Bridget St John -[02]- City-Crazy – YouTube
When I was 18 or19, thereabouts, I fell in love with Bridget St John for, oh, a few months or so. I’ll tell it like I remember it. I was young, impressionable, full of that kind of romanticism which only late teens can be full of. Still with bits of A level Wordsworth in my head, springtime (of my life?) in my soul etc. And my soul, I’m afraid, was an incorrigibly dippy, ‘sensitive’ one, far more Donovan and fairy tale gypsies and hawthorn blossoms than prog rock, heavy metal and sweaty electric guitar solos.. Let’s call a spade a spade : I was musically quite narrow, with distinctive blind spots. My loss, no doubt, but there you have it.
I was very struck with the voice when I first heard her on the radio – I do believe it was a Whispering Bob Harris radio programme: in my fuzzy memory I fancy I may even have ‘recorded’ the programme for some reason – unless I am blending memories, on the same list I can recall the Incredible String Band ‘Hedgehog Song’, Ralph McTell singing something from ‘You Well Meaning..’, and Judy Collins’s lovely ‘Albatross’ song. Then this English girl –very English in fact, and how refreshing, oddly, to hear those home counties vowel sounds rather than someone trying to emulate a transatlantic twang. The voice’s quality I’ve heard referred to recently as ‘cello-like’, which is not a bad description. The song was the first track on her second album ‘Songs for the Gentle man’ and it was called ‘A Day away’. Of course it struck a chord: I was a gentle man (!), and this girl sounded like some of the posh undergraduates I was meeting in my first year at Uni: I could imagine long flowing skirts, headscarves maybe, floral caftans etc. In my defence, m’lud, for my rather easy and shallow smittenness, she came with good credentials: whispering Bob said she sounded a lot like Nico (no idea who that was, then, but it sounded good) and he praised the lush orchestration of Ron Geesin’s production (which now sounds to me both twee and overly ornate in its twiddly woodwind accompaniment) PLUS she had been signed on to John Peel’s very own record label (Dandelion) so she had to be something special, didn’t she.
‘Course, it wasn’t just the sound and the voice that struck a chord in this gentle undergraduate’s pathetic consciousness: there was the whole business of the pastoral romance, the nature-child, fantasy rural idyll business. After all, that ‘Day Away’ song was just about that, wasn’t it, leaving behind the tired artificial drabness of ‘city life’ to escape to free and natural surroundings – the sea being the perfect example of freedom. [very funny, the allure of this idyll – it’s hardly as if I came from busy urban background! My own post-mining valley village nestled in a great deal of greenery!] And she evoked the lure of nature’s freedom with just the right set of conscious poeticism likely to appeal to this average English undergraduate – nice bits of personification (‘the winds scrawled her name through the stubble/as she ploughed through the pebbles to grab at the sea..’ etc, and of alliteration (‘ the wittering wind’, ‘slow city suburbs’)
So yes, dear reader, I bought the album, and a particularly loved the second track ‘City Crazy’ which lyrically was pretty much in exactly the same vein as the first song mentioned above, but with rather less orchestration I could work out the guitar and found that I could play it myself. I was, I’m afraid, still a little hooked and entranced by the sentiments of the nature-child fantasy: it’s all here again, in simplistic pastel colours: city BAD (‘living in the city’s grip/I feel I lose control/as she reaches for my body/she is hoping for my soul…’ Hmm. And there’s a ‘wilderness of buildings’ that ‘tie us to their chaos/and try to drag us down’. Whereas country/seaside GOOD:’ I need to sleep on shingle/yes I wish to step on sand/to move in time to tides and winds/and things I understand’. What can I say? I loved it, I sang it. In that sense, I bought into its dream. And it was a pretty one, however naive.
(And it was the age, wasn’t it? It was the very same idyllic dream that Joni Mitchell both flirted with and addressed in her first album: songs like ‘Sisotowbell Lane’ and ‘The Dawntreader’ paint those ‘natural’ images with a sense of beauty and delight; but in ‘Song to a seagull’ she faces the fantasy with a bold dose of realism rare for her generation of songwriters – ‘But sandcastles crumble, and hunger is human/ and humans are hungry for worlds they can’t share..’)
If we think the idealism and sentimentality of Bridget St John’s second album is naive, it is 10 times more so on the first, for me redeemed only by the extraordinary beauty of its title track ‘Ask me no questions’. AND another thing to be said for Bridget St John – she got better and better: the third and fourth albums were packed with some joyous tunes, and what felt like more of a ‘range’. By this time, I’d lost that first heady undergraduate dopey ‘smitten-ness’ and could just admire the music. Rumour had it that she went to America. She fell off one’s ‘musical radar’ for quite a while. She produced a fifth album called ‘Take the Fifth’ (a more meaningful title given her new American setting) which also had some lovely tracks, one of which – with the help of a kind new friend on the Bridget StJohn Facebook site I recently stumbled across – I’m learning to play.
So what about the early stuff? ‘City Crazy’ may not be part of my repertoire any longer? Can we still listen to it and enjoy it? Why not – it’s of its time. I think we can, in moderation.
Going for a Song 