#songlyricssunday WORDS DON'T COME EASY F. R. David - "Melody so far my best friend"

3 November 2019: [a fortnight ago] there was an emergency in Dresden relating to the neo-Nazis and more specifically the political pressure group PEGIDA. Very discombulating to see them on the top of the Yahoo.co.uk news page and the situation in Dresden more generally.

10 November 2019: [last Sunday] I watched part of a film called BALLOON which is about two East German families trying to get around the Berlin Wall to the West. That week there had been lots of celebrations about the 30th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall - I learnt a lot about journalists and Stasi informers. [That was a story which unfolded with my youth].

One of the scenes which moved me really hard was the youth confirmation of the 14-year-olds who were in the eighth grade or the third form [as lots of Europeans call that school stage/year - and still did in the 1970s and 1980s where Balloon is set - until about the National Curriculum in 1988 in the UK case and everyone had years except in grammar and more traditional schools]. The father - Strezlyk - sees a lot of nonsense and balderdash in it.

The last scene I saw was the first attempt at the balloon and then the blue screen kept breaking up from behind. It is a terrible thing for those with migraines and with photosensitivity; at least moderately disruptive and intolerable for every patron. You do get a complimentary drink and/or something to eat that you choose. You do get to know your patrons and the people.

It was a serious matter when it got into the advertisements which tell about future movies.

So that evening, after I went to a nearby park of native shrubs and trees with a lookout which is closed on Sundays, and to a ramen restaurant some way away in a food court, and the Housemuseum to see some challenging and provocative modern art - I drew a concertina door with two folds.

The outside is the setting up of the balloon process by the families.

There is a statistical opener which tells about the escapes from East to West Berlin and from East to West Germany from 1976 to 1988. So many attempts; so many failures.

The inside is a whole lot of nature in three colours [purple; red; yellow] and Zentangle-inspired artforms. It has been four years now since Zentangle was introduced to me.

Inside of the fold: various shrubs and trees and yellow cloud forms as well as scallop patterning

The outside of the fold shows the setting up of the balloon and the trial balloons

and then the family being triumphant - there were two families; eight members.

Some were young girls; some were small boys.

And this is roughly what happens when the world is upside down.

We do in fact see the world this way with primitive maps - however that was the scanner

Which leads me to the earlier Disney film - Balloon for 2018 was the very first German telling/narrative - which was made in 1982.

It provoked a lot of imagination and empathy for things which are often very hard to talk about and/or witness.

Like F. R. David and his piece of Italo-pop or Euro-pop which I am going to share with you today through Song Lyric Sunday. The prompt for 17 November 2019 is Do and Don't. Jim Adams has been using some very clever grammatical prompts.

What do we do when words don't come easily?

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see - 
I love you
Words don't come easy

Words - don't come easy to me
This is the only way for me to say -
I love you
Words don't come easy

Well, I'm just a music man
Melody's so far my best friend
But my words are calling I'm wrong
and I, I reveal my heart to you
and hope that you believe it's true 'cause

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy

This is just a simple song
That I've made for you on my own
There's no hidden meaning, you know
and I - when I say I love you, honey
Please believe - I really do 'cause

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy

It isn't easy
Words don't come easy

Words - don't come easy to me
How can I find a way to make you see -
I love you
Words don't come easy
Don't come easy to me
This is the only way for me to say -
I love you 
Words don't come easy

Words don't come easy

thank you Golyr for the clean reproduction of the text - diest sehr gut!

When this song came to the consciousness it was only really in Monaco and France; a year later it became a hit for the whole of Europe.

If you liked easy listening and ballads and songs which didn't announce themselves though they had a beat and a self-definition Words don't come easy was a natural choice.

Love the modesty of the narrator and the way he talks about himself - I'm just a music man.

And the simple song verse. Some people may want to shake the narrator and/or kick him somewhere.

One hopes the hearer will respect the narrator enough to see - and not see past - words - don't come easy and their relationship is one which transcends and doesn't depend on words.

In late October 2019 I was fortunate enough to discover Deezer.fr which was an incredible streaming experience. For 30 days you can listen to all the music free and even make comments.

Soundcloud has been kind as well. I was tempted to listen to Ok boomer so I did. And then some rapping about a toy/console character with a co-producer Poloboy21 who is about 18.

So many hidden meanings; so many implicatures and inferences we make. And love drives us to understand them all - and hope for what we do not understand and cannot undertake - yet!

The narrator is very innovative and creative in finding ways for the person - and for the listener/reader/receiver - to understand.

Of course this makes me think of love languages.

I particularly appreciated the way Rachel Reyes made a lyric video.

The don't is especially powerful in this song because it would be a very different song without it. 

We would have our usual suave and articulate hero who would be very hard to relate to - someone who is in a romantic novel. 

Now those people can be complex and intriguing characters - even in a comedy of manners like Vanity Fair which I am very glad I did not binge upon when the opportunity was offered to me. 

I do still want to know what happens to Becky Sharp and Steyne and Rawdon the younger - I did feel the narrative change its tone when Becky and Amelia were mothers and Jos was in India being a nabob - specifically Bengal [now Bangladesh if in the East].

I am thinking that Melody so far my best friend is the most powerful of the lot - the one single lyric. Unfortunately it is not an earworm - though the concept and the idea certainly is

Repetition of Words don't come easy is a good one.

That is repeated four times at the end of each verse plus chorus. As if to say "Words don't come easy but if you keep at it they WILL come or they MAY come".

"Try not to worry because everyday concerns would bring them out".

Wikipedia reminds us just how big a hit this Italo-pop piece was on the British charts in particular. Number two! And that was in 1983. So you see it was a slow burn.

Its genres are soft rock; eurobeat; synthpop. Some incredible equipment was put onto it; a Simmons; a Lind; a Oberheim.

Someone who was instrumental [I think the pun is allowed] in putting it together was one Roberto Fozzini. He is the songwriter.

In the 21st century - which leads us to 2000 - there was a French-language version with Winda.

A whole generation of children and adolescents had grown up into their loving and dating years.

And by [7 December] 2006 when the video above was made an era had ended.

Seven years longer than I had any reason or right to expect.

YouTube had mainstreamed and mainlined into all our musical brains.

Chart positions for Words don't come easy as of 1982 and 1983:

Did you know, first, that it sold a million copies in France and indeed across lots of French overseas territories - like the ones in Africa; Asia; the Pacific?

Springbok Radio in South Africa absolutely loved it. There was a lot of big trouble with Apartheid which did affect a lot of people in the Commonwealth. I was still so little when the Rhys Muldoon issue came through - I am thinking Jim Bolger and Greg Chappell and Chappeli.

Perhaps Laurence was still alive.

Australia reported it by the end of 1983 as #49 - wow! the top 50! When I think of all the good Australian and international songs which you can experience on nzoz83 - and that I have shared with you in the past - I think Words don't come easy deserves to be up there.

Number one was an acclamation in Sweden; Switzerland; Spain; Ireland; Italy; the whole Eurochart [if you want to listen to decent European music - you could do worse than start there - or maybe with Caroline or Luxembourg like Robin Carmody of High-functioning human fame - or Humain a niveau-haut which is what I would have grown up with] Austria and Belgium [the Flanders version]. Switzerland and West Germany were into it.

Now if that isn't an advertisement for detente and/or European unity I don't know what is.

We do badly need it now - especially on 12 December 2019. Badly.

Lots of debates on the British Broadcasting Corporation and the Independent Television in the next few weeks.

On two separate Dutch charts Words don't come easy came #2 as it did indeed in France. And The Official Charts Company of the United Kingdom.

The Commonwealth of Nations was far more mixed - Canada thought this song should come ninth. I am sure the Quebecois market/vote drove it - though there is no reason English Canada shouldn't have liked such a smooth song. 

New Zealand made it seventh and Australia's Kent Charts put it as 12th.

Meanwhile on the hot 100 of Billboard Words don't come easy was 62nd place.

Turns out there were several remixes within the 1990s - 1997 and 1999 respectively in Finland and France - these were both in the top 30 - 12 and 27 for the Finnish and French ones.

Another Don't song I like very much and discovered in early 2001 is Heart don't change my mind in the Elaine Paige version - though it was sung by Streisand and Glen Medeiros who I think I will explore more during the week [especially a lyric video of Lonely won't leave me alone - when you think this situation is pervasive and permanent this is when you are in big big trouble and disturbance. Systemic work helps too - there is a Minister for Loneliness and another for Social Inclusion].

During the week. too, I am seeing Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and its Second Part.

#keepthesecrets is reminding me of Luria and Vygotsky and a cognitive test.

It is about buttons and instructions.

And commands in particular. "Don't press; don't press; press" and "Press; press; don't press" is said to 3 year olds; 4 year olds; and 5 year olds by an experimenter/examiner.

Vygotsky was the First Master of Inner and Private Speech.

So he wanted to see how far and how much the children internalised these instructions and related ones in real life and culture.

I learnt of this examination in James Britton's Language and Learning.

Probably somewhere after the children's dialogues and before Participant and Specator which I feel is the meat and potatoes of this book.

I think also of expressive; transactional and poetic and what a tightrope and precipice it can really be.

Children do play still in the 21st century - however the play behaviour of the children of the 1950s and 1960s was wow especially Alison and Claire Britton - Claire was a perceptive and caring young lady by the time she was written about as a late teenager.

[and she is part of the inspiration for all the responsible and competent eighteen-year-olds I write about who have an ethical system and a humanitarian streak.

The fault is to me, though, that it breaks down in the early twenties, more or less catastrophically].

Wednesday last [13 November 2019] I read a wonderful report by a Consultant Psychiatrist on Attachment and in particular the First Year Cycle - which had been spoilt for me by certain populist Americans from 2002 to 2008.

Something important I learnt: you need only be 30% sensitive or have sensitive interactions for that proportion.

Thirty percent of anything is bloody significant. Especially it could sway cognitive or linguistic delay or deviance.

As I said words don't come easy - but they don't have to to be socially significant or valid.

Happy eightieth birthday Philip Adams! #latenightlive

Happy 80th birthday Phillip Adams!

Fiedler is interviewing him and having a conversation.

He is talking about the farm and the kangaroos and feral animals who live there.

He has an apartment in Kings Cross.

“Does living on a property change the way you see the world?”

When he was small he tilled the soil with donkeys and no motor vehicle or electronic appliances.

LNL is a wireless programme.

William Smith Adams - what you saw is what you got - no fragmentation of the personality.

These days people have multiple personality disorder - change and reconfigure and …. In contrast Grandpa was just grandpa.

He had a quiet wisdom and tranquility.

Bob Ellis called it the curse of interruption. - now is a great neon lit search lit sign which lasts a neurosecond -ahem, a nanosecond!

Reverend Charles Adams.

Sue Ellen Smith was Adams’ Mum. She came from Maryborough or did they live there?

Phil is two years old. His dad is writing a sermon. There is this vast thunderous noise and he looks up through the peppercorn trees and the sky is on fire.

He crashed through this door - thunder and lightning - he went to his father for comfort.

His first memory is apocalyptical.

“How so,” asks Fidler.

“A terrible sense of dread and mortality”.

A tiny farm on the outskirts of Melbourne - he was about four when it happened - and he was terrified of death and infinity and mortality.

It was dreadful and full of terror.

Christianity was the family business - he tried to believe in Charles’ god and failed miserably.

The Congregational Manse.

He joined the Communist party when he was 15 years old. 1954.

He felt the sting of poverty? Was everyone poor around?

The whole area was gentrified and something.

He went to school in badly hand-made clothing and a bike he was ashamed still to have pedalled.

Bullied for being an oddball and for being poor.

Kerry Packer was called a boofhead - so was Phillip Adams!

Reverend Charles called him Headling as a middle name. Kid with the big bum called Bottomley - it was like that.

A large papier-mâché head which he filled with brains - he didn’t quite decide to fill his head like that.

The only safe escape was books for Philip - the East Kew subbranch of the library.

Grandma and Grandad would send 2 romance books form the street - and also William books he would read for the 50th time and Biggles too.

The librarian went up the step and took Philip an adult book - The Grapes of Wrath.

All kids feel the battle and victimhood of injustice - something systemic and significant.

Your life is a walk in the park compared to others.

Mother partnered with a sleepy businessman who was abusive and violent.

His father didn’t protect him when his life was appalling - father was weak and appalling.

He broke off relations with his father and never spoke for 30-40 years until he died.

The poor businessman - PA made a bonfire of the PB/SB with his mother - at least his stuff.

Michael Burke is the guy’s name. Al Garnett character - ignorant and offensively unpleasant.

He must have been some kind of anti-father. And he tried to murder Philip - he was not a nice person.

Philip tried to protect his mother. He died too easily and painfully from a heart attack.

It was a ceremonial bonfire - suits; Lodge apron; [he was a Freemason]

Fidler’s dad could not bear to see a kid in a bad situation - and Philip supports children’ refuges like the Emblings.

The playground was not a playground - it was a little “hell on earth”.

The cruelty of children on each other - child-on-child abuse. It was just as bad as adult-on-kid abuse.

Blend and merge at the end of every school day.

With incredible shame - Mongoloid would be hanging out on the swings and PA and friends would pick on him.

The first refugee kids were arriving from Europe - PA was 6 to 14 when it was all happening. [1945-1953]

A shamed memory of what children do to children.

How did Philip choose to be an optimist? Not going to live that wounded self - a larger; more enthusiastic life.

On the cosmic level - you live in a meaningless universe without purpose - you give it a subjective meaning - meaning in another sense.

Philip’s meaning was trying to seek and find judgement. He was radicalised.

Comedy and humour was another radicalising and cathartic force for Philip - love is more congenial on balance.

Laughter contains great truths and he was a columnist for everyone - very inclusive

John Clarke had a genius for a compassionate satire.

He left because of the Soviet invasion of Hungary when he was 17 [1956].

Then you put a concentration camp on the utopia and it gets bigger and bigger and the utopia gets smaller and smaller.

A monumental claim collapses from its own contradictions.

-ology became suspect.

He was expelled? resigned? it was a time of chaos - it was the Prague Spring which was the final straw in 1968. That was when he was 29.

He stumbled into the Labor Party and was very embroiled in it.

More recently he resigned in a huff about the Kevin Rudd coup.

Rudd doesn’t have many friends - Philip is one of them.

Utopianism is mad and nuts and it leads to greed, grief and unintended consequences.

The most sterile and capitalistic endeavour you can be in - advertising.

The demands of the huge multinational clients - every boutique agency is run by an ex-Communism and Trotskyist.

The cunning plan to offer things people can’t afford. Manipulating the masses.

The late 1950s and 1960s - Australia had no film industry and there was ONE Australian play - that would be Summer of the Seventeenth Doll.

An odd Australian Council in advertising agencies - Schepsisi and Carey and Bruce Petty.

Amazing things done with the Australian film industry with Gorton and onwards.

The conquest of Australia House! Snags being cooked!

“How did you get away with stuff like that?”

“Nothing like a camera with you to engender resistance”.

Beresford/Humphries/Adams and Bazza McKenzie and the government executive. The GE was on the phone.

Please try to avoid too many Australian colloquialisms.

He was very proud that he kept his promise - Knock your dunny down into the grass.

“This is a family show”.

Converted them back into proper English - shove your head up in the dead bear’s bum. And the correct English translation is stuff your cranium…

Then we talk about the major columns in THE AUSTRALIAN and THE AGE.

Newspapers didn’t used to have columns -they were news wall-to-wall.

Graham Perkin was a legend - “Newspapers are in their dotage, don’t you realise,” said Philip Adams.

“Our newspapers will become a sagging lump.

“They’ve already seen the news and it’s on flipping television”.

Perkin took that on board and Adams was the first columnist for the Age.

He wrote about meaninglessness and could do this at intense and extensive length.

He had two pages in the Age and was encouraged to ramble.

John Singleton said he was a million words in desperate need of an editor.

And everyone else was doing it too - and he got lots and lots of letters.

There are 600 boxes of correspondence which are in the bowels of the National Library in Canberra.

They were in the farm in the shearing shed and rats were gobbling them up.

He would get some 20,000 letters. He would answer them all with his dictaphone.

Invariably now the letters are e-mailed.

He never wrote a poem - he dictated it.

We would go to the Bulletin or the Nation Review and he would do the same with correspondent.

How does he deal with abusive letters?

Bill Leak had a terrible letter from Timms - “Your offer that I should marry your daughter interested me greatly. Please send photo” he said as reply.

Which arsehole did it come off?

To this day it was delivered in perfect order from Australia Post - they can’t even deliver a Compact Disc without breaking it!

Did it have some structural integrity to it?!

Fidler was in a comedy group when he was younger.

and 2GB was when PA was working - “Total vision is a passing fad. Radio will outlive the passing parade like a cockroach”.

“radio was like two of you the guest and the listener sitting at a small table”.

That is why Gladys was invented - it wasn’t a joke about low ratings.

It’s a truth - it’s not a mass medium - it’s not like television - that broadcast energy.

You’re not shouting like - it amplifies the human ego - look at the shock jock phenomenon.

Don’t beat visitors or listeners with a point of view or your point of view.

Fidler can’t think of another guy like Adams [Adams is a bunch of guys, yes?].

2UE was considered a radio hellhole - RN was considered a Station of Lecturers.

Robyn Williams is an awesome science communicator since the 1970s and 1980s.

When he arrived at Radio National - it still talked to people like a university lecturer talked to a student. philip thought it was wrong.

Honorifics: forget them! Address the guest by their first name.

Then you’ve got to be two people talking - remind them how important they are at first.

You take people as you find them in an Australian egalitarian way.

Oh, yes, the book of australian jokes - the Hawke joke.

“There are 2 corpses on the Hawke library - one is a wallaby and one is a politician”

“There are skid marks on the wallaby”.

Isn’t that fantastic in that irreverence? So was Keating especially about Gough Whitlam.

PA collects ex-Prime-Ministers. And diplomats who have to behave themselves in office and then they tell the truth ex-officio.

They tend to be wounded  - and yes politics is a very cruel profession.

When Keating was reduced to human rubble.

Rudd did not leave the political process entirely unfazed or unscathed.

And, yes politicians do age at this accelerated rate.

You’d swear it was 20 after 5 or 10 years leaving office.

Advice from J Lang - watch how politicians treat drivers cleaners waiters nurse flight attendants.

And Keating DID marry a flight attendant - Annita Iersel.

80th birthday - people express great happiness when he bounces back from the grave.

A question to Ita - Ita is not in the first flush of youth herself.

Alan Jones admit to being just 70.

John Laws is 85.

Someone is 95 and still on the air [1923, right?].

Australians are not good at #talkingaboutdeath

We say that they’ve passed away or passed.

They will the sentence to be over as soon as it’s said.

Humanity is bad about talking about death.

Refusing to admit to its reality leads to pyramids and cathedrals.

As long as we deny death/prolong life as far as possible we will not be fully human.

Life is all too brief - to waste an hour of it is a blasphemy.

Stop deflecting and stop pretending and live in the moment and rejoice in it.

The chance of us being here is vanishing remote - it relied on the dinosaur asteroid.

The spilled seed in copulation. We can’t really be here - and yet we are. Enjoy it.

The fact that anything exists at all - carbon molecules organising themselves in to diamonds.

“Tahnk heavens’.

Living next door to Kerry Packer who was a fellow atheist.

He hated plutocrats on principle.

A $10,000 investment for The getting of wisdom - Packer can you pay for it? Invest it?

The excuse to visit in Melbourne Adams’ office - and there were several alpha males.

It’s 100000 or nothing. And then there was the cheque corrected.

For dinner in this working class restaurant in the Cross.

Kerry was a very serious dyslexic and he found reading impossible. So he became an interrogated who sucked information out of anybody.

About 3am in the morning he wanted to know What was a black hole and Adams quoted Stephen Hawking.

That’s what I’ve got inside me - a black hole.

The kids John and Heather Embling looked after - so was Kerry Packer damaged by a monster father.

Adams’ attitude really softened and then they became best friends.

Adams was Packer’s closet confidant - closest, I mean.

His choice was beyond bleak - don’t do it to James!

Don’t make it into an intergenerational issue - but James is seriously mentally ill - and he has the Packer curse in spades.

1648 - the slide into authoritarian leaders. Putin; Duterte; Trump - a lot of these people are ELECTED!

Could Australia elect authoritarian leader or leaders?

Kicking a the norms of democratic behaviour.

Someone who was born a week after he was - July 1939 - by this leader.

JOHN WINSTON HOWARD. The appalling treatment of refugees. Involvement in the horror of the War in Iraq.

In complete definiace of what the public wanted - the mass marches.

The perverted killing. He chose to accept the nonsense by Dubya and Bliar.

Trump hasn’t done anything really bad - yet.

Prorogue the parliament - advise the Tax Department - advise the police to attack the political enemies.

Violence against democracy - it is in peril.

He jokes when he talks about the United States as a failed state.

Comparatively healthy democracy like Australia.

“Do you still look at the Universe with Awe and Fear”?

“Wonderment and dread” - his wonderment has increased.

The test of a great idea is that its opposite - life is short and it is very long. You can do amazing things in your lifestyle.

The little boy who was terrified of fire and thunder still live-in 80-year-old Philip.

There are more stars than there are grains of sand in Earth. Billions of suns and moons out in the universe.

Many people still believe that God has a role in it or it is.

He can understand the need.

Fidler grew up with science fiction - travelling from planet to planet like country to country.

The distances between planets - a powerful idea! The vast unspeakable gulf between planets in the solar system.

We’re just beginning to understand the Great Paradoxes that advanced brains cannot even begin to comprehend.

It numbs the mind and it exhilarates. It is a dazzling fireworks display.

How is space able to bend? He puts his head up against this idea [Fidler] - it is a contra intuitiveness which doesn’t put against our cave brain.

They stair at their computer screens - they fill their time with their smartphones.

A lack of curiosity - an interest in the Kardashians - more than a cosmic adventure with a rocketship.

A wacky idea - in the future you could upload their consciousness - PA would be up for that - he doesn’t doubt - he’s more interested in artificial intelligence - hand on evolutionary process to others.

Humans will be pets and playthings for advanced robotic creators that look on us with sentiment.

He doesn’t want to have his future uploaded - a pseudoeternal life.

He doesn’t want to be stuck in heaven with people who he has successfully avoided.

Most people will be in Hell - Israel Folau said that - PA was on the list three times.

How are things better than they were when you were a young man?

Favourite aphorism and story - Pablo Casals was 80 and he survived the Spanish Civil War - press conference in Madrid - cogitating and complaining about the terrible mess of the world.

How the world was cuffed - he stopped when he heard his own voice hanging in the air.

Two sentences cannot fit together - they do it perfectly. “The situation is hopeless - we must take the next step”.

That is the whopper - we must take the next step.

We cannot surrender to it - it is the human nature to make things better.

Remaining curious is the best shield against depression and ennui [Fidler].

And knowing nothing is also interesting.

He wrote a list of things that he knew nothing about - astronomy to zoology.

He knows less and less as the common human knowledge increases.

A sense of defeatism and excitement and intensified curiosity.

“I will no longer be permitted to be curious and I will be curious that I’m no longer curious”.

PA’s favourite theme - Wombat Waltz by Elena Kats-Chernin.

[then the Wombat Waltz is played at the end].