Many Australians ask me why I left Ireland. They are mainly ones who haven’t been there. I think they have an image of freckly red heads dancing jigs before Guinness addled tourists in Western Seaboard pubs. Even the ones who have been there seemed to have spent their time flirting between castles and ceilis and managed to leave before the harsh realities kicked in.
There are many reasons why I left of course and most of them I’m not even consciously aware of myself. I guess it had more to do with the arriving than the departing. I wanted to come here more than I wanted to leave. But I don’t tell people this. I just mention the weather.
The truth is Ireland has the worst weather on the planet. Never cold enough to ski, slide or even throw snowballs. And never warm enough to leave the house without a woolly hat and gloves.
Australia on the other hand has ‘proper’ weather. Snow, ice, cyclones, spectacular electrical storms and blazing hot days when you could fry an egg under the sun, if you had an egg. And you get all this in a seven day period in Melbourne. Most days in Ireland it was too cold to leave the house. Ironically, today in Melbourne it’s too hot to do so. It’s 30c outside and it’s 11pm. I know this because I’m looking at the most popular website in Australia (OK, Australian Idol probably gets more hits, but I’m looking for dramatic effect here). The Bureau of Meteorology weather outlook. This gives 15 minute updates on temperature, humidity and rainfall. But everyone just looks at the temperature and wonders if they can make it from their air-conditioned office to their air-conditioned train without melting.
It peaked at 35c today. Not particularly a scorcher, we’ve had 45c this summer already, but hot enough to make you think twice about going for a jog on the beach. It’s the nights that are a problem. If it doesn’t drop below 20c you are faced with the prospect of a sleepless night or a bottle of Sauvignon Blanc induced slumber. On nights like this, I realise why Australia has such strong wine sales.
So I stuck the air-conditioning on at home and opened the internet to keep an eye on the weather. Technology is such now, that it’s easier to get accurate information from a web page than it is to stick your head out the window. While surfing the information highway, I stumbled across You Tube. I’m too old for bebo, too middle class for MySpace and too paranoid for facebook. You Tube gives me social networking without having to divulge any more information about myself than I’m a heterosexual male who likes female country singers who hate men.
I visited the site to do something I’ve meant to do since Christmas. For those of you who don’t know, Dan Fogelberg left us on December 16th and as the man said, I didn’t even know he was sick. Actually that’s not true. I heard he had problems a couple of years ago and that friends were rallying round. I wanted to call but it had been so long I was scared the shock might kill him. Little did I know then that the Big C would finally get him? And I don’t mean drowning!
Dan and myself kind of lost touch around 1992. I had moved to London and lost his address and he stopped writing (I actually only ever got one letter from him and that was a demand that I lay off the stalking back in 1985). The CD age had arrived and I had all his records on vinyl. It took me a while to backfill his catalogue and my tastes had kind of moved on then to maudlin tunes sung by anorexic long haired females. Dan was my teenage years, my growing up, my innocence. It was a bygone time when we had all our conquests planned before our dreams were turned to water and they trickled through our hands.
I first heard him sing on RTE Radio 2 on a tinny transistor back in 1981. The song was “Same Old Lang Syne”, a poetic tribute to a lost love. Back in 1981, I hadn’t had any loves, never mind lost ones, so it’s strange that this song should have touched such a chord. I saved up some money from my early creative work (overcharging drunk punters in the pub I worked in and pocketing the difference) and bought one of the seminal albums of all time. Dan Fogelberg’s “Innocent Age”. This was a double album, favoured by connoisseurs of “concept albums” like myself and it must have been really classy, because it contained all the words to the songs on a booklet inside.
I bought the album just before Christmas of that year and lost myself in its melodic tunes of Innocence Lost. Ironic really as my other obsession at that time was losing my innocence. I brought it to a party at Larry Cotters house around then as was the fashion in those bygone days. My mates were into The Human League and Duran Duran and I was hoping to educate them. I also wanted to impress a girl called Dearbla but she showed as little interest in me as my mates did in quality music.
I retired to a back room and put the Innocent Age on the record player, sat on the floor in the dark and listened to all four sides before returning to the party. Dan helped me through those years. He gave me a sense of common thought in a confused world.
So I logged onto You Tube tonight and typed in “Dan Fogelberg”. Maybe you have to die to get noticed, but Dan is certainly being noticed now. There are hundreds of videos and tributes to the man. It’s strange to read words written by somebody in Japan who is saying the same things as I’ve said above. It’s comforting to know that there are a lot of people out there as soppy as me.
Shoshin Seishu left this message and I think he sums up well for me.
“His music: So wonderful & full of insight & vulnerability (which in the privacy of our interior worlds, allowed even well-defended & emotionally walled-off men such as myself not only to feel but also to express our tenderness). In a particular four-year period, I can track passages, transitions, ups & downs, triumphs & heart-breaks, loves won & lost by certain Fogelberg songs & albums.”
Dan and the Innocent Age. It was nice knowing both of you.
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