Years ago I was browsing through a book on Saturday Night Live. The book listed the musical guests for each episode. An episode in 1987 featured two musical guests, the second of whom was Pink Floyd guitarist David Gilmour. (The first performer was, anomalously enough, Buster Pointdexter.) Gilmour was shown as performing a track entitled "Ah Robertson, It's You".
This caught my interest, not only because of the "Robertson" part, but also because I am a huge Pink Floyd fan, and I didn't remember any similarly-titled song in the Gilmour solo catalog. Recently I decided to find out more about the performance using the Internet, society's most powerful tool for research/time-wasting. I quickly discovered that, like every other piece of video footage on our planet, the clip is up on YouTube [link dead, ironically enough].
The mystery of the title is preserved by the fact that the song is an instrumental. It is rather Floydy in the middle section, when Gilmour plays a guitar solo over organ chords, but the opening and closing sections with the horn section are not very Floydy.
I have been unable to learn anything else about "Ah Robertson, It's You", except that it is also, perhaps more correctly, known as "Song For My Sara".
I am left with the impression that the music itself does not reflect the mood evoked by either of the alternate titles.
"Song for My Sara" sounds as if it would be treacly love song.
"Ah, Robertson, It's You" is harder to pin down, but it calls to my mind an old man wearing tweed sitting in a cottage on a moor in the north of England, thinking back over his life, when he is interrupted in his reveries by the appearance of someone named Robertson, who is also old and wearing tweed.
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While doing research related to this blog entry, I came upon a clip of my two favorite guitarists, David Gilmour and Mark Knopfler, collaborating . . . in sketch comedy.
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After further research, I find that what appears to be a comedy sketch may actually have been a chapter meeting of the Guardians of the Protectorate of Rock, though the guy from Level 42 was probably just an Associate Member.
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