Under the Bonus Tracks menu, you will find a song (Hold my hand I pray) that Old Gnu recorded 40 years ago on his shiny new cassette deck. One man, one guitar, one very cheap microphone and one shiny new Trio Cassette deck. It was a song that a clergy colleague requested should be sung at a 6.30pm ghost service. In those days there was no established new 6.30pm choir, so a kind man with a very fine voice agreed to sing this song to jolly the service along so to speak.  He was our equivalent, on that occasion, to George Beverley Shea singing at a Billy Graham Crusade evening. Who the song is by, I cannot tell, neither may I tell what manner of person the singer was. Perhaps releasing it will bring all to light. And perhaps both composer and singer will request its immediate removal if they discover it here. We shall oblige if that is the case.

Why has Old Gnu released this? Well two things happened that brought it about. The first was that a hardworking and honourable gnu-tube website minion had hinted earlier in the year that something ought to be done to mark the first anniversary of the website. The second incident was as follows.  Old Gnu was clearing out some rubbish in his shed when a pile of it gracefully slid off a high shelf landing resoundingly on the floor, except for a cassette which lodged between his horns and never made it to the floor. Old Gnu delicately pick it out with a sense of awe and wonder. He deciphered the following faded runes on the cassette case: 6.30pm Guest Service 1978.

Curiosity drove him to play the almost disintegrating cassette tape on the same trusty old Trio Cassette deck, which is with him even unto this day – well, it’s actually in his shed most of the time; Mrs. Gnu won’t have it in the house.

(Incidentally, the offending microphone refused to have its photo displayed in public.)

He had the good sense to run a digital recorder to encapsulate what was on the cassette for he knew it might disintegrate after one playing. And behold! This song greeted his ears. It sounded terrible – the recording, not the singer – but after much polishing and scrubbing in a music software package, voilà! the words and melody could be heard reasonably clearly, despite a little sibilant distortion. Much delighted by his efforts, Old Gnu proceeded to add instrumentalists from his LA Philharmonic DLH Orchestra.  And the result is akin to Natalie Cole singing the song Unforgettable with her father, Nat King, twenty five years after his death.  Except in this case I hope both composer and performer are alive and well, even though the addition, 40 years later, of the LA Philharmonic DLH Orchestra may be less unforgettable.

Then it occurred to Old Gnu: What better way to celebrate the first anniversary of the website than by releasing a song by an unknown composer and unidentified singer?  This, he thought, would be a good gesture, tribute and memorial to all those unknown composers who the world has forgotten but who hopefully have not died in battle.

Vetus Pater Gnu
Academiae Musicorum et Theologia
Turris, [LA]
IV Aprilis MMXVIII