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.
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.
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: