The fundamental things apply…

Within life’s repetitions, we might see individuals’ difference, freshness, novelty, divergence, innovations…

While taking a break in the homeland last week, we were travelling the coast road and the ever-vibrant @DavidWhite played the 1974 summer classic Beach Baby by The First Class.

As moods were lifted, it struck me that the horn in the final part of the track was used by the similarly vibrant Strawberry Switchblade in 1983 with their 1985 hit Since Yesterday.

But digging deeper, we inevitably find the 1974 and 1995 pop has used a refrain from 1915.
The opening fanfare from Since Yesterday and the horn from 3 minutes into Beach Baby is used in the third movement of Sibelius’s Symphony No. 5. It’s introduced after 1min 30 seconds and the musical motif is repeated and morphed throughout the finale.

Thinking of Switchblade, another borrowing that I have always noticed from the above is the wonderable Mike Scott’s The Whole of the Moon, which seems (to me anyway) to borrow Strawberry Switchblade’s vocal style if not essence. Halfway through The Whole of the Moon (after the trumpets) we hear Switchblade-esque “laaa la la la la laaaa” similar to the middle eight bars halfway through Since Yesterday.

“There’s nothing new under the sun…” a common proverb that originated from the Bible’s Ecclesiastes 1:9. “What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.”
There may be nothing new, but I think the fundamental things always apply. Within life’s repetitions, we might see individuals’ difference, freshness, novelty, divergence, innovation…
As time goes by… Play it (again) Sam!