Riding the Waves to Eternity

A bit of a self indulgent entry this one: read on at your own risk!

When I first came to Edinburgh in October 1977, on my eighteenth birthday, to start University, my musical horizons, amongst other things, expanded significantly.  I well recall encountering Ian Blyde’s extensive collection of blues and psychedelia on vinyl and my introduction to Mississippi John Hurt and Rev. Gary Davis.  Indeed this very blog and my nom de plume originate in a song by Quintessence whom I first heard on Ian’s record player. Emsley Nimmo played Five Hand Reel’s “For Aa’ That”, thus introducing me to the music of Dick Gaughan for which I shall be forever grateful.  Em also tried to get me interested in Jean Redpath whose charms sadly eluded me until much later.

And I remember the night when Jim Kay played an obscure album by Pete Atkin and Clive James entitled “Driving Through Mythical America” and Ian Blyde and myself were knocked sidewise by what we heard.

I bought a second-hand copy shortly thereafter (the 1973 re-release, not the 1971 original) at the late lamented Greyfriars Market and I have never been without a copy since – either that original vinyl which I still have or more recently an MP3 rip.  It is a great album and contains a fine mixture of literate lyrics and equally literate music which is neither folk nor rock, jazz nor blues – though there are elements of all of them in there.  Thirty two years after I first heard them, there are songs on it which still zip through my brain regularly.  Particularly I like “The Prince of Aquitaine”, James’ discussion of the nascent drugs trade when international airtravel was a relative novelty, the title and some of the imagery being a conscious evocation of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with a smattering of Shakespeare.  I know that sounds heavy duty but, trust me, it isn’t

There is one of the songs on the album, though, which, even although I like it a lot, continues to annoy me – or rather the central conceit of the final verse annoys me.  It is this one -

No Dice

I tried hard to be useful, but no dice
With no spit left I couldn’t soften leather
With these old hands I couldn’t even sew
So yesterday they left me on the ice
I could barely lift my head to watch them go
The sky was white, my eyes grew full of snow
What thing reached me first, bears or the weather
I just don’t know
Yesterday was oh so long ago — so very long ago

I saw across our path through the lagoon
Thick shrubberies of hail collide and quarrel
Sudden trees of shellburst hump and blow
Our LVT turned through the reef too soon
The front went down, we all got set to go
But the whole routine was just too bloody slow
What kind of splinters hit me, steel or coral
I just don’t know
Yesterday was oh so long ago — so very long ago

We hit the secret trails towards thin air
Aware we’d never live to tell the story
And at the last deep lake before the snow
We rigged the slings, chipped out the water-stair
Swung out the holy gold and let it go
It sank so far it didn’t even glow
And if the priest died too to share our glory
I just don’t know
Yesterday was oh so long ago — so very long ago

Yesterday we finished with the ditch
We stacked our spades and knelt in groups of seven
Our hands were wired by an NCO
With a fluent-from-long-practice loop and hitch
No dice — there was nothing left to throw
A bump against your neck and down you go
And if I kept my peace or cried to heaven
I just don’t know
Yesterday was oh so long ago — so very long ago

Yesterday from midnight until dawn
I lay remembering my lost endeavour
The love song that would capture how things flow
The one song that refuses to be born
For I have tried a thousand times or so
To link the ways men die with how they grow
But no dice, and if I’ll do it ever
I just don’t know
Yesterday was oh so long ago

What annoys me? The preciousness of the comparison of the agonies experienced by the poet/lyricist in failing to make a song with the mundane brutalites of casual death by men at the hands of other men explored in the first four verses.  Unless there was some elaborate piece of mickey taking going on, I suspect that the modern day Clive James with somewhat more mature critical sensibilities would give a rueful shrug at his youthful pretence, and rightly so, but it continues to bug me about an otherwise great song.  Sad git? Me?

Meanwhile, here is another from the album – a mini masterpiece in my view. Does anyone still write a lyric like this?

The Faded Mansion On The Hill

When you see what can’t be helped go by
With bloody murder in its eye
And the mouth of a man put on the rack
The voice of a man about to crack

When you see the litter of their lives
The stupid children, bitter wives
Your self-esteem in disarray
You do your best to climb away
From the streaming traffic of decay

Believing if you will that all these sick hate days
Are just a kind of trick Fate plays
But still behind your shaded eyes
That mind-constricting thick weight stays

When on the outskirts of the town
Comes bumping cavernously down
Out of the brick gateways
From the faded mansion on the hill
The out-of-date black Cadillac
With the old man crumpled in the back
That Time has not yet found the time to kill

Between the headlands to the sea the fleeing yachts of summer go
White as a sheet and faster than the driven snow
Like dolphins riding high and giant seabirds flying low

And square across the wind the cats and wingsails pull ahead
Living their day as if it almost could be said
The cemetery of home could somehow soon be left for dead

But the graveyard of tall ships is really here
Where the grass breaks up the driveway more each year
And here is all these people have
And everything they can’t believe
The beach the poor men never reach
The shore the rich men never leave

Between the headlands from the sea the homing yachts of summer fill
The night with shouts and falling sails and then are still
The avenues wind up into the darkness of the hill
Where Time tonight might find the time to kill

I have taken the liberty of lifting these lyrics form the comprehensive Pete Atkin site Smash Flops of which you will already be aware if you are a fan.