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An interesting and thought provoking article from today's Guardian no less, that compares one of our scenes most memorable tunes with one of Shakespeare's sonnets.
Well worth a read.


The final three records traditionally played at Wigan Casino's northern soul all-nighters were known as the Three Before Eight, and fittingly, for the closing notes of the night, all three were concerned with the passing of time. The sequence opened with Time Will Pass You By by Tobi
Legend, followed with Long After Tonight Is All Over by Jimmy Radcliffe, and ended with I'm On My Way by Dean Parrish.

It's the Tobi Legend track I have always loved most. It is somehow undiluted by the schmaltz of Radcliffe's track, or the hey-ho-on-we-go of Parrish's number, and instead is simply a song about seeing the preciousness of life, about trying to live our lives better and brighter.

Legend was born Bessie Grace Upton in Alabama, the daughter of the gospel singer Emma Washington. She began her career in Detroit, more commonly recording as Tobi Lark, and singing backing vocals for artists such as BB King and Wilson Pickett, Duke Ellington, Ben E King and Cannonball Adderley. This track was released in 1968, and written by the English-born engineer John Rhys, but it did little commercially until it was picked up by northern soul clubs in Britain. Earlier this week, I found a podcast in which Rhys talks about writing the song. "I didn't even know it had been released until 1982," he laughs, detailing the
history of Time Will Pass You By's composition and recording before it was seemingly lost. "After that, I don't know what happened," Rhys says, "but somehow it got to England … and it was successful. So thank you,
mother country … Thank you northern soul, so much."

Its verses cut a melancholy figure, its opening lines reflecting on the steady turn of the world: "Passing seasons ever fade away/ Into misty clouds of autumn grey/ As I sit here looking at the street/ Little figures, quickly moving feet." And then in zaps the chorus, a
remonstration of sorts, or a call to arms: "Life is just a precious minute baby," it yells. "Open up your eyes and see it baby/ Give yourself a better chance/ Because time will pass you/ Right on by."

Like many pop songs, there's something of the sonnet about Time Will Pass You By; it's there in the song's intention of course, but there is something about Legend's track that has always reminded me specifically of Shakespeare's Sonnet 60. Legend's second verse, "I'm just a pebble on the beach and I sit and wonder why/ Little people running around/ Never knowing why," for example, seems to echo Shakespeare's lines: "Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore/ So do our minutes hasten to their end;/ Each changing place with that which goes before,/ In sequent
toil all forwards do contend."

Sonnet 60 is itself a song, of sorts, about life's "precious minute".
Shakespeare was writing at the end of the 16th century, in an age when time had become increasingly mechanised, its measurements more accurate, and for the first time, clocks began to have minute hands – the sonnet's name is thought to reference the number of seconds in a minute. Time,
perhaps, never seemed to pass by so keenly.

Legend's song also came at the end of a decade, written over a three-year stretch in which the magnitude of events meant that life perhaps seemed to gather speed – Vietnam, the assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, riots in LA, New York and, of course, Detroit. In 1968, the year of this song's release, ours was a world trying to reorder itself, the civil rights movement was under way in the US, there were protests across Europe, and Apollo 8 allowed us to see Earth in its entirety from space. "This big old world is spinning like a top," Legend sings, "Come on help me now and make it stop."
But Legend offers the sonneteer's age-old remedy: "All you have to do is live for now," she sings, "Come along with me I'll show you how." And how softly reassurance turns into seduction: "Take my hand I'll show you how to live/ Why wait until tomorrow?"

Toby Legend - Time Will Pass You By