VERSION:
I’d always had an uneasy relationship with mis-used authority
& what happened after I played my first ever recorded song to
the music teacher at school nailed it. The engineer
had sprinkled a little magic dust on the song, some delays &
a pinch of reverb to sweeten the mix, he’d even managed to get
the old Hofner sounding good. The music teacher listened to the
recording,
“That’s good, but you’ll have to record it again”
“Why?”
“Because some girls from the year below are entering a song in
the competition & all entrants from have to be on the same piece
of tape”
“But this sounds really good, can’t we just send it in anyway?”
“No! We’ve arranged for you all to go to a recording studio at
Birmingham University where you’ll do it again”
“But why? It sounds great. Why would you want to do it again?”
“That’s the rule!”
And there you have it – ‘rules verses art’ – phase one
‘welcome to the world’
So we drove up to Birmingham in a rented coach (were there mini
buses back then?) to record our songs for the BBC. The studio was
like a laboratory, walls covered in white peg board
(the kind that look retro cool at Abbey Road). The engineers
were impatient, kept telling us how little time we had & that we
needed to get it right first time,
“There won’t be time to re-do it loads of times!”
I opened the case to my electric, to let it breath & impress the girls.
They were too busy practising their song, couldn’t give a damn about my
shiny red guitar. The engineer caught sight of it,
“Oh! Were you thinking of using that?”
“Yes, it’s my guitar, it’s what I use”
“Well I don’t think we have the right cables to plug it in, in fact
I ‘know’ we don’t, so you’ll have to use something else”
“But it’s my sound. Can’t you find the right cables”
“You should’ve told us you wanted to use this before you got here –
have you got something else?”
The music teacher had ‘thoughtfully’ brought the school guitar,
a lump of shaped wood with strings like girders & an action like a
suspension bridge.She grinned & pointed to it.
“But this sounds awful!”
“It’ll be fine” said the engineer rushing me to a stool in the middle
of the room
I wrestled with the lump of wood, the wires cut into my fingers,
a noise came out’ve it, I sang the words.
“Great!” said the engineer
“Who’s next?”
(K)
Karl Hyde 
We Are The World
I won´t go into detail how I feel about this song but MJ´s “world songs” in a way reminds me of my school days and our annual masquerade around 1975.
One year I stepped in amongst firefighters, policemen and sunflowers dressed in a creation no one understood except me, I guess. In the middle of January, wrapped in the most floral fabric I could find in the closet, I tried to be “The spring”.
Of course, as a tradition, “the best outfit” went even this year to a group of singing children dressed like various nationalities, directed by one of the teachers’ daughter.
The one who later ensured that I was elected to prom queen is now much older and working as Music Director at Radio 1 Budapest(Hungary). Last time I saw him was at your Underworld concert at Balaton Sound a couple of years ago.
Small World 🙂