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Jan 22

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The history of Les Cousins

Named after a 1959 Claude Chabrol film, Les Cousins operated as a folk club from 1964 to 1972, having taken over a basement in Soho run by John Jack as the Skiffle Cellar during the 1950s. On the ground floor was the restaurant of Loukas and Margaret Matheou, immigrants from Cyprus. Les Cousins, down a steep staircase, was run by their son, Andy. On stage at 49 Greek Street every night of the week he presented singers and musicians whose work would create a platform for the folk-rock and singer-songwriter movements of the late 1960s and early ’70s.

There were other important folk venues in London, notably Bunjie’s, just the other side of Charing Cross Road, and the Troubadour in Earl’s Court. But the Cousins had a special place in history, very well memorialised in a new three-CD box from the Cherry Red label, compiled and annotated by Ian A. Anderson, the singer, guitarist and editor of fRoots magazine.

It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans.

So far I’ve mentioned only male performers, but the Cousins was a place where women shone: not just Shirley Collins, Sandy Denny, Bridget St John and Maddy Prior but Dorris Henderson, Jo Ann Kelly, Beverley Kutner (later Martyn) and Nadia Cattouse. And, of course, the sublime Anne Briggs. They’re all here, represented among the 72 tracks licensed from labels such as Topic, Island, Transatlantic, Village Thing and Harvest.

There are the traditionalists: Bert Lloyd singing “Jack Orion”, the Watersons delivering “The Holmfirth Anthem”, and Dave and Toni Arthur’s “A Maiden Came from London Town”. And there are the influential Americans: Jackson C. Frank (“Milk and Honey”), Dave Van Ronk (“Baby, Let Me Lay It On You”), and Tim Hardin (“If I Were a Carpenter”).

You can hear the music going off in all sorts of directions, with weirder stuff coming from the Third Ear Band, Kevin Ayers, the Incredible String Band and Dr Strangely Strange. Ron Geesin’s “Two Fifteen String Guitars for Nice People” is in a class of brilliant weirdness all by itself.

The well produced brochure includes facsimiles of a couple of pages from Andy Mattheou’s diary in April 1965, listing the people he’s booked: Sandy Denny for £3 on a Wednesday night, Davy Graham for £15 on the Saturday, Van Morrison for £3 on a Tuesday, the American guitarist Sandy Bull on a Friday for £10 against half the door takings. Sandy Bull! How I wish I’d been there for that.

The programme isn’t predictable. There’s no “Scarborough Fair”, no “May You Never”, no “She Moved Through the Fair”. The sequencing is thoughtful: tracks from John Martyn and Duffy Power follow immediately after those by their respective mentors, Hamish Imlach and Alexis Korner. I’d only quibble with the inclusion of a small handful of songs — including Drake’s “Northern Sky” and Beverley’s “Get the One I Want To” — where the presence of orchestral arrangements takes them away from the mood of a basement folk club.

If I had to pick some personal favourites, the first would be would be the dazzling violin and guitar of Dave Swarbrick and Martin Carthy on “Byker Hill” and the second would be the magical guitar interplay of Jansch and John Renbourn on “Soho”. The third would be the intense voice and bottleneck guitar of Sam Mitchell’s “Leaf Without a Tree”: a hellhound stalking the lanes of Soho, half a century ago.

* Les Cousins: The Soundtrack of Soho’s Legendary Folk & Blues Club is out now on the Cherry Red label. The image is the club’s logo, the wagon wheel a reference to a feature of its décor.

Jan 16

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Written in air

Jan Bang is one of the people responsible for the great wave of creative music from Norway over the past three decades. As a producer and player, he’s collaborated with Dhafer Youssef, Nils Petter Molvaer, Arve Henriksen, David Sylvian, Bugge Wesseltoft and many others. In the fishing port of Kristiansand, where he was born in 1968, he and his friend Erik Honoré founded the annual Punkt Festival, where since 2005 live performances have been subjected to immediate remixes. (I wrote about a visit to the 2019 edition here.)

His new album, Reading the Air, is a sequence of songs with music mostly by himself and lyrics by Honoré. The musicians include Henriksen on trumpet, the singers Simin Tander and Benedikte Kløwe Askedalen, the guitarist Eivind Aarset, the bassist Audun Erlien, the drummer Anders Engen and the percussionist Adam Rudolph.

What does it sound like? I was put in mind of late Blue Nile filtered through Jon Hassell’s Fourth World recordings: fragile-sounding melodies, introspective lyrics, voices singing from some private sphere, gauzy textures shaped and layered with great care, on the edge of decay. Through the 10 tracks, there’s a consistency of mood, elegant and reflective.

Here are the opening lines of Honoré’s lyric for the exquisitely beautiful title song: Moving on /We’re planning our escape / Preparing to leave / The disconnected state / Bridges burned / The tables turned / Reading the air / To reconnect with fate. A piano is played in an empty ballroom. A swaying groove emerges and simmers quietly. Bang’s ruminative vocal is sometimes doubled by a female singing over his shoulder. What sounds like a section of shakuhachis turns out to be overdubbed trumpets played by Henriksen, who steps forward for a lighter-than-air solo. I could easily imagine successful covers of this by Annie Lennox, Bryan Ferry or Beth Gibbons with Rustin Man.

The other track I want to mention is the only non-original composition, a version of the old folk-blues song called “Delia” or “Delia’s Gone”, which exists in many versions. This is not the murder-ballad variant recorded by Bob Dylan on World Gone Wrong in 1993 (credited as “traditional”) or the bloodier iteration that Johnny Cash included on the first volume of his American Recordings in 1994 (credited to Cash, Karl Silbersdorf and Dick Toops). Curiously, it’s the smoother and more lyrical variation that Harry Belafonte sang in 1954 on his debut album, “Mark Twain” and Other Folk Favourites, credited to Lester Judson and Fred Brooks. Judson was a commercial songwriter. Brooks was a temporary nom de plume for Fred Hellerman, a member (with Pete Seeger) of the Weavers, who were then under investigation by the FBI for alleged Communist sympathies.

Bang’s version is a sort of Nordic Americana: the bell of a wooden church in the snow, muffled drums, the refined twang of Arset’s lightly picked guitar. No murders in the lyric, but three-part vocal harmony like a bluegrass family stranded up a fjord, in danger of death from exposure to the cruel elements. The line about “everything I had is gone” can rarely have sounded so final.

* Jan Bang’s Reading the Air is released on 19 January on the Punkt Editions label. The photo of Bang is by Alf Solbakken. You can hear “Delia” on this link: https://janbang.bandcamp.com/album/reading-the-air

Dec 14

20 Comments

2023: The best bits

Sometimes it takes me a while to catch up. This year I caught up with my late mother’s fondness for Death Comes for the Archbishop, a novel written by Willa Cather in 1927. A hardback copy had been on her bookshelves since I was old enough to notice, and she spoke often of how much she admired it. When she and my father died a few years ago, within months of each other, I took away her 1933 hardback edition as their house was cleared. And this year I finally got around to reading it.

Set in the mid-19th century, the story of two French priests sent by the Pope to New Mexico shows how Cather could paint on a vast canvas. Born in 1873, she was brought up in rural Nebraska, giving her a feeling for striking and often bleakly beautiful landscape and dramatic weather. The climate and the topography of New Mexico become an intrinsic part of her narrative, as alive as the characters. In that, and in a sudden, unexpected episode of shocking violence, I was reminded of Cormac McCarthy, who died in June, just as I was reading it.

I was reminded of him even more forcefully when I moved on straight away to Cather’s Great Plains Trilogy: O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark, and My Ántonia, written between 1913 and 1918, all very different, each with its own female protagonist, each casting a spell. McCarthy, of course, wrote a celebrated Border Trilogy in the 1990s: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain. None of his obituaries mentioned a possible influence, and it’s a long time since Cather (who died in 1947) was fashionable, but I’d be very surprised if he were not familiar with her work.

She could write about music and its effects, too. In The Song of the Lark her protagonist, Thea Kronborg, the young daughter of Scandinavian immigrants settled in the town of Moonstone, Colorado, and destined (although she has no idea of this yet) to become a great opera singer, is invited to a railroad workers’s ball by a character called Spanish Johnny:

The Mexican dance was soft and quiet. There was no calling, the conversation was very low, the rhythm of the music was smooth and engaging, the men were graceful and courteous. Some of them Thea had never before seen out of their working clothes, smeared with grease from the round house or clay from the brickyard. Sometimes, when the music happened to be a popular Mexican waltz song, the dancers sang it softly as they moved. There were three little girls under twelve in their first communion dresses, and one of them had an orange marigold in her black hair, just over her ear. They danced with the men and with each other. There was an atmosphere of ease and friendly pleasure in the low, dimly lit room, and Thea could not help wondering whether the Mexicans had no jealousies or neighbourly grudges as the people in Moonstone had. There was no constraint of any kind there tonight, but a kind of natural harmony about their movements, their low conversations, their smiles.

NEW ALBUMS

1 Billy Valentine and the Universal Truth (Flying Dutchman/Acid Jazz)

2 Matana Roberts: Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden (Constellation)

3 Sylvie Courvoisier: Chimaera (Intakt)

4 Darcy James Argue’s Secret Society: Dynamic Maximum Tension (Nonesuch)

5 Blind Boys of Alabama: Echoes of the South (Single Lock)

6 Fire! Orchestra: Echoes (Rune Grammofon)

7 Vilhelm Bromander: In This Forever Unfolding Moment (Thanatos)

8 Steve Lehman & Orchestre National de Jazz: Ex Machina (Pi)

9 Bob Dylan: Shadow Kingdom (Columbia Legacy)

10 PJEV/Hayden Chisholm/Kit Downes: Medna Rosa (Red Hook)

11 Tyshawn Sorey Trio: Continuing (Pi)

12 Sebastian Rochford: A Short Diary (ECM)

13 Paul Simon: Seven Psalms (Owl)

14 The Necks: Travel (Northern Spy)

15 Ambrose Akinmusire: Beauty Is Enough (Origami Harvest)

16 Cécile McLorin Salvant: Mélusine (Nonesuch)

17 Alexander Hawkins Trio: Carnival Celestial (Intakt)

18 jaimie branch: fly or die fly or die fly or die ((world war)) (International Anthem)

19 Aaron Diehl & the Knights: Zodiac Suite (Mack Avenue)

20 Julian Siegel Jazz Orchestra: Tales from the Jacquard (Whirlwind)

REISSUE / ARCHIVE

1 John Coltrane with Eric Dolphy: Evenings at the Village Gate (Impulse)

2 Mike Osborne: Starting Fires (British Progressive Jazz)

3 Miles Davis: In Concert at the Olympia Paris 1957 (Fresh Sound)

4 Bruce Springsteen: The Live Series: Songs on Keys (nugs.net)

5 Chris Cutler: Compositions and Collaborations 1972-2022 (ReR Megacorp)

6 Evan Parker: NYC 1978 (Relative Pitch)

7 Pharoah Sanders: Pharoah (Luaka Bop)

8 Derek Bailey & Paul Motian: Duo in Concert (Frozen Reeds)

9 Jon Hassell: Further Fictions (Ndeya)

10 Joy: Joy (Cadillac)

LIVE PERFORMANCE

1 Northern Soul Prom (Royal Albert Hall, July)

2 Mette Henriette + Charles Lloyd trios (Barbican, November)

3 Rickie Lee Jones (Jazz Café, June)

4 Kronos Quartet (Barbican, October)

5 Tyshawn Sorey / Pat Thomas (Café Oto, November)

6 Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin (Ronnie Scott’s Club, August)

7 Ethan Iverson: Ellington: Stride to Strings (Grange Festival, June)

8 Empirical (Vortex, May)

9 Decoy + Joe McPhee (Café Oto, July)

10 Mike Westbrook’s Band of Bands (Pizza Express, September)

MUSIC BOOKS

1 Henry Threadgill: Easily Slip into Another World: A Life in Music (Alfred A. Knopf)

2 Laura Flam & Emily Sieu Liebowitz: But Will You Love Me Tomorrow? (Hachette)

3 Richard Morton Jack: Nick Drake: The Life (John Murray)

4 Peter Watts: Denmark Street (Paradise Road)

5 Ray Padgett: Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (EWP Press)

FICTION

1 Rose Tremain: Absolutely & Forever (Chatto & Windus)

2 Jon Fosse (tr. Damion Searls): A Shining (Fitzcarraldo)

3 Michael Bracewell: Unfinished Business (White Rabbit)

NON-FICTION

1 Laura Cumming: Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death (Vintage)

2 Ned Boulting: 1923: The Mystery of Lot 212 and a Tour de France Obsession (Bloomsbury)

3 Marc Kristal: Pauline Boty: British Pop Art’s Sole Sister (Frances Lincoln)

FILMS

1 Killers of the Flower Moon (dir. Martin Scorsese)

2 One Fine Morning (dir. Mia Hansen-Løve)

3 Oppenheimer (dir. Christopher Nolan)

EXHIBITIONS

1 Nicolas de Staël (Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris)

2 Impressionists on Paper (Royal Academy, London)

3 Gwen John: Art and Life in London and Paris (Pallant House, Chichester)

Oct 22

4 Comments

Kronos at 50

The Kronos Quartet were already well into their second decade when I saw them for the first time, sharing the bill with John Zorn’s Naked City at the Royalty Theatre in London in November 1988. They closed their set with Aarvo Pärt’s “Fratres”, whose hushed, prayer-like cadences were what stuck in my head, and are still there. But they’d become famous for daring to introduce the compositions of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans and Jimi Hendrix to the format, and for making it clear that they’d be treating those works with the seriousness, rigour and spirit of inquiry that others applied to the standard Beethoven-to-Bartók string quartet repertoire.

Last night at the Barbican, during a year-long tour to mark the 50th anniversary of their creation in San Francisco by the violinist David Harrington, “Purple Haze” was their encore: a shout of joy to celebrate their longevity and the continued relevance of their founding ideal. Harrington and his fellow violinist John Sherba, Hank Dutt on viola and Paul Wiancko, the latest recruit to the cello seat filled so long and so brilliantly by Joan Jeanrenaud, worked their way through a dozen pieces, divided into two sets, coming as close to a career summary as would be possible in two hours for an organisation that, in its lifetime, has commissioned more than a thousand works.

Two guest artists appeared, both on pieces specially written for the quartet: the Indonesian composer Peni Candra Rini to deliver the swooping, chattering vocal lead on her “Maduswara” and the London-born djembe player Yahael Camara Onono to add percussive momentum to Dumisani Maraire’s “Mother Nozipo”. There were reminders of Kronos’s early days in the performance of works by three Americans commonly, if misleadingly, called minimalists: Philip Glass with a piece from the Mishima soundtrack, Steve Reich’s dense and fast-flowing “Triple Quartet”, and Terry Riley with “Lunch in Chinatown”, a light-hearted extract from a new suite featuring the members of the group chatting as if ordering a meal in a restaurant.

For me, the moments of seriousness were the most powerful. The ethereal “God-music” from George Crumb’s Black Angels featured Wiancka coaxing fragile melodies built out of harmonics from his cello while Harrington, Sherba and Dutt each bowed a table full of wine glasses. Dutt took the lead on Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Antonio Haskell’s “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away”, a setting of a gospel song recorded in 1938 by Mahalia Jackson. This directly followed an excerpt from Zachary James Walker’s Peace Be Still, played against projection of newsreel footage from the Alabama civil rights marches in 1965 and the words of Clarence B. Jones, Martin Luther King Jr’s lawyer and adviser. Jones had helped draft the “I have a dream” speech given at the March on Washington in 1963 — which only took its final form during the speech itself, when Mahalia implored King to break away from his prepared script and tell the crowd of more than 250,000 about his dream.

And then there was their arrangement of Alfred Schnittke’s “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief”, which they recorded in 1997, a year before the composer’s death: its skeins of muted melodies and modal harmonic underpinning settled on the hall like a pale but gently glowing mist, much as I remember “Fratres” doing 35 years ago.

Oct 16

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Terry Riley in Japan

In the early weeks of 2020, at the outset of a world tour, Terry Riley was in Japan when the Covid-19 epidemic began. The tour was cancelled. He was 85 years old, and his wife — the mother of their three children — had died five years earlier. In his words: “As I had no particular place to go, I decided to stay for a while.” He’s still there.

Before long he was recording in a friend’s studio. That’s not unexpected. What might be surprising is the nature of the resulting album, which consists mostly of solo piano interpretations of Broadway songs with a couple of original pieces, one of them featuring a synthesiser.

Before he became celebrated as the composer of In C, A Rainbow in Curved Air, Cadenza on the Night Plain and Salome Dances for Peace, and as the creator of beguiling extended organ improvisations given titles like Persian Surgery Dervishes and Shri Camel, Riley played the piano in San Francisco bars. When I was writing the book from which this blog takes its name, I talked to him about his experience of visiting the city’s jazz clubs — particularly the Blackhawk — to hear Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Jazz was an important part of his own evolving music. The nature of this new album, he says in the sleeve note, was suggested by friends and family members who had heard him warming up for his solo concerts by improvising on standards.

The album, called STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1, begins with “Isn’t It Romantic”, “Blue Room” and “The Best Thing for You (Would Be Me)”. These all very poised and charming mainstream-modern treatments of well known items from the American Songbook. Riley’s touch is sure, his conception that of a somewhat less introspective Bill Evans but his lines nevertheless probing and sometimes surprising. In particular, “Blue Room” is beautifully interpreted. Then comes “Round Midnight”, in which he treats Monk’s great ballad with proper respect and evident fondness while discreetly finding one or two little extensions and decorations that perhaps no one has thought of before among the many thousands of versions of a tune currently celebrating its 80th anniversary.

“Ballad for Sara and Tadashi”, a discursive original, is given in two versions. The first is for solo piano, and follows seamlessly on from the standards. After a six-minute piece for synthesiser titled “Pasha Rag”, which works its way towards a light-hearted reminder that ragtime piano was among Riley’s early accomplishments, “Ballad of Sara and Tadashi” returns with the synth adding an electro shadow-texture to his pensive melodic lines.

There’s a return to Broadway with “Yesterday”, eight minutes of variations on Jerome Kern’s melody swimming in some sort of light electronic reverb against synth backwashes, and Jimmy Van Heusen’s “It Could Happen to You”, the tolling of isolated chords introducing an unadorned treatment somewhere between pensive and sombre, and for me the most satisfying thing here. The album ends with a 43-second miniature in which voices apparently singing some sort of ritual chant fading in and out before they’ve even had time to register properly. A little jeu d’ésprit, maybe, to close one of the more surprising additions to the long and varied discography of one of the most extraordinary musicians of our times.

* Terry Riley’s STANDARDSAND: Kobuchizawa Sessions #1 is released in Japan on Star/Rainbow Records. The uncredited photograph is from the booklet with the album.

Oct 3

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The great-grandmother’s tale

The series of audio collages that Matana Roberts calls Coin Coin, now reaching its fifth chapter (of a projected 12) with the release of In the Garden, may one day come to be seen as a kind of Bayeux Tapestry of Black American life: an extended narrative portrayal of the struggles, the pain, the joy, the successes and reverses of the successive generations which Roberts, through her own family’s post-emancipation history, can touch and bring back to imagined life.

Each chapter has a theme and here is how, in her sleeve note, she introduces the latest:

There is something quite rancid going on in America right now, more so than any time I have seen… a growing cohort of ghoul-like humans who seem to think that your body does not belong to you. We have seen some of this before, and we eradicated some of the issues. It wasn’t perfect how we did it, but we did it. And yet, like a never-ending train wreck, here we are again.

She is referring to last year’s decision of the US Supreme Court, stacked with conservatives during the Trump administration, to reverse the decision in the case of Roe vs Wade, made in 1973 and guaranteeing every woman’s constitutional right to an abortion. That was a landmark case, won after a long campaign, and its reversal was equally significant in what it said about the prevailing social tides.

She continues: “The lack of access to safe and legal abortion services disproportionately affects marginalised and low-income communities, who often lack the resources and support to obtain safe reproductive health care. Reproductive health care includes abortion. The issue specifically of black folks’ mortality concerning abortion is a complex and sensitive one.” They are, she says, three or four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than their white counterparts.

As usual, Roberts tell stories of women, apparently drawn from her family’s history, affected by those tides: stories of survival in response to oppression, sometimes tragic. This one is based on the story of an ancestor, three generations back, who “perished at a young age, leaving her growing children motherless”. She did not have to die, Roberts says, but “the negative consequences of her death have reverberated down through generations in my family line, in the same way that a similar resounding might happen to someone else’s ancestral line generations from today.”

Her brilliance as a musician is to find the tones and blends that underscore, reflect and amplify these stories, carrying the sounds of both the past and the present in their combinations of reeds, fiddle, tin whistles, percussion, electronics and voices. The turbulent, swirling horns of the mid-’60s “fire music” (including the composer’s own eloquent alto saxophone), the tintinnabulating “little instruments” of the Art Ensemble of Chicago and Corey Smythe’s piano are blended with a simulacrum of the fife-and-drum bands of the 19th century to create an orchestral language that functions as a backdrop to her recitations while richly endowed with the capacity to move to the forefront when required.

Roberts inhabits her ancestor’s story, her voice and the music a palimpsest through which the outlines of history emerge. She is a superb narrator, wry and vigorous, and her alto saxophone solos are a match for her recitations in emotional impact. “At least I know through the eyes of my great-granddaughter [that] I am seen and I have been heard,” she concludes, channeling proudly, and suddenly, in Eliot’s phrase, “all time is eternally present.”

* Matana Roberts’s Coin Coin Chapter Five: In the Garden is released on the Constellation label, available along with its predecessors at https://matana-roberts.bandcamp.com/album/coin-coin-chapter-five-in-the-garden

Sep 26

5 Comments

Exhuming Nico

It was out of sheer curiosity that I went along to Café Oto last night to hear a performance of Nico’s The Marble Index by the string quartet Apartment House (Mira Benjamin and Chihiro Ono on violins, Bridget Carey on viola and Anton Lukoszevieze on cello) augmented by Kerry Yong on piano and other keyboards. The part of Nico was taken by the singer Francesca Fargion.

The room was sold out and the audience expectant. The original album, in which John Cale added his viola, other instruments and post-production touches to Nico’s seven songs, has a special status within the history of rock: barely half an hour long, it arrived as a message from a different world, seemingly shaped by the sensibility of European art-song and the practices of the American classical avant-garde, completely uncompromising in the challenge it offered the listener in 1968.

I suppose the nearest it ever came to being played in concert in its original form during Nico’s lifetime was when she performed a couple of its songs with accompaniment by Cale and Brian Eno at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin in 1974, where they were received with the mixture of applause and outright derision that had greeted the album’s release six years earlier. I certainly never expected to hear the music performed live again after her death in Ibiza 35 years ago.

It was brave of Yong to attempt a modified transcription of the full work, and of Fargion to deliver Nico’s words and melodies. Of course it wasn’t remotely like hearing Nico herself, whose strong, unabashed, wilfully inflexible and uninflected voice defined the music every bit as much as the sound of her harmonium and her strangely memorable melodies, with their echoes of folk tunes and lullabies.

Very wisely, Fargion did not attempt an imitation. But although she is a fine, classically trained singer with a pleasant tone, her interpretations seemed colourless, fading into the strings rather than dominating them. Only “Frozen Warnings”, where the string writing was at its most economical, and “Nibelungen”, a lovely acappella song unreleased until Elektra put out an expanded edition in 1991, allowed the emergence of an attractive poignancy at a worthwhile creative variance from that of the original.

If you wanted to do something really interesting with The Marble Index, to try and match its own inherent challenge, you’d probably have to take it apart and reconstruct it in a different form. This was a careful and respectful performance, observing some of the details of the original, such as the tiny vocal echo on “No One Is There” and a modest version of the pealing piano on “Evening of Light”, although the sound of the harmonium was not heard until “Julius Caesar (Memento Hodie)”, the fifth song in the sequence.

The audience listened intently, and the warmth of their response spoke of the veneration in which this extraordinary piece is now held. In the end, though, what was completely missing was the sense of outright shock and enigmatic purpose that the original artifact itself still conveys, 55 years later, and which is such a part of its eternally untranslatable meaning.

Sep 4

10 Comments

The return of Pete Atkin

It’s often said, with an air of puzzled regret, that Britain lacks the equivalent of chanson. We certainly had an influential Anglo-Scottish folk tradition, and we had the Beatles and Radiohead. But we didn’t exactly have a Georges Brassens, a Léo Ferré or a Jacques Brel. There never seemed to be a market for that kind of grown-up, ballad-based popular music. Some might say that Jake Thackray, the sardonic, saturnine Yorkshireman who died 20 years ago, came the closest. Others would make the case for Pete Atkin, who emerged at the end of the 1960s singing songs in which he put the melodies to the lyrics of Clive James, and who returned to live performance at the Pheasantry in Chelsea on Saturday night.

For a few years at the beginning of the ’70s, it looked as though Atkin and James, who had met as members of the Cambridge Footlights, might be on the brink of some sort of commercial success with albums such as Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, Driving Through Mythical America and A King at Nightfall. But things tended to get in the way. One example would be Kenny Everett getting sacked from the BBC for making a joke about a cabinet minister just as he was playing one of their songs every week on his Radio 1 show.

Another might be James becoming famous for his weekly Observer TV review, in which he found his comic voice. Polyglot, polymathic, he translated Dante, wrote a series of best-selling memoirs, hosted an annual Formula 1 review on TV, befriended Princess Di, and took tango lessons in Buenos Aires. Atkin, for his part, had a long and award-winning career with BBC Radio as a script editor, producer and head of network radio in Bristol — as well as voicing the part of Mr Crock in a Wallace & Gromit movie. In the early 2000s they reunited and toured together, writing new songs before James succumbed to leukaemia in 2019.

Atkin’s dry, classless English voice was always a long way from the tone of his male singer-songwriter contemporaries produced by the English folk scene, from Ralph McTell to Nick Drake. Lacking any hint of assumed American inflection, his delivery suited James’s agile, witty and erudite lyrics, even though James took so much of his subject matter from American popular culture. Together they aimed for a modern take on the great Broadway songwriting partnerships, absorbing the pop-culture influences of their own time alongside historical references just as their predecessors had. Cole Porter’s “You’re the Top” — “You’re an old Dutch master / You’re Mrs Astor” — might have been their template.

It’s a combination that appealed to a certain sensibility, one well represented at the Pheasantry, where Atkin was making a rare appearance in order to launch a new CD, The Luck of the Draw, the second volume of revisions of some of the old songs and a handful of hitherto unrecorded collaborations (the first, Midnight Voices, was released in 2007).

He sang and played guitar, accompanied for much of the time by Simon Wallace’s beautifully fluent piano. Wallace is one of the musicians on the new album, along with an A-team of Nigel Price on guitar, the bassist Alec Dankworth, Rod Youngs on drums, Gary Hammond on percussion and the saxophonist Dave O’Higgins, together reupholstering the older songs with care and imagination. (Atkin and James always had good taste in musicians: Chris Spedding, Kenny Clare, Alan Wakeman, Tony Marsh and Herbie Flowers were among the supporting cast on the early albums.)

The dramatic highlights of the live set were “Beware of the Beautiful Stranger” and “The King at Nightfall”, two songs for which Atkin, as was his underrated habit, found melodies at least the equal of the beguiling lyrics. The latter’s portrayal of a fallen and hunted despot, its title taken from a line in Eliot’s “Little Gidding”, seems even more resonant today than it was in 1973.

Sometimes James’s erudition could be stretched a bit thin in pursuit of wittiness, as in “I’ve seen landladies who lost their lovers at the time of Rupert Brooke / And they pressed the flowers from Sunday rambles and then forgot which book” (from “Laughing Boy”). During the show Atkin mentioned that the lyricist had self-critically dismissed “The Only Wristwatch for a Drummer” as an example of his own tendency to show off, and I suppose the same charge could be levelled at things like “Screen-Freak”, with its kaleidoscope of Hollywood images, or “Together At Last”, which plays games with pairs (“Two-gether at last / Hearts that beat as one / Swift and Stella, Perry and Della / Dombey and Son”). But they’re audience-pleasers, a facet of a talent that incorporated the audacity required to attempt something like “Canoe”, in which two time-frames, pre-technology and space age, are seamlessly blended.

In my view, James was at his very best at a provider of song lyrics when he was expressing deep emotion in relatively simple language. This was perfectly displayed in three songs Atkin performed at the Pheasantry, each of them a lament for love departed or unanswered. Atkin described the first of them, “An Empty Table”, as resembling a film, shot part in black and white and part in colour, the unadorned lyric perfectly matched by a tune which begins from an unexpected trajectory, then soars and settles with unassuming elegance. The second, “The Trophies of My Lovers Gone”, takes its title from Shakespeare’s Sonnet XXXI, its search for a complex emotional truth reflected in a melody that wanders gracefully. The third, “Girl on a Train”, more typical of James in that the girl he’s yearning after is absorbed in a volume of Verlaine, was presented on Saturday as a final encore, finishing the evening with an elegiac cadence of guitar and piano, drifting into silence.

* Pete Atkin’s The Luck of the Draw is released on the Hillside label (www.peteatkin.com). Ian Shircore’s book Loose Canon: The Extrordinary Songs of Clive James & Pete Atkin, first published in 2016 by RedDoor and now in paperback, is also recommended.

Aug 26

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Summer books 3: Ray Connolly

It would surely surprise anyone familiar with London’s Evening Standard only in its shrivelled, almost content-free current version to learn that it was once a substantial newspaper, a proper reflection of the city’s vitality. In the days when it was edited by Charles Wintour, its pages thrummed with big names as well with as the classified ads for flats and cars that paid their salaries: the likes of Alexander Walker, the film critic, Suzy Menkes, the fashion editor, and Sam White, the Paris correspondent, who filed his column from the bar of the Hôtel de Crillon. And, of course, Ray Connolly, who succeeded Maureen Cleave as the byline attached to interviews with the pop stars and other showbiz celebrities of the time. On billboards outside newsagents, “BEATLE TO RETURN MBE” would inevitably refer to one of Connolly’s stories. It was an enviable gig, and he made the most of it.

Although he never gave up journalism, he moved beyond it in the early 1970s when he wrote the screenplays for two films, That’ll Be the Day and Stardust, which examined the years of his own youth with a fondly nostalgic eye and made a star out of David Essex. He went on to write TV and radio plays, novels, and books about John Lennon and Elvis Presley (his radio plays included a smart counterfactual called Sorry, Boys, You Failed the Audition, which imagined a future for the four Beatles had their stars not aligned with success).

Three years ago he caught Covid-19 in a very serious way, spending six months in hospital, most of that time in intensive care. When he emerged alive, somewhat to his own surprise, he needed to relearn some of the things he had previously taken for granted, such as how to walk. He also set to work on a memoir, just published under the title Born at the Right Time.

The story of his journey from a post-war Lancashire childhood (he was born in 1940) to Fleet Street is interesting for the sharp contrasts it draws with today’s world, in which such priority is given to ambition and career planning. But the real value of the book comes when he raids his own cuttings file for excerpts from his interviews with the celebrities of his era. Ray was an exceptionally good interviewer at a time when there were no filters between journalist and subject. A PR person would set the time and place of the appointment, and then retire gracefully. Ray’s gentle but persistent stammer was, he believes, a help in enlisting the sympathy of those answering his questions.

He was the person to whom Ringo Starr described the Maharishi’s ashram in Rishikesh as being “just like Butlin’s”, and to whom Cynthia Lennon confessed that she “didn’t know the tricks” of how to stimulate John. When Ray asked Bob Dylan in 1969 why he always looked so moody, he got this reply: “When I ask photographers how to look, they always say, ‘Don’t smile.’ So I don’t.” Interestingly, when Dusty Springfield spoke to him for the first time about being attracted to girls (and afterwards he drove her back to the house where she was living with Norma Tanega), he and his editor decided not to highlight her responses in a piece that appeared under the headline “Dusty at 30”.

Don and Phil Everly — among his great heroes — talk to him about the origins of their hits. Don on writing “Till I Kissed You” on a place returning from Australia: “I’d fallen in love with a French girl called Liliane and I was afraid I’d never see her again. In those days Australia seemed like the end of the world.” Phil on performing “The Price of Love” in concert: “While Donald plays to the band, I like to look around the audience and maybe pick up a pretty face, a girl I’ll never see again. ‘You talk too much, you laugh too loud. You see her face in every crowd.'”

Away from music, Peter Fonda and Edward Fox behave as if still in character for Easy Rider and Edward and Mrs Simpson. Michael Caine talks while returning to London from Shepperton Studios in his chauffeured Rolls-Royce about his command of French and German and of the craft of acting: “Somehow I seem to have got the image of the world’s luckiest half-wit. But in my view, I’m not half-witted and I’ve never had an ounce of luck in my life.” Well, maybe just a bit when Terence Stamp and Anthony Newley turned down the lead role in Alfie.

Sharp assessments are made without leaving the subjects lying in a pool of blood, as would later become the Fleet Street fashion. Marc Bolan, the teenybop hero of 1972, sits in his flat in Maida Vale and claims that he can fly and make himself invisible. “Bolan was one of those stars who bubbled up in the vacuum left after the Beatles’ dissolution,” Connolly remarks.

There are stories about failures as well as successes in the movie business, the best of them being the protracted and painful saga of trying to get Bianca Jagger to star in the film version of Trick or Treat?, Ray’s 1975 novel, produced by David Puttnam and directed by Michael Apted. “A sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences”, it turned into a disaster both predictable and expensive.

Ray’s father was lost at sea during the 1944 landings in France. Unsurprisingly he developed an interest in talking to famous people about their war experiences, from Harry Secombe and Paul Raymond to Tony Benn, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Group Captain Leonard Cheshire, who won the VC for bravery after flying 200 bombing missions to Germany and tells Connolly about being sent by Churchill to observe the nuclear explosion that destroyed Nagasaki: “One part of me was thinking in relief, ‘That’s it. The killing of six years is finished. And another part was thinking about the people who had just died.” Cheshire devoted the rest of his life to charitable work.

In part, this is the sort of memoir you might write because you want your children and grandchildren to know who you really were, trying answer the questions they might never get around to asking. At 80-odd, too, your recall is unlikely to be flawless, and it’s not worth quibbling here about the year Dylan performed in the UK with the Hawks or whether it was Stormy Tempest and the Hurricanes that Ringo played with before the Beatles. The value of the book is elsewhere: in the reminder of how a fine journalist got people to talk, and what happened when he spread his wings.

* Ray Connolly’s Born at the Right Time is published by Malignon.

Aug 15

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Ronin at Ronnie’s

Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin at Ronnie Scott’s (photo: Robert Crowley)

Somewhere between an “oh!” and an “ow!”, the abrupt vocal command with which Nik Bärtsch cues his musicians for a shift in musical pattern is the polite zen-funk equivalent of James Brown’s exhortation to take it to the bridge. The reaction is immediate, the players switching from one polyrhythmic cell to another in perfect unison, reframing not just the abstract geometry of metre and tempo but the weight, tone and landscape of the music.

If you own any of the Swiss pianist-composer’s albums, on ECM or his own Ronin Rhythm label, you’ll know that his pieces all go under the bland title “Modul”: “Modul 17”, “Modul 44”, “Modul 55” and so on. I find it rather refreshing not to be primed to think about whether or not a particular piece is a successful portrayal of a nightingale singing in Soho Square. You can just get on and listen to the notes, free from baggage.

But although it may be programmed, there is nothing cold about it. Bärtsch’s music is sometimes attached to such categories and minimalism and systems music, but it’s too abundant to qualify for the former and too warm-blooded for the latter. Any superficial impression of austerity is profoundly misleading. To hear one of his bands live is to share an audience involvement that expresses itself at the end of each long and intense set in a roar of pure exhilaration.

That’s what happened when Bärtsch returned to Ronnie Scott’s Club last week with Ronin, currently a quartet with Jeremias Keller, a relative newcomer on bass guitar, joining the stalwarts Kaspar Rast on drums and Sha on bass clarinet and alto saxophone. Ronin was assembled in 2001 and plays every Monday night at Exil, Bärtsch’s club in Zurich, its members applying their virtuosity to perfecting what their leader calls “ritual groove music”.

I’ve heard Bärtsch’s music in several environments: with Ronin in churches in London and Bremen, solo (with a light artist) at the Barbican, with a horn section at Kings Place and with the Frankfurt Radio big band, orchestated by Jim McNeely, in Berlin. In the set I heard at Ronnie’s, they played the six pieces from their latest ECM album, Awase, blended together into two long sequences, plus an encore. Compared to those earlier performances, this sounded mellower, less edge-of-the-seat, a little more lyrical and reflective, particularly in something like the swooning chordal descent of one section of “Modul 36”.

Even in its gentler moments, however, it was still imbued with that characteristic sense of coiling and uncoiling while still held in tension. And the quality of the playing of all four was extraordinary, with Bärtsch delving into the grand piano’s innards to pluck, strum and damp strings, occasionally striking its frame with a stick, the devoted Sha in the role of Jimmy Lyons to his Cecil Taylor, Rast tireless in nailing down the complex metres and displaced beats, and Keller’s alertness and agility fitting in so well that he might have been with them since the beginning rather than a mere three years.

It was great to see a big crowd assembled to hear this music. Of course the majority of the audience knew exactly what they had come for and received their reward. But also it was interesting to watch the more casual type of customer, the sort who basically turn up for a night at a famous jazz club, as their initial scepticism turned to curiosity and then to intrigue and ultimately to delight, shared with the rest of us.

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