View from the Green Room: Moon Shadow on Tramore Bay
Derek Flynn as Cat Stephens at the Tramore Coastguard Cultural Centre.
Derek Flynn continues his musical entertaining journey around iconic folk and pop figures from previous decades to full houses in the Tramore Coastguard Cultural Centre and beyond.
Derek has that relatable charm that audiences enjoy. He never misjudges his audience and trusts their response. Not only does he bring his own unique style of interpretation to his work but his narrative is selective and informative. Along with the musical journey of tonight’s Cat Stephens, we also get his life story and the narrative of his musical journey.
Tonight’s audience seems to know every word of all the Cat Stephens classics and Derek embeds them in the social history of his times. ‘Matthew and Son’ has all the flavour of the anti-hero of the sixties that the Beatles, Kinks, Stones loved to write. There’s an edge to Derek’s delivery here of the young boy who dreamed of a better life but ends up on the dreary conveyor-belt of monotony of Sixties mass manufacture in a factory that only values profit.
The voice of protest continues in ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ (Triple Platinum in USA) like ‘Where do the children play?’ as multi-storey flatlands appear with no facilities for kids. ‘Father and Son’ (UK Top Ten no. 2) was the Stephens’s version of Dylan’s ‘Times, they are a changing’ in a duologue between a benevolent, if suffocating, patriarch who rejects change and a young man who simply wants out of his stifling relationship.
Still…there’s always time for love. And songs inspired by a broken heart. He wrote ‘Lady D’Arbanville’ after his relationship with his American girlfriend Patti D’Arbanville ended, along with ‘Wild World’ and ‘Hard Headed Woman’. ‘Lisa, Lisa, sad Lisa Lisa’ and ‘Sweet Scarlet’ came from a time when he was romantically involved with Carly Simon.
Stevens contracted tuberculosis in 1969 and almost died. He spent months recuperating in the hospital and a year of convalescence. During this time, Stevens began to question aspects of his life and spirituality… "To go from the show business environment and find you are in hospital, getting injections day in and day out, and people around you are dying, it certainly changes your perspective. I got down to thinking about myself. It seemed almost as if I had my eyes shut."
He took up meditation, yoga, and metaphysics, read about other religions and became a vegetarian. As a result of his serious illness and long convalescence and as a part of his spiritual awakening and questioning, he wrote as many as 40 songs, many of which would appear on his albums in later years like ‘Peace Train’ and his iconic ‘Morning has broken’.
Derek gives us the story behind ‘Moon Shadow’ that came to him in a flash of inspiration as he found his moon shadow on a still midnight tide in Spain.
And, there we all are, belting out the words of ‘Moon Shadow’ as the Coastguard windows reflect the moon shadows of the rocks on the bay below.
Heaven is surely made from moments like this.
