By The Landlord
“And the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts or start upright in bed with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: “Pieces of eight! Pieces of eight!” – Robert Louis Stevenson, Treasure Island
“There comes a time in every rightly constructed boy's life when he has a raging desire to go somewhere and dig for hidden treasure.” – Mark Twain, Tom Sawyer
“The purest treasure mortal times afford, is spotless reputation; that away, men are but gilded loam or painted clay.” – William Shakespeare, Richard II
“There is more treasure in books than in all the pirates' loot on Treasure Island.” – Walt Disney
“The royal road to a man's heart is to talk to him about the things he treasures most.” – Dale Carnegie
'“Our deepest fears are like dragons, guarding our deepest treasure.” – Rainer Maria Rilke
“The human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.” – Charlotte Brontë
“If teardrops were pennies and heartaches were gold,
I'd have all the treasures my pockets could hold.” – Dolly Parton
“Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate.” – Johnny Depp as Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean
Shiver me timbers, shipmates, suddenly it's eight years since this once rickety and creaky, now proud and sturdy ark, with a friendly bar at its very heart, set sail – sometimes through stormy, icy waters, then through serene blue tropic – with its first, bold, playful, playlist topic.
And since then, well over 400 others have flowed out, pretty much every week, dug from the deep recesses of my dark imagination and of others too, with an accompanying now huge chest of written introductions, not least playlist pieces too, all equivalent to at least 12 fat novels, but best of all, inspiring hundreds of thousands of songs nominated, gleamingly tuneful treasures dug out, picked, polished, cherished and lovingly stored in this beautiful, gleaming, open-access hoard.
Related topics such as money, gold, coins, precious metals, and even pirates have come up in the past, but not treasure per se, which can overlap of course but in a certain context, where they are indeed, treasure.
What then is treasure? Whether it be gold, jewels or other items deemed precious, perhaps also items of the natural world, art, or other original works, they always seem to share certain qualities. Being buried or deeply hidden, often rare and therefore valuable, subject to obsession and having immense power those who seek or find them, having a transcendent quality, made, hewn or evolved through time. But more on that shortly …
So then, why pieces of eight? Well, of course that's the years accrued, and with a little instrumental play on words of course, not unknown here, this phrase also seems summarily appropriate for the many joyous discoveries of our mutual endeavours. The word treasure can mean many things as we’ll see, but it also happens in the brain, with the sudden flash and glint in the mind's eye and ear, when a piece of music is found here, and the connection and association it brings.
But we can start with the core meaning when it comes to song lyrics and musical nuance. The term pieces of eight originally refers to division of the Spanish dollar coin, which in turn became the unofficial national currency of the original American colonies before independence. This Spanish currency, the equivalent of eight silver reales, was turned into change by the division of this silver coin into up to eight bits, ruling the currency and monetary waves from the 1570s until the French Revolution.
Divided spoils: piece of eight from the Spanish dollar
And so comes the phrase, a blessing and curse, when repeatedly spoken by the parrot belonging to and mockingly named by Long John Silver in Robert Louis Stevenson famous novel of 1883, Treasure Island. The setup of the treasure-seeking plot with maps and all, comes when in in 1750 Silver's former captain, the original Captain Flint of the ship The Walrus, had buried ill-gotten treasure on an Caribbean island with six of his shipmates, before he murders them all, leaving the corpse of one, Allardyce, with arms outstretched in the direction of the supposed buried chest.
And so, with a cast of wonderfully described characters, including Long John Silver and parrot of course, Jim Hawkins, Billy Bones, Black Dog, Captain Smollet, and the castaway Ben Gunn, the treasure seeking adventure ensues. As with all treasure, it’s as much about the human effect as the items themselves.
Classic edition: Treasure Island
The novel, which was first a serialisation in a children's magazine in 1881, owes much to other works, including The Gold-Bug, an 1843 story by Edgar Allan Poe about William Legrand, who becomes obsessed with an unusual gold-coloured bug he has discovered, and sets out to find the rest of the treasure on Sullivan's Island. But also particularly Wolfert Webber or Tales of a Traveller, by Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1824) by Washington Irving, a series of essays, which includes one, Kidd the Pirate, about the legends, but also real-life Captain William Kidd.
Kidd was a Scottish privateer of of the 17th century, who supposedly buried treasure from the plundered ship the Quedah Merchant on Gardiners Island, near Long Island, New York, before being arrested and returned to England, where he was put through a very public trial and executed. His supposed hidden treasure are the subject of many stories, speculation, real and fictional and of course many film franchises to this day.
Treasure has a legal definition too. The UK Treasure Act 1996 defines objects classified as treasure, legally obliging the finder to report their find. Only last year, two metal detectorists were prosecuted and ordered to pay back £1.2 million between over failing to report their precious finds of a Viking hoard.
In the Act, treasure defines various items such as coins in the same collection of 300 years or more in age, and including gold or silver, two or more prehistoric base metal objects in association with one another, and other associated object deemed also a treasure at the time. The idea is that all such are part of our history and culture. That said, Britain’s history is full of shameless examples of treasures robbed from other countries.
Perhaps the best depiction of the culture of treasure seekers is the BBC TV series, The Detectorists, written and directed by Mackenzie Crook, who also stars alongside Toby Jones in the two main roles. It's a beautifully nuanced bittersweet comedy of down-at-heel lives set in a small, fictional Essex town, filled with amateur hopefuls and oddballs scouring the earth, mostly finding ring pulls and old nails and old Matchbox toys, but then again, reaching into history, you never know. Is that the call of a magpie, or sound of galloping horses on the breeze?
Perhaps your song nominations might touch on real-life or fictional treasure as well as treasure seekers. From Italy's 18th-century adventurer Giovanni Battista Belzoni of Italy to Canada's 20th-century Captain Robert MacKinnon.
Or perhaps there may be even more lyrical reference to fictional ones, Bilbo Baggins to Tintin and Red Rackham’s Treasure, Indiana Jones to Lara Croft and more.
Tintin and Captain Haddock find salty adventure with treasure
From lost Inca gold to the Holy Grail, the original crown jewels of England, the Treasure of Amaro Pargo, Lost Imperial Fabergé eggs of Russian tsars, India's Patiala Necklace, or the London's Brink's-Mat heist robbery of 1983, which involved an extraordinary cast of almost folklorish London criminal underworld characters, and some mystery lost gold, these are more might be the subject of song.
All may open a fascinating portal of stories of human obsession, blood and violence, crime, punishment, and the forever precious.
Treasure seekers may be heroes or villains, crazy or cool. And often all at once. Treasure can make and break you, send you mad. And what better example than JRR Tolkien’s Smeagol, who in possession of the titular invisible power of the ring, transforms, via his greed and obsession into the isolated, monstrous Gollum, brilliantly voiced by Andy Serkis in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
Treasure can also be interpreted in other ways. But as a monetary item, if treasure is hidden, it may inspire desire, but that is of no practical use.
“Foul cankering rust the hidden treasure frets, but gold that's put to use more gold begets, writes Shakespeare in Venus and Adonis.
And Napoleon echoed this, less poetically, when he announced that: “Riches do not consist in the possession of treasures, but in the use made of them.”
And long before both, the Chinese philosopher of the 6th century BC, Lao Tzu, wrote a similar, ore cerebral remark on the same lines: “The wise man does not lay up his own treasures. The more he gives to others, the more he has for his own.” Perhaps that’s also why it’s best to share your treasures here at the Bar.
Any songwriter is seeking to find and preserve a form of treasure in their art. Treasure perhaps can also be defined, in a wider sense as capturing the essence of being alive.
As always, it’s fun to have the sublime and other sorts of material here and unlikely guests enjoying a drink together. So here’s Christina Aguilera adding a more personal pronouncement to her definition:
“I'm an ocean, because I'm really deep. If you search deep enough you can find rare exotic treasures,” she says, with a certain allure.
Ooh er, Christina. American Thornton Wilder is also here, sitting next to her, and blushes a little at this. Clearing his throat, he keeps his cool to recite one his own aphorisms:
“We can only be said to be alive in those moments when our hearts are conscious of our treasures.”
And another American writer, Joseph Campbell, also joins for a drink and by encouraging us to be bold in our treasure endeavours:
“The cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek. Fear of the unknown is our greatest fear. Many of us would enter a tiger's lair before we would enter a dark cave. While caution is a useful instinct, we lose many opportunities and much of the adventure of life if we fail to support the curious explorer within us.”
And he adds: “It is by going down into the abyss that we recover the treasures of life. Where you stumble, there lies your treasure.”
And here’s also Friedrich Schiller joining him for a glass, with another drop of wisdom: “The game of life looks cheerful when one carries a treasure safe in his heart.”
So treasure can mean more than riches, obviously. To almost close, then, Touched on a few weeks ago on the topic of touch, let’s return briefly then to the beautifully rendered French film Amelie, starring Audrey Tautou of course, who accidentally finds a rusty lost box of memorabilia in her apartment.
But then, after some subtle detective work, and in a act of cleverly plotted, anonymous generosity, via a telephone box, she returns the treasure to its original owner who had lost this precious childhood items four decades earlier:
But it’s time to set up your own treasure seeking, but before then it’s hard to to dip into a brilliantly balanced moment from that timeless spaghetti western, Sergio Leone’s The Good, The Bad and the Ugly, starring Clint Eastwood and co, and that soundtrack by Ennio Morricone, in a closing scene which Tuco, Angel Eyes and Blondie face off with that elusive gold on their minds:
So then, it’s time to dig deep for your own form of treasure in thematic musical form. This Bar finds its precious material far and wide, and appropriately perhaps, steering the ship this week is one of our correspondents from Down Under, the excellent ajostu! Please present your treasures in comments below for deadline at 11pm UK on Monday for playlists published next week.
Who will make the first musical move? A hearty thanks to you all for eight glorious, golden years.
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