“All I Have To Do Is Dream” was a 1958 #1 here in the UK for The Everly Brothers, a double A side with “Claudette”. I added it to my repertoire in September 2021. I can tell you the exact date without having to check anywhere else: Saturday 11 September 2021, or the 20th anniversary of 9/11.

The previous evening I watched an Everly Brothers documentary on BBC4. I had seen it many years earlier. It was repeated to commemorate the death of Don Everly in August 2021 (which had also prompted this piece, “Don Everly RIP, Guns ’n Roses and stories behind the songs”). While watching the show I thought that I really should add some Every Brothers songs to my repertoire. The following morning, while the house was quiet, I sat at my electric piano and tried to work out the chords to “All I Have To Do Is Dream”. Anyone with an ear for such things could tell quickly enough that the sequence in the verse is that well-used pattern of 1-6-4-5. It still takes me time to work out this sort of thing. I played it in Eb: Eb-Cm-Ab-Bb. Lots of black notes there. Then I tried it in D: D-Bm-G-A. I worked out the bridge too, while playing in D: G F#m Em A A7 / G F#m E E7 A A7. After playing around with this for an hour, and trying to remember the verses from memory, I went to the web, found the chords and lyrics and practised a bit more.

By lunch-time I was pretty much there, still a bit uncertain on the order of the verses, but confident that I could play it in public whenever the chance arose. This was September 2021 and theatres and music bars had been closed for 500 nights due to the various forms of lockdown. We were coming out of another set of restrictions. Bars had opened again. Church services had resumed. A few months earlier funerals had been restricted to 30 mourners but that no longer applied.

I was planning to go to a service at 3pm that afternoon for someone who was born a few months after me and had died in January 2021. Like so many other families, his family had been unable to commemorate him the way they wanted to. My wife was taking our children (aged 14 and 16 at the time) to visit her mother in North London. My plan was to attend the service, pay my respects to the family, get home long before 6pm. Mayo were playing Tyrone in the All-Ireland Football Final at 5pm. Later that evening Emma Radecanu was playing in the final of US Open, aiming to become the first British woman to win a tennis major since Virginia Wade in 1977.

I was at the service in plenty of time in my usual funeral wear of dark suit, white shirt and the black tie I bought for my mother’s funeral in 1997: Lancôme, pure silk, £40, the most I have ever paid for a tie. It has served me well.

As noted before on these pages more than once, I tend to allude to living people (“a former work colleague”, “a favourite cousin”, “ an old schoolfriend”) rather than name them directly. I am more direct about people who have died, as explained in this piece about Norman Stone. Even so I will only allude to the man we were commemorating on 11 September 2021 and not name him fully. He and I had many things in common: the same first name (Sean), maternal grandparents from the same counties in Ireland (Longford and Cavan, you won’t meet too many people here in London with such heritage), we were still into our music and football well into our 50s. We had both attended the same church throughout our childhood. He had been an excellent chorister. I had sung and played a bit in the folk group that my brother was involved with for many years. We had not attended the same schools. We should have been in the same school year but were not. As a September child I had “skipped a year” as it were. September babies here in the UK are either among the oldest or youngest in their class. I was one of the youngest. We had both married comparatively late and had children in our 40s (the same combination: a boy and a girl). His children are even younger than mine.

As the service progressed I heard many things that I already knew and learnt a few new things. I knew that he had written a book in the 1990s. I learnt that he kept a Blog, primarily about his passion for travel. I knew that he sang and played guitar and learnt that he was a regular on the Open Mic scene near where he lived (down Winchester way). He was still playing football regularly in his 50s.

It was a sad occasion, as you can imagine. His young children presented items that had particular meaning for him. To quote from the order of service: “a football jersey, to remember Sean’s love of all sport … a family photo [album], to reflect the joy his children brought him and how much he loved his family … a guitar, representing Sean’s creativity and his passion for music of so many kinds”.

Towards the end of the service I was reflecting on our similarities and differences. We have both written books. His was never published, which was a great disappointment to him. We both created Blogs. I had never come across his (and still haven’t found it). We both played music regularly. He didn’t headline any gigs as far as I can tell. I had a growing feeling that I needed to get out there and do more. We had endured 500 days of not being able to watch live music, or play live music, in any venue. Things were changing. The venues would be opening again soon. I’ll be honest with you. My exact thoughts, the words I said to myself, even though I was sat in a church, were: “Fucking hell, I’ve got to get back out there and do my Number One act”. I’d had a greater sense of purpose than usual at the start of 2020, to get out and play far more often than the once a month that I had been performing for the previous 18 months. I was ready. And what had happened next? 18 months of not being able to play at all.

The service drew to an end. If I had read all the way to the final page of the order of service I would known what was coming. I hadn’t. The last piece of music to be played, as the family were processing out of the church, was a recent recording. It was a duet featuring the deceased: “All I Have To Do Is Dream”, the very song that I had learnt to play that morning. It freaked me out. I had planned to go home soon after the service, as the mourners headed to the bar where the celebration of life would continue, about a mile away. But I got talking to some of the family, and another guy whose family we hung out with more than most when we were children. His older sister had gone out with the deceased Sean when they were teenagers. His name was also Sean. He’s a couple of years younger than me, no longer lives in London, and I had never had a beer with him. At his invitation more than anything else I headed to the bar as well, to carry on our conversation and have a few drinks. I got rather carried away. The first beer or two were on the house, paid for by the family. The next few, and the Negronis, and the JD and cokes, and the Jameson or two at the end, were not. I staggered home at 2am, having missed Mayo fall at the last hurdle yet again in a Gaelic Final, and having missed every minute of Emma Radecanu’s win in New York.

It took me a while to play “All I Have To Do Is Dream” in public. October 2022 was the first proper performance, at a pub in Hammersmith. I told a cut-down version of this story when I did so, and dedicated the song to the other Sean’s memory, and to everyone in the room who might have spent their life doing what I have done, “dreaming my life away”. I have played it over 20 times since then. The only song I have performed more often is “Nothing Compares 2U”, for reasons explained here. To paraphrase my closing words from that piece: for as long as there is breath in my lungs I plan to play “All I Have To Do Is Dream” regularly, explain my reasons for doing so, and dedicate it to the man whose life we celebrated on 11 September 2021. I’m trying not to dream my life away.