Simon Smith's way-out playlist

It’s got to be a baby boomer thing, has it, this new wave of funeral directors whose most distinguishing characteristic is that they are nothing like (old school) funeral directors? Not necessarily. I can think of some who have not come fresh to funeral directing in middle age. This is not exclusively a counter-culture thing. These new funeral directors are radical, for sure, but not in an angry or iconoclastic way. They have not spurned funerary traditions, they have simply left them standing. They are thoughtful and intelligent. And for those people who do not want a full-on religious funeral, they join up the care of the body of the person who’s died to the creation of their farewell ceremony; they can do both. There is immense value in that – especially to baby boomers, who have reinvented more or less everything they have encountered throughout their lives, and now, with their parents and not a few of them standing on the brink of eternity, are beginning to give to death culture the sort of makeover they once gave to youth culture.

Two such new-wave funeral directors are Simon Smith and Jane Morrell of green fuse contemporary funerals. They have a funeral shop in Totnes where people drop in and chat about funerals. I’m always interested to know what these two are thinking. So when I heard that Simon had been given an hour slot on the Carl Muson Show on Exeter’s Phonic FM I just had to find out what he’d said. By dint of employing those devious and menacing investigative ploys which have made the Good Funeral Guide the impressively terrifying consumer resource it has become, I managed to obtain a CD of the show by the underhand expedient of asking Simon nicely to send me a copy, which, because he’s the most agreeable of fellows, he was kind enough to do.

The show centres on Simon’s playlist of what he reckons to be really good songs to play at a funeral – “the ones I want to introduce others to, not the most popular.” The songs are interspersed by chat.

The chat covers all manner of thought-provoking areas. The absence of rules around funerals – the fact that there are hardly any (so long as you do not outrage public decency). The importance of families participating “to the extent that they can ... we see ourselves as permission givers.” The suggestibility of the newly bereaved, and the importance of “offering them choices, not channelling them.” The way that a death alters status within a family, a community, a workplace. The way it alters titles, too – a daughter becomes an orphan, a husband a widower.

Reflecting on his work as a celebrant, Simon says, “We don’t quite meet a lot of very interesting and fascinating people.” It reminded me of something Garrison Keillor once said: "They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days."

Considering the number of people who are not signed up to a faith group, whether religious or atheistic, Simon reckons that two-thirds of the population is currently not being catered for.

He talks about the denialist effect of two world wars on attitudes to death (everyone had had enough of it) and attitudes to dead bodies (ditto). He talks about the importance of death being “part of life, not tidied away,” and the value of spending time with someone who’s died: “The funeral doesn’t pass in such a blur if people have spent time with the body.”

He concludes with a wonderful quote: “We’re always standing on the edge of loss trying to retrieve human meaning from something that’s precious that has gone.”

Here is Simon’s playlist. Open Spotify now and type in the following:

You’ve Got A Friend – James Taylor

Spirit In The Sky – Norman Greenbaum

Amazing Grace – Elvis Presley (“People start swaying to that.”)

You’re The First, The Last, My Everything – Barry White

My Sweet Lord – George Harrison

Samba Pa Ti – Santana

Dido's lament

Check this out. BBC Radio Four's Soul Music. All about Dido's lament. You've got seven days starting now!

Highlight is the Jeff Buckley version (above). An extraordinary interpretation.

Another great programme from a great show.

My Way sucks? No, it KILLS!

I am indebted to Pat McNally for this. And while I might have added it to my post about My Way, I feel it’s too good to bury.

Over in the Philippines, it seems, karaoke is a popular pastime. According to the New York Times, after a hard day’s work, there’s nothing a weary person likes more than to find a bar, glug a beer and belt out a classic or two.

This is not a matter of audience indifference. You’ve got to be good or you get stabbed: In the past two years alone, a Malaysian man was fatally stabbed for hogging the microphone at a bar and a Thai man killed eight of his neighbors in a rage after they sang John Denver’s Take Me Home, Country Roads.

One song is strictly off limits everywhere. Simply too dangerous. My Way. The authorities do not know exactly how many people have been killed warbling My Way in karaoke bars over the years in the Philippines, or how many fatal fights it has fueled. But the news media have recorded at least half a dozen victims in the past decade and includes them in a subcategory of crime dubbed the “My Way Killings."

Why?

Butch Albarracin, the owner of Center for Pop, a Manila-based singing school that has propelled the careers of many famous singers, was partial to what he called the “existential explanation.”

"‘I did it my way’ — it’s so arrogant,” Mr. Albarracin said. “The lyrics evoke feelings of pride and arrogance in the singer, as if you’re somebody when you’re really nobody. It covers up your failures. That’s why it leads to fights.”

The song never leads to carnage at polite British funeral. But I wonder if it leaves a subliminal bad taste in the mouth?

Read the entire New York Times piece here.

Singers for Funerals

From their press release:

Singers for Funerals is the brainchild of two professional opera singers, mezzo soprano Kirsty Young and soprano Toni Nunn. Both have performer with professional opera companies across the UK and beyond, including Kirsty's own company, Hatstand Opera. Between them, the two ladies have sung in over 600 venues in the UK, from cathedrals to tiny parish churches, theatres to town halls, mansions to marquees.

Kirsty Young is keen to bring all that performing experience to provide quality singing for funerals:
"After singing at various funerals over the years, we realised how music could be a great comfort to family members at a difficult time, by celebrating what their loved one enjoyed in life. It is often very difficult for churches to provide a choir to sing at funerals or cremations. Many families therefore had no choice but to use recorded music, where they might have preferred a real 'live' singer. We give families back that option for live music, sung by an experienced professional, at an affordable price."

I like them. Check out their website and their voices here.

WHEN I’M 64 – music for Babyboomer Funerals

Simon Smith of green fuse contemporary funerals had a piece published in October's Funeral Service Journal, the undertakers' trade journal, which, I feared, had something of a flower of the desert about it. Despite the best efforts of its excellent editor, Brian Parsons, funeral directors are not great readers, nor are they great writers.

I asked Simon if I might put what he had written before more fertile eyes. He agreed. Here it is:

The earliest babyboomers are now 64, and many

are prepared to think about funerals, sweeping

away the 20th Century taboo with regard to

death. If you are one of them, one thing you

probably know is that you don’t want a Victorian

style funeral, with solemn black, a vicar and

Abide With Me. What you’ll want is something

different. And the music definitely must be

different, to reflect your own particular taste.

I always advise that the best music to play at a

funeral is the music the person who has died

loved, and which family and friends associate

with them. One lady in her sixties came into

Showaddywaddy’s Under The Moon Of Love and

went out to Abba’s I Have A Dream, another had

Blue Hawaii by Elvis. One man had his heartthrob

Doris Day singing The Deadwood Stage

(“Whipcrackaway!”) at the end of the ceremony.

I love music and I have studied over three

hundred songs for lyrics, style and tempo, many

of which have actually been played at funerals

and some of which are my own personal choices,

and have come up with a Babyboomer Top 20

(not in any particular order):

Read the rest of Simon's piece here.

Got that summer's over feeling? Grieve it.

Do the waning of days and the coming of autumn make you come over elegiac? It probably depends on the length and sunniness of the summer. If it was brief and wet, that first nip in the air leaves you feeling cheated. But if the summer was long and glorious, the coming of autumn feels reasonable and seasonable. There’s a sense of relief, even.

Just how we feel about human lives, the short and the long, the happy and the sad.

Over in Bethany Beach, Delaware, they have a funeral on Labor Day to mark the end of summer—a jazz funeral. The expired summer, represented by a mannequin in a casket, is carried in procession to the town’s bandstand for a concert. Says the event’s founder, Paul Jankovic, "The most important thing is you're guaranteed to have a wonderful time. Instead of standing on the sidelines watching a parade, (those in attendance) fall in behind us as we walk down the boardwalk, just like the jazz funerals they have in New Orleans."

Read the full story here.

At the top of the page, the Piccolo Funeral Band, agreeably lunatic street performers from Germany (where else?)

And below the good people of Bethany Beach mourn the death of summer 2009

All hail to the Green Street Mortuary band!

The best things in life have a signature tune, a tune forever associated with, and evocative of, a time, a place, a person -- a soap.

Funerals have signature tunes, too. As a celebrant, every time I hear Oasis’s Stop Crying Your Heart Out I think of the lad who died at Glastonbury: Hold up / Hold on / Don't be scared, / You'll never change what's been and gone … Stop crying your heart out. Every time I hear Kelis’s Lil Star I think of the lovely man whose children kept hearing it on their way to see him in hospital. There is nothing special about me was how their dad self-deprecatingly thought of himself, but not them, not them. He never actually heard the song himself, but that makes it no less perfect for him. Yesterday we had the Moody Blues’ I Know You’re Out There Somewhere, so that’s a new one for me.

Not all funeral signature tunes are memorable to me -- Katherine Jenkins has sung Time to Say Goodbye at so many funerals she’s lost all specificity. Not the case for the people who were there.

Likely enough, you have a favourite song -- the one you call ‘my song’. That’s probably more than just a signature tune, it’s more likely your soundtrack. This notion came to me when I was looking at one of Louise’s little life films.

I’m trying to work out what mine is, now. I know that it can’t and couldn’t be a piece of classical music: a classical piece wouldn’t work for anybody. "Strange how potent cheap music is," said Noel Coward. He ought to know; he wrote enough. He's right, too, dammit: it's got to be something pop, something that can play over a photmontage of your life. 

You may have a very clear idea what yours is. Perhaps this is something that others must decide for us.

I know I favour something joyously anarchic. I’ve toyed with the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain and am presently inclining towards the Green Street Mortuary Band. Here’s a band that plays for Chinese funerals in San Francisco. It’s a longstanding tradition here. The band’s repertoire comprises all manner of Christian hymns, a custom inspired by military bands in British-occupied Hong Kong. The Chinese don’t mind about this at all; all they care about is that it sounds good.

It does, too, in a most agreeably chaotic way. The bass drummer habitually sets off car alarms, adding to the melodic cacophony. Find out more about this fascinating, wonderful band here. Enjoy the YouTube vid.