Melting in the Dark

Last week, having elected to play 'cake-related' songs during his drivetime show, Simon Mayo played the Donna Summer version of 'McArthur Park'.  If ever there was a clear case of criminal damage done to a work of art, that is it, in my view - almost on a par with taking a scalpel to the Mona Lisa.  All respect to Ms Summer as a disco diva, but she was entirely the wrong person to sing that song, and comprehensively ruins it - though I suppose the arranger and producer must take some of the credit also. She sings without the slightest sense that she has any understanding of what the lyrics mean, and her shout at the beginning of each instrumental interlude robs the song of any remaining traces of the wistfulness that is its real theme.

Why Mr Mayo chose to play that version rather than the wonderful Richard Harris "original", I don't know. I suppose hers was the bigger hit, having made no.1 in the Billboard chart in 1978 - and again in the dance chart as recently as last year, I understand. I suppose it does work as a piece of dance music, but the Richard Harris version works as a song. I love a story song, and so have always been a major fan of the writing of Jimmy Webb, most of whose songs seem to combine a strong thread of narrative with a wistful pull at the heartstrings.  I wish I could write like that - perhaps at my very best I do at least make an attempt in that direction, but my very best doesn't come round all that often.

I place McArthur Park somewhere near Lou Reed's 'Perfect Day' in my library of songs . . . both look back at moments, shared times, you desperately want to last for ever, but of course they don't and can't, and nor can they ever be re-created. Life is a series of bereavements, and there is a sense of that in both of those songs. Jimmy Webb uses the way in which the colours melt into each other and fade as the daylight goes as a theme, linking it to the image that has been ridiculed by generations of DJ's but has always worked for me - an iced cake left in the rain to melt and spoil. Something wonderful worked just that once, and will never happen again, can't ever be made like it was that day.

The depressive mentality takes the reality of bereavement, of losing what was wonderful and can't be repeated, and dwells on it to the extent of refusing to believe that anything as good or beautiful can happen again. The truth is that, even as we say goodbye to past experiences of beauty and ecstasy and love, so the future remains replete with possibility and promise (at any rate, for most of us, most of the time). Faith encourages me to understand life in terms of direction and flow, and purpose, rather than merely as a series of random events - in which case, not only am I bound to look forward in hope and expectation, but also to believe that there is always something to take with me from within those lost days of wonder or joy. Nonetheless, the wistful notes of songs like 'McArthur Park' and 'Wichita Lineman' will continue to engage with a tender spot in my soul . . .