This month marks what would have been Mary Millington’s 68th birthday. “It is hard to believe so many years have passed since she died” remarked one long-time fan of hers to me recently “still one of the horniest ladies ever in my opinion”. 68 years on from her birth though, I suspect we’re now nearing a time when we have to acknowledge that even if she had been left alone by the pious fools, the bent coppers and the bad time taxmen, gotten to live out her life naturally, and the events of the 19th of August 1979 and that lethal overdose of anafranil, paracetamol and alcohol never happened, she still might no longer be around now, but we’ll never know the answer to that one.
“No more looking back, No more living in the past, Yesterday’s gone and that’s a fact” claims Ray Davies in the 1975 Kinks song ‘No More Looking Back’, the penultimate track from an album entitled – appropriately enough - “Schoolboys in Disgrace”. Too true Ray, but elsewhere in that song Davies’ key themes of love, loss and nostalgia for better times conspire to form a contrary, and more persuasive argument. One suggesting that the past isn’t ever that easy to escape from or forget, since there are certain people from it destined to live on in the imagination of others, walking along beside them in their heads. I know that for many Mary Millington is such a person. So to mark the occasion I offer up an honorary spin of the tormented yet beautiful ‘No More Looking Back’, dedicated to all those now fully grown up schoolboys in disgrace who still carry her around in their heads, and of course to Our Lady of Dorking herself, who sadly belongs to yesterday.
