Page 9 - November 2021

did sundry friends and relatives when we played it to them over the following weeks. Like most of our material, the song was left to repose in semi- obscurity. I still have a copy of this early version on cassette tape: a poignant testament to some very fine guitar playing. Sadly, Alan died in 2018.
Ebony curtains of midnight, silvery sheen of the stars,Wavelets that lap at the shoreline, and white coral strand.
The theme of the song is enacted through the eyes and senses of a lone figure standing on an empty shoreline at high summer -so enthralled by the starlight and the gentle lapping of the wavelets, that the sensations evoke the memory of a half- forgotten tryst set against a similar backdrop years before. By exploiting the repetition of the sibilants in words such as ‘silvery’ ‘sheen’ and ‘stars’, my aim had been to emulate the faintly hissing sound of the sea. This is reinforced by the use of the nouns ‘shoreline’ and ‘strand’ that follow as the verse progresses. Similar examples occur throughout the chorus and remaining verses. So potent is the spell cast upon the figure that, later in the song, the form of the past lover seems to materialise. The term ADAGIO is a musical instruction denoting that the piece should be played ‘moderately slowly’. The song becomes an evocation of the midnight itself as an almost living entity.
of mine that I had also tagged with a classical sounding title, AUGUST NOCTURNE (the latter word meaning ‘night piece’). Although written in a major key, rather than a minor like MIDNIGHT, there seemed a definite relationship in the ‘feel’ and style of the two numbers. Pursuing an impulse to experiment, I linked them both together into a single track: one verse of the new song being placed at the front of MIDNIGHT as an intro, another after the second chorus to form a bridge passage. Although the experiment worked, and I recorded it (at Hangover Hill), it did make the song somewhat overlong -as both Matt and Helena pointed out to me. When Helena’s version was produced a while later, the lyrics were omitted, but the piano breaks you can hear on Matt’s instrumental solo and the finale are, in fact, played around the chords of AUGUST NOCTURNE, with Helena ‘la-la-ing’ the actual melody line.
I am delighted with the way MIDNIGHT ADAGIO turned out, but, as a writer, can’t help but wonder, how it would have sounded had it been recorded (possibly in duet with a male voice) in tandem with a vocal version of NOCTURNE. Who knows? Perhaps such an arrangement of the two songs will be released one day.
A few years ago I was working on another song 9
Rob Atkins.