It was whilst looking through a 35-year-old diary for something else that I stumbled across the entry for today’s date, December 9. At a glance, it might seem to an outside observer like a relatively ordinary entry. I’d taken the day off work and had gone with my dad on an early shopping trip into Lichfield. This in itself was a relatively unusual event, as I normally went on such trips alone. It may even have been the last time I ever went shopping with our dad (although he would live for another thirteen years). Did I think back to the times he took myself and my brother around the toyshops of Lichfield during the 1960s? Probably not. Of course, if this really was our last ever shopping trip, I had no way of knowing this. It’s the kind of thing that is revealed only when it’s too late to do anything about it. During our tour of the shops in search of gifts, we happened to look in at the small independent record shop that had its premises in Tudor Row, a small passage alongside a genuine Tudor building where we’d been bought sugar mice as children. Browsing through the shop’s rack of recent releases, my eye was caught by the sleeve of a 12” single, featuring an attractive design in the style of the Incas. The record was by an ensemble called Robert Lloyd and the New Four Seasons, of whom I knew precisely nothing. Lloyd was, if I had but known it, something of a local hero, hailing from Birmingham, whose band The Nightingales had been long standing favourites of DJ John Peel. I’d never heard the record, but something about the sleeve intruigued me enough to risk £2.95 on a purchase (the price tag is still attached to the sleeve 35 years later).
Back at home, that lunchtime, I gave it a listen. The song, Something Nice, weighed in at a staggering nine and a half minutes – three times the length of the average pop single. It began with a relentless ‘four on the floor’ drumbeat that didn’t let up for the entire recording. The melody was pretty unimaginative, consisting of just two notes for the verse and another two notes for the chorus. For all that, it was quite listenable, if lacking in dynamics. But what really drew me in were the lyrics – and at nine and half minutes, there were quite a lot of them. The singer seemed to be taking himself to task for his failure to grasp life’s opportunities for fear that ‘something nice would fly by.’ He talks about his responsibilities, his failings, his work and his relationships in a frank and self deprecating manner. And that was what I related to. Like Mr. Lloyd, I wasn’t entirely happy with how my own life was shaping up (shaping down?) at the age of twenty-seven. I too was afraid that ‘something nice might fly by’. Rather than sticking my head above the parapet and risking having it shot off, I’d been keeping my various creative endeavours – primarily of a musical nature – to myself. The single seemed like a warning. It might have been sent by my future self. And yet I failed to act upon it. Thirty-five years later, as far as ambitions go, I’m still where I was that December day back in 1988. The only difference between then and now is that, at the age of 27, I still had some good years ahead, years in which I might conceivably make good on my failure to get anything off the ground. At the age of 62, the Billy Liar-esque notion of somehow becoming a pop singer – or even a writer of scripts for Danny Boon – begins to seem not only unattainable but laughable. The creative industries have never gone a bundle on old people. You’ll have noticed the decided lack of sexagenarians on TikTok.
Something Nice – life, to be precise – has indeed flown by. Finding that diary entry feels akin to Philip Larkin’s reflection on lost youth in his verse Sad Steps (1968). The poet, ‘groping back to bed after a piss’ parts the curtains and is confronted by the startling sight of a full moon in a ‘wind-picked sky’. It serves him not as a romantic symbol, but as ‘a reminder of the strength and pain of being young/ that it can’t come again/ but is for others undiminished somewhere.’ On finding that diary entry, I fetched out my copy of Something Nice – it lay in a cupboard mere inches from where I sat – and, for the first time in many years put it on the turntable. As I did so, the windy overcast of the morning blew aside to let in a low, wintry sun – recreating precisely the same conditions of weather as on that long-lost day in 1988. I’d even venture to suggest that, purely by chance, I’d chosen to play the record at the exact same time of day. A circle had just been squared.
Back in 1988, I played that song to anyone who would listen. It came to feel like a kind of personal soundtrack, a manifesto even; and it accompanied a developing relationship that in time would bring some of Larkin’s ‘strength and pain’. But I was still young. I got over it.
As for Robert Lloyd, the single, on small indie label InTape Records, did nothing, but it got him noticed, along with his slightly more successful and tuneful pop song Nothing Matters. Within a year or so, he’d been signed to Virgin. Something Nice, now pruned to a radio-friendly four minutes, was re-recorded and reissued. It still did nothing. Lloyd and Virgin soon parted company. Much later, he would revive his new wave combo The Nightingales, whose noisy cacophony was a world away from the smoother sounds he’d been aiming for in the late 80s. As an artist, Lloyd seemed determined not to play the conventional pop star game. When last sighted, he was the subject of a Sky Arts documentary, and came across as an immensely likeable, funny guy with a Midland sense of humour that I got immediately. The kind of chap who could keep you entertained for hours down the pub. His own personal Something Nice has long since flown by, but judging from that film, he seems happy with his lot.
As for me, to subvert a lyric from Doris Day, what will be has been. I can look back thirty-five years but I can’t look that far forward. As a more quotable source has it, ‘nothing will come of nothing.’ And I can’t say I wasn’t warned.
If any of that intrigues you, then the original, full-length Something Nice can be heard here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FuL4isLD7cc
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