Richard’s Musical Byways: Pete Who? (No 2)

[RichardB]

There is a genre of French music known in English as chanson – ironically, since in French chanson simply means song, any kind of song. You might call it popular music with brains, for its distinguishing characteristic is articulate lyrics that set out to say something actually worth saying. In France it has a long and noble tradition, its best known practitioner being probably Jacques Brel, but it has never really caught on in Britain. Which is one reason why the music I am going to tell you about is very much a by-way. A back-alley, even.

Back in the late seventies a friend of mine with whom we’d exchange evening visits every couple of weeks started occasionally playing tapes (reel-to-reel: remember them?) of some albums he’d borrowed from a workmate. I didn’t pay much attention at first, for the music was background while we and our wives chatted, but I did register that there was something different about this music. It wasn’t a good fit for any recognised genre, not rock, nor jazz, nor folk, nor the singer-songwriter stuff that had been so popular a few years before – though at times it had elements of all these. There were distinctive, individualistic melodies, and literate, elegant lyrics delivered in an uncompromisingly English accent.

And then, one evening one of those lyrics really made me sit up and take notice.

He worked setting tools for a multi-purpose punch
In a shop that made holes in steel plates.
He could hear himself think through a fifty minute lunch
Of the kids, gas and stoppages, the upkeep and the rates,
While he talked about Everton and Chelsea with his mates

I had never imagined that such subject matter could be used for a song – and made to work, because it did work. The song, called (as I later discovered) Carnations on the Roof, used the funeral of a machine-shop worker to call attention to the lot of all those who live out their lives doing tedious unfulfilling jobs for little reward. The worker, never named, was ‘used and discarded in a game he didn’t own.’ All he had to show for his decades of work were the carnations on the roof of his hearse,

This was something arrestingly different and original, boldly saying things that no song I’d ever heard before had said. I mean, how many songs do you know that mention Swarfega?

Forty years of metal tend to get into your skin,
The surest coin you take home from your wage.
The green cleaning jelly only goes to rub it in…

I asked what this music was. The singer, I was informed, was named Pete Atkin, and he also wrote the music. The words were by a bloke called Clive James, who wrote the television column for The Observer.

It wasn’t long before it became superfluous to explain who Clive James was. Television personality, wit, critic, essayist, novelist, poet, he seemed to be able to earn plaudits for anything he turned his hand to. With one exception. James himself once said that of all the things he’d done his song lyrics were the closest to his heart, but also what he was least known for.

I am of the same mind. I am not a fan of everything Clive James has done. True, he could be hysterically funny, but I’ve often had the impression that he was just a bit too aware of his own cleverness and trying a bit too hard to prove it. Though that also applies to some of his lyrics, enough of them have hit the bullseye with me – sharp, observant, witty and moving by turn – to convince me that they are the best thing he ever did, and to play a big part in making the music of Pete Atkin stay with me for forty years and more, as long as the worker in Carnations on the Roof endured the sheet metal shop.

But I am in a small minority – though I am in good company, for Stephen Fry is a big fan, as was the late Iain Banks. Though many of those who do love this music are fiercely devoted to it, elsewhere mention of the name of Clive James’ friend and collaborator is, in sharp contrast to his own, likely to evoke the response ‘Pete who?’ Which says it all. Pete Atkin released six albums between 1970 and 1975, but despite regular appearances on John Peel’s radio show, and one or two outings on The Old Grey Whistle Test, he never attracted more than a small cult following. A cover of one song on an album by Val Doonican (yes, really) earned Atkin and James more royalties than all six of those albums put together.

Perhaps one of their major influences had something to do with it. When Pete Atkin and Clive James met each other in the late sixties at Cambridge University, where they were both in the Footlights – James, several years older and a mature student, was chairman and Atkin was musical director – what brought them together was a shared love of the music from the golden days of Tin Pan Alley: the songs of Rodgers and Hart, Cole Porter, George and Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and others of that ilk. In the days of prog rock, glam rock and introspective singer-songwriterism such influences were never going to produce music that won friends and influenced people.

James and Atkin’s approach to getting the songs they’d begun to write together out there was equally out of step. Pete Atkin never intended to become a professional performer. At a time when the Beatles and Bob Dylan had inspired a sea-change in the music world, as more and more musicians took to writing their own songs – even those who weren’t actually much good at it – and the role of the non-performing songwriter was diminishing, that role was exactly what the partners envisioned for themselves. Their initial approaches were to music publishers rather than record companies. The tracks on Atkin’s first album had been conceived as demos for the songs, but they became an album and his career as a musician was launched. For the next few years he made a modest living gigging mostly in small venues and and on the then-thriving college circuit, and making those six albums. Modest, because the critical acclaim the albums gathered was never mirrored by the sales.

By the time I discovered Pete Atkin’s music that career was just about over. His recording contract had fallen due for renewal, and dissatisfied with the minimal support they’d received from the record company, Atkin and James had decided to take their music elsewhere. Only to find that no-one was interested. They’d never been exactly a hot property, and now all the record companies were getting obsessed with a new movement that was steamrollering all before it to push Atkin’s music even further out of fashion. Anything more different from punk rock than those thoughtful words and quirky, intriguing tunes would be hard to imagine.

With no new records to promote, the gigs began to dry up. While Clive James’ burgeoning fame brought him plenty to do, Pete Atkin worked as a self-employed carpenter and furniture maker until, in 1981, he saw an ad for the job of light entertainment producer on BBC radio and applied for it. Rather to his surprise, he got the job – and prospered, rising by 1989 to Head of BBC Network Radio in Bristol. He resigned four years later to become a freelance radio producer, his best-known work being the award-winning This Sceptered Isle, an epic 216-part history of Britain.

By now the albums he’d made in the seventies were long out of print and a distant memory, though he still did the (very) occasional gig when he got the chance. These were usually in folk clubs, even though Pete Atkin is by no stretch of the imagination a folk singer, and even though he is just as likely to play piano as the traditional folkie’s instrument, the acoustic guitar. It was at a folk club in Eastbourne, one evening in 1996, that he was approached by a gent named Steve Birkill who had a proposition to make to him. Birkill had very much not forgotten those old records. A self-confessed Atkin obsessive, he’d driven all the way from his home in Derbyshire to hear Atkin play and to ask his permission to set up a website about his music – still a fairly novel idea in those days, when the World Wide Web was only a few years old, but Birkill was an electronics wizz and satellite television pioneer, and was well up in communication technology. He also had it in mind to promote a folk festival on his own land in Derbyshire, as a vehicle for a performance by Atkin.

Pete Atkin was agreeable to both, and soon the website, sardonically entitled Smash Flops, was on-line. Birkill’s festival brought together people from up and down the country who were delighted to find that they were not, after all, the only ones who remembered this stuff, as most of whom had spent years believing, and the mailing list spawned by the website brought together more. And Pete Atkin and Clive James were brought to the realisation that there was still an audience for their songs.

In the next few years years they went on tour together three times, Atkin singing the songs and James talking about them and reading from his other works. The seventies albums were, at long last, reissued on CD. Atkin embarked on a project to record the songs that got away, as it were, in the late sixties and the seventies – there were enough of them to fill two CDs. Best of all, the pair started writing together again, resulting in the first album of entirely new material for nearly thirty years. A few years later came an album of re-workings of some of the older material, the fruits of a collaboration he had begun with the pianist and arranger Simon Wallace which continues to this day. And later still one last (because Clive James was by then terminally ill) album of new material, featuring the legendary session guitarist Chris Spedding, who’d played on a couple of the original albums forty years earlier.

If the digital revolution hadn’t freed musicians from the ties of contracts and record companies, enabling them to record and release their own music, it’s doubtful if any of these albums would have seen the light of day. By the standards of the music biz it’s been a low-key revival, not to mention a slow-motion one. Twelve years elapsed between the two albums of new songs, and (the tours with Clive James apart) Pete Atkin has seldom done more than half-a-dozen gigs a year. But a little of what you fancy is better than nothing, and one of the advantages of interest in a low-key, minority-appeal artist is that everything happens on a much more intimate scale, giving you more of a chance to get involved. As I found out.

I was one of those people who thought themselves alone in the wilderness. My friend with the tapes had moved away, and for over twenty years the only Pete Atkin music I had to listen to were the twelve tracks on a vinyl best-of album, the only record I’d been able to find in the shops. No one I knew was in the least interested in it.

It wasn’t long after we’d got internet access, around the turn of the millennium, before I thought of doing a search. I quickly found the Smash Flops website, and joined the mailing list. One thing led to another: not content with buying records, going to gigs and participating in the mailing list (which soon morphed into a web forum), I contributed stuff to the website and even found myself doing something quite out of character for a reticent, timid character like me: I promoted a gig. This wasn’t quite as intimidating as it sounds, as it was a private gig specifically for members of the forum and publicised there, and so I had a guaranteed audience. That was nearly twenty years ago now, but I still look back on it with satisfaction, as one of the few times in my life I’ve set out to do something worthwhile and actually achieved it.

After I found the Word Cloud, moved to Wales and started devoting more time to writing all this began to take a back seat. By now I’ve even forgotten my password for the forum, though it doesn’t seem as if I’ve been missing very much: as I write it’s been three weeks since anyone posted (shades of the Den…), which is a sad come-down from the lively place it once was. But I still enjoy Pete Atkin’s music as much as I ever did, and I still carry with me a string of favourite quotes I know by heart. Like:

The slide from grace is really more like gliding;
And I’ve found the trick is not to stop the sliding,
But to find a graceful way of staying slid.

Or:

There are some ideas you can’t play round with,
Can’t let go of and you can’t give ground with,
‘Cause when you die they’re what you’re found with…

Or:

Some people walk on air,
And everyone seems to love them.
With her it was hardly fair:
She walked an inch above them.

Clive James, of course, died in 2019 after surviving his terminal diagnosis longer than anyone, including himself, expected. Pete Atkin had a close call three years earlier: while crossing the road in Bristol, where he still lives, he had an argument with a bus, suffering multiple injuries and losing the sight of one eye. But he recovered and is now performing (on the usual desultory basis) again, and he has completed another album of old songs re-worked, once again with Simon Wallace.

I can tell you from personal experience that he is one of nature’s gentlemen, soft-spoken, with a quiet, dry wit and a total lack of side and of the consuming egotism that drives some people to seek stardom: another reason, no doubt, that he ‘s never become one. Perhaps my most endearing memory of the man comes from a night I went to see him at a folk club – the very club, in fact, where that momentous meeting with Steve Birkill had taken place. It was just after the interval, the raffle was being drawn, and the first prize was a copy of the first of the albums of new material, then recently released. Pete Atkin was standing right behind me, and as the MC said, ‘And the second prize is…’ he muttered something under his breath. I’m pretty sure I was the only person in the room who heard what he said: ‘…Two copies of my new album.’

It seems fitting to close by giving one example of a full lyric. The question was which one, when there are so many I like on so many diverse subjects and in such a variety of styles. In the end I chose Canoe, originally intended for the seventh album that never got made and a firm favourite among Atkin aficionados. It is one of Clive James’ cleverest lyrics, not with the dense allusiveness and literary references of some of his more ambitious (or pretentious, if you like) songs but in the way it juxtaposes two stories that echo and enhance each other. It hinges on a single shared line in the third verse, and abruptly we are snatched away from three doomed Polynesians in their canoe, lost in the vastness of the South Pacific, and taken to the vastness of space, into the crippled Apollo 13 with the three astronauts struggling to bring it home. Though, being a song rather than a poem, to really bring it alive it needs Pete Atkin’s ear-worm tune.

The perfect moon was huge above the sea.
The surf was easy, even on the reef.
We were the lucky three
Who slid in our canoe through the flowers on the water
And tried to read the signals in the sky.

We travelled with our necklaces of shell.
The moon was waning through the nights and days.
And how we dreamed of home.
We couldn’t find the island where you trade the shells for feathers.
We fainted in the sun’s reflected blaze.

With cracking lips I turned to tell my friends
The time had come for all of us to die.
‘She’s out a whole degree,’
I told them as I floated, checking read-outs at my shoulder.
‘Re-enter at this angle and we’ll fry.’

The go for override came up from Earth.
We took control and we flew her with our hands.
And how we dreamed of home.
We saw the South Pacific as we fought to get her zeroed
Before the heat-shield started hitting air.

We came home in a roaring purple flame
And gave the mission back to the machines.
We were the lucky three.
Parachutes deployed, we were rocking like a cradle,
As we drifted down in silence to the sea.

[Athelstone]

Fabulous blog, Richard. Chanson is so little known outside of France. People think they know it because they’ve heard a recording of Non, je ne regrette rien or maybe they know that Seasons in the Sun is a translation (sort of) of a Jacques Brel number. It’s hugely popular in France. Travel to any town and go out and about on market-day. Every fourth or fifth stall will have tapes, CDs, LPs of Chanson. It’s a genre hard to pin down. There are crossovers into so many other areas, with singers from Charles Aznavour to Serge Gainsbourg. My own introduction was via Renaud, a singer/songwriter I still enjoy greatly although he is little know in the UK. The nearest equivalent I can think of is Country & Western where sometimes you want to say ‘this is blues/hillbilly/delta blues/rock & roll/and so on.’

My brother is a fan of Pete Atkin although I have no idea what he’s got by way of recordings. Curiously, his main musical interests lie in folk music. I almost wish you hadn’t reminded me of his name, because I know I’m going to spend hours tracking down what I can!

Incidentally, Smash Flops is a fantastic website that appears to have emerged from the early days of the WWW almost intact. It’s a fabulous place to visit for its nostalgic style alone.

[John T]

Oh wow! That brings back memories. I heard Pete Atkin (without Clive James) at a soaking wet Bristol Folk Festival sometime in the early 70s, and again in Cardiff Student Union. And I loved his music. I had a Clive James/Pete Atkin LP from that time, but it is one of the many that I sold when I moved to a single room in Scotland in 1980.

As for Chanson, I love to listen to Jacques Brel, but I failed French O level, and so I just guess what he’s singing about!

[RichardB]

Ah, Ath, your wife is French, n’est-ce-pas?

I don’t find it particularly surprising that a folk music lover should like Pete Atkin. Folk audiences, right from the start of the revival sixty and more years ago, have always been receptive to more serious subject matter in what used to be called ‘contemporary folk’ – though it’s often been with a left-wing political / social commentary slant, and such stuff is almost entirely absent from the Atkin/James songbook. I nearly left out the ‘almost’ until I remembered one song about the Kent State shootings (‘There isn’t much a target needs to know’), and another about the My Lai massacre (‘Just lying there were ladies so old they hardly bled’).

Tracking down the music, at least on-line, is dead easy. If you go to the discography section of Smash Flops you’ll find a play button beside just about every track Atkin has ever recorded. Hard copies are another matter. The reissues of the seventies albums I mentioned in the blog vanished when the record company went bust. They were reissued again, re-mastered even, about ten years later, only for the company’s whole stock to be destroyed in a warehouse fire during the 2011 Tottenham riots. I once suggested on the forum that there must be a curse on them. Pity, because the second time around I had my moment (a very brief moment, as it turned out) of fame when Pete Atkin mentioned me in the sleeve notes to one of the albums.

Yeah, the appearance of the website has hardly changed at all over the years, though the content has grown quite a lot.

Glad I brought back some meories for you, John.

[Athelstone]

She seems pretty English to me – although her mother is French and her father’s Maltese. But yes, it’s the French connection that hooked me on Renaud.

I don’t know, but put the speculation aside. Pete Atkin has a smooth confident voice and he holds a note very well. And that’s true right from the first album to the last. The songs hold your attention and the words are all well-formed. Strange world, isn’t it?

[Sandra]

Thank you for this treat of a blog, Richard, which addressed my total ignorance of chanson. I’ve long preferred lyrics which say something (hence my liking for Arab Strap and The Floating Men, discovered via my youngest son.) I’m thinking I can repay him with Pete Atkin.

[RichardB]

I see you’ve been having a good listen, Ath…

Interestingly (or not) Messrs Atkin and James have each blamed themselves and excused the other for the lack of sales. After Clive James wrote in the fourth volume of his memoirs that the problem was that his lyrics were too cerebral, Pete Atkin wrote a long and thoughtful refutation (it’s here on the website if you’re interested) which boiled down to his belief that his tunes weren’t simple and catchy enough. ‘The egg is on my face.’

I’d like to see him one more time before one or other of us pops his clogs, but since I took myself off to the wilds of Wales he hasn’t done a gig anywhere within convenient reach. About the nearest was a recent appearance at Ledbury (Herefordshire), but that was a workshop-type thing at a poetry festival, rather than a ‘proper’ gig.

[Athelstone]

I have had a good listen. I have a feeling he’s somebody to hear live. Perhaps we’ll meet up at his next gig – if he has one.

[RichardB]

Wow, you mean I’ve turned somebody on to Pete Atkin? Result!

Yes, he is good live, preferably in an intimate setting. There are actually three gigs in very unusually quick succession lined up for next month – in the King’s Road, Ambleside and Middlesborough – plus one in October in Whitby. One 200 miles from me (and I’m reluctant to go back to London unless I really have to: Rebecca’s attitude to the place in that story was written from the heart), the others more like 300.

[Janette]

How have I missed out on Pete Atkin? Been going to folk festivals for years, and just having heard snippets of him on Youtube, I thought I’d have had recommendations before now, if not seen him in person! I might have to look up some of the gigs you mentioned.

[RichardB]

A lot of people seem to have missed out on Pete Atkin, Janette…

Details and links for the gigs can be found on the Smash Flops website. Just scroll down a bit.

[RichardB]

Some afterthoughts.

After getting negative reactions to Atkin’s music in the past, up to and including on one occasion ‘Rubbish!’, I was a little hesitant posting this blog at all, so it’s particularly pleasing that it seems to have made at least two converts.

And now, the plug. If anyone wishes to put their hard-earned money where their enthusiasm is, the new album I mentioned, The Luck of the Draw, has become available since I posted from (and only from as yet, as far as I know) the Hillside Music virtual shop on the Smash Flops website. Buying it from here cuts out the middle man, as you’ll be buying it directly from Pete Atkin himself.

[Athelstone]

The clues to his, and their, lack of recognition are all there, I think. There’s some folk in it, some protest, a lot of the jolly sound of the 60s (cf the Beatles, Bonzo Dog Band, etc), but essentially it’s quiet, undemonstrative, intelligent music. Sometimes serious, sometimes funny, often both.  It’s the sort of music that you want to listen to, maybe with a pint and some friends. Atkin’s voice is good. It doesn’t have the pure tone of Sandy Denny, or the raw emotion of Joe Cocker, but that wouldn’t be an issue if there was any promotion going on. At all. If you’re going to sing songs in a curious hinterland between Loudon Wainwright III and Victoria Wood, and you want some cash and recognition, then you might need to shout a bit louder.

This struck me very clearly when I went to look for the album you mentioned. Surely only a reserved Englishman could make such a good job of hiding a new CD on a website. Is there a splash-banner? Of course not. Is it a tiny entry in a huge list of other items, nearly invisible? Of course it is.

This line from his Wikipedia entry sums it up for me: “In 1976, Atkin’s recording contract with RCA Records expired and he concentrated on renovating his house.”

 

[RichardB]

I wouldn’t describe it as tiny, but neither is it very huge, and you do have to scroll down a way before you see it. So yes, not exactly a blaze of publicity.

To augment that line in Wikipedia, here are Pete Atkin’s own words on the subject: ‘I’ve never ever spent much time trying to figure out why the songs Clive and I wrote in the seventies – and more specifically the records I made of them – didn’t turn out to be hits. That was just what happened. Get on with the next thing.’

And yes, I have ordered my copy of the album.

[Athelstone]

Don’t get me wrong though, I’m not attacking him. I think it’s great that he doesn’t measure his success the way that some singer/songwriters do. And I do like his songs. He’s also a pretty accomplished guitarist. He seems to have been very successful indeed in other areas he’s chosen to work, pursuing a big career in Radio as a senior producer and editor, with dozens of top shows to his name.  He’s done voice acting (including for a Wallace & Gromit movie), written a musical play that was performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company and written for magazines and papers. He’s friends with some of the great names across the world of entertainment and if his website is anything to go by, he’s a happy man. I think that’s success.

[RichardB]

My, you have been doing your research, haven’t you?

I never for one moment thought you were attacking him.  I assumed that you were thinking what I think, that he’s an admirably level-headed bloke with both feet firmly on the ground. No regrets, move on, ‘that was then and this is now,’ to quote one of the songs. I would have said that he comes across as the sort of person I’d like to meet, except that I have met him and yes, it was a pleasure. And I agree: I think you could call that a pretty successful life.

I’m rather relishing the irony that this blog about some very much overlooked (but close to my heart) music has prompted more response than any other of my byway blogs…

[Author]

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