Guitarists

Tags

Al Di Meola, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Brandi Carlyle, Cory Wong, Ichika Nito, John Mayer, John McLaughlin, Joni Mitchell, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mike Dawes, Paco de Lucia, Plini, Polyphia, Rolling Stones, Scott LePage, Tim Henson, Tommy Emmanuel

When I say I play guitar, what I mean is that I can form a pretty wide selection of open chords and a fair number of barre chords; I can change between chords with reasonable ease; and I can play a few simple tunes well enough to be fairly recogniseable, at least to me. I play purely for my own pleasure, and I have no intention of playing when anyone else can hear me, so you will have to take all of that on trust.

For reasons that will be apparent to anyone who has noticed the most recent posts on this blog, I have barely touched a guitar for several months. When I did pick the guitar up again the other day I found myself fumbling chords, but before this hiatus I was moderately competent playing things like “Fast Car”, “Blackbird”, “Alone Again Or”, “The End of the Line”, “Beware of the Beautiful Stranger”, “Diamonds and Rust” and such like. I clearly need to get back into practice even if it is just to manage a decent stab at these basics.

I got my first guitar, a rather battered old nylon-strung classical, back in the late 60s. It was good enough to learn the songs of Leonard Cohen (and I still find myself defaulting to his sometimes idiosyncratic picking pattern when I play today), but was perhaps less good for anything more rock and roll. As a guitar player I tended towards folk idioms: basic chords, simple picking patterns. These were things I could manage, not brilliantly but well enough to please me. Yet when I listened to guitarists (and I am making a crucial distinction here between someone playing a guitar like I did, and a guitarist who could wrest wonders from the instrument), I found myself drawn to people like John McLaughlin, Paco de Lucia or Al Di Meola, whose mastery of the instrument I knew right from the start I would never come within a million miles of replicating.

Anyway, I played guitar fairly consistently from the late-60s through to the early-80s. I never became proficient, but I could knock out a Dylan track well enough and there were even one or two Joni Mitchell tunes I could essay (though I never tried to reproduce her often eccentric tunings, and I simplified some of the more baroque chords). But by the early-80s I was playing guitar less and less, and sometime around the middle of that decade the instrument simply disappeared.

Around ten years ago, Maureen and I started spending our holidays in a cottage in North Wales, and there was an acoustic guitar in the lounge. After a while I picked it up. Of course I did, it was like the gun on the wall in a Chekov play, you can’t just leave a guitar like that untouched. And I was surprised by how many chords I could remember, C and G and Dm, A7 and Em and F#m. So that became a regular part of our holidays: on my tablet I would find the chords for a song I knew and then strum away in the evening.

As we came up towards my 65th birthday, Maureen decided she was going to buy me a guitar of my own. And she did, a cheap steel-strung acoustic with a surprisingly nice tone. I took it up quite seriously, scouring the web for online guitar lessons, even learning some basic music theory. I learned what every guitarist needs to know, the names of the strings (E, A, D, G, B, E), and the notes along the high and low E strings, though try as I might I can never fix in my mind the rest of the fretboard. And I played things that interested me. I managed a reasonable version of “Can’t Find My Way Home”, and I started to learn the Bert Jansch version of “Anji”, and the Rolling Stones version of “Angie”. Since then I’ve added an electric guitar (guitar players are collectors, didn’t you know that? You can’t have just one guitar, there is something unnatural about that.)

Yet, much as I enjoy watching the guitar work of people as varied as John Mayer or Brandi Carlyle, the people I found myself most drawn to were the ones who were as far from what I could do as John McLaughlin had been in the 70s. I know John Mayer is infinitely better than anything I could manage, but you watch him and you know what he’s doing and there’s a part of me thinking that yes, in time I could imagine myself doing something like that. But the guitarists I keep going back to are the ones that mystify. The ones who, if I were serious about becoming a good guitarist, would make me give up on the spot.

The first of these I discovered was the English guitarist, Mike Dawes. I’ve seen quite a lot of his YouTube videos now, but this is the one that first caught my attention. It’s a version of Van Halen’s “Jump”, but watch: he’s playing on a battered old acoustic guitar, but he is playing rhythm, melody and percussion all at the same time. It’s just breathtaking.

Or then there’s this video, aptly entitled “Playing the Impossible on Guitar”, which helps to explain why people like Rick Beato have labelled him perhaps the world’s greatest acoustic guitarist.

Dawes led me, through this glorious collaboration on the Gotye song, “Somebody That I Used to Know”, to Tommy Emmanuel. I recognised the name, but I’m blowed if I can say where or how I heard it. Emmanuel’s spirited version of “Classical Gas”, which I remember in the Mason Williams original, is just one example of how good his guitar playing is.

Even so, Emmanuel and even Dawes are fairly conventional guitarists compared to my next discovery. I kept coming across references to a band called Polyphia (as with the acapella group Pentatonix, it’s amazing how many reaction videos you can watch in which people enthuse about the musicianship without recognising, or often even being able to pronounce, the musical reference hidden in plain sight in their name). I have seen their music described in many different ways, such as Trap or Math Rock, neither of which I have previously encountered, though the first video of theirs I saw, “Playing God”, contains clear echoes of both Spanish music and free-form jazz.

From those who know about such things I gather that the bassist, Clay Gober, and the drummer, Clay Aeschliman, are exceptionally good at what they do. But though I am bowled over by the effect, I am not familiar enough with technique to be able to comment on their virtuosity. But the guitarists, Tim Henson and Scott LePage, that I can appreciate, and it boggles the mind. Both play unusual guitars: in “Playing God” they use solid-body acoustic guitars with nylon strings, a very peculiar set-up; in other videos I’ve seen both of them play seven-string guitars, and on at least one occasion I will swear that Henson played an eight-string guitar. No, I’ve no idea how you do such a thing. But it is not just the equipment that is stunning, but what they do with it. There are passages in “Playing God” where Henson seems to be playing chords and harmonics at exactly the same time. That should be impossible: playing a chord involves holding a string down against a fret, playing harmonics involves touching the string lightly above the fret and then lifting the finger away. In other words, two diametrically opposite actions are taking place at the same time. Yeah, you do want to give up guitar, don’t you.

LePage is at least as good a guitarist as Henson, he’s got to be to keep up with him, but it’s Henson who gets all the attention. Perhaps because he has his own YouTube channel and keeps producing solo stuff (like “Quintuplet Meditation”, another outing for that signature Ibanez nylon-strung guitar, in which typically he plays along to a pre-recorded track), or collaborations with contemporaries who are also performing wonders with the guitar.

Here, for instance, he is with Plini (who is good but not always to my taste) and Cory Wong (who I’ve not otherwise encountered).

And if you keep going down this particular rabbithole you will find that this is an amazing time for extraordinary guitarists, like the Japanese guitarist, Ichika Nito, who also, curiously, plays a signature Ibanez guitar.

And I watch these people. I keep coming back to them like an addict. I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve watched “Playing God” or “Jump”. Yet I don’t think there is any connection between what they do and what I am attempting to do when I pick up one of my guitars. I am not trying to emulate them, I have no desire to do what they do. It is just something to admire, something that leaves you amazed, it is not something to aspire towards. It is not just that my fingers will not move that way, but I really do not want to play like that. It is far better to watch and wonder. If I were to attempt to replicate what they do, even in a fumbling manner, it would spoil the mystery. They are not playing the guitar, they are doing something completely different. There is no connection between what they do and what I might wish to do even if I were capable. It just makes you appreciate the magic of the instrument in your hand.

It all comes round again

Tags

Al Stewart, Alexis Korner, Ashley Hutchings, Bert Jansch, Bob Dylan, Clive James, Danny Thompson, Dave Pegg, Dave Swarbrick, Fairport Convention, Jacques Brel, Jacqui McShee, Jeannie Franklyn, Joe Boyd, John Renbourn, Joni Mitchell, Judy Dyble, Julie Covington, Linda Thompson, Martin Lamble, Maureen Kincaid Speller, Mr Fox, Pentangle, Pete Atkin, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Scott Walker, Steeleye Span, Teddy Thompson, Terry Cox

There was a television drama series, back in the late-1960s, called Take Three Girls. Remember it? No, I don’t, not much (it was apparently the BBC’s first drama series in colour, though I doubt we actually had a colour TV by then, and anyway I suspect that what I do remember I’m getting confused with the slightly later series, Rock Follies, which starred the wonderful Julie Covington who had, incidentally, produced some pretty good covers of early Pete Atkin/Clive James songs, but that’s taking me down a rabbit hole I don’t want to explore right now …)

Where was I? Oh yes, Take Three Girls. There is one thing I remember about the series to this day: the theme music. It mesmerised me. I found out, after a while, that the song was called “Light Flight” –

Let’s get away you say find a better place
Miles and miles away from the city’s race

– (quoted from memory probably ten years after I last heard the song) and the song was performed by a group called Pentangle. I went out and bought their most recent album, Basket of Light, which also happened to include “Light Flight”. That album became easily the most played record in my collection for the next 20 years or more.

It would be wrong to say that Pentangle was my introduction to folk rock because a) the term hadn’t been invented yet, and b) Pentangle was really more a sort of folk jazz. The rhythm section, Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums, were both jazz musicians who had played together with the great Alexis Korner. Up front were the guitarists and flat mates, John Renbourn who was into folk played with a baroque style, and Bert Jansch who was, right up to his death in 2011, one of the greatest and most influential of all blues and folk guitarists. To complement Jansch’s rather growly vocals, they brought in Jacqui McShee, who ran her own folk club and who had a hypnotically clear voice but who was so nervous of performing that she had to sit down for all their appearances.

For just five years following their formation in 1967, Pentangle did extraordinary things with traditional songs, adding complex guitar parts up front and varied rhythmic patterns behind. What Danny Thompson does with the double bass on their own composition, “Train Song”, is more like free jazz than anything traditional. And the interplay of Jansch’s and McShee’s voices made every song sound mysterious, sexy and enchanting. Folk music became something entirely other than the finger-in-the-ear, droning voices, and grudgingly-accepted acoustic guitar of most folk music to that point.

In his wonderful memoir, Beeswing, Richard Thompson says he was “fairly unenthused” by Pentangle. But for me they were the gateway drug, the necessary ear training so that I was ready for what came next. And what came next was Fairport Convention.

Oddly, Pentangle and Fairport were in lockstep in those early years. They both formed in 1967, and both released their classic albums, Basket of Light and Liege and Lief in 1969. But in my memory, Pentangle always came first, probably because I knew Pentangle before I heard of Fairport, and knew Basket of Light before I heard of Liege and Lief. In a way, I bought Liege and Lief because of Basket of Light, because Pentangle had shown me how inventive and exciting folk music could be so I was ready to try this other highly praised reinvention of folk.

Liege and Lief was nothing short of a revelation, a pounding, thrilling piece of rock music. A few years later, when I was at university, I got into one of those long, rambling, late night conversations at a party at a house way out in the middle of nowhere outside Portstewart. It started out being about Jacques Brel, whose work I loved when covered by other artists (I’m thinking particularly of Scott Walker) but whose own performances I barely knew. But it meandered on from there as such conversations have a habit of doing, and at some point came around to the inevitable question: “So, what sort of music do you like?” To which I answered that I was mostly into folk. Except I’m not sure that was true. I bought Transatlantic samplers, so I was familiar with the work of people like Mr Fox, and I had a few Steeleye Span albums, though other than Below the Salt I got tired of them very quickly. But I really didn’t have that much in the way of folk music. But I liked the people who had emerged from folk music, the singer-songwriters like Al Stewart, Sandy Denny, and, of course, Joni Mitchell; and I liked the groups who had made something fresh out of folk music, by which I mean (because there weren’t really that many others) Pentangle and Fairport.

Pentangle, of course, only lasted a few years, and I got every album they released though I never saw them live (when they were reincarnated with different personnel some years later I had no interest in them at all). Fairport I followed for a few years. I got the two albums that preceded Liege and Lief, What We Did on Our Holidays which is okay and Unhalfbricking which is excellent, and at one point I even had a copy of their first LP with Judy Dyble on vocals, but she never worked for me as a singer. After Liege and Lief I kept up with them for a while through their innumerable personnel changes. Though I didn’t see them live at this time, it was their live albums that were generally most interesting, including the original vinyl version of Live at the LA Troubadour which includes a version of “Matty Groves”, with Simon Nicol on vocals, in which he changes the line:

Lord Arnold struck the very next blow
And Matty struck no more

to the rather more effective:

Lord Arnold struck the very next blow
And Matty struck the floor

accompanied, if I remember rightly, by a thump on the drum from Dave Mattocks. Alas, when a retitled version of that album was reissued on CD they switched to another version of “Matty Groves” with the conventional lyrics.

But the departure of Sandy Denny was something that, so far as I was concerned, they never really recovered from, though the departure of Ashley Hutchings at the same time was no great loss because the addition of Dave Pegg on bass more than made up for it. But when Richard Thompson left as well … I think it was “Babbacombe” Lee when I realised I didn’t like the album anywhere near as much as I felt I should. After that, I bought Rising for the Moon because it was Denny’s temporary return, but otherwise I bought no more Fairport.

Years later, through Maureen Speller, I reconnected with Fairport, and we saw a later iteration of the group live a couple of times, and they were every bit as thrilling as you’d hope they would be. And I reacquired on CD several of their albums, but it is still the Denny/Thompson era that works best for me.

Post-Fairport I followed Sandy Denny through Fotheringay and her solo work (The North Star Ravens and the Grassman remains for me an absolute classic, though there are songs on each of her other three albums that I keep returning to). With Richard Thompson, for some reason, it was more hit and miss. I skipped Henry the Human Fly until quite a few years later, but I did get the albums he made with Linda Thompson, of which the first, I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, and the last, Shoot Out the Lights, (an interesting circularity of titles there, given the rise and collapse of their relationship) are clearly the best. And I followed him intermittently into his solo work (the early compilation, (guitar, vocal) is essential), but I missed out on more albums than I ever bought. Even so, I continue to rate Thompson as one of the great guitar geniuses of our age, and a songwriter of rare power. (Have I seen him live? That’s the strange thing. I have a feeling I must have done, but I just couldn’t say for certain. I know I have seen his son, Teddy Thompson, in concert, but was he accompanying his father? Must have been, but the picture in my mind is blurred and fuzzy.)

All of which reminiscence is prompted by the fact that I have just read Richard Thompson’s Beeswing, his memoir covering the years from the formation of Fairport Convention to the break-up of his marriage to Linda Thompson. Beeswing, which is as elegantly and engagingly written as one might expect of Thompson, is subtitled “Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice”, as if the voice (by which he means his guitar playing rather than his singing) was in place by the time he went solo. What follows, a career that has so far lasted another 40-odd years, might generate the usual showbusiness anecdotes, but the story itself was essentially over. And he is right in that: the story lies in how he got going rather than in what he did when he got there.

It is the relatively narrow focus – a period of less than ten years taken from a career of over 50 years, and a life of over 70 years – that makes this book work. It’s like Dylan’s Chronicles in that respect. And those ten years contain all the dynamics, the interplay, the discovery, that we want to read about. Some of the stories are fairly well known, of course: how they were auditioning for a new singer and Sandy Denny ended up auditioning them; how she sang “A Sailor’s Life” in the dressing room before a gig in Southampton and they impulsively decided to include it in the set that night only for it to go down so well, both with the band and the audience, for them to invite Joe Boyd down to hear them play it again the next night, and how he then called on his mate Dave Swarbrick to play on the recording, thus essentially inventing folk rock. There’s a detail I didn’t know: I know that a guitar is tuned in fourths but I hadn’t realised that a violin is tuned in fifths, so it is physically impossible for a guitarist to match many of the chords that a violin plays, and vice versa, so the interplay between Swarb and Thompson on “A Sailor’s Life” and many other tracks involved them both developing new ways of playing their instruments. There are other well-known incidents that acquire a little more detail in the telling here. We learn that he barely knew the groupie Jeannie Franklyn when she attached herself to him, and after a couple of weeks together he seems to have been on the point of splitting with her when she accompanied them to a gig in Birmingham. That’s when the van crashed on the way home afterwards, and Jeannie along with drummer Martin Lamble were killed. The death of Lamble had a far greater effect on Thompson and the rest of the group. And then there’s stuff that is new, at least to me. I now know, for instance, why the magnificent “Sloth” is called that. Thompson and Swarb were making their first attempt to write songs together. They had two pieces of music they were working on, one was fast paced and one was slow paced. For convenience they called the fast tune “Fasth” (it would become “Walk Awhile”), and the slow tune “Slowth”. Only they never got around to deciding on a proper title for the slow tune, and “Slowth” mutated into “Sloth”.

And writing all that makes me want to just go away and listen again to “Sloth”, or “Meet on the Ledge”, or “Calvary Cross”, or any of a dozen other songs that are seared into my memory.

(Atkin/James)

Tags

Al Stewart, Clive James, Ian Macdonald, Ian Shircore, John Peel, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Pete Atkin, Robert Altman, Stacy Keach

Loose Canon by Ian Shircore is essentially a poor man’s version of Revolution in the Head by Ian Macdonald for the songs of Pete Atkin and Clive James. It’s a good book, don’t get me wrong, and I learned a lot from it. It has to be essential reading for any fan of perhaps the finest songwriting team of the late twentieth century, if only because of the dearth of other material. But it is a partial book, it doesn’t even pretend to cover all of their songs, and many of my favourite Atkin/James songs (A King at Nightfall, Driving Through Mythical America, The Prince of Aquitaine) aren’t even mentioned, and while there’s a lot of good stuff in Shircore’s book about the tropes and themes that recur in the songs, some of those themes, such as James’s habit of filtering the world through references to often obscure Hollywood films, do not get the depth of analysis I think they deserve. So here are a few other things about the music of Pete Atkin and Clive James.

I don’t remember how I came across them. Their music seems to have been an intimate part of my entire life, and in such circumstances there are no real beginnings. The first album I got was Driving Through Mythical America, which I must have picked up back in 1971 or 72 soon after it came out. I don’t know what the impetus was that made me pick it up, perhaps a song on the radio, but it was surely my happiest musical discovery. I only ever saw them perform live once, in 2005 (so long ago?) in Canterbury, two old men who had recently started performing together again after more than 20 years out of the business. I don’t know what I was expecting, but the reality was better, it was mesmerising. The songs hold up better than anything else from that era. In interviews, Clive James has said he is prouder of his songwriting than his poetry; I understand the feeling, but what makes the songs so good is that they are written with a poetic rather than a lyrical sensibility. Sometimes this shows through, as in Girl On The Train, for instance, in which “mouth” is rhymed with “earth”, a rhyme which works visually on the page but not vocally, but this is a rare exception.

The words were always written first, then Pete Atkin would spend days, sometimes weeks or even longer fitting music to them. In part because he sings with such clear diction that every word is always crystal clear, and because the music showcases the lyrics so well, I always used to think of Atkin’s music as fairly simple. It was only when I started trying to play it on guitar that I realised just how richly complex his music is. He uses a lot of complex chords that aren’t common in popular music, a lot of 9th chords, for instance (the shift between Em9 and A9 in A King At Nightfall, or the C9, F9, D9 progression in All The Dead Were Strangers, and Thirty Year Man has a G13b9 chord that I still haven’t worked out); and the rhythms vary constantly, from the jazzy C-Bb-C-Bb opening of Thirty Year Man to the more folky strum of Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger. There’s a fairly straightforward illustration of how adept Atkin was in mastering different musical styles in their 6th (and for a long time their last) album, Live Libel, which contains effortless parodies of about a dozen different forms of popular music, from country to heavy metal. It is not a great album – Atkin and James weren’t popular with the label because they simply weren’t producing the hits that were expected, and this was an openly derisory effort to complete and get out of their contract – but it is instructive in its way, and at times quite funny.

Why they didn’t break through to a mass audience is, of course, one of the great mysteries. They began writing songs as undergraduates at Cambridge, and there is always an edge of undergraduate cleverness about their stuff, but were they too clever? Yet at pretty much the same time Leonard Cohen was being equally clever in his lyrics. Was it the jazz infusion that Atkin brought into so many of the songs? But Joni Mitchell was being jazzy and popular at the same time. They had devoted fans, including people like John Peel, but it never translated into high sales.

My own theory was that the mood of the songs was at odds with what people wanted from popular song. The overwhelming mood evoked by their early albums is pathos: they were songs about failure, death, loss, often comic in effect but pathetic nevertheless. There were, for instance, no straightforward love songs. If there are love songs, it is about unrequited love for another man’s wife:

Another night I bring the flowers and the wine
Has slipped away
There were only three to dine
And two to stay

Or the object of affection doesn’t even notice the hopeless swain:

Apart from the chance of the driver accepting a cheque
For crashing his loco so I could be brave in the wreck
To boldly encounter this creature was not in my power
So my heart mended and broke in the course of an hour.

James’s heroes can can look forward only to an endless stream of broken relationships, as the character granted the chance to see his future mistress in a crystal ball:

“Hello there” she said with her hand to her brow
“I’m the one you’ll meet after the one you know now
There’s no room inside here to show you us all
But behind me the queue stretches right down the hall
For the damned there is always a stranger
There is always a beautiful stranger”

And this wasn’t just a characteristic of James’s writing; one of only two songs that Pete Atkin wrote the lyrics for concludes:

All I ever did while you were here was done for you
Now through my tears I’m asking why
All you ever said was goodbye.

And it is not just love that is imbued with this fatalistic tone. There are any number of songs about death and defeat:

You spun the crown away into a ditch
And saw the water close
The army that you fed now feeds the crows
A king at nightfall

So yesterday they left me on the ice
I could barely lift my head to watch them go
The sky was white, my eyes grew full of snow
And what thing reached me first, bears or the weather,
I just don’t know.

Even a song about the dignity of labour, an expression of the left-wing sensibility that comes out in so many of James’s lyrics, turns into a song about a funeral:

He was generally respected, and the proof
Was a line of hired Humbers tagging quietly behind
A fat Austin Princess with carnations on the roof.

And one of the most syntactically convoluted sentences in popular song also ends in death:

When on the outskirts of the town
Comes bumping cavernously down
Out of the brick gateway
From the faded mansion on the hill
The out-of-date black Cadillac
With the old man crumpled in the back
That time has not yet found the time to kill.

[In a parenthetical aside: you go to the web sites of singers and songwriters and you will find the chords for their songs all very carefully transcribed. It’s a valuable resource for those of us learning guitar. But I wish they were as careful transcribing the lyrics. The transcription of The Faded Mansion On The Hill, for instance, has a line that the web site tells us is “The cemetery of home”, but the sense of the lyrics, common sense and a casual listen to the song will tell us this is really “The cemetery of hope”. There’s something similar on Al Stewart’s site, where the lyrics as given insist that the final verse of Electric Los Angeles Sunset includes the line “Movie queens diffuse into a cinerama haze”, where sense, internal rhymes and a listen will tell us the real line is “Movie queues diffuse into a cinerama haze”. And these people are supposed to be listening carefully to what is going on.]

Back to The Faded Mansion On The Hill, which appeared on the 1971 album Driving Through Mythical America, and I am convinced that the passage I quoted is a direct reference to the Stacy Keach character in Robert Altman’s 1970 film, Brewster McCloud. This, of course, is perfectly in keeping with James’s interest in the cinema, which would pretty soon translate into a film reviewing spot on TV where he would first come to popular attention. Film references constantly crop up in his work, most interestingly, to my ears, in Driving Through Mythical America.

This, again from 1971, is a direct response to the shootings at Kent State University:

Four students never knew that this was it
There isn’t much a target needs to know
Already Babyface had made the hit
And Rosebud was upended in the snow

America is not a real place, but a melange of film references. The real urgent moral and political purpose that got the four students at Kent State killed is overwhelmed by the pretend America that is created by a diet of Hollywood movies.

Movie metaphors recur constantly throughout James’s work:

Through screens of memory you leave me
Smile on the screen behind
And then the screen behind the screen behind the screen
But nothing alters what has been
Nor do my eyes deceive me

Or again:

And I’ve seen the Maltese Falcon falling moulting to the street
He was caught by Queen Christina who was Following the Fleet
And Scarface found the Sleep was even Bigger than the Heat
When he hit the Yellowbrick Road to where the Grapes of Wrath are sweet

The problem with an exercise like this is that there is no limit. Clive James’s lyrics are so meaty you want to keep quoting them, in fact you want to cite the complete lyrics of every song, simply because they are so good, and because there is such intimate connection within the lyrics that the whole is always more than the sum of its parts. Of course there are problems, one of the things that makes the lyrics so alive is that they are of the moment as much as they are timeless. Would a reference to duty-free allowances in The Prince of Aquitaine –

I have brought them all the plunder of the international jets
An envelope of sugar and two hundred cigarettes

– require an explanatory footnote nowadays? Is a line like this, in A King At Nightfall –

Tomorrow’s men who trace you from the field
Will be in it for the bread
There’ll be a price on your anointed head

– sound too slangy to a modern ear?And yet the songs work for me, probably better than any others. They make me laugh, they make me wonder; at times the writing is extraordinarily beautiful, at other times it is delightfully colloquial. I keep playing them over, on my music system, on my guitar, or just in my head. They do what the very best songs are supposed to do.