Elektra had just remastered many of the band’s recordings and Manzarek was in the UK playing a few gigs and doing promotion.

I’d heard Ray in an earlier interview and just thought his wonderful speaking voice and a bag of records would make for a engaging programme – and so it proved,

The suggestion went into his management, and within days he sat down in a radio studio in London and proceeded to talk eloquently about the music that had influenced him and, in turn, the band he co-founded with Jim Morrison – The Doors.

The programme and its contents are now (I hope) archived away somewhere in the BBC.

But the webpage promoting the programme – ‘Ray Manzarek’s Summer Of Love’ – is part of the online archive, and you can hear extracts from it here.

Ray Manzarek’s Summer Of Love – webpage

The tunes below are four chosen by Ray for the hour-long show, which I can recall.

They provide a flavour of his own love of rhythm and blues, prompted he revealed by his desire to find an alternative to anodyne 50s American music like Patti Page’s (‘How Much Is That) Doggie In The Window.’

Plus two records from 1965 by the Beatles and Them that heralded the impact of mind-altering substances and how a particular sound could help define a song.

The Doors, of course, did their own thing.

But that few hours with Ray Manzarek, who’s died aged 74, certainly helped me fully appreciate how much the past and present informed The Doors journey into a musical future.

Ray Manzarek RIP.

Howlin’ Wolf – Smokestack Lightning

Muddy Waters – Hoochie Coochie Man

The Beatles – I’m Looking Through You

Them – Gloria

And the wait’s been well worthwhile.

‘Respectable Rebellion’ from Union Jill is a record I’ve been lucky to enjoy listening to since the turn of the year, thanks to a pre-release copy from my good friend John Wood.

John engineered the album with Clive Gregson producing.

And the result is a set of songs that any lover of acoustic music, harmony singing and the social history of the UK will savour.

The tone is set with the opening track, ‘The Queen of Holloway,’ which has a hypnotic hook and, like the rest of the album, tells a compelling story.

That’s one of the album’s strengths, marrying Sharon Winfield and Helen Turner’s close-knit vocals with lyrics that are a mile away from the predictable fare of many current performers.

I can’t recommend the album highly enough, and if you ‘re in the vicinity of the National Centre For Early Music in York this evening, you’re in for a treat.

Union Jill will be backed by a full band with Clive Gregson on guitar joining the girls for their big night.

Union Jill – Mad Alice

Union Jill – ‘Respectable Rebellion’ – audio clips

Union Jill blogpost – 14th September 2012

So it was pleasing to see his life and career marked so promptly in a special programme on BBC Four.

What became clear while watching ‘Sir Colin Davis With Love: In His Own Words’ was that it had been commissioned and recorded shortly before Sir Colin’s recent illness.

What emerged in John Bridcut’s sensitive and thoughtful portrait of the man were a number of deep truths about classical music and life itself.

Bridcut’s work as a documentary maker in the field of classical composers is celebrated elsewhere in these pages.

But here he took the opportunity to interview Sir Colin, allowing him space and time to reveal more about his musical life and career which had its fair share of ups and downs.

Davis was one of the first classical conductors I was aware of as a teenager, studying Beethoven’s symphonies for my ‘A’ level music course.

If memory serves, it was a recording of the 6th ‘Pastoral’ Symphony with the London Symphony Orchestra on the Phillips label.

What I particularly enjoyed about the programme was that Bridcut kept in the gaps and pauses between Davis’s answers.

Not every programme maker would have the confidence to let the camera keep rolling and then to resist the urge to move on to another topic with a new question, or over-edit and cram more material in.

There was poetry in the silences as Davis, clearly old and frail, reflected on musical moments that had left their mark on him and searched for the right words to articulate them.

As he did, Bridcut intercut marvellous performances from across half a century that captured a younger Davis, full of energy on the podium, maturing into a conductor whose final appearances needed the support of a chair.

A marvellous musician and a marvellous communicator of the music.

Sir Colin Davis With Love: In His Own Words – BBC iPlayer

I was brought up on a peninsula – surrounded on three sides by water – so daily life was punctuated by these magnificent structures.

As their original use has been superseded by satellite navigation and automated ways of alerting shipping to coastal dangers ahead, lighthouses have found new roles.

As long ago as 1984, I spent a week on holiday staying in a former lighthouse cottage, battered by the wind and waves of the Atlantic ocean.

And more recently, one former lighthouse I know well in North East England has been the venue for film showings.

Now the ever resourceful musician Thomas Dolby has used his experience of one particular lighthouse to fuel his latest project.

And judging by the trailer for the already award-winning documentary ‘The Invisible Lighthouse,’ the results look intriguing.

The Invisible Lighthouse – trailer

I’m hoping to get to one of the four ‘events’ Dolby is planning in the UK during May where the film will be shown combining live narration plus music from his career.

If you can’t get along, the two links below might provide an equally fascinating insight into the origins of lighthouses in the UK.

I read Bella Bathurst’s book ‘The Lighthouse Stevensons’ (Flamingo) when it came out in 1999, and was captivated by its tale of human ingenuity and endeavour in the face of overwhelming odds.

A tv documentary broadcast in 2012 is no longer available on the BBC iPlayer.

But lots of clips from it are, featuring lighthouse keepers sharing their mind-boggling experiences and the engineering triumphs behind the building of lighthouses in truly spectacular locations around the UK.

The Lighthouse Stevensons – documentary clips

The Lighthouse Stevensons – Bella Bathurst website

Among them was a British pianist called Victor Feldman – not yet 30 years old, but with a lifetime of jazz experience, first as a child prodigy drummer and then as a talented vibes player and percussionist.

By the time Miles came calling, Feldman had already lent his singular talents to other legendary jazz figures like Woody Herman, Benny Goodman and Cannonball Adderley.

But the sessions with Miles on 16th and 17th April 1963 proved to be significant in a number of ways.

Feldman contributed two tunes that are now regarded as jazz standards – ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ and ‘Joshua.’

While ‘Joshua’ is credited to Feldman, ‘Seven Steps’ is credited to ‘V.Feldman – M.Davis’ on the sleeve of the 2005 Columbia reissue of the ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ album.

But Victor (who died in 1987) was very clear about the ownership of the tune.

Quoted on the VictorFeldman.com website, put together by his eldest son Joshua, he’s quoted thus.

“I used to go to Miles’ hotel and we’d sit at the piano and figure out chord changes together. We worked something out on ‘Basin Street Blues,’ which we played on the date. I wrote an original, ‘Joshua,’ named for my eldest son.

“He (Miles) asked me to write another tune for the next date. I said, ‘It’s tomorrow, how can I?’ But that night after recording all day and working at the club at night, I went out to the car, sat in the back seat, and just wrote this tune. That was ‘Seven Steps To Heaven.’”

That places the recording of ‘Joshua’ on 16th April 1963 and ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ the following day.

So with both tunes having received thousand of recordings and performances over the past 50 years, this seems to me to be an anniversary that should be celebrated.

So impressed was Davis with Feldman’s playing and contribution to these sessions that he offered Victor the vacant piano stool in his quintet.

Amazingly, Victor said ‘no,’ but his reasons for doing so were totally sound.

He’d recently married and had a young son to provide for – plus life on the road over the years hadn’t done much for his health and sense of well-being.

So he returned to playing jazz clubs in Los Angeles and developing his career as a first-call studio session player.

His later credits on albums by such diverse artists as Steely Dan, Marvin Gaye, Joni Mitchell and Tom Waits bear testimony to the far-sightedness of that decision.

Ironically, the original recordings of both ‘Joshua’ and ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ featuring Feldman didn’t make the cut.

The following month, Davis relocated to Columbia’s 30th Street studio in New York and recorded both tunes with a new line-up of musicians.

Feldman’s place on piano was taken by Herbie Hancock with a 17 year-old Tony Williams joining the new Davis quintet on drums.

With Ron Carter on bass and Wayne Shorter joining the following year on saxophone, the personnel was in place to help Davis reinvent jazz yet again.

How that reinvention might have been different if Feldman had accepted Davis’s invitation we can only speculate.

But the fact is that ‘Seven Steps To Heaven’ remains a tune that jazz musicians revere.

Stan Getz – Seven Steps To Heaven

Lynne Arriale Trio – Seven Steps To Heaven

Chet Baker – Seven Steps To Heaven

GRP All Star Big Band – Seven Steps To Heaven

Victor Feldman’s Generation Band – Seven Steps To Heaven

The scene in Westminster Abbey as Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush) prepares the soon-to-be King George VI (Colin Firth) for his Coronation is particularly powerful.

But what I hadn’t noticed before is that the music composed by William Walton for the real 1937 Coronation is nowhere to be heard.

It’s the sort of commission that must give a composer nightmares.

But such was Walton’s success, it’s now a piece of music that is a part of the furniture at royal occasions nearly 80 years later.

The version I found on YouTube features the conductor Sir Adrian Boult, whose 13-cd set of recordings for EMI from the 1960s and 1970s I blogged about recently, and provides another musical link with the era of George VI.

William Walton – Crown Imperial (Coronation March)

But 30 years ago, when Granta magazine published its first list of 20 young British novelists to keep an eye on, it established a tradition that has helped both writers and readers.

Among the names featured in that first list were amongst others Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Pat Barker, Kazuo Ishiguro, Graham Swift, Rose Tremain…. all at the start of careers, which have blossomed and flourished.

Also featured in the first list was Ursula Bentley, who I interviewed at the time because she was originally from Sheffield, which meant the evening newspaper I worked for could get a local angle.

Her debut novel was called ‘The Natural Order’ (Secker and Warburg) and I remember phoning her in Switzerland where she was living at the time to do a brief interview.

Not a great novel reader myself, I actually enjoyed the book and expected to hear more about her in the years that followed… but didn’t.

Fast forward to 2003 and the last Granta list coming out, which prompted a Guardian journalist to see what had happened to Ursula Bentley.

I’ve attached a link to the resulting article because it’s a rather moving piece about being a writer and the fickle nature of success, particularly in light of the fact that Bentley died shortly after it was written.

Her books are still available via Abe Books for a few quid each, and 30 years on from her being highlighted alongside McEwan, Amis et al, it would be good to see her books receiving more attention.

Ursula Bentley: The One That Got Away – Guardian article

Ursula Bentley – AbeBooks website

The 2013 Granta list of Young British Novelists will be unveiled on BBC Radio 4′s ‘Front Row’ on 15th April.

Our village has the honour of being the last resting place of two winners of arguably the best-known steeplechase in the world.

Reynoldstown was a back-to-back winner in 1935 and 1936, and Well To Do took the prize in 1972.

It’s quite an historic double connection.

The National has been part of my sporting life for over half a century through the Foinavon pile-up race in 1967 through to the race that wasn’t in 1993.

Never a gambling family, our luck with sweepstakes down the years has been riddled with misfortune.

Worst of all was the year 1973 when my father got Crisp in his office sweep.

Miles out in front, Crisp was slowly caught and then finally overtaken in the last few strides by the great Red Rum in the first of his trio of wins.

So as the horses are lining up this afternoon at Aintree, millions of once-a-year punters will be hoping their each-way bet is in with a chance.

With that thought in mind, here’s a 1973 hit that was dominating the UK charts as Red Rum was beginning his Grand National odyssey.

Slade – Cum On Feel The Noize

As Nick’s mentor, it’s been something of a labour of love.

Using a core group of musicians and performers, he’s allowed each song covered to develop and mature.

So if you didn’t catch one of the concerts, we now have a new cd of the best performances from gigs in London and Melbourne.

‘Way To Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake’ (Navigator Records) is released on 15th April.

Having recently declared my own belief in these pages that Nick’s songs are almost uncoverable, it’s also true to say that some of Boyd’s line-up succeed in their task.

My own favourite remains Krystle Warren’s ‘Time Has Told Me,’ which I blogged about when the Barbican show was repeated on tv.

Certainly, Nick fans will find their own favourites to enjoy, and the project, patiently executed as it has been, deserves to gain a wider audience for the music.

Navigator Records – official website

Kyrstle Warren – Time Has Told Me

Take the latest ‘big idea’ series to grace the airwaves of BBC Radio 4.

Put in one sentence, it’s about the role sound has played in the last 100,000 years of human history.

Our guide through this story is Professor David Hendy of Sussex University, one of whose books about radio I’m currently staring at on the bookshelf in the room where I write.

Made in handy-sized 15 minute chunks, scheduled between ‘The World at One’ and ‘The Archers,’ we’re about half way through its 30 parts.

What I love about it is that it allows room for radio to do what it does best – and let sound speak for itself.

The latest episode I heard made particularly effective use of acoustics in large buildings, designed for worship.

The series website has all the episodes so far broadcast, and I’m sure you’ll find something to catch your ear.

Noise: A Human History – BBC iPlayer