| Mike's
Pith & Wind - The Prodigal Son
As an ‘old rocker’, some people
might find it hard to reconcile my current disposition with the
bright-eyed young person I was in my pre-teens. Although I suspect
I was verging on being autistic as a youngster, I had an instinctive
affinity with music that far outshone my academic, or indeed my
social skills.
My mother recognised my musical potential and took me along to audition
for the Boys’ Choir (pic) at the Anglican Cathedral,
the overrated neo-gothic building in the very centre of town after
which Christchurch’s Cathedral Square is named. While I was
comparatively old at the age of eleven - most of the boys started
as early as eight or nine - I showed enough in my audition for the
choir's director and organist, Charles Foster Browne, (Fossie),
to immediately take me on.
My stint as a ‘probationer’ lasted a matter of weeks,
and I had a meteoric rise through the ranks. My singing hero, Russell
Fuller, who was the principal soloist when I arrived, (and not the
BBC radio sports commentator of the same name), departed suddenly,
as adolescent choir boys are prone to do, and I was prematurely
promoted to being a soloist and happily solo’ed away for the
next four years.
As a chorister, or choir boy if you prefer, I was compelled to listen
to many excerpts, or Lessons, from the Old and the New Testaments,
as well as a shitload, (or shipload, as Microsoft would have it)
of sermons.
The Lessons had the advantage of at least sounding good,
whereas there was no such.. read
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