THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,754) Pete Atkin — “Laughing Boy”
Ah, the team of Pete Atkin and Clive James. (see #263, 859-60) It’s as if Gilbert and Sullivan woke up in Swinging London. And I’m not talkin’ Gilbert O’Sullivan!
Christopher Evans writes that “Laughing Boy” “laments the fact that the singer’s friends — especially the female ones — are unable to discern the suffering artist behind the carapace of caustic wit.” He notes that “James, it is worth remembering, was already established on British TV by now as a purveyor of corner-of-the-mouth putdowns in his capacity as a film reviewer.” (https://www.allmusic.com/album/beware-of-the-beautiful-stranger-mw0000844411)
Bittersweet, yearning and knowing. “I’ve got the only cure for life And the cure for life is joy”
Christopher Evans talks of the partnership:
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
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