This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Breakfast Show with Zoe Ball.
I seem to spend a lot of time on trains. There’s always loads of work to do and reading to catch up with, but sometimes I am either too tired or have just had enough. Then I listen to music. I usually try to listen to new stuff, but recently I’ve found myself digging into the back catalog – and recalling being stuck for an hour in the middle of nowhere with U2 echoing the lament of the Psalmist: “How long, o Lord, how long?”.
For me the back-catalogue means the blues. Somehow it’s the blues that draw the emotion out of me. On holiday once, listening to Eric Clapton’s album Pilgrim, I was haunted by one song in particular which went by the miserable title of River of Tears. But, that perfect combination of weeping guitar and a voice wrenched from the depths of the heart tore through my soul. It still does a couple of decades later.
It’s not just the blues, though. I saw Imelda May doing rockabilly at the Royal Albert Hall when she first supported Jools Holland and she was brilliant – a revelation – and I didn’t even know I liked rockabilly. It was vibrant and exciting, and yet the confidence was haunted by vulnerability. Her later albums change the mood – the vulnerability seeping through lyrics of grief and regret and the sadness of loss, too. A really beautiful, reflective, lovely voice infused with honesty.
There’s something about music in general – and, for me, the blues in particular – that cuts through the rubbish and distractions of a busy mind, dodging around the emotional barricades I so easily erect.
Joy and sadness, hope and despair, creativity and loss. We all know what it’s like to discover that we are not in control after all and that we are more fragile than we thought we were. The veneer of self-sufficiency is stripped away and the rawness exposed.
“How long, O Lord, how long?”
For a Christian like me even God cries out in cross-shaped grief. But, it is the same God who whispers towards the dawn that, indeed, “joy will find a way”.