboy in Shrewsbury, moved around by his policeman father’s jobs, Ian Hunter Patterson (his real name) found himself at the bus station (it is still there today, under the big town clock) waiting and waiting on a girl. More than once in his life he journeyed to and from Barker Street Bus Station whilst living in outlying Shropshire towns his father had been stationed at. Ian attended the town’s Grammar School, through most of these changes of address. The bus shelter became a constant, a dependable. There came a time when he was living within a stone’s throw of the bus shelter (more splendid to me even than the bus shelter of the Beatles Penny Lane) at Swan Hill. Indeed 23A Swan Hill, which became another of his best songs over 40 years on from his leaving there. Then he had no need to catch a bus from or to it.
But…
At 16 he met and doted on “Irene Wilde” whom he recognises later to have been barely more than a child. He had not a hope with her – actually that’s all he had. And a note, and another note – notes from an older boy for whom Ian ran errands. Errands to take the notes to Irene, as a go-between. But it gave him purpose and a chance to gaze upon if not speak to at close quarters this most beautiful of species.
Once he wrote a message from himself to her on his hand in the hope that she might see it when handed the note from the other. But it was upside down. He had written it to himself! I made this bit up, but it’s in the spirit of the song.
She was the measure of his failure by which he would make himself famous.
Recently I had the chance to walk my hero around his Shrewsbury, which he is still uncomfortable about, and could have had him on those very same benches on which sat he and Irene decades before. But I did not want to see him sat there now. I wanted it all still to be in the imagination, brought on by the song.
So I stood him up by the wall, near the railway station and the prison and took his picture there instead. Indeed for a moment he gazed upon me as he would have Irene Wilde all those years ago – with suspicion and hurt and curiosity – that he might get let down or by the evidence of the photo emerging, let himself down. He might look crap. But he had those shades to hide behind, and still the curls of hair. And something of the stance – he looked fine.
In the song he sings of unspeakable jealousy at having to watch Irene fall for another and his feeling of being ‘not good enough’. He speaks of the retaliation – his leaving a town not quite big enough for his own ambition and he being able to return all those years later to ask of what became of her when most would only know of what became of him, Shrewsbury’s Ian Hunter (Patterson) now famous.
“Wilde as your name I soon left that country town, I’ve been around , seen some fame, seen some ups and seen some downs”.
Dragged into the song is the put-down from the elders, rather his father than his mother, which made him more resolute when mixed with the put down of Irene’s disinterest “you ain’t no chain, you’re just a link, which made me think, I’m gonna be somebody someday”.
And that’s the sum of the song. I sit there on Barker Street now and imagine it all.
“Irene Wilde” can be found on Ian Hunter’s second solo album “All American Alien Boy”, and in various live versions and on compilations of the best of. But does not appear to be downloadable off the web. The photographs I took of him and Shrewsbury can be found on this my very own web under Music and then Songs In The Backyard, mixed with some Elton John stuff! Yes, Ian from Shrewsbury did get to be somebody someday, rubbing shoulders with the stars, and groupies. Here he is on You Tube in what looks like a Dutch Disco heaven…
Imagine my dismay when, years later, I got to meet my hero and he invited my wife to come up on stage during the bit where he “asks the girl out” at his gig at Newcastle. Come the night we argued and she didn’t come. I coul see Ian looking for her in the front row come the song – he had requested she be there to pull up. In the end he plumped for an ugly gruff roadie who thought he was adjusting Ian’s foot pedal. I sat in the balcony head in hand.
Catch him live in England this autumn : 20 Oct 07 Glasgow Scotland Fruitmarket 21 Oct 07 Newcastle England Carling Academy 23 Oct 07 Oxford England The Zodiac 24 Oct 07 Liverpool England Carling Academy 25 Oct 07 Bilston England The Robin 26 Oct 07 Southampton England The Brook 28 Oct 07 London England Sheperds Bush Empire 30 Oct 07 Brighton England Komedia
