Andrew Miller: There is no generational divide when it comes to songwriting for the operating theatre

A music review. Like a driver on a road trip, the anaesthetist often chooses the operating theatre playlist. We try not to alarm the next patient by blaring Acca Dacca - the aim is generally to create a relaxed ambience and exclude anything that might disrupt the team from their subconscious competence. Surgeons, like all animals, behave better within their comfort zone. Each procedure has an ebb and flow, and like the arc of any good story, less is more when things get difficult. Within these parameters, we range from Paul Kelly to Taylor Swift and back again - via the final four decades of the 20th century, naturally. Variety is encouraged, because we spend more hours operating than we do with our families. Many are excited by news that Swift’s next album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be released hot on the heels of Kelly’s new single, Rita Wrote a Letter - the much-anticipated sequel to his 1996 classic, How to Make Gravy. At first blush you might think these two iconic artists do not have much in common. Kelly is a 70yo bloke who looks like a skeleton with leather stretched over it - reanimated roadkill perhaps - while 35yo American sweetheart Swift is at home on the cover of Vogue any month of the year. His Aussie drawl and no-frills presentation stand in stark contrast to her mega-stage two-billion-dollar Era’s tour, but the Venn diagram overlaps broadly when it comes to their understanding of combining guitar with poetry to tell stories. Their mastery even subdued my distaste for crowds sufficiently for me to line up for their outdoor concerts - to pay my irrelevant respects, and be left in awe. Kelly says that poetry is about play and companionship - that a favourite poem can be with you always. The good ones, he says, are often fun and serious simultaneously. Like How to Make Gravy, in which he tells the story of Joe - a prisoner who, on the 21st of December, writes a letter home to express FOMO, fear of missing out on making the Christmas gravy, but also the gathering of characters like Frank and Dolly and, fundamentally the fear his brother Dan might be dancing “later in the evening” with Joe’s lonely wife, Rita. In a few short verses, with no chorus, Kelly painted a big enough picture to touch our hearts, and inspire a 2024 movie. Almost 30 years later, we now learn that Rita wrote a letter, and the story of loss is complete, as Joe speaks posthumously. Rita was expecting brother Dan’s baby, so perhaps Joe was better off dead. Perhaps. Swift won a national US poetry competition when she was only ten years old, and expanded on that prodigious start in ways that critics miss whenever they underestimate the ubiquitous pop star. When Kelly covered Swift’s song Anti-Hero, he infused his trademark accent and emphasis, but his respect for her words resonates. “I have this thing where I get older but just never wiser,” echoes his own famous line - “I’ve done all the dumb things.” “At teatime, everybody agrees, I’ll stare directly at the sun, but never in the mirror.” For Swift’s generation, “teatime” is whenever the gossip is spilt, but when Kelly separates her words ever-so slightly more, it’s anyone and everyone’s family dinner. Their themes are universal - Shakespearean. The sun they stare recklessly into is the tragicomedy of life and love, the wreckage of it all gone wrong, and the fragile beauty of redemption. Author Stephen King once observed that life often does sound like a country song. “Our song is a slamming screen door,” was penned by the precocious 15yo Swift, but would ring just as true coming from Kelly. The ordinary becomes extraordinary, if you look at it the right way. We must remember that for our patients, even routine surgery is actually a little miracle. Musical context for the scalpel - 9/10.