So once again there weren't many music videos to choose from this week as some of songs have the audio track only. I think this week I vote for Lapwing video "Hope Christmas gets you to me". The reason for my vote is there is a part in the film which strongly reminds me of a time I was in Manchester around Christmas time after visiting a work colleague (a very talented neurosurgeon) that we were working with at the time in Imagen Therapeutics.

I remember after our meeting walking out onto the pedestrian plaza (he lived in the Manchester City centre at that time) and remember thinking how pretty the Christmas lights looked. They were very interesting days in my life when I worked on the concept of using High Content Analysis to personalise chemotherapy.

"Karma Police, arrest this man he talks too much.."

For you Séan Ó Cuinn

From the Americans back to the Brits. Another song with comprehensive lyrics that tells a story of a young couple who "moonlight" up to Gretna Green in the name of love.

This album came out when I was working for AstraZeneca in the naughties. This song is particularly good and also sad. I guess it captures the dynamics of abusive relationships and also the deep scars that are left in adults when they fail to receive the parental love that is so essential for adult mental health.

Really there was no other song to choose was there?

This is another song which captures the human condition for many quite nicely. It pictures life's progression as being on a runaway train. I particularly like the chorus which goes:

Runaway train never going back
Wrong way on a one way track
Seems like I should be getting somewhere
Somehow I'm neither here nor there

Another sad touch to this video is notices of real people who have gone missing. Finally, love the acoustic base guitar.

Well it is my lovely wife's birthday today and I have the perfect song for this day. "Happy Birthday Helen" by Things of Stone and Wood. Sadly, the audio quality of this video is very poor so I have put two versions of the song one so you can see the Aussie band members of Things of Stone and Wood performing, the other so you can hear the song with decent sound quality. It is always gratifying when one can find the perfect song for an occasion (slightly more aligned than the song I chose for our 20^th wedding anniversary (Covid Island Discs Day 26) 😀.

Video of the band performing but poor sound quality

Audio of song with no video

Covid Island Discs: The final Song

So 69 weeks after the UK first went into lockdown I am finally bringing Covid Island Discs to an end. In theory the last lockdown restrictions in the UK were meant to be lifted on 21^st of June 2021 although the new delta variant of the virus, which is incredibly contagious and is leading to a new increase in hospitalisations in the UK, delayed the final removal of restrictions until the 19^th of July. This final release is occurring despite the rising number of Covid-19 cases in the UK being driven by the delta variant. It looks like we will be in for a 3^rd wave this summer but hopefully it will be less lethal than previous waves due to the over 50s now being mostly vaccinated.

Anyway, for better or worse, whatever the outcome, it is just a simple harsh truth that we must now get used to living with this horrible virus in our presence because clearly it is so widespread throughout the world that it is never going to go away. Even if we do get a new lockdown in the future, I shall not restart Covid Island Discs as I did last summer because at some point things must return to a new normal.

So choosing the song to close Covid Island Discs was not difficult because Jesus Christ Superstar was one of the first pieces of music that I fell in love with as a very young child when my sister Julie took me to see the rock concert in Sydney in the early 70s. I can't remember how old I was but I could not have been much older than 5 or 6.

I was a crazy child and so began learning and singing the whole rock opera. My family still have photos of me with my arms stretch out in a crucifix position such was my obsession with the Musical and gospel story of Jesus of Nazareth. Not only did I fall in love with the musical, but this also led me to the Christian faith and I was about 8 years old when I committed my life to Jesus of Nazareth who was born around 4BC and who was crucified around AD 33 under the reign of Pontius Pilate and Herod Antipas who would die some 6 years later. So I guess when all is said and done, Jesus Christ Superstar as a piece of music has had the most significant effect on my life out of all the music I have cited in Covid Island Discs

It is my hope that someone reading this final post in the future will find joy looking through the 484 songs (very early on in covid Island Discs I did a Midnight Oil bonus track) I have collated during the 69 weeks of this twilight zone living in some form of lockdown due to Covid-19. In some ways this song also captures that universal longing when things go horribly wrong of wanting to rerun history so we could have a better outcome. In relation to Covid-19, if we could start again then obviously the thing we would do differently is lockdown much harder and sooner before the virus became so ubiquitous in the human population. Once the virus had spread far and wide in the human population, the chances of new more virulent and contagious variants of the virus arising was only a matter of time and such variants are now preventing us ever being able to completely eradicate Covid-19, even with a widespread vaccination program. Whoever you are reading this, as I say when I sign off in my Youtube videos: ""I hope your body and mind are in a good place".