BREAKDOWN ANALYSIS by Planet Giles
SINGLES RELEASES
KIMBERLEY
We met our friend Simon many years ago. We were living in London at the time, and Pete was a prolific buyer and seller of musical equipment and instruments via LOOT. Musicians from all walks of music from production to performing bought and sold all they needed for their musical requirements:
Many well known musicians turned up at our apartment to purchase speakers, my keyboards and all manner of equipment we were selling. Conversely, Pete met many musicians and producers from his sojourns cross country to buy equipment. One notable gent was the producer ROBIN MILLAR who produced Sade’s début album DIAMOND LIFE. He popped over to purchase Peter’s beloved AR18s speakers!
Back to Simon. He worked for Formula 1 at the time and contacted Pete to buy something. A native of South Africa, we became firm friends. When he married his English wife Karen, we continued our friendship when they moved to Sweden, then to South Africa.
Their firstborn daughter was born in Sweden. And they called her KIMBERLEY. I loved this name, as it sounds like music just to say it! And of course it had the added resonance of being the place that housed the diamond mines in South Africa:
Of course I knew we had to write a song called KIMBERLEY when this happened! This allowed me to express the spiritual message I knew that children are the mirrors that allow change to occur in the world. If you can regard them that way, you can see that the new generations are always incarnating with the next thing that evolves humanity towards the light. Adults put up a great resistance to whatever the New Wave bring in. But they will find themselves being ‘dragged’ through the evolutionary process kicking and screaming if they resist the changes that will come with inevitability! The key is to provide strong boundaries for children, but to allow them leniency to create what they have come here to do. It is a fine line that requires time and patience, something that is increasingly difficult in these days of huge turmoil resulting from the necessary transitional state we find ourselves in.
This song was demoed, then shelved for a few years. When it surfaced, I renamed it OUR MAZY. This was because I had had an astonishing event that forever affected my regard of the natural world in which we live.
Pete was at his usual training session at Wimbledon. After the session, he noticed a white blob at the side of the track. When he went to investigate, he found sitting there a motionless pure white baby dove. Pete had introduced me to birds in Clapham, and we often took in injured birds, rehabilitated them and then let them go. So we had a great love and affection for them and their obvious personalities as we got to nurture them.
This baby had no fear of Our Pete. She looked up and began pecking at Pete’s watch! He scooped her up, put her in a safe box in the back of his car and then returned home. I could not believe this precious little baby when I saw her. It was love at first sight! Then after a week, he took off to Lyon in France to run in the World Masters Championships in 2015. And left the baby bird with me!
In total, she was with me for 7 weeks. We had some hilarious (and traumatic) experiences together. I spent the whole time (when I wasn’t teaching) covering up things with newspaper and cleaning up her poop! But the joy we shared was unsurpassed. As she lived with me, we luckily have very high ceilings in our apartment in Surrey. So she learned to fly here. She would be put up as high as I could get her on the bannister (on the second floor of the flat), and then swoop down to her perch in Pete’s office. It was astonishing to see this feat. Because there was a low hang from the second floor, she learned to ‘drop’ like a stone from the second floor to avoid this, then straighten up and fly to her destination. Instinct at its finest!
Whenever I taught singing to the children, I would never see her if boys were in the room. But if the girls sang, she would fly in and land on the music stand, listening and loving their voices. Such a joy for us all! I had named her MAZY, and for a long time after we let her go, the children would ask after our Mazy. Hence the retitled song.
Every morning when I would wake at the top of the house, she would fly in as soon as dawn broke, land on the end of my bed, then fly onto my pillow. I was forced to get up! If I went out, she perched on the first floor bannister peering at the door until I returned. And if I cooked, she would wander all over the kitchen pecking and nosying about!
I had researched keeping her as a pet. But I realised that it was hugely high maintenance and would entail putting a ‘nappy’ on her so that she didn’t poop everywhere. The love of all things wild would not allow Pete and I to keep her captive. When we let her go eventually, she circled the skies above our flat, then flew back and landed on my head! She was not quite ready to leave. The evening before she left, when she had figured out that we could not fly with her, she spent an hour sitting with each of us separately. If I had realised that she was saying goodbye now to each of us, I would have spoken to her in a very specific way - as a mum telling her child how much I had loved and valued her.
When we finally let her go, I cried for 6 months and couldn’t look at a photo of her. She came as a gift from God - and I will forever be grateful that we shared our lives with her.
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