Little Boxes by Pete Seeger
When I was a child our family would drive through France every year for our annual fortnight’s camping at La Paillotte, in the Landes department, close to the Spanish border. Being the youngest, I got to travel in the boot of my father’s Ford Cortina estate, along with the tents, and everyone joined in when he sang this song.
I can’t hear it without a rush of the smell of the pine forests around the campsite and the taste of thrilling one-franc wraps of pommes frites from a little cabin there. I returned to the same campsite with my own family and nothing had changed – except that I could have as many pommes frites as I wanted.
Fingerprints by Leonard Cohen
Leonard Cohen has been the soundtrack to just about every holiday I’ve ever taken. I can remember, for example, in the early years of marriage, being in Lindos on Rhodes and one of my stepdaughters emerging from her room and shouting: “Why, why do we have to always listen to this dreadful old man singing?” (She has since mended her ways.) Since 2014 I have been immersed mentally and literally on the Greek island of Hydra, where Cohen had a home and where my novel A Theatre for Dreamers is set. Those much-published photographs of his first ever concert, the writer Charmian Clift singing beside him, surrounded by the fabled bohemian community, have always made me wonder what he might be playing. I imagine Fingerprints (though not recorded until the Phil Spector album, it was published as a poem earlier). In subject matter it strikes me as an ideal candidate for this 1960 sing-a-long.
One of the first times I went on holiday with David Gilmour (the Pink Floyd guitarist, now my husband) we went to the tiny Dodecanese island of Kastellorizo which is the most easterly point of Greece and at that time barely inhabited. One evening, David’s luggage tag came apart and he realised that, secreted behind it, was a tab of acid that he’d been given when he visited the Soviet Union in 1988 for a rocket launch, and had forgotten about. He’d subsequently, unwittingly, taken it everywhere, including on a Pink Floyd world tour. The impregnated sheet had been a picture of Gorbachev and this smidgeon was his red birthmark, the strongest part, apparently. David doubted it would still have much potency but we dissolved it and shared it in a glass of water. Turned out he was wrong. I scribbled something about it at the time and years later found my notebook, some lines from which found their way into the lyric of this song.
I was seven months pregnant with my first child when his father and I went to Dingle to swim with the wild dolphins. It was September 1989, and though the sea must have been freezing (and no wetsuit could be found that would accommodate my bump) I don’t remember being cold because it was so exhilarating. We spent a month there, swimming with the dolphins every day (“the first of God’s creatures to see our baby” said his father, referring to their sonar) and in the evenings the music in the pubs was so good: all the traditional Irish instruments – fiddles, whistles – and this song remains with me as part of that happy time.
This is every summer of my teenage years in a song – and then again in my early 20s, on a holiday from my publishing job, cycling from Bordeaux to Biarritz, weighed down by the enormous typescript of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. It took up every inch of my panniers and is now inextricably linked with singing this song to myself and wishing I had a change of clothes instead.
I’m All Out of Love by Air Supply
One year we went to Union Island in the Caribbean and came across a lovely man called Pleasure who cooked us a barbecue on the beach. The meat turned out to be Iguana, which was one of the worst things I’ve ever tasted, but that hasn’t tainted my memory. Pleasure had a guitar and said he’d play us his favourite song which turned out to be I’m All Out of Love. A couple of years later we went back to the same lovely beach, having rehearsed the song to surprise him. Three members of our party were professional singers but still Pleasure looked mystified throughout its many verses and claimed never to have heard it before.
One year we took a tiny rust-buckety plane from Mexico to Dallas (where DG was playing a gig) and hit a sandstorm that necessitated flying extremely low between skyscrapers on the way to an emergency landing. All I remember are the stricken faces of my children and playing this on repeat in my headphones and thinking it would be the last thing I’d ever hear. David kept saying it was not a problem, but when we landed, the pilot got out and was sick on the runway.
When I was 20, in my first job in publishing and on a salary that made foreign travel a distant dream, I put my name down to be a courier and the chance to go to Hong Kong came up. It was the strangest thing – it cost nothing at all – but I did have to take some mystery packages. I stayed a month and it was glorious to be on my own and discover the city and the islands of Lantau and Lamma and to cycle the length of Macau to the leper colony. There were so many escapades on that trip and this song always makes me think of how much more intrepid I was then.
One Easter we drove from Rome to Puglia in a rented Fiat Multipla which we’d hated on sight, only to realise it was the best car in the world because you could seat three in the front, which made it seem thrillingly carefree and retro. Whenever I hear this song I think of Puglia and that car and the fields of wildflowers and one child or other bouncing between us and everyone singing along and competitively trying to hold that long note of daaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay.
Yes, I Have Ghosts by David Gilmour
This is another one with my lyrics, but it’s so linked to my last – pre-Covid – holiday that it’s impossible to write this list without including it. This song was written about Charmian Clift and about being haunted by people who are not dead. The last time I left the UK was in March 2020 to go to Hydra, where we recorded a video of David singing it, but had no idea of what was to come. It is now inextricably linked with the ghosts of the life we lived before this pandemic.
Charmian Clift’s memoirs, Peel Me a Lotus and Mermaid Singing, with new introductions by Polly Samson, are published by Muswell Press (£8.99)
