Tom Fletcher

I walked out to a boxing ring in Nairobi to this, with 3000 people chanting that they wanted me dead. My boxing motto was ‘float like a bee, sting like a butterfly’. One opponent had t-shirts made saying ‘Fletcher goes home on a stretcher’. This is also youth, Folkestone, an ill advised period as the lead singer for ‘Freshly Squeezed’, my brothers and sister, my oldest friends: we’re here for a good time not a long time.

Extended family reunions with the Shillingfords and Shillingtons normally involve fancy dress, volume, cauldrons of black velvet, ‘We are Family’, and singing this around a piano. My Northern Irish grandmother lived with us for twenty years. After she died I discovered in an Oxford library a lifetime of extraordinary letters to her from my grandfather. He spoke of the Irish Sea as something that united not separated them, a quote that came in handy when I too fell for an Irishwoman. I’m a proud descendant, now trying hard to work out how to be a good ancestor.

This song for me is my parents, because we used to listen to the Woody Guthrie original traveling around Europe in an unreliable orange VW campervan. I later played it constantly while driving Route 66 in a 200 dollar Chevy Malibu. And more recently I was able to watch better musicians perform my version about Lebanon. The Boss (who Spotify tells me I listen to all the time) sang this version on campaign for Obama, whose extraordinary election – and all it meant – was such a privilege to experience. Diversity, tolerance, coexistence: easy to say, hard to do. ‘This land was made for you and me’.

The album played constantly when I was a student at Hertford. Thirty people in a tiny room in Ab House, all bellowing along tunelessly. It was better than it sounds. I’ve been so impressed by how today’s students are coping without all that. When I said to one first year that I was sad they were missing out on the Hertford experience he told me “we have to own it – who is to say this is not our Hertford experience?”

When I was ambassador, there was a running track in Beirut that my bodyguards would seal off for me when the threats were high. This was my go-to song for those moments: proceed until apprehended. ‘Maybe I just wanna fly, wanna live, I don’t want to die, maybe I just wanna breathe, maybe I just don’t believe, you and I are gonna live forever’. I wrote farewell letters to my wife and kids to it, and to Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Freebird’: ‘if I leave here tomorrow, will you still remember me’.

Our wedding song was Sinatra: ‘All The Way’. But this is really the one. ‘I loved you, I love you and I will love you’. We were born on the same day, same year. I skipped a conference in Moscow and flew to Thailand to surprise her for our first date. This song for me is living in the Marais in Paris, settling down, planning a family, starting the great adventure of marriage. We had David Bowie on the wall – ‘I don’t know where we’re going, but I promise it won’t be boring.’ Apart from my playlists, that still works.

I should have Fairouz or Um Kalthoum, or the One Lebanon theme song to the unity concert we helped put on, but of all the Lebanese songs that I love, this ridiculous disco tune captures for me the energy and vitality of Beirut. ‘We’re going to love together, we’re going to dance together, this is life’. What nights, what a time. Resilience, beauty, life, wine, olive oil, danger, laughter, mountains, oceans.

As you might understand from this list, my boys are increasingly derisory of my dependence on Dad music. They don’t dance with me to The Jungle Book any more. We’ve been to a huge amount of live concerts together. But the most precious musical moments as a family are normally in a car in the sunshine. Every choice I make in life is basically an effort to get more of those, and more time with my sons.

This is a song of apology to all those who support you along the way, and to whom you don’t say thanks enough. So it has to be the Willie Nelson version, not Elvis. It’s an apology for screwing up, not turning up, neglecting to tell someone why they mean so much. The song I would run to keep from the waves. And the song I should have listened to every day to remind me to say thanks more often. Just edges out Alicia Keys and Adam Levine’s cover of Wild Horses. ‘Faith has been broken, tears have been cried, let’s do some living, before we die’.

Like many people, I would take the Hertford College by-laws and statutes. If I ever got off the island I could then become the Jackie Weaver of Governing Body. (Ed – topical reference. Like the choice of tracks, it will not age well.)

Assuming I could somehow fashion a decent bat from a palm tree, I’d like a bowling machine and an unlimited supply of cricket balls. Strollers CC have long since become a WhatsApp group that used to play cricket, but I still believe (more in hope than expectation) that my best batting days are ahead of me. I’d try to train the turtles to play ‘Soul Limbo’ by Booker T and the MGs in the background while I scored imaginary double centuries against my cricketing nemeses.