George Benson: Star Of A Story

The winter of 1996 was the last time I remember seeing really heavy snowfall.

I lived in Flintshire at the time, and can remember sitting up in my room one evening watching an enormous blizzard sweep across the farmland behind the house and envelop the village in a foot-and-a-half's depth of pristine whiteness.

It was also about the time that I started listening to jazz. The conduit was Jazz FM, a radio station that taught me that jazz was not just about tedious Dixieland bands and Frank Sinatra records. It also taught me that George Benson was actually one of the world's greatest guitarists and not, as might have been surmised from most of his output in the early eighties, a second-rate Luther Vandross wannabe.

I had bought a copy of Benson's 1980 album Give Me The Night, from which this track is taken, about a week before the snow hit. My abiding memory is of sitting and listening to this song as the snow banked up against the window.

It's funny how these little things seem to stick.