Around 1969, a Scottish band called Marmalade charted a song entitled "Reflections of My Life". I was vaguely aware of it and had always assumed it was an early pre-disco Bee-Gees number. Heard it recently on the radio and the DJ gave the band's name and that started me looking into it. First things first, here's "Reflections of My Life"
A sweet melancholy little number (I'm Irish heritage and Celts are suckers for sad songs), made it as high as number ten on the US charts and number three in the UK.
Then, Marmalade faded into obscurity. Never had a follow up hit, professional rivalries, the lead singer and cowriter, Dean Ford, headed off to the US to make a name ... except he never did. He ended up a limo driver, chauffeuring the likes of Bob Dylan and Michael Jackson, and forbidden by his boss from "bothering" the clients with stories of his own brush with musical fame. He drank and was eventually fired for drinking on the job from the limo bar.
He didn't live a particularly long life (died in 2018 at 72) BUT ... before he did, he hooked up with an American guitarist named Jon Tansin. He eventually made his way back to Scotland and almost exactly fifty years after charting "Reflections of My Life", he rerecorded it as part of a collection called "This Scottish Heart". A poignant title - "This Scottish Heart" - in another generation, I fear the mystical ideal of a "Scottish" heart will have vanished forever. Overrun by unwelcome immigrants, these nations will lose any sense of a unique self and become a shapeless flavorless mongrel mass, and the world will be a much poorer place for it.
Look at that lonely little old man, as the bagpipes pass. Look at the fleeting image of a younger self - like most young men who were in a band at the time, likely thought they were going to be the next Rolling Stones, the next Beatles. Leaves Scotland with a dream of musical stardom and fifty years later returns, an old man, plaintively singing "Take me back to my own home". Thankfully, he finally does get back to his native Scotland, where he belongs and where he probably always belonged.
Apparently, he died less than a month after recording this version.
