Thursday, October 13, 2011

A Song of One Hundred Years, Adam Beattie

A Song of One Hundred Years by adambeattie

I played as a consultant of Adam Beattie regularly for a couple of years after graduating, and have very fond memories of the experience. Indeed without Adam there would be no three headed Inspector Tapehead, seeing as Chris too was a consultant at that time, and Jonnie was unashamedly in thrall to Adam's croonings. It is fairly damning for us then that since he parted our close proximity, Adam has continued to improve without pause, revelling amongst a host of excellent London consultants. Of course we still meet occasionally and the meetings are all the more delightful for their scarcity. In a good way.

My favourite of his songs that we played together was Man Running, a track realised in boldly different colours on his second album We'll Wave From the Shore. When we played Man Running it was something of a heartfelt, rich, tearjerker, almost rubbery in its rubato (as was oft the way in that lineup, much to Adam's delight). It got me in the same way that pretty much any brass band playing Nimrod or Danny Boy does - when we played it at the Abu Bozy album launch in the Tron, I got pretty carried away with the old deep-sighing of the harmonium!

Anyway the point of this essay is that a couple of years ago Adam nonchalantly whipped out a song that has come to replace Man Running in my top spot of Beattie tunes, in the form of A Song of One Hundred Years. An astonishing bit of song writing, he has now put it into zeroes and ones and uploaded it to Soundcloud as a preview of his third album. In Adam's words, it is "A song I wrote for my grandfather George Craigie, who died last April 2010, at the age of one hundred years old." Listen to it above, and enjoy.

PS. As you can see, the effect of any dose of Beattie is acute sentimentality such as this!

Roy

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