With trembling knee and shaking hand, Ted Bruning allows his musical past to catch up with him.
Not many people are filled with dread at the the thought of going to see
their favourite band - unless their favourite band is the Fall, that is, or
Slipknot.
But my fave band is nothing like the rage-fuelled Fall, or the Texas
Chainsaw Massacre wannabes Slipknot. Caravan are definitely - definitively
- soft-rock, given to wistful melodies, lush orchestration, and plaintive
vocals. They come from Canterbury and are terribly, terribly English, owing
more to John Barry than to Chuck Berry. "Pink and floaty," my brother calls
them.
I got to like Caravan when I was in the sixth form at public school in the
early '70s, when glam rock ruled the singles charts. My peer group, being
awful snobs, shunned all singles as disco-fodder for proles. We were intellectuals and
individualists, and to prove one's intellectualism and individuality it was
de rigueur to build up a collection of the most abstruse and obscure prog
rock albums possible. (I think John Peel may have had something to do with
this).
The ultimate badge of cool was to produce at the beginning of each term an
album by a band the rest of the gang had never heard of; and in 1973 or '74,
a friend trumped everyone by producing an album by Caravan.
I fell in love with Caravan immediately and bought three of their albums -
In The Land Of Grey & Pink, For Girls Who Plump In The Night, and Blind Dog
At St Dunstan's - myself. This was definitely uncool, but I didn't care.
Something about their music - its rich, colourful texture, its romanticism,
its Englishness - filled a need in me. Like Elgar or Vaughan Williams, it
created a sense of place which is often lacking in boarding school children.
If you spend two-thirds of your childhood locked up in an institution, it's
hard to put down roots. A fortnight after leaving school I
left home as well, to start my first job; in the next few years I moved
again and again, never staying anywhere long enough to develop a sense of
belonging, and never really wanting to be wherever I happened to find myself
anyway.
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