THE GREATEST SONGS OF THE 1960s THAT NO ONE HAS EVER HEARD
1,817) Duncan Browne — “Alfred Bell”
I’ve played the A-side (see #155), here’s the B-side from Duncan Browne (see also #357), one those beautiful souls who was lost to us all too early (in ‘93). “Bell” is “[p]erfect UK Baroque psych folk” (robison5396, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xEkuebIz23Q), and as David Wells writes:
[It’s] the tale of an ageing schoolteacher that opened with some raucous, playground-style chanting from the unfortunate Mr. Bell’s unruly young charges. “I recall quite vividly the recording of children’s voices on this track”, [lyricist David] Bretton recounted . . . . “Andrew Oldham allowed us to drive around to the school in his famous Rolls Royce — which Duncan and I enjoyed immensely!”
liner notes to CD reissue of Give Me Take You
Bruce Eder says of the album Give Me Take You:
[It] was one of the jewels of the Immediate Records catalog, a quietly dazzling work that embraced elements of folk, rock, pop, and classical, all wrapped around some surprisingly well-crafted poetry and Browne’s stunning voice. Over the decades, it has been compared to the best work of Paul McCartney and the Moody Blues, and also to such albums as Astral Weeks by Van Morrison . . . .
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/duncan-browne-mn0000154955/biography
Wells digs deep:
An achingly beautiful compendium of ornate chamber pop wispiness, layered vocal arrangements, Spirt of the Age lyrical pretensions and Brown’s plangent, folk-derived melodies, Give Me Take You is now widely acknowledged as something of a cult classic, [with a] quiet intelligence and elegiac, gently urbane baroque pop classicism . . . . Certainly, there was a musty, sepia-tinted Englishness to the set, which incorporated Arthurian legends and literary allusions alongside autumnal vignettes of the grey, closed-on-Wednesday-afternoons melancholia that underpinned English suburbia”.
liner notes to CD reissue of Give Me Take You
As to Browne, the Aquarian Drunkard writes that:
[Browne was] sensitivity, sophistication, artful baroque and progressive leanings. . . . [with] the ability to chart his own arrangements, buoyed by a flair for melodies so sweet and sad that they almost hurt to hear. At a time when most of his fellow countrymen desperately tried to sound American, Browne dared to embrace his British-ness . . . . Andrew Loog Oldham . . . first snapped up a young Duncan . . . . When I asked Andrew to share his first impressions . . . he replied: “other worldly, attractive, mannered, confident.” Oldham encouraged him to record a solo album, and Duncan recruited a friend [David Bretton] to add fanciful lyrics to his then-wordless new songs. . . . Andrew professed, “Duncan was therapy in a time of madness. And I got to be in the studio for my therapy. How good is that?”
Yes, how good was that? In 2 Stoned, the second volume of his must-read memoirs, Oldham writes that Give Me, Take You “is well remembered but did not sell well at the time. . . . Duncan . . . remains one of the artists I was proudest to stand in a room with and watch evolve.”
Why didn’t the album sell? Bruce Eder says:
Despite its many virtues, the album died a commercial death, largely as a result of its being released just at the point when Immediate’s financial underpinnings were beginning to collapse. . . . Browne probably could have gotten some concert work from the release, but for a certain degree of confusion as to who he was, owing both to Immediate’s slipshod publicity operation and the design of the album jacket — the triple superimposed image of Browne, coupled with the multiple overdubs on many of the songs, led some promoters to think that Duncan Browne was a trio of some sort.
https://www.allmusic.com/artist/duncan-browne-mn0000154955/biography
And as Oldham himself told the Aquarian Drunkard:
“My partner Tony Calder was going through a period where he loathed anything I championed. Duncan and Billy Nicholls [see #2, 64, 144, 428, 757, 964, 1,085, 1,205, 1,396, 1,678, 1,797] fell victim to that and got no pragmatic promotion. Tony wanted big – I wanted good.” . . . [Browne’s widow] Lin confirmed that “they were still in touch right up until Duncan’s death” . . . .
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