While playing our evening round of Scrabble tonight my wife and I were talking, and somehow or another the Beatles came up. She actually attended a concern at the Bradford Gaumont, I think in 1963. I was in Canada at that time, and remember that it was not until I returned to the UK in 1964 that I developed any awareness of them, let alone any liking. At some point I asked her if there was a particular song by the group to which she had a special attachment, but there was none. My case is very different.
I have no difficulty at all in homing in on Hey Jude! What is more, I can remember exactly when that attachment was made, and how. It was probably in 1965, when I was back in the UK and working as an assistant at Leicester University. I was invited to a party by a good friend, with whom I had shared lodging as an undergraduate. They played Hey Jude!, and I danced with a young psychiatrist. It wasn’t a romantic relationship: just the fact of dancing that made it specially memorable.
Dancing is important to me. If I were to be invited to appear on the famous radio show Desert Island Disks one of my eight records would certainly be Bob Dylan’s Tambourine Man. Apart from the fact that I could spend an unlimited amount of time on my desert island working out just what it is supposed to mean, I would never tire of hearing that line about dancing “beneath a diamond sky with one hand waving free”.
I ask myself just what is going on here. Perhaps I ought to renew my acquaintance with that psychiatrist.