by Bob Stanley
Rod and Elton, Zeppelin and Purple, they all pointed to a future, to something specifically seventies, but it was all in shades of grey compared to the myriad colours of the late sixties. The elephant in the room was the Beatles, now in four pieces. Initially it was the unlikely lads who looked as if they might have come out of the break-up best: Ringo released the stellar ‘It Don’t Come Easy’ 45 (UK and US no. 4 ’71) and at a stroke trounced all his Beatles novelty efforts, while George sounded like a free man with nothing but open spaces on his mind on the vast but vastly successful All Things Must Pass triple album and its lead single ‘My Sweet Lord’, an international number one. It wouldn’t last. By the time of Living in the Material World, his second album a full three years later, it was already clear that he’d been stockpiling songs for All Things Must Pass, while offloading tosh like ‘Savoy Truffle’ onto the later Beatles albums.
John Lennon initially released the bleak Plastic Ono Band album as therapy, which was hard work, quite un-Beatles and very 1970, though much of it sounded whiney and little more than self-pitying when stacked alongside the raincloud of breakdown albums scattered through the seventies.6 ‘I don’t believe in Beatles,’ he sang, to slam that door shut. Things improved with his mood on two scorching singles – ‘Instant Karma’ (UK no. 5, US no. 3 ’70) and ‘Power to the People’ (UK no. 7, US no. 11 ’71) – and the almost homely Imagine album in ’71. Beyond that, jewels like ‘Mind Games’ and ‘Number Nine Dream’ were rare, scattered over the rest of the decade. Double Fantasy, his last album issued shortly before his death in 1980, was a thin stew of icky philosophies mushed in a blender until they resemble puréed carrot and peas. His taste for Maoism had been displaced by rich-man domesticity, and his efforts on Double Fantasy were shown up by the contributions of his wife Yoko Ono, whose scratchily erotic ‘Kiss Kiss Kiss’ sounded very New York 1980. Lennon’s ‘Beautiful Boy’ sounded like he wished it could be 1970 again (here’s another unwritten rule of modern pop – never write songs about your kids).
People who had pinned their hopes on Paul lighting the way in the darkness of the new decade got to hear him sing ‘I want a home, I want a sheep, I want to get me a good night’s sleep’ on good days and snidey songs about his ex-bandmates (‘Three Legs’, ‘Too Many People’) on bad. Having paved the way for the seventies with Abbey Road’s studio-stretching collage in ’69, he generally retreated into campfire cosiness; Ram was Abbey Road’s spiritual successor, arguably his best album of the seventies, and he never lost his deceptively easy melodic gift.7 But sonic innovation and tub-thumping were behind him. Who could blame him? He must have been knackered. All four, in every way, were ex-Beatles. The early seventies was a post-Beatles world.
1 Picking up Curtis from his flat, the other members of Roundabout – as the first line-up of Deep Purple was known – were surprised to find he’d covered everything in tin foil to confuse anyone who might be spying on him. He was living in complete darkness: the windows were blacked out, and every time he turned the lights on the foil-covered bulb blew up.
2 A rocksploitation film from 1970 called Permissive shows the true horror awaiting students who were just too young to have made it to college in the sixties. Everyone and everything looks greasy. Titus Groan and Comus play to kids who look as if they’re playing a predetermined role, just as surely as their bowler-hatted father and pinafored mother.
3 The profit margins on albums were considerably greater. Led Zeppelin’s manager Peter Grant figured that if you wanted ‘Whole Lotta Love’ badly enough, you’d fork out £1.99 for Led Zeppelin II. There was little more to Led Zep’s album-only aesthetic than that.
4 Of Burrows’s many solo singles ‘Melanie Makes Me Smile’ and ‘Every Little Move She Makes’ are at least the equal of his hits and highly recommended. In the wake of his 1970 chart domination, Burrows reckons he was ‘banned from BBC Radio for two years. That was the period when I had the solo records, and I really and truly couldn’t get played. We had no commercial radio in those days, just the BBC.’
5 This generic look, with no distinguishing visual marks, is the easiest explanation as to why so many artists revered forty years later – Judee Sill, Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Linda Perhacs – slipped through the net at the time.
6 Nick Drake’s Pink Moon, Big Star’s Sister Lovers, Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear, Gerry Goffin’s (unlistenable but heartbreaking) It Ain’t Exactly Entertainment.
7 As soon as the seventies ended, and punk had meant no one would ever again look to him for innovation, he produced the electro-minimalism of McCartney II in 1980, mixing avant instrumentals (‘Front Parlour’) with trademark winsomeness (‘Waterfalls’) to great effect, especially when it was stacked up against Lennon’s 1980 retro wimp rock on Double Fantasy. The first decade of the twenty-first century likewise saw him write more emotionally open songs than he ever had before (‘Memory Almost Full’) and mixing art and commerce on the Fireman projects. When he’s gone, Paul McCartney will be everyone’s favourite Beatle.
27
AN ENGLISH PASTORAL: BRITISH FOLK ROCK
When I write songs I often picture myself standing on a beach, or standing on a rock, or a promenade or something. I just put myself there sometimes and without even realising it I find myself describing what I’m looking at and often it’s the sea. I keep promising myself I’ll put myself somewhere else when I’m writing songs but I really can’t think of anywhere that’s nicer than that.
Sandy Denny, Sounds, 1973
Modern pop may have been well defined – well established in the market, certainly – in the early seventies, with its hard-rock albums and soft-bubblegum singles, but in its divided state, post-Beatles, it was deeply wanting. Throughout the first half of the decade there was a furthering of this split, and a withdrawal – especially in America – from any potential sources of revival or renewal. The result was that music on the outside of the mainstream started to become more important – sounds from beyond the Anglo-American ambit, from various points in the past (the twenties, the fifties, the seventeenth century), from the suburbs rather than the city centre, from Jamaica, from truculent electric noise, from ultra-black funk. As deep soul had done, different musical strains started to pass close to planet pop without landing, causing a fuss without ever seizing control.
British folk rock was an early indicator of things to come. It was music made in a bubble, a space free of commercial and even chronological constraints; much of the British folk scene was making music that possibly nobody wanted in the belief that, some day, someone would. It was a pocket of idealism that – when it worked its way through – emerged in a striking and unexpected way. By the turn of the seventies folk seemed to be everywhere in Britain, informing children’s TV (The Changes, Children of the Stones, The Owl Service) and cinema (Witchfinder General, The Wicker Man). The cover of Led Zeppelin IV,1 a painting of an old farmer on the wall of a derelict house in an urban wasteland, showed how close folk was to the pop-culture pulse.
British folk rock was a side effect of the post-psychedelic search for roots and escape from pop’s perceived plasticity, quite different from the American twelve-string and protest-based variant of 1965. Partly it reflected the move from urban to rural. Swinging London was over, the scene had become stale, it made sense to decamp to a cottage where, chances were, you wouldn’t get busted. It had filtered through from a Soho club movement, the stars of which coalesced in a supergroup, Pentangle, in 1968. In their wake came a bunch of contemplative outsiders, without the flash or confidence to have made it in pre-hippie pop, who were brought out of themselves by the musical and social freedoms of the late sixties; shy kids who could barely make eye contact when they went to buy a paper suddenly found themselves with an album deal just because they owned an acoustic guitar.
In some respects the folk-rock movement was barely pop at all, but at the turn of the seventies it had real commercial clout: if the Band could move out to Woodstock to reconnect with America’s pa
st, then idylls in Dorset, Hampshire or the Scottish borders could be just as inspiring to London-based acts on a post-flower-power comedown – we had the hedgerows, we had the Tudor houses, we had the crofts, we had the country pubs. We weren’t short of history and inspiration. By the early seventies British TV soundtracks were often folk-based, Fairport Convention were high in the album chart and Polydor had launched a subsidiary called Folk Mill. This was different from 1968’s rock retrenchment – it was an attempt to forge a way forward through musical archaeology and Apollonian productions.
The roots of British folk rock had been another offshoot of the beatnik trad-jazz boom – while some had followed Chris Barber’s blues train, others connected with the acoustic guitar. The post-war, left-leaning folk clubs, led by the dry, dogmatic figure of Ewan MacColl, had produced two firestarters in Anne Briggs and Shirley Collins,2 the English wife of American song collector Alan Lomax; their a cappella visions were taken a step forward in the early sixties on collaborations with Bert Jansch and Davy Graham, guitarists who saw no boundaries between folk, blues and jazz.
Davy Graham was something new under the sun. Born in Hinckley, Leicestershire, to a Guyanese mother and Scottish father, he was a heroin addict with restless feet who had travelled to Africa and India in the late fifties, returning with a new way of tuning his guitar – DADGAD – and a tricksy melody he had written called ‘Anji’. Released on an EP in 1962 by the folk label Topic, ‘Anji’ soon became the standard by which all guitar players were judged. With Shirley Collins, Graham cut an album called Folk Roots New Routes in 1964, which was the first time anyone had taken traditional English songs like ‘Reynardine’ and given them a guitar backing.3 Folk, jazz and blues merged; Miles Davis, modal music and North African scales all fed into Folk Roots New Routes. Art-school kids turned off by the growing commercialisation of the blues by the Rolling Stones and their ilk were understandably hooked.
By 1964 the Soho scene – featuring John Renbourn, Roy Harper, Martin Carthy and US émigrés Paul Simon and Jackson C. Frank4 – was strong enough for a string of clubs to play host to the new folk movement; upstairs rooms at the Prince of Wales Feathers on Warren Street and the King and Queen on Foley Street were colonised, and the Les Cousins club on Greek Street became the folk equivalent of the Cavern. The best of these acts appeared on the Transatlantic label – the producer, Bill Leader, recorded many of them in his Camden Town flat on a Revox tape recorder, using blankets and egg boxes for soundproofing. John Renbourn remembered a session for the touchstone Bert and John album with Leader ‘setting up the tape machine in the sink and having us play in the broom cupboard’. It was small-time, but it was intense.
King of this world was Bert Jansch, a Glaswegian with a look of total concentration beneath a black curly mop. He rarely spoke, a man of mystery – the fact was he had very little to say. He loved a pint and he loved his guitar, and women adored him (he loved this as well). His best-known song was ‘Needle of Death’, written for Davy Graham; it was cold, unromantic and hypnotic. It was on Jansch’s self-titled first album, which featured a stark black-and-white photo of the tousled Bert on the cover. Even the pirate stations wouldn’t touch it – its legend spread purely by word of mouth.
By 1966 the brightness had been turned up in London. Al Stewart wrote a song called ‘Swiss Cottage Manoeuvres’, Jansch and Renbourn cut ‘Soho’, Roy Harper wrote ‘Freak Suite’ about the scene’s focal point, Greek Street. A wide-eyed boy from St Albans called Donovan wrote ‘Sunny Goodge Street’, ‘Hampstead Incident’ and ‘Sunny South Kensington’, three of the greatest odes to sixties London. His tuning was learnt from Jansch, but his voice and his curly locks brought to mind Chatterton or Byron; Donovan’s was a refined bohemia that took folk out of Soho clubs and all the way to number one in the US in ’66 with ‘Sunshine Superman’. Some of the Soho crowd thought him a copyist and a fake Bob Dylan;5 when he was made to look foolish by Dylan, like a fourth-rate imitator, in D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back, it became apparent that – in spite of what Donovan may have thought – the two had little in common. One was a hummingbird, one was a hornet.
Initially, he had been under the wing of a North London manager/producer called Peter Eden, who sensed Donovan could be Britain’s first folk superstar; Eden secured him a run of appearances on Ready Steady Go! which got him two fast hits with ‘Catch the Wind’ and ‘Colours’ (both UK no. 4 ’65). Contract disputes then stalled Donovan’s career, so he swanned off to the States in late ’65 and came across San Francisco’s fledgling psychedelic scene. Heading home with a stash of new songs and lysergic inspirations, he went to work with hit-machine producer Mickie Most6 and was rarely off the charts for the next four years. Though his base was still folk, which could be quite straight-ahead and Soho-style on album tracks like ‘Young Girl Blues’ or ‘Sand and Foam’, Donovan’s A-sides ranged from the ‘blow your little mind’ psych ‘Sunshine Superman’ (US no. 1, UK no. 2 ’66) to the dope-addled New Orleans jelly roll of ‘Mellow Yellow’ (US no. 2, UK no. 8 ’67) and the childlike, bassoon-led ‘Jennifer Juniper’ (UK no. 5 ’68). Best of all was the very strange ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ (UK no. 4 ’68), a piece of hard-edged, eerie psychedelia, with Donovan’s voice sounding like it had been recorded under water, as if he was Ophelia’s kindred spirit.
He was a very gentle man. In 1967 he told the NME’s Keith Altham, ‘All the really beautiful things happen so slowly that we hardly ever see them – the clouds, the tides, birds, the wind rising. All things are fascinating and inspiring if you only give yourself the time to watch. It’s at those times I get my inspiration.’ He wasn’t scared to write albums for children – not one, but two.7 In a way he epitomised the late sixties as concisely as Eddie Cochran had the late fifties and, when the calendar turned to January 1st 1970, his career died like a butterfly in winter.
Donovan was the key link between the Soho cellars and the folk-rock boom. He led the way to a pharmaceutically informed music that was open to Albion’s mythic past, a mixture of the bubbling Soho folk scene and psychedelic rock. He had an arranger called John Cameron, who augmented his songs with excellent jazz musicians – notably Jamaica-born flautist Harold McNair, the secret star of the Mellow Yellow album. He was as comfortable toying with jazz (‘The Observation’) as he was with Arabic and Indian styles (‘River Song’), and all of this was rooted in solid rock session work: ‘Hurdy Gurdy Man’ featured soon-to-be Led Zep members Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, with ex-Tornados drummer Clem Cattini at his busiest; ‘Barabajagal’ (UK no. 12 ’69) was turned into a flaming floor-filler thanks to the backing of the Jeff Beck Group. And yet Donovan was allied so closely to flower power his career couldn’t survive the transition into the new world of folk rock he had pioneered.
Other Soho folk survivors ganged together and, with some fanfare in the press, created the scene’s first star attraction. Bert Jansch and John Renbourn – after Jansch’s failed attempt at a pop crossover in ’67 with the Nicola album – met up with clear-voiced singer Jacqui McShee, a bear of a bassist called Danny Thompson and nimble jazz drummer Terry Cox. Calling themselves Pentangle – the name had spooky connotations, definitely not flowery – they were as unreadable as a stone circle. ‘There’s one thing we never talk about – music,’ said Jansch in 1970. ‘We never talk music to each other. You understand? It’s like, we talk about what we’re going to do next. Where we’re going, what bars we’re going to visit, whether we can have a game of golf at all, or who won the football … never music.’ The exceptionally pretty ‘Light Flight’ was used as the theme to TV series Take Three Girls, and their career had lift-off; it was a perfect musical evocation of escape from the city, buying the ticket, boarding a train at Marylebone and – into the wordless dream of its middle eight – drifting far away. With their perceived heads-down heaviness, Pentangle walked streets where softie pop star Donovan was forbidden. They may have been cold as ice but, on Basket of Light or Solomon’s Seal, they had the keys
to a secret garden.
Up in Muswell Hill, meanwhile, were a group of middle-class kids who rehearsed above a dentist’s surgery in a house on Fortis Green called Fairport. They called themselves Fairport Convention, which tripped off the tongue as smoothly as Jefferson Airplane, and they turned out to be far more approachable and less intimidating than Pentangle. The rich, lightly psychedelic mix of their first album in ’68 featured Joni Mitchell covers, Byrds-like harmony and a lovely singer called Judy Dyble. They may have been US-fixated, but already you could sense oak and brocade in Fairport’s music. In fact, they sounded exactly like the Arts and Crafts house in which they played.
In what was to be the first of many line-up changes, Dyble left in 1968; manager Joe Boyd then introduced the group to Wimbledon-born folk singer Sandy Denny, whose voice was so astonishingly pure and strong that she had no equal, and Fairport had no choice but to invite her into their home.8 Denny was a tomboy with waves of red hair; she sounded warm, comforting, ancient and modern, and suited the group’s temperament perfectly. As their new singer she quickly bossed the group towards an English sound – ‘Nottamun Town’ was the first traditional folk song they recorded, on a BBC session in June ’68.
By their third album, which had the oblique but quite perfect title Unhalfbricking, Fairport Convention had one foot in Home Counties suburbia, the other in seventeenth-century Suffolk. Richard Thompson’s west-coast guitar lines flowed around Sandy Denny’s liquid, centuries-old voice, and everything clicked. By the spring of ’69 Fairport were on Top of the Pops (with a perverse French-language cover of Dylan’s ‘If You Gotta Go, Go Now’) and looked set for stardom. Then one night, returning to London from a gig, their van came off the M1: drummer Martin Lamble and Richard Thompson’s girlfriend Jeannie Franklin were killed. According to the NME’s Chris Welch, clubs around the country played their prophetic ‘Meet on the Ledge’ in tribute.