Tag: hippies

98. CITY-CRAZY – Bridget St.John

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.

by Categories: 1970s, Contemporary Folk, singer songwriters, UncategorizedTags: , , , , Leave a comment

89. ISLE OF ISLAY – Donovan

When ‘flower power’ arrived on British shores in the late 1960s, Donovan Leitch embraced this whole heartedly but perhaps imbued it with his own brand of Celtic-British fairy-folk, rustic-romanticism back-to-innocence. He was not alone in this, I suppose: in some ways add a few drugs and these were the colours of the British psychedelic folk boom.

In the same way (minus the drugs) with the same unquestioning enthusiasm I too embraced the gorgeous ‘box set’ double album of ‘A Gift From A Flower To A Garden’ when Allan brought it home one day. [did we say ‘box set’ in those days? Was there such a term?] The lavish artwork that accompanied the albums – line drawings of children, birds, farmers and fishermen; arty-photos through weird coloured filters of robed wizard-looking Donovan holding a flower – it all now bespeaks cringy dippiness at its worst (no –at its very worst were those perhaps exploiting the thirst for faux-rusticity, for peace and love and faeryfolk… but that would be the record producers). Anyway, dippy teen that I was myself, I think I swallowed it whole.

I imagine it must have been released in spring or early summer because that’s the season evoked and corresponded to by this double album, the second disc of which was dedicated to kids or to‘wee ones’ probably. I loved it: it drove me out (after or before listening) to long walks ‘up the mountain’ to commune, presumably, with the cuckoos and a hawthorn berries alluded to in the songs.

It’s easy to look back and feel embarrassed but actually there was and is much value in this double album, and yes I’d say especially in this second disc with its pared-down production, its addition of natural sounds, and in the (why not) commendable childlike charm of its simplicity. Nowhere more so for me than in ‘Isle of Islay’. Take the structure; three verses of three lines each. The melody: simple, unadorned, beautiful. A little hidden craft: internal rhymes throughout (sad/farmlad; neat/peat; blessed/forest). A sense of awe at the simple rugged beauty of nature – OK romanticised no doubt, but evocative in its lexical selection – sheep’s bell, sand, gull, farmlad, peat, seed.

In one of my own early songs (called ‘Dust’ and happily consigned to that!) I ‘borrowed’ a line from this: ‘felt like a grain on your sand..’ This line and the final line ‘felt like a seed on your land’ have strong emotive power, I think, because they encompass a two edged feeling a. a sense of our smallness and insignificance in the whole great scheme of things; but conversely b. a sense of our belonging as part of the whole great natural scheme of things.

….

Something of a coda.

I wrote the above essaylet longhand, in the notebook I carried with me everywhere, nearly five years ago. I decided in this case not to modify and extend it in ways that I have done when writing about other songs. But I did want say something else Donovan-related.

It can often be a disenchanting mistake to read the autobiographies of people you have admired for their musical output. I can think of several where I have just ended feeling appalled at how artists have taken their minimal talent for granted, or as a money making piece of luck, or have wasted fortunes (to which record buying fans like me have contributed) on mountains of narcotics. Others where musicians are keen to chart their chaotic love lives forgetting to acknowledge that the musical lyrical output is really what has made them interesting. Donovan’s autobiography saddened me in a different way: while at times he could be modest or even flippant about his success, more often he seemed to take himself rather too seriously, to the point where he clearly felt that his output was every bit as sophisticated and timeless as Dylan’s. Really? Some perspective please, Mr Leitch.

by Categories: Folk, singer songwriters, the 60sTags: , , , Leave a comment