19/02/2011

Kew Gardens



An aspect of many places, commented on in previous columns, is that they can hold the past and present simultaneously. London, in particular, has always been a good example of this, where you can quickly move from the present to find a hidden square or side street that seems little changed since the London of Dickens or beyond, or a park that seems a hidden world away . The best songs can enhance this perspective –as with Cath Carroll’s London, Queen of My Heart, taking the night bus from Camden over the ancient plague pits.

In some ways this searching of the past by pop songs can seem odd. Pop music’s initial concerns were very much of the here and now but at some point - maybe it was with Sgt Pepper - artists started taking off into past centuries. Strange instruments like harpsichords and dulcimers started to appear on pop records. One musical path headed back to the 19th Century English surreal whimsy of writers such as Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear: the spark was the Syd Barrett - dominated Pink Floyd first album, Piper at the Gates of Dawn, the title taken from a chapter of Kenneth Graham’s Wind in the Willows. Another path at the turn of the sixties went further back to a courtly Elizabethan age, perhaps kicked off by the Stones and Lady Jane. Sandy Denny brought her song about Mary Queen of Scots, Fotheringay. to the Fairport Convention album, What We Did On Our Holidays. Soon after she named her own group after the song, their first album depicting the group members dressed up in cod mediaeval clothing. Around the same time the folk rock outfit, Trees, brought out The Garden of Jane Delawney, also drenched in echoes of the 16th century.

The song here, Kew Gardens, is not time - bound and could be set at any time in Kew Gardens’ history, with the same kind of courteous and graceful feel of the songs mentioned above. Prominent in the musical backing is the recorder, previously associated with the mediaeval court or small children playing in school concerts. It was written and first recorded by Ralph McTell, of Streets of London fame, before being picked up by Mary Hopkin and is very characteristic of some of his work: veering to the whimsical but carried by his ability to tell a descriptive little story in 2 or 3 minutes (In the 1980’s he featured in an oddly compelling children’s TV series, Tickle on the Tum, in which he appeared in a grocery shop in a fictional village every week to showcase songs like this one). In this case, the musical vignette is a brief and rather sad love story-that-never-was against a backdrop of the Pagoda and the griffin statues outside the Palm House.

This version is by Mary Hopkin, released as a ‘B’ side in 1971. She holds a comet-like place in pop history. Her debut single in 1968, Those Were The Days, was the first release after Hey Jude on the prestigious Beatles’ Apple label, was produced by Paul McCartney, went to Number One and sold over 8 million copies worldwide. By 1970, after 3 or so smaller hits, her chart career was over. In some ways, she seemed out of time, like this song and Kew Gardens itself. She was too late for the pop folk boom of the mid-60’s, too early for the singer-songwriter genre of the 1970’s and caught between the rapidly diverging worlds of rock and pop. Her crystal-clear voice was not dissimilar to the early Marianne Faithfull and she recorded some of the same sort of folk tunes that Marianne Faithfull had in the mid-sixties. Image-wise, however, she was the opposite, marketed on TV variety shows and in cabaret as a ’girl next door’ with family appeal.

She also suffered, I think, from associations with two shows: Opportunity Knocks and The Eurovision Song Contest. Opportunity Knocks was a long-running talent show on British TV in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with winners chosen by public vote. These included a singing dog and, for 6 consecutive weeks in 1964 when the Beatles and Rolling Stones were topping the charts, by a bloke twitching his muscles to the cha-cha-cha sounds of Wheels by The Stringalongs. This can be glimpsed on the clip below. (This is from 1978, by which time he had been doing the act for 14 years. Viewers were less demanding then).


Mary Hopkin won the show in 1968 but, as another winner/subsequent chart act, Sweet Sensation, found later, that did not help in giving wider musical credibility. Neither did being the British entry for the 1970 Eurovision contest with Knock Knock, Who’s There – it took Abba winning in 1974 to turn that view of Eurovision around.

Her gentle and rather wistful style, however, is perfect for a song about  Kew Gardens, where it is easy to feel you have gone back to a more sedate age of the Victorians or Edwardians as you stroll along tree-lined walks or through the elegant buildings. I first went there as a young child and three things stuck in my mind. 1) The entrance fee through the turnstile gates was 1p, which even then struck me as good value. 2) The Chinese Pagoda there seemed wildly exotic, as though suddenly transplanted from China itself ( I am sure that a group in the 1970’s put out an album with them standing by the Pagoda on the cover and claimed that they had recorded it in China). 3) In one of the cafes I was served, I believe for the first time, the dish called ‘salad’. This was both unexpected and disappointing, being the great British Salad of the time – some lettuce and tomatoes, a piece of ham, a chopped hardboiled egg and Heinz Salad Cream. Years later, however, on a family visit there, we spied a much more fitting meal for Kew Gardens: seated by the river was a group dressed entirely in white - white suits, white flowing dresses – with a hamper picnic of smoked salmon, strawberries and cream and champagne laid out on the grass. Somehow it did not seem out of place.

The song, in some ways, is a period piece but then so are parts of Kew Gardens, with the Walled Gardens and Queen Charlotte’s Cottage and the maids of honour cakes in the tea room on the road opposite the entrance. Go through the gates - you can then find what ever age you want as you wander round the gardens.

44 comments:

  1. Geoff, I was so curious when I saw this title,thinking you were writing about the Kew Gardens in Queens (NYC)!:) And then it is about the original place, which the Queens neighborhood must be named after. Which sounds WAY more attractive! Here is the Kew Gardens I know about: http://www.flickr.com/photos/nrvlowdown/2123795304/in/pool-kewgardensny#/photos/nrvlowdown/2123795304/in/pool-561029@N25/

    :) Very different! Thanks for the wonderful column about the original Kew Gardens!

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  2. I wonder if it WAS with Sgt Pepper that artists started heading back into past centuries.... I think I agree that this was some kind of watershed moment, but I'm curious if others can think of earlier examples of this kind of musical timetravel.... totally fascinating Geoff!

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  3. HA HA HA - I love the clip of the "bloke twitching his muscles" Geoff!:) This is such a strange thing, that people watched and enjoyed this! Although I feel like I saw online some clips of the current British talent show - "Britain's Got Talent" - and it had the same kind of feel, there was even a dog singing or dancing.... I think this kind of talent show, where it feels like the local village talent show, might be a (wonderful) British phenomenon.............

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  4. Geoff, I love love LOVE the idea that music took different "paths" back into the past - via the English Victorians, or via Elizabethan England. I wonder if U.S. music has similar paths, back to Puritan Massachusetts or back to the era of Western expansion and the frontier, I'm not sure but I don't think it does in quite the same way (where the actual musical sounds and instruments are designed to evoke the musical styles of past centuries), I think maybe there are images and lyrics describing past events but not quite the same immersion in past sound the same way that British music did it, as you describe.

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  5. I had never heard of Mary Hopkin, presumably because of that comet-like trajectory she had - where traces of her vanished from the sky - but I am very glad to know about her now! I tracked down "Those Were the Days": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2KODZtjOIPg - which is lovely.

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  6. Thanks for the shout-out to the Dulcimer. I create music on one - here is one of my songs (from an album), in case you are interested: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TxjpYHhfRyI.

    Nice blog!!

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  7. I read your column most weeks, like it a good deal. Thank you for mentioning I wrote and first recorded "Kew Gardens". And I like your characterisation of my stuff (veering to the whimsical but carried by his ability to tell a descriptive little story in 2 or 3 minutes).

    Just cos you mentioned it elsewhere in this week's writing, I did also do the theme song to The Wind in the Willows.

    Maybe there is something relevant, for your theme of place, on my newest album "Somewhere Down the Road". Or what about my song "England" as I don't think you have done a column on the whole country yet, have you?

    Cheers for the great reading, always a pleasure and an education.

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  8. Just for fun!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLy6CBHKpIE

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  9. Love that first album cover! - http://freemusic07.ucoz.com/StoreE/Fotheringay-1970-Fotheringay.jpg

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  10. I looked up that song "The Garden of Jane Delawney" - what a great, haunting, beautiful song!

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoddtUn77do

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  11. I thought you might be interested in a project I worked on recently with Kew, where we made an album of songs with a conservation theme: http://www.kew.org/news/in-harmony-with-nature.htm

    I suppose it's only tangentially related to your column, but I thought I'd jump on the themes of music and Kew and post this message!

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  12. I met Mary Hopkin once at the Chinese pagoda. It was in late '69. She was walking in Kew with Linda McCartney. They both talked to me for a few minutes underneath the pagoda.

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  13. Geoff, I think you're right about there being a 1970s album cover featuring the pagoda at Kew, but I can't remember what it is - and no amount of Google searching has unearthed it!!

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  14. I remember when it cost 1p too. Here's me and my brother there in 1964: http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4153/4975245981_0116471c02_b.jpg

    :)

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  15. I thought it was going to be about Kew Gardens in Queens too:) But I was glad when it wasn't!

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  16. Geoff, I love how you turn Kew itself into a parallel of your idea of music taking different paths into the past - the idea that just as pop music has charted that journey, so do we as we walk around Kew.

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  17. Geoff, first of all, please accept apologies for the delay in posting: it is a 3 day weekend here in the U.S. (because of President's Day tomorrow) so I think many of your American readers are traveling or have family staying with them!

    I was really struck by your description of the fancy picnic! I very much wanted a visual image of this, and so went in search of one. But I couldn't find quite the right thing, all the picnic-at-Kew photos online were of informal picnics. This sort of thing: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jadelus_smells/475873224/

    Ah well!

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  18. Geoff, if you don't own it already, I recommend this great collection - Come and Get It: The Best Of Apple Records - http://popyoularity.com/Blog/?p=8630 - just wonderful!

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  19. Remember David Cassidy's “Daydreamer”? The video, which appeared on TOTP, featuring a yellow-tinted Cassidy wandering moodily through Kew Gardens.

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  20. "Suddenly the rain came flurrying, sending the two of them scurrying, helter skelter for the shelter. And feeling bolder in the big pagoda,he gently enquired her name. And they waited till the sunshine came ..."

    Gorgeous!

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  21. Anyone who appeared on the Radiators' Ghostown LP (produced by Mary's husband) is alright with me!:)

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  22. I didnt know there was another Kew Gardens in Queens!

    I'll have a listen to Somewhere Down the Road -and thanks for the nostalgic clip of Tickle on the Tum, Ralph!

    No, I have tried googling the album cover with the Pagoda. I am sure it existed!

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  23. Apparently, at the time it was written, McTell had never been to Kew, but the song was written after a friend of his visited and described it to him, which might mean this song also fits into the category of songs about imagined places!

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  24. Great column Geoff! I think I might prefer McTell's own version though (the arrangement of both the instrumentation and the vocals is much more varied and complex than Hopkin's). Although I do love, the purity and innocence, which fits the innocence and simplicity of this rather sad tale.

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  25. It could also fit in the category of songs about Tube Stations (technically, because there IS a Kew Gardens tube, although the song of course isn't really anything to do with the Tube). I've been keeping a secret list of songs about the tube ever since the topic came up in this blog, and here are the ones I have thought of!

    Victoria The Kinks
    Finsbury Park Among The Missing
    Camden Town Suggs
    Baker Street The Shadows
    Canada Water The Heights
    Euston Station Betty And The Werewolves
    Sunny Goodge Street Donovan
    Highgate Road Incident Saint Etienne
    Kensington High Street Marty Feldman
    Old Street Medium Kitchen

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  26. I saw Mary Hopkin in Christmas 1980, playing the Virgin Mary in Rock Nativity at a theatre in Reading. She was actually rather good!
    :)

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  27. Steve, don't forget the Wombles Of Wimbledon too....:)

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  28. I remember that she was voted "Britains Number 1 Singer" in 1971!

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  29. I think I have been to the teashop opposite Kew Gardens - it is called the Original Maids of Honour, and here they baked tarts for Henry VIII!

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  31. I loved this column with all its clever meditation on real and figurative paths into the past. I do think though that it is worth pointing out the strangeness of pop music about such middle-class environments. I think Kew Gardens is basically synonymous with middle-class Victorian culture. A "Royal Botanical Gardens" built with money from the coffers of kings, queens and nobles, supposed to be full of exotic follies, the playthings of a royal pleasure ground (the Pagoda being one example) - all to reference the advance of British power internationally. And in fact, it is also an example of British botanical imperialism - representing all that was integral to British colonialism. George III used Kew to project the glory of his reign, and it continued to be a botanical testament to the inter-relation of science and colonialism that characterised the 19th century. The government set up a world-wide colonial network of satellite gardens, sent people out to search for plants, to gather and categorise, and the expansion of Kew was without a doubt directly linked to the expansion of the British Empire and its interests.

    So I guess my point is that even though the garden (like British music) offers various paths into various era, the only real time period on display in the garden is the era of British colonialism!

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  32. I have never been to Kew Gardens but I have read Margaret Fuller's account of it - she adored it, thought it was a fairyland, and she especially loved "the great-grandfather of all the cactuses" - which had apparently lived at least 1000 years. She introduced it to her American readers (she was an American journalist in the 19th century), which was helpful because other accounts of Kew in the U.S. described it as run-down, inaccessible, lacking a museum, overgrown.

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  33. Yes, it's a pretty cool area of Queens. Very diverse. And it does have a park, actually (called Forest Park, rather than anything "gardens").

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  34. I love the giant waterlilies at Kew. They look big enough for small children to sit on them.... And in fact, apparently similar waterlilies HAVE been sat on!:) - http://digitallibrary.usc.edu/assetserver/controller/view/CHS-6010

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  35. In case anyone is interested, you can now do a free online, Virtual Tour of Kew Gardens - it just was launched. http://www.explore-kew-gardens.net/engMarch/pano_pages.htm

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  36. I was at Kew last week, when it was warm! I've wanted to visit Kew Gardens ever since my first trip to London. While a trip never quite made the itinerary before, we live seriously close now and I knew that I'd eventually get there. I've been biding my time, waiting for the right day to go as the admission
    price is a tad expensive I didn't want to waste a trip by just meandering without a purpose. Finally, that purpose came around: the spring orchid show. I had read glowing reviews so, I just HAD to see them for myself. And, it was unbelievably impressive. Literally, thousands of orchids were staged in the Princess of Wales Conservatory. It was like a Georgia O'Keefe explosion.

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  37. Interesting Laura! And it is also true that after Charles I was executed, and The Commonwealth had taken over under Oliver Cromwell, much of the Royal property around Richmond and Kew was sold off. However, those sales were reversed during the reign of William III. So Cromwell wasn't a fan of the idea of royal gardens:)

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  38. But Laura, the whole point of that "botanical imperialism" was to create what Kew remains: an important place for plant species and scientific research. It has a seed bank that holds 10% of all the worlds’ plant species, and contains samples of nearly all endangered species. It also has a herbarium whose collection is being added to virtually daily. At the Joderell Laboratory at Kew, they research the molecular systems, and study the physiology and biochemistry of plants. They study the plants to find natural medicines, specifically for anti-cancer and anti-inflammatory drugs. One department focuses on agricultural research, and there are also botanical illustration and photography departments. Kew is a world leader in conservation and plant technology.

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  39. I remember the 1p entrance fee too. The old turnstiles that took the penny are still in situ.

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  40. I remember the 1p entry too. I think they felt in those far off days that a token payment, just to keep the paths swept, was all that was required. It was and is a government-owned establishment, and so by default, we, the British public, own it. Nowadays, it costs an arm and a leg to get into Kew Gardens. I’ll whisper this; “it’s £13.90 for an adult.” The Government decided, to help finance research, and to develop further public facilities in the gardens, we should all pay to get in.

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  41. The wistful sound of her voice is so beautiful - thank you Geoff!

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  42. I could also have mentioned Tudor Lodge, who had a similar sound
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XRqAgjGShDQ&feature=related

    They also did a version of Kew Gardens on one of their albums.

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  43. hello Geoff, thank you for mentioning our version too (Tudor Lodge). Kew Gardens is the last track on our 1971 album. We are still around you know, just a duo now, me and Lynne. And before that I was also in the band The Mackandas in the 1960s but no one has heard of them. But during 2 or 3 years from about 1964, we played consistently 2 or 3 times a week in Reading, sometimes more, mostly in youth clubs, but occasionally a larger event. We played support for Crispian St Peter (remember him? he predicted that he would be bigger than Elvis - and last longer - well I suppose he lived longer!). One time we were booked for a large dance hall in Slough, we were dead chuffed - when we got there, we found that we were the break in the middle, while the DJ had a rest. Shortly before disbanding, we decided to make a recording. Studio, what studio, we nailed blankets all around Pete's garage, set up a borrowed domestic 2 track tape recorder, with the little plastic microphone that came with it - just the one mic in the middle, and we huddled round and played. A couple of years ago (2003) I rediscovered the old acetate record we'd had cut. Magically it had not got broken, though the quality had degraded, and a couple of tracks were by now unplayable. However, I took it into a studio where we remastered it as best we could, and I produced a CD: http://johnstannard.co.uk/Mackandas_CD.JPG. It may not be good, but it's memories. We did audition for EMI on one occasion, the session was produced by Tim Rice who at one point was heard to remark "That's got to be the worst group I've ever heard" - what does he know?

    Anyway, cheers!

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  44. Thanks for that info - its fascinating to hear memories like that. I remember reading a few years ago about some pub/club in Tenerife, I think, where someone was impersonating Crispian St Peters! Very bizarre.

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