Yeah Yeah Yeah

by Bob Stanley

  Once he got out of hospital, bassist Ashley Hutchings, who had escaped the crash with a broken nose and cheekbone, went to as many folk festivals as he could, talking late into the night with traditional and revival musicians, obsessing over the English Folk and Dance Society’s archive at Cecil Sharp House in Camden Town. It may have been therapy, but it resulted in their best-selling album, Liege and Lief, which was almost entirely made up of traditional folk songs. Coming out just five months after the crash, it was impressive, slightly academic, and inevitably lacked the clear-eyed sense of fun of their earlier albums. Rolling Stone called it ‘a nice album to accompany sitting by the fireplace or staring vacantly at a candle flame’. Narrowing their vision, they had created a folk-rock template (Trees, Steeleye Span and the Woods Band couldn’t have existed without it), but destroyed themselves in the process. Thompson (‘Meet on the Ledge’) and Denny (‘Who Knows Where the Time Goes’, ‘Autopsy’) had already proved they were very talented songwriters. Unsurprisingly, they both quit soon after Liege and Lief. Fairport would carry on selling records and playing to folk lovers for decades to come, but their muse was gone.

  Peeking out of glades, glebes and garden sheds were gentler souls and wild eccentrics: Heron, Trader Horne, Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan9 created music that seemed to use birdsong and fresh air as instruments – Vashti once admitted apologising to a piece of broccoli after she’d picked it. There were other folk discontents who tended towards the apocalyptic. Michael Chapman, Bill Fay and Roy Harper were visionary descendants of social outcasts like Augustus John and Peter Warlock, genuine mavericks who probably didn’t subscribe to Donovan’s petal-strewn image of the world.

  An also-ran of the Soho scene, Roy Harper was an unlikely sonic voyager. He’d been in the RAF, in prison and in Lancaster Moor Mental Institution before he headed to London with his guitar. ‘If you’re a wild animal,’ he told Rolling Stone, ‘there’s only one thing you want to do. That’s escape.’ He became the life and soul of the party, the ultimate giggling stoner, sharing Pink Floyd’s manager, Peter Jenner, and guesting on their Wish You Were Here album. Led Zeppelin were similarly enamoured of his untamed spirit, paying tribute with ‘Hats Off to (Roy) Harper’ on their third album. Harper himself never seemed to keep his pants on for long enough to make a great album until 1971’s Stormcock, which was made up of four lengthy songs, accompanied by David Bedford’s luxuriant strings and Harper’s whirlpool of echoes and delays. It was breathtaking.

  A year later, Harper was doing a screen test to play a fictional pop star. He was up against stiff competition, from Ray Davies and Marc Bolan, but director John Mackenzie picked him to play Mike Preston in his 1972 big-screen debut, Made.10 How Mackenzie must have wished he had plumped for the Bopping Elf or the saturnine Davies – Harper was such a handful that at one point he stuck a magnet inside the tape box containing potential spin-off hit ‘Valerie’s Song’, erasing half the track. Asked to re-record it, he sang ‘Shitty city, shitty city’ over the blank parts. Radio 1 received the single with raised eyebrows. The single, and the movie, undeservedly sank in a sea of indifference. Roy Harper returned to the margins.

  Outselling Fairport, Pentangle and everyone else in British folk rock were Lindisfarne. ‘Lady Eleanor’ was the most successful UK folk-rock single of all, reaching number three in 1972. It floated on finger bells, a warm organ swell and a picked mandolin, with its tales of the dead dancing in soft meadows softened by a more radio-friendly chorus than ‘Valerie’s Song’ or ‘Needle of Death’: ‘It’s all right, Lady Eleanor, it’s all right.’ Lindisfarne’s music wasn’t a product of chewing on blades of grass in the shade of an old oak tree, however. Their mythical visions were fed on stout, and their album Fog on the Tyne went all the way to number one in 1972. The title track, though not a hit, became their best-known song and replaced images of the siren Lady Eleanor with ‘sickly sausage rolls’. Relentless touring built their audience. ‘We’ll never work as hard as this again,’ said guitarist Si Cowe in 1973, ‘it’s killing the magic. And it’s not doing us much good either.’ He lifted up his jumper to show a Melody Maker journalist his shingles: ‘It’s a nervous complaint. We’ve all had something.’

  A scene based around myth, ancient history and nature’s magic wasn’t built to last. Some of the records made under the folk-rock banner – Oberon’s ‘Nottamun Town’, Stone Angel’s ‘The Bells of Dunwich’, the Water into Wine Band’s ‘Harvest Time’ – were recorded in makeshift studios and pressed in tiny amounts; they were as localised and obscure as a deep-soul 45 from Shreveport or a rockabilly single from Wink, Texas. Decades on, they sound as lost and adrift from the modern world as Cecil Sharp’s field recordings of the twenties: campfire get-togethers on Box Hill, saved for the ages, packaged on coarsely pressed vinyl.

  Fairport Convention’s ever-changing line-ups and the steady drop in the quality of their albums matched the decline of folk rock in the mid-seventies; musical stasis, an increasing bearded geniality – sausage rolls washed down with warm ale11 – and lack of serious intent ran it into the ground. There were two number-one albums in 1976 by folk singers – Max Boyce and former Transatlantic act Billy Connolly – both of whom had switched to comedy to become more commercially successful. The previous year, Mike Harding had charted with the horrible ‘Rochdale Cowboy’ (UK no. 22), and Steeleye Span had a Christmas novelty hit (UK no. 5) with the pub singalong ‘All around My Hat’. The secret, cobwebbed path trod by Sandy Denny, Vashti Bunyan and Roy Harper was lost in a haze of beery burps. Blame the fog on the Tyne. Steeleye Span’s 1976 Mike Batt-produced album was the final straw: possibly a well-intentioned but misguided attempt at futuristic folk, it dabbled in reggae and boogie, attempting to give folk a contemporary, space-age twist – they called it Rocket Cottage. What the hell were they thinking?

  Punk – a music from which magick and myth were banished – was as much a bullet in the post for folk rock as it would be for the more easily savaged progressive rock. Its last hurrah, and a strange mixture of truth and legend, lay in a poignant story resulting from the 1978 National Theatre production of Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise to Candleford. The live soundtrack was provided by husband and wife Ashley Hutchings and Shirley Collins. During the rehearsals, Hutchings began a relationship with one of the younger cast members and, like a character from a centuries-old ballad, Shirley Collins had to carry on singing each night while watching her marriage disintegrate in front of her. She was, literally, struck dumb: Alan Lomax’s sidekick, and Davy Graham’s co-conspirator, never sang on stage again nor made another record. Shirley Collins became her own part of mythic folklore.

  1 Led Zeppelin’s isolated Welsh home, Bron-yr-Aur, was only ten miles from where acid-folk group Trees rehearsed and the same distance from Cader Idris, in the same Snowdonian territory as Alan Garner’s novel The Owl Service. This had been turned into a disturbing children’s television series in 1969, with Gillian Hills – an Anglo-French yé-yé singer who had made an exquisite, breathy folk-pop 45 called ‘Look at Them’ in 1965 – as the flame-haired reincarnation of Blodeuwedd, a mythical woman made from flowers. Mixing the occult, the class system and adolescent sexuality, it found a counterpart in the Christian-baiting, anti-Establishment horror film The Wicker Man three years later. Both couched eroticism and nature worship in eerie, ivy-hung acoustic folk, the music of the ages made new. It declared victory for the pagans. No wonder it kept its head down – the Wicker Man soundtrack wouldn’t get an official release until the nineties.

  2 Shirley Collins’s voice is so close to the soil of Albion that a German admirer once complimented her by telling her she sounded ‘like a potato’.

  3 Traditional British folk singers never had a guitar, electric or acoustic – the trad form was a cappella. So the sixties folk-club fear of ‘going electric’ never made sense. Instead, the hardliners should have been against the guitar altogether.

  4 Frank was in a school fire as a kid, in which most of his classmates died.
When he turned sixteen, he collected a load of compensation money and came over to London. He stayed on an even keel for long enough to make the best record of the Soho folk era, his self-titled album on Columbia, which included his own theme tune, ‘Blues Run the Game’. The tragic nature of his life and wasted talent is about as extreme as it gets: Frank had long been homeless, broke and blind in one eye – shot randomly by a stranger for fun – by the time he died. The only other recordings he made (in the early seventies) were released posthumously, and included the busted but beautiful ‘Marnie’.

  5 A tipsy Jansch claimed in 1970 that Donovan’s management would call on him and buy tunes to give to their charge. This seems extremely unlikely – Donovan had an easy way with a melody, while Jansch’s talent was all in his guitar-playing. His only obvious attempt at writing a hit was ‘Woe Is Love My Dear’, a 1967 orchestrated single that was too subtle to work on the radio and on which he sounded too constrained.

  6 Most’s success was phenomenal – he’d already scored number ones, almost back to back, with Herman’s Hermits and the Animals in ’64, and would go on to boss the glam scene with his RAK label. I’d grant him more space if I could only find some common thread. Where’s the link between Eric Burdon’s wailing ‘House of the Rising Sun’, the pitter-patter beat of ‘I’m into Something Good’, Donovan’s stoned, nearly legal ‘Mellow Yellow’ and Mud’s ‘Tiger Feet’? Search me. Most seemed to know exactly what the public wanted, no more, no less. In this respect, he probably had a better ear for a hit than anyone else in this book.

  7 1967’s For Little Ones (released in the UK as part of the double set A Gift from a Flower to a Garden, along with Wear Your Love Like Heaven) and 1970’s HMS Donovan both have moments colourful and haunting enough to give a child with a vivid imagination some wild dreams. The cover of HMS Donovan, with sailor-suited Don looking as if his face is melting, surrounded by jabberwocks and all manner of weirdness, is more nightmarish.

  8 Judy Dyble resurfaced as half of Trader Horne, with former Them guitarist Jackie McAuley. Their one album, the very delicate Morning Way, works like a fairy tale. It’s good medicine if you like your folk rock from the winsome end of the spectrum.

  9 Nick Drake and Vashti Bunyan were among the lucky few to benefit from the verdant melancholy of Robert Kirby’s arrangements. They reflected and amplified the profound loneliness in Drake’s music, brought a skip to Bunyan’s ‘Just Another Diamond Day’; he also arranged John Cale’s ‘I Keep a Close Watch’ and Keith Christmas’s ‘Forest and the Shore’, two songs whose majesty is akin to standing on the top of the Long Mynd.

  10 Mackenzie was a BBC Play for Today veteran who went on to make The Long Good Friday, and his cinema debut is bleak beyond belief. Carol White plays Valerie, a downtrodden single mum who meets hippie Mike – all flaxen hair and cheeky grin – on Brighton beach as he is being interviewed. When Preston, having rubbed noses with her, turns Valerie’s plight into a hit record, everything goes dark.

  11 Folk became associated with CAMRA – the Campaign for Real Ale – in the mid-seventies. It was driven into a craft-brew corner by the end of the decade, and only resuscitated in the great ‘world music’ niche-market move of the late eighties. Pubs may have helped to destroy folk rock, but they would feature positively in another strand of British pop later in the mid-seventies.

  28

  FREDDIE’S DEAD: ELECTRIFIED SOUL

  At a 1966 press conference, Bob Dylan had told the world he thought Smokey Robinson was ‘America’s greatest living poet’. Presumably Smokey was quite tickled, rather proud, but his response was not reported. While America had Hit Parader and Tiger Beat and the UK had Rave, Fabulous and various inkies, they were produced for an almost entirely white market, and interviewed almost exclusively white singers. No one expected soul singers to come up with much in interviews beyond ‘We love your beautiful country’ and, truthfully, the Motown machine had done little to dispel this preconception. Sly Stone changed all that.

  Sly and the Family Stone were the most goodtime group since the Lovin’ Spoonful. Their spirit was irresistible. The Spoonful had been white New Yorkers in a different age. Sly and the Family Stone were the first pop group in which black and white, male and female came together, and they emerged in 1967 as race riots raged in Detroit leaving forty-three dead. Within a year they had changed soul music entirely. How? It’s all there in their first hit, ‘Dance to the Music’ (US no. 8, UK no. 7 ’68): thumping fuzz bass, doo-wop harmonies, propellant drums,1 topped off with a Minnie the Minx yell of ‘All the squares, go home!’; inside three minutes, every singer and every instrument get their moment in the spotlight. It had the feel of a Sunday-school riot, the same giddy spontaneity as ‘Be-Bop-a-Lula’, with its random, exultant shouts. Motown was made to look lumbering, embarrassing by comparison, and its reined-in performers appeared like marionettes alongside the sheer joyous freedom of the Family Stone. While Motown acts played the Copa, covered Rodgers and Hart and wore processed hair for Berry Gordy’s perception of black/white crossover appeal, the Family Stone effortlessly exuded Oneness. They were Everyday People, and their music was all about celebration.

  Sly Stone must have wondered why no one had come up with the recipe before. He took the live excitement of the Stax soul revue, grafted on James Brown’s functional, rhythm-as-a-pure-state funk, and mixed in the heightened airs of psychedelia (the Family were from San Francisco, after all). But it’s not just that no one else had thought of it; no one else could have made it quite as tight and loose and blessed and blithe-spirited. Visually, he could have pushed sexy Rose and tomboy-cute Cynthia to the fore – as Ray Charles had done with his Raelettes – but Sly wanted a family, equals on every level.

  Sly Stone, brother Freddie, sister Rose, teenage Italian American drummer Greg Errico, slap-pop bass pioneer Larry Graham, Motown-loving saxophonist Jerry Martini and a Californian forest fire of a trumpet player called Cynthia Robinson went from mere stars to superstars at Woodstock in ’69, the year they had back-to-back US number ones (‘Everyday People’, ‘Everybody Is a Star’). Sly didn’t want to do lounge, like the Temptations, or stick to the Apollo, like James Brown – he wanted to do concerts. He also dressed the Family Stone in polka dots, stack heels, space-suit silver and eye-popping fluorescents, so it looked as if the next decade had already arrived. In the meantime, he was making a name for himself as the new Stagger Lee – a wrong ’un. During an engagement at a Vegas stripclub called the Pussycat a’ Go Go, Sly took up with the white girlfriend of the club owner, incurring a barrage of racist threats. He told this story from the stage that night and got a standing ovation, followed by a police-escorted route out of town.

  When Sly Stone changed the rules, Motown didn’t slouch. By the end of ’68 the Supremes had hit back with ‘Love Child’, Diana Ross singing like a girl from the Brewster Projects for the first time since ‘Where Did Our Love Go’: ‘Started my life in an old, cold, rundown tenement slum. My father left, he never even married Mom.’ It was their first American number one in over a year.

  Still, sonically ‘Love Child’ was classic Motown. Standing in the shadows was Norman Whitfield, who saw an opportunity to rewrite the Motown template when Holland/Dozier/Holland quit the label over a financial row in ’68.2 Whitfield was a former pool-hall punk from Harlem who had first got work in the quality-control department at Motown before succeeding Smokey Robinson as the Temptations’ producer in 1966. He loved to play in the studio: Sly Stone’s breakthrough loosened him up, as did the departure of the Temptations’ nominal lead singer David Ruffin in 1968 – later that year Whitfield used each Temp in turn on the spooky, oddly structured ‘Cloud Nine’ (US no. 3, UK no. 15). It borrowed the Family Stone’s ‘Higher!’ lines but subsumed their defiance, yearning and pride into a smackhead’s private realm; if it didn’t make the trip sound all that appealing, it certainly didn’t admonish. Soon there were wah-wah pedals, pools of echo, funky basslines and social commentary all over the voca
l group’s records – ‘Psychedelic Shack’ (US no. 7, UK no. 33 ’70), ‘Ball of Confusion’ (US no. 3, UK no. 7 ’70), ‘Papa Was a Rolling Stone’ (US no. 1, UK no. 14 ’72) – and they effectively became the Norman Whitfield Chorale. Eddie Kendricks soon left to regain his identity in 1973, and the group swiftly lost momentum.3

  Whitfield’s single best record, though, was recorded with the sensitive Marvin Gaye. He’d cut it back in ’67, but Gladys Knight’s version of ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’ (US no. 2), recorded at the same time and full of piss and vinegar, had been released in its place. Marvin Gaye’s deeply paranoid, much slower take had to wait until late ’68, and became the darkest Christmas number-one hit in US pop history. A stray snare set the scene, like the gunshot intro to ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, only this time, quite differently, it was followed by near silence; we were in the domain of a lost and troubled singer rather than one who could see through walls and bring down governments. Next came a muted electric piano that sounded like it was being played in a haunted house, the soft tribal thud of a bass drum suggesting smoke signals and bad omens, Jack Ashford’s rattlesnake tambourine and, finally, Marvin Gaye, his anguish unbottled in the most intense confessional: ‘Oooohh, I bet you wonder how I knew, about your plans to make me blue.’ For the conspiracy theorist there are clues everywhere. ‘I Heard It through the Grapevine’ was Sly-derived, but while the Family Stone’s ‘Stand!’ was scaling the mountain (‘Stand! You’ve been sitting much too long, there’s a permanent crease in your right and wrong’), this stared into the abyss.

  With Sly Stone, a black political consciousness had entered American pop. Just as protest in white rock was on the wane, Sly encouraged fellow soul musicians to pick up the slack. Marvin Gaye had felt he was on a short leash from the get-go, and his Motown labelmate Little Stevie Wonder, the boy genius who’d had a US number-one single back in ’63 with ‘Fingertips’, was now coming of age. Taking Sly’s lead and having Norman Whitfield’s stormcloud soul as back-up, Gaye and Wonder challenged Berry Gordy’s authority and asked for more autonomy. They wanted to make albums, personal statements, no more pat dance routines. Wonder began with ‘Where I’m Coming From’ and ‘Music of My Mind’ (both 1971), writing, producing and playing virtually every instrument: here was jazz, funk, Latin and soul, lusty and liberated. Always the optimist, he was also a spiritual crutch and – most gently – advised against drugs (‘Too High’) and dreaming about the other man’s grass (‘Living for the City’). By the time of Talking Book in ’72 and Innervisions in ’73 he was in a perfect world, entirely of his own making, and this endeared him to a white audience who saw him as a genius, separate from other black artists. There were reasons why he stood out. His blindness had kept him away from the rest of the Motown family, his voice had no gospel or group-vocal grounding, and so he pitched it against other instruments, which he was usually playing. He loved to work in the studio, twiddling knobs on new gear rather than bonding with other black musicians. He was a master of sound textures (no one had thought of using a clavichord as a rhythmic instrument before ‘Superstition’ in ’72), and in this seemed closer to white progressive acts, while also being more prodigiously talented. Even forays into MOR (‘Isn’t She Lovely’) couldn’t hurt his reputation.