Waterloo Sunset excerpt

 

I must have been eight years old when I first heard Waterloo Sunset, in the year of its release, and - like just about everyone else in the world - realised it was something special.

Perhaps for a child the fact that it wasn't, strictly speaking, a love song had something to do with it, even though lovers figure in it. But for someone growing up in Scotland the song's setting was enough in itself to suggest something magical, even if the Engerland in my head may not have swung like a pendulum do. My childish notions of the country and its capital came largely from Ealing films on the telly, all decency and community spirit, tempered by odd glimpses in police series of a modern day city seemingly awash with criminals, spies and pyromaniacs like George Cole  (below) in Gideon's Way.

Whatever the reason, the song stayed in my imagination. A few years later, when a family holiday finally necessitated an overnight stay in London, I eagerly craned out of my room's tiny window to take in the stretch of water in the reddening dusk: it was Waterloo Sunset.

We were in Camberwell at the time.

You can find a great deal about the song on the net, and I'm not going to try to provide a digest of others' comments here. Instead, I'm going to pick up on a few points which have stuck with me over many years of thinking and reading about the song.

To start with the identity of the lovers: my only contribution to the Terence Stamp/Julie Christie question is that I'm prepared to swear that on one early occasion when the Kinks were performing the song on TV (possibly Top of the Pops, possibly not), I distinctly heard Ray sing the words: "Terence meets Julia."

A playful reference to one half, at least, of cinema's golden couple (they starred in Far From The Madding Crowd that year) or an equally playful booting of the song's original pair a rung or two up the social ladder?

I think I prefer the latter explanation. And even if the revision was a momentary whim to amuse his bandmates it still suggests the inclusivity of the song: no matter how much of an allowance your daddy gives you, the healing balm of that view is yours for the gazing. (And I didn't even need to be there.)

In the act of listening, of course, the song makes perfect sense. Scanning the lyrics cold on the page, however - without the benefit of additional information about family members who may have inspired it - you can't help wondering about the character of the speaker and his relation to this couple. For a kickoff, he seems to have been watching them regularly enough to note that

Terry meets Julie, Waterloo Station
Every Friday night

But there's no clear indication he actually knows them. He appears to be a recluse, claiming in his defence:

I don't need no friends

[...]

I am so lazy, don't want to wander
I stay at home at night

But two details suggest that he has somehow absorbed the couple, is them as well as himself: an artist, in other words, identifying with his subject.

He is an omniscient narrator, swooping down on them as though via a crane shot, picking out the young lovers from the "Millions of people swarming like flies." And he even knows that they, like him, "don't need no friends" - that the city itself, the beauty of the scene, is enough to sustain the watcher and the watched.

Waterloo Sunset has already been compared by others to Wordsworth's famous sonnet about Westminister Bridge. But a small detail from his book-length poem The Prelude may illuminate the song further. Subtitled "Growth of a Poet's Mind", the poem might be crudely summarised as "boy meets Lakes - boy loses Lakes - boy gets spirit of Lakes back again." (Other synopses are available.)

One section deals with his sense of alienation in London until he too is able to zoom into the swarm to pick out tiny details of humanity:

.... In the tender scenes
Chiefly was my delight, and one of these
Never will be forgotten. 'Twas a Man,
Whom I saw sitting in an open Square
Close to an iron paling that fenced in
The spacious Grass-plot; on the corner stone
Of the low wall in which the pales were fix'd
Sate this One Man, and with a sickly babe
Upon his knee, whom he had thither brought
For sunshine, and to breathe the fresher air.
Of those who pass'd, and me who look'd at him,
He took no note; but in his brawny Arms
(The Artificer was to the elbow bare,
And from his work this moment had been stolen)
He held the Child, and, bending over it,
As if he were afraid both of the sun
And of the air which he had come to seek,
He eyed it with unutterable love.

Suggs (how's that for a cultural leap?) was talking in a TV series about the impact of first hearing Lola . He said something to the effect that although he didn't get the details, he knew enough to understood it was describing an adult world, and set in a place - Soho - associated with adult pursuits.

He went on to say, however, that he had found the song reassuring: the message he took was that whatever the obscure challenges to come later in life, they could somehow be coped with, that ultimately he'd be alright, just as the speaker seemed to be.

The subject matter isn't quite the same, but Waterloo Sunset had, I think, a similar effect on my younger self. The speaker may be a reclusive adult - is it merely being "lazy" which keeps him indoors? - or he may be an artist. But it could equally easily be a child's eyes which are timidly peeping out at life from that window, at the big city with its "millions of people", and those as yet unknowable adult challenges.

That, at any rate, was how I think I took it - and the London I knew then only from TV seemed more remote and dangerous, closer to my notion of "The City", than nearby, familiar Glasgow.

Taken like this, Terry and Julie could be seen as imaginary figures, brought into being by the child-artist in an effort to make sense of that frightening mass of people and bring them down to a manageable scale: two people who at least know each other.

Their names are friendly, reassuring, perhaps absorbed from film or TV (which might bring Terence Stamp and Julie Christie back into the equation); they presumably have found proper grown-up jobs in the big city as they meet at the end of a working week; maybe, too, the fact they have discovered each other in all this crowd offers hope for that peeper-out at the window that he might someday be redeemed from his isolation.

As would be consistent with a child's-eye view, however, the speaker doesn't enter into details of their lives beyond the suggestion that they have in some unspecified way completed each other ("they don't need no friends") and feel "safe and sound" - a phrase perhaps more associated with children than adults - once they have crossed the river.

And instantly I see in my head the image used to sell Start-Rite shoes in the sixties and well beyond: two small children hand in hand, a boy and a girl, walking along a road which stretches to infinity with the dark unknown safely fenced off:

 

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