Mr. Pie Ramblings: "I hear they sung..."

Mr. Pie Ramblings: "I hear they sung...": I recently responded to a Facebook thing about “'five albums that made me what I am”. Obviously, it was hard to narrow it down to j...



OK, now you need to know that 'Mr Pie' here is a friend of some 40 years; one of the four Apoc Generals, no less.  Someone asked him a question about "Five Albums That Made Me What I Am".  Most of the time our discussions about music centre around his penchant for "industrial grind" the type of thing Abnett refers to as 'Pound'.



Anyway, I was thinking about music that means something to be and it occurred to me that lots of music does affect me, emotionally (which is the point of music, n'est pas ?), but it almost either has a very strong context of its own in the first place or has a strong context for me, personally.

An obvious example is the last post.  I've been one of the quarter guard, arms reversed, around Dunstable war memorial on Remembrance Day.  As a youngster I did it in scout uniform, freezing my young arse off, often in the pissing rain, but I got it, even at eleven years old.  Being there 'for real' was more about getting the unfamiliar rifle drill right.  Now I don't do that anymore, it's more about a personal act of remembrance for me.  So, yeah, the last post is piece of music that can stop me from doing something.

But that came to mind after this;

I wanted to mention as well the closing theme to Dads Army.  It was a superb comedy, but it did always have an edge to it.  That edge was the Warmington on Sea Platoon of the Home Guard conducting something in between a bayonet charge and a more tactical 'advance to contact'.  If you watch it without the sound it might strike you as another bit of farce, in the vein of the episode.

But with the attendant sound track, what you have is a last ditch defence of a beloved homeland, England's Volkstrum.  A bunch of retirement age soldiers, most of whom had already served their time in the trenches thirty years before, once again taking up arms.  We see them advancing through a bombardment (albeit simulated) and the camera fades to the sound of the air raid siren - an eerie and penetrating noise my parents grew up with.  And of course the sequence ends without us really knowing if it was an exercise - of course it was !  Wasn't it ? - surely the whole point of the home guard was that these men were, once again, in most cases, putting themselves in harms way (to use a modern phrase).

Anyway, the closing credits of Dads Army, strange though it may seem, is another piece of music that resonates with me.

There are other non-military pieces that also  touch something here, (the theme to game of thrones is exciting) but I thought someone out there might find this vaguely interesting.