8.
Edward Elgar – Enigma Variations
If there is one piece of English music I should have written but didn’t [it is ‘Nimrod’]… in fact this is the only English song that makes me truly jealous of the composer. If there’s one piece of music that conjures up the England I knew as a child of four or five – there were steam trains going between every village, the hedgerows were full, there were moths and butterflies everywhere, it was so different I can’t even explain. If there was one piece of music that illustrated this lost world of England, it would be this, and it’s a piece of music that’s important now. When I see the boys in the band we will put this music on and it’s very rare that I do such a thing.
I played this music at my father’s funeral and Big Paul [Ferguson, Killing Joke drummer] he was with [bassist] Youth this Christmas and his father died and for us in Killing Joke it was massive when Paul’s dad went, ‘cos all our fathers are dead now. We were all close to our dads and each other’s dads, so it’s funny, here we are in our fifties and the last of our fathers have died. Bearing in mind what I’ve just told you, it’s very hard to listen to this piece of music. It still provokes very powerful emotions in me, which I guess is what the best music does. I won’t say nostalgia, ‘cos it’s so much more than that. When you hear ‘Nimrod’ you get this feeling of a very different place to the England today and all the things we lost, another reason why I couldn’t live here [the UK] today.
