JOHN DENVER

I have deliberately left uploading this selection until today, 12 October 2017. The simple reason for that is that it was on this day, twenty years ago, that John Denver lost his life when the experimental plane he was piloting crashed into the sea off Monterey Bay in California.

For me, and I well aware that it is not for everyone, Denver wrote many of the most beautiful songs I have heard. In my opinion he managed to combine moving, emotional lyrics to which I could so easily relate, with melodies which fitted perfectly the feel of the song. We all have different tastes in music, we all identify with different genres and styles and, of course, even among the fans of one group or artist, we can interpret their songs differently.

Here are 10 of Denver's best songs, in my mind but I could so easily have found a different 10, or 11 if you actually count them. Just listen to the words, watch when there is a video, and relax, or otherwise, with the music.

John Denver wrote this first song for Richard Buckminster Fuller. You can look him up but Denver was a fan. Indeed in the third song I have chosen he uses Fuller's phrase about spaceship earth. Fuller would claim that "The most important fact about Spaceship Earth: an instruction manual didn't come with it". Fuller said he set out, after several bad periods in his life, to see what a single individual could contribute to changing the world and benefiting all humanity. Denver managed to put this into the words of a song. Personally, I always identified with the grandfather of the future and thought of my own father. It's a nice thought and I know how much he loved seeing his first grandchildren. Sorry about the video quality.

This second song is Denver the campaigner, the peace activist. His own introduction explains it all. After this was released his record label, RCA, decided not to renew his contract. RCA had just been taken over by General Electric, a company who manufactured weapons. Any coincidence. I have no idea. The song to me not only is anti-war but also highlights the plight of the ordinary farmer, the little man ultimately controlled by the big bankers.

This song is very poignant The Challenger disaster happened during my first Round Britain trip. We were about seven months into the trip and were staying in a small cottage in St Austell. It was winter and snow was outside. We saw the Challenger explode and I had this forlorn hope that if you could build a shuttle that could enter through the earth's atmosphere without blowing up you could design and build a crew compartment that could withstand an explosion. I was wrong. John Denver had passed NASA's rigorous physical exam and was in line for a space flight, a finalist for the first citizen's trip on the Space Shuttle in 1986, but he was not chosen. He wrote this haunting song after the disaster and the sad death of the crew, which included Christa McAuliffe, a teacher, and supposed to be the first civilian in space.

The introduction says it all. Have we made progress? I fear not. Please listen to the words.

Now the love songs. Denver claimed he wrote this after he went on a long drive, shortly after his father died. His loss came around the same time as I too lost my father. My memories of love will always be of him. Denver wrote the song when he was, as he says, down and, like so many things I have written or ideas I have had, he has no idea from where it came.

This isn't my favourite Denver song but it's right up there. The romantics amongst us, and Denver always claimed he was one too, cannot fail but relate to this. “For you, for the rest of my life, for you, for the best of my life” is something to look forward to. Sadly I am running out of the rest of my life but one can but hope and believe. Unusual to see Denver without a guitar.

And I suppose these are the sentiments when you eventually find that one person who loves you for who you are and accepts that as being exactly what they want; your soulmate. Denver once said, I think, that his first marriage went wrong because his wife, the Annie in Annie's song, wanted him to be something he wasn't and he wanted her to be something she wasn't. I've been there several times and do I still know that “I'll find you someday”? Only I know that.

Listen to the words. If you've been there and done that, you've experienced one of the saddest but sometimes necessary parts of life. “Love is why I came here in the first place, love is now the reason I must go”; too many people don't realise that sometimes you need to split for love. I love this song because it says so much of what I have felt. It seems to be written for parts of my life. Oh, how unusual, he's at a piano again.

The older I have grown, the more I get to love this song and its look back on life. I'm not sure that I get turned on by growing old but there are bits I like. To be totally truthful I like every day because it will be different from any other and so the more I have, the better it is. Why have I chosen a muppet version? It's all to do with my anti-drug philosophy. I know Denver, like so many performers, used drugs and in its original version instead of singing “sit and watch the sun go down” he would sing “sit and pass the pipe around”. Didn't like that.

These last two songs weren't going to be here until I started looking for videos. The reason is that I had never heard them before. Denver, with some friends, set up the Windstar Foundation to promote his environmental hopes. Each year they had a meeting. These two songs come from the final symposium held in 1995 and are, for me, absolutely beautiful. Love is the answer, trust me.

I can, as a writer and some time song writer, totally relate to this. You can spend months trying to write a song and eventually you get there, or you can suddenly hear the words and the music and the song is there in hours, if not minutes. Nice way to finish. Time to start healing as well.