I caught a sad news item concerning one of my music icons: Jimmy Cliff, who died at the age of 81… although it wasn’t a bad innings, I suppose. He was a Jamaican reggae artist whose lyrics influenced me when I was trying to get my head around life in the 1960s and 70s. A contemporary of Bob Marley, though perhaps less well known… I probably had them on equal footing. His hits included, ‘Many Rivers to Cross’, ‘The Harder they Come’, ‘Wonderful World, Beautiful People’, ‘Suffering in the Land’ and ‘Vietnam’.

Funny old life… music has a way of bringing back memories.

Back in the 1990s, I worked in technical sales for an engineering company. At one point, I had occasion to team up with a fellow employee who was a welding expert, to visit a customer who had concerns about the weld quality of some components we had supplied. He was a black bloke called, Desmond Redman, and something of a character whose party piece was to describe himself as a ‘black man with a red man’s name’. My role was to sweet-talk the customer into accepting the parts, and his role was to confirm the integrity of the welding. We were successful on both accounts. I had a company car at the time, and as we were driving to the customer’s location, I played a CD of Jimmy Cliff on the car’s music system. Desmond was gobsmacked that I liked Jamaican reggae… it turned out he was a huge fan of the artist. When the refrains of the first track rang out, he turned to me and exclaimed, “I thought you were just a middle-aged honkey!” I wasn’t offended… everyone was politically incorrect in those days. He introduced me to other reggae artists, and I introduced him to Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Fair exchange!

Then in the early 2000s, I had an office-based role, and worked with a young man called, Johnny Bull. Yet another of life’s characters, who liked to introduce himself as, ‘Johnny the Bull’. He had an old soul, and loved 60s, 70s and 80s rock and pop, though had never encountered much reggae. I lent him a CD of Jimmy Cliff, and it blew his mind. He confessed he’d played, ‘Vietnam’ continuously on loop for about two hours. It’s a song about a young man fighting in the Vietnam war, who writes a letter home telling his girlfriend and his friends that he’ll be home soon. The day after the letter is received, his mother gets a telegram bluntly advising her that her son is dead. I told him that Bob Dylan considered that track to be one of the best protest song he’d ever heard. We both agreed it was one hell of a recommendation.

As I march through my seventies, song lyrics (and poetry) still mean a lot to me.

In the words of Jimmy Cliff… ‘Hey there, sunshine, don’t let me down’.

And in the words of Bob Dylan… ‘It ain’t dark yet, but it’s getting there’.

And in the words of Dylan Thomas… ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’.