Climate Change Series “Where Do The Children Play“🎹🎼🎧play⛹🏾‍♀️

This is funky, funky because Yusuf/Cat Stevens song’s message had such lasting value that he is still performing it at shows more than half a century later.

It’s funky because this song castigates the pollution🥵 and the concrete jungle that a new generation of youngsters had to grow up in. Cat Stevens grew up in Holborn, London attending a school in the theatre district of Drury Lane. “It was all entertainment, everywhere; I mean, I thought this was natural,” he said. “But then I realised that there weren’t so many parks around there and that’s where, when you come to my music, a song like ‘Where Do the Children Play?’, there’s a kind of harking to that issue.” ⚽️🎾🏀🏏🥅⛸🎭

Many of the lines by Stevens – such as “You roll on roads over fresh green grass/For your lorry loads pumping petrol gas” – remain sadly pertinent in the 21st Century. Stevens said that because his “iconic song” was “talking about ecology”, it remained relevant in an era struggling to find “the balance of nature to allow our children to play, to enjoy life”.

“At the time I was growing up in London, there were bomb ruins, because the war had just ended. There were still signs of destruction all around. And there weren’t many gardens… you had Hyde Park… you had to travel quite a long way to get there. So there was a yearning for the countryside and space for kids. At my school, we had a basement. It was like a lower ground floor. That’s where the children played, confined to that small basement. That was the reality of growing up in the city, and that’s where, ‘Where Do The Children Play?’ originates.”

Excerpts from ‘udiscovermusic.com’

Check this if only for the photograph: https://www.unicef.org/sowc2012/pdfs/SOWC-2012-Chapter-1-Children-in-an-increasingly-urban-world.pdf