Words, music, voice, piano: Dai Griffiths

'Classical music doesn't go like this': a midpoint between Randy Newman and the New York Dolls. 'Get rid of David Bowie': easier said than done.

Classical music doesn't go like this

Words/music Dai Griffiths
Vocal Craig Prosser
Piano Dai Griffiths
'Bad day at the office' is from around 2001, and had this programme note:
'Paying someone with a degree in marketing to redesign a brand and logo for British Steel didn’t do much good for the 2,800 tinplate workers sacked in South Wales during 2001. This song sees the world from the point of view of someone who has to make those ‘tough decisions’. To paraphrase Henri Matisse in 1908, one ideal purpose for art is to function like a good armchair for a tired businessman.'
Apologies for four seconds of incompetent silence before it starts.

Bad day at the office

Dai Griffiths retired from Oxford Brookes University on July 31 2020, having arrived there September 1990. Due to the events of 2020, a social gathering proved sadly impossible but his retirement speech is included here as an audio recording. Since it lasts around 55 minutes, few listeners are expected to last the distance: several cups of tea and judicious use of the pause button are recommended. Reflecting on thirty years' experience, the views expressed are his alone. Dai's first book, on the album OK Computer by local rock band Radiohead, was 'dedicated to the staff and students in the Music Department at Oxford Brookes University since I arrived there in1990' (2004, p. xiii), and the same could be said of much of his lengthy oration.

Retirement speech 13.7.20

Union Song
Dai Griffiths, words, music, piano, voice

This is a stirring song in praise of trade unions. The song as much as thirty years old, this recording is from 2009, done 'in one take'. If there was an inspiration, it might have been the great Dick Gaughan, whose 1985 Live in Edinburgh album was a vinyl favourite. The reference to Margaret Thatcher would have been current, but doesn't even now sound especially anachronistic since, so far as I can tell, her long and troublesome shadow continues. 

For all the song's gospel uplift, the elevation of key changes, the bashing endured by the piano and my shouty voice, ‘Union Song’ was always something of a lament: if unions 'are all right by me', singular, thinking collectively might be gone. But the song is also a celebration of the heroism, sacrifice, and good sense of unions. 

The teacher in the third verse is my Auntie Grace, of Kidwelly in Carmarthenshire, who did indeed teach English, possibly in a secondary modern, as they were called: the secondary schools in Britain distinctly lower-class set next to grammar schools. She was a lovely, diminutive, soft-spoken lady, observant of proprieties. I well recall her telling me more than once - partly since I was going to become a teacher - what her father had in turn told her when she started her career, in the 1930s or 40s at a guess. 'He said to me', she began and, going by her voice and demeanour, I’d expect her to say something a bit Thatcherite like 'be sure to take out a pension!', or 'stay the right side of the headmaster!' But no, her father said to her: join the union.

I've always been a union member: COHSE as a nurse, NUT as a school teacher, NATFHE then UCU as a university lecturer. I describe some of my time in the University union in my retirement speech (at around thirteen minutes).

On the virtue of unions, I also have another recording which I term Union Song: Prelude. Against an improvised 'Over the Rainbow', Harold Arlen's great piece, I read out a passage from the American pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty. (First published 1998, the passage is found at pp. 206-7 of Philosophy and Social Hope (1999)). If the prelude is played first, the music acts as a dominant preparation, as we say in the trade, C major, for the Union Song to follow, F major. But both tracks are sufficient in themselves.

Dai Griffiths

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