When I was in the sixth form studying for my A-levels I had an experience that I imagine many of you can relate to: some days were great, some lessons were great, but other days, other lessons dragged and whilst I waited for them to finish I looked forward to Friday night when I would get to hang out with my friends – we’d go to a youth group together and afterwards hang out at the leader’s house, drinking his tea, eating his biscuits and, unless someone had thought to bring music of their own, listening to his record collection. Unfortunately for the more forgetful among us, his record collection was entirely classical – or rather almost entirely classical because one of our number had thoughtfully donated a single Ultravox album with which we consequently became quite familiar.
Ultravox were a moderately successful British band from the early 1980s fronted by Midge Ure. Their biggest hit came in 1981 with Vienna, known for a moody percussive opening, a video inspired by the film The Third Man and the line “This means nothing to me – Oh Vienna”. It’s possible that Vienna is as much of a mystery to you as it was to Mr Ure so I’ll take a minute to fill you in. Vienna was founded by the Romans and is now the capital of Austria and the largest city on the river Danube. It used to be even more important - from the 1450s to the first world War, Vienna was the heart of a huge empire that stretched across central Europe and for a long time was the largest and most important German-speaking city, being overtaken by Berlin at the start of the 20th century. On a more positive note it has had a surfeit of great musicians, having been home to Beethoven, Brahms, Haydn, Mozart and Schubert among others. A surfeit is an excess of something and, whilst I mean it positively here, surfeits can be dangerous, having accounted for the deaths of two English kings: Henry I of lampreys and John of peaches. A lamprey is a sort of parasitic eel and I think you know what peaches are.
So back to Vienna which inspired both Ultravox, as we have seen, and Billy Joel, whose take on the city is notable for its piano line and the line “When will you realise Vienna waits for you.” The opening lyric is “Slow down, you crazy child, you’re so ambitious for a juvenile, but then if you’re so smart tell me why are you still afraid,” which might take us back to you and certainly takes us back to my sixth form days when I was an ambitious juvenile and to that youth group that meant so much to me – I met friends there with whom I’m still in touch, met my first girlfriend with whom I’m not, acquired a taste for rock music, played a lethal version of hockey and had my first experience of teaching.
That came about because my youth group decided to set up a new youth group based in a church on the other side of Sheffield – which is the city in which I grew up. The new group would be for 7-11 year olds of which it seemed they had a surfeit and they needed some people my age to help out. One of my friends decided this sounded fun and I allowed myself to be roped in – what else are you doing on a Tuesday evening, right? Our usual role was running the games – twenty minutes of 20 kids running around like lunatics to blow off enough steam to sit down and listen to whatever the grown ups wanted to talk to them about that week. Billy Joel asked “if you’re so smart, tell me why are you still afraid” – I think that if he was routinely faced with a bunch of year 5s to entertain he’d have something to be afraid of, but that’s not what he’s talking about. He’s not singing about the manic half hour on the Tuesday evening when we hoped we’d thought carefully enough about all the ways in which the kids might injure themselves – he's singing about our discussions on Friday evenings when we wondered about our futures. What would we be when we grow up? Growing up was really what we were afraid of – and wondering if we were doing enough, working hard enough.
Billy Joel again “You’ve got so much to do and so many hours in the day.” I think this will feel familiar to some of you, and I’m here to tell you that this isn’t a problem, it’s normal – more than that, it’s desirable. You should feel that you have so much to do that your hours are packed – that means you’re using your time rather than just filling it. But maybe some of you don’t feel this way – maybe you have a Tuesday evening that you’re not doing anything with. Maybe you’re afraid of filling your time in case something turns up and then find yourself at the end of the day with hours to spend and nothing useful to do with them. If that’s you then I want to encourage you to take more opportunities, to say “yes” to new experiences, to allow yourself to get roped into some mad enterprises. There are two reasons for this – the first is that opportunities, experiences and mad enterprises are all more fun than doom scrolling and updating Instagram, they really are – and the second is that Vienna waits for you. Billy Joel says that, so it must be true.
The chorus goes “You’ve got your passion, you’ve got your pride, but don’t you know that only fools are satisfied? Dream on, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true, ooh, when will you realise Vienna waits for you.”
When we sat on the sofa, drank tea, ate biscuits, talked about our futures and waited in vain for the girls we were interested in to show an interest in us, it was generally agreed that my destiny was to become a mad scientist. Being good at maths and science was certainly my pride, maybe even a passion, and it was something I worked at. I wasn’t satisfied with just doing the work set by my teachers – only fools are satisfied and I wasn’t a fool so I scoured the library for books on maths, physics, chemistry – mad scientist stuff – I took advantage of any extra projects that were available at my school and I dreamed of a future in a lab coat.
Some of you will be in a similar position – you’ll have worked out a plan for your future and be working hard at the subjects you need to make that dream become a reality. I hope that you’re not satisfied, though – remember that only fools are satisfied. I hope that you’re reading around your subjects, getting ready for further study, for the next step rather than just the next set of exams; but I also hope you’re not too tightly focused on your dream. If you’re saying no to opportunities and activities because you don’t need them for your dream then you are not taking enough of Billy Joel’s advice – dream on but don’t imagine they’ll all come true, ooh. I didn’t become a mad scientist, I became a teacher, and those Tuesday evenings running games sessions for nine year olds ended up being as important to my career as the time I spent working through maths problems. Perhaps even more important were the planning meetings we had after the kids had gone home when we would sit around and work out what we were going to do next. I didn’t appreciate it at the time – I certainly remember struggling to stay awake through some of them - but it turns out that planning ahead is really important – as a teacher, even more so as a headteacher, but actually it was going to be useful preparation whatever career I went into.
Your future, your Vienna, waits for you but until you get there you won’t know what it is. We might take our advice from Billy Joel but we are all, inevitably, a bit like Midge Ure in that oo Vienna, it means nothing to me, not yet at least. That means that you need to be prepared to take advantage of a variety of different futures; it means that you can never know that something won’t be relevant to you. If you are one of those people who honestly finds they have so much to do and only so many hours in the day, who has deleted social media from their phone in order to make the most of their time then you will have to prioritise, to think about which opportunities are going to make the biggest difference to your life. Most of you, though, are not there yet – and so you should be on the hunt for opportunities (and the library is an easy one to take – get yourself an interesting book to read). You’ll naturally lean towards opportunities that fit in with your dreams – that’s fine – you should dream, but don’t imagine they’ll all come true, don’t imagine that you know the future, don’t imagine you know what will be relevant and what won’t. And so I urge you to take opportunities that don’t seem relevant even if you’re not sure what they’ll achieve, what you’ll learn – sometimes the bits you don’t value at the time (those planning meetings) are what actually turns out later to be the most useful.
And if you’re still thinking you’ll say no to reading, no to guest lectures, no to volunteering then I can only ask “When will you realise – that Vienna waits for you.”
Footnotes
1. More on my adventures in the youth group can be found in Groups and Shirts