Two Billies

I love the name Billy. Not William, Will, Bill or any other thing but Billy.

Why, I think is clear to me. Two Billies have been dear to me, others less than dear but positive enough, and I never have known a Billy I couldn't live with.

The less than dear Billies, which still I hold dear enough, are Billy T, an older boy, who, when I was a child, forgave me my grammar schooling and foreignness and took me under his wing. And Puffing Billy. I don't know where I heard it but I have always loved steam engines and steam trains (am I alone in thinking that we have made our trains faster and more wonderful but by no means better looking? There is something majestic and astonishing about a steam loco but the squat, electric sausages of CityRail are just ways to get from A to B).

And need I say anything about Billy Goat Gruff, the king of fairy stories?

But the Billies I adored are one of my childhood, one of my youth. Billy Bremner was the epitome of football for me. The captain of Leeds when I first came to love them, the man who led them through the glory years. He was a fiery mix of skill and crunching tackling, feisty, murderous sometimes. He would never back down, always giving all he had to the cause. If you could ever love a footballer, he was it.

The other is Billy Mackenzie. A brilliantly talented singer, who had enormous musical vision and what appealed to me most, an idiosyncratic, wildly different way of using words to articulate his view of the world, he reached a place in a young man's heart that his contemporaries simply couldn't. He will always be for me the guy who, on his first appearance on Top of the Pops, caused my dad to say "If you buy that record, I'm putting it straight on the fire". I bought it the next day, of course.

Mackenzie never had the success I wanted for him. He was just too bright a star for a world that likes its glitter in the packaging rather than the product.

The tragedy of my Billies is that both died in 1997. Bremner died young and Mackenzie younger, by his own hand. I don't know why -- I know that he had been a depressive, but very little more than that, because I prefer to allow my stars to be voices without lives as far as possible.
I think I loved them because each had a talent that I wish I had but do not. I never was much more than an enthusiastic but poor footballer, and I cannot sing although I would dearly love to be able to. And each brought beauty into a poor boy's life -- Billy a precise pass that opened up a game like a knife flipping apart an oyster shell, Billy a stunning high note stretched for, reached, made a piece of aural honey that sings his name forever.

posted by Dr Zen @ 4:45 pm