Stop, Look, Listen Christmas specials – 2) The song that takes me back to my dad, The Flying Pickets' Only You, and what it was like to talk to the man who made it

You may be reading this newsletter because you read my book, The Sound Of Being Human: How Music Shapes Our Lives. If not, it’s a memoir which begins with a little girl whose father died suddenly when she was five, and whose last memory of him was him asking if she could find out what was the number one single in the charts when he was in hospital. After that, it’s about how music has shaped my life ever since, through growing up, adolescence, teenage lusts, love, work, miscarriage, childbirth, trauma, a pandemic. And yes, I’m that girl, and that dad was mine.

The blurb on the back says it’s a book about neuroscience, anthropology and much else, but it’s also a dead dad story. Sometimes I think if I’d presented it that way, it wouldn’t be hidden in years to come in dusty bookshop music sections. But music was us – it was ours – as much as it is yours.

My dad, Roy, in around 1981, and me, from the cover of the Observer New Review in late March 2022. This photo still sits, unframed, next to my desk in my home office/dumping ground/laundry room. I really must sort that out.

Before my book came out, the Observer ran a cover story about it with a long extract about my dad’s final request. Dad had loved the song that had been number one for a while, Only You, sung by The Flying Pickets. I wrote about it seizing me one early evening decades later while Christmas shopping as I walked out of Waterstones in my recently-new hometown of Abergavenny:

I tunnelled through the heaviness of the season, longing for the shop doors to open, and to breathe, and I breathed.

And that’s when I heard it.

Ba-da-da-da.
Ba-da-da-da.
It had arrived uninvited, with the full force of a tornado.

The Flying Pickets’ version of Only You starts this way, with a figure adapted from the synthesiser middle-eight of the Yazoo original.

A few weeks after the extract came out, I received an email. “Imagine my surprise and delight when I happened upon your fascinating and moving article in the Observer, and discovered that we got a special mention! It means a lot, all these years later, to hear that our song has special memories for many people.”

The email was from David Brett, a Flying Picket, the arranger of the song, the architect of that ba-da-da-da.

***

In the late 1960s, a teenager from a scruffy part of Shepherds Bush went to Essex University to study Politics and Russian. He had just spent the summer of 1967 hitchhiking across America. He lived on a houseboat for a while in Wivenhoe, that sunk. At Essex, he made a friend called Angie, who over fifty years later found herself reading the Observer one Sunday.

Angie read about a little girl who had lost her father, and how they had both loved a song by a band of which her husband happened to be a big part. Then she clocked the writer’s name, realised she knew that this girl was related to her old friend, Geoff Fordham, and dropped him a line:

Hi Geoff
Good to hear from you!
Well here is a delightful and unexpected connection.
If your daughter-in-law is up for it David would love to contact her.
Would she be ok if you gave me her email to pass on?

Geoff, my father-in-law of many years, did the honours. I emailed David back, saying I was eager to speak to him soon, Then book promotion, work, life, parenting, everything else, as it does, got in the way. We finally spoke twenty months after our first contact, on Monday. It felt lovely. It felt important. I felt I wanted to thank him, at last, for giving me a song that felt like a place to put my empty heart for so long.

(I didn’t say this to him, of course. If you’ve written a song that becomes connected profoundly to a stranger’s sudden childhood bereavement, I imagine that could be an unsettling thing. But I wanted to connect the person to the performance, colour inside the lines.)

David: Hello! At last!
Jude: Yes! How are you?