Queen - Now I'm Here

Looking through my motley collection of vinyl singles the other day, it struck me how different were their reasons for being there.  Some sit there anonymously as if I’d never bought them at all and they had just sneaked in by chance during a dark night, yet others are full of pride and bursting to tell their story.  One of those eager storytellers is ‘Now I’m Here’ by Queen.

In the early 1970s I had become a fully fledged album buyer after spending much of the late sixties amassing a small, yet top quality (ahem) singles collection but as I became a student at University in the autumn of 1974 the restrictions of a student grant (remember them?) meant that in order to satisfy my rampant music possession syndrome urge I had to reduce myself yet again to a singles buyer.

This was a pain in the backside yet it did lead to my purchase of Queen’s ‘Now I’m Here’ in early ‘75, which if memory serves, was the first Queen record I ever bought.  Now, the second issue I was faced with was this: not wanting to uproot my beloved stereo system, I didn’t have a record player with me – only a tape player and a load of LPs hastily transferred to cassette the previous summer.  True, my first year room mate had brought with him an ancient autochanger-in-a-box, the sort of kit that every sixties teenager owned in order to annoy the older generation with the new-fangled beat music.  But it was his, not mine.

So the reason this single has its very own back story is partly because it didn’t get played very much…until I went home for the weekend, that is.  In my first year, I went home for a weekend once or twice a term.  Of course this didn’t happen at all after the first few terms as life away from home became infinitely preferable to life at home but that’s another story and probably one that everyone knows.  I always managed to arrive home about midday on the Friday when the house was empty, all occupants still being at work or school and this was the moment that ‘Now I’m Here’ came into its own.

My own prized stereo system still sat in my room and I cranked it up to ‘11’ to play my still pristine Queen single.  It’s a great rock number in anyone’s book but at deafening volume in an empty house it sounded sublime.  You could even play a bit of air guitar and leap around without anyone seeing.  This is what teenage years were made for.  Brilliant.

Time and a Word

‘But you can’t hear the words!’

How many times did I hear that from my parents when I was about 9 years old or thereabouts? This was the finger-in-the-dyke cry from a generation who were desperately trying to hold back the tide that was the newly imported popular music, but it cut no ice with the young me.

I had no difficulty whatsoever in hearing the words and just to prove it, I would fill exercise books with lyrics from pop songs of the day so that I could sing along with them when they came on the radio (or wireless as my dad would have it). It must be the sponge-like mind of a child that is ever receptive to all kinds of junk that allowed me to do this and much of it I can still recall today. Whether I can hear and recall any of today’s lyrics are moot points and the jury’s still out.

I was reminded of all this recently when my 8 year-old daughter sang the whole of Queen’s ‘Don’t Stop Me Now’ on a car journey. Not only was it just about word perfect (as far as I could tell), she knew every verse. But where did she learn it all? It’s not a song I tend to play at home and we don’t generally have the radio on in our house, so where did all this knowledge come from? It’s frightening to think that she has pieced this together from bits and pieces heard at school, in shopping malls and other public places. What else has she been absorbing?

However, on closer scrutiny, it is clear that what she is regurgitating is a sort of verbal facsimile. There are parts where it becomes apparent that she doesn’t really know what the words are but just makes the sound of what she thinks she is hearing – leading to some amusing misheard lyrics. It also means that she doesn’t really understand what she is singing about half the time, which is of some comfort given the content of some rapping material available to minors. But is does show that perhaps we worry too much about what children are exposed to. Real understanding only comes with education and experience.

In the meantime, I will continue to be amused by some of her facsimiles. After all, as I was reminded by my American friend, Byron Wilkins (see TR-1 Guy link), Creedence Clearwater Revival claimed in 1969, ‘There’s a bathroom on the right’!