10/09/2011

River Man


A previous column, (Let’s Get Out Of This Country),  looked at some of the more unlikely places that crop up as subjects of songs. There are some, however, which rarely figure. There are , perhaps unexpectedly, several songs about cathedrals and cathedral cities but less about universities and university cities. Schools - yes. Songs about school have been a staple of pop songs since  the early days of rock and roll, perhaps as the spirit of rebellion is easily inter-changed between the two. Hence songs like Chuck Berry’s School Days –“Soon as three o'clock rolls around, you finally lay your burden down, close up your books, get out of your seat, down the halls and into the street” – or Alice Cooper’s School’s Out. But there have also been plenty that have a nostalgic air to them: like Cat Stevens’ Remember The Days of the Old School Yard or Madness’  Baggy Trousers.

Once past school days, however, the inspiration from education starts to wear thin. There was a time, of course,  when pop music was pigeonholed as plebeian entertainment  and performers weren’t expected to have experience of any education past school. When the Zombies hit the UK charts in 1964 with She’s Not There, the papers found it so unusual  that the group members had 50 ‘O’ levels between them that it became the main part of their publicity. More common were the sorts of quotes from some head teacher lamenting  an ex-pupil who had left school early and gone onto success with a group like The Applejacks or Mindbenders; “He is a foolish young man. All right, he has bought himself a car and a house but he hasn’t got  a Maths ‘O’ level to fall back on”. It is also easy to forget just how young some musicians were. When  the original Shadows’ drummer, Tony Meehan, left the group after 3 years or so, he had recently turned 18. By the time Helen Shapiro was 16 she had had a string of hits, including 2  UK Number 1’s and headlined a tour over the Beatles.

With the influence of  graduates of Art School or  university  on 60’s pop and the move of pop music towards  the realms of intellectual and cultural acceptance  this changed –but there were  still few songs  about this in the  way that school days were remembered. Too respectable to sing about?. This is perhaps why there are relatively few songs – as opposed to poems or novels - about Cambridge, so identified with the university and its colleges. Marillion had a rather jaundiced view of it  in their 1985 hit about social elitism, Garden Party (The Great Cucumber Massacre): “Aperitifs consumed en masse display their owners on the grass. Couples loiter in the cloisters. social leeches quoting Chaucer “

 A different perspective was found in a  rare rock eulogy to the place – in Roger Waters’ Granchester Meadows on Pink Floyd’s Ummagumma album. You can walk to Granchester from Cambridge, along by the river  and willows and past the sights  and sounds described in the song. In the village there  is the church in Rupert Brooke’s  poem, The Old Vicarage, Grantchester, with its famous closing lines:Stands the Church clock at ten to three? And is there honey still for tea?”. The clock tells the right time now but you can still get honey –and tea and scones –at The Orchard opposite whilst you sit in a deck chair under an apple tree as the bees and wasps circle round. Next door is the Old Vicarage itself, now owned by Jeffrey Archer and the fragrant Mary.

Yet despite the pastoral idyll nearby and the sense of timelessness amongst the colleges and cloisters, there is something about Cambridge that seems to cast a melancholic air over some of the work inspired by it, including the song here River Man by the English singer-songwriter Nick Drake, from his 1969 album Five Leaves Left. Like much of his work, the lyrics are open to interpretation. Is the river man meant to  be Charon the ferryman taking the souls of the dead across to Hades? Is he a drug dealer? A god of nature, like the Piper at the Gates of Dawn? Is the Betty who comes by a reference, as has been suggested, to Betty Foy in Wordsworth’s poem The Idiot Boy, studied by Drake at Cambridge University? Whatever, the song is like a journey in  a punt  down the river Cam, the rise and fall of the rhythm and of Drake’s voice – from major to minor and back -  like the ebb and flow of the water on the banks as you drift by the lilac trees and fallen leaves

As with much of his work, there is also an autumnal sadness about it, the more acute when the listener knows that Drake was to die 5 years after this record, commercial success eluding him in his lifetime. You think then of another Cambridge musician and drug casualty, Syd Barrett of Pink Floyd, who had also sung of a river in See Emily Play. His own musical star flared brightly but briefly before a return to decades of seclusion in his mother’s home in Cambridge. Look at this photo of a 5-man Pink Floyd in 1968: Barrett, the former front man, is at the back fading from sight in front of your eyes. Or there is the central character in Sebastian Faulk’s novel, Engleby ,which  explores the disturbed mind of a Cambridge student from the 1970’s. It is as though there is for some a golden age in Cambridge - maybe childhood, perhaps  university – after which life is never as bright again, like a colour film changing to black and white
Link to See Emily Play

Maybe Cambridge has that effect  because it is so easy to find the past there in the colleges and cloisters and the punting on the river.  Some of Barrett’s work took inspiration from Victorian literature and a piece like Grantchester Meadows could be describing a Victorian landscape painting. A friend and musical colleague  of Nick Drake is quoted as saying :”Nick was in some strange way out of time. When you were with him, you always had a sad feeling of him being born in the wrong century. If he would have lived in the 17th Century, at the Elizabethan Court, together with composers like Dowland or William Byrd, he would have been alright”.(Robert Kirby).As with Brooke, Drake’s early death means he will always be  remembered as a young man. Out of time - I guess Cambridge is a good place to be for that, where you can float on a river for ever and ever.

36 comments:

  1. Nick Drake is one of the greatest british singer guitar song writers ever - thanks Geoff!!

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  2. Ahhh Nick Drake. I'm such a fan. "One of these things first" is my personal favorite.

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  3. I love this song, 'River Man', don't think I had ever felt so hurt by a song – and, indeed, by someone's life story, as I learned of them both in the same moment. Everything about 'River Man' is perfect, and it reminds me of my time spent living on the river. Shortly after discovering it I began to incorporate it into my set at a local pub each week, and watched it work its magic.

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  4. Noticed that Nick Drake's voice has a strong Colin Blunstone element to it.

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  5. If you like the edge in Nick Drake then try Tim Hardin as well.......

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  6. Drake was fantastic - any players out there, it's worth studying his various detunings of the strings for those lovely resonant chords he plays. He influenced so much too.

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  7. What a haunting, beautiful, song!

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  8. There is a fairly lengthy documentary called "A Skin Too Few" that tells his (quite sad) personal story and is illustrated with some lovely images to accompany the music.

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  9. Musicians copping to Drake's influence include luminaries such as David Sylvian, Jose Gonzalez, The Books, Kate Bush, Paul Weller, Robert Smith, Belle & Sebastian, The Dream Academy (Life in a Northern Town was a Drake tribute) as well as pretty much anyone who was on the 4AD records roster (i.e. Cocteau Twins, Dead Can Dance, This Mortal Coil etc.) during the 80s. Other amazing versions of River Man are by jazz vocalist legend Andy Bey and a heavy funk-psych version from Shawn Lee. I’m also digging the female led, indie/band-by-the-seaside take by Brighton’s The Mummers, a mindbending psychedelic sitar cut from the normally straight laced Paul Weller (ex-Jam/Style Council) and Arabic/Belgian diva Natacha Atlas who spices up her version with a few taps of the tabla. Then besides the aforementioned Andy Bey cut we also have several more jazz renditions by Brad Mehldau as well as the Steve Evans Quartet and Germany’s Till Brönner. And lastly straight ahead overs all around from ladies Katell Keineg, Rachel Unthank & The Winterset, Norma Waterson (of The Watersons fame); and gents Jesse Sykes, Chris Seefried, Duncan Sheik, Tom Barman & Guy Van Nueten, Robyn Hitchcock and Way To Blue (a Nick Drake Tribute band overseen by Drake producer Joe Boyd with Vashti Bunyan, Scritti Politti and Robyn Hitchcock).

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  10. Claire Martin did a version too

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  11. I think Marillion is right that this is still a huge part of Cambridge - “Aperitifs consumed en masse display their owners on the grass. Couples loiter in the cloisters. social leeches quoting Chaucer" - I've only been there once, but I struggled to feel comfortable with the inherited wealth and dead tradition on display there.

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  12. FINALLY! I have been trying to post that comment for about 5 days, and it wouldn't let me. Looks like I wasn't the only one having trouble too, as some of your usual readers were missing in the comments section this week. It wasn't just your blog either, I noticed a couple of other blogs weren't posting the comments. I guess Blogger was having issues. Glad it's back up and running!!

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  13. Ha ha, I can absolutely imagine head teachers saying this sort of thing:) “He is a foolish young man. All right, he has bought himself a car and a house but he hasn’t got a Maths ‘O’ level to fall back on”.

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  14. I love that photograph of Barrett in 1968, you are so right that he is fading away already - very very sad and eerie to look at.

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  15. I love that this might another example of the song actually embodying a place in its sounds: "the rise and fall of the rhythm and of Drake’s voice – from major to minor and back - like the ebb and flow of the water on the banks as you drift by the lilac trees and fallen leaves"

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  16. I love Cat Stevens’ Remember The Days of the Old School Yard - it brings back all kinds of bitter sweet school memories! - www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ec_GjF5lt8

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  17. I don't think anyone posted Alice Cooper’s School’s Out yet - here it is!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qga5eONXU_4

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  18. This was really interesting, the fact that while there are lots of songs about schools, there are fewer about universities - I had never figured out that in part this is because singers were so young, and some didn't go to university - really interesting, thanks Geoff!

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  19. I hadn't heard of the Zombies before - here is the song She’s Not There, in case anyone else is curious - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5IRI4oHKNU

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  20. Here is the classic by Chuck Berry, School Days: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DHG5-GxI_Es, always a fun one to have on the ipod for dark grey mornings on the way to work!

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  21. Madness’ Baggy Trousers is worth watching for the original music video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XJOLwy7un3U - although not sure it gives a great impression of British schools:)

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  22. Mick, one of the Zombies' best songs was Time of the Season(since sampled a few times). Unfortunately they had split up before being able to capitalise on it
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BdghL1NGk0g

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  23. I definitely think there's an impression that it was when many key figures of the British Invasion -- including John Lennon, Keith Richards, Pete Townshend and members of numerous other fine groups -- came on the scene that the image of the musician changed, from being an uneducated but inspired individual to being a more middle-class, educated one. Lennon etc were all art-school students before turning professional. They had no less of a feel for pure rock & roll than anyone else, but their background had exposed them to bohemian enclaves and intellectual currents of thought in both art and music. The best of the British Invasion groups were instrumental in turning rock & roll into a more consciously artistic statement that was open to cutting-edge ideas from the art, fashion, literary, and of course non-rock musical worlds. And I think The Velvet Underground were the first rock band to incorporate many ideas from the musical avant-garde. The pivotal man here was original Velvets bassist/violist/organist John Cale, a Welshman who had studied with experimental composer Cornelius Cardew and came to the United States under a Leonard Bernstein scholarship to study modern composition with Iannis Xenakis at Tanglewood, MA. Cale actually got a photo spread in the New York Times in 1963 after participating in an 18-hour rendition of Erik Satie's "Vexation" with John Cage. Moving to New York, he was a member of the Dream Syndicate with minimalism pioneer LaMonte Young and other musicians who would play with members of the Velvets before the group had properly formed.

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  24. There's a huge shift happening in the demographics of Britpop. According to a study from 2010 conducted by Word Magazine, a majority of charting British pop and rock artists were educated in private, tuition-based schools. And, often in highly-elite, ultra-expensive institutions. In fact, the magazine found that 60 percent hailed from schools requiring annual tuition, academic admissions, connections, or all of the above. Yet overall, just 10 percent of the general population enjoys such privilege. Even crazier, just one percent of charting British artists claimed the same pedigree in 1990.

    So, instead of bands like the Smiths, Oasis, and the Stone Roses, the current mainstream milieu includes private school artists like Lily Allen, Mumford & Sons, Coldplay, Florence Welch and La Roux. Allen attended the pricey Bedales, at £9,240 per term, while Welch attended the Alleyn's School, whose per-term commitments push past £4,430.

    Here are just a few of the others...

    Radiohead: Abington School
    Chris Martin: Sherborne School, Dorset
    Mumford & Sons: King's College, St. Paul's
    Laura Marling: Leighton Park School
    Pixie Lott: Italia Conti Academy Of Theatre Arts
    James Blunt: Elstree School, Harrow School

    The reasons for the shift are undoubtedly complicated, and subject to debate.........

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  25. The scones at the Orchard are almost the size of a Victoria sponge.

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  26. Here is what the Orchard looks like, in case anyone is curious - it really is an orchard with lots of deckchairs in it!

    http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-GS-7QNXV8DQ/TdJCdSuHJdI/AAAAAAAAATc/ceQEYcEtmfQ/s640/_1010644.jpg

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  27. I went to Grantchester when I visited England. One thing of note about Grantchester and The Orchard. Judging by the size and composition of the crowd...it definitely deserves a spot on the Stuff White People Like list...without a doubt. (http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/full-list-of-stuff-white-people-like/) :)

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  28. Geoff, you might enjoy this extraordinary piece by Irish poet Michael O’Siadhail. It’s an evocative meditation on the sense of history that a place like this creates.

    Grantchester Meadows

    Across Grantchester Meadows, May has snowed
    cow parsnips, hawthorn, chestnut a stone’s throw
    from here the Cam grooves slowly towards King’s.
    An English heaven: ‘My real life’s began since
    I came to Grantchester I eat strawberries and honey.
    A perfectly glorious time. Think only this of me.’

    I see you Rupert Brook blazered, flannelled,
    a strolling presence in this albescent funnel
    of young summer or picnicking under an oak
    with Darwin’s granddaughters: ‘We used to talk
    wearily about art, suicide, and the sex problem.’
    Übermensch, libido, absinthe, fin de siècle.

    A 100 rings in an oak which may have seen
    George Herbert brooding by the Came or Milton
    explaining the ways of God now Galileo’s sun
    no longer danced attendance on our world. Newton,
    did you some midsummer hatch along this path
    laws to bring our universe back to earth?

    ‘Certainly I approve of war at any price,
    it kills the unnecessary.’ Evenings of tennis
    and cricket. It’s the Aegean 1913:
    ‘My poem is to be about the existence of England.’
    Dead before the Dardanelles. A circle closes;
    the hawthorn almost in bloom, the oak leafless.

    Wars. Disillusion. Certainty a fallen idol,
    our daylight turns a dice-dance of potential.
    Turmoil of change as an old order dies
    into us. Herbert must have known the crux.
    Does the slow-leafing oak trust without proof?
    I know the ways of learning yet I love.

    Ghost Brook you could be my father’s father,
    yet I’m your elder. Ride my Aeneas shoulder
    as Grantchester blooms a lover’s carte-blanche,
    another innocence. Do you remember how strange
    the fullness of the riddle seemed? The acorn can’t
    explain the oak, the oak explains the acorn.

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  29. It's a bit annoying that the Old Rectory where Rupert Brooke lived, and about which he yearningly and hauntingly wrote from the WW1 front, is now, much less impressively, owned by Jeffrey Archer.

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  30. Geoff, did you see Byron’s Pool on the walk from Cambridge to Grantchester? Lord Byron is reputed to have bathed here when he was a student at Trinity College, Cambridge. Now it’s dominated by a weir in which various bits of floating rubbish churn themselves to a presumed oblivion. The poet, if he were here, would no doubt take one glance and shuffle off to Geneva or Lake Como.

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  31. The Pink Floyd – Grantchester Meadows - lyrics are beautiful and worth reading:

    Icy wind of night, be gone.
    This is not your domain.
    In the sky a bird was heard to cry.
    Misty morning whisperings and gentle stirring sounds
    Belied a deathly silence that lay all around.
    Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
    See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
    And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
    Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.
    In the lazy water meadow
    I lay me down.
    All around me,
    Golden sunflakes settle on the ground,
    Basking in the sunshine of a by gone afternoon,
    Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room.
    Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
    See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
    And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
    Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea.
    In the lazy water meadow
    I lay me down.
    All around me,
    Golden sunflakes covering the ground,
    Basking in the sunshine of a by gone afternoon,
    Bringing sounds of yesterday into my city room.
    Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog fox gone to ground.
    See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water.
    And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,
    Laughing as it passes through the endless summer making for the sea

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  32. And here is the song itself by Pink Floyd: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfZPNQPNw-U

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  33. Geoff, I just read a new release, Syd Barrett: A Very Irregular Head by Rob Chapman (I hadn't read much about Syd Barrett, other than Nick Mason's lavish Floyd book of a few years ago, and one chapter of Richie Unterberger's Unknown Legends, which isn't to say I haven't admired and enjoyed his music many times), and it's definitely worth reading. The author argues for the influence of his peers and surroundings rather than chemical inspiration, such as the often overlooked influence of Mike Leonard's light show on the music of Pink Floyd. Personally, I like my non-fiction cluttered with details and tangents, so encountering John Clare, Bob Cobbing, Chaim Soutine and Edward Lear in these pages heightens my interest and appreciation.

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  34. I've loved Syd Barrett for a long time and somehow never heard his version of Vegetable Man until today. I guess it's never been officially released. I first got the song on the Jesus and Mary Chain single years ago. And I just now heard the Soft Boys' version. So I finally dug up Syd's Vegetable Man and found some other wonderful tapewreckage from the sessions he was recording for Pink Floyd's second album. He'd be coming pretty unhinged and getting booted from the band right around this time.

    Some lovely eaten and warped tape here for your listening pleasure:
    http://themudpiesun.com/tapewrecks/Syd%20Barrett/01%20Vegetable%20Man%201.mp3

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  35. Geoff, if you didn't hear it, there was a great Radio 4 about Syd Barrett in June, called The Twilight World of Syd Barrett - http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b011plrs - you can listen to it online.

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  36. Thanks for that link, I will listen to it.

    Re Richard and Paul's comments above, I think the role of the Art School/College in British pop was a crucial one. I don't think the presence of artists from private schools is a new one, however.In the 60's there was Genesis and Jonathan King(Charterhouse), Mike d'Abo of Manfred Mann (Harrow School, Peter & Gordon (Westminster), Nick Mason of Pink Floyd (Frensham Heights), amongst others. Several pop managers of the time also came from such a background - including Andrew Loog Oldham (the Stones) and Simon Napier Bell (Yardbirds amongst others)

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