I don't know if you remember — I certainly do — the ribbing I got when I bought this from Our Price on Bridge Street. I was exploring. I made no apologies then, and I'm really glad I did it now. Besides, I did like John Arlott, I love cricket, and it is on the Famous Charisma Label.
I used to wish I couldn't understand English so that I could appreciate the musicality of Arlott's voice without the words and their meanings get in the way.
But what meanings! These reminiscences have a poignancy as a 42-year-old that they couldn't have had for an 18-year-old. Of course, Arlott's memories all relate to personalities and happenings from before I was born, but hearing an older man recall how he became captivated with the sport and its characters as a boy now has a significant wistfulness.
It was recorded in Alderney, presumably at Arlott's home, and I love the way you can hear his carriage clock strike the quarter hour in the background at one point. On the first side, you can tell where the edits are because he has shifted in his chair or changed the distance between mouth and microphone between takes, and the acoustics are subtly different. By Side 2, he's either hit his stride and done it one take, or settled on a consistent set-up.
There are many stories of humour, courage and cricketing statesmanship (marred only very briefly by reporting a Len Hutton joke about West Indians wanting self-government without noting its patronising attitude to another race). I'd never heard of C.B. Fry before I listened to this album, and he's always been the stand-out character for me: the Oxford Blue who played cricket and football for England, broke the long jump world record between puffs on his cigar, then — it goes on and on — wrote a novel as well as for the popular press, advised the League of Nations and said he'd been offered the throne of Albania (Arlott reports this last point as fact, though Wikipedia suggests it may have been a fabrication). Apparently his record of six consecutive centuries in 1901 is unbroken in first class cricket to this day.
Arlott's portrait of Fry would be breathless coming from anyone else, but he invests it with just the right amount of gravitas. And that music in his voice, in the beautiful way he phrases, "He had the features of a Greek god: the aquiline nose, the wavy hair…"
I put together a mix-tape for Jeremy in the summer of 1986, with various bits of spoken word material, mostly from Burroughs, Zappa, Fripp, Cutler and Crass, but also including the story of C.B. Fry. I edited the five minutes of John Arlott's account into three parts, which I distributed throughout the tape. Jeremy couldn't believe it, years later, when I told him that all three parts related to the same person.
Arlott makes the point at the end that cricket is the most deep of all sports, because, among other things, the players show their character in so many ways. They're always being tested, often without being able to hide behind other team members. I agree. Cricket is the only game I follow now (you'd be the same if you'd ever been a Sheffield United fan). For the best part of 30 years I've been a cricket fan via radio/internet/TV, but this past summer I reconnected with watching it live, particularly as scorer for the Dulwich Second XI. Travelling in the minibus, you get to see how eleven guys of differing ages, nationalities and experience try to turn themselves into a team; how a 30-something Australian goes about motivating, say, a teenage fast bowler (mostly by teasing him about his sexual experience) or an Afghani batsman with only a little English (errr…). And then how this plays out on the field: who attacks, who battens down the hatches, and who gives most lip. Also, now The Oval is just a 20-minute bus ride away, I plan to go there more often next summer, having seen Mark Ramprakash score one of his many centuries in a two-year-and-counting purple patch of almost Fry-esque proportions.
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