Keith, the Music Man!

My husband Keith, although by day a mild-mannered teacher of handicapped children, for years had a multi-award-winning radio show. Sunday nights from 9 to 11. Although it was a time-slot no regular radio announcer wanted because it never had an audience, Keith gathered a large following entirely because the show was so sincerely beautiful.

And it always appeared effortless too, but only I used to know the amount of time he spent putting it together.  Regularly, between 19 and 20 hours for a two hour show.

But the results were always worth it.  He chose songs from all over the world, and very frequently by artists no one had ever heard of, but every song tickled your ear, touched your soul and stirred your heart, and every song was always followed by the exact song your ear, consciously or unconsciously, longed to hear next and the music collectively built up and up and up until, by the end, it resolved with a frankly orgasmic and spectacular song that would blow the top of your head off ...

... but only in conjunction with the others; only as the end of the journey.  You'd think it was the greatest song ever written so track it down but listening to it in isolation, without the other songs coming before, it would never have the same effect.

I was so proud of Keith.  I always knew he knew music like no one else I'd even known, but I'd never previously known you could do so much with a large record collection - to build the music in that spectacular way, and do it week after week, and keep it going for several years - but, my oh my, that radio show was always a mighty, mighty listening experience.

Taxi drivers on night shift discovered it first and would regularly slink by the radio station to peer at Keith through the window, and they'd talk to other people wanting to share the experience and raving Keith up to family, friends and passengers, and so those folks began to listen in too.  And then the hospitals and hospices began to play the show for the dying, and he got calls from staff who said that regularly folks died in numbers immediately after the show but not in a bad way; that they would always tell the nurses that they'd hang on for a couple more days so they could once again hear The Music and then, once the show was over, be finally ready to pass on.

Our comedian friend Andrew always said that was one of the funniest stories he'd ever heard, but he always did have a dark sense of humour.

And then there were fans who'd recognise Keith's voice as we'd go about our lives and they'd frequently slather over him in a quite alarming fashion, and, after meeting him in person, the female fans would then start dropping by the station with cakes or cupcakes they'd made especially for him, and when he'd tell me about it I'd always say "Oohhh, creepy! Play Misty for me!" ...

... but that stopped being funny when one female fan began dropping by our house to tape the music she'd loved on the show and she was so very, very creepy I'd grab a cuppa and go sit out in the garden to get away, but Keith would race out pleading "Please don't leave me alone with her." and I'd say "Hey, you want to be Homme Fatale you accept the consequences!" but I'd acknowledge the increasingly genuine fear on his face and kindly drift back indoors to play "Jealous Wife" and run interference ... and started to get the distinct feeling that my life was in very real danger ... except she thankfully had to do a runner for credit card fraud or something and thus passed out of our lives!  Yayyy!

And he once got a phone call from a visiting Trust Fund Kid, a scion from one of those American super-rich families with an instantly recognisable surname. Fascinating fellow, and well worthy of a large trust fund because he spends his life tracking down up-and-coming young GREAT singer songwriters who "have it" and taping them on his desperately old-fashioned Naga tape-deck.  Did nothing with those tapes, however, just listened to them in private, and later rejoiced when His Chosen Ones finally "made the big time", relishing the chance to say "Told you so!"

And, I have to add, he got it right so often, A&R men of the world should follow him around, shouldn't they!!!

Anyway, Trust Fund Kid rang to tell Keith that he too "had it" but in a different way and said he wanted to meet him, so we spent a lovely evening drinking truly fabulous wine on the visiting fellow's luxury yacht, listening to very early Robert Zimmerman, gay-bath-house Bette Midler and pub-band-singing, grave-digging Rod Steward, and also to a young Ismael Lo and Youssef N'Dour from when they were practically buskers.

And he told us stories about the McKrimmies, a Scottish clan that no longer exists but who, for more generations then you can count, wrote the greatest soul-stirring songs of Scotland and Ireland, and also stories about the Dubatis, the descendants of the Cryors of North Africa, the musician-laureates in the courts of the long-defunct African kings.

He told us that his "hunt for the music" began many decades earlier when he read the story about what happened to the McKrimmies: how the British had a 300 year-long policy to kill McKrimmies because they wrote all the songs that owned the hearts and minds of the Celtic people, and thought that by killing off the composers of those songs, they'd kill off the Irish and Scottish spirit. So, yes, for 300 years everyone who wore the McKrimmie kilt, especially if they developed a rep for great songwriting, could expect to die, usually by a sniper bullet from the hills as they went around their daily business or as they played their bagpipes and flutes in battles!

And these deaths went on and on for centuries until the last McKrimmie left alive, who knew he would die in battle the next day, wrote "McKrimmie's Lament", now the farewell song of Scotland, as a final McKrimmie gift to the Scottish peoples and as a Farewell Forever to The Music!

Anyway, Trust Fund Kid thought the Killing of the McKrimmies was the greatest atrocity ever committed on this planet ever until he realised that female McKrimmies would have married into other clans so the gene for The Music had to still be out there, so thus began his hunt for what became of the McKrimmie Great-Music gene ... and discovered that, for generations, the women had married into other musical clans like The Corrs, The Clannards, The McGarrigles, The Clancys, and, most frequently, the mighty Fury family, so the "composing music to stir your soul" DNA was still out there and well represented in the current world music scene!

Although, I ask you ... ENYA???? Why is there never a decent sniper up in them there hills when you need one!

But then, after 20 years of geneological research and haunting low-life venues for a bit of Naga-action, someone told Trust Fund Kid about the Cryors of Africa; that there was a similar musical family, The Dubati Clan, who for similarly thousands of years had written the songs to stir the soul of North Africa, but who had vanished during the era of European Colonialism and not been heard of since.

And thus began Trust Fund Kid's hunt for the Dubatis. They were out there too, and it was taping songs from descendants of their matrilineal line that he discovered Youssef N'Dour and Ismael Lo. And he made us the promise that, when the recording technology got good enough that poor people too could make broadcast quality recordings, the Dubati family would burst back onto the world music scene in a HUGE way.

And he isn't wrong. Occasionally, I go through the World Music oeuvre, and, yes, there are already five remarkable singer-songwriters with the surname Dubati on the lists .... and I should end this post with a quite remarkable story that I found genuinely funny at the time.

What happened was that, about three years into Keith's radio show and only months after our evening with Trust Fund Kid, Keith got a call from a blind African exchange student from Chad called Nasemba.  He told Keith that African students at the university campus adored Keith's show and told him that he HAD to listen, and he did and, because he was blind and so took in everything through his ears, and knew what was what, it was almost a great honour that he indeed always found Keith's radio show very special.

Anyway, they chatted for a while, and Nasemba started to talk about his best friend back in Chad, a fellow he only ever named as Vincent, and how he composed the most beautiful songs and how he'd love to share Vincent's music with Keith.

Keith being Keith and always wanting to discover GREAT new music, made a date for the following Sunday afternoon, and, well, I don't actually recall why I was there because normally I considered the station to be a Keith-only thing, but I was, at first in the role of coffee-maker, as Keith chatted with Nasemba, but then as ... well, Keith asked me to entertain Nasemba while he took the home-made tape into one of the booths to listen to singer-songwriter Vincent's music and was gone for over an hour.

OK, here's a puzzler:  what do you talk about to entertain a blind monosyllabic teenage African exchange student from Chad?  I mean, after the obvious questions about their studies and "how are you finding ...?" and "Would you like more coffee?" The silence stretched out until it got truly embarrassing, but then I had a wonderful flash of sheer brilliance.  "Do you know any musicians back home in Chad called Dubati?"

Nasemba's jaw dropped and he pointed behind him, in the direction Keith had walked, and said "You already have heard of Vincent?"

Yes, Nasemba's great-young-composer friend was indeed a descendant of the Great Music-Gene family of Africa ... and I was very sad to hear that modern-day Dubatis don't know their own history nor their past of Principle Poet-Laureates of the Kings' Courts nor how all North African kings would scramble to get their very own Dubatis on their staff, nor did they even know that once North Africa indeed had Courts and Kings who needed entertaining.  European Colonialism was devastating in the extent of the knowledge that was so carelessly tossed aside, wasn't it!

But the subject got Nasemba talking freely, and that's how I heard a great many wonderful stories about what it's like to grow up living next door to a household where everyone had the Great-Music gene, and where everyone is constantly singing and playing music and composing ephemeral songs that exactly describe each moment and then are gone forever.  Nasemba, blind and only able to take in the world through his ears, couldn't stay away and practically spent his entire childhood sitting on their stoop.

And then, when Keith finally got back, he said Vincent indeed "had it" in a big way but that Nasemba's recordings weren't of sufficient quality to be played on the radio.  Thus none of the rest of us ever got to hear the music made by a teenage Dubati Cryor ...  but we will, my friends, one day we will!

So that's the story of the years Keith was Music Man!  He says he misses it more than anything else he left behind when we came to Hong Kong ... even moreso than his band ... however, it's all there to go back to, one day, isn't it!