Will

This month I’d thought of writ­ing (again) about the trial of the Cata­lan po­lit­i­cal pris­on­ers, but as this has now been re­duced to an end­less cho­rus of po­lice­men whose pre-pre­pared state­ments about the sup­posed vi­o­lence of Cata­lan demon­stra­tors and vot­ers drone on with­out the judge al­low­ing even one of the 700 videos that dis­prove said state­ments to be shown, I de­cided to give the whole thing a miss; then I thought of writ­ing (again) about Brexit, but dur­ing a re­cent visit to Eng­land the many con­ver­sa­tions I had with just about every­one I met showed me that peo­ple in Eng­land are thor­oughly con­fused (and frus­trated) about this sub­ject; and if they can’t de­scribe what’s going on, who am I, an out-of-touch émigré, to broach the topic? So for once, I’ll use this col­umn to do some­thing apo­lit­i­cally pos­i­tive, by writ­ing about Will Var­ley, an Eng­lish singer-song­writer who I have so far un­suc­cess­fully tried to bring to Barcelona. Who? I pre­tend to hear you ask. And that’s just the prob­lem: even in Eng­land, de­spite rave re­views, the sup­port of well-known fel­low artists, a stun­ning live con­cert at the Shep­herd’s Bush Em­pire re­leased last year, and nu­mer­ous US and EU shows, not very many peo­ple seem to have heard him or even of him. Yet those I know to whom I’ve sub­jected his songs, Cata­lans in­cluded, like them so much they often mem­o­rise the lyrics.

Said lyrics are forged out of a com­bi­na­tion of po­et­ics, pol­i­tics, irony and an aware­ness of mor­tal­ity that ends up being both en­ter­tain­ing, in­tel­li­gent and em­pa­thetic to the point where you feel you that every song is about you (no won­der the au­di­ence at the recorded Shep­herd’s Bush con­cert knew all the words to all the songs). ’King For a King’, for ex­am­ple, which has be­come an an­them for his fans, de­scribes the life of a man from birth, through school and fa­ther­hood to the loss of his dreams and the death of his best friend (’You bury him, it’s rain­ing, you stand by your wife/You say “What have I done with my life?”/Just a name in a fam­ily tree, noth­ing to his­tory...’). In ’The Man Who Fell To Earth’, Var­ley uses the true story of an im­mi­grant who tried to get into Britain by clutch­ing onto an aero­plane’s land­ing gear and even­tu­ally falling off over Lon­don, to con­vey a sense of the un­re­al­ity of the world today: ’This sim­u­la­tion I’m liv­ing in makes no sense to me/I’m still dream­ing of the man who fell to earth’. And in a lyri­cal tour de force, ’Wed­dings And Wars’, the en­tire his­tory of hu­man­ity is com­pressed into four and a half min­utes: ’Birth, death, wed­dings and wars/That’s all we’re good for/Singing and danc­ing and look­ing at the sky, say­ing/Why are we here, what hap­pens when we die?’ If any con­cert pro­moter in Cat­alo­nia hap­pens to be read­ing this, please - please! - let’s get this ex­cep­tional singer (a kind of cross be­tween Roger Mas and Cesk Freixas) over here as soon as pos­si­ble. After all, life is short. Or, as Var­ley puts it: ’Well, at least we can laugh , at least we can smile/We all just drop in for a while/Yes, we all just drop in for a while...’