Ben Harrison and David Paul Jones - Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – Songs and Stories of an Eighties Teenager

Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was the final single to be released by The Smiths, the mercurial Manchester band who for a certain breed of sensitive young men helped define life in the 1980s. One of these was Ben Harrison, who went on to become the co artistic director of the Edinburgh based Grid Iron Theatre Company. Growing up in a small English town, for Harrison, the Smiths, and Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me in particular, became a soundtrack to his life.

 Harrison was a hopelessly romantic middle class teen who undertook a very quiet rebellion against his background by way of the trappings of Cold War communism and radical chic. He also fell for the Smiths just as he fell for girls at bus stops and older women at the local am-dram group who offered some kind of salvation in a humdrum town.

 

It should come as no surprise, then, that Harrison has co-opted the title of the Smiths swan song for his autobiographical look back at the decade in which he came of age. Taking a cue from Morrissey’s heart on sleeve lyrics and sense of emotional torment in the cruel world the Smiths occupied, Harrison’s Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me thrusts him into the spotlight to perform a series of autobiographical short stories that lay bare some of his teenage years’ key moments.

 

‘I suppose the theme of the show is escape,’ says Harrison. ‘There's a theme of falling in love, and possibly over romanticising women, but then also falling very much in love with the music, which did the same thing. It kind of oscillates between hope and despair.’

 

This very Morrisseyesque sounding notion for Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me came to Harrison while touring Undertow Overflow, a similarly styled compendium of autobiographically inclined songs and stories presented in 2022 in collaboration with singer-songwriter Amy Duncan. This saw Duncan and Harrison do a proper rock and roll style tour in a van.

 

‘We were driving around on the tour,’ Harrison remembers, ‘and we started listening to eighties music on Spotify.’ 

 

This prompted Harrison to recall a Valentine’s Day concert presented several years earlier by composer and long time collaborator of Harrison and Grid Iron, David Paul Jones. Harrison and Jones had first worked together in 2003 on Those Eyes, That Mouth, a devised work drawn from classic European literature and film and presented in an Edinburgh townhouse. Jones also worked on Barflies, an adaptation of Charles Bukowski short stories performed in Edinburgh’s Barony Bar. It was at the Barony that Jones performed his Valentine’s Day concert.

 

‘I think it was about a week before the concert,’ Harrison remembers, ‘and I said to DPJ, oh, could you do a cover of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me. I thought it was a stupid idea proposing it, and that he’d never do it. On the night, he played this mix of covers and his own songs, and then, I think it was the last track, he started to play it, and it was incredible.’

 

Once the tour of Undertow Underflow was done, Harrison contacted Jones about his idea. Shortly afterwards he received a seven-hour playlist of 1980s songs. With director Scott Johnston on board, these were gradually whittled down to a selection of songs from the era that left their mark on both Harrison and Jones. Songs featured  alongside original music by Jones include Bronski Beat’s Smalltown Boy, Like a Prayer by Madonna, and The Power of Love, by Frankie Goes to Hollywood. 

 

This is no karaoke covers hour, however. As those well versed in what might be regarded as the Morrissey and Marr of the site specific theatre scene’s previous collaborations will already know, Jones’s interpretations of classic songs are likely to be more in keeping with what the 4AD record label’s 1980s rolling ‘supergroup’, This Mortal Coil, did with covers of leftfield classics. Like them, Jones remakes and remodels existing material in his own more nuanced image.

 

‘With Ben, says Jones, ‘from the minute we started working together, he has always given me this kind of freedom of expression. Cover versions play a big part in our history together, and there's not a single show we have done where a cover version hasn't been this real seminal moments in a piece. The lovely thing about this show is we're doing classic eighties songs, but we’re not trying to parody the sound world of the eighties.’

 

Jones will be accompanied on stage by internationally renowned Edinburgh based  cellist, Justyna Jablonska, whose work mixes classical sensibilities with electronics and improvisation.

 

‘The palette we’re using is a very mixed piano and ambient soundscape one,’ says Jones, ‘so the soundtrack is very cinematic, It's about interpreting the words. We are faithful more or less to the original melodies of the songs, but the feel, the tempo, and the orchestration is very different.’

 

As for the song that gave Harrison the title of his and Jones’s show, he intends paying it the ultimate homage.

 

‘Last night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me is going to be a played at my funeral’, Harrison says. ‘I've written it into my will. I'm still having the dream that last night somebody told me they loved me. I’m still looking for that.’

 

Tron Theatre, Glasgow, 19-21 September; Summerhall, Edinburgh, 23-25 September; James Milne Institute, Findhorn Bay Arts Festival, 28 September.

 

 

Last Night I That Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me – A Life

 

Last Night I That Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was the third and final single taken from the Smiths’s fourth album, Strangeways, Here we Come.

 

By the time it was released in December 1987, the Smiths had split up. Billed as ‘The Last Single’, it reached number 30 in the UK singles chart.

 

The Smiths’ swansong arrived six months after Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had been elected for a third term in office.

 

The album and 12” single version of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me opens with a one minute and fifty-five second recording of the 1984-1985 Miner’s Strike, which became one of the 1980s’ defining moments.

 

Cover star of Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me was Billy Fury, the Liverpool born rock and roll singer who died aged 42 in 1983, just as The Smiths were playing their first gigs.

 

Morrissey’s theatrical leanings saw the run off groove of Last Night…’s original vinyl release etched with the words, ‘’THE RETURN OF THE SUBMISSIVE SOCIETY’’ (X) STARRING SHERIDAN WHITESIDE’. The `B-side reads ‘’’THE BIZARRE ORIENTAL VIBRATING PALM DEATH’’ (X) STARRING SHERIDAN WHITESIDE.’’

 

Whiteside was the lead character in George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart’s 1939 play, The Man Who Came to Dinner, and was based on drama critic of the New Yorker

, Alexander Woollcott.

 

A film of The Man Who Came to Dinner was made in 1942 starring Bette Davis and Ann Sheridan, with Whiteside played by Monty Woolley after his appearance in the original stage production made him a star.

The List, September 2024

 

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