Woke up it was a Chelsea morning

And the first thing that I saw

Was the sun through yellow curtains

And a rainbow on the wall

Blue, red, green and gold to welcome you

Crimson crystal beads to beckon

Joni Mitchell

In Chelsea, on New Year’s Day morning of 1966, I woke up with a throbbing head and a general, self-inflicted unwellness. I was lying on a carpet in a sitting room, fully clothed. Beside me was a man whom I dimly recognised from celebrations of the night before; he still slept, clasping unto himself an opened tin of Ind Coope 5-pint Pipkin. 

What January light there was from a large window threw itself onto a wall, illuminating, bizarrely, pieces of a Beetle: a wheel-guard, door, an outside mirror, that sort of thing. Between the wall and window was a grand piano, its key lid open. A young woman entered, barely glanced at us, sat at the piano and began to play, vigorously. The light played on her hair, on the varnish of the piano and I was transfixed; noteworthy also was that she was clad only in her undergarments. I never remembered what she was playing. My carpet-companion woke, we looked at each other, at the pianist, then back at each other in dumb incomprehension.

After a while she stopped, looked down at us, said her name was Phoebe and that it was time we left. We arose, stumbled a little out into the street, mumbled goodbyes and trudged off to rejoin our lives, mine in a shared flat in Fulham Road. I never saw Pipkin man again. Or Phoebe.

It was a year before Joni Mitchell wrote the song. When later I discovered Joni Mitchell’s seraphic voice and especially ‘Chelsea Morning’, I immediately associated my morning’s episode with it, and assumed that her morning and mine took place in the same city. A few days ago, I looked the song up and was a little deflated to read that it referred, not to my Chelsea, but to the one in New York City; that Joni’s yellow light was of an East Coast summer and her rainbow was formed by the prisms of mobiles, handmade from cast-off stained glass.

It doesn’t matter that our Chelseas are not the same. What I have is another wistful connection cast by song, a sweet, cameo memory of my London life, sore head or not.