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RICHARD'S CHOICES
Choice 1 - Whose Garden Was This?
Choice 2 - The Living Years
Choice 3 - The Children Are Listening

Choice 1

Song - Whose Garden Was This?

Writer - Tom Paxton

Performer - Tom Paxton

Recorded - 1970

People have been worried about the damage we, as humans, are doing to our environment for far longer than Climate Change and Greta Thunberg. Back in the 1960s there were no controls on waste spillage or air pollution. In 1970 an American senator, Gaylord Nelson, wanted, like Greta, to create an awareness of the damage being done to our world. He created Earth Day as a way to bring this danger to more people's attention.

The first Earth Day took place on April 22nd 1970 and twenty million Americans demonstrated in different U.S. Cities. At midnight, an American folk singer, Tom Paxton, sang a song he wrote especially for the day. Listen to the words carefully. It imagines a world where we have effectively destroyed nature and all we once knew is gone. The singer has heard about it but......was it really true.

Earth Day is celebrated every year now all around the globe. Just like Earth Day, Greta Thunberg's "School Strike for Climate" outside the Swedish parliament brought greater awareness. Millions of young people across the world joined her Fridays For Future strikes. My generation have blah, blah, blahed for too long. Do we want our legacy to be the world imagined in the song. Just a little personal note here. When I was young most homes had front gardens with lawns and flowers and shrubs. They looked lovely if you walked by. Do you really like concrete? Did they really have gardens?

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One of the reasons for creating this section is to show that we can all interpret things in a different way. This is my interpretation of this song but I see it in a different way as I have got older, from a different view point

Choice 2

Song - The Living Years

Writer - B A Robertson and
Mike Rutherford

Performer - Mike and the Mechanics

Recorded - 1988

"The Living Years" was written in 1988 by BA Robertson and Mike Rutherford and recorded by Mike's group, called Mike and the Mechanics. Rutherford said about the song that they had recently lost their fathers and they looked at how attitudes had changed. Around the two world wars, boys wanted to be like their fathers but then it all changed and boys wanted to be completely different.

The song portrays the generation gap and how it became difficult to talk to your parents. It says this in each verse. The chorus, beginning "say it loud" looks at the situation when the parent dies. It is then too late to mend any rift. I particularly like the lines "we open up a quarrel between the present and the past, we only sacrifice the future....."

When I first heard the song I was the young man trying to be different. Now I'm the old guy, the father. I was lucky with my father. He didn't just hear, he listened. He didn't understand me but he accepted me. He didn't like my long hair but only ever suggested I should have it cut. It never built a gap between us. I even wrote him a song too after he died. Nevertheless I realised after he died that there was so much we hadn't talked about, so little that I really knew of him. Talk between generations is precious. We can learn so much from each other.

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Choice 3

Song - The Children Are Listening

Writer - the late Peter Yarrow

Performer - the late Peter Yarrow

Recorded - unknown

This song says it all in the first four lines. Whatever we, as adults, do or say, children will hear. We cannot be sure that our influences will shape their lives but it would seem likely. As parents one would hope that we want our children to behave well in society although of course what is the definition of "well". If they see that we don't, neither may they. As the song says "grown-ups rage and hate-filled words are ringing in their ears". Small children, babies, react to noise and, as they grow they will recognise noise which comes from angry human voices. They will think that is how one can behave.

While you can try to protect young children from things, it is more that adult behaviour should change. If adults criticise the behaviour of children, then those adults must share most of the blame. If you know someone is violent you wouldn't want children or be near that. Yet angry words can have the same effect, emotionally and psychologically. Don't surround your child with that either, if you can avoid it.

Peter Yarrow, who wrote the song, was so worried about the effects that these things can have on young people that he set up something called Operation Respect with his daughter. Part of their reason for that was that they heard a song which you will too next week. Listen to this one and, if you're an adult, think about the effects you may be having.

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