Song of the Week #9: “Heartaches” by Al Bowlly
A funny thing happened to me on the way to see a film last September.
I was on the Charing Cross Road in London, trying to find my way to the one cinema that was showing 2001: A Space Odyssey, and I ended up turned around and lost. I overshot my turn by some metres, and ended up at the far end, close to Trafalgar Square.
On my way there, I happened to look up and I saw a blue plaque:
AL
BOWLLY
1899 – 1941
Singer
lived here
1933 – 1934
I didn’t pay it much thought, but the name was quite familiar. I was sure I’d heard of Al Bowlly, but couldn’t place a face or a tune to the name. I retraced my steps, found the cinema, watched the film, left, went in search of Chinese food, decided I didn’t fancy Chinese food after stuffing my face with popcorn for the better part of three hours, went shopping, got on a train and went home.
It was only later that I realised where I had heard the name “Al Bowlly”. By total coincidence, someone I was talking to just happened to mention him, in reference to what he is perhaps best known for today.
Al Bowlly was born in 1898 in the Portuguese colony of Mozambique, the son of a Greek father and a Lebanese mother. He grew up in British South Africa, in Johannesburg. By the mid-1920s, he was singing in a dance band. He moved to Britain in 1928, where he sang in the Savoy Hotel until 1930. Between 1930 and 1934, he recorded over 500 songs. He began to suffer throat problems in the late 1930s, requiring surgery to correct; he was forced to travel to New York. By 1940, his career had all but dried up.
On 15 April 1941, Bowlly went to bed at 32 Duke Street. A Luftwaffe parachute mine detonated outside his house while he was sleeping, blowing his bedroom door off its hinges. The door struck him with enough force to kill him instantly. He died largely forgotten. He was buried in a mass grave along with other victims of the bombings. He was 43.
Today, Bowlly’s frame of reference mainly comes from the cultural context in which his music has been placed. His recording of “Midnight, the Stars and You” is famous for its inclusion in Stanley Kubrick’s horror masterpiece The Shining, playing over the ending revelation that Jack Torrance has become another restless ghost of the Overlook Hotel. An eerie camera shot pans in on a photograph from 1921, showing, impossibly, that Jack Torrance was an attendee at a party in that year.
This notion of “haunting” has clung to Bowlly’s oeuvre ever since. The powerful association of his song filmically with one of the most infamous haunted houses of modern fiction has led it to become somewhat reified as the poster child for “haunting”.
Jacques Derrida, a French philosopher, coined the term “hauntology” in his 1993 book Specters of Marx. The term, in its original meaning, refers to the persistent presence of concepts – particularly ideals and aesthetics – from the past, and how they seem to “haunt” the present, spectres of what-could-have-been.
In Derrida’s work, he was referring to how the ideals of nineteenth-century communism – once stated by Marx to be “haunting Europe” – are now quite literally ghostly apparitions, obsolescent, yet present, immovable.
The term has since been taken up to refer to other hauntologies. Mark Fisher describes hauntology in terms of a nostalgia for “lost futures”. There are many hauntological musicians who create music that evokes the aesthetics and culture of the 1970s, that middle-decade between the psychedelic counterculture of the 60s and the cynical ultracapitalism of the 1980s; a time of increasing conflict, economic breakdown in the East and West, greater awareness of the environment. In short, fertile ground for hauntological rupture.
One hauntological musician who bucks this trend, however, is James Leyland Kirby, known better by the name of his most famous musical project: The Caretaker.
The Caretaker’s works are experimental reworkings of 1920s big band music into something much darker, reflecting the violence and tumult that defined much of the twentieth century, and still defines how we live today. The project’s first release, Selected Memories from the Haunted Ballroom, features a noise track that is designed to evoke the invasion of Poland in 1939.
Beginning with the 2005 release Theoretically Pure Anterograde Amnesia, The Caretaker becomes much more interested in the idea of memory, and more specifically, memory loss. It evokes the haunting of someone who is slowly losing the narrative of their own past.
It was on The Caretaker’s next album, Persistent Repetition of Phrases, that Kirby begins to explore his most famous subject matter: Alzheimer’s disease, and other forms of dementia.
Albums such as An Empty Bliss Beyond This World also explore this topic, but The Caretaker’s most famous release is perhaps the most wide-ranging exploration of this theme.
Everywhere at the End of Time is a six-part, three-hundred-and-ninety-minute-long odyssey that presents, bleakly and terrifyingly, the experience of a person with Alzheimer’s disease. It begins with the early symptoms: lapses in memory, listlessness, and so on, progressing gradually into incoherency, catatonia, and ultimately death.
The album is well-known online for being listened to as a morbid “challenge” by younger people on TikTok, to see if they can endure the full thing, which is noted for its intense emotive power, evoking feelings of horror, claustrophobia, anxiety, helplessness, even depression. Some people experience panic attacks while listening to the album; others have said the experience gave them a sense of empathy with real people living with dementia.
It opens with a track called “It’s just a burning memory”, which heavily samples “Heartaches”, a 1931 song by Sid Phillips & his Melodians, featuring Al Bowlly singing vocals.
The original song describes a heartbreak from the perspective of a lovelorn man, but the lyric “I can’t believe it’s just a burning memory” is recontextualised on the Caretaker album, referring not to the heartache of losing one’s love, but of the anxiety and terror of losing one’s ability to tell a consistent story about oneself; this loss of narrative is a recurring theme throughout the work.
It is interesting to juxtapose the Bowlly piece with the Caretaker remix of it. Both tracks are of approximately equal length. The Bowlly recording opens with around 41 seconds of instrumental (not unusual for the time), before Bowlly begins to sing. The Caretaker’s remix, on the other hand, features no vocals at all. Instead, the 41-second instrumental repeats three times, threatening to launch into Bowlly’s vocal.
It gives the sense of someone trying to remember something that was once incredibly familiar, and is now eluding them. They run through the intro once, twice, but the lyrics don’t come. Perhaps the person in whose mind we are trapped could once sing the song by heart. A minor memory slip, perhaps? Or is something worse happening?
The Caretaker returns to this piece several times on the album, each time using it as a motif to underpin the current state of mental degeneration suffered by the unseen figure, the eponymous Caretaker, for those six-and-a-half-hours. In the end, the Caretaker “dies”. There have been no releases by Kirby under the Caretaker moniker since the album’s release.
“Heartaches” is a genuinely good song. It’s catchy and bittersweet. But we cannot escape the allure of its context. We cannot help but listen to it in a far darker light than was ever intended by the original songwriters, Al Hoffman and John Klenner.
Bowlly died relatively young at 43. He died from blunt force trauma to the head. He died long before diseases of old age might trouble him. He died just as his career was undergoing a revival, allowing him to avoid the harrowing experience of being haunted by his past, by what he had lost.
Yet, it is in some way fitting that the story of Al Bowlly’s music and its cultural context cannot escape being haunted by the darkness that has grown up around it. It is forever associated with the freezing death of an insane murderer in the hedge maze of a hotel; forever associated with mental disease and aging.
“Heartaches” is fascinating, not necessarily as a piece of music in itself – it’s fairly standard stuff for the time period – but of the emotions it evokes in us beyond its original artistic intentions.
Just as the past haunts the present, the present cannot help but haunt the past. We cannot help but look back at the past as if through a rear-view mirror, drawing us inexorably away from where we began.
Al Bowlly died before he could truly understand the legacy of his work. Would he appreciate how the world remembers him? Resent that he is remembered now as another phantom in a postmodern house of horrors?
We can never know.
Shirley Jackson once wrote: “No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality,” and though ghosts may or may not be real in an ontological sense, they are real in a phenomenological, a hauntological, and a teleological sense.
Whether some aspect of the spirit persists after death makes no odds.
We are, all of us, haunted by what went before, what never came to pass, what remains out of reach, and what is to come.
The legacy of Al Bowlly is a stark reminder that we cannot choose the ways in which we are haunted, or we haunt.
We are here for a vanishingly short moment. Then we are just a burning memory.
This work is released under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License, except the illustration.