My Favourite Things (x 2)

When Julie met John

I was 11 or 12 when I fell in love with Julie Andrews in the Queen’s Cinema in Newcastle. The Queen’s was the most luxurious of all the cinemas in town, with plush velvet seats, a grand staircase, enormous loudspeakers and, most spectacularly, the wondrous delights of Cinerama.

Cinerama was a widescreen innovation that projected images simultaneously from three synchronized 35 mm projectors onto a huge, deeply curved screen, which produced a visual impact more stunning than anything I’d seen before. The name alone evoked spectacular invention and I'm still inclined to believe that by adding the suffix ‘erama’ to any word it will be transformed and delivered from mundanity: ‘Shoperama', ‘Picnicerama’, ‘Substackerama'…

Life was larger and more intense at the ‘Queenserama’ so it was no wonder I fell in love when the opening theme music twirled and Julie swirled (or was it the other way round?) while my world was filled with The Sound of Music. 

Later in the film, during a dramatic thunderstorm that presaged the Nazi blitzkrieg, Julie comforted the Von Trapp children who were frightened by the storm. She advised them that whenever she was scared by something she simply thought of her favourite things and then felt much better. Cue the song.

Watch: My Favourite Things on YouTube

The wholesome profundity of her advice wasn't wasted on me when she recommended that when the dog bites or the bee stings all you need do is think of your favourite things and then you won’t feel so bad. Despite Julie’s list of favourite things seeming a bit soppy to me – whiskers on kittens, raindrops on roses, bright copper kettles and all that – her words hit home. I left the cinema floating on a cloud of Julie’s prelapsarian loveliness and sage advice. She may have been an insoluble problem for those nuns but for me she was a thing of beauty who could do no wrong.

At the time, we had a stereogram the size of a sideboard with two 78s and a copy of South Pacific that nobody ever played. My pleas for the Sound of Music soundtrack went unheeded so I had to content myself with listening out for it on the radio, which sustained me for quite a while. 

But then puberty came along: my voice broke and suddenly Julie’s platitudes no longer did the trick. As life became more challenging, Julie’s ‘cream-coloured ponies’ were less convincing when I got a dodgy school report or was caught smoking on the music room roof. As one does, I put away childish things and became a man – leaving Julie somewhere behind.

Many years passed and I must have been in my 40s when I began listening closely to jazz. I travelled from Duke to Count to Monk to Miles, eventually reaching John Coltrane. I bought a CD of Coltrane’s one day and discovered to my surprise a 20 minute version of My Favourite Things. I put it on and was instantly transported and entranced by Coltrane’s speed, virtuosity and energy. The early bars sounded like My Favourite Things as I knew it but pretty quickly he and the guys got bored by all that and took it to a wild, untamed and unknown place where, for sure, I was unlikely to find the Von Trapp children or the blessed Julie.

As luck would have it, the version I first heard was Live in Stockholm 1961 when he was arguably at the height of his creative powers. Backed up by an incredibly talented set of musicians in McCoy Tyner (piano), Eric Dolphy (flute/alto sax), Elvin Jones (drums) and Reggie Workman (bass) this is one of his most famous recordings and you can listen it to it here on YouTube.

Coltrane’s raindrops were a tsunami of sound that drowned me in their flowing freedom. Those cute kittens had become wild lions who roared with passion while their whiskers vibrated with electricity. Somebody had torn the string off the brown paper packages and revealed a wild heart pulsating with Dervish rhythms and bebop. Dogs growled and bees swarmed like a plague of groovy locusts until I was exhausted by the unbelievable spontaneity of it all. After a sax-propelled ride around the block, Coltrane and the guys eventually brought me back home – changed forever. 

These days I appreciate both versions. Julie’s ‘snowflakes that stay on my nose and eyelashes’ have an innocent nostalgia about them. But when dogs bite and bees sting, it’s Coltrane I turn to and then I genuinely don’t feel so bad.