The Scotsman 10 September 2024
Seven years ago, David Paul Jones performed a Valentine’s day gig in the Barony Bar on Edinburgh’s Broughton Street. The pianist put together a compilation of romantic songs he would sing for the occasion. In the run-up to the performance, his friend Ben Harrison, best known as the co-artistic director of Grid Iron theatre company, put in a request. Jones, known to his friends as DPJ, gave him a withering look. This was a serious concert, not a karaoke night.
“That’s not really how it works,” said DPJ. “I have been planning this for quite a while.”
But Harrison was in for a treat. At the end of the gig when DPJ returned for an encore, it was Harrison’s request he played.
The song he had secretly rehearsed was Last Night I Dreamt That Somebody Loved Me, the final single to be released by the Smiths after the band’s break-up in 1987, and an achingly sad lament to loneliness. A lover of the baroque and romantic, DPJ brought out all of its plangency.
“It felt like such a gift,” says Harrison today as he and DPJ meet over a post-rehearsal drink in a Marchmont café. “That song is written into my will to be played at the funeral – and guess who’s going to perform it…” [READ MORE]