"IF YOU want to understand music,” began my good friend the Philosopher, but his flow was briefly halted by the toothy waitress with a comely manner, who had just rested the breakfast plate before him on our table among the ghosts in the old bandstand of the marble café, hidden off the windiest street in the world.

With a saintly-blue smile, the Philosopher admired the delicate fan of a mushroom wheel and then sliced off a strip, which he forked onto a squelch of fried bread, spiced with a trickle of brown sauce. This done, he inhaled the rising aromas and shook his wise head in a prayerful way, before dipping both into an egg yolk as full as the sun that shone over Eden on that first day. I watched and awaited the nod of approval, as he chewed and swallowed with his Adam’s apple rising over a loose-buttoned collar. He then dabbed his lips slowly as a prelude to the nod. We were able to continue.

“If you want to understand music,” said the Philosopher again, “you must listen to a young and eager busker in a railway shelter – not an orchestra of men and women in penguin suits, stiffening their necks as they scrape the violins and violas, their faces frozen in concentration. You see, the passion comes from the individual performer, who has yearning in his or her voice and an unquenchable desire to regain a lost sweetheart. In the orchestra and the choirs, you get skill, obedience and dedication, which can be fine qualities in themselves, but they are found in the polish of the music, not in its soul. Music began with a howl in the night, and it mellowed into the melodies that express our feelings, making a few geniuses along the way.”

“As always, you are right,” I said, while pronging a sausage with my fork. For I enjoy a good sing and I knew that the Philosopher had sung a good song in his time – strumming his guitar in the corner of the pub, listened to by admirers, who pulled their chairs around his table, so that they could join the choruses. “We haven’t got a music licence, you know,” said the landlord, popping his bespectacled head through the serving hatch.

“You don’t need one,” replied the Philosopher with a smile, as the strong-willed and broad-legged Cynthia hooked her smoke-stained voice back to New Orleans, where there was a house called the Rising Sun. “It’s been the ruin of many a young girl, but in God I know I’ve won,” she sang at a table-trembling pitch.

“Get her a glass of gin,” said the Philosopher, realising that the exhausted Cynthia would need a boost, if she was to attempt the high sentiment of Irene Goodnight. In those days, you’d often hear people singing on the streets, in the bus shelters and at work. Some men whistled like birds, as they walked to the factories or football matches. Others could not. I pursed my lips and blew with mounting desperation and I formed my tongue into a slope, down which Beethoven could have slid, but nary a sound came out. Where are the whistlers today? Now, you see the grandchildren of those men walking along with earphones, listening to their personal players, instead of singing themselves. And what of those barrel-chested choirs, which once swelled in Everton’s Gwladys Street and Liverpool’s Kop? Romantic football commentators maintain that it is the same today on the big matches, but we all know that it isn’t really. This leaves us with a question – where do all the songs go? Most schools still sing at assembly and at this very moment boys and girls are practising their carols for the Nativity plays. But, when they are older, the singing seems to stop.

My guess is that the studio-produced pop songs are to blame – suggesting that singing comes from an electronic box, rather than the chest and the mouth. The “sound engineers” frantically twiddle the knobs as the girl groups caterwaul on stage, adding “yeah” to the end of most lines. This “yeah” is the bluesy expression of soul, telling the listener that the singer understands the emotion in the lyrics – the pain and the suffering. Certainly, their facial contortions suggest an affinity with both pain and suffering.

“Sweet Molly Malone,” whispered the Philosopher, wiping his plate clean with the final squelch of fried bread.

LISTEN to David Charters on his picture podcast at www.liverpooldailypost.co.uk