I Confess: D M Thomas on a love of show tunes and Zulu
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Your support makes all the difference.I HAD a long depression several years ago, during which I couldn't read or write. I simply couldn't. What kept me going was my South Pacific album. I'd play it every day - every day without fail - and sing along. Everyone thought I was mad, which I almost certainly was. But I was responding to the cheery optimism of the classic pre-War / post-War American musical. In my imagination I was transformed into John Hanson, singing in the desert. Singing brings out the sentimental and romantic in me.
Show tunes give me a real, powerful feeling of nostalgia, not just for my childhood but for a time that seems simpler, a time of innocence, of purer love between man and woman. And the lyrics from the period are brilliantly done, very sophisticated without being clever solely for the sake of being clever like so many current musicals. What today can stand comparison with Cole Porter? Or the sheer feeling of Showboat's 'He's Just My Bill'?
And I love to sing. My idea of paradise is three or four like-minded people gathered together over a drink on a Greek island or on a cold winter's evening to sing Broadway hits and romantic ballads. One of my great memories is of being on a boat in the Gulf of Finland, after having dinner with my Finnish publishers, coming back late on a summer night. It was still warm and the light shone off the water. And my hosts surprised me. It was bizarre - they knew all the words to Rodgers and Hammerstein. We sang and we sounded really good, our voices travelling over the water.
My second confession is Zulu, which is a wonderful film, a Boys Own adventure. I suppose this choice is also governed by a form of nostalgia, for when Britain was 'great', bringing so-called 'civilisation' to the world. I have it on tape and have seen it 30 times. I watch it at least twice a year. I know the film almost by heart; so well that a friend and I can act it out. He'll say 'How many miles can you march a day?' and I'll say, '30 miles' and he'll say, 'Zulus can run for 30 miles and fight a battle at the end of it.' I'm hooked on the feeling of encroaching threat it creates. I get a prickle at the back of my neck when the Zulus' feet drum. Is the thin red line, this heroic small band, going to get it this time?
What strikes me about my choices is that they are not intellectual. In fact, they might be considered evidence of middle brow tastes lingering under my 'high brow', serious writing . . .'
D M Thomas was in the confessional with John Lyttle
(Photograph omitted)
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