Karaoke

This is the script of this morning’s Pause for Thought on BBC Radio 2’s Zoe Ball Show as Rylan completed his karaokathon in aid of the Children in Need appeal.

Karaoke! I’ve never done it. Been tempted once or twice, but I value my life too much to inflict my inner Gloria Gaynor on anyone else. How Rylan has managed it for 24 hours is anybody’s guess. However, I did once get arrested in Paris for busking when I was younger – the police just didn’t appreciate my art.

My favorite karaoke experience is Bill Murray in the great film Lost in Translation belting out Elvis Costello’s ‘What’s so funny ‘bout peace, love and understanding?’ in Tokyo.

But, even those of us who don’t do karaoke do sing other people’s songs – in the bath, quietly on the train, walking the dog. There are always those songs that creep up on you when you’re thinking about something else and then, like Kylie, you can’t get it out of your head. It always amazes me to watch Glastonbury on the telly and see thousands of people singing every word of a song I’ve never heard sung by someone I just don’t recognize.

We all have those songs – words written by other people – that give us a vocabulary for saying what we can’t frame for ourselves. This isn’t new, though. Go back nearly three thousand years and you find poems giving voice to experiences of joy, wonder, anger, frustration, fear, hope: you name it, you’ll find it in the Psalms. Which is why in churches and synagogues you keep hearing them read or sung. They get under your skin. Sometimes, feeling fine, you find yourself doing a Psalm that expresses different emotions or experience; but, sing or say it anyway and, after time, you find it whispering through the mist of misery when you’ve lost the words to say what you feel.

I guess this also inevitably leads me to think about what it might look like to sing my own song. Not just to go along with someone else’s poetry, but to write my own. Some of the Psalms were written by and for a people living in exile – keeping the songs of home alive in a strange land. They had to work at it, not letting hope be swamped by the ‘now’.

Give Rylan a medal … and I’ll find the words today that give voice to my own song.