Daydream… a time detective story

The double album that started it all… as featured on Radio 2 in April 1970.

Saturday, April 25^th, 1970

It’s a warm, springlike afternoon, with tulips and daffodils blooming in the flower bed and the laburnum tree in next door’s garden showing signs of life. It’s lunchtime: our mum’s in the kitchen, while in the back room the radio is turned on... a huge, valve-powered 1950s artefact, nearing the end of its working life. I’m pretty sure my dad’s tuned in to hear something specific, but I’ve no idea what. We don’t, as a rule, have the radio on on Saturday lunchtimes, so there has to be a reason. We’re listening to Radio 2, and the programme on air is LP Showcase presented by Brian Matthew: ‘the Top Sellers, the evergreens, and the latest longplayers’, according to the Radio Times. This week, amongst the featured albums is a new double LP collection entitled Easy Listening, a compilation of recordings by various artists. This is perhaps the first time I’ve heard the expression ‘easy listening’. One of the tracks played is a cover version of a song entitled Daydream, released the previous year by progressive pop/classical Belgian ensemble Wallace Collection (not to be confused with the Lovin’ Spoonful’s song of the same title). The song, much sampled in later years, is based around a distinctive descending chord progression, and has been covered by the massively popular (in Germany) Günter Kallman Chorus. (In fact, it will be this cover version, rather than the original, that becomes the source for numerous samplings some twenty five years hence).

The lyrics begin as follows:

Daydream/ I fell asleep amid the flowers/ for a couple of hours/ on a beautiful day.

I’m hearing this as I gaze out into the back garden with its colourful display of spring flowers in the beds. But there’s something else happening. A thunderstorm is brewing. It seems rather early in the day (thunderstorms are most common in the afternoon and early evening). But there’s no doubt about it. The storm is breaking, and it’s quite nearby. Günter Kallman is about to be silenced in mid flight. Our mum comes in from the kitchen to insist that the radio is turned off. Why, I have no idea. Silence reigns... making it all the easier to hear the thunder through the french windows...

I was not keeping a diary in 1970, but I can recreate this scene with precision. How? Partly from memory – the song, interrupted after maybe two verses, will become indelibly imprinted on my mind forever – and partly through a combination of research, and finding associations with the same point in time. For some reason, it became a moment in time that held an odd fascination; forever after, the whole mood could be evoked simply from those few lines of melody and lyric. Much later, it became the focus for an in-depth piece of what one might call ‘time detective’ work. I still had the memory, but I had no clear idea of when it happened. 1968? 1969? For a long time, I couldn’t be sure. I didn’t even know who was singing the song, or what it was called, and I had slightly misheard the lyrics (‘daydream’ sounding to me like the more predictable ‘baby’).

I have to wait until the late 1990s for the first clue: an issue of Mojo magazine dealing with prog/psych bands prints the opening lines of the song. For the first time in all those years, I finally have a title... Daydream... and an artist... Wallace Collection. I’m a step closer to revisiting that mysterious ‘thundery Saturday’. But it proves to be a case of one step forward and another sideways. Wallace Collection’s version is not the one I’m looking for, but it will take a long time before I realise... for the time being, my first goal is to find a copy of the song.

In those pre-ebay days, this proves to be surprisingly easy: rare record specialists the Diskery, on the corner of Bromsgrove Street, Birmingham, have a copy of the Wallace Collection’s album Laughing Cavalier in stock, which contains said recording (I’m pleased to report that the shop is still trading, and claiming to be the ‘oldest record store in England’). It costs me about a tenner, a small price to pay for resurrecting a memory of twenty years vintage.

In all those years, I haven’t heard the song again, yet I can still recall the melody of those opening bars. Playing the album, though, I can tell at once that there’s something not quite right. The melody and lyrics are exactly as I remember them (apart from the misheard opening word) but the production isn’t as smooth as I recollect, and the Belgian-accented singer is not the voice I remember. So far, so good... but I can do better.

A few years later, Daydream resurfaces in a new version, given a contemporary makeover by an artist called I Monster, and retitled Daydream in Blue. This 2001 cover, which will get to No. 20 in the UK album charts, is sampled from the Günter Kallman recording, but omits the song’s mid-section melody, lifted from Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake. Curiously, back in 1970, the radio was turned off before the Günter Kallman Chorus could reach this section, leaving only the famous bars ‘sampled’ in my own memory. Aside from this, I Monster’s reading includes an unnecessary ‘dirty’ sounding chorus based on the sample’s chord changes, now buried beneath a distorted soundscape.

It is iTunes that finally leads me to the version of Daydream that I remember: looking for it in their store, and imagining I might come across the Wallace Collection version, I find instead the Günter Kallman reading, now considered an essential item in the sampler’s arsenal. Hearing it after some thirty-five years is like finding the missing piece of a jigsaw: the way it sounds matches up exactly with what’s been in my head all this time. But I’m not finished yet, not by a long way.

Some years later, I discover that the Günter Kallman version of the song enjoyed its brief moment of popularity as a result of its inclusion on a ‘popular easy listening record from 1970.’ It takes scant minutes online to identify this album, and locate a copy for sale on ebay. Another tenner changes hands. Now I have the exact artefact that I heard playing on the radio, and a specific year – 1970. Just one piece of the puzzle remains to be solved. When, exactly, did this take place? I know it was late spring, but I can’t be any more precise than that. Not yet, anyway.

Fast forward to 2014. Saturday, April 26^th is warm and brilliantly sunny. The flowerbed is blooming with daffodils and vivid red tulips. It’s a different flowerbed in a different garden, but the mood is strangely familiar. Radio 2 is playing in the kitchen... Pick of the Pops. This week’s chart is 1970... All Kinds of Everything by Dana is at number one, a song that holds all manner of associations, from seeing her win Eurovision that year to a contemporaneous craze for ‘Crater Critters’, small plastic space creatures being given away in packets of Kelloggs’ Sugar Smacks. Don’t ask me why: such is the way with memories.

The thought strikes me that it was a day very much like this, back in 1970, when the Günter Kallman/ thunderstorm moment occurred. I’ve long been of the opinion that, if you want to recapture a specific moment in time, then the more orignal artefacts you can put together, the closer you’ll get to actually being back there. It’s as close as you can get to time travel. Today we have the same weather (barring the thunderstorm), 1970’s chart on the radio, and the garden in bloom. Add to that some contemporary copies of TV21 & Joe 90 (complete with ‘Crater Critters’ promotion on the back cover) and the Radio Times, and the trip is almost complete. The Radio Times reveals the identity of the programme we were listening to: LP Showcase was a regular feature at lunchtimes from 1969 into 1970. I put the Easy Listening album onto my dad's old Bang & Olufsen hi-fi… Günter Kallman's version of Daydream issues through the speakers. This is almost time travel. Maybe if I concentrate really hard it will be. All that’s missing now is the exact date.

I’ve got a very strong feeling it was close to today’s date, but I can’t be sure. There’s one way of narrowing down the search: the thunderstorm. The met office website holds monthly weather records going back to the year dot, and while these are for the most part basic summaries rather than detailed local observations, there is sometimes sufficient detail to pin down a notable event like a storm. The record for April 1970 notes the following: ‘Occurrences of thunder were mostly isolated except in Scotland on the 20^th and in the Midlands and eastern England on the 25^th.’ April 25^th 1970 was a Saturday – and the final piece of the historical puzzle is in place.

(For the record, that evening’s television on BBC1 included part 6 of the Dr. Who serial The Ambassadors of Death, The Debbie Reynolds Show, Dad’s Army (wiped out for us by further thunder, if memory serves) and a film, Ride Vaquero!, in the BBC’s High Adventure season. I well remember this proto Spaghetti Western being on the television mid evening that same day.)

Aside from anything else, this story serves to illustrate a phenomenon that I experienced growing up: you weren’t allowed to have the television (nor, seemingly, the radio) switched on during a thunderstorm. Our mum insisted on this. We even had to turn the lights off, which if anything only served to accentuate the oppressive gloom associated with most summer thunderstorms. The earliest example in memory is of an episode of Top of the Pops being interrupted in maybe the summer of 1966, but there were countless others. It drove my dad mad; for some reason he had specially wanted to hear that radio programme in April 1970: I suspect that a record might have been scheduled featuring musicians he had worked with, but that’s something I’ll never know. What I do know is that, one thundery Sunday evening a few years later, in frustration at not being allowed to watch TV, play records or listen to the radio, and being made to turn off the lights, we were all taken out in the car for a drive to ‘nowhere in particular’ (in actual fact, West Bromwich) rather than sit in the dark and silent house.

It also illustrates part of the point of this blog: there is nothing you can’t remember if you try. It’s all still there. Sometimes, it takes a little prompting; but given the right combination of circumstances, information, and the mnemonic qualities of a half-forgotten song, you can damn nearly travel back in time. I’ve been back to a specific moment in April 1970. It took me years to get there. But it works.