Doesn’t it always take you by surprise when a sudden shift of perspective shows you something that’s been right under your nose? No. this isn’t about the Pina Colada Song, but it does concern music.
I wrote this tune several years ago and we used to play it in the band between dance sets as an atmospheric piece. It’s a slow air, heavily influenced by the Irish music which was all around during my college years in Northern Ireland.
A group of us shared digs in the small fishing village of Portrush on the Antrim coast, just a few miles from the Giant’s Causeway. Though the landscape where we lived was not quite that spectacular, there was a cliff on the headland where the wind coming off the Atlantic was amazingly fierce, even on a calm day.
In need of a title for this tune, I named it after the headland – Ramore Head – which was pronounced locally with the accent on the second syllable; Ra-MORE Head.
Not long ago a friend of mine was listening to some arrangements and said he liked ‘the slow one”, which he called RAM-ore Head. All of a sudden it was obvious that the last line of the tune fit the title when the name was pronounced that way.
So the tune became a song;
Walking on the strand in the summer morning sun.
Hear the seagulls cry – lost sailors’ souls, it’s said.
The distant past echoes down along the years
To a memory in my heart; the wind at Ramore Head.
O, how young we were!
The world was our own.
All things were yet to be.
Now our choice is made, and the past is set.
We must move on and live the track we tread.
But still and all, when I hear that haunting cry,
I remember once again the wind at Ramore Head.