Pete Atkin

Pete Atkin and Clive James

In the early '70s, the songwriting partnership of Pete Atkin and Clive James was held in high esteem by the British music press, yet commercial success proved much more elusive. Their unique attempt to fuse the discipline and craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley with the self-expression of rock, while refusing to accept any limitation on what constituted appropriate subject matter for lyrics, inevitably set them on a collision course with their record companies' marketing departments. An Atkin-James album could embrace a brief encounter in a railway carriage, the Vietnam War, and the lot of an aging session musician, while James' points of reference took in the full panoply of art, cinema, literature, and poetry, sometimes leaving his work open to accusations of being wordy and pretentious. In its own way, Atkin's music was just as erudite, drawing on every form of popular music from show tunes through folk, jazz, and rock. Both words and music, then, were no match for the blistering anti-elitism of punk when it arrived, and after six albums the partnership succumbed before the irresistible union of record company indifference and the Clash.

The pair first met in 1966 as members of the Cambridge Footlights Revue that spawned so much British comedy talent, from the satire of Beyond the Fringe to the surrealism of Monty Python. (It was this connection that would later result in Atkin and James being invited to perform alongside the likes of John Cleese and Peter Cook at various Amnesty International benefits, subsequently released on DVD under the Secret Policeman's Ball titles.) James, recently emigrated from Australia, was a postgraduate student, six years older than Atkin, and already acquiring a reputation as something of a guru among the younger students.

Though they managed to finance a couple of private recordings of their earliest songs, it wasn't until 1970 that a full-fledged record emerged in the form of Beware of the Beautiful Stranger. In fact, the album had been recorded as a collection of demos to showcase the pair's talents as songwriters for other artists, but producer Don Paul was a friend of popular BBC DJ Kenny Everett, who took a shine to the album's opening track and began playing it on daytime Radio 1. As a result, Philips agreed to issue the album as it stood, and Atkin's career as a recording artist was launched. Later that same year, fellow student and subsequent Evita star Julie Covington released an album composed almost exclusively of Atkin-James songs called The Beautiful Changes.

Though Everett's heavy rotation of "Master of the Revels" would normally have guaranteed success, British record-buyers were having none of it. By the time the pair's second album, the more rock-oriented Driving Through Mythical America, arrived in 1971, their beyond-the-mainstream status was confirmed. On their final album in 1975, Atkin and James opted to close their RCA contract with an album mainly composed of mildly scurrilous send-ups of artists like Leonard Cohen ("Doom from a Room") and James Taylor ("Sheer Quivering Genius"). James even made his vocal debut with a spoof of the irksome Telly Savalas hit "If" (mercifully omitted from the CD reissue). Amusing though it seemed at the time, it nevertheless made for an unfortunate swan song. Exhausted by all the ceaseless wrangling with RCA, Atkin went on to find a new career in radio production with the BBC, though he continued to make the odd appearance in small folk clubs.

Meanwhile James quickly became one of the most familiar figures on British television, where his lacerating wit and coruscating wordplay secured him a seemingly endless sequence of programmes tailored to his unique style, before he finally quit in the late '90s. A prodigiously gifted writer, James also excelled as a novelist, essayist, critic, and poet. His weekly column for The Observer during the late '70s virtually established TV criticism as an art form in itself, while the first volume of his frequently hilarious autobiography — Unreliable Memoirs — became a critically acclaimed bestseller.

And there the story might have ended were it not for the Internet and a nostalgic fan named Steve Birkill. His Smash Flops website launched in 1997 not only reminded aging fans how much they'd enjoyed Pete Atkin's records, but prompted Atkin to start performing in earnest again. Soon he was joined by James, whose appearances guaranteed much larger attendances. Many members of the audience, though, were doubtless totally unaware of James' earlier career as a lyricist, and were often to be heard wondering who that chap on-stage with him was. But Atkin certainly acquired many more new fans as a result.

Another consequence was the long-overdue CD reissue of Atkin's back catalog, a small selection of which had been previously available only on a rather slapdash compilation called Touch Has a Memory. For older fans, however, the big question was whether Atkin would resume where he'd left off decades earlier. The answer came in 2001, when he began by releasing a pair of albums called The Lakeside Sessions, Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, which featured newly recorded versions of many songs left over from the '70s. Yet the composing partnership was finally renewed in 2003 with the release of an album of brand-new material called Winter/Spring. While no radical departure from their original work, it found James newly determined to pare his lyrics to the bone and Atkin sometimes adopting a funkier style informed by his beloved Steely Dan.

Beware of the Beautiful Stranger (1970)

Though it was intended only as a collection of demos designed to showcase Pete Atkin and Clive James' talents as a songwriting team, Beware of the Beautiful Stranger ended up launching Atkin's recording career after BBC Radio 1 DJ Kenny Everett started giving the opening track some heavy airplay. It proved a happy accident, for Atkin's deadpan and very English voice was the perfect vehicle for James' wryly melancholic musings, most of which focused here on an infinitely sensitive young aesthete's quest for eternal love and his endless capacity to screw it up when he found it. "Girl on the Train" finds "the leading poetic hope of the whole Planet Earth" alone in a railway carriage with a beautiful young woman whose spiritual depth is signaled by the fact that she's "reading obsolete Monsieur Verlaine." The poetic hope, of course, says nothing and is left ruing another lost opportunity. "Laughing Boy," too, laments the fact that the singer's friends — especially the female ones — are unable to discern the suffering artist behind the carapace of caustic wit. (James, it is worth remembering, was already established on British TV by now as a purveyor of corner-of-the-mouth putdowns in his capacity as a film reviewer.) Yet already, there are signs of the impatience with pop lyric conventions that would increasingly characterize his later work. There's the carnival-esque "Master of the Revels," for instance, that so entranced Everett, and the title track, a beautifully constructed comedy sketch set to music in which a lovesick young man consults a dodgy soothsayer ("I can't even get the Lone Ranger," she protests). Musically, the album finds Atkin still in an MOR no man's land between folk and tasteful acoustic pop, a little too eager to please and reluctant to offend. Yet there was enough vaunting ambition in the melody and arrangement of "The Rider to the World's End" to suggest that he had only just begun. His two attempts at lyrics, however — the comical memory feat of "The Original Honky Tonk Train Blues" and the fragmentary "All I Ever Did" — suggest he was right to hand over the literary side of the operation to James. [The original Fontana album included a track called "Touch Has a Memory," replaced on the RCA reissue by "Be Careful When They Offer You the Moon." The situation was reversed when the album was released on CD as a two-fer with Driving Through Mythical America.]

Driving Through Mythical America (1971)

Released just a year after Atkin's debut, Driving Through Mythical America represented a quantum leap in terms of both words and music. Gone were the whimsical folk-pop trappings of Beware of the Beautiful Stranger, replaced by an altogether tougher sound that for the first time signaled that Atkin was looking to join the big boys with electric guitars. The change was appropriate, for Clive James' lyrics had also moved on. Now he was demonstrating his belief, expressed in an article for Creem magazine, that there really was no limit to what you could write songs about. The title track is a verbal tour de force, name-checking every modern American myth from Gatsby to Bogey to point up the reality of a nation whose police had recently slain four students at Kent State University. This is language in the hands of a master stylist of the kind that is all too rarely drawn to the task of writing rock lyrics, and Atkin's melodies complement every syllable. "Sunlight Gate" is a solemn meditation on the effects of war on the "heroes" who make it home, while the altogether sprightlier "Thief in the Night" looks at the love-hate relationship between guitarist and guitar. There is characteristically wry humor in the music biz satire of "Practical Man," while the tender ballad "The Flowers and the Wine" ended up being covered by Irish crooner Val Doonican — thus earning the pair more than the rest of their catalogue put together. Arrangements are sturdy and unfussy throughout, with "Sunlight Gate" in particular benefiting from a sombre brass arrangement redolent of Gil Evans. The epic "No Dice," however, demonstrated that Atkin's distinctive vocal style — measured, warm, and undemonstrative — is not an ideal instrument for the histrionics of rock.

A King at Nightfall (1972)

Pete Atkin's third album — his first for RCA — is the most fully realized and instantly likable of all his '70s recordings, yet it met the same cruel fate as all the rest. Here both Atkin and his lyricist, Clive James, set out their stall as never before. The remarkable scope of James' approach to his art can be gauged by contrasting just two tracks. Firstly, there's the savage depiction of U.S. soldiers both relishing and brutalized by the massacre of Vietnamese villagers in "All the Dead Were Strangers" ("Just lying there were ladies so old they hardly bled/Thin kids who never needed a red hole in the head/We were all in this together, we were friends/But all the dead were strangers"). At the other extreme there's "Screen Freaks," a wistful waltz — with a melody not a million miles from the Engelbert Humperdinck smash "The Last Waltz" — consisting of an affectionate litany of movie references ("The Ambersons have spiked the punch and livened up the ball/Cagney's getting big and Sidney Greenstreet's getting small/The Creature from the Black Lagoon left puddles in the hall/And Wee Willie Winkie is the most evil of them all"). But most richly satisfying of all is "Thirty Year Man," a tender depiction of an aging jazz pianist reduced to backing some kid singer to earn a buck. ("And it isn't my name that brings them in/It's a little girl just starting to begin/It's her they're piling in to see/And I'd kill that kid, if she wasn't killing me"). When fans start tugging on your coattails about the importance of listening to the words, it's usually time to head for the hills. But this is not your standard-issue rock profundity, whereby cosmic significance emerges only after intensive study and no little self-deception. This marriage of old-school craftsmanship with modern-day self-expression is pretty much unparalleled in the rock canon, and it finds a perfect vehicle in the ever ingenious melodies of Atkin.

The Road of Silk (1972)

Following hard on the heels of what would turn out to be his most wholly satisfying album, A King at Nightfall, The Road of Silk made a frustratingly muted impression by comparison. This may have been partly down to the production — for the first time by Pete Atkin himself — which resulted in a curiously muffled and airless recording, but the real problem is inconsistency. Nevertheless, closer inspection reveals that some of Atkin and Clive James' strongest songs can be found here. "Perfect Moments" makes for a beautifully languid opener, highlighted by a deliciously sensuous tenor sax solo by Tony Coe, but even that is surpassed by "The Hollow and the Fluted Night" — one of Atkin's most beguiling compositions — and the closing "Payday Evening." Unfortunately the album sags in the middle thanks to some of Atkin's less inspired melodies — including the ill-advised blues "Our Lady Lowness" and the lifeless "My Egoist," while "The Shadow and the Widower" emphasizes again that his normally measured voice is not the ideal instrument for rock & roll melodrama. Time has also not been kind to the album's other "epic" tracks: "Wall of Death" and "An Array of Passionate Lovers." The latter in particular — a lament for the demise of the counterculture that might once have caused chins to be stroked sagely — now comes across as merely portentous, and a vehicle for some seriously dated guitar punishment. An important purchase for anyone wanting to explore the work of one of Britain's finest songwriting partnerships, then, but perhaps not the place for a newcomer to start.

Secret Drinker (1974)

The fifth collaboration between Pete Atkin and lyricist Clive James, Secret Drinker unhappily turned out to be the pair's least inspired collection to date. Comprising just ten tracks, many of which meander needlessly over five minutes, the album boasts no more than four songs to rival their best work. "Rain Wheels" makes for a powerful opener, while the title track features a woozily complex melody that perfectly complements its protagonist's inebriated state. "National Steel," on which Atkin accompanies himself on just such a guitar, is another song — like "Thief in the Night" — about the relationship between guitarist and guitar, though this time one haunted by the ghosts of generations of blues players. "Sessionman's Blues," meanwhile, is a close relative of the poignant "Thirty Year Man" — though far from its equal — being the lament of another musician whose dreams of success succumbed to the reality of grinding out a living. (Remarkably, the lyrics for this song were written by James as a challenge during the 50-odd minutes of a BBC radio chat show). Overall, though, the album sounds both hastily and inexpensively recorded. Gone are the brass and string arrangements that played such an important part on Driving Through Mythical America and A King at Nightfall to be replaced (ironically) by the sound of session musicians earnestly plying their trade. Then again, no amount of window dressing could have rescued workaday plodders like "Tenderfoot," "Tongue-Tied," and "Time and Time Again" — which ends up sounding like a reference to the annoying frequency with which the hook recurs.

Live Libel (1974)

For some 25 years, until the release of The Lakeside Sessions, it looked as though Live Libel would be the inglorious swan song of one of the most distinguished songwriting teams of the '70s. In fact, the album was intended chiefly as a contractual obligation while Atkin — increasingly dissatisfied as he was with RCA's support — looked around for another label. Unfortunately, punk happened while he was looking, and suddenly labels weren't interested in articulate singer/songwriters. So for 25 years fans were left with an album that largely consisted of mildly scurrilous send-ups that had proven popular in live shows (or as the blurb put it, "An album of musical tributes to insufficiently neglected contemporary artists"). Since most of their targets (Kris Kristofferson, James Taylor, Leonard Cohen, Alice Cooper, Steeleye Span, and other '70s notables) long since ceased to be particularly influential, contemporary listeners are unlikely to find themselves convulsed with laughter — though anyone allergic to Cohen will probably still find "Doom from a Room" (credited to Leonard Conman) something of a hoot. Adding further to the album's ragbag feel is "Ballad of an Upstairs Window," an already aging comedy song — with lyrics by Atkin — whose principal interest is as a road not taken. "Uncle Sea Bird," too, sounds as though it were recorded for another project entirely. Most significantly, perhaps, the album also boasted lyricist Clive James' first and last vocal lead on "Why," a less than savage spoof of the then ubiquitous Telly Savalas hit "If," though this was omitted for the CD reissue.

The Lakeside Sessions (2001)

Resuming a career that had ground to a standstill 25 years earlier, Pete Atkin — energized by the sudden Internet-generated renewal of interest in his music — unexpectedly unleashed a veritable torrent of material mostly written for what would have been his seventh album, but for the intervention of punk. This time, however, there would be no big-league record company to mess it up. The two albums that comprise The Lakeside Sessions — initially released individually as History and Geography and A Dream of Fair Women — were recorded and released under the auspices of Atkin's own label, Hillside Music. And though the budget didn't run to the kind of top-notch session musicians and occasional orchestrations of his RCA output, the enforced intimacy of the arrangements mostly suited the material. Although most of the songs dated back to the mid-'70s (some even earlier), there had also been a subtle evolution in Atkin's style of delivery over the intervening years. Gone, mostly, was the acoustic guitar that landed his records in many stores' folk sections, to be replaced by electric piano and an altogether jazzier feel. Only the occasionally jarring use of synthetic strings smacks of budgetary constraint. As for the songs themselves — though the usual caveat about double albums applies — there are enough crackers to suggest that the album after 1975's disappointing sign-off, Live Libel, would have been one of Atkin's best. Certainly there was no evidence to suggest that lyricist Clive James was any less determined to expand the horizons of the humble pop song. "Canoe," for instance, begins with three native huntsmen navigating home by the stars before fast-forwarding hundreds of years to three astronauts reentering the earth's atmosphere. "Urban Guerilla" — with its untypical but startlingly effective use of synthesizers — takes the view of a freedom fighter whose world is about to cave in on him, while "Search and Destroy" tells the story of the Resurrection in the hard-bitten language of a GI's report: breathtakingly ambitious by rock standards, and with memorable settings to match. In amongst all the old songs contained in what was essentially a mopping-up operation were a few unannounced new compositions — notably "I Feel Like Midnight" — that suggested there was mileage yet in the Atkin-James partnership, and foreshadowed Winter/Spring, the pair's first album of all-new material since 1974's Secret Drinker. That album, however, ushered in a whole new approach to lyric writing, leaving The Lakeside Sessions as the last recorded example of a style that divided critics and listeners so bitterly between those who regarded it as the fullest flowering of the rock lyricist's art and those who found it merely wordy and self-satisfied.

Winter/Spring (2003)

Atkin and James' first album of all-new material since 1974's Secret Drinker surprised many not only by its mere existence, but its content too. For his part, Atkin had finally severed all remaining connections with folk music and fully embraced the mixture of slinky jazz, rock and Tin Pan Alley that had always played a significant part in his '70s work. Yet the greater change had been wrought in the lyrics of Clive James. By his own admission, James felt he had pretty well used up the style that had excited so much debate among British rock critics before he abandoned lyric writing for essays, novels, poetry and broadcasting. Gone were the literary allusions and arcane references, to be replaced by a refreshingly spare and direct approach. There is also a tangibly autumnal feel about many of the songs, which for the most part address the subject of ageing (the title track, "Dancing Master," "Prayer Against the Hitman") or the end of an affair ("I Have to Learn," "Empty Table," "Thought of You"). Yet there is light relief in "So Loud I Couldn't Hear It" — in which an effusive fan meets his idol of yore, only to realise he's stone deaf — and "Fat Cat." But the most heart-stopping song on the album is "The Hill of Little Shoes," James' unsentimental lament for the children who lost their lives in the Nazi death camps. As with The Lakeside Sessions, there are moments when budgetary constraints make themselves felt — a sax solo played on a Korg especially makes you hanker for the days when Atkin could call on the cream of London's session musicians. Yet despite the extended lay-off, his melodic powers seem unimpaired, with "Prayer Against The Hitman," "An Empty Table" and the title track in particular lingering in the mind long after the album has finished.