When I was in Year 9 my favourite
band were a “progressive metal” band from Canada called Rush. My favourite song
was called Xanadu. I found out that it was a reworking of a poem by an English
poet called Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Even better, he was mates with William
Wordsworth, lived in the Lake District and lived like a rock star. The poem on
which the song Xanadu is based is called Kubla Khan. It’s my favourite of his
poems, obviously. It was written in, shall we say, circumstances that might not
be unknown to some modern rock stars. Words from the poem Frost at Midnight are
carved into the steps where you hire rowing boats at Keswick. Read The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner if you’ve got lots of time. (Iron Maiden
did a song based on that!) Coleridge turned me into a Romantic (as opposed to
romantic – there is a difference). And he’s my hero because he’s the first
person recorded as descending Broad Stand on Scafell. He fell down it and lived
to tell the tale.
