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Posts tagged ‘Pete Atkin’

Sep 4

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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 18

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Alone and palely strumming…

There they were, half a century ago, alone and palely loitering, with their long dark hair and their flares and their Martin guitars and their debut albums on Transatlantic, regulars at Les Cousins or the Troubadour, peering up from bottom of the bill at Implosion or next weekend’s rain-drenched festival, finding slots on Sounds of the ’70s and the Whistle Test, maybe even Top of the Pops if they struck lucky with the right song — a “Catch the Wind”, a “Baker Street”, a “Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?”, a “Streets of London” or an “Alone Again (Naturally)”.

British male singer-songwriters mostly came out of the local folk scene, which seemed to imbue them with a leaning towards the wistfully romantic. Their American counterparts, springing from close exposure to the blues and bluegrass traditions, seemed more robust in temperament. The exception would be Paul Simon, who shared the British tendency to what it would be unkind to call feyness — but then he’d spent time playing the London folk clubs as part of his formative experience, soaking up the vibe.

There was more to them than that archetype, of course, and the whole genre is interestingly captured in Separate Paths Together, a new three-CD box subtitled “An Anthology of British Male Singer-Songwriters 1965-75”. Compiled and annotated by David Wells, it parades an extraordinary range of artists in solo guise. Most of the usual suspects are here: Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, John Martyn, Donovan. Others — Kevin Ayers, Peter Hammill, Richard Thompson, Jim Capaldi, Mike Heron, Gary Farr, Dave Cousins — had made their initial reputations as members of bands. Free-standing solo artists range from Pete Atkin, who came out of the Cambridge Footlights putting melodies to Clive James’s effortfully intricate lyrics (maybe the nearest thing ever devised to an English version of French chanson), to Peter Skellern, whose deceptively artless “Hold On To Love” still sounds like a great pop record,

Among my favourites are David McWilliams’s “Days of Pearly Spencer”, as enduringly perfect an evocation of 1967 and the days of pirate radio as could be imagined; Bert Jansch’s brief, unadorned “Tell Me What Is True Love”; Mike Cooper’s “Paper and Smoke”, with its fine horn arrangement; Andy Roberts’s warmly nostalgic “All Around My Grandfather’s Floor”, from a poem by his Liverpool Scene bandmate Mike Evans; and Murray Head’s “Say It Ain’t So, Joe” — a record that everyone at Island in 1975 expected to be a huge hit, but mystifyingly wasn’t.

The alone-and-palely-loitering archetype is particularly well represented by Keith Christmas’s diaphanous “The Fawn”, Dave Cartwright’s poised “Song to Susan” and Duncan Browne’s lovely “Journey”, which kicks off the whole collection and makes me regret a crudely dismissive review I gave him when he supported Lou Reed at the Sundown in Edmonton in 1972 (not the happiest of juxtapositions, it must be said, and I wasn’t much kinder to Lou). I’d offer an apology, but he died of cancer in 1993, aged 46.

The tracks I’ve mentioned are on the first two discs, where the genre is stretched to include something like the heavily arranged “Jesus Christ Junior” by Patrick Campbell-Lyons, a member of the original Nirvana. The third disc is largely devoted to also-rans (Bill Fay, Chris Baker, Paul Brett) and anomalies (Steve Gibbons, Jona Lewie, Crispian St Peters), including Mike Hart’s “Disbelief Blues”, a “Subterranean Homesick Blues” homage, and Al Jones’s extremely creepy “Jeffrey Don’t You Touch”, a clumsy portrayal of a sex abuser that wouldn’t get anywhere near the radio today.

The two most obvious omissions from the set’s 66 tracks represent the genre’s opposite poles: the introspection of Nick Drake and the extroversion of Elton John. I guess their absence is explained by permission issues. Cat Stevens isn’t represented, either. But you already know what they sounded like.

* Separate Paths Together is out now on Cherry Red’s Grapefruit Records label. The photograph is of Duncan Browne; perhaps someone out there can tell me who took it.

Nov 27

23 Comments

Clive James 1939-2019

Clive James 2

At school I was in a folk group with two chaps called Ian Taylor and Jeff Minson. Ian had the looks and the voice, Jeff had a 12-string guitar, and I just tagged along. When was this? Well, one Saturday afternoon we paused our rehearsal at Jeff’s parents’ house to watch the transmission of the very first episode of Dr Who. (Another clue: the coffee bar we played at was called the Jules et Jim.) Eventually Ian went up to Cambridge, where he joined the Footlights. In 1970 he invited me to one of their performances at the Hampstead Theatre Club, and that’s where I met another member of the troupe, the singer-songwriter Pete Atkin, and his lyricist, a talkative Australian called Clive James.

Clive died on Sunday. He and I once joked that we should start a club for people who had voluntarily stepped down from presenting a BBC television series; the two of us would be the only eligible members. But a couple of years later he returned to the small screen and went on to a fame far beyond that which he earned from his wonderful weekly TV reviews in the Observer.

He did a lot of stuff, and sometimes he overdid it, but what will last for me are some of his more serious poems — such “Japanese Maple”, the one in which, writing in 2014, he foresaw his own death — and a handful of his lyrics. The latter could be archly funny, like “The Only Wristwatch for a Drummer”:

The Omega Incabloc Oyster Acutron ’72 / Without this timepiece there’d have been no bebop to begin with. / Bird and Diz were tricky men to sit in with / Max Roach still wears the watch he wore when bop was new. / Elvin Jones has two and Buddy Rich wears three, / One on the right wrist and one on the left / And the third one around his knee.

A number of his lyrics were about musicians, always informed by his huge reservoir of knowledge and an understanding of the condition of, for instance, a session man or a pianist accompanying a torch singer. Above all, he knew how to draw popular culture into the art songs he and Pete wrote together. For me, their magnum opus was the title song of the 1971 album Driving Through Mythical America, in which James imagined the four students shot dead by the National Guard during an anti-war demonstration at Kent State University the previous year hurtling to their tragic destiny through the landscape of the American imagination: Baby Face and Rosebud, Moose Molloy and Herman Kahn, Norman Rockwell and FDR, Jersey Joe and the Kansas City Seven. Being Clive James, he even chose their cars with precision: a Studebaker Golden Hawk and a Nash Ambassador.

James and Atkin took a high-risk approach to singer-songwriter music in the early ’70s. The combination of music, lyrics and voice didn’t always work. But it was a risk worth taking, and it still has an audience.

* The photograph is taken from Loose Canon: The Extraordinary Songs of Clive James & Pete Atkin by Ian Shircore, published in 2016 by RedDoor.