It’s the Big Garden Birdwatch this weekend in the UK. This involves participants observing their garden – or a local patch of nature – for an hour and recording all the different species (and highest number of each in one gathering) of birds in one hour.
I will probably take part but I know already that my tally will comprise mainly of black backed gulls, feral doves and magpies. But there may just be the odd blue tit, house sparrow or robin – if I am lucky!
It had me thinking about references to birds in Simple Minds songs. Obviously the first one I thought of immediately was Wonderful In Young Life with Jim referencing “crowded swallow skies”.
I felt it too obvious to choose Wonderful In Young Life (again!) for MMM – we all know how much I love it!
The next song that came to mind was their recent cover of Richard Hawley’s Long Black Train. A bird reference right from the opening line – and several more within.
I have now been grappling over which to choose from the others. I needed some help to jog the memory. Song titles were enough to jog the memory while others came to the fore as I made my way to the Dream Giver “songs” section.
Woman is one I could have plumbed for “picture of some strange tattooed bird on her thigh”. Geez, that song is sexy AF! And I loooove Charlie’s guitar on that. But, no. As much as I love Woman…another time.
I pondered If I Had Wings….but it never has been a song that I have ever really been too drawn to. It’s quite mystical with pretty ambiguous lyrics…which I usually love. I don’t know. Reading the lyrics compared to the musical structure of the song, and reading Jim’s words about how the song came to be – it just doesn’t seem to work. The music and lyrics seem disjointed and mismatched. Just my feeling on it. And, well there is no actual mention of birds anyway.
I was left with two big contenders – Wall Of Love or, the song I have finally decided to go with. And there’s a special place for me for Wall Of Love, thanks to Valentine’s Day and SM being in NZ in 2017, and Jim choosing to use some fan art I had done for the song to thank the crowd at the gig in Auckland that night.
But in the end I have gone for this. It started to play in my head shortly after Wonderful In Young Life, because I pretty quickly heard the line (after having just heard “a crowded swallow skies” play in my mind) “birds of a feather always stay together, and never separate no fear”. So it had to be…
I Wish You Were Here…