Anne Briggs

Anne Briggs (TOPIC, 2019, CD) 

Anne Briggs was one of the most influential figures on the 60s folk scene. Often mythologised in biographies of friends like Bert Jansch, Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson, her free spirit still resonates on disc years after she retired from performance. 

Though she began under Ewan MacColl’s protective (left-)wing, her uncomplicated delivery, often unaccompanied, free of vibrato or emotional affectation, set a benchmark for traditional singing among her contemporaries, the younger folkies.

So this is a welcome reissue, to mark the 80th anniversary of Topic Records, of her first full-length LP. Originally produced by mentor A.L. Lloyd, with Johnny Moynihan of Sweeney’s Men sharing bouzouki duties on one track, it sounds as fresh and lucid now as it did in 1971.

Here are definitive presentations of songs like ‘Blackwater Side’, ‘Willie O’Winsbury’, ’The Cuckoo’ and ‘Reynardine’. Helpful sleeve notes by RnR’s Ken Hunt fill in the pre-history of these classics and remind us of Briggs’s importance for successors like June Tabor and Emily Portman. Writing of later treatments of ‘Blackwater Side’, Hunt laconically observes: “Led Zeppelin made a different meal of it”. Indeed they did — which just shows how versatile such ingredients can be in creative hands.*

[Review first published in RnR 74]

[*Before anyone points out that Led Zeppelin I was released in 1969, let it not be forgotten that Jimmy Page learned this tune via Bert Jansch, who had recorded it on his 1966 album Jack Orion. Jansch, in turn, had learned it from Anne Briggs, who had been singing it for years before she committed it to vinyl in 1971.]

Helen Mirren

In 1969 John Goldschmidt was a young documentary maker in search of his next subject. A graduate of the Czech National Film School and the Royal College of Art, he had already attracted attention with a TV film about Bernadette Devlin, at the time the youngest woman ever elected to the Westminster Parliament. His choice next fell on 24-year-old Helen Mirren, youngest Associate Artist of the Royal Shakespeare Company. Speaking to me recently, Goldschmidt recalled the exact circumstances:

I’d made the film about Bernadette Devlin, partly filmed during the Londonderry riots, which was very controversial. I was looking for something completely different, and my ex-wife had a copy of Vogue. There was an article and photos of Helen Mirren. I suddenly thought that she’d make a good subject for a documentary film.

It was a happy conjunction: one rising talent documenting the rise of another. At the time, ATV was the commercial television company with a licence covering the Midlands and as such felt an obligation towards the Stratford-based RSC. With ATV’s boss Lew Grade on side, the project was set up quickly, in two or three weeks. Lest any viewer complain that they’d never heard of the young thespian, an ATV official assured the Sun that ‘she is very much an up-and-coming Shakespearian actress and a very dolly lady. She’s going places.’

The resulting film, Doing Her Own Thing (the, now rather dated, title was the company’s idea), aired across the ITV network on 23 June 1970. Long thought to be lost, the master copy has resurfaced recently in the ITV archives. Viewed after nearly fifty years, it’s both a fascinating time-capsule of a distant era and a picture of a hard-working actress at the outset of her career. The impression given onscreen is of someone articulate, grounded and self-aware, even as she expresses in voiceovers the necessary uncertainties of youth:

It's quite impossible to say what’s going to happen to me. I even find it impossible to say what has happened to me […] I don’t know what I’ll be doing in three years’ time, or even in a year’s time. I’ve absolutely no idea.

Although Goldschmidt’s early speciality was what he calls the ‘portrait documentary’, he also harboured a desire to make drama. His compromise in the Mirren film was to capture events from her present life, film her in performance, and get her to re-enact episodes from her earlier life. Thus we see her first ‘starring role’ (impersonated here by a young girl) as Gretel in a primary school Hansel and Gretel. Then, playing herself as a teenager, she whiles away evenings with friends in coffee bars, and secretly dreams of being ‘discovered’ as she walks the Essex seafront. She returns to the Kursaal Amusement Park in her hometown of Southend, where she worked as an attendant on the famous ‘Rotor Wheel’, a giant spinning tub which pins pleasure-seekers to the wall by centrifugal force. By now her taste for the theatrical is developing apace. Without telling her parents – fearing their disapproval – she travels to London to audition for the National Youth Theatre; Michael Croft, the NYT’s cheery, avuncular director, re-enacts his enthusiasm for the young performer as she delivers her audition piece from Henry VI Part 3, the withering ‘molehill’ speech in which Queen Margaret humiliates the captured York (I.iv.66-78).

Al Parker, veteran theatrical agent, next puts in appearance, recalling how he first signed her to his agency before then launching into a rambling anecdote about Rudolph Valentino. To the soundtrack of Al Bowlly (‘You Oughta Be In Pictures’), a starry-eyed Mirren gazes into shop windows. ‘Suddenly roads seemed to be opening out in front of me,’ she muses. She joins the Royal Shakespeare Company. There follow scenes in a Stratford churchyard filmed late in October (as Goldschmidt fretted about the fading light). Cycling along Warwickshire lanes to the tune of ‘Greensleeves’, she recalls days of ‘quiet, calm fun with another actor in the countryside’. This same actor, Bruce Myers, helps her re-enact their amorous horseplay among the costumes of the Stratford wardrobe department.

Moving to the present, we see what she calls the sheer ‘technical slog’ of working in classical repertory. The learning of lines, the physical exercises (‘Reach… and contract!’), and – perhaps most interesting – one-on-one voice production work with the RSC’s specialist Kate Fleming. At this point Mirren was rehearsing Lady Anne in Richard III for opening in April 1970. These lines seem to cause her particular difficulty:

The which thou once didst bend against her breast
But that thy brothers beat aside the point. (I.ii.97-8)

I asked Ben Crystal, who with his father David has worked extensively on reconstructing Elizabethan speech, whether these lines would have been easier to deliver in Shakespeare’s ‘Original Pronunciation’ (‘OP’) than they were in Mirren’s very proper Received Pronunciation (modern ‘RP’). Ben, himself an actor, thought not. He pointed to the aspiration of the wh in ‘which’ and the pronunciation of ‘once’ as ohnce as distinctively OP features, but found ‘nothing particularly difficult about the line in either RP or OP’ in his mouth. David Crystal, a linguistician, shared my sense that there was a tongue-twister lying in wait here: ‘If she was trying to articulate every consonant, then she could have had a problem with dstb [‘didst bend’]. In OP the consonant cluster for -st endings would have been simplified, by dropping the t, as can be seen in some spellings of the period.’

Another scene catches her at a photo session. While she poses winningly for the camera, her voiceover strikes a self-deprecating note: ‘I honestly and truly don’t find myself attractive… I have a basically very ordinary face and it’s not going to make my fortune.’ This was a time when she still relished her anonymity: ‘I wouldn’t be recognised walking down the street or asked for my autograph. I think I prefer it that way.’ She leads an isolated life as a jobbing actress, she tells us, with marriage far from her thoughts, but still she’s a ‘1970 girl’ who feels she should be demonstrating against apartheid. Immersion in Shakespeare has made her all too aware that women in sixteenth-century England led lives far more restricted than her own. ‘They were used very much as pawns,’ she reflects. ‘They had no political say, and I find that I rebel against it.’

Crucial to the documentary was to capture her in performance, engaging in what she calls the ‘big lovely deception’ of theatre. We see her pacing up and down in the wings, striving to ‘keep the energy going’ until her entrance. There are several extracts from Troilus and Cressida at the Aldwych: Mirren in heavy fake tan; Troilus (Michael Williams) clad in an alarmingly short chiton; Pandarus (David Waller), curly-wigged, the epitome of ‘camp’. In order to secure close-ups, Goldschmidt filmed these scenes in the empty theatre in the afternoon, then intercut the footage with film of the audience arriving for the evening performance and applauding the curtain-calls. More endearing is a recreation of her early Cleopatra. In tight close-up on her face, she gives us the queen of the Nile among her attendants, brooding erotically on her absent lover:

O Charmian,
Where think'st thou he is now? Stands he, or sits he?
Or does he walk? Or is he on his horse?
O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony! (I.v.19-22)

Reviews were generally favourable. The Sunday Telegraph welcomed a glimpse of this ‘Shakespearian nymph’ with the ‘arresting, tilted profile’, noting that Goldschmidt was ‘refreshingly unafraid’ to use the ‘old-fashioned’ technique of re-enactment. The Daily Mirror was full of praise for the young director’s ‘technical wizardry’, deployed in the service of a rising star: ‘nobody exalts the artist like another one.’ The Daily Sketch’s critic came ‘prepared to be harrowed with the usual heartbreak’ of the showbiz tale, but instead found ‘gaiety all the way’, with Mirren’s ‘a face like a promising new day’. When television shone a spotlight on show business, the Daily Express observed, it usually gave ‘a reflection of an unreal world jangling with highly paid people.’ However, in this ‘affectionate’ documentary, ‘it was refreshing to discover someone of such potential who cared far more about her work than a Rolls Royce.’ The Times admired how the young actress’s ‘honest self-knowledge’ and pointed opinions emerged with clarity from the film but regretted that the extracts from Troilus and Cressida ‘did not allow her to be more than attractive and efficient.’ The Guardian was not alone in spotting that the director seemed more than a little in love with his subject – ‘in another age John Goldschmidt might have written sonnets’ – but concluded that ‘she emerged with considerable dignity from the film’. A rare voice of dissent was the Daily Telegraph, for whom this was ‘one of those remorselessly “pop” productions’ seemingly organised by a ‘berserk cameraman, with commentary added later. It scampered frenziedly round the externals of its subject without really getting to grips with the actuality.’ George Melly, writing in the Observer, was also unconvinced. ‘A prettily photographed but empty little essay,’ he announced. ‘What she had to say about her life and profession was the opposite of riveting.’

Goldschmidt, these days a multiple award-winner with feature films as well as documentaries to his credit, remains proud of this early work. He recalls that it drew plaudits from Trevor Nunn, and Mirren herself acknowledges that it raised her profile at this point in her career. The director found his subject easy to work with, he tells me – an impression confirmed by a surviving set of photos taken during shooting on a blustery Southend Pier in 1970. They record actress and film-maker in relaxed, close confab: two young people, suspended in their time-capsule, little suspecting what the future will bring.

But listen to how Mirren describes this era in an interview with Noreen Taylor a quarter-century later:

Between 18 and 30 were the worst years of my life. I tried never to show it by just getting on with things, but during those decades I cried myself to sleep most nights simply because I felt afraid of what was ahead, of the unknown. I’ve talked about this to other women and found that it was similar for them. Odd, isn’t it, when you consider that at the time you’re at your physical best, in reality there is all the misery and fear of wondering what is to become of you. (The Times, 19 September 1996)

In retrospect we (re)write our autobiographies, placing an interpretation on events that wasn’t apparent at the time. Which is the more valid – how we felt at the time, or how we feel decades later? The joie de vivre radiating from the young Mirren in Goldschmidt’s film, or the sober stocktaking by her older self? Whatever we are in the second half of life will incorporate whatever we were in the first, yet in between lies that long, unpredictable process of ‘becoming’.

[This is an extract from my ebook, Becoming Helen Mirren (2019), available from Amazon UK, Amazon US, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes & Noble, etc. My thanks to John Goldschmidt for the photos used here and for other assistance.]

June Tabor

In early 2011 I had the privilege of interviewing the singer June Tabor (b. 1947) for a now-defunct music magazine. Since then she has continued her collaborations with Oysterband and as part of the trio project Quercus. But Ashore, which we discuss here, remains to date her last solo album…

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“I might be under a bush or making marmalade,” says the voice at the other end, explaining why she doesn’t always hear the telephone. Luckily, June Tabor, gardener, marmalade-maker – and one of the greatest living interpreters of English song – is engaged in neither activity when I call to ask about her new album, Ashore.

The album, her thirteenth as a solo artist, has its origins in the seventieth birthday celebrations for Topic Records, the label that June has been with throughout her career. Tony Engle of Topic invited her to do a concert at London’s Queen Elizabeth Hall and gave her a free hand in the programme. “I like when putting together a concert to bring together songs that tell a story, trace some kind of storyline, songs that are connected in some way, possibly by subject matter, irrespective of where they might come from,” June explains. 

She’d long been thinking about a concert in themed sections on the relationship between the British people and the sea. “That doesn’t mean, as some people seem to think, sea shanties. That’s just a very small part of it. There’s a huge breadth of material which has the sea as its subject matter or its inspiration, both in the tradition and in the hands of modern writers. And if you juxtapose things that haven’t previously been put together but which still have this connecting thread, and in this particular case the sea, it’s amazing what pictures and images, what passions you can stir up amongst us all, performers and audience.”

After the concert, once she’d got over the “abject terror of doing a whole lot of new stuff in one go”, she realised she had the makings of a complete album. Ashore is the happy outcome. 

On the new release she takes the opportunity to revisit a couple of songs she has recorded before. It opens with ‘Finisterre’, a number that appeared on her 1989 collaboration with the Oysterband. The voice is close and intimate, the arrangement spacious. The track establishes a mood for what’s to follow. These are broad soundscapes opening onto long vistas, like a view of the open sea. Also up for reappraisal is Cyril Tawney’s ‘Grey Funnel Line’, which she first recorded with Maddy Prior in 1976 and has been singing on and off ever since. June still loves the duet version with Maddy but admits her own approach to the song has changed over the years: “It’s got a bit more space. It has room to breathe. The images, I think, stand out very clearly.” 

With time, particularly if she hasn’t sung a song for a while and comes back to it, the meaning of the words changes: “That’s the beauty of a good song, that however well you think you know it, you discover something in it that you didn’t see before. Certainly, ‘Grey Funnel Line’ is a song that speaks so clearly – and I don’t know that I even thought about it when I first recorded it – of that need for anyone who has spent most of their life on the sea to turn their back on it. I’ve been told this by people who served for a long time in the Navy, that if you want a life of your own then you’ve got to leave the sea. And the more I sang it and thought about it, the clearer that became to me. That’s exactly what Cyril was writing about.”

One highlight of the London concert was a suite of songs about cannibalism at sea. This is a surprisingly virile genre, from the starkly lyric poetry of ‘The Ship in Distress’ to a comic treatment by Thackeray where the cabin boy’s on the menu until he’s rescued in the nick of time by the arrival of the fleet. On Ashore we hear a French song, ‘Le Petit Navire’, where the child is not so lucky. He ends up being eaten, with appropriate garnish. “I laughed so much when I found the words of that,” says June. “How French! They’d run out of anything to eat but they still managed to cook up white sauce and a nice salad! So I can only assume that ‘something to eat’ has got to mean meat!” The incidence of enforced cannibalism must be as old as seafaring, but, intriguingly, the songs about it only surface in the eighteenth century as broadsheets. The modern equivalent would be disaster movies about aircrash survivors. It all stems from our eternal love of horror, June suggests, lapsing into mock-Brummie: “As we say in the Midlands where I come from, ‘we loiks a bit of bad!’”

‘Le Petit Navire’ is one of two French songs on the new album collected in the Channel Islands. These were still being sung in the mid-twentieth century – the Islands remained French-speaking until the Second World War – and June is drawn to the way they combine a very English sensibility and loyalty to the English crown with their origins in the French tradition: “I love that – and also it gives me an excuse to sing in French!”

Like its predecessors, the album has a distinct aural texture. “We often get described as chamber folk. That’s a very good way of expressing that it isn’t quite folk music and it’s not classical and it’s a few other things as well.” June works with a regular group of co-musicians drawn from a variety of backgrounds. Huw Warren is a pianist and composer whose jazz-inflected style perfectly complements June’s vocals. “The piano is such a glorious instrument. It’s an orchestra in itself.” The multi-tasking Mark Emerson on violin and viola unites a classical training with a grounding in traditional and dance music. “Extraordinary player of an extraordinary instrument” is June’s comment on Andy Cutting: “Andy does things with the diatonic accordion that just aren’t possible to most other musicians.” The line-up is completed by Tim Harries on double bass, who, I’m told, has “two brains”. 

How are the arrangements arrived at? “I come up with the songs and I have an idea of the direction I want them to go in and, quite possibly, an idea of what the main instrument should be as the basis of the arrangement. I learn the songs and I sing them to the musicians and we sit round and the arrangement evolves. It’s very much input from all of us as to how the finished arrangement ends up. Very seldom is anything written down. It’s carried in everybody’s heads. As far as I’m concerned the songs tell me what they need and I’m just trying to convey everything that I get from a song to a listener in the best way I can.” 

As an example, she quotes the last track on the album, ‘Across The Wide Ocean’, an epic 12-minute setting of a Les Barker poem about the Highland Clearances. “The grounding of that song is piano and what Huw is playing. The musicians are improvising. They know roughly when each instrument should come in but they’re responding to the words and I just sing when I feel like it. It is a long track, it’s just the way we felt that the song deserved to be sung and played to give it that incredible breadth, so that it is a very visual arrangement. Through the music you see the sea, the people being driven from their homes, the dereliction of the island and the burning houses and the ships setting off for America. It’s all there in what the musicians are playing just as it is in the words. It’s one of those film songs – I like those.” 

Despite her enviable technique, June insists she has no musical training. She seems apologetic that she can’t read music: “You’d think at my age I would have learned by now.” I point out that Paul McCartney has the same “disability” but has managed to do quite well for himself nonetheless – which seems to reassure her. 

Martin Carthy always says that the worst thing you can do to folksong is not to sing it, and June agrees with him wholeheartedly. Does that mean she’s a curator? “I’m a teller of stories,” she responds. “I don’t like that word curator. It is part of what traditional music is about but it just seems to me the wrong word. I’m someone who is keeping great music alive. I’m a life-support machine rather than a curator.”

She first discovered folk music as a teenager. She recalls a couple of religious programmes on TV on a Sunday afternoon where folk artists like Martin Carthy were featured. When a schoolfriend took her to a folk club, she found a “social aspect, a way of life”. It was the start of her own involvement in singing, but the breakthrough moment was a chance purchase of Anne Briggs’s EP The Hazards Of Love. 

“I went to visit my sister in London and she took me to Dobell’s, where they had jazz and folk sections in the basement, and I found that EP. I thought, this looks interesting. So I took it home and I put it on my funny little Dansette record player and I thought, God, this is amazing. Here’s a woman singing on her own, it’s just the voice. I want to do that. So I played it over and over again, I broke it down, slowed it down, cut it up into little pieces and learned how to do each little tiny bit, drove my mother mad, shut myself in the loo – there was  a good acoustic in there! – and just taught myself how to sing like that. I was fascinated by the decorated style, the material.”

A late starter, she didn’t release her first album until 1976 and attributes the impetus to her old friend Maddy Prior. Steeleye Span were at the peak of their stadium-filling power in the mid-70s and their record company, Chrysalis, allowed each member to make a solo album. Maddy announced she would do hers with June, as a duo, the Silly Sisters. “So I actually stepped into a recording study. Oh God, how terrifying!” When she’d recovered from the fright, June got down to making the solo disc of her own that Topic had been pressing for, Airs And Graces. Since then she’s put out a string of accomplished releases, most of them bearing titles beginning with the letter ‘A’ (“It gives you somewhere to start when you’re looking for a title, which is not an easy thing to do.”) 

Her background is somewhat different from many in the folk world. Oxford-educated, she captained her college team on University Challenge in 1968. They lost (narrowly) to Essex, despite “thumping” Bangor in the warm-up round. What sticks in the memory about that experience? “How nice Bamber Gascoigne was. And the other thing I remember, apart from not winning, is that we walked through the set of Coronation Street to get to the University Challenge studio. I got onto Coronation Street, albeit briefly!” Outside music, she’s served time as a librarian and even ran a restaurant in the Lake District for a while. 

She is a remarkably versatile performer who can switch from trad folk to jazz by way of modern singer-songwriters. An earlier album, At The Wood’s Heart, brought a cool reading of Duke Ellington’s ‘Do Nothing Till You Hear From Me’. On the new album she tackles Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’, already covered memorably by Robert Wyatt. Whatever the material, her singing has the naturalness of speech. Where lesser singers merely skate the surface, June is always deep inside the song. 

She ducks when asked if she has any comments on the current folk scene. At first she admits she “hasn’t a clue”, then she speaks in praise of newcomer Emily Portman for “making new songs of old and working folktale and storytelling into songs” – which is, of course, exactly what June Tabor herself has been doing triumphantly for the last forty years.

[First published in Properganda 19, April/May 2011] 

Pentangle

Well, cards on the table – it didn’t start with a disc, it started with a TV programme. Take Three Girls was an innovative BBC drama series at the end of the Sixties, the first to be filmed in colour, which followed the lives of three young women of different social backgrounds flat-sharing in Swinging London. I was a bit too young to appreciate it – and watching the surviving episodes posted to YouTube by Liza Goddard, one of its stars, I’m surprised how gritty it was – but I appreciated the theme tune, ‘Light Flight’. This intricate composition, with its interlocking guitars, honeyed vocal and unexpected shifts of time signature, was the work of Pentangle. I had to know more; the game was afoot.

Pentangle began in 1967 with a coming-together of two desperately talented acoustic guitarists – Bert Jansch and John Renbourn. They had a residency at London’s Horseshoe Hotel. Happenstance brought them together with singer Jacqui McShee and a rhythm section comprising Danny Thompson on double bass and Terry Cox on drums. They came from different directions, these individualists: McShee from the folk scene, Thompson and Cox from jazz, Jansch from the British blues revival, Renbourn via a fascination with Early Music. But each was interested in so much more than narrow genre, and they pooled their interests to make a music that could only have emerged at that moment. “An uncalculated synthesis of musical disciplines,” Rob Young calls it in his book Electric Eden, “rock and folk inflated by modern jazz’s zephyr breeze”. The band name, alluding to the sign on the inside of King Arthur’s shield, derived from Renbourn’s interest in the Middle Ages, but also conveniently embraced the five corners of this quintet of equals.  

‘Light Flight’, I discovered, was the opening track on their new LP, Basket Of Light. Released in October 1969 at the very peak of their success and reaching number five in the album charts, this remains for me the perfect distillation of their art. For once, my saved-up pocket money was well spent. By then the career of this most British of bands had been supercharged by a pair of ambitious American expats: manager Jo Lustig and producer Shel Talmy. Lustig got them the gigs and the media exposure (including, I assume, the Take Three Girls connection); Talmy gave the recordings their striking bell-like clarity, thanks to judicious microphone placement and enhancements from the mixing desk.

Basket Of Light mixed the band’s original compositions with folk standards. Even the traditional songs sounded fresh when painted in a new instrumental palette. ‘Once I Had A Sweetheart’ featured glockenspiel and multi-tracked vocals. Renbourn, swapping guitar for sitar on ‘House Carpenter’, marshalled an improbable but successful duet with Jansch’s banjo. Their voices merged with McShee’s on ‘Lyke-Wake Dirge’, a chilling rendition of this Yorkshire-dialect threnody, replete with churchy echo effects.  ‘If hosen and shoon thou ne’er gav’st nane / The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane’. Was the soul’s hazardous journey from earth to purgatory ever better evoked than in that threat? I’d no idea what “whinnes” were – thorns, I later learned – but they sounded painful.

In contrasting vein, ‘Sally Go Round The Roses’ was an upbeat arrangement of The Jaynetts’ 1963 hit, evidence of how far the band cast their net for material. Among the band’s own compositions, I always returned to ‘Light Flight’, preferring it to Jansch’s lugubrious lead vocal on ‘Springtime Promises’. But I also liked ‘Train Song’, the closing track on Side One (track positioning really mattered in the vinyl era). A line from the song – ‘Love is a basket of light’ – provided the album title. It was a reference, so Jansch confided to his biographer Colin Harper, to his “first sexual experience with a lady”; how afterwards he remembered “sitting in this flat where the light shade had a basket hanging from it.” The song alternated fast and slow sections, with McShee scat-singing as if to suggest the locomotive wheels turning, before braking gradually until only Thompson’s bowed bass was audible in the mix.  

I only saw them once in concert. Fairfield Halls, Croydon, in November 1970. I was a young teen, new to live amplified music, and I remember how different they were. (Admitted, my formative experience had been seeing Herman’s Hermits blast out a set in the middle of a Christmas panto.) For a start, apart from Thompson, they all performed sitting down. McShee has explained how, in her case, this was a response to the trauma of her first gig during which her knees had been shaking so much she could barely control them. Perhaps there were more expressive singers on the circuit than McShee, women who inhabited a song better, but none whose voice so melded like a fifth instrument into an ensemble. With no strutting front man or woman to distract the eye, you listened to the music and to how these supremely talented musicians listened to each other. Even the folk-rockers had gone electric by then, but although Renbourn sometimes picked up an electric guitar, the key to Pentangle’s distinctiveness was the undertow of Thompson’s nimble acoustic bass and Cox’s restrained use of brushes in preference to sticks.

Of course, it feels wrong to talk about Pentangle as ancient history. The original band made three further albums after Basket Of Light, split, then reformed in 1981. A Lifetime Achievement Award at the BBC Folk Awards in 2007 was confirmation of their enduring impact on musical life. But while McShee still leads the band in another worthy incarnation, the deaths of Jansch in 2011 and Renbourn in 2015 mean that the personnel of the 1960s can never again reassemble. We shall not see their like.

[First published in RnR, July/August 2020]

Taking stock

It feels like some personal stocktaking is in order. What does my writerly self have to show for himself after all these years?

Books

Encounters with Michael Arlen (Market Harborough: Troubador, 2023).

Instead of a Critic: Essays Written and Unwritten (Cambridge: Minos, 2022).

Laura Nyro... On Track (Tewkesbury: Sonicbond, 2022).

Becoming Helen Mirren (e-book: Matador, 2019).

Sandy Denny: Reflections on Her Music (Kibworth Beauchamp: Matador, 2011; new e-edition, 2019).

Hofmannsthal and Greek Myth: Expression and Performance (Oxford/Bern: Peter Lang, 2002).

Articles

'The Spats School of Thought', Times Literary Supplement, 10 May 2024.

'The Mystery of Mally Alexandra', Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter 46 (December 2023), 35-8.

'A Fractured Relationship: Rebecca West and Michael Arlen', The Rebecca West Society blog (December 2022).

‘“Swarthy Syrian” or “Nimble Greek”? Huxley and Michael Arlen’, Aldous Huxley Annual 20 (2021).

‘“A very real warmth”? Hemingway and Michael Arlen’, The Hemingway Review 41.1 (Fall 2021).

‘A “Comer” or a “Second-Rater”? Fitzgerald’s Encounters with Michael Arlen’, F. Scott Fitzgerald Review 18 (2020).

‘Green Hats and Constant Nymphs Versus Life-as-It-Is: The Unlikely Friendship of Michael Arlen and D. H. Lawrence’, D. H. Lawrence Review 44.1 (2019).

‘Marianne Mitford’, The Mitford Society blog (December 2020).

‘Katherine Mansfield and Michael Arlen: A Footnote (or Two)’, Katherine Mansfield Society Newsletter 31 (December 2018), 26-29.

‘Egon Wellesz: An Opera Composer in 1920s Vienna’, Tempo, 219 (January 2002), 22-28.

‘“Bacchen des Euripides zu erneuern”: The Pentheus Project of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’, Orbis Litterarum, 55.3 (2000), 165-194.

‘Hofmannsthal, Elektra and the Representation of Women’s Behaviour through Myth’, German Life and Letters, 53.1 (January 2000), 37-55.

Poetry

'47 Redcliffe Road', in Katherine Mansfield and London, edited by Aimée Gaston and Gerri Kimber (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2024).

'Born To Be Wild(e)', WolfWords 2024.

'The Bird-Man', WolfWords 2023.

Translations

Frank Wedekind, Mine-Haha, or On the Bodily Education of Young Girls (London: Hesperus, 2010). [Reviewed in The Guardian, 25 April 2010].

François Pantillon, Cries of the World (‘secular oratorio’, libretto, unpublished, 2009) [French-language premiere as Clameurs du monde, May 1986; no known performance in English].

Ernst Krenek, Heavyweight, or The Glory of the Nation (libretto, unpublished) [Cambridge University Opera Society, premiere, 7 December 2002].

Alexander Mosolov, The Hero (libretto, unpublished) [Cambridge University Opera Society, premiere, 7 December 2002].

J.W. von Goethe, Erwin and Elmire (libretto, unpublished) [Singspiel with music by Anna Amalia, first performance in modern times, Cambridge University Opera Society 29 January 1999; new production by iOpera, Melbourne, Australia, February/March 2008]. [Photos and programme].

Frank Wedekind, Franziska, adapted by Eleanor Brown; translation and introduction by Philip Ward (London: Oberon, 1998) [premiere, Gate Theatre, London, 13 May 1998; reviewed in The Independent, 26 May 1998].

Reviews

Charlie Louth, Rilke: The Life of the Work, in Austrian Studies 30 (2022).

‘Egon Wellesz, Symphony No. 4 (Sinfonia Austriaca), Op. 70; Symphony No. 6, Op. 95; Symphony No. 7 (Contra Torrentem!), Op. 102. Radio Symphonieorchester Wien, cond. Gottfried Rabl,’ in: Tempo, 225 (July 2003), 49.

Nancy C. Michael, Elektra and Her Sisters. Three Female Characters in Schnitzler, Freud, and Hofmannsthal, in: Austrian Studies 11 (2003), 222-223.

George Mackay Brown, Andrina and Other Stories, in: Catholic Herald, 20 April 1984, p. 6.

The Flight of the Mind: The Letters of Virginia Woolf: Volume 1, 1888-1912, edited by Nigel Nicolson, in: Catholic Herald, 10 June 1983, p. 6. 

Other

Numerous features, interviews and reviews for popular music magazine RNR, 2010-present [some republished on this blog]. Occasional contributions on music to English Dance and Song, Shindig! and Properganda.

‘A Religious Source for Newton’s Science?’ (unpublished thesis, University of Oxford, 1980; winning entry, Stanhope Historical Essay Prize, University of Oxford, 1980).

Several short stories in Oxford University magazines: Isis, Oxford Literary Journal, Envisage, 1977-9.

Numerous reports on parliamentary business and public policy issued under the imprint of the House of Commons Library, 2003-2016. Whereas Kafka’s ‘official’ writings as an insurance assessor investigating injuries to industrial workers have been slavishly studied, I doubt that my future biographers will be detained long by my ruminations on the Horserace Betting Levy Bill or the ownership of air guns in Scotland. 

Shirley Collins

Back to 2015 for this concert review...

ALL IN THE DOWNS: SHIRLEY COLLINS EIGHTIETH BIRTHDAY CONCERT

Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, Sunday 5 July 2015

In some countries – Japan and Australia come to mind – they have a system of declaring people to be ‘living national treasures’. We don’t have that in Britain, but if there’s one living Briton who’d qualify (alongside David Attenborough, of course) it’s Shirley Collins. Song-collector, singer and writer, she remains an inspiration across the generations.

A concert to mark her eightieth birthday brought together three of my favourite young chanteuses of the moment – Olivia Chaney, Lisa Knapp and Lavinia Blackwall: that was promising for a start. The first part of this good-humoured tribute was given over to soloists, the songs drawn mostly from Collins’s own repertoire. Knapp (accompanying herself on fiddle) sang ‘Fair Maid Of Islington’; Chaney, rapt in concentration at the piano, was masterly in ‘All Things Are Quite Silent’. Graham Coxon of Blur served up a neat, Jansch-inspired guitar arrangement of ‘Cruel Mother’. Sam Lee blotted his (usually spotless) copybook by giving a rambling introduction that was longer than the song itself, but Alasdair Roberts saved the day with his unaccompanied ‘Lord Gregory’.

The second half was a marvellous recreation of the No Roses album of 1971, led by an irrepressible John Kirkpatrick. He being the only member of the original line-up on stage, support came instead from Trembling Bells. I’m not the Bells’ biggest fan, I admit – I find them unsubtle compared to their folk-rock ancestors – but they gave it their all here, and everyone seemed to be having a ball, audience included. ‘Murder Of Maria Marten’, ending with the soloists joined in six-part harmony, was a joy.

Finally, Collins herself took a standing ovation on stage, positively beaming with pleasure. Stewart Lee, the stand-up comedian who had proved an erratic MC for the evening, suggested a singalong ‘Happy Birthday’, so we obliged.

Oh, and there were morris dancers.

[First published in RnR, September/October 2015]

Photo: Domino Records

Rethinking American Music

RETHINKING AMERICAN MUSIC
Tara Browner and Thomas L. Riis (eds.)
(UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS) www.press.uillinois.edu
ISBN 978-0-252-08410-2 Softcover. 355 pp.

This is a collection of academic essays on American music ranging widely across genres, from classical to jazz, musical theatre and Tin Pan Alley. Although they come grouped into four sections – ‘performance’, ‘patronage’, ‘identity’ and ‘ethnography’ – they’re a miscellaneous bunch, and few will read this volume cover to cover. That said, certain themes recur that reflect disquiet in a nation still troubled by its segregated past, themes like minstrelsy and ‘cultural appropriation’.

An informative essay on hip-hop compares ‘turntablists’ and ‘mashup’ artists. Both are making new music out of old but while the former are performer-DJs who proudly claim ‘authorship’ of their work, the latter skulk behind the anonymity of the internet, successfully evading copyright litigation. Another chapter considers how the Native American melodies collected by Natalie Curtis played into the European avant-garde’s fascination with ‘primitivism’ in the early twentieth century, using the composer Busoni as example. Another deals with a 1929 benefit concert for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People that defiantly busted the ‘colour bar’ by featuring a multi-ethnic cast. In lighter vein, a diverting contribution by Jeffrey Magee examines the ‘cosy cottage’ trope in the American musical, tracing its evolution from the comforting promise of ‘Tea for Two’ in the 1920s to Mrs Lovett’s dreams of rural retirement on the profits of cannibalism in Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd (1979).

My usual problem with academic writing about popular music is the mismatch between descriptor and described – too often it feels like improvised music created by self-taught musicians unversed in music notation is being crushed under the analytical tools developed for Western ‘art’ music. A final essay on transcribing a Thelonious Monk solo faces this issue head on. If ‘rethinking American music’ means restoring the precedence of historical and evidence-based research over theory, I’m all in favour.

[First published in RnR, March/April 2020]