UNDERRATED ALBUMS # 15

A Bygone Afternoon: Floyd Alfresco

(2013)

 By Pink Floyd

 

Track List

1.   Scarecrow (Barrett)

2.   Flaming (Barrett)

      from The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn (1967)

3.   Remember A Day (Wright)
from A Saucerful Of Secrets (1968)

4.   Grantchester Meadows (Waters)

5.   The Narrow Way – Pt. 1 (Gilmour)

      from Ummagumma (1969)

6.    Cirrus Minor (Waters)

7.    Crying Song (Waters)

8.    Green Is The Colour (Waters)

       from More (OST 1969)
9.   Embryo (Waters)
from Picnic (1970)
10.   Breathe (Waters)
from Music From The Body (1970)

11.    If (Waters)

12.  Summer Of ’68 (Wright)

13.  Fat Old Sun (Gilmour)

       From Atom Heart Mother (1970)

14.  A Pillow Of Winds (Waters/Gilmour)

       from Meddle (1971)

                                                   15.  Burning Bridges (Wright/Waters)

                                                         16.  Mudmen (Wright/Gilmour)

                                                     from Obscured By Clouds (OST 1972)
 

I fell under the spell of The Pink Floyd on hearing their first two singles, ‘Arnold Layne’ and ‘See Emily Play’, during the fabled spring and summer of 1967 – I think the definite article may have still been in play then, although it had certainly disappeared by early August when the debut album was released. At the time, I spent approximately half of one week’s wages on the thrilling ‘See Emily Play’ – about 35p these days – from my after-school job (collecting paint and wallpaper etc. for a local decorator’s shop from a wholesaler on a delivery bike with a basket attached) . Joint-top of my birthday wish-list were Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Piper At The Gates Of Dawn. I certainly got both albums, although as I had left school and was working by then, I may have had to cough up some of the price of them out of my wages. I think albums cost 32s/6d each – in modern money, a combined sum of £3.25p. I doubt if I’ve ever since had such value from that amount of money. No wonder that Pepper and Piper are forever linked in my mind. Incidentally, the recording of both albums overlapped in the studios at Abbey Road during the first half of 1967.

Until the late 1970s, Pink Floyd was probably my second favourite band after The Beatles. Wish You Were (1975), fine album that it is, nevertheless spread its ideas somewhat thinly, whilst with Animals (1977), they were, it seemed to me, starting to repeat themselves. Apart from ‘Comfortably Numb’, by far its best song, The Wall (1979) left me cold - and that was me and the Floyd done.

My ‘relationship’ with them had seen them go from Syd Barrett’s Psychedelic Pop Group to the premier Underground / Progressive / Freak-Out / Space-Rock Band to Roger Waters’ Psychoperatic Musical Assistants. It’s that post-Syd, pre-Dark Side Of The Moon  period which has interested me most when I think back over their career. When I came to rough out a preliminary list of underrated albums for my Jukebox For A Brain project, it was that era I looked to.

I couldn’t make up my mind between the More OST and Atom Heart Mother. Both had enjoyed a measure of chart success in the UK: ATH had indeed, been their first UK # 1 (US # 55) and the soundtrack record had reached # 9 in the UK and # 2 in France. In the wake of the mind-boggling success of DSOTM, both sold steadily but, in the long run, have tended to be overlooked by critics, fans and the band alike. Not a single track from either album appears on the supposedly ‘definitive’ 2CD set Echoes: The Best Of Pink Floyd (2001), a 26 track compilation assembled by the band themselves.

The quieter, more pastoral side of Pink Floyd on their earlier records has also tended to be overshadowed by their more grandiose concepts. It is these forgotten, simpler songs of sunlit, rustical nostalgia that I have gathered together here on this collection.    

                                                    * * * * *

 

                           ‘Golden sunflakes settle on the ground,

                            Basking in the sunshine of a bygone afternoon,

                            Bringing sounds of yesterday into this city room.’

                            (‘Grantchester Meadows’)

Nostalgia tends to be an emotion suffused with sunlight. My theory is that this is partly due to childhood often being captured by the lens of a camera. In the old, pre-digital days of snapshot photography, there were far, far fewer pictures taken than nowadays. Cameras only used to come out when the sun did. Thus it was that the summers of yesteryear seemed brighter and longer then. Coming from one of the last generations of children to be allowed or indeed, inclined to enjoy the freedom of playing out in streets, parks and fields, I can’t help but feel more fortunate than modern kids tucked away in the private interior worlds of their hi-tech bedrooms with their iPhones and Xboxes, whilst the sunshine outside waits in vain for them to come out and play*1.

                     

  (5-man Floyd: a rare transitional shot
 with both Barrett and Gilmour)

Nostalgia certainly set in early for Syd Barrett. He was barely out of his teens before he’d recorded the handful of songs for which he is best remembered: the child-like snatches of psychedelic whimsy which appeared on Pink Floyd’s early singles and first album*2. Lyrically charming as these songs are, they wouldn’t ultimately have added up to much without Barrett’s musical vision and the brief but brilliant blaze of his guitar-playing allied to the power of his band’s ensemble performances. These are great recordings and, when they are not suggestive of the starlit darkness of space,  they often emanate a sundrenched return to childhood.    

On ‘Scarecrow’ though, which opens our compilation, the sound is rather ominous due to Richard Wright’s evocation of a lonesome oboe sound on his Farfisa organ and Roger Waters’ dramatic bass guitar looming in towards the end like a storm cloud. This wonderful little song was the b-side of ‘See Emily Play’ before it appeared on Piper and I used to play it almost as much as the a-side. The clip-clopping percussion fascinated me, evoking riders on horseback cantering past the barley field without a thought for the lonely, windswept ‘black and green scarecrow...with a bird on his hat / and straw everywhere’.

The song now seems something of a metaphor for Barrett himself and as it leads into the doomy organ chord, eery voices, whistles and whooshes at the start of ‘Flaming’, you might be wondering where the sunshine is that I’ve been alluding to. It comes streaming in with Barrett’s mischieviously boyish vocal gleefully declaring ‘Yippee! You can’t see me but I can you’ from where he is ‘lying on an eiderdown’, fantasising about ‘lazing in the foggy dew’ before ‘watching buttercups cup the light’. Barrett bashes away on an acoustic guitar while Wright’s keyboards and backing vocals lift the melody up in a way befitting a narrator by now riding ‘a unicorn’, not to mention ‘travelling by telephone’ amidst assorted clattering of percussion, tinkling of bells, cuckoos and Waters’ inventive bass lines. ‘Hey ho! Here we go / Ever so high’: indeed!

This trip around Little Boy Barrett’s mind is a delight but, by the next album he’d all but disappeared, left behind by his band and contributing just one song, the poignant ‘Jug Band Blues’ (‘I’m much obliged to you for making it clear / That I’m not here’). He was replaced by his old friend David Gilmour, who plays high-pitched slide- guitar on ‘Remember A Day’, composed and sung by Wright, who does a fine job of trying to write like Syd.  The dreamy melancholia of the song, which yearns to return to when we were ‘Free to play alone with time’, conjures up a profoundly nostalgic effect. Musically, the song drifts woozily along, led by Wright’s splashy piano and Nick Mason’s drumming*3.      

The next two tracks are drawn from the neglected second half of the double-LP, Ummagumma, sides  3 & 4 of which feature experimental solo suites by each member of the band. In the same way that John Lennon’s abstract piece for The Beatles’ White Album (1968), the eleven and half minutes of ‘Revolution 9’ has been routinely ignored or dismissed down the years by lazy journalists and close-minded fans, so has the second disc of Ummagumma. I’m no great fan of abstract art and there’s no doubt that these tracks do contain quite high levels of self-indulgence, but they also are very interesting milestones in the development of both bands. And ‘Grantchester Meadows’ from side 3 of Ummagumma, has always struck me as one of Roger Waters’ very best songs.

At seven and a half minutes making it the longest track on this compilation, it fades in with birdsong and the buzzing of bees over the song’s solitary acoustic guitar. There is a powerful sense of place – the meadows run alongside the River Cam near the band’s native Cambridge – and the words find Waters at his most poetic. Note the elaborate internal rhyming of the chorus:

                         ‘Hear the lark and harken to the barking of the dog-fox

                         Gone to ground.

                         See the splashing of the kingfisher flashing to the water

                         And a river of green is sliding unseen beneath the trees,

                         Laughing as it passes through the endless summer

                         Making for the sea.’

Waters’ gentle vocal carries the melody beautifully, but this pastoral idyll is brought rudely to a close by a moment of black comedy as footsteps are heard following a fly which is then abruptly swatted.

Appropriately, Gilmour’s ‘The Narrow Way Pt. 1’ from side 4 comes spinning in next. A short guitar instrumental with some phasing and wordless vocalising, it seems to me to maintain the pastoral mood before spinning back out into the birdsong which flutters throughout ‘Cirrus Minor’, the first of three Roger Waters songs from the More OST *4, all of them sung by David Gilmour. Proceeding from ‘a churchyard by a river’ through the clouds and ‘a thousand miles of moonlight’, the song features a suitably churchy organ from Wright in the style of ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’ and peals of church bells. The druggy atmosphere also pervades the sun-drunk ‘Crying Song’ with its ambling bass, and the folky ‘Green Is The Colour’ - a song which would fit nicely on one of Ronnie Lane’s bucolic ‘70s albums - with its whistle, acoustic guitar and piano accompanying Gilmour’s appealing higher register voice.

'Embryo' trickles in on a stately Eastern groove suggested by Wright's keyboards, with a gentle guitar and cymbals. Waters intones a lyric in the character of a nascent baby developing in  amniotic fluid: 'All is love, is all I am / A ball is all I am...Warm glow, moon bloom / Always need a little more room'. Gilmour coaxes subterranean sound effects from his wah-wah pedal and Wright adds piano as the voice declares, 'I feel my dawn is near', expecting to soon see the sunshine that bathes the simple acoustic guitar and another tremulous vocal by Waters in 'Breathe'. This song comes from the soundtrack of Music From The Body*5 and is not to be confused with the much more well-known - and different - track from DSOTM which shares its title and first line. Contrasting hopeful images of a pastoral idyll with those of an increasingly polluted urban reality, the song is fragile little piece and works here as something of a wake-up call to the soon to be born baby of the previous song.

The three tracks from Atom Heart Mother follow, beginning with Waters’ breathy, wistful ‘If’*6. This dolefully pretty song outlines Waters’ perennial themes of insecurity and insanity, the guitar and piano closely tracing the vocal melody. Wright’s ‘Summer ‘68’ with its jaunty piano, Beach Boys harmonies and brass section  seems at odds with its sour lyric about giving a groupie (or possibly prostitute) the brush-off, but it has an uplifting sound which one can imagine wafting out from a bandstand in a park. Gilmour’s hymn to eventide, ‘Fat Old Sun’ which again features church bells, is one of the absolute gems in the Floyd’s catalogue. Beautifully sung and adorned with a soaring guitar and bass coda which Harrison and McCartney would have been proud of, it fails to appear on any of  the band’s compilations…
 

The Waters/Gilmour co-composition, ‘A Pillow Of Winds’  from the Meddle album, is almost as good. Waters presumably wrote the words of this sleepy love song, but Gilmour’s voice and distinctive guitar work is all over it. The final two songs from Obscured By Clouds*7 have a similar, languorously romantic atmosphere with Wright and Gilmour sharing vocals on ‘Burning Bridges’. These two are also to the fore on the instrumental, ‘Mudmen’, with Gilmour's dazzling guitar cadenza bringing our programme to a closing crescendo.
 

I’m generally inclined to think that compilation albums tend to make most sense when they’re sequenced chronologically – and that’s what I did with A Bygone Afternoon. I was very pleased therefore when the order seemed to make sense musically. If this review has tickled your fancy, then I’d recommend that you find the tracks and burn yourself a disc (it will last just under 70 minutes) and listen to it in your garden with a bottle of wine on a sunny afternoon. A sun-dappled world of birdsong, bees, church bells and drowsy melodies drifting down the river into the sunset awaits you.

 N. B.

*1 – I could, of course, be partly or even wholly wrong about this. In the UK at least, there certainly seems less sunshine around these days to tempt the young folk outside and, to be fair, when the old currant-bun does have its hat on, I do notice groups of kids mooching around town centres, heads bowed in concentration as they fiddle with their phones, on their way towards an invigorating ramble around the shopping mall. It’s not the same though, is it?    

*2 – It has often been noted that a feature of UK Psychedelia that tends to distinguish it from its US counterpart is the British preoccupation with childhood and ‘the old days’. The acid-fried withdrawal from the public eye and the adult demands of the music industry led Syd Barrett back to his Cambridge home where he spent the second half of his life in quiet seclusion with his mother and other relatives.

*3 – Opinion seems to be divided on Mason as a drummer: some see him as a bit of a weak link in the Floyd, others as a jazz-influenced and original player. Personally, I’ve always liked the imaginative percussion-work on Floyd records, but his actual drumming, especially on the early albums, to my ears owes an unrecognised debt to the 1966-67 era Beatles, especially Ringo Starr’s playing on ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’, which clearly influenced ‘Remember A Day’ and ‘A Saucerful Of Secrets’, for instance. Paul McCartney was also reaching his peak as an imaginative and melodic bassist at this time too, and I think it’s possible to detect his influence on Waters’ playing.

*4 – More (1969) was a European-produced film with English dialogue, directed by Barbet Schroeder. Set on the island of Ibiza, it is a sunglazed hippy tale of drug abuse which all ends in tears. The soundtrack music is integral and certainly enhances the rather dull and dated plot.

*5 - Like all of the music featured in Roy Battersby's film, The Body (1970), 'Breathe' is credited to Roger Waters & Ron Geesin (he who also contributed to Atom Heart Mother) even though, in this case, it is a Waters solo voice and guitar piece.  The contemporaneous 'Embryo' would have surely fit well on the soundtrack, - especially as Battersby filmed the interiors as well as exteriors of the human form - but instead, it ended up on a Harvest Records sampler called Picnic that same year, failing to make the cut for any official Floyd studio album.

 

*6 – Not to be confused with the Kipling poem or Bread song written by David Gates of the same name. The latter became an unlikely spoken-word # 1 UK hit for bald, lollipop-sucking US TV cop Kojak played by Telly Savalas in 1975.

*7 – La Vallee (1972) was a French film, again directed by Barbet Schroeder, about a  quest for a lost paradise in a New Guinea valley ‘obscured by clouds' by a group of explorers and a tribe of primitive indians. This OST album isn’t as strong musically or quite as complimentary to the film as More.

I created the 'cover' picture for this imaginary album from a photograph that I took of a meadow by the River Soar on Abbey Park
near where I live in Leicester. Think of it as a gatefold LP sleeve...

MOONSHINE

Old, grey ocean rolls in
And siren stars slink out.
Now the evening wears thin
And, with night, comes sidling doubt.

Crawl along the kerb of the shore,
Kidding yourself it’s all for experience;
Never satisfied, you always want more,
Cruising for some new, blue radiance.

There she is: ancient, vapidly proud,
Blue Moon playing her cheapest trick,
Gliding behind a rainy cloud
In the dark sky louring thick.

Skewbald charlatan rides, can disappear;
Two-faced, she can wax and she can wane;
She’s nothing but a chameleon-fakir,
Making idle fools wonder if they’re sane.

She’s just a grey, dead stone
Stuck up in a void of black-blue,
Pale, pocked and windblown,
With no more magic than me or you.

But still the old heathen exerts a pull,
Mesmerizes with her illusory rides,
Making us passive, making us dull,
Turning us to her magnetic tides.

All things pass in this way
And flat, black sand strikes chill;
While you hesitate to go or stay,
Moon’s false motion holds you still.

Swing back from this sibilant surf!
Tramp that guttural shingle – inhale!
Mount the steps, cross the turf,
Shake from shoes a riddle gone stale,
Kick it back where it splashed from
Then stride alive the peopled prom.

Never mind having come this far
Or where to go from here:
There will always be another bar,
Another smoke and another beer;
Wind in your face makes you feel free:
Toss back your head, shake that philosophy!


(1981)


Conceived in Llandudno during a comparatively happy period. Why then so much doubt and disgust lurking behind the puns and symbolism here? Maybe it was that lack of ‘magic’ mentioned in stanza 5. The magic would arrive after much misery a decade later and – praise be – it’s still there.

I like the ‘Pull your socks up, lad!’ air of the final stanzas (hence the poem’s second-person narrator) and the ambiguity of the last line: was the philosophy shaken off or shaken up, I wonder.

Of course, this was written when you could still smoke in pubs and long before I, at last, quit.

The picture of Lise was taken many years later by a different sea, in a galaxy far, far away (Koversada, Croatia, actually).

WINTER SONNET

This weather shrinks the soul: wet, cold and grey;
Freezing your face like a December grave;
It cannot but recall mortality.
You wait in the cavernous, empty nave
And wish for the bright, fleeting clarity
Of winter sunshine to stream through and save
The stained glass from the gloom of dying day,
To lift and light you up and make you brave.
The world turns and flowers yielded to frost
Will stir again beneath hard, ancient ground,
To remind you that some of what is lost
May rise up like a proverb and be found:
That what you can’t control, you rise above
And though seasons pass, what stays is our love.


(2010)

The last one from ‘The Seasons: A Sonnet Sequence’. When I had finished this, I became aware that it does somewhat recall Philip Larkin’s ‘An Arundel Tomb’ and I considered reworking it, but then I thought, what the hell, there’s room for both and, as they say, there’s nothing new under the sun anyway…

The photograph was taken in a church at Palma in Mallorca.

THE ARROW OF TIME

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

It has given us a sporting start,

But Time will run us down,

Like man-hunters honing their spears,

Measuring our breath in the rain-risen dawn

As we race past the arrow in the wilderness

And the certainty of death, towards life itself.

And all life ever here on populous planet Earth

Has lived in the twelve and a half miles girdle

Between Mount Everest and the Mariana Trench,

Riding the glorious freak of chance that made us

Light up the solar system’s dark, vast loneliness,

But as we circle the Sun and rush ever faster away,

The universe expands and we contract and end:

And no matter how we may bid Time to stay,

The lark will ascend,

Ever higher, ever farther away.

And from white dwarf to red giant,

From the organism to the machine:

All will run down in Time

And be run down by Time,

And nothing can or has or will go

Beyond the endless flight of Time’s arrow.

(C. IGR 2012)

 American Indians would sometimes sport with their captives, firing an arrow high and far on to the plain; where it fell would mark the point to which their prisoners would be allowed to flee before th hunt would begin.

The 'arrow of time' is a complex scientific concept which can be crudely summed up as 'no turning back'. After the 'Big Bang' and the first sparks of creation, everything eventually outlives its growth, declines into entropy and dies, even as the universe surges outward into infinity and perhaps - as Buzz Lightyear adds - beyond...

THE BIRDMAN OF ABBEY PARK

More wanderer than beggar,
The Birdman of Abbey Park
Is a solitary mister
Like Dylan’s lonely hunchback,
He rests between trees and water
And listens to the birds talk.

Beyond the island and the weir,
Under windcheater and rucksack,
He appears mainly in dry weather
To loll on sloping grass the better
And wait for swan, goose and duck
To swoop and splash and honk and quack.

For unto him they will surely gather,
Though often in a blitz when he will chuck
Thick sandwiches at them like flak
Until the sirens of their beaks tire
And they wait, then merely loiter
As the Birdman sprawls supine and slack

Before stretching his long legs to kick
At the sky, or arching that lean back
Like the stone bridge that spans the river
Green with algae, lily-pads and weed-wrack
At the end of the time-flown summer
To await the winter’s cold, grey dredger.

Watch him on his gangling walk:
Shunning eye-contact, head thrown back,
The birdman has no eyes for ruins or lake
Nor for flowers or Pets Corner,
No eyes for book or newspaper,
No eyes for you and none for me neither.

About my age but angular, taller,
Imperious as a hawk,
Silent as the heron on the weir,
He heads straight down to the river
For his distant, never changing mark
Where he stays till he slips away in the dark.


(2009)

The Dylan mentioned in the opening stanza is our old friend Dylan Thomas again and I am reminded of his poem, ‘The Hunchback In The Park’ every time I see the Birdman. The rhyme-scheme is an echo of that in the DT poem although mine sustains the same two rhyme-sounds throughout.

One of the park-keepers told me that he’d been trying to engage the Birdman in conversation for many years but had never been so much as looked in the eye by him, let alone had a word back. I once took some pictures of the Birdman doing his weird calisthenic-type exercises but they mysteriously disappeared. Hopefully, I’ll catch him again and include a shot here just to prove that he really does exist.

I took the shot above in the snow just before Christmas when I saw him there in his usual place before the birds came to him. By the time I came back round, they had, as you can see, ‘gathered unto him.’

We’re very fortunate to have this beautiful park almost on our doorstep. It’s every bit the equal of London’s famous green spaces.

VERSE NOIR (Here's Lookin' At You, Kid)

Tell me, have I got this story right –
You know that serpentine story in black and white?
Is there a Big Wheel in moonlight turning
And black midnight oil burning, burning?
Is there a telephone always ringing
And a detective in a tilted hat singing?
Will there be a gunfight
And blood in the night?
I want you to tell me –
Am I right or am I right?

In Club Chicago, the band strike up that play-it-again song.
A girl there wears her gold hair short and her black dress long,
Her eyes sparkle through the smoke;
She rattles the ice in her vodka and coke
And watches a third man coming up behind an old has-been,
In the familiar shadowplay of that played-out scene.
(Well, she already dumped one sap for you, Jack,
Gonna leave you too, she’s a gal don’t look back
And this young dude collects blondes in bottles too.
Hey, your golden girl – she thinks he’s cute).
Outside in the rain, the private eye sees them leave,
His finger on the trigger at the end of his sleeve.
They melt into a cab as the lights go green –
Ain’t this that same old movie, same old scene?
Upstairs, later in a house on West Tenth and Vine
There’s two silhouettes in lamplight, closing the blind.
So, forgive me baby, if I don’t seem too bright
And excuse me while I stroke this ear on the right;
Won’t you tell me, sugar –
Am I right or am I right?

Now a saxophone plays in a monochrome haze
And neon nights dissolve into twilight days.
Over the street, a falcon circles the steeple
While he wonders if the problems of two little people
Amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world,
Where she says she’s still his girl,
Asks him if he’s OK and he says ‘Top of the world’.
He thinks of the shots in the envelope and the piece cold at his side
And he wants to leave with her but he stays frozen inside.
In Technicolor, she whispers, ‘I love you’, he says ‘Ditto’,
And begs her to stay when she says she’s gotta go.
She says she’ll be back but then it’s time for time to fly
And wish each other good luck and goodbye.
But this movie, lady, is shot in black and white
And the screenplay is vague but the timing is tight.
Now, tell me, sweetheart –
Am I right or am I right?

In the fog, the plane engines hum and choke
And he has to get out now or just go for broke.
Though time and distance will drag them apart,
He figures that falcon may yet have a nightingale heart.
She has a lotta class but he don’t know how far she’ll go;
He shrugs, lights a cigarette, guesses he’ll never know.
He catches her wrist and says, ‘You’ll forget where we were, won’tcha,
But you know how to whistle, baby, don’tcha?’
And he don’t think she will but he hopes she just might…
You tell me, kid –
Am I right or am I right?


(1997)


This is one of my personal favourites and needs to be heard in the reader’s head as if Humphrey Bogart is narrating it. I’ve always loved 1940s Film Noir and we’re both fans of Dennis Potter’s TV drama, The Singing Detective. It  did occur to me to add a filmography to this note but I think it will be more fun for people to try and spot the references for themselves.

 

 

THE YOOF OF TODAY

Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen,
They should – as every parent and teacher will tell you –
Never ever be heard, let alone be seen.
‘Kids! Who’d have ‘em? I rue the day they were born.’
They’re ignorant, arrogant and insolent,
Addicted to vulgarity, vice and vandalism;
Lazy, loitering litterbugs – that’s what they are –
Ill-mannered, leering, sub-literate liars
Who’d sell their grannies and little sisters for fivers.
They’re foul-mouthed, fickle and unfair;
Selfish, spiteful and obsessed with sex, sport and soap-opera;
And they grin and gossip gormlessly
As they barge and bully and brawl;
We say, ‘It’s just a phase they all go through.’
The phase their parents dread most of all.

Between the ages of dirty thirteen and sex-mad sixteen,
They live on crisps, cola, chocolate and chips
And when they’re not idiotically giggling, they’re venting their vicious spleen.
Moody, mardy malcontents all,
Who sulk and pout and flounce;
Cool fools, louche louts, fashion-fascists,
Snobs and yobs brave only in mobs.
Rebels without a cause, indeed,
Without ideas or ideals,
Prejudiced and unprincipled,
Knowing the price of everything
And the value of nothing;
Respecting neither the old nor the past.
‘Please God,’ their parents pray through
This phase they too all went through,
‘Please God, it won’t last!’


(1997)


Having worked as a teacher for longer than I care to remember, as well as being a parent, I do know of what I speak here. It was written during a timed assessment which took place in blessed silence with a class of 14 and 15 year-olds who had, over the course of the school year, made me a fervent believer in retrospective abortion…

I do hope, however, that no-one reading this poem – no matter what their age – will be left with the impression of it being merely an exercise in denunciation and wordplay.

OLD RAY

As a cold and frosty morning
Turns into a sunny afternoon,
Old Ray wanders round old London town
With, as usual, too much on his mind.
Murmuring songs from way back
When his voice was always on the radio,
He hunches his shoulders
And digs his hands deep down
The pockets of an old overcoat.
A bit barmy and battered,
But still a well respected man,
Old Ray rambles the old familiar way,
His forehead growing higher now
Under one of Max Miller’s old hats,
With one of Eric Morecambe’s old ties
Under an untidy scarf half-hiding
That gap-toothed grin on the sardonic face,
Which some passers-by fancy
They half-recognise from the telly long ago.

Young Ray bought a big house in the country
Once, but he soon came back to where he belonged.
He couldn’t get away because it was always
Calling him to come on home,
Back to the river and the big black Smoke.
It may all be cleaner now, but Old Ray
Hurries head down, muttering past
The shining new towers of the City of London,
New songs humming in his old head
With memories of family and friends
And the way love used to be
And the sacred days all scattered to the fields.
But though they’re gone
They’re still with him every single day
And he’s going home, so what does it matter?
Over the bridge and along the Camden canal,
By the old school and dance hall and pubs,
Through the Heath and villages and up the hills
Of Muswell, Parliament and Primrose,
In the blessed, chilly evening light
To sit on a bench and watch the sunset,
Way across the dirty old river.
Flowing into the night


(C. IGR 2011)

I wrote this after watching what struck me as a very eloquent TV documentary about Ray Davies last year (one of the ‘Imagine’ programmes on BBC 1). As I write, Ray is, I think, 66 years old, which in 21st century terms is no longer thought of as ‘old’, but back in the heyday of The Kinks during the last century, it really did seem ancient…

Fans of The Kinks will, of course, detect many bits and pieces from the band’s wonderful back catalogue woven into this poem.

The lovely picture of Ray (which first appeared in The Independent Magazine) was taken when he was 50 and, actually, he hasn’t really changed much at all since then. So – not so old.

  

 

MEMENTO MORI

Illuminated by the high, hot sun
Of the Algarve, she pauses
At the walled foot of the hill,
Framed by the arched gateway
To the old cathedral town of Faro,
From which she has come.
She holds my eye calmly whilst
Adjusting the cowl of her black robe
With her one good hand,
But not, I think, to hide the leprosy.
Perhaps she has become indifferent
To the appalled expressions
On ordinary faces
Which only distort temporarily.
Then she turns away the ghost
Of what was once, quite clearly,
A handsome, proud face and slowly,
But with a straight back and a clear eye,
She moves over the cobbles,
A ruined hand hanging at her side,
And crosses the busy road
Into the city beyond the old town,
As if from another age,
But looking life full in the face.


* * * *


We have climbed to the top
Of the medieval cathedral,
The sunlight casting abstract
Reflections from the stained glass
On its cold, silent stones,
And we have wandered the walls,
Taking in the estuary views
With our eyes and cameras.
Then, later, on a hill in the city,
We find a plaza with a church
At each end, amidst noisy streets,
Where we stand now in sepia light,
Inside an arched and vaulted room
Across a courtyard in the grander
Of the churches, the Igreja De Carmo.
This is the Bone Chapel,
Its altar, walls and ceiling made entirely –
Save for the mirror above the altar –
From the bones and skulls of ancient monks.
Its barred windows are reflected
Perfectly in brilliant shadows on the ground.
I gaze in the glass and around and around,
With death looking me full in the face.


(2010)

We were on a summer holiday in Albufeira in Portugal and had taken a train to Faro, the ancient capital of the Algarve. Having recently read Victoria Hislop’s novel, ‘The Island’ about the leper colony on the isle of Spinnalonga, just off the coast of Cyprus, I had assumed that terrible disease had been eradicated. The woman we saw in Faro suggested that was not the case.

Lise took the picture of me in the Bone Chapel at my insistence. She didn’t like the place and doesn’t like the picture but it had to be taken and is the obvious image to accompany this poem. So there.

VALENTINE

See this blush symbol of Saint Valentine:
Trace the symmetry of two perfect halves
Fused flush into one, evoking Love’s shrine;
It beats out the rhythm of the romance dance
Where trees lean together and branches entwine
Over lovers entranced, taking a chance…

Winter looks over his shoulder, sees sunshine
Waiting to stream forth from the eye of Spring –
Who neither Time nor tide can undermine
As she sets the future growing with hopes
Of fresh new lives - maybe yours, love, and maybe mine,
Deep beneath the heartland, all across the skyline.


(1998)


I wrote this in the last Valentine card I sent to Lise before our wedding later that year.

This posting is a little late and should have gone on last week when the chocolate box from Thorntons was still full and the flowers from Aldi were still fresh.

 

INTRODUCTION TO PHOTO GALLERY

I’ve always enjoyed taking photographs, but over the last few years I’ve become a little more serious about it, investing in better cameras and generally taking more thought and care with the pictures.

Although I’ve had a fair few shots published, I still regard myself as an amateur photographer. The digital revolution has made photographers of us all and there is a wealth of technical features not only built into the camera itself but available in online packages such as Photoshop. Personally, I’m not in favour of too much artificial enhancement and I prefer the picture I print to be pretty much the picture that I originally took – so you won’t find much in the way of jiggery-pokery with my images.

Like most people who take pictures, I am inspired by landscape and the passage of the seasons, but seascapes, skyscapes and cityscapes also inspire me. Apart from my wife, Lisa who is by far my favourite model, I have to admit that I don’t seem particularly interested in photographing people much (and often get irked when they walk into my shots!).

To enlarge any image in this or any other part of the blog, simply click once on the picture. To return to the text or sequence, click on the white cross on black background to the right -not the top-right white cross on red background.

Anyway, this gallery will be an ongoing record of what I consider to be my very best pictures. Anybody who might be interested in acquiring prints of particular photographs can contact me at lisa.roberts@live.co.uk

I’d also like to give a plug here to The Leicester People’s Photographic Gallery on Belvoir Street which does an excellent job of exhibiting work by local talent.

The mirror-images which accompany this introduction, by the way, were both taken in Corralejo, Fuerteventura in 2012.

LIKE A DEAD MAN’S LAST PISTOL SHOT: CONSIDERING DYLAN AS A SINGER

‘Nobody Sings Dylan Like Dylan’

(Columbia advertising tagline to promote Dylan’s own records)

Many years ago, Bob Dylan was asked by an interviewer what motivated him to write songs. Dylan might have said, for instance, that he was inspired to reflect the times he lived in; or indeed, that he hoped to try to help change those times by protesting via song; or simply that it was his chosen way of earning a living. What he actually replied, however, was that he became a songwriter because he needed the songs to sing himself…

Now, it may be that Dylan realised early on that that his own voice was not likely to provide him with a conventional career in singing - although it’s fun to imagine that in some alternative reality there is another Dylan who became the Elvis Presley of his time. We should recall, at this point, that Dylan himself has never actually seemed to have experienced many doubts about his voice. He fronted his first band at high school, a rock ‘n’ roll outfit, after all. In the mid-60s documentary film, Don’t Look Back, when Dylan bragged to an interviewer that he was ‘just as good a singer as Caruso [superstar operatic tenor of the early C20th]’ who could ‘hit all those notes’ and not only that, but with the option of holding his breath ‘three times as long’, you got the impression that his tongue was only partly in his cheek. And in the late 1970s, he took to the stage sporting a glitzy white jumpsuit a’la the recently deceased Presley, occasionally performing sans guitar or harmonica, with a hand-held mike.

Dylan, of course, first became known in the field of Folk music, a genre defined and, at that time, somewhat confined by its tradition. Folk singers were not particularly noted for the sweetness of their tone or the technical stretch of their voices. Dylan fitted in well for a while, contributing original masterpieces to the old archives and becoming the first Folk superstar, before breaking free of its limitations to help invent the new phenomenon of Rock Music (in his wake, the sub-genre of Folk Rock developed, although he never really took part in that, by then being driven more in the direction of electric Blues and Country music). 
 

By 1965, Dylan more than ever needed to write the songs that he himself wanted to sing because no-one else had ever written such songs before, let alone played them like he and his new backing musicians did, or sang them as he did. His voice, always an exceptionally expressive instrument, if not a mellifluous one, had grown in authority with each of his records. It was as if the strength of his voice was following the upward curve of his commercial success and cultural influence.

The apex of this arc was reached during the brief period of January 1965 through March ’66 when the albums Bringin’ It All Back Home, Highway 61Revisited and Blonde On Blonde were all released – quite possibly the most remarkable purple patch in the history of popular music. The performances from this time are wildly original, sometimes almost to the point of abstraction – take for instance the rendition of ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’ from the acoustic half of the Manchester concert (‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 4 – Live 1966). The way Dylan accentuates the last words of lines is absurd, and yet taken with his other-worldly harmonica playing, the effect is weirdly compelling.
 

Dylan’s legendary motor-cycle accident brought his tumultuous world tour to an end by midsummer ’66. His singing would never again aspire to such heights as those he reached during this period.

Back To The Starting Point!

(Planet Waves (1974) sleevenote)

Following the austere, biblically inspired comeback album, John Wesley Harding (1967), Dylan achieved with ‘Lay Lady Lay’ what is still his biggest crossover hit – in the sense that it was bought by many people who may never have bought his records before or since. The single came from the sessions that produced Nashville Skyline (1969), Self Portrait (1970) and the bootlegged duets with Johnny Cash. These recordings featured a dramatically different Dylan voice with a rich, honeyed Country tone attributed to a spell away from smoking. A voice which, had he retained and maintained it, may have led to bigger sales across a broader spectrum of the record-buying public.

For whatever reason – panic at the critical mauling dished out to Self Portrait; succumbing back into smoking; or sheer and typical contrariness – Dylan rapidly found his old voice again and it would stand him in good stead throughout the 1970s and beyond. The vocal reach was reducing though: whilst his middle range remained strong, the gentle balladic croon and the glorious, soaring holler either side of it were fading slightly. By the late 1980s, even though he left the decade with one of his strongest albums (the eloquent, luminescent Oh Mercy (1989), the rot had set in.

Always an acquired taste, Dylan’s singing subsequently became a real challenge to listeners whose ears were becoming more attuned to the increasingly homogenised sounds coming out of Top 40 radio stations and MTV. Dylan, however, still had to write the songs he needed to sing and, as The Never-Ending Tour ground on through the 1990s into the 21^st century, he would trickle new material into his jukebox set-lists, also occasionally attempting cover-versions that were well beyond the frequently one-dimensional growling of his live performances.

The paradox is that since the appearance of the career-rescuing Time Out Of Mind (1997), produced - like the similarly revivifying Oh Mercy – by ambient swampster, Daniel Lanois, Dylan’s critical reputation and album-chart positions have flourished as his voice has declined. His most recent albums, self-produced under the pseudonym ‘Jack Frost’, find him settling into comfortable old Blues and Folk grooves, rhyming his way, often quite aimlessly, through vague, overlong narratives about the battle of the sexes. Familiar territory indeed, and with recycled riffs and tunes, not to mention uncredited lyrical borrowings in verses that might have been shuffled around in sequence without losing – or gaining – much of their sense.

Depending on where you stand on Dylan, he’s either doing a grand job of keeping the Folk and Blues tradition alive, or merely treading water in the twilight of his career. Critics, however, appear to love this later material, and there seems to be evidence of the records picking up new fans along the way. Maybe this younger audience are seduced by the weather-beaten monument of Dylan’s voice in a similar way to how he and so many of his own generation were drawn to the gravelly, grizzled old Blues and Folk troubadours of the pre-Rock period. Didn’t Dylan say, way back when, that he hoped to ‘carry [himself] the way that Big Joe Williams, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly and Lightnin’ Hopkins have carried themselves.’?

And who’s to say that, half a century into his recording career, along with all his other achievements, that he hasn’t attained that end? (Of course, he also said way back when, that he wasn’t interested in ‘making a million dollars’, a sum of money far beyond the reach of Big Joe & Co., but merely the tip of the iceberg of riches that he’s assiduously amassed during his long and lucrative career, writing songs, touring and producing those dubious ‘artworks’ sold for ridiculous amounts of money in upmarket galleries).      

‘It was Rock-A-Day Johnny singin’

“Ooh wah, tell your Ma, tell your Pa,

our love’s a-gonna grow, ooh-wah, ooh-wah.”’   

(‘Talkin’ World War III Blues’ (1963)       

Apart from the rapacious rise of Rap (a style which appeared in the early 1980s and which Dylan is often credited with foreshadowing via ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ a decade and a half before), the most significant developments during the past thirty years in terms of chart success are a) the gender shift towards female singers in the US, b) the proliferation of so-called Boy Bands and Girl Bands in the UK and c) the influence of globally franchised of TV talent shows for singers. This has led to a protracted artistic wilderness similar – but much longer – than the sterile hiatus that blighted pop music between 1959-62, the period between the withering of Rock ‘N’ Roll and the blooming of The Beatles and Dylan himself. 

The first of these phenomena, though generally to be welcomed as evidence of growing equality between the sexes in the music industry, has hardly resulted in the pushing of any musical boundaries. The likes of Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Beyonce are undoubtedly more than merely competent singers, though none of them has produced what could be described as art. Madonna is more interesting, but like the others, is celebrated more for her commercial superstardom than her artistic achievement.

The British Boy & Girl Bands (e.g. Take That, Boyzone, Westlife, The Spice Girls, The Sugababes, Girls Aloud, Steps, S Club 7 etc.) are not even real ‘bands’, of course – they are merely groups of anodyne singers with telegenic faces. Managed by people with no intrinsic interest in music beyond its capital potential and auto-tuned in the studio by producers who work up songs with composers who write on Pro-Tools technology, these groups churn out hit after hit of the same moronic, balladic slush year after year. Anyone seeking proof of the contention that sustained chart success does not necessarily bear any relation to notions of artistry, need look no further than the extraordinary career of Westlife, who provide living embodiment of the old maxim that ‘shit sells’.   If ever there was an example of Orwellian ‘prolefeed’ in the UK today than this is it. Call it Pap Music.

Bob Dylan’s latter-day abrasive croak is the antithesis of the sort of pop music described above. Indeed, his singing has long provided an easy target for parody: in a recent episode of the long-running Radio 4 spoof game-show, I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue, the comedian Jeremy Hardy, competing in a round called ‘One Song In The Style Of Another’, was called upon to sing the nursery rhyme, ‘The Wheels On The Bus Go Round And Round’ in the style of Dylan. Hardy carried it off to hilarious effect, but it’s probably true to say that most of these piss-takes tend to be affectionately done.

Dylan’s contemporary growl exists – and indeed, prospers – in an alternative artistic reality that he himself helped to create in the mid-1960s. Though critical of much of his work over the last twenty years, I continue to applaud and value it, albeit with reservations. But what of those relentless money-spinners like The X Factor and Pop Idol that dominate TV, radio, charts and tabloids the world over? How do we regard Dylan as a singer in this kind of context?

During the spring of 2012, BBCTV aired a new talent show designed to satisfy the tastes of the reality TV and karaoke generations. The Voice UK, offered an intriguing new gimmick: in its early rounds, the judges would conduct ‘blind auditions’, selecting hopefuls for their teams purely on the basis of hearing them sing. The four judges, sat on swivel chairs in the TV studio, punched a button to indicate their choice, and only then swing round to actually see the singer, who would, in turn, decide which of the judges’ teams they wished to join.

The judges, by the way, were comprised of venerable Welsh tenor and titilator, Tom Jones, a fine singer by any standard; Jesse J, a fairly average English pop songstrel; Danny O’ Donoghue, unremarkable lead singer with Irish soft rockers, The Script; and the fatuously monickered will.i.am of hip hop outfit, The Black-Eyed Peas, who cheerfully and accurately admitted that he was more of a producer / songwriter than a singer.

Anyway, in later rounds the competitors took part in a knockout competition as players in Team Tom v. Team Jesse, for instance, eventually arriving at an overall winner. The novelty value of the early ‘blind’ rounds helped The Voice out-perform its rival X Factor, but it soon lost ground dramatically once the judges, who also operated as mentors and coaches to their charges, failed to provide the waspish put-downs associated with Emperor Simon Cowell & Co. in the Coliseum over on ITV.

Almost without doubt, we can assume that, even at the peak of his vocal ability, Dylan would not even have progressed beyond the pre-TV auditions, let alone the televised ‘blind’ stage. But – and here’s the thing – neither would have, say, Randy Newman, Lou Reed, Jimi Hendrix, Leonard Cohen, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Kate Bush, Mark Knopfler, John Lydon, Ian Dury, Jarvis Cocker or P. J. Harvey…
 

The performers on these shows are persuaded to operate within very limited parameters: they’re predominantly solo singers; the material they’re offered is non-original and overwhelmingly mainstream; and the expectation from the programme-makers (and that fostered in the audience) is that they will tend to over-sing in the manner of Whitney Houston and Maria Carey. One X-Factor winner, Alexandra Burke, who has gone on to become a successful chart act, epitomises the sort of melismatic mess of ultra-emoting that led to her covering Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ as her debut single – clearly without the vaguest notion of what the song was about and actually getting the lyric wrong! Not that it mattered to her producer or public who duly took it to the top of the charts.

The history of popular music features a procession of strikingly individual singers with, more often not, untrained voices. The way they sing is not so much a style as a extension of their thought-processes and personality, especially if, like my list above, they write their own songs.

By and large, most modern pop singers are directed to sing in the prevailing style of the day, whilst trained classical and operatic singers tend to not so much interpret the canon as repeat it. When young-fellow-my-lad Dylan cheekily compared himself to Caruso, there was a serious edge to his assertion that pointed towards a growing democratization of the culture during the early 1960s. It is no exaggeration to maintain that Dylan opened the door for Randy Newman, Lou Reed et al to find their own places on the airwaves and in the marketplace.

Thus it was that Dylan encouraged pop music to evolve more creatively – as compared to the relative stasis of classical technique - and for its voices to become even more individual and varied. Although jazz-based singers like Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra and Ella Fitzgerald exerted a quite diverse influence before and after Dylan, they were broadly conventional artists. More outré vocalists such as Al Jolson, Louis Jordan, Hank Williams, Little Richard, Howlin’Wolf, Johnny Cash, Buddy Holly, Mick Jagger and Aretha Franklin were also highly influential and can be added to my initial list of atypical performers.

If we must delineate, then it is into this more radical parade of course, that Dylan belongs and, to some extent, leads. That tremendous talent, Elvis Presley might straddle both the conventional and unconventional territory, although his early impact was more to do with him being new and white rather than truly original. He did nevertheless provide the catalyst for the modern era of Rock Music.

It is, however, The Beatles, far more than, say, Sinatra, Presley or Dylan who provide the most shining example of putting Art on the Chart. No act has ever been more simultaneously popular and artistic and innovative than The Beatles – and let’s not forget that, in Lennon and McCartney, they not only had two great singers, but in Harrison, a good, if limited one and, in Starr, a distinctive, if even more limited one.   

‘My voice is really warm,

It’s just that it ain’t got no form,

But it’s just like a dead man’s last pistol shot, baby’

( from ‘She’s Your Lover Now’ (1966))

One of the qualities associated with great singing is soulfulness – that grainy gospel sound that seems to lend extra sincerity and meaning to the voice. But soul is a slippery and subjective quality. Is it merely another genre-label or does it actually indicate a more profound type of singer? Our kneejerk list of great soul singers would surely include Ray Charles, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye, Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin and may well feature a host of other predominantly black singers. As with so many of the tropes which form our understanding of contemporary pop music, Soul really hit its stride during the 1960s when it spawned – if you can keep up with the  colouring – the first batch of UK white Blues and Soul singers such as Dusty Springfield, Van Morrison, Steve Winwood, Chris Farlowe, Steve Marriott, Joe Cocker and Rod Stewart et al. Could they really be Soul singers if they weren’t black Americans with a Gospel background? Or as The Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band amusingly sang, ‘Can Blue Men Sing The Whites?’

Those British singers certainly seem more soulful to my ears than some of the more conventional exponents of the genre that have emerged subsequently – Luther Vandross, James Ingram and Michael Bolton, for instance. As far as I’m concerned, one can quite easily make a case for Frank Sinatra and John Lennon as occasional soul singers, but would it be stretching the term too much for it to include one Bob Dylan?

Well, Blood On The Tracks (1975) would appear to be a strong candidate for soul singing by Dylan. The passion and sincerity of his singing on that record is remarkable. It is not, however, a genre soul album, in the way that Nashville Skyline is a Country album or the so-called ‘trilogy of Christian albums’ from 1979-81 are Gospel albums (especially Saved (1980)). Those three sets, incidentally, show him to be a more than competent Gospel singer.

But soulfulness has certainly been an element in Dylan’s singing over the years, as indeed, it is with most great singers. Dylan’s revolutionary impact on the history of popular music was not purely to do with his extraordinary song-writing. As well as his image and attitude, it was that voice that made the difference.

During the earlier period of his recording career, Dylan quickly demonstrated a mastery of the Folk style and an ability to render his own love songs in a gentle, sensitive manner (i.e. ‘Girl of The North Country’, ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’, ‘One Too Many Mornings’). Comedic songs such as ‘I Shall Be Free’, ‘Motorpsycho Nitemare’ and ‘Leopard-Skin Pill-Box Hat’ were delivered with a sly coolness that impressed as much it amused. His apparently effortless combining of American hip slang from the street and from films with more formal idioms drawn from the Folk tradition and literature lent his voice glamour, if not conventional beauty.

The intellect behind his songs and the confident authority of his performances gave philosophical songs like ‘Blowin’ In the Wind’, ‘A Hard Rain’s A-Gonna Fall’ and ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ more of a prophetic and political edge. It became increasingly clear that Dylan had at his vocal command a number of tones, frequently negative ones only rarely, if ever heard in the rather saccharine world of pop music’s happy / sad romantic topography. Outrage, for example, (‘The Lonesome Death Of Hattie Carroll’); righteousness (‘Masters Of War’); wistfulness (‘Tomorrow Is A Long Time’); scorn (‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’); melancholia (‘Visions Of Johanna’); accusation (‘Positively 4^th Street’); bitterness (‘Like A Rolling Stone’); and disgust – I’m fairly certain that no-one had ever communicated this as startlingly as Dylan does when he delivers the line, ‘and you’re siiick of all this repetition’ in ‘Queen Jane Approximately’, not to mention the sustained revulsion of  ‘It’s Alright, Ma (I’m Only Bleeding’.
 

In an era when establishment norms were being challenged by ever more active, literate and politicised younger people, it was not surprising that Dylan would be described as ‘The Spokesman Of His Generation’. Neither was it simply a case of the subject-matter of the songs dictating the style of his performance of them. It was the breadth of attitude and emotion that Dylan brought to them as a singer.

Not that it was all negative waves being emitted: Dylan’s powers of vocal expression extended to the yearning sense of wonder present in ‘Lay Down Your Weary Tune’ and ‘Mr. Tambourine Man’; the empathy of ‘To Ramona’; the joie de vivre in the face of adversity of ‘Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35’ and the lusty mischief of ‘I Want You’. When he returned to recording after his temporary retirement in 1966, he did so with a markedly sunnier disposition (usually attributed by biographers to a time of settled family life in the rural environs of Woodstock). The period from 1967-74 – i.e. The Basement Tapes through Planet Waves – yields up more positive, happy songs than any other in Dylan’s career.

This sequence was broken by the trauma which pervades Blood On The Tracks - an alternative title for which could have been ‘Marriage On The Rocks’ – although the brief reconciliation with his first wife, Sarah, before their eventual divorce, was glimpsed in the more positive moments on Desire (1976).

Notwithstanding the New Testament elements of the Christian albums, it has been largely doom and gloom ever since, often on an apocalyptic scale. Eventually Dylan’s singing became more and more gnarled, darkened and trapped by the grim artistic weather that overshadowed so many of his songs and the diminishing returns of his vocal range. Albums like Oh Mercy and Time Out Of Mind both sounded like they might have been his last, such was the despairing mood conveyed by his singing and the emotional wilderness of the songs’ terrain.

In my view, some of Dylan’s most potent vocal performances from this period and beyond were left off the original releases, but they can be found on ‘The Bootleg Series Vol. 8 (Tell Tale Signs – 1989-2006), another collection which reminds us yet again what an unreliable judge of his own material Dylan often is.

Dylan has, however, kept on keeping on. The smoking ruin of his voice remains an expressive if mortally reduced instrument. The battered ballads of broken love are drawn up from an apparently bottomless well. Like a novelist able to dream up plots year on year, Dylan continues to find ways of retelling the micro-narratives of his songs. On his latest record, Tempest (2012) - lyrically his most interesting collection for a time - there’s a whimsical centenary reimagining of the Titanic going down; a touching, if rather odd homage to his old friend and rival, John Lennon; and a couple of blood-soaked revenge dramas scattered over his usual stamping ground. The singing, now into its seventies, is geriatric beyond its years - really sounding like the ‘sand and glue’ as David Bowie described it in his 1971 ‘Song For Bob Dylan’ - but we can be sure that Dylan has no intention of going gently into any good night.   

In that historic review in the September 29, 1961 issue of The New York Times, reproduced on the back cover of Dylan’s debut album, Robert Shelton considered the vocal performance by the twenty years old singer he’d witnessed at Gerde’s Folk City club the night before. He presciently summed it up thus:-

                 ‘Mr. Dylan’s voice is anything but pretty. He is consciously

                 trying to recapture the rude beauty of a southern field hand

                 musing in melody on his porch. All the ‘husk’ and ‘bark’ are

                 left on his notes and a searing intensity pervades his songs.’   

‘Mr. Dylan’, in his seventy-second year, has long been able to evoke that ‘rude beauty’ of the deep Blues and Folk tradition. What’s left of his once astonishing singing voice is almost all ‘husk and bark’ with ‘searing intensity’ now probably beyond his reach (‘Pay In Blood’ from Tempest bears out these contentions).

Ultimately, however, the correct response to all my carping, should be, ‘So what?’ If Dylan had died, or at least retired from singing after say, Oh Mercy, his audience would still have a fabulous, if chequered, canon of work to last them a life-time. The same might even be said if his career had wound up with the underrated Street Legal in 1978. And if that motorcycle accident in 1966 had been fatal, then the world would have been left with a body of work as perfect, in its way, as that of The Beatles.

Perfection, though, isn’t everything.

C. Ian Roberts 2012

This article originally appeared in ISIS (issue 167), the international journal of all things Dylan.