This is a song, 'I Wish I Knew How It Would Feel To Be Free', that has astonishingly powerful resonances for me. And yet, until I found this on YouTube a few years ago, I don't think I'd ever seen this performance of it before; or indeed, any performance up to that date. It's entirely possible that I'd never heard the song all the way through before.
The reason it induces such a swoon of nostalgia in me is that it was used as the theme music for BBC1's weekly roundup of new cinema releases (imaginatively titled Film + last two digits of year in question), a Monday night fixture throughout my childhood and adolescence. I think it was originally presented by a journalist called Iain Johnstone (ah, well, Johnstone certainly covered for the more regular presenter a number of times later on, but I discovered the early days of the show had a number of different presenters, including Freddy Raphael and Joan Bakewell.... before my time!); but he soon ceded the position to Barry Norman, whose lugubrious wit in the role soon made him a popular figure, even something of a media celebrity (and the target of numerous comedy impressions). Norman helmed the series through most of the '70s and '80s, and on into the '90s - when I became a less regular watcher (overseas a lot; and without much access to television even when I was in the UK). I hadn't noticed at the time when it finally disappeared from British TV screens; but I learned online that it was cancelled in 1998 (when I was spending a year in Canada, on a law scholarship).
I really should not have been able to watch this as a child, since it was usually on after the Monday night film - and thus starting at well after 11pm, and sometimes after 11.30pm, and going on until around midnight. However, staying up LATE - especially for a film - was something that I had come to regard as the best of treats at a very early age, maybe as young as 4 or 5 years old; and I'm sure I made such a pain of myself when denied one of these treats that my parents soon began to give in to me. Once I'd proven that I could still get up in the morning and function at school the next day, they started allowing me to stay up until 10.30 or 11 every night, and occasionally until 12..... even when I was barely 10 years old. By the mid-70s, Barry was a Monday night addiction for me. This was where my love of cinema began - and particularly where my awareness of a broader cinema began, my first exposure to an artier sort of film (things that would never appear in my local 'fleapit' theatre; films I would only get to see years later, when they showed up in a late-night slot on BBC2, or when I finally had access to art cinemas as a student).
The music played every week under the opening montage of micro-clips of famous films (which remained largely unchanged for long periods - although I think they updated it occasionally during the course of each year to represent some of the recent big hits). It was also used during the show for shorter montages of the films to be featured that night. It could be quite a challenge to spot all of the excerpts - they were usually without sound and some were subliminally brief; and, as often as not, they were from films that I'd never actually seen. Even so, I usually did pretty well: my competitive film-buffery started early!
And so...... well, I've heard this tune - especially the opening few bars - countless hundreds of times; yet it's such a catchy little number that it never seems to lose its charm. The Beeb seems to be rather over-zealous in deleting any clips of the Film shows that turn up on Youtube; but here's a rather poignant little montage of Barry 'through the ages' - accompanied by what he once not unreasonably described as "the best theme music on television".
And here is the piece's composer, the great jazz pianist Billy Taylor, playing his original instrumental version (the one, I think, used as Barry Norman's theme for all those years) - for once! - all the way through.
Shortly after discovering the clip above, I learned through further online researches that Billy Taylor had generously 'donated' the song to one of my greatest musical heroes, the divine Nina Simone. Here she is, absolutely tearing the piece apart during her celebrated concert at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival. (You can find most of this show on YouTube in segments; but it really is worth sitting down to watch the whole thing from start to finish, if you can - it is one of the great moments in musical history.)
And here's a link to a more restrained - but still powerful - recording of this song by the great lady.
Enjoy.
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