h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Well, I finally got my three songs up on my web page, http://www.Andrew.Robinson.net
Click and listen.

I wrote them all about 1968 when I was nineteen or twenty. My influences were the Beatles (of course) but also a bit of Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, and the Irish Incredible String Band offshoot, Dr Strangely Strange. I was also fascinated by the chord progressions in Brahms's German Requiem, which we had sung in Trinity College (the University of Dublin Choral Society). I was studying music and philosophy, and life was gentle. People remember the sixties as a time of student unrest, and there was a bit of Maoism going on in college, but for the most part the sixties were the decade of apathy. No point getting in a frenzy, sure the Bomb was going to wipe us all out any day.

So I wrote three songs, to see if I could. Also to express my inclinations, attitudes, intentions. The Chimpanzee Song, Alexander Frink and Son, and Learner Driver.

In 1972, I took them to London to make my fortune. I hired Adam Skeaping's one-man studio for an afternoon, bought a guitar on the way there, and put them onto a little quarter-inch tape. A record company man said "come back when you have a whole album", but I never wrote any more, other than little things for my children and nieces; I've written things for children's orchestras and beginner string quartets, too.

I had met Adam Skeaping as a viol player. He said he was sure I would like Joni Mitchell, and indeed I do.

Dear R'man,

I must take grave exception ( as an old friend ) to your description of the sixties as "the decade of apathy." You may have felt apathetic ( One could be so happy were it not for one....) but many of us did not ( OK, you said "for the most part" but I would disagree even with that.) The sixties were a time of idealism, admittedly often wooly and unfocussed ( clouded by interesting chemicals ) but the entire "ecological/environmental awareness movement" with its offshoots like Greenpeace grew out of the sixties. Pop/rock music has never been so vibrant as in the sixties. And while Maoism in China hit its nightmarish worst between 1966 and 1970, Maoism in the west was but a bizarre accompaniment to real movements of political concern ( The USA Civil Rights movement was at its strongest after 1962 ) with the first demonstrations of "People Power," in organisations such as CND, and the many demonstrations against the Vietnam War ( in which demonstrations lives were lost. e.g. Kent State 1968 ). The sixties also saw the "peoples' " first determined efforts towards a more just polity in Northern Ireland, before the gunmen took over.

This is an off-the-cuff response from an ageing hippy late at night, who remembers being ejected from the Trinity College Dublin Internationalists ( as the Maoists were called ) in 1968, for raising the issue of Tibet, a cause for which the said hippy is still active.

Cheers,

Chaiwallah

Point taken, apology offered.

You were full of beans in the 60s; I was too, intermittently . . .

No comments? Perhaps you have qualms?
They're not meant to rival the Psalms!
They're small in dimensions
And have no pretensions
Despite passing mentions of Brahms