Chapter 5 Angelica and Murnau 1983 to 1985
I had to wait 3 months before getting in to the special hospital, and was prompted by friends to spend this time at an ‘alternative’ health centre. It was a happy place with natural food, herbal remedies etc.
The retreat was run by Angelika Haaring, a herbalist and natural birthing specialist attached to Landshut hospital, where they had a home-like birthing room. Angelika was a great fan of the English natural birther Sheila Kitzinger, and she lent me a guitar so I started writing songs again. The first one I wrote I Need A Woman was an obvious subject, expressing my current deprivation. It featured Dolly Parton, Shirley Bassey, and, if push came to shove, Edna Everage!
And then along came King Of Charleston, which is regarded as one my best, and may have reflected my wish to be on my feet again. The lyrics drew on my knowledge of this type of song which came from my years with The Cherry-Tones Singing Group. I later wrote Unser Tag (Our Day) about a couple looking forward to having a baby.
Angelika held antenatal classes, and I was invited to join in the meditation and relaxation exercises. We had to make a vocal sound “Aaah” together, and because of my singing perhaps, I could out-last all the pregnant women with my “Aaah” sound.
Angelika took students on country walks identifying edible and healing herbs. I went along with my crutches on one of these expeditions. She also gave lessons in cookery and made very nice waffles which she took wherever she went, and offered them round to people. She had bundles of sedative herbs in the dormitory corridors and bedrooms. Her sayings included ‘It doesn’t have to be perfect’ ‘I’m not jealous’ and ‘We’re both over eighteen’. She was a cheerful non-conformist, and wore traditional Bavarian alpine ‘Dirndl’ costume. ‘We’re both over eighteen’ is in Mountain Song and Eric Or Me.
In March 1984 I was admitted to the Unfallklinik (accident clinic) in Murnau. It had extensive garden grounds, tennis courts, classrooms for the children and views of the Austrian Alps. It was built for wounded soldiers in the war. I was there for over a year, with 2 or 3 breaks between operations. My stay in the hospital was very productive for my songwriting. I didn’t play cards or watch TV. Instead I wrote lots of songs (including the musical notation), in order to make a songbook, called Not Just A Songbook. The picture illustrations were cut from magazines discarded by other patients, who were quite keen to hear me singing the songs, in the wards or in the hospital gardens. The songbook contained lyric sheets, music sheets and German translations provided by Ilse Wolfram, one of the hospital visitors.
At the start, I met a patient called Karin Fasser, a taxi driver with a damaged foot, and a guitar. The first words I said to her were “Do you speak English.” This led to the song Parlez-vous Francais? She suggested I write a song called Peter And I, and this song forced me to adapt my guitar playing to suit gentle songs, instead of scrubbing the strings. Karin thought a new patient, called Eric, who survived a fall from a crane, was very handsome. This led to Eric Or Me, and reflected Angelika’s sayings ‘I’m not jealous’ and ‘We’re both over 18’.
I met two girls in the hospital gardens, who had a booklet of popular songs such as ‘Morning Has Broken’, and we sang some of them. Then I went on to sing some of my songs, such as Listen To The Wind, Love Don’t Come and Hey Little Girl. They threw the booklet into the bushes!
I wrote a song about life in hospital, Mountain Song, in which a man is worrying about what his wife is getting up to in his absence. This was popular with the doctors, who nudged each other with amusement at some of it, such as “Why has she changed her perfume and who was the man who chose?” Later in the song he has an affair with one of the nurses and stops worrying.
The doctors lent me a classroom to rehearse in. There was a map of the world on the wall, and Take A Ride came from that. It was a bit of a spoof on the Rolling Stones’ song ‘Can’t Get No Satisfaction’.
A man with memory loss was luckily still able to speak English, and for a few days I did some of my songs for him. His memory was recovering. He liked Down By The River, and we had some conversations. He was a structural engineer.
When I started writing Blue Corner, two girls suggested writing it in Bavarian dialect and wanted me to make it ‘naughty’. The song begins: “Now I’ve got a broken leg I have to rise at dawn, watch the nurses make the bed while I stand and yawn.” The two girls went straight in with a rude word: “Scheiss! i hab man Hax’n broch’n.” There are some rude jokes in the English version, too. Blame the girls!
At my previous hospital, a doctor had told me that people who do outdoor work such as lorry drivers are more likely have a bad mental reaction to being hospitalised after an accident. This led me to a more optimistic song called Rolling Along about the daily life of lorry drivers. I ran it past a patient who was a lorry driver and she thought it was authentic. She said she was going to call her lorry “Continental Dragon”. This song has been described as having ‘actual commercial potential.’
She told me that certain resistant bacteria are present within hospitals but not outside (In later years they were called “Superbugs”). When my wound started showing pus, I was transferred to the septic wing of the hospital, where I met Maria, who inspired Something Special, Goodnight Maria and Good Morning Maria. Back in the main hospital, the patient in the next bed to Maria asked me to write a song for getting up in the morning, so I did Wake Me Up When The Sun Comes Up. On her birthday, she was given a bottle of pink champagne, which I thought was a ridiculous drink, so I wrote Pink Champagne.
Relationships are restricted among hospital patients. We all feel the lack of intimacy, and that is why so many songs, such as Stay With Me, Let It Show, Hallo Mausi, Cool Lady were just love songs or seduction songs.
A patient who had seen the German translation of one of these, When I’m Loving You, asked my permission to send the lyrics to his girlfriend. The song began “It feels so good when I hold you in my arms” (He had lost one of his arms in a motorbike accident)
He gave me the names of popular motorbikes, which I used in Dream Machine.
Another patient who had lost an arm was trying to tell me the chords for the 1960’s song San Francisco. He couldn’t, because the memory was in the fingers of his missing arm.
Peter Kreitmeir was a patient who had only injured his thumb. He was a goldsmith and lived locally. Between operations, I had temporary discharges from the hospital, and Peter took me and my wheelchair from place to place and let me stay at his house in Bad Kohlgrub. His wife Barbara was a fan of Don’t Let Go and Loving You Loving Me. He got me one or two gigs, such as the Holiday Inn, which were written up in the local paper.
Heinz Ensinger was a friend of Peter’s and he had a home ‘Studio’ with a 4-track cassette recorder. I was encouraged to record lots of songs and Peter helped me produce my illustrated book Not Just A Songbook. I recorded some songs at Heinz and Uli’s house in the country, with Susie Bell who played the flute. Susie had been paralysed in a car accident. Heinz carried her into the house from his car.
I wrote a song about her called Poor Suzanne and at her request a more cheerful song called Susie Susie. One of my tunes, Dancing Dolphins featured her flute. I also had a singer called Silke Genster who gets a mention in a song called Special Girl. Some years later I rewrote the lyrics and changed it to Special Boy, about my son Jamie.
I used to take a borrowed cassette recorder when I went around the hospital, with Karin’s guitar on the back of my wheelchair. I visited a group of Italian patients who were paralysed from back injuries and were sent over from Italy because Murnau had good paraplegic wards. Their accidents were things like parachuting, horseriding and driving on the wrong side of the road on a visit to the UK. One of them was showing his son how to dive out of a boat, and forgot to check that the water was deep enough (In the song Massimo, I included their stories). One of the cassette recordings has me singing King Of Charleston to them at great speed, and at the end of Might-Have-Beens one of them says “Bella Agusta.” Among my song paperwork there were sheets of carbon paper with the Eros logo and the word ‘Piccadilly’. The Italians seemed to like repeating the word ‘Piccadilly’, so I wrote Piccadilly and got them to sing it.
I met another Italian patient with an operatic voice, and wrote a song for him but he went home, so another Italian patient and his wife helped me convert it to Italian and ‘All of me All of you’ became Tutto Di Me, Tutto Di Te. It sounded better in Italian than in English.
As I passed by other patients in the hospital gardens and corridors, I was often asked “how are you?” They were amused to hear me say “Comme ci, comme ca”, because they were using me to practise their English, only to find that I was spouting back to them in French! The song Comme Ci Comme Ca is about Yes or No questions that arise in love or medicine, and ponders the mystery of the placebo effect, which, in the song, works better than the prescription drug. I found Gunther Igler to draw four patients with either the drug, homeopathy, placebo or control. It made an amusing picture, and the nurses put it up inside their door. One of them told me that they did in fact use placebos, for pain relief.
Between operations I was staying at a farm B & B where they made good yoghurt. I was visited there by Christjane Ernst whose father was the hospital’s principal medic. The song I was working on was Falling In Love (but we didn’t!).
One of the radiologists, Duane Perestenko, invited me to go to his church’s social event. They were Seventh Day Adventists. He said he had seen in my notes that I was vegetarian, so thought I’d fit in, because 7th Day Adventists are all vegetarian. He was American, and his daughter looked at my song A Man’s Gotta Do What A Man’s Gotta Do to check it sounded authentically American. It implies a “shotgun wedding” in the line ‘Our little boy was born on a hasty honeymoon’ and the song includes ‘The law’s gotta do what the law’s gotta do’ and, typical of me, ‘A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do’. This is regarded as one of my best songs.
I saw a bit of someone’s TV, and noticed that pop music was getting more aggressive, and this led to A Hundred Per Cent.
While I was in Murnau Unfallklinik, I used to tune in to the BBC world service on my borrowed cassette recorder. They reported that on 8th. January, 1985, Primrose Hill was covered with snow. People were surprised to see a police van mounting the hill, and out poured a full load of police with riot shields. Was there a demonstration in the area? Or a picket line of striking miners? Nothing of the sort. They had fun tobogganing down the hill on their riot shields, until they were summoned back to the van by it’s two-tone siren. They drove off again, presumably to more serious business.
Also on the world service, I heard a bit more than I already knew about the Nestlé baby milk scandal (Nestle used unethical promotion of milk powder as a superior alternative to breast feeding, causing countless baby deaths) and I wrote We’re Alright Here, criticising multi-nationals such as Coca-cola, drug companies who dump their drugs on the 3rd. world when they have failed safety tests, and also there was a campaign called “Impact,” headed by Sir John Wilson, to reduce by half the number of handicapped people in the world, including thousands of people blinded by cataracts, which could be cured by a simple operation costing just 8 dollars. Sir John was blind himself.
I also had a note from the New Humanist magazine that led me to say “It wouldn’t cost a lot to feed the poor and hungry for a year. We spend that every fortnight on munitions in the fear, they might get restless, and demand a bigger share . . . ”
Years later, Lucy Malvin was on Radio 4, 13/10/2019, saying she runs a charity that restores sight to 50,000 people every year, and good surgeons can remove cataracts and give you sight in 5 minutes. She talks about “the ignorance of the poor. They don’t realise there is a treatment . . .” This echoes what I said in We’re Alright Here, way back in 1984:
“The blind can see and the deaf can hear and the cripples can walk but have no fear – they don’t know, and they won’t know.”
Not Just A Songbook was printed by going to the university in Munich and photocopying all the pages at 3 pfennigs each. They were trimmed and bound by a local printer. All the songs were translated into German and typed out by Ilse Wolfram, who was a teacher of English. I was encouraged to enter the Eurovision Song Contest, so Ilse made 3 of my songs fit the music in German: Mario, When I’m Loving You and My Early Night. I had contributions from a double bass player, and a harpist, Renate, who found it difficult to get her harp in tune. The bass player invited me to a party in Munchen Gladbach and gave me a lift there. He got lucky with a girl at the party, and I had to go back by train early the next morning (I slept in the park!) On the train I saw that in some areas all the trees had died from acid rain. This is in the song Say No.
In early 1985 I had my fifth operation at Murnau. They took bone marrow from my hip and transferrred it to the unhealed bone in my leg. I had 2 months to wait and see if this had worked, so I went back to England, and stayed at my Mum’s. I saw a doctor in Harley Street and he took an x-ray and gave me an electric magnet to surround my leg during the night. I advertised for musicians and singers in Melody Maker and wrote The Road To Babylon for one of them, and another heard me sing Arkansas, and said he’d had a similar experience of being jailed for a crime he didn’t commit. This is also in You Belong To The Hills. I watched Top of the Pops and saw Jimmy Nail in a raincoat singing ‘Love don’t live here any more’ which led to Walking In The Rain, and someone singing ‘Come Closer’ which led to I Don’t Wanna Dance Any More.
I went back to Murnau, approx. May 1985, and they said my bone was beginning to heal at long last. They prescribed a “Stutz Apparat”. My leg and foot were measured by a specialist cobbler. He made a shoe with a leg extension that strapped tightly and allowed me to put some of my weight on my kneecap and some on my foot. When they were satisfied I didn’t need crutches any more, they discharged me. I don’t know if the magnet had helped, or even my Mum’s cooking. For a year or two I stayed at my Mum’s in North London.
Before I left Germany, a patient invited me to stay at his parents’ farmhouse and I was introduced to his musician friends who had a group called “Style”. They had made a backing track with guitars and keyboards, and I was asked to write a song to fit with it. I wrote Strangers In The Night (not the Frank Sinatra song) and recorded it with them. I got their girlfriends to do backing vocals. That is the only time I have written to a backing track, words and tune. It was good, quite danceable, and is one of the few songs that have been described as commercial. Some have likened it to Village People. I stayed a week at the farmhouse and wallpapered their Kitchen.
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