Sometimes Son Is Better Than Father, Sometimes Father Better Than Son

Towards the end of the era of the “India By Land” hippy trail-makers, Mike and I often used to hang around the Sultanahmet area of Istanbul – where most western long-hairs would end up at some point – and make a bit of money busking in cafes and restaurants round about. There were two pudding shops, both very popular, one known just as “The Pudding Shop”, and the other one, a few doors away, called “Can [pronounced Jan] Shop”, or simply Can’s. The Pudding Shop itself, with its history of appearing in the film Midnight Express (although not a favourite film with Turkish people), had gone rather bigtime, and didn’t encourage buskers, but the Can Shop was a different story.

Can was the name of its owner, and he was always very friendly, encouraging us to play as much as we wanted, when he was there; but on days when his son was left in charge we weren’t welcome at all. However, a little bit further up the road (Divanyolu Caddesi) the roles were reversed. There, there was a hotel called Hotel Pirlanta, which had its own restaurant on the ground floor: and it was the boss of the hotel – the father – who didn’t like us; but his son Mehmet, running the restaurant, used to welcome us to come in and play to his customers.

A bit further up the street still was the Hotel Sultanahmet, probably the cheapest in the area, where the proprietor had once let Mike live free of charge in return for some English lessons. And it was while staying there, in a small room with walls painted a rather garish greeny-blue colour, that I had the idea one evening for a song that would start with the line, “Sometimes son is better than father, sometimes father better than son”….

We did nothing with the song for a long time, but many years later we were in Skopje, Macedonia, in the music studio of a friend of ours called Eroll Jakupi – a well-known singer of Albanian language pop songs in those days – who had said, could we find a song of ours for him? Well, we let him listen to a few we were currently working on, without getting much reaction (which didn’t surprise me, in fact, because it’s a very different musical culture down there), when I just thought to myself, “Oh well, why not try him with ‘Sometimes son…etc.’ ” and after I’d played a couple of lines Eroll stopped me. “That’s the one “, he said.

So, Mike did some magic with the lyrics, which we’d never properly finished, and which then of course had to be translated into Albanian; Eroll set Xheni (pronounced Jeni), his arranger at the time, to work; and in the end the version that seemed to come out the best was one that featured all of us weighing in with the vocals, but didn’t actually use the original line that had inspired the song – so it ended up being called “Mushti Rushti Balkan Families”. Don’t ask me what that means exactly, ’cause I haven’t a clue, but it’s got to be the only Balkan folk song that was written by two British buskers!

You can listen to it here if you like.

Myself, Bongo Mike, and Eroll Jakupi, on a bright but cold Winter’s day.