Adventures on the High Teas

by Stuart Maconie

  Hergest Ridge is pronounced ‘Hargest’ with the ‘g’ hard as in garden. You’ll find this out as soon as you ask for directions. The lady in the newsagent’s will snigger, the paper boy will join in and you’ll finger the cookies in your pocket that the nice lady in Ludlow gave you. You’re lost, as she predicted, and in a foreign country.

  Well, nearly. Hergest Ridge is a big, shapely, friendly hill that sprawls on the English-Welsh border. Certain long ways up begin in Wales, but whichever way you come, climb high enough and you’ll end up in England as the summit lies there. From the top – a large green sward made for kiting or striding or lying on your back chewing grass and listening to the drone of light aircraft on summer afternoons – the view is sweeping and grand. East and south lies Wales, land of song, of trilling harps, of valleys ringing with the sweet upraised voices of sooty-faced coal miners singing of love and chapel and community and keeping a welcome in these hillsides. West and north, though, lies England. And silence.

  That’s what our old friends the Germans used to think anyway. In 1904 Oskar Adolf Hermann Schmitz published a book about England entitled Das Land Ohne Musik, or ‘The Land Without Music’. Admittedly the years leading up to the First World War were not the most cordial for Anglo-German relations and the book was intended to pander to chauvinistic feelings in his homeland but the central premise – that England cares about music less and produces less music than all its European neighbours – had currency in general and specialist circles for centuries. The quote ‘Das Land Ohne Musik’ had first been used half a century earlier by the German music scholar Carl Engel, and Schmitz, in his book, goes on to try to diagnose our national tin-ear.

  ‘I have asked myself what is missing from this nation. Kindness, love of people, humour or aesthetic sense? No, one can find all these attributes in England, some of them more noticeably than among ourselves. Finally I have found something which distinguishes English people from all other cultures to quite an astonishing degree, a lack which everybody acknowledges therefore nothing new but has not been emphasised enough. The English are the only cultured nation without its own music (except street music). This does not mean that they have less sensitive ears but that their life overall is much poorer for it. To be immersed in music, even ever so little, means being able to lose yourself.’ Ralph Waldo Emerson also said in his English Traits of 1856: ‘England has no music. It has never produced a first-rate composer and accepts only such music as has already decided to be good in Germany and Italy.’

  The poet Heinrich Heine – guess what, another German! – even dissed our moves on the floor, alleging that: ‘The sons of Albion are themselves the most awful of all dancers, and Strauss assures me there is not a single one among them who could keep time. He too fell sick unto death in the county of Middlesex when he saw Olde England dance. These people have no ear, neither for the beat nor indeed for music in any form, and their unnatural passion for piano-playing and singing is all the more disgusting.’

  Which is a bit rum when you take into account The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Vaughan Williams, Elgar, Bax, Nick Drake, The Clash, Kate Bush, Harrison Birtwhistle, Delius, The Smiths, Paddy McAloon, The Human League and a thousand other rock and rollers, jazzers, rappers, composers, choirs and folk singers.

  However, and however galling it might be, up until roughly the turn of the twentieth century these slurs and canards may have contained a goodly portion of truth. While Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Verdi, Wagner et al were churning out masterpieces by the yard in Vienna, Leipzig, Salzburg, Bayreuth and Rome, we were quiet as church mice when we weren’t hammering and welding and forging our way to industrial supremacy. We didn’t have much in the way of opera or string quartets, true. What we did have, though, was a fabulously rich folk music tradition: drinking songs and working songs, songs from farms and mills and latterly factories, murder ballads and bawdy tales, songs about generals, rascals, cutpurses, children, lusty wenches and peevish masters and the whole panoply of life as it was lived in the raw by the ordinary people of England not the gods in Valhalla.

  As has so often been the case, because this canon was the preserve of ordinary working people rather than the privileged classes, it was dismissed. The parlours and drawing rooms of middle-class England tinkled to the sound of prim gavottes and mazurkas written in Paris and Prague whilst outside the window, a gardener whistled ‘Barbara Allen’ or ‘Dives and Lazarus’ or ‘Lovely Joan’; beautiful old melodies worth in a few bars the whole tedious cabbagey length of The Ring, ja.

  Then around the start of the twentieth century, a handful of enlightened individuals began to see the worth in our indigenous music. First came Cecil Sharp, a light composer who chanced upon some Morris dancers in an Oxfordshire quarry and fell in love with English traditional music. Sharp was something of a prude – he bowdlerised many of the songs to remove their erotic allusions – and he was rather prescriptive about what counted as folk music, dismissing much Lancastrian music because it originated in factory and mills and wasn’t ‘rural’ enough. But he was crucial in a sea-change in the way we saw and heard our own music. Inspired by Sharp, a young composer called Vaughan Williams began to travel across Middle England, collecting and transcribing the folk melodies he found in pubs and farmers’ fields and village squares. Other like-minded individuals took up the cause and soon a kind of English music revival was under way, spearheaded by Vaughan Williams, Bax, Ireland, Moeran, Butterworth and more, who unashamedly took as their wellspring the deep traditions of English music. Later they would become misunderstood and mocked for this. Vaughan Williams in particular, the greatest English composer ever, I’d say, was unjustly looked down on for years. His work was dismissed as ‘cowpat music’ by Elizabeth Lutyens, a dry intellectual of the serial music school that dominated in the 1950s, and Constant Lambert, another vastly inferior composer, said sneeringly of his wonderful Pastoral Symphony that it was the musical equivalent of a cow looking over a gate. Recently his transcendently lovely and radiant The Lark Ascending was voted the nation’s favourite piece of classical music in one of the polls that appears every day in modern Britain. The music critic of The Scotsman, Ken Walton – not to be confused with the former all-in wrestling commentator Kent Walton – sniffed that it was ‘a very safe choice … it’s fair to say that he is loved by middle England’.

  There is real snobbery here, not just about music but about Middle England itself. Lutyens’ arid, forgettable music was written in the style of the Second Viennese School of Schoenberg, Webern and Berg. If Vaughan Williams’ is the cowpat, it may be that hers is the squeaky gate at the corner of the field. Implicit in her comment is the notion that music rooted in the verdant, rich and passionate soul of England cannot be worth our serious attention, merely a pretty diversion, an amusement. She was wrong. Vaughan Williams was right. And in some ways, in their insistence that popular song, the songs of the people, the tunes whistled and danced to and loved to and wept to by the great mass of us were as worthy as grand opera, Vaughan Williams and Cecil Sharp were the forefathers of English pop and all its glories. That, as the title of the late music scholar Ian MacDonald’s book reflects, truly is the People’s Music.

  All of which is sort of why I’m here on Hergest Ridge on this fine and windy day. It’s a name you may know from the sleeve of a battered vinyl album reeking of patchouli oil and perhaps bearing the distinct brown stains that tell of having been used in the construction of aromatic recreational cigarettes at some point in the past. For the Middle English countryside has not just been a touchstone and mother lode for classical musicians. When they decamped from swinging London to a remote Berkshire cottage in 1967, the rock band Traffic pioneered what was to become a rock cliché: ‘getting it together in the country’.

  Singer Steve Winwood of the band told Q magazine: ‘We were staying in a house in London and whenever we wanted to play, the neighbours would be banging on the walls. We wanted somewhere where we could just play whenever we wanted. We fo
und this cottage in the Berkshire Downs. It was a big estate with a sort of hovel for the gamekeeper, which was what we rented…Actually, it was a beautiful place and we set up a sort of mud stage where we could just play in the open air. It was very cut off with no road to it, just a track, and there were only about three weeks in the year when you could get a car up there. The rest of the time it was just a quagmire.’ ‘I think we endeared ourselves to our contemporaries,’ added Traffic’s drummer the late Jim Capaldi. ‘People would come and hang out with us – Bonzo, Leon Russell, Stephen Stills, Ginger Baker, Pete Townshend, Eric Clapton – the hours would just drift into days. I suppose, looking back on it, they were all in cities in hotel rooms, going to the Bag O’ Nails and all those clubs and getting out to the country was a nice break for them. You’d call it a hippy commune now, but at the time it was just a practical thing, but very inspirational. When I hear Traffic records and look back on those years, I don’t really think of festivals and clubs and rock ‘n’ roll, I think of tracks on the Berkshire Downs, crows over a coppice. It was a very powerful experience.’

  Not far from where Traffic were getting it together in their gamekeeper’s hovel, in the Reading suburb of Tilehurst, a young man called Mike Oldfield was taking his first footling steps in the music industry, playing with his sister in local folk clubs and the bass with English eccentric Kevin Ayers. Oldfield’s was a traumatic childhood, dominated by his mother’s struggles with alcoholism and mental illness. He sought refuge in music, in the countryside and in particular in the creation of a long, purely instrumental piece that married folk, classical and progressive rock into a unique whole. He hawked a tape around various record companies to absolutely no interest and was looking for the address of the Soviet embassy, having heard that the state there supported musicians, when the phone rang. It was someone called Richard Branson.

  It’s amazing, bizarre even, to think that without that troubled kid from Reading and his unsaleable magnum opus, there would be no Virgin trains, no Virgin airlines, no Virgin pensions, no Virgin broadband. Without Mike Oldfield’s forty-odd minutes of defiantly uncommercial music, you wouldn’t be able to use your Virgin mobile to tell someone that your Virgin train would be late due to signal failure at Leighton Buzzard, and there’d be no Virgin cola to put in your Virgin vodka as you quietly fumed. Mike Oldfield’s Tubular Bells, the music no one wanted, was the first release on the fledgling Virgin Records label, a mail-order business set up by beardy, youthful, public-school entrepreneur Richard Branson. It turned out that lots of people wanted it, were enchanted by its haunting, plaintive, complex melody, and bought it in their droves. Branson and Oldfield, both barely twenty, became world-famous and multimillionaires. One of them didn’t handle it very well.

  Never the most emotionally robust of individuals, Oldfield found the overnight success of Tubular Bells (it stayed on the chart for five years and sold 17 million copies around the world) brought its own stresses. ‘If it had happened ten years later, after I’d been through the therapy and the psychological training, then probably I could have been the person that Richard wanted me to be: “OK, I’ll go out and flog my album to death, talk to everyone you want me to talk to, play concerts all over the world.” But there I was instead, hunkered down among the sheep on Hergest Ridge, terrified of life, completely ill-equipped to do the things he wanted. Mental torture, let me tell you.’

  As it was, Oldfield fled. To here, this lovely corner of Herefordshire and the splendid bracing uplands of Hergest Ridge. He bought a property called the Beacon, now a B&B, and set about building a multi-track studio there so he could avoid even going back to Virgin’s Manor Studios in leafy Oxfordshire and hardly an urban jungle itself. He disconnected the phones. He flew model gliders and he bought a sheepdog called Bootleg, both of which feature, along with the hill itself, on the cover of Hergest Ridge. He made local friends like William Murray and Les Penning and got drunk with them in the local pubs. Recently I was speaking to Kevin Ayers, the dissolute, dishevelled ladies man and songwriter who employed Oldfield as a bassist, and I told him I’d visited Hergest Ridge. ‘Oh yes, I went up there to see Mike at the time. We …’ and then he either said ‘had some lagers’ or ‘flew some gliders’. It could have been both. Kevin had had a late night.

  Oldfield also took flying lessons from Martin Griffiths of nearby hotel Penrhos Court, and his kids sang on a subsequent recording, ‘On Horseback’, which is perilously close to being twee but does offer an insight into Oldfield’s bucolic bliss. ‘I like beer and I like cheese,’ he offers, Hobbit-like, in one verse and concludes, ‘If you feel a little glum, to Hergest Ridge you should come.’ He pronounces it wrongly, suggesting he hadn’t gone entirely native. Speaking to the Sunday Times in 2008, Oldfield admits that he is very much a product of 1950s Britain. His love of Middle England and its ways even extends to sounding like a Daily Mail reader sometimes. ‘I don’t know what the hell went wrong with our country. There’s a culture of thuggishness that I can’t help but blame on punk-rock music. I know it’s fashionable to think it was a great advance, but it also inspired two generations of young people to think that being rude, aggressive and violent is cool – and it’s very much not cool. I felt less and less safe in the UK. You could no longer walk around the local town – I won’t say which it was – while all the pubs had been taken over by chains and turned into places with loud music and no chairs, designed for people to get plastered in and to start fighting. That’s not the country I grew up in. The Britain I love is disappearing.’

  Clearly he hasn’t visited the Welsh Marches in a while. Here you get the feeling that if time has not quite stood still, it is moving forward more slowly, like the river Arrow at its most midsummer sluggish. Staunton on Arrow is simply beautiful and the border lands hereabout are strewn with converted churches, old rectories and public schools. Near the village of Lucton, I spot a hand-painted sign for, of all things, a coracle regatta. Pembridge is the most attractively higgledy-piggledy half-timbered chocolate box of a village I have ever set eyes on. ‘The Bootomics are back!!’ declares a blackboard outside the local pub.

  The bunting is out in Kington; not for me, I’m sure. Perhaps it’s always out. Whatever the reason, it made the town look awfully nice, although friends of mine from nearby Leominster said it can be rough. That could just be local rivalry though. Leominster, by the way, is another of those linguistic traps for the unwary. It’s pronounced ‘Lemster’. But Kington is just Kington, and on the Sunday morning I was there, it was gearing up for a medieval festival so there were lots of chain-mailed dummies in crusader garb anachronistically grinning out from the window of the local Spar. On the bench outside the police station, which looked shut, a young girl in her Primark finery was languorously texting from her pink Nokia, her face a picture of exquisite boredom. I don’t ask her whether she’s heard of Mike Oldfield. I think I know the answer. In a tiny village at the foot of the hills, a brisk, genial man in his fifties with a small boy in tow – young granddad maybe or second family – is collecting his Sunday Telegraph from the large plastic honesty box. I doubt if anyone has ever pinched one. He’s heard of Mike Oldfield (‘Tubular Bells, yes? Popular with the students, wasn’t it?’) but wasn’t aware that the large, steep hillside behind him was the inspiration for Tubular Bells’ sequel.

  A cheery woman walker with poles and a map case passes me as I climb the whaleback of the ridge. Apart from those accoutrements, she could be dressed for dinner at the Ivy. All is bracken and fern and lush grass, there are squirrels, rabbits and sheep and the view is a delight. In the distance lies a favourite local hill, Twympa or, as it is better known, Lord Hereford’s Knob. Better known as this since obviously it is much funnier to say that you can see Lord Hereford’s Knob from here, that you spotted some people larking about on Lord Hereford’s Knob, etc etc.

  Only one thing spoils the view and that is the sight of a huge SUV 4x4 parked right on the summit. Middle England’s love affair with these wretched thing
s is a blight on all of us. To drive them at all is pathetic, but to drive them to the top of hills which should be the preserve of walkers and birdsong should see you in the stocks. The door is open and the driver is lying back with his eyes closed. He may have been asleep but I entertained the pleasing notion that he was dead.

  Returning to the village via a lovely little muddy pool crowded with dragonflies I pass a young lad in cricket whites who lifts his bat in greeting. It really is too perfect. However, as I drive past the bilingual sign near Burlingjobb I notice that the English has been crudely painted out, leaving only the Welsh, suggesting that something might simmer beneath this tranquil exterior.

  Hergest Ridge was hugely successful, by the way, and, in a pleasing irony, was the album that knocked Tubular Bells off the top of the chart. The critical response was frosty, most dismissing it as son of Tubular Bells. I like it a lot. You can hear in it the rolling hills, the wind on moor grass and a sense of old, deep peace, as Oldfield himself commented to Melody Maker on the album’s release. ‘There are no Tube trains, very few car doors, lots of open countryside, smooth hills, a general feeling of smoothness and well-being and non-hysteria, just a much nicer environment…It was really like Herefordshire… There’s lots of things hidden, things that may seem meaningless, but they do have a meaning, a musical meaning. And just the general texture is so comforting.’

  That sense of comfort and security is often mistaken for smugness. The critics of Hergest Ridge misread it, just as those who sneered at Vaughan Williams’ Pastoral Symphony assumed that the landscapes evoked were stolid vistas of ploughed fields and hay bales in the Home Counties. They weren’t. They were inspired by the fields of France that Vaughan Williams saw during the catastrophic and bloody conflict of the years 1914 to 1918.