You Say It's Your Birthday

Tate Modern

At a certain precise chronologically / astronomically / astrologically [1] / biographically significant point over the weekend I became what is generally referred to as "65 years old". Which is late middle-age by any reckoning, and quite possibly even a first, tentative step into becoming "old". It certainly feels like one of those significant anniversaries, the ones that deserve a special space in the rack of greetings cards in the local stationery shop. My sister did actually find me an "On Your 65th Birthday" card, but, disappointingly, it did not come with one of those "I AM 65!" badges you get when you're ten. Which is a shame, as I'd have enjoyed wearing that, when we took the train up to London to meet our children, and visit the Bonnard exhibition at Tate Modern, my birthday treat.

It's a funny old business, isn't it, the passing of time? They're a hundred years old, some of those Bonnard canvases, and yet something about them now seems very contemporary, unlike, say, an aeroplane or motor-vehicle of around the same vintage. Which may mean that art, as Ezra Pound said of literature, is news that stays news, or perhaps it simply means that art is stuck in certain recurring loops in ways that engineering isn't. Certainly, back in 1968/9, when those paintings would only have been fifty years old and the Beatles were coming to a fractious end, Bonnard could well have appeared a little dated. But it seems his time may have rolled around again.

Everything does and will always change, albeit at different rates and on different scales, especially if we humans cannot resist giving it a prod. This, as we are discovering to our cost, includes the climate, which you would have thought was quite changeable enough. The sort of cold snap with snow that we had in Britain recently is becoming quite a rarity these days, as unusual and as short-lived as our customary few days of hot, sunny summer. As I embark upon my anecdotage, I find myself remembering the more wintry winters of the last century, when snow would start by sending a thrill of excitement through the classroom, drag on for weeks, and end as a dreary, disruptive bore for those trying to get to work. And houses were really cold in those days! Central heating? What's that?

The other day I heard "Blackbird" from the 1968 album The Beatles on the radio (I think it was one of poet Wendy Cope's Desert Island Discs) and experienced an intense flashback to that very cold winter of 1968/69. I had asked for The Beatles (a.k.a. "The White Album") for Christmas that year and – entirely by accident, it must be said, if not entirely truthfully – I found it hidden in a cupboard. In the days before shrinkwrap, I was able to give it a couple of fairly thorough sneak pre-auditions, school having broken up for the holiday and both my parents being out at work all day. That year we had a white Christmas and, for me and I imagine for the thousands of others who bought or received the album that winter, the White Album has an indelible association with frosty air and snow on the ground. So, for old times' sake, I decided to put it on my 65th birthday wishlist.

The White Album has never been one of my favourite records: four sides of vinyl of which at least the equivalent of two sides are made up of lightweight tracks and filler (although Beatles-quality filler, obviously). The true Lennon-McCartney magic had faltered, and the record sits at an oddly sardonic angle to the new directions popular music was taking: several tracks seem to be heavy-handed parodies of other artists and styles. In fact, quite a few are parodies of the Beatles themselves, so that, for example, those middle-eight and chorus changes of rhythm, so brilliantly original in a song like "We Can Work It Out", have simply become an annoying stylistic tic. Worst of all, McCartney's love of whimsical pastiche and Lennon's daft sixth-form poetry had been allowed to run completely out of control. I don't think it would be controversial to say that many, if not most of the album's better tracks were actually written by George Harrison: "While My Guitar Gently Weeps", "Long, Long, Long", "Savoy Truffle", and "Piggies".

Something very important was happening to the more serious-minded side of "pop" music around then. Like some mobile fluid suddenly setting into a crystalline form, music found certain hospitable modes of expression which became stable and are still with us now, remarkably, fifty years later. Compare, say, Simon and Garfunkel's Book Ends of 1968 with their Bridge Over Troubled Water of 1970. The former is strange, experimental, tentative, and clearly derives from the coffee-bar, beatnik era of the New York of the 1950s and early '60s; I doubt whether anyone under 60 even knows the album. The latter is end-to-end hits, most of which you will still hear on the radio today, with no sense of having passed their sell-by date. The Beatles, of all people, somehow couldn't make that transition, collectively, and the White Album is the fascinating residue, an experimental fluid that failed to crystallise out.

That strange and significant year 1968 had seen plenty of influential new musical departures, but the new year would see even more, things like the first Led Zeppelin LP and Stand Up (Jethro Tull), Unhalfbricking (Fairport Convention) and Basket of Light (Pentangle), Songs From A Room (Leonard Cohen) and Clouds (Joni Mitchell), just to mention the few that would eventually end up in my record box [2]. But there were dozens of other unobtainable treasures, too, whose empty sleeves we used to flip through ritually in the record racks in Boots or W.H. Smith on the way home from school, and most of which I still haven't heard to this day. In the end, I gave my copy of the White Album away early in the 1970s – I think I swapped it for something else, something more of the moment – and haven't heard most of those thirty tracks in the fifty years since I first guiltily put the needle of the family stereogram down onto side one, and heard the whistling jet engines and Beach Boys pastiche of "Back In The USSR". Fifty years! It seems enough time may have passed to give it another chance.

Hold VERY still, grumpy old man... Pinhole selfie

1. At birth in February 1954 I became "Aquarius, with Scorpio in the ascendant", or so I'm told. Whatever that means.
2. Figuratively speaking: there was a thriving exchange of home-made tapes going on between pocket-money-poor music fans... One Christmas present had many recipients.