A Short Essay About A Long-Playing Record

One I bought fifty years ago.

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I’ve been travelling a lot over the last ten days and haven’t had a great deal of time for writing. That aside, these days you’re limited in the number of words you can take on an aeroplane, and I used most of mine up last week. So here is a short essay about a pivotal moment in English social history, and a road not taken, as illustrated by a record I bought just about fifty years ago, the very day it came out. It’s also a recommendation to listen to a desperately underrated artist.

The “record” as we called it in those days is Richard Thompson’s I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight, recorded with his then-wife Linda and a host of eminent folk-rockers of the day, of which more later. The record was critically ignored at the time, and sold very few copies. Typically, after its re-release a decade later it started to attract critical acclaim, and now, apparently, it’s widely considered a “masterpiece.” There have even been a few articles to celebrate its fiftieth anniversary. The record is now effectively in the public domain, and you can listen to it on YouTube here.

Why is it important? Well, it is a masterpiece, but more importantly it’s part of the attempt that lasted from the late sixties to the late seventies to create a popular music that was inspired by English traditions, just as American popular music was inspired by the Blues and other forms of traditional music there. The effort failed, and the reasons why it failed are interesting, but it was a good attempt, and enjoyable while it lasted. A bit of background first.

Although there were traditional types of English music (and Scotland and Ireland are too different to include here, sorry) including the Music Hall, various comical and satirical music forms, and a few decent singers and some composers like Ivor Novello, the vast majority of the music that my parents’ generation listened to was American music from the thirties, forties and fifties. British popular music of the late fifties and early sixties was so indescribably awful that I’m not even going to try to describe how awful it was: full of pretty-boy Elvis wannabes and girls with beehive hairdos, without an ounce of talent between them.

This is why the Beatles arrived with the force of a Kinzhal missile. Yes, a lot of their original inspiration was American, but if you listened carefully, then from the beginning there were echoes of traditional musical modes and the music of the Liverpool Irish community. There was the European sensibility from the years in Hamburg: the hairstyles and the moody black and white photographs. And quite quickly, everything from avant-garde and electronic music, to tape-loops and studio trickery to brass bands and symphony orchestras went into the mix, as the Beatles casually invented entire musical genres overnight. And in turn, many of the “groups” that followed them, such as the Who and the Kinks wrote and played music that was distinctively English, and could not have been produced anywhere else.

But little of this directly drew on the tradition. English cultural nationalism had never really been a thing. The English (indeed British) ruling class looked backwards to Greece and Rome and across the Channel to France, Germany and Italy for their culture, and there were no composers of the stature of Grieg, Bartok or Dvorak inspired by their own musical heritage. The best England could offer was the bicycling clergyman Cecil Sharpe, who, after serendiptously hearing a gardener singing a traditional song, devoted the rest of his life to collecting and preserving such music before it died out entirely, and founded the English Folk Dance and Song Society. Ralph Vaughan Williams tried valiantly, if not always very successfully, to use traditional English material in his orchestral works. But for the rest it was pretty much preserved in aspic, in universities and among specialist musicologists, and traditional songs were sung in bowdlerised form by school choirs (I was there) or set to a piano accompaniment as though they were Lieder. There were a few singers who tried to preserve a living tradition, (without attracting much of an audience) but they tended to be purists like Ewan MacColl, whose uncompromising musical attitudes and Marxist fundamentalism created a ghetto of their own.

Curiously, the impulse that changed this came from the United States. In the late fifties and early sixties, traditional American music began to spread in England, especially from the records brought back by merchant seamen to places like Liverpool (the Beatles almost certainly heard some.) This produced something of a musical boom in England, as teenagers realised that most of the songs had a simple harmonic structure and could be played with a few chords, on the guitar that their indulgent parents would buy them on credit. And when the first records of Bob Dylan and Joan Baez found their way across the Atlantic, people started to realise that they were singing versions of traditional English songs. (Dylan’s A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall is a re-working of the English ballad Lord Randall, and many of Baez’s early songs were transplanted US versions of English originals.)

Excitedly, young musicians threw themselves into this new material, and by the mid-60s artists started to appear like Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, fiddler Dave Swarbrick,  and my personal hero Martin Carthy, who showed that it was possible to combine scholarly research and vocal and instrumental virtuosity with a genuinely modern and popular performing style. The late 1960s saw guitars and fiddles everywhere, and the flourishing of an entire underground musical economy of folk clubs (usually rented rooms in pubs, or rooms at Universities), singers travelling the country sleeping in somebody’s spare room, and even a few enterprising record companies like Leader and Transatlantic. The economics were on a knife-edge: they only worked because people gave up their free time for nothing, and because the two half-hour professional sets were supplemented by floor singers like me who, provided we could meet an acceptable musical standard, were allowed in free. It was a genuinely popular (not to say politically radical) movement while it lasted, and it stayed  largely beneath the cultural radar.

The final strand was the contemporaneous rediscovery of English early music. As long-playing records of the standard classical repertoire became widely available, more adventurous musicians started to look backwards to lesser-known music.  It turned out that England was not, after all, the “Land without music,” but had a rich musical heritage that had been largely forgotten. The pioneer here was David Munrow with his Early Music Consort, who pretty much introduced early music to British audiences, including much forgotten and overlooked music from England, before his untimely death by suicide in 1976. It was obvious from the start that there was a massive overlap between traditional English music and the music of the court and the town, and unsurprisingly Munrow soon collaborated with traditional singers such as the acapella trio the Young Tradition (on Galleries, 1969) and with Shirley and Dolly Collins (Anthems in Eden the same year.) Other ensembles such as Philip Pickett’s New London Consort carried on the same tradition.

Traditional music was transmitted orally, and worked by accretion and selection, which is why there are so many versions of traditional songs. Inevitably some traditional singers also wanted to try their hand at composing, and musicians like Cyril Tawney and Ian Campbell sometimes featured traditionally-based songs of their own composition. But it was Richard Thompson who brought together the traditions of nascent English rock music, traditional song and early music for the first time, and the rest of this short essay is about him.

Thompson was a founder member of Fairport Convention, a vaguely folk-rock outfit inspired by the Byrds and the Jefferson Airplane. Fairport had traditional influences from the beginning—singer Sandy Denny was a folk-club stalwart—but when Dave Swarbrick, then playing with Martin Carthy in England’s premier traditional duo, made a guest appearance on their third album  Unhalfbricking, he and Thompson hit it off musically instantly.  Swarbrick, Thompson and Denny  played together on Fairport’s masterpiece Liege and Lief (1969). Thompson was always interested in traditional music, but as he says in his autobiography people, like Carthy were already doing that very well. On the other hand, he had already written traditionally-influenced songs like Meet on the Ledge for Fairport. Thompson left Fairport in 1971 and has since pursued a career as a singer-songwriter, initially with his wife Linda. Fairport also spawned Steeleye Span, the other foundational ensemble of the time, with former bassist Ashley Hutchings and Martin Carthy. After one solo album Henry the Human Fly which sank without trace, Thompson and his wife recorded I Want to See the Bright Lights Tonight in early 1973, although the release was delayed for a year for various reasons.

The main reaction to the album at the time was incomprehension: there was too much going on, and too many different styles that no-one had ever tried to put together before. Record shops didn’t know which bin to put it in. Partly, this was because of the range of musicians involved. As well as Thomson’s electric and acoustic guitars, and an orthodox rock rhythm section, the album featured Simon Nicol of Fairport on dulcimer, Royston Wood of the Young Tradition on voice, two Renaissance krummhorns, and John Kirkpatrick on accordion and concertina. (Kirkpatrick later joined Carthy in a subsequent version of Steeleye Span, and the two of them formed Brass Monkey, combining traditional music with brass instruments. Oh, and there was a brass band on the 1974 recording as well.)  And Thompson and Pickett were later to record an instrumental album of Elizabethan dance music, The Bones of All Men, with the Fairport rhythm section. If all this seems a bit complex and incestuous, well it represents very well the overlapping world on English musicians of all types interested in traditional culture.

In many ways, Thompson’s album was the English equivalent of Dylan’s John Wesley Harding, drawing on parallel folk traditions. Like Dylan’s, Thompson’s lyrics were allusive and cryptic, often bleak and stoic in nature, reflecting the folk tradition, and the centuries of slow infiltration of the language and imagery of the Authorised Version of the Bible into daily speech. The difference, of course, is that Dylan was an established, world-famous performer, and Thompson was a cult figure with a small fan-base: not that it seems he ever wanted much more than that.

For a while, though, to did seem as though English culture, as opposed to just copies of American culture, might make its way into the mainstream. Musicians, actors and authors from the working class and the lower-middle class began to find favour and an audience in the 1960s. The long-running BBC TV drama series “Z Cars” depicted in surprisingly realistic detail the work of the Police in Liverpool, and prepared the way for many more dramas about ordinary people.  The opening of universities to people like me from the lower reaches of society seemed at last to promise a governing class with somewhat wider social origins. And it was actually possible to feel that there was a genuinely English musical spirit abroad, in everything from the hardest of rock to the most delicate of medieval plainsong.

It didn’t last, and the reasons why not would take a separate essay, but let me just mention two things. The combination of inflation and stagnation resulting from the 1973 Oil Crisis brought unemployment back for first time since the 1930s. The confidence of the sixties (exaggerated in retrospect perhaps, but very real nonetheless) gave way to disappointment, pessimism and a sour resentment. The Left turned to vicious infighting after the defeat of 1979. This directed a lot of musical energy into the nihilistic anger of punk rock, itself technically unsophisticated and within the capability of anyone who could play two and a half chords and spit. And secondly, the beginning of Thatcher’s reign saw the deregulation of entertainment media, and the inevitable flooding of the country with cheap imported material and US soap operas, and internationalised music from everywhere and nowhere. Thatcher, perhaps the only British Prime Minister in history to have absolutely no interest at all in culture, seemed to be quite happy with “choice" in the quantitative wholesale sense, even if in practice the choice involved was between one piece of dreck and another. The economics of folk clubs became impossible, and folk-rock itself stumbled. British music began to sound like a knock-off of American music again. It wasn’t all misery of course—many of the performers I’ve mentioned above are still alive and performing, notably Thompson himself—but it could all have been so much more.

But give Thompson’s work a listen anyway: I don’t think you will be disappointed.