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Dear in the headlights

Legend has it that Paul McCartney hated the line from Hey Jude – ‘the movement you need is on your shoulder’ – so much that he was going to scrap it until his partner in grime John Lennon told him it was the best part of the song. So it stuck. And it still sticks to this day, imbued as it is with all the mystery and pathos that a memorable line should possess. It makes me wonder how many other great thoughts have been scrapped in the cold hard light of the morning sun. How many inspired ‘moments’ have been lost to the brutal touch of logic. There’s something to be said for spontaneous creation; for the hurried gift of a great idea. It’s the unexplainable, the intangible; that bustling cosmos of thoughts and dreams. Keith Richards is convinced of it. He claims to be a receptor to it all, a human divining rod, picking up on the riffs and melodies that drift by unobtrusively. Which probably explains his remarkable capacity for musical expression but not his taste in tie-dyed bandanas. No, that can be put down to a lifetime of hard drugs. But I digress … there’s a wonderful line in the Crowded House song Fingers Of Love: ‘Colour is its own reward’. I love that. Colour is its own reward. Simple, intelligent and profound yet wrapped up in the tight parameters of a gently rolling, minor key catharsis. Just like all great ideas should be. [illustration by Jillian Tamaki]