It is the evening of the day / I sit and watch the children play
Smiling faces I can see / But not for me
I sit and watch / As tears go by
My riches can't buy everything /
I want to hear the children sing
All I hear is the sound /
Of rain falling on the ground
I sit and watch /
As tears go by
It is the evening of the day /
I sit and watch the children play
Doing things I used to do /
They think are new
I sit and watch /
As tears go by
My life seems compartmentalised by music: there was Nana Mouskouri in Greece, Eddie Rabbit in Singapore; Lobo in Burma, Neil Diamond in New Guinea, the Seekers in Australia, and Marianne Faithfull in what was then South-West Africa and is now Namibia.
My flatmate Karl-Heinz Herzberg, another young German who like me worked for starvation wages for the German company Metje & Ziegler in Lüderitz, played her record "As Tears Go By" endlessly night after night.
Yours truly on the left
Drinks helped to cope with the view from the window to the harbour ...
... while listening to the howling winds coming out of the desert.
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Endlessly playing "As Tears Go By" seemed to have helped Karl-Heinz to get through those long nights, as he's still there in what is now Namibia, unlike me who left after only six months, but the memory of Karl-Heinz who was a good friend despite his very limited taste in music, lives on.
All this came back to me when I read that "Pop star Marianne Faithfull has died peacefully in the company of her family in London, aged 78".
It's now the evening of our lives, Karl-Heinz, and I don't know if you're still spending your nights playing "As Tears Go By" as the desert winds howl outside, but I am sure you'll be playing it one last time tonight.
