Interview with Guy Evans, drummer with Van der Graaf Generator, London 2015

Guy Evans, best known as drummer with progressive rock legends Van der Graaf Generator, grew up around jazz in Birmingham, where his mother sang Sarah Vaughan and Peggy Lee classics and his father was a bandleader. One windswept north London day back in March 2015 , he talked to The Regency Mod about growing up in Brum, his role as a musical events organizer in mid-sixties Coventry, drumming in a late line-up of The Misunderstood and, above all, the influence of jazz on his musical development and the underground scene in London in the 1960s. Today (2021), Guy continues to be engaged in a multitude of musical collaborations in addition to being an integral part of the current three-piece version of VDGG.

[This interview was originally published in 2015 as part of the New Untouchable’s ‘Jazz for Modernists’ series on their Nutsmag website.]

01: Your father [Joe Evans] was a saxophonist and bandleader in Birmingham. What were your first musical memories or influences?

GUY EVANS – Oh, well, that was it, and it was my mother as well, my mother was a singer…. we actually lived in a flat opposite the large pub/dinner-and-dance place where my dad’s band [Joe Evans Orchestra] had a residency. Our place was pretty much the dressing room on a Saturday night, ….everybody ironing their tuxes…on a summer’s evening, I’d leave my bedroom window open and I could look straight over into the pub and see the band and hear them, see my Mum and Dad play…

02: A major influence on you was Bill Harris, a local trumpeter…

GE: Were there a god, Bill Harris [not of Woody Herman’s Herd] would be my godfather…he was a kind of flatmate of my parents and a very fine trumpet player…unlike my Dad, he was interested in modern jazz which a lot of big-band musicians regarded as rather alien when it first happened and he used to turn up with white label copies of the latest Charlie Parker or Miles Davis recordings. I just thought it was music from Mars… and that’s where I think it got into my DNA.

03: Was modern jazz in any way rebellious if your family was mostly playing pre-bebop swing?

GE: It wasn’t really rebellious; it was just that my dad found it all a bit too much. I was very intrigued by it, wowed by the virtuosity, but it was the adventure of it. One of the first musicians I really got hooked on was Miles Davis. I remember that one of the first things that struck me about Miles Davis was that I could hear the mistakes. I was thinking ‘this is music that has got mistakes in it’ or in which mistakes aren’t really mistakes, but part of the vocabulary or a different avenue, different direction to go in…I remember being very blown away by Birth of the Cool.

04: That was released in 1957, so you must have been very young.

GE: I was ten. Before that I’d heard things that were hugely influential. My dad took me to see the Count Basie Band when I must have been about six or seven and I was just completely blown away by them. I’d never seen anything like it. I’d heard big-band music obviously, but nothing of that power, that kind of elasticity, I suppose. And the drumming, of course, was absolutely wonderful….

05: So, were the drums your first instrument?

GE:  I started off playing soprano saxophone and recorder, funnily enough, but I used to go along to my dad’s big-band rehearsals and sound checks on a Saturday. I used to sneak up onto the drum kit and start fiddling around in spare moments…a few of the more waggish members of the band would start playing, so we’d have these little kind of free jazz interludes and I just loved the control when everybody started doing what I was dictating.

06: You were a big fan of Mingus. Were his records easy to get hold of?

GE: Relatively. There was a fantastic record shop in Birmingham that, to my delight, I found is still going, called the Diskery. It’s a specialist record shop, a collectors’ record shop, and now it’s all sorts of genres but then it was very much jazz and blues place and I used to just dive in there and get stuff.

07: Were you part of Birmingham’s mod/r & b scene? Venues like Whiskey-a-Go-Go, El Sombrero coffee bar, the Kardomah Cafe…?

GE: El Sombrero coffee bar I went to a couple of times, yes. In Digbeth, I think. I don’t remember who I saw there…The Kardomah Cafee was never a venue as far as I know, but it was a haunt of mine… I used to pass through the centre of Birmingham on my way to school, and that was a bit of a gathering place for the sort of hipsters from my school. There was another place, more esoteric… a little cafe called The Stage Door, behind the old Alexandra Theatre, I think. It’s gone now…that was very beatnik; one had to have one’s black roll neck sweater and gaulloises. [In terms of mod], I think that maybe I was unaware of what was happening. I was leading quite a strange life really and kind of picking my own tribe, or being my own tribe or whatever.

08: In 1965, you went to study sociology and economics at Warwick University in Coventry… ’65-’68 must have been a wonderful time to be a student….

GE: Well it was staggering: I didn’t get much work done. I went in the founding year of the university and they were just about the most hip places to go to. I was one of 400 students who went there in the first year. As my late old mate Mal Peet said, the main distractions were mini-skirts and psychedelia. But there was also music and we had this fantastically generous entertainments budget and I became very involved in how it was spent. We had a great venue, not far from the M1. Bands used to love coming to play there as it was not far, and we paid quite well and had a very good audience. We had regular gigs by the Bluesbreakers, all the classic London bands like Steampacket, Shotgun Express, Graham Bond, everybody came and played loads of times; we had Cream, I think, on their second gig for 105 quid and I managed to get (through some personal connections) the Spencer Davis Group. As luck would have it, that gig was the week they topped the charts with Keep on Running.

09: You were in a group called The New Economic Model. How did that come about?

GE: That was a bit of hustling really. People wanted to have a whole evening of music and we were spending quite a lot of effort and money on support bands. Then there were just a bunch of us who were quite into playing music. We got into a little kind of jamming scene, put together a few tunes and we finally persuaded the university that we should be the support band. We were a kind of soul/r & b covers band, they equipped us a bit and we put together the classic line-up: two singers, guitar, bass, drums, organ, sax and did many a gig. It meant that I was playing in a band on the same bill as all sorts of great people, learning from them. Then came the great dream moment when Victor Brox’s Blues Train came to play and the drummer didn’t turn up because he’d broken down somewhere. So I volunteered to play and we had a little dressing room rehearsal and I did the whole set with them which was a real blast for me.

10: Did you keep in touch with a lot of these musicians?

GE: Yes, Victor, particularly (I haven’t seen him for years now) because when I came down to London he was playing with Aynsley Dunbar. Aynsley’s two roadies lived in the flat above me and we became really good mates. I used to go and see Aynsley’s gigs all the time because I thought he was a great drummer.

11: Do you remember a band from Coventry called The Sorrows?

GE: Yes, I do. I don’t remember seeing them. I remember my cousin talking about seeing them, but I don’t think I saw them myself.

12: Peter Hammill [VDGG singer/songwriter] cites The Beatles’ Revolver, particularly ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ as a milestone. Do you recall Revolver [August 1966] having an influence on changing musical styles of bands coming to Coventry?

GE: I don’t know about bands coming to Coventry, because they were still very much the British blues boom…I think that remained quite a solid core of a particular style that I really loved. There were quite sudden moves into psychedelia, I suppose… Zoot Money suddenly became Dantalion’s Chariot and it all became quite psychedelic. One of the earliest bands we had at Warwick was The Move and that was interesting because, apart from looking really sharp, they were an extremely good band. They were quite hard-edged and loud and blowing up televisions and that kind of stuff. And then the next thing that came to Warwick that, live, was anything like a shift, was The Incredible String Band…and then it was Pink Floyd.

13: Was New Economic Model a jazzy r & b band in the Brian Auger/Graham Bond style?

GE: Yes it was, because the big thing that had come into popular taste or reasonably soft popular taste was soul/r & b. We had the soul revue coming over. People were suddenly picking up on all this stuff. So they liked to dance to Eddie Floyd and Sam & Dave etc. There is a fabulous discipline in it [Stax, Motown] and, also, it is fairly forgiving of limited ability as long as you do the right thing. That was nice, to be able to discover that energy of an ensemble doing some relatively simple things, but doing them with some energy and feel.

14: So, were you able to keep your jazz drumming going, as opposed to having to completely change style.

GE: Yes. I’d say, with my jazz drumming, I always feel a bit bogus with that. I love playing it with people who are very forgiving of me but I don’t really claim to be a jazz drummer. It’s more something that’s in my blood as an influence than something I’ve ever really sat down and studied…I have a semi-frustrated, semi-in-awe relationship with jazz really. I’m in awe of the playing ability and the knowledge and the dedication; but I also get frustrated by the sort of familiarity of the territory now, sometimes. I thought it was incredibly rich the first time I saw Roland Kirk, Albert Ayler, Sonny Rollins, Archie Shepp, and, of course, John McLaughlin, all those people. I was aware that I was seeing something fantastic, something new, something that I was not even bothered whether it was jazz or not…

15: Around 1967 you were part of a psychedelic trio called Green Marble Mind…

GE: That was great, I really enjoyed that band. It just went along with swapping the mod gear for the paisley shirts and the long hair and all that. It was a power trio, we wanted to be The Jimi Hendrix Experience really and there was a very good guitar player who was not actually from Warwick University, he was from Oxford. I think he sort of knew someone who was there and he turned up one day and could play all this Hendrix stuff, it sounded brilliant; and there was a very good bass player, so we just started playing…

16: You mentioned the Incredible String Band. Did folk come into your musical progression?

GE: Well, we had The Incredible String Band at Warwick a lot. I thought they were pretty extraordinary actually. They could be a bit impossible sometimes, but I’d never heard anyone making music like that really before. [With folk], it came down to the guitarists really for me: Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Davy Graham, who of course was something else because of all that Indian and Arab stuff that he used to incorporate into his playing. I loved that adventure. I didn’t get so much into the English folk movement, at the time, I somehow felt it was a bit anal, which is probably a bit superficial of me, but at the time I wasn’t terribly attracted to it…

17: You joined Van der Graaf Generator in summer ’68. Someone who independently had a big influence on the other members of that band was Arthur Brown. Was he one of the main figures in the move from jazzy r & b to progressive music?

GE: Yeah, I can see that… while he did this extraordinary stuff with the flaming hat and all that, he completely had the chops. He had an extraordinary voice, a great, great performer, Arthur. The band was tremendous, with Drachen Theaker and Vincent Crane. Here was a band that could absolutely cut it with all the r & b on every level, from instrumentalist, drummer, singer, doing this wild psychedelic stuff that happened to have a huge number one hit as well…

18: Just before joining VDGG, around June ’68, you helped organize a music festival at Warwick University. The line-up sounds incredible, including Family, Chris McGregor’s Brotherhood of Breath, Cornelius Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra and Ravi Shankar.

GE: We just decided ‘let’s just do something, let’s just have a really big splash here, because this moment is never going to come again’. We’d had these very nice connections with London musicians and agents, who regarded Warwick and Coventry Art College as a sort of consortium of venues to be reckoned with. It was quite well known…[With Chris McGregor], it was the whole band. It was Dudu Pukwana [alto sax], Louis Moholo playing drums, Mongezi Feza playing trumpet, and it was fantastic. It was wonderful. And to me, it was one of the gigs that kind of brought jazz right back into my bones…

19: Well, it sounds fantastic, because also Family at that time, Jim King was on sax, this festival must have been one of the earliest sort of fusion gigs….

GE: Oh, I think it was, it was…

20: Van der Graaf around this time [autumn’ 68-May ’69] was a pretty full-time affair. Did you get a chance to see much live jazz in London?

GE: Oh absolutely, this was an incredible time to see jazz if you were a Central London musician where everything happened around Wardour Street and Dean Street. What happened that was incredibly fortunate was that the first Brit Invasion had happened and was happening (The Beatles, Stones, Animals and The Who and all that sort of thing) and because of union regulations all of these acts had to have acts of equivalent status coming to Britain on an exchange. I don’t know who worked the miracle but I think Ronnie Scott had a lot to do with it… in exchange, we got Roland Kirk, Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Archie Shepp….you were spoilt for choice…and because Strat [Tony Stratton-Smith] knew Ronnie Scott, we used to get either very discounted or free admission…  every musician in town was down at these gigs…they were thinking it was just like Christmas every day.

21: VDGG played at some solid jazz venues like Klook’s Kleek in West Hampstead. Was it easy to see how different styles of music were influencing different bands?

GE: Yeah, you didn’t think about it too much because what was actually happening was a real melting pot and I think quite a lot of it was coming from the jazz musicians as well. Jazz wasn’t nearly as snooty or exclusive a world as people make out sometimes. I think there were two reasons really. One was the spirit of jazz allowing, even embracing, the whole idea of different forms, different ways of playing music, different types of musicians, incorporating different styles etc and overall cherishing improvisations, and, secondly, a kind of opportunistic thing which was that they kind of wanted to get in on the act. A lot of jazz musicians were either in soul/r & b bands as well or were best mates with people who were in horn sections. And yes, it was great to go around being in the Bluesbreakers and occasionally maybe getting a bit more money than you might get for a night at Ronnie Scott’s …but actually ‘wouldn’t it be great if you were out there coining it in the same way that The Who were’…so I think there was a certain amount of motivation to embrace electric music and rock styles and things from a commercial point of view…

22: What about those crucial Miles Davis records for the fusion of jazz and British rock: In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew…

GE: They were wonderful. In a Silent Way and the small group electric Miles stuff exist in a planet of their own. I remember being very excited by Bitches Brew but also thinking that I wish I could have produced it. It was still suffering a bit from ‘jazzer’ recording techniques, though again looking back, it sounds pretty good…

23: So, from the jazz world, would you have been seeing people like Evan Parker and Keith Tippett?

GE: I never saw Evan Parker. I would like to have, but I just wasn’t aware of him…Keith Tippett, yes, absolutely. Keith Tippett [1947-2020] was pretty hip; he was a mate of Robert Wyatt and, of course, Julie Driscoll, who was a chart-topping and supremely hip person. So, you’d go and see Centipede playing somewhere, that kind of thing. And I think there were some quite remarkable crossover/elisions of pop culture and jazz thinking at the time. I think one of the most remarkable albums to come out from then is Extrapolation [John McLaughlin LP, 1969]… because here you have an album that is produced by Georgio Gomelsky, who managed the Rolling Stones, set up the Crawdaddy Club, produced the Yardbirds, produced Brian Auger and Julie Driscoll and then John Mclaughlin does his first solo album (before Mahavishnu and all of that stuff) and I think it was Georgio Gomelsky’s influence really that actually dictated the line-up in that band which was John Surman, Brian Ogers on bass, and, completely left-field, Tony Oxley, the great British free jazz drummer who was considered very far out at the time, who I loved, but was certainly not one of the powerhouse drummers that you might have brought into that situation. The obvious one to have brought into that would have been Ginger Baker, or possibly Mitch Mitchell or John Marshall, even, but that idea of that band was genius, I thought; I don’t quite know who was responsible, but certainly Georgio Gomelsky was very creative in his influence on things…

24: Talking about Mitch Mitchell, VDGG supported Jimi Hendrix at the Albert Hall [February, ‘69]. Any memories of that night?

GE: Yeah, it was just great, it was lovely. We were very nervous about it. I remember having very little notice of it…we weren’t bad, because we’d actually been doing quite a few gigs, and we were quite well-oiled, we actually went and did a pretty good set, I think…

25: In summer ’69, you met [future VDGG bassist] Nic Potter, playing together in a later line-up of The Misunderstood on two singles and the ‘Golden Glass’ sessions. How did that come about?

GE: Because I wanted to. That was it. VDGG had broken up. I was kicking about in London, feeling pretty frustrated and not really wanting to join in the gang of sort of dissolute, out-of-work musicians hanging around Le Chasse and the Marquee bar. My partner at the time, who was Strat’s secretary, said ‘what band would you like to join?’ (cos I didn’t actually like much of what was around at the time.) It was either The Misunderstood or Captain Beefheart…that was my thing. These were two things that John Peel had been playing, so I’d heard them on his recommendation and so, about three days later, she came back and said ‘right, you’ve got an audition with The Misunderstood. They were in town. I mean the whole thing had happened with their work permits and visas all screwing up. It was in fact two members of The Misunderstood trying to put together a band…Glen Campbell and Steve Hoard. And I went down and the person running the auditions was Chris Mercer, sax player with John Mayall. I was feeling a bit ‘right, okay!’

26: Did that line-up play a lot of the songs that the original Misunderstood had done?

GE: Unfortunately not, that was what I wanted to play. There was a bit, but somehow they’d gone…I enjoyed it, it was a pretty good band, but I was rather frustrated in that that was the music I wanted to play, because that’s what I’d heard and I wanted to go in that direction. I think Glen had gone ‘no, we’re not doing that sort of stuff anymore’. I think he’d associated it with being a bit too ‘out there’ mentally anyway, and all sorts of things…he was going much more sort of roots/bluesy and Steve Hoard, who was a very good singer, in fact, but he was quite into that very kind of alpha male leather trousers sort of delivery and wanting to be a bit commercial …so between us, we pushed each other in all sorts of directions, thrown together by the mad situation anyway, the best thing was when we just got on and played, because it was actually a good band and we just sort of played what we felt like playing or could play….we did a version of the Beatles’ ‘She Said, She Said’, we did ‘Who do you Love?’, we occasionally did an old Misunderstood song like ‘I Can Take you to the Sun’, but very, very rarely…

Space does not permit Guy’s further memories of VDGG)

Ornette Coleman (1930-2015) (Part 2)

August 29, 1965. Croydon. England. Shortly before the Beatles endured relentless screaming at the Hollywood Bowl, the Ornette Coleman Trio greeted a smaller, more ‘listening’ audience at Fairfield Halls, a much-appreciated venue on Greater London’s southern fringes.  This was Coleman’s first British date, part of a major European tour lasting until May 1966 (including, later that spring, a four-week residency at Ronnie Scott’s and concerts in other major cities). The trio’s European trip dovetailed with a period of revolutionary experimentation in popular culture, that transitional period when London was in full swing, California was ‘a-dreamin’’, Byrds’ guitarist Jim McGuinn (on ‘Eight Miles High’) imitated John Coltrane and the Beatles transformed themselves from the slightly anxious individuals of Help! to the dandified aural astronauts of Revolver.

By 1965, Coleman’s freedom-searching, boundary-shifting music was not simply a badge of uber-beatnik identity or confined to the margins of experimental jazz and the classical avant-garde, but had infiltrated the previously ‘straight-ahead’ forms of R & B and folk music. The shift from beat, folk and R & B to psychedelic rock privileges (in addition to pot and LSD) a new awareness of Eastern and Indian music among such luminaries as George Harrison, Brian Jones, David Crosby, Jeff Beck, Donovan, Ray Davies and Jerry Garcia. True. The importance of Indian sounds and imagery is paramount. But not only had Eastern-style modes already featured in jazz (check out John Coltrane’s modal 1961 classic ‘India’: (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIgP6-HqKhs), but the ‘free’ music of Coleman, Coltrane, Cecil Taylor and Albert Ayler contributed other important elements to the development of psychedelic and ‘progressive’ music from 1965 onwards.

Coleman’s influence on British jazz dates to 1959. Whilst not all his Atlantic LPs were released immediately in Britain, copies of non-UK albums were shared by American GIs, imported by specialist shops and played on more daring European radio stations. Despite hostility to Coleman’s new approach within some modern jazz circles, British jazz from 1960-1965 was familiar with notions of freedom. Joe Harriott, independently of Coleman, recorded Free Form (1961) and Abstract (1963) with other West Indians: Coleridge Goode (bass) and Shake Keane (trumpet, flugelhorn), and British-born Pat Smythe (piano) and Phil Seamen (drums). By 1966, Harriott was also experimenting with Indian music, soon to record Indo-Jazz Fusions I & II with composer and multi-instrumentalist John Mayer. Around 1960, Coleman-loving New Departures poets Peter Brown and Michael Horowitz invited Ronnie Scott’s house rhythm section (including pianist Stan Tracey and bassist Jeff Clyne) to live performances combining spoken word and jazz. These led to the New Departures Quartet, featuring legendary Scottish saxophonist Bobby Wellins, which released an LP in 1964 for Transatlantic Records.

Coleman’s blues-drenched radical music was also an (often overlooked) influence on the emerging British R & B scene, particularly on musicians working with Alexis Korner and Graham Bond. Although partly a reaction to the conservatism of ‘trad jazz’, from the late ’50s British R & B had incorporated modernist and mainstream jazzers. Bond’s alto work with tenorist Don Rendell was compared to Coleman. Though Bond actually preferred Eric Dolphy, Coleman was a major inspiration to the other members of the Graham Bond Organization: bassist Jack Bruce, drummer Ginger Baker and saxophonist Dick Heckstall-Smith. Bruce later claimed he and Baker had envisaged Eric Clapton’s role in Cream mirroring Ornette’s in his trio. Bruce, with Heckstall-Smith, future Colosseum drummer John Hiseman and guitarist John McLaughlin, would record the Ornette-inspired Things We Like LP in August 1968, three months before Cream’s final performance at the Albert Hall.

By August 1965, then, Coleman was a key figure within several interlocking contexts: the New Departures poetry crowd, freer modern jazz, avant-garde improvisational music and the trajectories of various pioneering musicians (Bruce, Baker, Heckstall-Smith, Syd Barrett, proto-Soft Machine) looking to push R & B into unchartered waters. These people shared Ornette’s fluid, egalitarian philosophy of freedom in which each instrument could potentially represent any human voice. The British debut of the Coleman Trio, early in the counter-cultural ‘underground’, was a symbolic opportunity to affect and engage with the experimental zeitgeist. Organized by Michael Horovitz, pioneering improvisational music promoter Victor Schonfield (who’d met Ornette in New York in 1964) and Pete Brown, the Croydon concert was part of Horovitz’ Live New Departures series of multi-media performances, poetry readings, concerts and happenings. Due to unsatisfactory British Musical Union laws, Coleman composed a piece of classical music to qualify him as a ‘serious’ musician and therefore bypass regulations prohibiting performances by American jazz musicians.

The resulting twenty-four-minute ‘Forms and Sounds for Wind Quintet’, performed by the Virtuoso Ensemble, provided an interesting interlude between pianist Mike Taylor’s quartet (featuring John Hiseman, bassist Tony Reeves and sax player Dave Tomlin) and the Coleman Trio. The Trio, with drummer Charles Moffett and bass virtuoso David Izenson, then perform stunning versions of seven tracks including ‘Sadness’ and ‘Doughnut[s]’ from the recently-released Town Hall, 1962 LP and the John Cage-inspired ‘Silence’ (where Coleman answers with witty aplomb a heckler requesting Ray Noble’s tricky standard ‘Cherokee’). The Croydon concert, now available on CD, was released in 1967 in Germany as the double box set An Evening with Ornette Coleman (see first photo). An exceptional testimony to Coleman’s unique genius and an intriguing source of future musical adventures in British music, critic Barry McRae called it ‘some of the greatest jazz ever presented in this country’ (“Ornette Coleman – Live”, Jazz Journal ,October 1965).

Some of those adventures up to 1970 can be traced here. In October 1965, Mike Taylor’s quartet recorded Pendulum, one of the rarest items in British jazz. Released on Columbia in June 1966, it reveals Taylor’s huge potential as a pianist somewhere between free jazz and lyrical post bop. Like Pete Brown, Taylor would collaborate with Cream, writing music for ‘Passing the Time’, ‘Pressed Rat and Warthog’ and ‘Those were the Days’ from Wheels of Fire (1968). Jack Bruce would feature on his second LP Trio (1967). A friend of the equally troubled Graham Bond and a heavy user of LSD, Taylor was found drowned in 1969. Another important 1966 release was Challenge (Eyemark Records) by the Spontaneous Music Ensemble, formed by drummer John Stevens and saxophonist Trevor Watts. Recorded in March, the album included two direct tributes to Ornette and Eric Dolphy (‘2.B. Ornette’ and ‘E.D’s message’). SME, who enjoyed a residency at London’s Little Theatre, signed to Island records for their second LP, Karyobin (1968), featuring some of the earliest recordings of leading British alto player Evan Parker.

An important link between Ornette and British psychedelia was Steve Stollman, brother of Bernard, founder of US avant-garde label ESP-disk, one of whose earliest releases was Coleman’s Town Hall, 1962 LP. Stollman was in London in early ’66 to promote ESP. With Barry Miles and John ‘Hoppy’ Hopkins, founders of International Times, he helped organize the Spontaneous Underground ‘happenings’ at the Marquee, one of which (Trip, 13 March 1966), featured Pink Floyd Sound and the free improvisation trio AMM. Formed by Eddie Prévost (drums), Lou Gare (saxophone) and Keith Rowe (guitar) and soon to be joined by oboist Lawrence Sheaff and avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, AMM were part of Mike Westbrook’s big band before reaching the ears of Victor Schonfield in late 1965. Alongside Donovan, an African vocal group and ESP’s British signings the Peter Lemer Quintet (whose 1967 LP Local Colour featured baritone saxophonist John Surman), AMM played the first Spontaneous Underground event, the so-called ‘Giant Mystery Happening’ (30 January, 1966). Performing with Pink Floyd on several occasions in 1966-7, they inspired the sonic guitar experiments of Syd Barrett, who attended the recording of their debut AMMUSIC (May 1966). Whilst not the only inspirations for Pink Floyd, AMM or any other British improvisational or psychedelic act, Coleman was a key influence on Barrett and organist Rick Wright, while Eddie Prévost remarked in 2002 that ‘the music of Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler gave us permission to disobey’ (George McKay, Circular Breathing, 2005, pp. 196).

This refusal to ‘obey’ musical rules helps explain Coleman’s influence on British music in the late 1960s. The Trio’s 1966 gigs at Ronnie Scott’s and elsewhere divided the jazz world in much the same way as Bob Dylan’s almost contemporary British tour did amongst folkies. Melody Maker’s Benny Green, disparaging of the saxophonist’s chromatic playing and anticipating Withnail and I, remarked: ‘Like a stopped clock, Coleman is right at least twice a day’ (John Fordham, Jazz Man: The Amazing Story of Ronnie Scott and his Club, 1995, p. 121). Disappointingly, Thelonius Monk was another critical attendee at Ronnie Scott’s. However, others left with positive impressions, including future Yes drummer Bill Bruford and a young Ian Dury.

The boundaries between jazz, rock and improvisational performance were breaking down fast. Coleman’s next London concert in February 1968 (at the Albert Hall) featured Yoko Ono (whom he’d met in Paris) simulating what (in a recorded rehearsal at least) sounds like her nascent passion for John Lennon. The revolutionary atmosphere of 1968 in Britain was probably more suited to incendiary free jazz and improvisation than 1967. In addition to Jack Bruce’s first solo LP, 1968 saw Heckstall-Smith, Hiseman and Tony Reeves appear on John Mayall’s Bare Wires LP and the formation around this trio of Colosseum, arguably the first progressive jazz-rock band. Fusion was also happening within Folk: Ornette was familiar to the groundbreaking acoustic guitarist Davy Graham and future members of Pentangle and Notting Hill’s Third Ear Band (featuring Dave Tomlin on violin). Alongside Coltrane, Ayler, Roland Kirk and Sonny Rollins, by the end of the decade Coleman’s example had not only inspired experimentation, but also cemented the saxophone within ‘progressive’ rock. Among major British players in this field were: George Khan (ex Peter Lemer Quintet, Pete Brown & the Battered Ornaments), Barbara Thompson (Colosseum), Elton Dean and Lyn Dobson (Keith Tippett Group, Soft Machine), Ian McDonald and Mel Collins (King Crimson), David Jackson (Van der Graaf Generator) and Phil Shulman (Gentle Giant).

Jazz for Modernists 2- Ornette Coleman (1930-2015) (Part 1)

[This article originally appeared in 2015 on the New Untouchables’ Nutsmag website in 2015]

©JamesThomas 2015

(Don Cherry & Ornette Coleman at Five Spot Café, New York, November, 1959) 

On June 11, 2015, the world of jazz (and beyond) lost one of its most revolutionary figures of the past sixty years: Texas-born composer, saxophonist, occasional violinist/trumpeter and all-round visionary Ornette Coleman (1930-2015). Like John Coltrane and pianist Cecil Taylor, his major North American contemporaries in the foundations of what became known slightly problematically as ‘free jazz’, Coleman’s influence was enormous, his legacy both undeniable and at times controversial. This brief article (the first of two) does not attempt to cover his life or major works, though it examines recordings from 1958 to 1965. Readers looking for reliable general appreciations of Coleman can consult these and other recent obituaries:

http://www.mojo4music.com/20560/ornette-coleman-1930-2015/http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jun/11/ornette-colemanhttp://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/culture-obituaries/11670777/Ornette-Coleman-jazz-revolutionary-obituary.html

Instead, through an overview of his earliest UK releases, coupled with some fascinating nuggets of information about key listeners, I will outline Ornette’s importance for British music during the first half of that decade. In part two, I will examine in more depth his importance for the specific shift in our beloved modernist world towards the experimentations of the counter-culture and underground scenes of the middle and later sixties.

1959. A pivotal year for jazz in Britain. The disbanding of the Tubby Hayes- and Ronnie Scott-led Jazz Couriers; the second UK tour by the Modern Jazz Quartet and the opening of Ronnie Scott’s Jazz Club at 39 Gerrard Street. It also signalled the first official British release of an Ornette Coleman LP: Tomorrow is the Question! (Contemporary/Vogue), described by blogger ‘London Jazz Collector’ as “Perhaps tame by future “free jazz” standards, but adventurous and uncompromising in its time” (https://londonjazzcollector.wordpress.com/2011/08/25/ornette-coleman-a-walk-on-the-little-more-wild-side/). This is a fair appraisal of a record which, like its predecessor Something Else!!!! (1958), still provided (minus piano) a fairly conventional bop rhythm section to Coleman’s (and trumpeter Don Cherry’s) non-chordal harmonic and melodic improvisations. By the time his quartet had divided opinion with its residency at New York’s Five Spot (November 1959), Coleman’s first Atlantic LP, The Shape of Jazz to Come had appeared in the States (though its official UK release was not until 1966).

With Coleman’s quartet now featuring Cherry, Billy Higgins (drums) and dapper bassist Charlie Haden, The Shape of Jazz to Come is considered a major staging post on the journey from bebop to free jazz. Critic Piero Scaruffi writes: “The idea was to make every member of the band a soloist equal to the others and to free the improvisation from musical constraints: basically, each individual was only bound to the mood of the other individuals, not to the technical aspects of the music that they were playing” (http://www.scaruffi.com/history/jazz15a.html). The music, though, was still rooted in the blues and even pre-blues forms (field hollers, laments). This is perhaps not surprising, as Coleman had paid his dues in various rhythm and blues combos in Texas and on the West Coast during the 1950s. For this reason alone (to say nothing of his band’s sartorial elegance c.1960-1962), the quartet’s LPs on Atlantic are required listening for today’s open-minded modernists. Take ‘Lonely Woman’, from Shape, for example, or ‘Ramblin’’ from its follow-up Change of the Century (1960). Both tracks are infused with blues feeling. The first is an impression of a rich white woman wearing “the most solitary expression in the world”. Of the second, Coleman wrote in the sleeve notes: “Ramblin’ is basically a blues, but it has a modern, more independent melodic line than older blues have, of course”. Perhaps music writer Richard Williams summed it up perfectly last week, reminiscing about his first encounter with the 1961 LP This is Our Music. Rightly hailing the “impossibly cool” cover appearance of the quartet (now with drummer Ed Blackwell), he wrote: “Nothing about it — the raw timbre of the horns, the lack of conventional chord sequences — bothered me in the slightest. What it had, apart from undoubted modernity, was the “cry” that went back to the origins of the blues” (http://thebluemoment.com/2015/06/12/ornette-coleman-1930-2015/).

Early receptions of Coleman’s music in the UK jazz press (Melody Maker, Jazz Journal, Jazz Monthly etc) were not always complimentary. Alun Morgan, in Jazz Monthly (June 1959), for example, remarked that he “appears to be handicapped by his own bad fingering in places and frequently produces two simultaneous notes an octave apart (in Claire O’Neal, Ornette Coleman, 2013, p. 22). However, for some young ‘in-the-know’ jazz musicians, this rejection gave him an appealing outsider status. Guitarist Derek Bailey remembered “as a kid in Goole hearing the Ornette Coleman Quintet on the radio, 1958 or 1959, and thinking it was fantastic. I also loved it because it was being so much reviled by the jazz press, I thought this must be great” (Ben Watson, Derek Bailey and the Story of Free Improvisation, 2004, p. 82). The views of Morgan and Bailey encapsulate the divided opinions Ornette Coleman engendered throughout his career.

One important audience for this new music comprised intellectuals, poets and beatniks associated with Michael Horovitz’ New Departures, a new poetry journal emanating from Oxford. A student at Brasenose College, Oxford University, Horovitz, alongside Liverpool poet Pete Brown and David Sladen, played a key role in introducing readers to beat writers such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. In June 1965, he would also be one of the brains behind The International Poetry Incarnation at the Albert Hall, often claimed to be the birthplace of the British ‘Underground’ counter-culture and (less plausibly) ‘Swinging London’. In volume 4 of New Departures (1962), a number devoted to jazz, Coleman’s work was appraised seriously alongside contemporaries Eric Dolphy, John Coltrane and Cecil Taylor. Dolphy, who played UK dates in 1961, had appeared as part of a double quartet on Coleman’s extended improvisation Free Jazz (1961), which was initially only available in Britain on import. However, specialist jazz record shops in major cities were not slow to meet the demand for the new experimental forms of jazz. Furthermore, the case of London-based West-Indian sax player Joe Harriott, whose Free Form (1961) was recorded just before Free Jazz, shows that British modern jazz was undergoing its own revolutionary changes.

(Image: http://realitystudio.org/bibliographic-bunker/new-departures/)

Between 1962 and 1965, despite a self-imposed two-year break from live performance and recording, Coleman was gaining significant attention in Britain on the fringes of beatnik and mod circles. In Cambridge, where the New Departures crowd would stage readings and ‘happenings’, future Pink Floyd members Rick Wright, Syd Barrett and their entourage were fans. In Syd Barrett and Pink Floyd: Dark Globe (2010), Julian Palacios paints a vivid picture of free-jazz-loving ‘hip undergraduates’ rubbing shoulders with Vespa-riding mods, Barrett seemingly with a foot in each camp. In Canterbury (and later Mallorca), Australian beatnik Daevid Allen shared his love of Ornette with Robert Wyatt, Kevin Ayers and Mike Ratledge (who in 1966 would become Soft Machine). Wyatt, who in Jonathan Green’s essential Days in the Life: Voices from the English Underground, describes his mod youth in the early sixties, recently paid generous tribute to his hero: “His voice is immediately unique, as if he were the last surviving speaker of an ancient language” (http://www.thewire.co.uk/in-writing/essays/ornette-coleman-1930-2015_robert-wyatt).

By the time of his first UK concert, at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, August 29, 1965, hastily organised by Horovitz, Brown and promoter of experimental music Victor Schonfield, Coleman’s music enjoyed currency not only among jazz and improvisational avant-gardes, but also the more searching elements of the rhythm and blues/nascent rock world. Two further Atlantic LPs (with bassists Scott LaFaro and Jimmy Garrison) had appeared in Europe: Ornette! (1962), recorded just five weeks after Free Jazz in January 1961 and Ornette on Tenor (1962), the latter of which Richard Cook and Brian Morton say “hooks Ornette back into the raw R&B of his Texas roots” (The Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD, 2000, p. 300). His new trio, featuring Charlie Moffett on drums and David Inzenzon on bass, had recorded Town Hall Concert (in December 1962) and a June 1965 soundtrack with free tenor player Pharaoh Sanders for the film Chappaqua (though director Conrad Rooks would ultimately use music by Ravi Shankar). The Kinks (minus Ray Davies) had seen the new Coleman trio perform in Greenwich Village in February 1965, while bands from the emerging American rock underground (Grateful Dead, Velvet Underground, The Fugs) were incorporating elements of his free improvisational styles into their own blues, folk and European-based music. Part two of this article will return to Ornette Coleman’s influence on the psychedelic and underground British music of 1965-1970.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Great Expectations, BBC 1967

The announcement this summer that several vintage BBC TV adaptations of Dickens novels produced between 1958 and 1969 were at last to become commercially available on DVD was met with unconstrained glee in the household of Mr. & Mrs Regency Mod. My regular reader(s) will be aware that this very portal of debate and deliberation was the site of an article concerning the legacy and reception of Charles Dickens in the 1960s. Coincidence, then, that the august corporation should reexamine its archives and dust away the cobwebs from telerecordings of yore? Perhaps. But here at Regency Towers, we flatter ourselves that, in our own small way, we have cajoled certain people into action so that others may now reap the fruits of our labours.

So, it was with mounting trepidation and a not uncommon sense of excitement that, a month or so ago, the outer polythene wrap was removed from my newly-received digital recording of Campbell Logan’s 1967 production of Great Expectations, starring Gary Bond as Pip, Francesca Annis as Estella, Maxine Audley as Miss Havisham and John Tate as Magwitch. Reader, you may recall I wrote briefly about this in my last post (May 2017) on what little information I could find. Now, having watched this fascinating and important landmark in television Dickensiana, I can provide more details and opinions.

Serialized over ten 25-30-minute episodes (from Jan 22), filming for the 1967 BBC dramatization of Great Expectations started late in 1966. Most of the action was recorded in the studio on videotape with outside location sequences in film and occasional inserts of filmed landscape. However, because the videotape was lost or destroyed and only a film telerecording exists, the inside shots are now visible in a format that largely mirrors the exterior scenes. The overall impression is therefore more antique than, say, The Forsyte Saga, running concurrently on BBC2, which still survives in ‘as live’ b & w videotape. Occasional faults in picture quality tend to reinforce an impression of a film made decades earlier, prior even to the classic 1946 David Lean production. Personally, I find this lends an eerie, gritty atmosphere to the whole, with unexpected benefits for a modern audience.

An episode-by-episode analysis of this adaptation would be superfluous to current requirements. Nonetheless, the opening scene of the novel, where seven-year-old orphan Pip encounters the desperate escaped convict Magwitch on the north Kentish marshes, is the stuff of legends and a crucial marker of any film, television or theatre production. How does it fare?

John Tate as Magwitch, Great Expectations, BBC, 1967

Working with a small budget (the BBC had invested heavily in the lavish Forsyte Saga on BB2), there is a certain impression of making do. A jauntily incongruous soundtrack thankfully fades before young Pip, played with quiet aplomb by Christopher Guard (elder brother of Dominic), approaches the graveyard where the manacled Magwitch lies in wait. Despite its minimalism, the ensuing encounter is dramatic enough, Tate immediately capturing both the convict’s raw, brutal instinct for survival and the humanity that will bind him to the boy who brings him food and a file. Dialogue is crisp, rushed even, but so much action is packed into Dickens’ opening chapter that this hardly matters. The harrowing sight of a decaying corpse hanging from a jibbet will provide the backdrop to the opening credits to each episode, thus reinforcing the shock and significance of Pip’s early encounter with the convict.

Indeed, what the early scenes lack in scale and grandeur is made up for in small details that reveal a close, astute reading of the novel. For example, as Pip pours tar water into the brandy  that will cause Uncle Pumblechook (Norman Scace) such choking discomfort at the Christmas dinner, the camera picks out the upturned hare imagined in the text to be winking at the guilt-ridden child. The range of Guard’s facial expression here is impressive. Nearly thirteen at the time (and thus suited to later scenes of Pip’s burgeoning feelings for Estella and changing relationship with Joe (movingly played by Neil McCarthy), Guard’s ability to convey emotion outwardly translates to the screen the inner workings of Pip’s mind (a haunting feature of Dickens’ brilliant first-person narrative). Unfortunately, his early visits to Miss Havisham’s Satis House are undermined by the choice not to cast a child actress as the younger Estella. Though Maxine Audley as Miss Havisham is coldly middle-aged as the book insists (rather than decrepit), the gap of eight years between Annis and Guard at the time of filming precludes a convincing depiction of the (pre-)adolescent tension so crucial to these character-forming events in Pip’s life.

An overall emphasis on close textual analysis, though, is a welcome feature of an adaptation that preserves much of Dickens’ memorable dialogue. It also extends to a sensitive handling of subtleties of the novel that have eluded subsequent versions, especially for cinema. Those of us disappointed by how later productions mistake or ignore the novel’s significant dating (GE is a Victorian novel set for the most part in the Regency period) will be reassured by writer Hugh Leonard’s evident knowledge of its historical setting. References to ‘His Majesty’ and ‘the King’ during the scene of the soldiers’ arrival at Joe’s forge in Chapter 5 (the novel opens c.1809-13) are maintained in preference to the incorrect ‘Her Majesty’ of other versions. Later episodes of Pip’s life in London, his renewed acquaintance with Estella and Magwitch’s flight convey convincingly an 1820s ambiance (give or take an occasional anachronism) rather than an erroneous Victorian one. Only the very last scenes of the adaptation (Pip’s ‘final’ encounter with Estella) are correctly and unambiguously Victorian (the unfolding of both endings of the novel can roughly be dated to 1840-1845).

Maxine Audley as Miss Havisham and Christopher Guard as Pip, Great Expectations, BBC, 1967

More importantly, perhaps, the shady and insidious character of Orlick (played by Ronald Lacey), excluded from so many film and television versions, is present in this production.  Orlick is a crucial figure in the novel’s structure and meaning, shadowing and exposing Pip’s guilty thoughts, the responsible party for the violent attack on Mrs. Joe and  a determining agent in the Compeyson plot. Adaptations of the novel without him are effectively stripped of an entire layer of its deeper meaning, his absence usually clearing the way for a smoother transformation of the protagonist into a romantic Hollywood hero. Lacey’s Orlick is a sinister, lime-besmirched whiner, at times bordering on the ridiculous. Yet the scene of his capture of Pip out on the marshes towards the novels’ denouement is strangely powerful and unsettling.

It should be remembered that in 1960 Julian Moynahan’s article ‘The Hero’s Guilt: The Case of Great Expectations’, published in Essays in Criticism, had foregrounded Orlick’s role in the novel. The darker realism and proto-modernism of Dickens’ later period was now competing with his Pickwickian joviality and fireside Christmas cheer. Director Alan Bridges may also have been thinking of ‘rite of passage’ British films such Look Back in Anger and Billy Liar as well as Ken Loach’s immediately contemporary Cathy Come Home, broadcast on November 16, 1966. Though her brief analysis of the 1967 Great Expectations is, in my opinion, unduly negative, Professor Mary Hammond makes a good point when defining it as ‘kitchen-sink Dickens’ (Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: A Cultural Life, 1860-2012) and is certainly correct to link it with Loach’s drama and flag up contemporary comparisons with Joe Orton’s Loot. 

Despite press criticism that the adaptation was ‘slow-moving’ (Hammond cites The Western Daily Press) the ‘three stages of Pip’s Expectations’ are given equal space over the ten episodes. The shift from Kent to London occurs during episode 4, the arrival of the mildly obsessive-compulsive lawyer Mr. Jaggers (brilliantly played by Peter Vaughan) at the forge providing the culmination to episode 3. Magwitch’s return from Australia to Pip’s new quarters in the Temple (the culmination of the second stage) takes place in episode 7. With Magwitch’s flight and recapture dominating episode 9, space is given in the final episode to Wemmick’s wedding, Pip’s illness and convalescence with Joe (complete with psychedelic dream sequences de riguer for early ’67), his return to the forge and (of great interest) a culminating scene adapted from the novel’s original ending in which Pip and ‘little Pip’ (Joe and Biddy’s son) meet Estella by chance in London but there is no hint at all of a future partnership.

Maxine Audley as Miss Havisham, Francesa Annis as Estella and Gary Bond as Pip, Great Expectations, BBC, 1967

Great Expectations has proved a difficult novel to transmit to the screen without curtailing much of its wry humour or the ambivalent narratorial construction of Pip as at once a sympathetic and deeply unsympathetic character. In compensation for the Orlick plot and symbolism, the Logan-Bridges production leaves out most of Pip’s education in London (with Matthew Pocket), the ‘third convict’ scenes, the Finches of the Grove drinking club and perhaps the most amusing sections of the novel, the theatrical set-pieces of Mr. Wopsle’s dramatic career (one of which features the sighting of the returned Compeyson). Nonetheless, Gary Bond is largely successful in conveying the central transformation of Pip’s character as he learns to love Magwitch, the architect of his ‘fortunes’. Like the majority of the Kentish characters, however, his pre-gentleman accent seems to come from anywhere but the Hoo Peninsula!

The major women characters are all well-cast and convincingly played. Maxine Audley (Miss Havisham), known to some of my readers as Mrs. Beauchamp in Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush (1967), was a highly-experienced stage and screen actor at the time of production. Her interpretation of the jilted bride encrusted in dusty cobwebs, faded linen and vindictive intent strikes a fine balance between unhinged delusion, calculated revenge and (alongside Dickens himself) a sarcastic contempt for the hangers-on and toadies around her. Meanwhile, Francesca Annis plays the beautiful but ‘heartless’ Estella with just enough compassion for us to feel aggrieved at the choice of the original ending for this production (especially as the viewer sees her turning back to look at Pip as he continues examining exhibits in a museum). Finally, Hannah Gordon as wise, loving Biddy and Shirley Cain as Mrs Gargery (Pip’s sister) both give strong, sensitive performances.

Bernard Hepton as Wemmick & Gary Bond as Pip, Great Expectations, BBC, 1967

Whilst acknowledging Professor Hammond’s view that the directing of the original ending may ‘border[s] on misogyny’ in ‘the use of broken Estella to salvage Pip’s ego’ (Hammond, 2016, p. 140), I would like to suggest an alternative reading of the unusual choice of the original ‘less happy’ ending.

This TV production of Great Expectations was broadcast in the lead-up to the decriminalization of homosexuality for men over the age of 21 in August 1967. Gary Bond (26 at the time of filming) was a gay man who, from 1969 to 1976, would be the partner of actor Jeremy Brett. Although further research would be needed to put this case, I wonder whether the decision not to have Pip and Estella united romantically may have been a reflection, not just on the sexuality of Bond himself, but the impending change in the law. Without going as far as calling it a ‘gay reading’ of the novel, I wonder if these circumstances might have dictated the choice for a new, daring adaptation of Great Expectations so soon after the 1959 BBC production.

More than a conventional romance between a man and woman, Great Expectations is one of the ultimate novels of what today we might call a ‘bromance’. Pip has significant emotional attachments to four other men: Magwitch, Joe, Herbert Pocket (charmingly played by Richard O’Sullivan) and Wemmick (delightfully played by Bernard Hepton). Whilst the first ultimately reveals a marked father-son structure, the other three are ‘brotherly’ relationships which all end in marriages except for Pip. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist jocularly refers to himself as “quite an old bachelor”, a line that is preserved in the final episode of this adaptation. Later, as Pip leaves Estella to look once again at the ‘exhibits’, the viewer is left with an impression that time has  left him with no romantic interest in any woman whatsoever.

© The Regency Mod, 2017

 

 

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Regency/Victorian BBC TV dramas 1967

Amidst the plethora of golden anniversary celebrations of 1967 currently emerging like tadpoles swarming towards an early edition of Mr. Hazlitt’s Essays, and after an unforgivable absence of over six months from these pages, I would like to make my own humble contribution, namely an overview of the BBC’s costume dramas of that year based on novels that were either written or set in the Regency or early Victorian periods. Now, this could, I hear at least one reader exclaim, be something that might equally be done for any year of the 1960s, and she is right . Perhaps I shall turn the clock back to 1964 at some future juncture or forwards to 1968 or 1969. But ‘we are where we are’, in 2017, and thus by a simple process of subtraction, golden anniversary celebrations take us to 1967.

Moreover, this was no ordinary year in the history of television costume dramas or the small screen in general. No indeed! Astute readers will already know that 1967 saw the introduction of colour television in the British Isles (and also Germany, France and Holland). From July 1, BBC2 officially started occasional broadcasts in colour (studio recordings, feature and documentary films, imported film serials and live outside broadcasts) before the station turned completely into colour (barring a few exceptions) on December 2.

On that very day, episode one of the first full British costume drama serial to be made and broadcast in colour, Rex Tucker’s adaptation of Mr. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, was transmitted into the kitchens, lounges, attics, student digs and drawing rooms of at least some regions of the United Kingdom (sadly, for many of my fellow West Countrymen and women, the Mendip transmitter was not working until 1969, though the Wenvoe transmitter in Wales was broadcasting BBC2 in colour from August 1967). For those who had a 625-line colour TV, the frocks, cravats, carpets and, most importantly, Susan Hampshire, were in glorious PAL colour, albeit with occasional studio lighting problems that can surely be forgiven fifty years later.

Vanity Fair was the fitting culmination of a year in which studio-based costume dramas on both BBC channels were still in black & white. There is a little uncertainty around whether the adaptation of Wuthering Heights, broadcast on BBC2 in October and November 1967, may have initially been planned as the first colour costume drama. However, in the same Christmas week that The Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour was switched to BBC1 and broadcast in black & white, it fell to Vanity Fair to fully depict the colour and panache of the Regency clothes which had been an influence on contemporary  fashion for the previous couple of years.

Here then is a brief synopsis of the Regency and Victorian BBC costume dramas of 1967. Much of the information has been sourced from the BBC’s Genome website and the IMDB film and television website (though the latter is occasionally inaccurate about colour/b & w status for individual programmes in 1967). The entries below contain information about the existence and availability of each serial. Future research will engage with programmes made for Independent TV channels. The most famous and popular costume drama of 1967, The Forsyte Saga, is not included here as its action and publication history falls outside the time period under consideration.

Great Expectations (BBC1, Jan 22-Mar 26, 10 Eps, b & w)

Charles Dickens’ seminal 1860 novel of Pip’s childhood encounter with convict Magwitch and his growth into eventual self-awareness through disappointment in the source of his ‘expectations’ has seemingly never been far away from a film or TV camera. A Victorian novel set (c.1810-1830) in the Regency period , my earliest memory of its visual representation was the 1981 BBC production with Joan ‘Miss Marple’ Hickson playing Miss Havisham and a teenage Patsy Kensit as the young Estella. The rarely-seen 1967 adaptation, directed by Alan Bridges, featured Gary Bond as Pip, Francesca Annis as Estella and the late Peter Vaughan as Mr. Jaggers. Though criticized at the time for a gruesome scene of a body hanging from a gibbet, it has otherwise been all but forgotten.  Whilst the original videotape copy seems to have been deleted, a film telerecording exists in the archives, thus at least raising the possibility of a future commercial release. For context, the Beatles single released during the serial’s run was ‘Penny Lane/Strawberry Fields’. Were Regency sideboards ever more on the money?

St Ives (BBC1, April 9-May 14, 6 Eps, b & w)

Those who wish to read a synopsis of this adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s unfinished 1897 novel of a captured Napoleonic soldier, Viscount Anne de Keroual de St. Ives, could do worse than consult a direct reminiscence from a contributor to the IMDb website: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424464/reviews?ref_=tt_ov_rt. The historian must rely heavily on such memories as the serial itself was junked/wiped from the archives.

Lovers of 60s psychedelic pop might be intrigued to know that Murray Head, whose 1967 Immediate single ‘She Was Perfection’ is, I am reliably told, ‘a gas’, played the part of Saladin in two episodes.

Further Adventures of the Musketeers (BBC1, May 21-Sept 3, 16 Eps, b & w)

Alexandre Dumas’ celebrated 1844 historical novel of seventeenth-century intrigue, Les trois mousquetaires, and its two sequels, have enjoyed a long history of cinematic (from 1903) and television representation in French, English and beyond. Friendly with Dickens, Dumas was quickly translated into English, with three versions doing the rounds by 1846. It has long been one of the most popular French novels in English, with dozens of film versions and loosely-based adaptations and three British TV serials (1954, 1966, 2014).

Over the summer of 1967, BBC1 broadcast Further Adventures of the Musketeers, the sequel to the previous years’ The Three Musketeers, starring Joss Ackland as D’Artignan (in the 1966 serial he was played by Jeremy Brett) and a young Brian Blessed as Porthos.  This serial was based on the Dumas sequel, Twenty Years After (Vingt ans après, 1845).

Both serials were kept in the archives, at least in the form of telerecordings. The quality is evidently good enough for commercial release, as both seem to be available on DVD (the 1967 serial as apart of Simply Media’s DVD releases). A very thorough review of this and the 1966 serial can be read at the excellent Archive TV Musings blog: https://archivetvmusings.wordpress.com/2016/04/22/the-further-adventures-of-the-musketeers-to-be-released-by-simply-media-on-23516/

The Regency Mod will be putting this on his wish list for summer viewing.

Kenilworth (BBC2, July 22-Aug 12, 4 Eps, b & w)

Sir Walter Scott was popular at the BBC in the 60s & 70s, with several of his novels being dramatized (Rob Roy, 1961, The Heart of Midlothian, 1966, Kenilworth, 1967, Ivanhoe, 1970, Woodstock, 1973, The Fortunes of Nigel, 1974). However, only one episode, the final one, of David Conroy’s 1967 production of Kenilworth exists in the archives. Scott’s 1821 romantic novel of sixteenth-century ambition had already been dramatized by the BBC in 1957, a live adaptation featuring Paul Eddington (The Prisoner, The Good Life) as Edmund Tresillian. The role was played ten years later by Jeremy Brett, while the part of the 1st Earl of Leicester’s squire, Richard Varney, was taken by John Fraser (Repulsion, 1965).

Pride and Prejudice (BBC1, Sept 10-Oct 15, 6 Eps, b & w)

“Then, may we enter the parsonage.”

Jane Austen’s 1813 novel of Regency manners has been, in its ‘original’ form, the subject of five British TV serials (1952, 1958, 1967, 1995, 2005) a TV movie (1938) and two major feature films (1940, 2005). It remains, for many, the ultimate nineteenth-century novel for translation to television and film. Curiously, though, the BBC’s 1967 production, with Celia Bannerman as Elizabeth Bennet and the late Lewis Fiander as Mr. Darcy, made to mark the 150th anniversary of the author’s death, evades DVD release despite still existing in the BBC archives.

The series was directed by Joan Craft and a low-resolution recording of episode 5 can be found on you tube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ3kzO1cVfA. The production has been criticized for supposed anachronisms of costume and appearance. At the BFI Screenonline website, Louise Watson writes: ‘The costumes and makeup (copious black eyeliner, bouffant hairdos) reflect the fashions of the 1960s rather than the novel’s Regency setting’ (http://www.screenonline.org.uk/tv/id/1012588/).

This seems a little unfair. More recent adaptations with vast resources have been equally guilty of adding contemporary touches and in forty years time will be open to the same retrospective critique. Based on one episode, it’s true that some costumes may have been influenced by 1967’s playful nostalgic blending of Victoriana, Edwardiana and the Regency (or simply matters of cost and availability). Neck attire, that of Mr. Darcy in particular, may not be entirely accurate.  However, any ‘bouffants’ on show in the production look like wigs rather than freshly starched from a Chelsea salon.

Despite its drawbacks, it would be nice to see this production on sale. Hopefully, fans of ‘the Jane’, as I believe no one calls her, will knock on a few BBC doors and get the thing spruced up for commercial release.

Les Misérables (BBC1, Oct 22-Dec 24, 10 Eps, b & w)

And so, just a week later, BBC1 took its viewers from Pemberley to Provence, where Victor Hugo’s great 1862 novel, Les Misérables, begins its labyrinthine journey through the years from Napoleon’s final defeat at Waterloo (1815) to the July Revolution (1830).

Directed by Alan Bridges, this 10-episode production featured a cast including Frank Finlay as Jean Valjean, future ‘Betty’ in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave Em Michele Doltrice as Fantine and Vivian Mackerrell, the real-life prototype of Withnail, as Marius. Once again, a telerecording of the serial exists, though, as yet, there is no commercial DVD release, despite the novel’s abiding popularity as a stage musical.

Despite what Wikipedia says, the BBC have confirmed to me that this adaptation was not made in colour. Some scenes from it can be found as inserts in a Portuguese-language version of a 1990s North American TV programme about the novel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kJmIe8KvCLQ

Lovers of French and American 60s pop may also like to hear this version of The Box Tops’ ‘The Letter’ by Les Misérables – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5E2Y08Z-F8

Wuthering Heights (BBC2, Oct 28-Nov 18, 4 Eps, b & w, possible use of colour cameras)

The first half of 1967 in BBC2’s costume drama schedule was taken up by Donald Wilson’s 26-part epic production of John Galsworthy’s The Forsyte Saga, which ran from Jan 7 until July 1, the day of the first official colour broadcast (a Wimbledon tennis quarter-final). With production having started in July 1966, it was made in black & white, BBC studios not being fully equipped for colour until summer 1967.

There has been some debate as to whether Hugh Leonard’s 1967 adaptation of Emily Bronte’s classic novel, Wuthering Heights (1847), may have initially been the first scheduled colour costume drama, though recent correspondence with the BBC’s Genome project would suggest otherwise.

Either way, what exists today on DVD is a reasonably clear and quite atmospheric black & white telerecording, mostly recorded in the studio but with location shots filmed near Haworth in West Yorkshire. The production itself, featuring Ian McShane as Heathcliff and Angela Scoular as Cathy and Catherine, is a bit stagy but intermittently compelling. Particularly striking, even today, is the window appearance of Cathy’s ghost, which various people have suggested was seen by Kate Bush as a child and the inspiration for her song ‘Wuthering Heights’. This scene was probably more spooky in the ‘as live’ feel of its original videotape transmission.

An interesting piece of colour film of the production team and actors in costume on location has been uploaded onto you tube by Anthony Greenwood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqnykhKyggs

Vanity Fair (BBC2, Dec 2-30, 5 Eps, colour)

Embed from Getty Images

Dyson Lovell as Rawdon Crawley & Susan Hampshire as Becky Sharp, BBC studio, Oct 1, 1967

And so, to finish, Rex Tucker’s dramatization of William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847), produced by David Conroy and starring the delightful Susan Hampshire as Regency mischief-maker Becky Sharp. As already stated, this was the first British costume drama to be made in colour. Happily it still exists (albeit not in a totally homogeneous format) and is commercially available on DVD.

The move into colour certainly helped bring these period dramas to life, inevitably blurring the gap between past and present. Vanity Fair effectively begins the long sequence of classic costume dramas that now so divide opinion.  Some viewers cannot abide the cheap studio props, heavy lighting and theatrical acting of these productions. Others, either reminiscing or simply fascinated by television history, accept the technical limitations and enjoy them for what they are: well-intended, faithful and generally well-acted adaptations of great literary works.

The 1967 Vanity Fair has all the charm and limitations of this period of small budget, tight deadlines and heuristic experimentation. Rushed post-production editing is in evidence (especially between film and videotaped sections of episode 1) but small quibbles shouldn’t detract from the overall lushness of the picture. At times a touch too close to drawing room farce rather than epic novel, it nonetheless deals well with the central themes of masquerade, scheming and hypocrisy. Roy Marsden is excellent as George Osborne and fans of Coronation Street will notice a very early performance by Thelma Barlow, playing the fastidious Miss Briggs.

Of the five episodes, the first has the slightly muffled, slow-motion quality of an NTSC conversion, while the others are much clearer (at least one is in its original PAL format). Being in colour, the serial was one of those selected to be converted into NTSC for the USA’s Masterworks series. During the period of junking, it seems that the BBC may have kept one or two episodes as historical evidence of their first colour drama (outtakes of the production also still exist). The DVD is composed of a combination of PAL and NTSC prints.

The British military costumes, long sideboards, paisley dresses, references to India and themes of flirtatiousness in a bellicose setting cannot help but echo and mirror events and fashions taking place outside the studio doors.

Six of the Best – 60s bands you might not know

Dylan Thomas’s “roadside bushes brimming with whistling/Blackbirds and the sun of October” have, among other things, kept your correspondent on matters Regency modern away from this site or blog for much too long. Despite earlier stated intentions, my research on Napoleon is currently in limbo, and so, to avoid any confusion engendered by too long a silence, I return to these pages now with different matters on my mind.

Recently, a friend asked if, in addition to such eighteenth/nineteenth-century-inspired beat combos as San Francisco’s Beau Brummells or London’s Bo Street Runners and Tintern Abbey, there were any other unknown or barely-known Regency-Modernist or Victoriana-fuelled 60s bands who took their names directly from individuals or cultural references from the period 1700-1850.

Dear Reader, over time we shall uncover myriad possible answers to this question, some of them supplied by anonymous individuals (and thus subject to confirmation), others the result of my own future research. For now, here are six bands from 1963-1969 whom you may never have heard of who (according to my sources) straddled the tightrope of temporal interplay between their contemporary moment and the unavoidable pull of the collective past. The following information has been provided to me by individuals who swear they were there ‘back in the day’.

The Huguenots

Inspired by the textile history of southern French protestants who emigrated to England from the Cevénnes region in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries , this dapper four piece from East London apparently started pounding out r & b in late 1963. Singer Jean Cavallier met guitarist Anthony Court at a Graham Bond Organisation gig somewhere in the West End, teamed up with bassist Elliot Marion and French-speaking drummer Esprit Collins and recorded a 4-song demo tape ‘Stop the Dragoons’ in April ’64. The tape led to nothing and is nigh-on-impossible to locate, all members having given up music in 1965 to become fishmongers in different parts of Europe.

The Lyrical Ballads

As their moniker suggests, these lads were massive fans of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Long before the revolutionary collection, The Lyrical Ballads (1798) was being hailed as British poetry’s first ‘punk rock’ moment, five young mods from West Somerset (not the only ones, it must be said) were tapping into its meters and imagery to produce singles (on the Quantock label) such as ‘She’s in a Monastery’ and ‘Poor Susan’. Both of these were released in 1966 to little fanfare from the buying public. Singer Dave ‘Idiot Boy’ Parsons is still remembered in Bridgewater for setting fire to his breeches on stage.

The Mantalinis

Taking their cue from a character in Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, Mr. Alfred Mantalini, this bunch of sartorial reprobates formed around Holborn in 1964. Little is known about either their line-up, their recording history or live performances, but they certainly cut a dash in the streets of central London. Their visual attire was inspired by the illustration below, available in most good editions of the novel. It is not attested, though, whether their effect on women was akin to that of Mr. Mantalini in the illustration.

‘The Reduced Circumstances of Mr. Mantalini’ by Phiz (Hablot K Browne), from Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839).

The Female Vagrants

The only girl-group in our list, Slough’s Female Vagrants took their name from one of the lyrical ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge. Though purveyors of the blue-eyed-soul sound favoured by New York’s The Vagrants, it seems that the female variety were not inspired by them. Led by guitarist/singer Hannah Less, they are rumoured to have recorded one of the great lost folk-soul LPs, ‘By Derwent’s Side’, after leaving Berkshire for the Lake District in 1967. Theirs certainly is an intriguing mystery.

Los Faidits

Back to France, it seems, for one of the most obscure boogaloo outfits in musical history. Taking their name from the Occitan word for ‘exiles from the Albigensian Crusades’, Montauban’s Faidits have long been a source of hope, anxiety and shattered expectations on the Mediterranean underground soul scene. Collectors known to your scribe would gladly part with their entire stash of button-down shirts for a copy of the uber-rare 1968 side ‘Use it Before Toulouse it’ on the Fan-i-òc label.

The Thomas de Quincey

Think of proto-prog and you think of Procol Harum, Clouds, The Nice, The Moody Blues and perhaps Nirvana (the British ones). Do you, I ask, include Kent quartet The Thomas de Quincey? They were seemingly one of the first bands to destroy a mellotron on stage (a very foolish thing to do and perhaps a career-defining/ending moment). Two rarer-than-medium-rare singles, ‘Confessions of an English Oatcake Eater’ and ‘Knocking at the Gate’ (both 1967) are thought to exist as acetates, along with 1968’s unreleased LP Suspiria de Profundis, the master tapes of which are jealously guarded by someone claiming to be a direct descendant of Geoffrey Chaucer. Thought you knew your prog? Well, perhaps you do.

Until next time,

© The Regency Mod 2016

 

 

A Statement of Intent

At the risk of daring to wish to imbibe the aurum potabile of wider recognition, the Regency Mod has succumbed to the temptation to advertise his musings in an arena beyond his current audience of a mere handful of chosen acolytes.

That is to say, I hope to enlarge my audience, to reach out to those hitherto and perhaps even forthwith unaware of my scribblings, ideas and impressions. The time has come, Dear Reader, to utilize what I understand is termed ‘social media’ or, if not so bold, then at least to actively seek out new adherents to the cause of Regency Modernism.

If the tools of twenty-first-century modernity are there to communicate with like-minded spirits then, hey presto, it shall be done. That, at least, is my current position, one which I hope is not injudicious to put forward in these troubling times.

We are surely in and of an age where the post-modern is now passato. For too long, it has exerted its hegemony, flexed its ahistoricism and trampled hard upon the ancient desire to sift fact from falsehood, or simply cherish the joy of the primary source, the very real and tangible ‘document’ that yields its mysteries on closer inspection and contextualization.

A new age of historicism is upon us, one that draws parallels between the distant and recent past in a bid to better understand the present.

All this is not to imply that I gainsay any previous stated intention to at times be ‘fanciful’, to invent, juxtapose and tease my reader (s) for our mutual and consensual intellectual pleasure and satisfaction. Au contraire. The supercherie, if not the snuff, is not to be sniffed at.

However, for the time being, we shall aim for sincerity and authenticity.

So, allow me to use this as an opportunity to update you with news of forthcoming posts for this Autumn. Shortly, there will be something on Napoleon during the 1960s, Daumier in London in 1961, a first venture into fashion and a piece on costume drama.

The  reader may also like to note that the 1960 BBC production of Barnaby Rudge has been added to the list of dramas in my blog ‘Dickens in the 1960s’.

Until next time,

© The Regency Mod

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Five Regency Ballads

As the dog days of August fade into distant memory and September heralds the first mellow hints of autumn, the Regency Mod often finds thoughts turning to song, particularly of a folkloric variety. The 1960s saw a revolution in the British folk revival, a transformation from its learned origins in scholarly documentation and field recordings made of ageing singers for whom this music was a vestige of traditional oral culture.

Indeed, the decade witnessed a truly global engagement between folk music of the British Isles and the popular folk traditions of other cultures (North American, West Indian, North African, Pan-Celtic, Middle Eastern and Indian), as well as new dialogues between folk, jazz, pop, country blues, modern rhythm & blues and even medieval and baroque music. Tradition was starting (not without a struggle) to embrace Modernism and a big fat kiss would soon be returned.

Of course, interest in national and regional popular musical cultures of the past (and present) was a major element of European Romanticism, inspired in no small measure by the writings of German thinker Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803). In Britain, collections of ballads and other songs ancient and new were published in increasing volume from the 1760s onwards: one thinks of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Sir Walter Scott’s The Minstrelsy of the Scottish Border (1802-3) and, much later, Francis James Child’s The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882-98).

In addition to Scott’s book, the Long Regency (c.1790-1837) saw the publication in Britain of various folk song collections such as Joseph Ritson’s posthumous Northern Garlands (1810) and William Sandys’ pan-European Christmas Carols Ancient and Modern (1833). The period also witnessed one of the last major flourishings of single broadside ballads – song lyrics telling a story, often composed by one (sometimes named) individual, which were printed on one side of a sheet of paper to be distributed by hand or in larger folded sheets called chapbooks. The broadside had existed since the sixteenth century, reaching its peak of popularity in the seventeenth.

Joseph Ritson (1752-1803), an 1803 engraving by James Sayers

Source: Wikipedia

Whereas the impulse of the formal collections was often an antiquarian or Romantic desire to preserve or celebrate an idealized rural national past, the popular broadside ballad of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries tended to deal with contemporary or near-contemporary matters. These were either specific events (Battle of Trafalgar or Waterloo, political demonstrations (Peterloo), murders, executions) or imaginary representations of real social and cultural issues (industrial unrest, deportation, press-gangs, wartime separations and the perennial themes of sex, violence and adultery).

By the time of the mid-twentieth-century folk revival, the Industrial Revolution (c.1780-1840) occupied a privileged position on the borders of what had become ‘ancient rural tradition’ and the modern industrial or post-industrial landscape. Events and emotions dramatised in songs from this era belonged to an age distant enough to evoke ‘tradition’, but sufficiently recent and concrete to suggest parallels with the rapidly changing post-war climate of the 1950s and 1960s.

Analogies were not hard to find. For the Napoleonic Wars (1793-1815), read the Cold War, potential nuclear war and, towards the end of the decade, Vietnam. Working conditions, union unrest, strikes, the position of women, democracy, urban expansion, (im)migration, the threat to rural traditions and the countryside, Anglo-Irish relations – all these matter were relevant to Britain in 1825 and 1965, together, of course, with…the perennial themes of sex, violence and adultery.

Here, then, is a selection of five ballads composed roughly between 1780 and 1830 which were recorded during the 1960s by artists involved in the revival and reinvention of traditional folk song.

1/ A. L. Lloyd, ‘The Poor Cotton Wayver’, from The Iron Muse, Topic LP, 1963

Known also as ‘The Four Loom Weaver’, as it was recorded in 1957 by Ewan MacColl for the 10” LP Shuttle and Cage (Topic 10T13), this post-Waterloo depression era industrial ballad dates to 1819-20, when handloom weavers’ wages were at an all-new low and steam was replacing traditional working methods. MacColl collected his version from a certain Becket Whitehead of Delph, near Oldham. London-born A. L. ‘Bert’ Lloyd, founder-member of Topic Records, co-editor (with Ralph Vaughan Williams) of The Penguin Book of English Folk Songs (1959) and major architect of the (English) folk revival, recorded ‘The Poor Cotton Wayver’ for Topic’s seminal compilation of industrial folk music, The Iron Muse (1963). British cotton production was in decline during the 1950s, a state of affairs leading to the 1959 Cotton Industry Act. Further reductions in demand for cotton during the next decade ensured this song would retain deep resonance in Lancashire and other cotton-producing regions.

2/ Anne Briggs, ‘Rosemary Lane’, from The Hazards of Love, Topic EP, 1964

Rag Fair or Rosemary Lane by Thomas Rowlandson (1756-1827)

Source: Wikimedia Commons

A much-loved ballad of seduction, ‘Rosemary Lane’ (sometimes called ‘Bell-Bottomed Trousers’) is perhaps best known to modernists via the version by Scottish guitar legend Bert Jansch, whose 1971 LP of the same name is something of an afterhours masterpiece. The song was introduced to him by Nottinghamshire-born Anne Briggs, one of his main collaborators and companions from 1959 to the mid-sixties. The nineteen year old Briggs, a pure-voiced free spirit who’d come to the attention of A. L. Lloyd at one of his Centre 42 music and theatre workshops, recorded the song in 1963 for the following year’s The Hazards of Love EP. Narrated by a servant girl persuaded into a night of passion by a sea-bound sailor, ‘Rosemary Lane’ is a variously dated to c.1780-1830 and was one of dozens of broadsides printed by Mrs Jennings of 13, Water-Lane, Fleet Street, London.

http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/search/roud/269

3/ Davy Graham & Shirley Collins, ‘Reynardine’, from Folk roots, new routes, Decca LP, 1964

In distinct ways, Davy Graham and Shirley Collins were two of the most iconic figures of 1960s British folk music. A Guyanese Anglo-Scot who trod the Middle Eastern musical path long before most, Graham was the composer of ‘Anji’, a trailblazing guitar instrumental later recorded by Bert Jansch and Paul Simon. He was one of the first, if not the first, folk modernist, a sharp, dapper fellow whose love of modern jazz, calypso and Indian ragas bled into his jaw-dropping finger-picking guitar style. Sussex-born Collins, now 81, was one of the undisputed founders of the folk revival, recording as early as 1955 and a collector (with Alan Lomax) of European and North American songs by the likes of Almeda Riddle and Mississippi Fred McDowell. In 1964, with innovation the thing, she and Graham were coupled for a series of high-profile London concerts and an eclectic set for Decca of sixteen numbers ranging from Bobby Timmons’ ‘Grooveyard’ to the medieval ‘The Cherry Tree Carol’. One of several ballads balancing Graham’s raga-blues touches with Collins’ soulful interpretation of tradition, ‘Reynardine’ is another seduction ballad, in which the “sly, bold” male figure, who invites maidens to his castle, might be an outlaw, a ghost or Mr. Fox.

4/John Faulkner & Sandra Kerr, ‘Van Deimen’s Land’, from The Critics Group: Waterloo-Peterloo, English Folk Songs and Broadsides, 1780-1830, Argo LP, 1968

Dating probably to just before its first broadside appearance in 1830, ‘Van Deimen’s Land’ (the song also known as ‘The Gallant Poachers’) is a deportation or transportation ballad, from a time when poachers and other convicts were regularly transported to the penal colony of Tasmania (until 1856 Van Diemen’s Land). Like so many traditional songs, locations and personalities featured in the lyrics vary from version to version. This may give credence to one theory that the ballad was composed as a warning to poachers and other wrong-doers.

This version, sung by John Faulkner with guitar accompaniment by Sandra Kerr (both responsible for the music of 1970s children’s programme Bagpuss), was recorded in 1968 for an album of broadsides from 1780-1830 by The Critics Group, an ad-hoc ensemble set up by Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger. The Regency Mod enjoys listening to this and the 1971 version by Shirley Collins and the Albion Country Band in conjunction with The Kinks’ 1969 single ‘Australia’. The antipodean sub-continent’s journey from penal colony to land of opportunity is telling.

5/ Fairport Convention, ‘The Bonny Bunch of Roses’, from Meet on the Ledge: The Classic Years, 1967-1975, Island 2 CD, 1999

One of various Napoleon-themed British ballads doing the rounds in the early nineteenth century, literally dozens of recordings of ‘The Bonny Bunch of Roses’ have been made since Norfolk singer Harry Cox committed it to BBC tape on December 18, 1945. Artists to interpret it include Phil Tanner, A.L. Lloyd, Bill Porter, Bob Davenport, Nic Jones, Barry Lister, June Tabor and Jon Boden. The song dramatizes a dialogue between Bonaparte’s son Franz, Duke of Reichstadt (1811-1832) and his mother, Marie Louise of Austria (Napoleon’s second wife), who advises him not to rise to avenge the British who defeated his father at Waterloo. Critics have argued long the extent to which the song sympathizes with Napoleon Bonaparte, as several English-language ballads from the period undoubtedly did. Fairport, with Richard Thompson’s chiming electric guitar and the late, great Dave Swarbrick’s vocals and violin to the fore, recorded their ten-minute version at Gold Star Studios, Hollywood in May 1970 (see the excellent website https://mainlynorfolk.info/folk/, a source of much information provided here, for more details of this and many other ballads. ).

Portrait of Franz Bonaparte on his death bed, 1832, engraved by Franz Xaver Stöber

Source: Wikipedia

© The Regency Mod 2016

Dickens in the 1960s – An Introduction

Johnny Dankworth What the Dickens! LP (1963)

Source: Wikipedia. Copyright – Fontana

I am not the first, nor will I be the last, to say, with some conviction, that Charles Dickens (1812-1870) is one of the best loved and, let’s be frank, d**ned finest novelists ever to stroll through planet Earthington. Yet from around 1920-1950, within academic and literary circles at least, his star did not always shine so brightly as it had during his lifetime and has done since.

A combination of narrowly realist readings, gloomy E.M. Forster-inspired literalness (“But can we believe in his characters?!”) and snobbery towards his popularity with children and cats had reduced his status within British universities to that of an uncomfortable onlooker, a trespasser on F. R. Leavis’  The Great Tradition (1948), from which he was (initially) excluded.

Yet, as Bob Dylan still occasionally reminds us in another context, ‘the times they were “a-changin’” – by the late 1950s, there’d been a significant shift in appreciation among scholars. Of course, significant voices, such as George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Wilson and George Orwell, had championed Dickens before. Orwell’s 1940 essay ‘Charles Dickens’ (from Inside the Whale) is a landmark in modern criticism.

By the turn of the 1960s, though, several new books were arguing for the seriousness and complexity of Dickens, particularly the later novels: Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Great Expectations and Our Mutual Friend. In 1958, the American deconstructionist critic Joseph Hillis Miller (b.1928) published the highly influential Charles Dickens: The World of his Novels (http://victorian.lang.nagoya-u.ac.jp/dickens/miller-dickens.pdf), while in Britain there were important contributions from John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson (Dickens at Work, 1957) and the editors John Gross and Gabriel Pearson, whose Dickens and the Twentieth Century (1962) included important essays by Angus Wilson, John Bayley and W.J. Harvey.

Outside this rarefied world, of course Dickens had remained a consistently popular world writer since his death in 1870. Editions, dramatizations and translations of the novels and major stories, alongside biographies and studies of his life and times, were never in short supply. A major biographically-minded publication was G.K. Chesterton’s Charles Dickens (1906).

The early-twentieth-century technological developments of cinema, radio and television (the earliest film of a Dickens’ text dates to 1898) were all fruitful media for new representations of the imaginative universe of Dickens’ fictional grotesques and the panoramic scale of his social commentary. The BBC broadcast a television opera, Pickwick, in 1936, while the immediate post-Second-World War period produced two major, much-discussed British films by David Lean: Great Expectations (1946) and Oliver Twist (1948).

In the UK, television in particular became increasingly important during the 1950s as a medium for education and entertainment. By the end of the decade, Dickens was a regular fixture of the BBC’s serialized costume dramas, initially broadcast live, but recorded on videotape from around 1962. The survival rate of adaptations made in the 1960s is patchy to say the least, though some survive in the archives as film telerecordings.

Produced by the corporation’s Children’s Drama Department, these multi-part serials of (usually) 30-minute episodes were broadcast on BBC1 at Sunday tea-time, a sign perhaps that, despite his acceptance as a complex, adult-minded writer, Dickens was still cherished as a favourite for all the family. The absence of the more heavily satirical Hard Times and Little Dorrit from this era of programming is quite telling.

From the period that concerns us came Our Mutual Friend (1958/9), Bleak House (1959), Barnaby Rudge (1960), Oliver Twist (1962), The Old Curiosity Shop (1962/3), Martin Chuzzlewit (1964), A Tale of Two Cities (1965), David Copperfield (1966), Great Expectations (1959 & 1967), Nicholas Nickleby (1968) and Dombey and Son (1969). Our Mutual Friend featured future Man from U.N.C.L.E star David McCallum in the role of Eugene Wrayburn, while a young Ian McKellen played the lead in David Copperfield.

The 1969 production of Dombey and Son is quite possibly the very last BBC period drama to be made in black and white (Dickens’ popularity kept him away from BBC2, which started broadcasting colour dramas in late 1967 with Thackeray’s Vanity Fair). However, there is a 1970 colour television film of David Copperfield, and a 1974 BBC production of the same novel, with even longer sideburns, is available on DVD.

For many, though, the most iconic 1960s representation of anything written by Charles Dickens is Lionel Bart’s stage musical Oliver!, a hugely successful production which premiered at the New Theatre, London on June 30, 1960. For many Mods, Oliver! is most notable for a fourteen-year-old Steve Marriott playing the role of the Artful Dodger (and other members of Fagin’s gang) throughout most of 1961. Another young Mod-thespian, Phil Collins, he of Saxondale favourites Genesis, would take his turn in the role in 1965, towards the end of the show’s initial run.

Oliver! was not the first musical adaptation of a Dickens text or character. Parlour songs, ballads and instrumental pieces such as Brinley Richards’ ‘The Dolly Varden Polka’ date from the author’s own lifetime, while the 1950s saw two musical television adaptations of A Christmas Carol. However, it was easily the most ambitious up to that point and remains the most popular to this day, enjoying various revivals in London, Broadway and beyond.

A Galician Jew from Stepney, East London, Bart, by 1960, had already written hits for the likes of Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele and achieved success with the Joan Littlewood-produced cockney low-life musical Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be (1959). The Dickensian subject matter of London gangs, petty and more serious crime, cockney dialect, prostitution and police activity found in Oliver Twist was therefore familiar and fertile territory, ripe for contemporary treatment. Unrelated, though still worth mentioning, 1959 also saw a one-series sitcom, The Artful Dodger, featuring Dave Morris and future ‘Ethel Skinner’ Gretchen Franklin.

January 1962 was something of a high watermark in the modern history of Oliver Twist’s reception. On the 7^th, with Bart’s West End musical half-way through its second year, the BBC launched its own 13-part mini-series, starring Bruce Pochnik as Oliver, to coincide with the 125^th anniversary of the publication of the first instalment of the novel in 1837.

Of all Charles Dickens’ novels, Oliver Twist is the most immediately relevant to all things mod. Think of some of the shared ingredients – London locations, cockney dialect and invented slang, a gang of working-class adolescent males, theatrical strutting and peacock behaviour, subversive mockery or imitation of ‘respectable’ society, honorary girl members and, perhaps more controversially, a Jewish element (whilst the portrayal of Fagin by Dickens and in Lean’s production has long been seen by some as anti-Semitic, Bart, for obvious reasons, created a more sympathetic and amusing figure). Ok – the Artful Dodger may not have been moving his feet to John Lee Hooker, but his adopted mate’s surname does evoke a dance craze from 1961 and 1962!

There is little doubt that the success of both Oliver! and the BBC costume dramas, together with his place on school examination syllabuses, contributed to Dickens’ significant role in the development of post-war popular youth cultures. Is it too far-fetched to talk of a short-lived Olivermania in early 1962? Perhaps. And yet the success of Bart’s adaptation was immense and far-reaching. The character Nancy’s torch song ‘As Long as He Needs Me’ (initially sung by Georgia Brown) was covered worldwide by, among many others, Shirley Bassey (1960), Joni James (1962), Anita Kerr (1963) and Shani Wallis (for the Carol Reed film version of Oliver! (1968). When the stage show hit Broadway in 1963, the US response was not unlike that for the Beatles the following year.

As the London mod and r & b scenes grew throughout 1962 and 1963, certain Dickensian echoes filtered into the emerging tapestry of events. Eel Pie Island, the location of some of the earliest Yardbirds and Rolling Stones gigs, had featured in Nicholas Nickleby (1838/9)– Miss Morleena Kenwigs repairs there by steamer from Westminster Bridge “to make merry upon a cold collation, bottled-beer, shrub, and shrimps, and to dance in the open air to the music of a locomotive band”.

In 1963, the seminal modernist jazz saxophonist-composer Johnny Dankworth, alongside other British jazz legends including Tubby Hayes, Bobby Wellins and Ronnie Scott, recorded ‘What the Dickens!’ an entire LP inspired by the novelist (see photo at top). By 1964, the Kinks, regularly turned-out in leather top boots, waistcoats, riding coats, longish hair and frilly shirts, were now modelling themselves on Dickens characters. In his 1994 autobiography X-Ray (p. 120), Ray Davies remarked that “Avory was Bill Sikes; Dave was the Artful Dodger, I was Smike from Nicholas Nickleby and Quaife insisted on being Pip from Great Expectations, even though his manner suggested he was more like Mr. Micawber”.¹

By June 1965, as London was officially ‘swinging’, Charles Dickens himself appeared to return to Earth to see what all the fuss was about. Perhaps he took time to visit a Paddington restaurant themed in his honour called ‘Our Mutual Friend’ (http://www.britishpathe.com/video/dickens-restaurant/query/MUSIC+PUB). He certainly knocked on the door of the Top 40, with the single ‘That’s the Way Love is/In the City (Pye 1965) – a second, the Jagger/Richards-penned ‘So Much in Love’ appeared on Immediate in February 1966. Much to the disappointment of this scribe, the Dickens in question was in fact a fashion photographer called David Anthony. ‘In the City’, however, so my friend Claude tells me, is ‘a nice mid-tempo mover’.

‘B’ side of Charles Dickens’ single, ‘That’s the Way Love Goes’ (1965)

Source: http://www.45cat.com/record/7n15887

Regency imagery and Victoriana increasingly pervaded the British fashions and designs of 1966, 1967 and 1968. The psychedelic era in Britain is perhaps more associated with Lewis Carroll, Aubrey Beardsley and Thomas de Quincey. However, with continued BBC adaptations, the 1968 film version of Oliver! and preparations for the centenary of his death in 1970, Dickens inevitably remained in the spotlight. As the decade reached its conclusion, East London hard rockers Spice changed their name to Uriah Heep, ensuring that the inimitable Boz would be honoured in truly ’eavy and ’umble style.

Footnote

[1] This quote also appears in Christine Jacqueline Feldman’s We Are the Mods (Peter Lang, 2009, p. 28).

© The Regency Mod, 2016

Further Reading

The Oxford Reader’s Companion to Dickens (ed. Paul Schlicke), OUP, 1999, especially entries: ‘criticism and scholarship’, ‘music and musicians evoking Dickens’ work’ and ‘television adaptations of Dickens’

The Kaleidoscope BBC Television Drama Research Guide, 1936-2006 (eds. Simon Coward, Richard Down, Christopher Woodall Perry), Kaleidoscope, 2009

Joss Marsh and Carrie Sickmann, “The Oliver! Phenomenon; or, ‘Please sir, we want more and more!’”, Essays and Studies. 65 (2012): 150-170. Dickens Bicentenary Special Issue, Dickens and Modernity. Ed Juliet John.

Avertissement to Reader

As I write (August 2016), now in the second half of the sixth year of what has by some been termed ‘This New Regency’, not only is there a bicentennial reappraisal of the Regency era itself (1811-1820) and  a continuing interest in what may be termed the ‘Long Regency’ (c. 1795-1837), but also an intensifying semi-centennial marking of the 1960s, a decade which, though fading from living memory, never ceases to beguile, fascinate, mislead and tease new generations as well as (let us not forget) those for whom it cast its various spells either in present tense mode or during subsequent periods of nostalgie.

Thus it seemed apposite to this particular scribe, the Regency Mod, for whom both these epochs of history have co-existed in a fraternal embrace since at least 1985, to devote a portion of his energies to a full and boundless examination of the influences the one had on the other (notwithstanding the possibility, for some readers of certain theosophical persuasions, that the other may also have exerted its retrospective influences on the one).

Of course, an objection rears its head! “How could only ten, perhaps twenty years come to bear so significantly on a single decade some 150 years later?” goes the cry. Even allowing for contemporary notions of “inventing tradition” and “cultural reception” and the acknowledged importance of the 1810s and 1960s in Europe, nay the World, as periods of vitality, crux and radical change, do the various echoes of the Regency strictu sensu found in the costumes, poetry and ideas of the 1960s merit such attention?

Though my immediate answer would be “Indeed, Sir and Madam, it does”, my interests in the past and its effects on more recent times can be extended back to the Georgian period and onto the Edwardian. This Regency Mod is the friend of the Victorian Dandy, the Orleanist Beatnik and the Hanoverian Skinhead. Hence these musings, compiled in the form of a Blog, will incorporate the myriad influences on the events and productions of the 1960s of a longer period stretching from around 1780-1900 – the Ages of Romanticism, Capital, Empire and early Modernism and their revisitings and reworkings in the Age of mid-twentieth-century Modernism.

It will strive to be factual; it may at times permit itself to be fanciful. It will always be thoughtful.

© The Regency Mod