She is 90. I'm A Boy.
A (musical) tribute to a mother with dementia, on her 90th birthday.
This “long read” is going out a day ahead of my usual weekend schedule, for reasons that should quickly become apparent. If you enjoy what you read, please share, like, comment - and subscribe.
Today, March 29th 2024, coincidentally a Good Friday, Hudson Palace releases “I’m A Boy,” a cover of The Who single from 1966. Also today, March 29th 2024, my mother turns 90, and I am in Beverley, in the beautiful East Riding of Yorkshire, with my girlfriend and Hudson Palace partner Paula, along with my only and older brother, Nic, to “celebrate” with her.
The two sentences above are connected by more than just date. As those who have ever met her or who have read Boy About Town will know, my mother played an outsize role in my life even by the standards of most mothers. After breaking up with my father when I was very young (and I had an intensely difficult relationship with my father as a result, despite the fact we appear to have had much in common), Ruth Macdonald Campbell, to give her her incongruous full maiden name, gained a new lease of life and was very much my record-buying companion in my formative years.
While she arguably doted on me a little too much, and certainly at the expense of my elder brother (who received that love from my father instead in lieu of my own; the Humberside poet Philip Larkin has words to say about all of this), my mother engaged and indulged all my pursuits. She backed Jamming! to the hilt, and
and Mike at Better Badges have fond memories to this day of her driving up to Ladbroke Grove when a new issue rolled off the presses, helping me bring them back to her house in the farther depths of South London, where I would throw “collating parties” in the hope that girls from our all-boy’s neighboring school might feel safe coming into my bedroom. My mum had an open-door policy regarding visitors, and my place quickly became the preferred hang amongst all my proper mates.Ruth likewise supported all my musical endeavors, though it was to her credit that she never imposed herself around my band, or my relationship with The Jam. (She did find it funny to keep picking up the phone during my teens to find Paul Weller on the other end, however.) Indeed, my generation was the last of the “latch-key kids” and we were expected to find our own way around town and deal with our own schedules, book our own rehearsals, find our own entertainment, and as a result, by the time we were 14-15, a whole group of us were regularly coming home from school, rushing through our homework and our tea, and meeting back up again at the Marquee a couple of hours later. These days the parents would probably be prosecuted for neglect, but it seemed perfectly normal back at the time, and once we lived in Crystal Palace together when I was 16, just the two of us as my brother had left home, the relationship felt more like room-mates than parent-son.
Indeed, another reason my mother didn’t impose once I had London Transport sussed (especially the fact that I could use my school bus pass at all time and seemingly all over London if I tried), was that she was enjoying her own social life. Ruth was a party animal, constantly hosting dinners, buffets, brunches not that we used that word in the UK at the time, and always accepting invitations from her friends in the upper classes that she made effortlessly, so as to enjoy “how the other half lives.” Her popularity stemmed in part from the fact that she was constantly full of wonderfully entertaining stories, many of which were suitably embellished in the oral tradition, particularly once she was on her second large gin-and-tonic, which, regrettably, was usually all too soon.
But Ruth was more than just a social being with a predilection for a drink: she was an inquisitive intellectual, always discussing news and politics, and always keen to hear the other side, and she applied that inquisitiveness to the correct profession, one that ran deep in her own family. She worked as an English teacher in British state schools, particularly enjoying her time at Norwood Girls School, Lady Edridge in Thornton Heath, and Stockwell Manor. The kids clearly loved her in turn, and as if it wasn’t enough that we couldn’t go shopping in Brixton for years without a young West Indian immigrant or first-generation Brit approaching my mother to say thanks for believing in them when no one else did in an overtly racist UK, there are still former pupils of Stockwell who travel up to Beverley to see her, over 40 years on.
In 1972, she became a Justice of the Peace, and rose in that volunteer role to become Chief Magistrate of Camberwell Court and to regularly sit at Crown Court as well, subsequently given the keys to Southwark upon retirement after 30 years of servuce. While I was embarrassed at the time that she was doling out fines and sentences, I came to realize she saw her role as a magistrate as of vital importance, helping correct an imbalance dominated by retired majors and ladies of the manor whose understanding of immigrant and working class culture was precisely zero; working in multi-cultural Inner London schools, my mother had a much better understanding of the need for occasional compassion and second chances as well as that for justice.
Though she always had the travel bug, it was only after a physical attack on her at school by an especially unruly Stockwell student pushed her into early retirement, that she truly engaged in that pursuit, journeying all over the planet, with a special focus on and love of the Middle East. She visited Syria, Iran, Egypt multiple times, Tunisia and Morocco, Jordan, Nubia-Sudan, Pakistan, Russia when it was still Soviet, Uzbekistan when it was not, China, Brazil, Japan, and more, and she kept diaries of them all. A dedicated choral singer who performed in choirs from the earliest age until she turned 80, she toured Israel with the London Bach Society directly after the 7 Day War of 1967, an especially fascinating diary to read, and she also had the fun of touring the USA with the Bach Society in 1971. Once I moved to the States, it was hard to keep her away, and she was a regular guest all the years I lived in Manhattan, Brooklyn and the Catskills Mountains, which she last visited in 2015. She was so comfortable coming to visit and enjoy New York as our guest that I once came home to Brooklyn to find her waiting for me, completely unexpected! She was that kind of person.
You may be wondering why I am using the past tense considering the opening sentence here - unless you are among those who already know that she has been living since 2018 in a care home, with increasing mixed dementia. This last year she was moved off the main floor to the official dementia floor, which has been a blessing in terms of her comfort and care, but a further confirmation of her cognitive decline, which is matched by a gradual physical “slimming down” and problems with mobility that were hardly helped by draconian isolation rules during lockdown, when she was in and out of hospital with shingles.
There will be no shortage of readers here who have dealt with or are dealing with the similar loss of a successfully communicative relationship that comes with dementia and Alzheimer's, and they – you – will know that it is heartbreaking to witness. I won’t claim any special hardship: my mother’s dementia is, blessedly, mostly non-aggressive and if anything, her visible love for those who she senses she is connected to by way of family has only grown with her decline. But it is tough to see someone who so loved deep conversation, storytelling, and who stayed up with current events, which of course she could discuss from the perspective of an international traveler and a Middle East expert, to gradually lose all memory entirely. At this point, we are down to glimpses of her childhood in the Shetlands, and, if we are lucky, the occasional recollection of something from her professional and mothering years if sufficiently prodded by the power of suggestion. She seems to know her kids are connected to her, but rarely exactly how or why, though at least she doesn’t mind asking as much.
For those of you who have got this far – and I do trust that the universal subject matter (parents, ageing, dementia) has kept you going – you may still be wondering what my mother’s 90th birthday has to do with my Hudson Palace musical project releasing “I’m A Boy,” and why on the same day. Well, from a musical perspective, it has taken until almost the end of my 50s to put a Who cover version down on tape, let alone to release a pair of them. It’s not so much that I consider Pete Townshend’s songs sacred, as like many young bands, my teen group Apocalypse, back when we were called Direction and barely 14 years old, covered “I Can’t Explain” as one of our first rehearsal tunes. It’s just that Who songs are indelibly tired to The Who’s performances, and notoriously difficult to cover successfully, without slavishly copying the original.
But somewhere down the line of making music with Paula, and after audaciously re-arranging Buzzcocks’ “Love Your More” as an acoustic ballad in ¾ time, I saw the opportunity to take on a couple of Pete’s songs about gender roles, androgyny and general childhood-adolescent confusion, and have them hopefully given a new twist via a female lead vocalist. A month ago today, Leap Day, we released our cover of “Tattoo,” one of the more playful of the many playful songs on The Who Sell Out, and which, to my ears at least, becomes additionally so when you have a woman singing of her new permanent inked acquisition that, “My dad beat me ‘cos mine said Mother.” (Fun fact: not long after we became a couple, I talked Paula into getting her first ever tattoo. Like myself when I took that plunge twenty years ago, she found it liberating.)
As for “I’m a Boy,” it’s a particular personal fave, as well as being one of The Who’s most successful 45s, and indeed, per Townshend’s witty live introduction from somewhere back among the classic recordings (Isle of Wight? If I had more time, I’d confirm it for you), their only #1 – for about a week in the less official charts than the BBC one that pegged it to number 2.
“I’m A Boy” is also a textbook example of Pete Townshend’s songwriting. The verses and choruses are ludicrously straight-forward, but the instrumental section finds Townshend playing with augmented as well as perfect fifths as he descends down the guitar neck, the pairings given an additional edge by John Entwistle’s relentless hammering of the bottom E string. Once I mastered this guitar part – well, once I figured it out, at least - I decided to extend that section so we could pay homage to The Beatles’ “Twist and Shout” and another Who song that substituted the lack of available string sections by chanting the name of the desired instrument instead.
Ours, then, is a loving tribute to The Who which, like our take on “Tattoo,” features some baroque additions (using a Chamberlin, a precursor of the Mellotron tape sampler as would have been available by the mid-1960s), and which, with the lack of drums, ideally offers room for the song to breathe. It was all recorded at my apartment in Kingston, vocals included, and mixed by my teenage son Noel down at SUNY Purchase, where he is studying this exact skill, I am confident that it’s the best of the four Hudson Palace releases to date. (You can listen to “I’m A Boy” on your preferred streaming service via this Link Tree.)
But this “I’m A Boy” is also a personal gift to my mother. Back when I “discovered” The Who, I was encouraged by my substitute big brother Jeffries to dive into the catalogue with Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy rather than try and make sense of the more recent Quadrophenia. It was the right advice for a 10-year-old, and that compilation of 1960s Who hits spent more time on my turntable in my bedroom over the coming years than any other – to the extent that even today, I struggle with hearing the songs from Meaty, Beaty in any other running order. I also got the shock of my life when I learned, only while writing the Keith Moon biography, that the version of “I’m A Boy” on that album is a longer, slower “alternate” version to the actual 7” 45. Because I grew up with the MBB&B version, that’s the one we covered.
My mother also loved The Who. Well, she loved Meaty, Beaty, Big & Bouncy, and would usually bound into my room to sing along when she heard “Boris The Spider’ and, especially, Side 2’s finale “I’m A Boy.” I don’t think she took the words any more seriously than I did at the time, and I’m not especially sure they were intended to be anything other than mischievous in the first place. But just as Pete Townshend later realized that the Tommy character he invented was based on his own blacking-out of childhood sexual abuse at the hands of his grandmother, the words to “I’m A Boy,” in which a boy sings of his mother dressing him like a girl though he knows he’s a boy, take on new meaning in a more trans-conscious society. It’s not hard to hear them now from the perspective of a sexually denominated girl whose mother insists she dresses and behaves as one, even though the child knows that inside, they are a boy.
I will be playing our version of “I’m A Boy” to my mother later today, when we will also be hosting a small “party” for her, for ourselves, and for the few friends in Beverley themselves still standing and able to attend on this Good Friday. I doubt my mother will recognize the song any more than she could identify Crystal Palace FC as a major part of her life [as the photo below will confirm] when I talked with her yesterday, but we don’t always do these things for the gratitude or acknowledgement; we do them because they seem the right thing to do, and they bring us our own peace and comfort. Hudson Palace was always going to release “I’m A Boy,” but doing so on my mother’s 90th as a tribute to our own musical memories, and a mother’s sometimes obsessive love of her youngest child gives it a special personal meaning.
It makes additional sense as my Hudson Palace and romantic partner Paula is here in Beverley with me, on her first ever trip to the UK. (Spoiler alert: she is having the time of her life.) A keen amateur genealogist (and a public – i.e. State-funded – schools teacher herself), she helped put together not just a commemorative photo album that includes pictures from my mother’s side of the family dating all the way back to the mid-19th Century, but in the space of three weeks, traced roots of our family tree back to the 16th Century! Along the way, I have found out, only this late in life, that my maternal grandmother’s side hail came to the Shetland Islands from Sweden, where my brother has been living for the last 15-or-so years by complete coincidence, while her father’s side emigrated to the Shetlands from the Scottish mainland: maybe the controversy of a Campbell marrying a Macdonald was enough to force that particular couple into exile?
I have found out many fascinating things about the Fletchers as well, some of which will be explored geographically and maybe in writing over subsequent days, but this post is about my mother, not my father. There is no coming back from dementia, and Ruth’s mind (along with the body) will only shut down further in whatever time she has left. As such, I’ve made this a much longer trip “home” than usual, and will be basing myself here in this beautiful birth town of mine, Beverley, through the month of April. I send this post out to everyone who has a mother, i.e. to everyone, but especially to those who’ve had an especially close relationship with their mother, only to later find it hampered by dementia.
It also goes to anyone who enjoys a cover version. May today be an equally good Friday for you, regardless of faith or creed, color or sexual persuasion. Happy 90th Birthday, Ruth. This song’s for you.
A lovely account !
A touching glimpse of a remarkable woman. Sounds like the sabbatical is proceeding nicely.