Driving through Napa Valley, with Mount St Helena looming and a watery dusk coming down, it discombobulated me to hear the Thompson Twins’ Hold Me Now on the radio. America’s regional stations seem to subsist on a diet of below-average 1980s British pop. This was the final straw. At the next town, I made straight for the record store.
As a gardens writer, my only rule is that I have to visit any place I am going to write about. This makes for quite a lot of driving in America, where much of the interesting new conceptual landscape design can be found. But, as usual, I had forgotten to pack any CDs to play in the rental car.
Browsing the racks, the first album by Jonathan Richman’s band, the Modern Lovers, leapt out at me. I was already familiar with Roadrunner, the signature track, because it had been covered by the Jazz Butcher, a band that obsessed me and my friends in the mid1980s. It is a great song for 17-year-olds to play while driving too fast. It begins “Roadrunner, Roadrunner, going faster miles an hour”, and speeds up from there though, in my case, the claim “the highway is your girlfriend” was perhaps a little close to the bone.
Anyway, I now had the chance to experience the original 1970s American Roadrunner, so I grabbed the CD. If anything, this was even better as a driving song than the version I knew and, of course, it was genuinely 100% American. With “suburban trees, suburban speed and it smells like heaven” blaring out as I cruised the freeways, it wasn’t long before I was nabbed for speeding coming over the crest of Death Valley at dawn, with no cars in sight, at 65mph. The speed cop gave me the full treatment: gun out, he spread-eagled me on the bonnet as I tried to explain that I was writing about gardens for Country Life.
The Modern Lovers is now my US soundtrack. When I was in New York last year, I played it in my room in the “rock’n’roll” Chelsea Hotel to drown out the soft-porn “fashion” shoots being conducted outside my door.
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It seemed spooky that Richman should be playing in Brooklyn during my stay, so, of course, I went along. As I waited in the crowd, a voice behind me murmured: “Excuse me.” I turned to see this small guy smiling at me as he made his way to the stage. It was the Roadrunner himself, still going strong and about to play an excellent acoustic set.
Tim Richardson’s The Arcadian Friends: Inventing the English Landscape Garden is published by Bantam Press at £25