By The Landlord
Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
To the last syllable of recorded time;
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player,
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage,
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing." - Shakespeare, Macbeth, Act 5 Scene 5
“Tomorrow is our permanent address
and there they'll scarcely find us (if they do),
we'll move away still further: into now” – e e cummings
“I never put off till tomorrow what I can possibly do - the day after.” – Oscar Wilde
“Tomorrow is a satire on today, And shows its weakness.” – Edward Young
“I am tomorrow, or some future day, what I establish today. I am today what I established yesterday or some previous day.” – James Joyce
"The word tomorrow was invented for indecisive people and for children." – Ivan Turgenev
"Today was good. Today was fun. Tomorrow is another one." – Dr. Seuss
"Yesterday's just a memory, tomorrow is never what it's supposed to be." – Bob Dylan
"Tomorrow belongs to those who can hear it coming." – David Bowie
"After all, tomorrow is another day," proclaimed the tearful Vivian Leigh's Scarlett O'Hara, suddenly gazing up from that staircase and then, finally into the red sunset, with that famous melodramatic line at the end of the massively grossing and now very dated 1940 epic Gone With The Wind. Will she ever get Rhett Butler (Clark Gable) back? We'll never know. And to be honest, unlikely, frankly, to give a damn. But no shit, Sherlock, she's right about what tomorrow is, and hopefully, it's always on its way.
Tomorrow plays an important role in our psyche. Is it a motivator, a deadline, a focus? Does it allow more time? Perhaps to recover, improve, renew, offer a fresh chance, and, after a night's sleep, put a new complexion on things, offer more perspective, hope, and answers? Or is it yet another opportunity to procrastinate and delay? It's all of these and more.
Tomorrow might come with anticipation, excitement, fear, or dread. It could be Shakespeare's Macbeth contemplating his actions and forthcoming fate, or Henry V encouraging his nervous troops before The battle of Agincourt the following dawn. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die" is a conflation of two biblical sayings from Ecclesiastes and Isaiah.
Tomorrow could be the night before a return to work or school, or the beginning of the weekend. Or perhaps it will bring the same again, a Groundhog Day cycle of a treadmill existence, where no matter what he does, tomorrow is always today all over again, and even more for Bill Murray in that retrospectively rather good film about time and perception.
Or maybe tomorrow will bring a complete change, but like the cycle of Earth going round the sun, it's always another go on life's big roundabout.
But what, more precisely, about tomorrow in song? Conceptually, emotionally, temporarily, in narrative and situation, tomorrow is always linked to the idea of 'today', which in turn is associated with 'yesterday', but for the purposes of this topic, let's try to concentrate on tomorrow, even though the other two words might be mentioned in the context of song lyrics. And with so many songs likely to arise, it's important that the idea, setting, mention or thought of tomorrow isn't just a word that appears somewhere in lyrics, but plays a central or prominent role in any songs put forward, whether in the title, or within it.
What time does tomorrow come to mind? At the end of the working day when you might acknowledge next encounters with colleagues or others, or just realise that so much has still be be done? Perhaps it's just before you go to bed? Or when you wake up and tomorrow is now suddenly transformed into today? One thing is for certain, tomorrow is always coming. Well, it'd better, or we're really in trouble.
Tomorrow can be expressed not merely by the word itself, but in many other ways. And when it comes, literally to tomorrow, does this mean after midnight, or when the sun rises, in the morning?
Tomorrow can also mean more metaphorically a reference to the future. The Big Tomorrow has always been around in our culture. In the 1970s I grew up watching TV programmes that were all about tomorrow, but not literally the next day, such as the popular science programme Tomorrow’s World, which profiled new technology as something that would be part of our everyday lives in the near future. As the writer Edward Teller puts it: “The science of today is the technology of tomorrow.” It included, as on our previous topic about electronic music up to 1983, an early TV appearance of Kraftwerk in 1975. Here’s the evolution of the theme tune, originally composed by John Dankworth, but it changed to something more electronic and upbeat in the 1980s courtesy of Richard Denton & Martin Cook, also rather good, but then in 1987 dipped into something far more traditional and dull. Tomorrow doesn’t always bring improvements.
And just for even more retrospective tomorrows, let’s hear original presenter Raymond Baxter talking about Kraftwerk:
And there was also The Tomorrow People - originally a 1970s British series, about the emergence of the next stage of human evolution (Homo novis) with characters born to human parents, each an apparently normal child who might at some point between childhood and late adolescence experience a process called 'breaking out' and develop special paranormal abilities. It’s since been subject to at least one US/American remake and of course the idea has been recreated in many other books, TV series and films ever since.
Although I watched some of it, personally I don’t recollect all that much about that original British TV series itself, which no doubt will seem very slow and low budget by today’s standards, but it ran for eight seasons from 1973 to 1979. For me though the best part, something that really stuck is the wonderfully eerie and futuristic sounding theme music by Dudley Simpson:
So then, there’s a big crowd of regulars and new guests crammed into the Bar to say more about the concept and culture of ‘tomorrow’.
And only in the Bar can you have the scenario of Bob Marley passing a massive joint to the My Fair Lady actor Rex Harrison who in turn is enjoy a bottle of whisky. They are not looking forward to the next day. “Tomorrow is a thief of pleasure,” says Rex, with worry about his hangover. “Yeah man,” says Bob. “The good times of today, are the sad thoughts of tomorrow.”
Tomorrow can broadly be divided into two camps – don’t consider it and live for today only, or those who see it as a positive thing to look forward towards, but of course there is plenty of nuance in between.
The prolific singer and songwriter Sia is here to talk about the big role it plays in pop music. “About 50 percent of the songs on the radio are like, 'Live like tomorrow doesn't exist. Like it's my birthday. Like it's the last day of my life'... Such a large percentage of pop music is really about party time.”
And there’s plenty who back that up. Gloria Estefan’s attitude is: “You can put things off until tomorrow but tomorrow may never come.”
Tomorrow can be the thief of art and creativity, and Pablo Picasso is all about doing things sooner. “Only put off until tomorrow what you are willing to die having left undone,” he announces.
Chuck Close has a more balanced view of what’s possible in the immediate future. “You don't have to reinvent the wheel every day. Today you will do what you did yesterday, and tomorrow you will do what you did today. Eventually you will get somewhere.”
Joan Rivers is here too, never one not to get in on the act: “Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, today is God's gift, that's why we call it the present.”
But some people really can’t really wait for tomorrow, but happily returning to life in only the way the Bar can bring, here’s two huge music icons recalling ironic remarks before their early departure but without regrets.
Marc Bolan. ‘It could all end tomorrow …”
“If I died tomorrow, I would be a happy girl,” recounts Amy Winehouse.
“I honestly feel it could all end tomorrow. Not just the band thing - I mean life,” says Marc Bolan. Oh the irony.
Even Mahatma Gandhi, also here, seems to have something of a semi-rock’n’roll attitude: “Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever,” says that eternally wise man.
And to back that up, Margaret Fuller puts it succinctly: “Today a reader, tomorrow a leader.”
Heroic campaigner Malala Yousafzai is also here, and has nothing but positive things to say about the idea. “Let us make our future now, and let us make our dreams tomorrow's reality.”
“Yes,” says the poet John Dryden. “Happy the man, and happy he alone, he who can call today his own; he who, secure within, can say, tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today.”
Malala and John now having a chat to Martin Luther who adds: "Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree.”
And they are now all joined by Joan of Arc. Now that would make a great dialogue. Here’s Joan warning that tomorrow will bring some serious events, but her attitude to it is still positive:
“Get up tomorrow early in the morning, and earlier than you did today, and do the best that you can. Always stay near me, for tomorrow I will have much to do and more than I ever had, and tomorrow blood will leave my body above the breast.”
Joan of Arc: early riser
Tomorrow, however, isn’t always so straightforward. “If I shall exist eternally, how shall I exist tomorrow?” asks Franz Kafka.
“Remember, tomorrow is promised to no one,” says Walter Payton.
“Yesterday's weirdness is tomorrow's reason why,” adds Hunter S. Thompson.
“We are tomorrow's past,” says another novelist, Mary Webb.
Gore Vidal reckons the obsession with tomorrow is one of US culture’s problems. “Americans are future-minded to the point of obsession. We are impatient at living in the present. Tomorrow is bound to be better... next year, next century, always what might be rather than what is. This trait in us makes for 'progress;' it also makes for a continuing dissatisfaction.”
“It is not the cares of today, but the cares of tomorrow, that weigh a man down,” says George MacDonald.
“Yes,” says Leo Buscaglia. “Worry never robs tomorrow of its sorrow, it only saps today of its joy.”
But what about considering tomorrow when it comes to the bigger picture, such as climate change? Perhaps the problem lies with politics itself as much as society only worrying about the short-term tomorrow.
“Politics is the ability to foretell what is going to happen tomorrow, next week, next month and next year. And to have the ability afterwards to explain why it didn't happen,” says Winston Churchill. But what if it does, Winston?
Whoever is the leader, whether prime minister or president Gracie Allen dismisses their status. “The President of today is just the postage stamp of tomorrow.”
Dr Martin Luther King Hr is here, and in the climate of Vietnam, warns of another thing that doesn’t truly consider the next day and beyond: “War is a poor chisel to carve out tomorrow.”
But where does this sticky problem of tomorrow lead us. Mixed blessings of course. Let’s leave it with Lewis Carroll, reminding us of his White Queen character in Alice Through The Looking Glass.
“The rule is, jam tomorrow and jam yesterday - but never jam today.”
But … despite this, it’s time to jam!
So then, it’s time to turn the subject over to you, learned Bar patrons, and to this week’s guest who will see what today and tomorrow brings and turn them into playlists a few tomorrows later. The irony is that he is actually in Australis where it is already just become tomorrow - being 11 hours head of of Greenwich Mean Time! Welcome back the nimbly knowledgeable Nicko – who is no doubt ahead of this game in all sorts of ways! Place your songs in comments below for deadline on Monday at 11pm UK time, for playlists published next week, though for the purposes of this topic, tomorrow is now!
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