003: The Kinks, caravan holidays and dad jokes

From "Days" to Shania Twain, music journalist Danny Wright on the records that connect him to his dad.

Welcome to My Mum Loved This Song, a series of conversations about music and grief.

50 percent of proceeds from today's newsletter will be donated to Cancer Research UK, so please consider a paid subscription if you're able to.

"It's about grabbing the days as they come and remembering people in the fondest way you can."

Today's interview is with Danny Wright, a freelance music journalist who's written for publications like the Guardian, Crack Magazine, The Quietus, Vice and London in Stereo.

Danny and I have known each other since we were both writing for London in Stereo (RIP, shout out Jess and Dave!), and as soon as I had the idea for My Mum Loved This Song I knew I wanted him to be involved. In November, 2020, Danny published a piece on Vice titled " Without Live Music, I Wouldn’t Have Been Able to Overcome Grief." Deep in lockdown and almost six months into life without my mum, his words about the catharsis that live shows offer him helped me make sense of my own yearning for the return of live music experiences.

"Being at a gig is so much more than watching the people on the stage, or even really the music itself," he wrote. "It's a cathartic experience. It allows you to breathe again and feel the joy of being with people who make you happy, or be out in the world, surrounded by a crowd, but at the same time, alone (I love a solo gig). It's getting a 6 AM bus home with friends after a five-hour Four Tet set as the fuzzy morning light rises between buildings. Or watching Janelle Monae crowd surfing over the Roundhouse and smiling at my wife, just as I was realising she was going to be my wife."

Five years earlier, Danny wrote a piece for the Guardian, about six months after the death of his dad, Clive. He hadn't set out to publish it or even pitch it, but, like me, he was getting things out of his head and onto the page in an attempt to make sense of his grief. "Death with dignity: how music eases grief's deep ache" would become one of the pieces he's most proud of. Since then, Danny told me, he's continued "thinking about the relationship between music and grief and loss. And not even the grief of it all, but the hopeful side of music and how that can pull you through."

If you're not a subscriber but you'd like to make a one-off payment to My Mum Loved This Song in support of Cancer Research UK, you can do so here:

Thank you for reading, here's my conversation with Danny Wright.

I'd love to hear about your dad. What's his name, and can you tell me about him and your relationship?

He was called Clive Beverly Wright, and he always hated his middle name! He never told me about it, I saw it on his passport. It was my gran, who I never got to meet, but her favourite singer was called Beverly. He was a headmaster at a school in Liverpool, where I grew up. He was quite strict, but also very loving and inspired me in many ways. I love sport now because of him. We used to play tennis and football together.

I'd always thought we had completely different musical tastes. He liked '60s music, and never really got into more modern music. Even as he grew older, he stuck with what he liked when he was young. But as I've looked back on it—especially with the song I'm going to talk about—there was a lot that we shared. I remember one year he asked me for the Shania Twain album for Christmas. I was 17, thought I was way too cool for school, and I was like, "Why the hell do you want that?!" Now I realise he was bang on the money!

We had a great upbringing and a really loving family. We were very lucky. We went on holiday all the time in a caravan across France, the Cotswolds and Cornwall. Apart from me, my whole family are teachers, so we'd go away for four weeks in the summer. We were always traveling together in the caravan, playing tennis, eating pizzas. When you lose someone, you get to reflect a bit more. I always kicked up a fuss about those holidays, especially as I was getting older, and now I remember them so fondly.

I had a similar thing, actually. We've got a static caravan in North Wales and I went through a phase of thinking it was so boring. For a long time there was no internet, and I got to the age of texting boys and I couldn't text them when I was in the caravan! But now it's my most treasured place, and I'm so lucky and grateful that I had those times with my family.

I'm sure my kids will be the same. I think I'm taking them on these amazing holidays, and they'll be like, "Oh, it's so embarrassing going on holiday with dad."

What's the record you'd like to talk about today?

So I had this memory that my first ever gig—and I've told this to a lot of people—was The Kinks in Southport. I couldn't remember the year, but I knew it was when I was 10 or 12 years old. So I was like, my dad made my first gig cool because he took me to The Kinks when I didn't have any music taste. And then last night, I wanted to find out what the actual date was, and it just wasn't anywhere on the internet. And I found a wiki-gigs thing for The Kinks and there was nothing for Southport in the '90s! Then I went down a wormhole and found this guy chatting about following The Kinks round in the '90s, and that a gig in Southport was announced just a few days before. So it's not on any posters or any T-shirts or anything. It just happened. And it actually did happen, I was worried I'd made up this memory! But yes, November 20th, 1994 in Southport Theatre. If it was up to me, my first gig would have been Fun Lovin' Criminals four years later, so I'm glad my dad made my first gig The Kinks.

My song is "Days" by The Kinks, which I genuinely love as a song, beside the context, the history and what it means to me. It's such a beautiful, melancholic song, but also really hopeful at the same time. The Kinks were one of my dad's favourite bands. When he died, and my mum left me in charge of picking songs to play at his funeral, it just seemed so apt. It's about grabbing the days as they come and remembering people in the fondest way you can. It just seemed perfect.

It makes me feel a lot of things when I hear it now. I don't listen to it very often because it feels quite heavy. If it came up on Spotify, I think it'd kind of strike right at my heart. But I still love listening to it in certain moments, remembering him.

What's the picture that comes to mind if you think about your dad listening to music?

We had a record player at home, and he had a lot of records, so it would be him putting those on. If people were coming round and he wanted to impress them, he'd put a record on and set the mood. But I think it's our holidays most of all. I specifically remember those little tape cases you'd fill to go on holiday, and he would have them all set out. Fleetwood Mac's Greatest Hits was a constant. He drove from our house in Liverpool, down to Dover to cross into France, about a seven-hour drive. There was a lot of me requesting songs, my dad choosing songs, my mum choosing songs. That's what I always picture when we're listening to music, all of us in the car together with my brother, too.

And how do you think your relationship with music has changed since your dad passed away?

So in my day job I'm a copywriter, and he had no idea what that was really. When I was a music journalist, it was when I was published in the Guardian that he understood what I was doing. He was very proud of me, and told me how proud he was when that type of thing happened. When he died, I was going through his stuff and I found a Twitter account that he'd started just to follow me. That was one of the things that really choked me up. He was always vocal about how much he cared and how proud he was, but that kind of stuff was heartbreaking, but also really special. I was thinking back to some of my Tweets and wondering what the hell he would have thought of them all! But yeah, that was a nice moment.

After he died, I knew I needed music to help me through. But I also felt a bit guilty. A month after he died, and I'd come back to London and left mum on her own, I was like, "Should I be going to a gig? How should I react? How should I deal with this? What is the right way? What is the right thing to do? What is the right way to act?" I went to a gig and it lifted me up so much. I didn't feel guilty because I knew he would have told me to go. If he could have spoken to me, he would have said, "Just go, feel better and do the thing you love." And so I think that's one way that music has helped, and how my relationship with it has changed a bit. I think as a younger person, I used to listen to sadder music when I was sad. I wallowed in it. Now I've gone the other way, and I try to listen to music that will lift me out of those things. There might be an element of sadness too, but I listen to optimistic, hopeful music that points to the future.

I think there's something about when you've been through something that difficult, obviously you do have to sit in it sometimes, but you also have to get on with your day and survive it. I definitely went through a stage of listening to really sad tunes. And now I don't think I listen to any, really.

There's also the realisation that, more than any other art form, music is the thing that you can pinpoint to loads of different memories in your life. You know, you don't think, "Oh, that film was out at the time that thing happened." It's always a song or an album that you've been listening to that can transport you back. The older you get, you realise you can't really control it, because it could be a song that happened to be playing on the radio that didn't mean anything to you, but now it's there as part of your memory.

What music do you think do you think your dad would enjoy today?

Probably Olivia Rodrigo. He loved Jake Bugg, that traditional, bluesy music, so stuff like that he would always listen to. I think he'd like Arctic Monkeys. There was a lot of stuff I thought he'd like and I'd play it to him and he'd be like, "No." My mum was more the person who'd walk past my room and she'd say, "I love that song!" I'd note it down each time over a few weeks or months and then make her a CD to play in the car. But my dad would always take the piss and say, "I think the CD is scratched, that sounds crap."

That's a real dad joke, that. How do you like to honour his memory today, musically?

I think there's songs that, either the feel of them or the emotion of them, make you sit with those feelings. It might not be specifically about my dad, but a maelstrom of different things. My mum's not very well at the moment, either. So, the Cameron Winter album, Heavy Metal, I've listened to that so much over the last few months. There are lines that make me think of my dad, lines that made me think of different situations I'm in, lines that made me think of the kids and [my wife] Chloe.

I think because it's ten years later now, it's not so much one song that will make me think of my dad, but the songs that have that emotive feel to them. I think that's a lot of what I've done with music over the last ten years. It gives a shape to those emotions. When they're just swirling around in your head, putting your headphones in and listening to music allows you to have a bit of focus, and helps you express yourself. I think writing that piece in the Guardian when I did, it had been six months since he died and I didn't really know what to do with a lot of things I was thinking about. So I wrote it all down. It really helped sort my head out a bit. I didn't even know if it would be published, I wrote it without a pitch.

If you could share a tool with somebody that's earlier on in their journey of navigating grief, what advice do you think you would give, as someone that's further down the line?

There's no wrong answer. If you find something, do it. Obviously being selfish isn't a good thing, but I think in those moments, you can be selfish, because people know what you're going through. Listening to music, or going out, not going out, whatever you want to do at that time, people will understand. Just do that thing that feels right in the moment—and find the song that will help.