All Aboard the Pete Atkin “Midnight Special” Edition: Pete Atkin— “Girl on the Train”, Pete Atkin — “The Original Honky Tonk Night Train Blues”: Brace for the Obscure (60s rock)! — June 13, 2023

THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD

Ah, the team of Pete Atkin and Clive James (see #263). It’s as if Gilbert and Sullivan woke up in Swinging London. And I’m not talkin’ Gilbert O’Sullivan!

Christopher Evans:

In the early ’70s, the songwriting partnership of Pete Atkin and Clive James was held in high esteem by the British music press, yet commercial success proved much more elusive. Their unique attempt to fuse the discipline and craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley with the self-expression of rock, while refusing to accept any limitation on what constituted appropriate subject matter for lyrics, inevitably set them on a collision course with their record companies’ marketing departments. . . . James’ points of reference took in the full panoply of art, cinema, literature, and poetry, sometimes leaving his work open to accusations of being wordy and pretentious. In its own way, Atkin’s music was just as erudite, drawing on every form of popular music from show tunes through folk, jazz, and rock. . . . The pair first met in 1966 as members of the Cambridge Footlights Revue that spawned so much British comedy talent, from the satire of Beyond the Fringe to the surrealism of Monty Python. . . . James recently emigrated from Australia, was a postgraduate student, six years older than Atkin . . . .

Though they managed to finance a couple of private recordings of their earliest songs, it wasn’t until 1970 that a full-fledged record emerged in the form of Beware of the Beautiful Stranger. In fact, the album had been recorded as a collection of demos to showcase the pair’s talents as songwriters for other artists, but producer Don Paul was a friend of popular BBC DJ Kenny Everett, who took a shine to the album’s opening track and began playing it on daytime Radio 1. As a result, Philips agreed to issue the album as it stood, and Atkin’s career as a recording artist was launched. . . . [But] British record-buyers were having none of it. By the time the pair’s second album, the more rock-oriented Driving Through Mythical America, arrived in 1971, their beyond-the-mainstream status was confirmed. . . . Exhausted by all the ceaseless wrangling with RCA, Atkin went on to find a new career in radio production with the BBC, though he continued to make the odd appearance in small folk clubs. Meanwhile James quickly became one of the most familiar figures on British television, where his lacerating wit and coruscating wordplay secured him a seemingly endless sequence of programs tailored to his unique style . . . .

Atkin’s deadpan and very English voice was the perfect vehicle for James’ wryly melancholic musings, most of which focused here on an infinitely sensitive young aesthete’s quest for eternal love and his endless capacity to screw it up when he found it. . . . Musically, the album finds Atkin still in an MOR no man’s land between folk and tasteful acoustic pop, a little too eager to please and reluctant to offend. . . .

https://www.allmusic.com/artist/pete-atkin-mn0000312634/biography; https://www.allmusic.com/album/beware-of-the-beautiful-stranger-mw0000844411

As Pete Atkin recalls:

I’d sung a few of my own silly songs at [Cambridge] Footlights . . . concerts, and one day Clive simply handed me a lyric and said “Hey, sport, do you think you can do anything with this?” . . . [W]e soon started turning out songs . . . . [W]e did imagine our songs being sung famously by successful singers, which is partly what led me to organize some amateurish recordings . . . and to assemble a couple of privately-pressed LPs. The idea was to sell enough of them to unwitting friends . . . to cover the costs and use the rest as demos. . . . [T]he demo LPs did lead us in late 1969 to the publishers Essex Music [and] some proper studio sessions to record some of the songs. And those, amazingly, are the recordings you have here. . . . [The producer Don Paul was] a mate of Kenny Everett, at that time the most famous and influential DJ in the land with his Saturday morning show on BBC Radio 1. Don played him a couple of the tracks, and he . . . played them on his show several weeks running. . . . And so I became a recording artist, which hadn’t originally been the idea at all . . . . At that critical point Kenny . . . notoriously got himself sacked by the BBC for what was considered in those days to be an inexcusable and intolerable joke, something to do with the Minister of Transport’s wife having just passed her driving test. . . . Although the album didn’t, as they used to say, trouble the charts, it did pretty well really, perhaps partly because it didn’t sound much like anything else. It might have done even better, but the trouble was it didn’t sound much like anything else.

liner notes to the CD reissue Beware of the Beautiful Stranger . . . Plus: The Songs of Pete Atkin & Clive James

858) Pete Atkin — “Girl on the Train”

Christopher Evans writes that “‘Girl on the Train’ finds ‘the leading poetic hope of the whole Planet Earth’ alone in a railway carriage with a beautiful young woman whose spiritual depth is signaled by the fact that she’s ‘reading obsolete Monsieur Verlaine.’ The poetic hope, of course, says nothing and is left ruing another lost opportunity.” (https://www.allmusic.com/album/beware-of-the-beautiful-stranger-mw0000844411)

Pete Atkin informs us that:

This is the other track that Kenny Everett latched on to. Clive says that the events it describes (or a version of them — they do seem to recur) occurred on the Cambridge-to-Oxford train . . . and that the girl was in fact reading Lamartine and not Verlaine, a change made for the sake of the rhyme. Sadly, as someone pointed out . . . “Verlaine” doesn’t strictly rhyme with “train” either. The three sided knife . . . turns out to be a particularly nasty kind of stiletto . . . .

liner notes to the CD reissue Beware of the Beautiful Stranger . . . Plus: The Songs of Pete Atkin & Clive James

Clive James chimes in: “[N]othing beats the erotic charge of a beautiful woman reading a book. . . . [F]or me ‘Verlaine’ and ‘train’ still rhyme. I speak Australian French. Tant Pis.” (liner notes to the CD reissue Beware of the Beautiful Stranger . . . Plus: The Songs of Pete Atkin & Clive James)

859) Pete Atkin — “The Original Honky Tonk Night Train Blues“

Atkins recalls:

I had a phase of being fascinated by the way the likes of Jon Hendricks, King Pleasure, and Eddie Jefferson, for instance, were writing hip lyrics to improvised jazz solos, and I foolishly wondered if I might be able to do the same for Meade Lux Lewis’s Honky Tonk Train Blues. As you’ll hear if you check this against the original, I kind of ran out of (ahem) steam after about eight bars of what was in any case a fairly approximate attempt. But not wanting to waste those eight bars, I filled out the rest of the lyric, with steam engineering knowledge which I did not possess but derived from a cutaway drawing in Odham’s Modern Encyclopedia for Children, and finished the song with musical ideas nicked from just about every train blues there’s ever been. I have been told condescendingly by some unnervingly friendly steam engine enthusiasts that, apart obviously from some lamentable anthropomorphism, the song is surprisingly accurate.

liner notes to the CD reissue Beware of the Beautiful Stranger . . . Plus: The Songs of Pete Atkin & Clive James

Christopher Evans was less impressed: Atkins’ “two attempts at lyrics, however — [including] the comical memory feat of ‘The Original Honky Tonk Train Blues’ . . . suggest he was right to hand over the literary side of the operation to James.” (https://www.allmusic.com/album/beware-of-the-beautiful-stranger-mw0000844411)

Here is Mead Lux Lewis:

I have added a Facebook page for Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock! If you like what you read and hear and feel so inclined, please visit and “like” my Facebook page by clicking here.

Pay to Play! The Off the Charts Spotify Playlist! + Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock Merchandise

Please consider helping to support my website/blog by contributing $6 a month for access to the Off the Charts Spotify Playlist. Using a term familiar to denizens of Capitol Hill, you pay to play! (“relating to or denoting an unethical or illicit arrangement in which payment is made by those who want certain privileges or advantages in such arenas as business, politics, sports, and entertainment” — dictionary.com).

The playlist includes all the “greatest songs of the 1960’s that no one has ever heard” that are available on Spotify. The playlist will expand each time I feature an available song.

All new subscribers will receive a Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock magnet. New subscribers who sign up for a year will also receive a Brace for the Obscure 60s Rock t-shirt or baseball cap. See pictures on the Pay to Play page.

When subscribing, please send me an e-mail (GMFtma1@gmail.com) or a comment on this site letting me know an e-mail address/phone number/Facebook address, etc. to which I can send instructions on accessing the playlist and a physical address to which I can sent a magnet/t-shirt/baseball cap. If choosing a t-shirt, please let me know the gender and size you prefer.

Just click on the first blue block for a month to month subscription or the second blue block for a yearly subscription.