Podcast appearances and mentions of Martin Carthy

JB goes reed cutting with Christina Alden and Alex Patterson as he celebrates harvest time, along with autumnal sounds from the likes of Martin Carthy, Woodie Guthrie and Amy Laurenson

Enjoy this classic episode from August 2018Eliza Carthy inherited her love of English music from her famous folk singing parents, Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson. Norma had recently suffered a serious illness and Eliza moved back to the family home in the North Yorkshire fishing village of Robin Hood's Bay to look after her. Eliza takes Matthew on a walk along the cliffs near her home, reflecting on her family heritage and then on to the farm where the whole extended family used to live when she was a child. Martin, Norma and Eliza's aunt Ann and cousin Marry gather at the kitchen table for a rousing and emotional sing.---We rely on support from our listeners to keep this show on the road. If you like what we do please either...Become a member and get great rewards: patreon.com/folkonfootOr just buy us a coffee: ko-fi.com/folkonfootSign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.comFollow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot---Find out more about Eliza at https://eliza-carthy.com/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the free-for-all version, featuring Martin Carthy in Kershaw's kitchen, plus lots of songs and a joke about Joni Mitchell.

Matthew Bannister's guests on this month's Official Folk Albums Chart Show are Grace Petrie talking about the inspiration behind her album “Build Something Better” and Sam Lee on how his passion for the natural world has shaped “songdreaming”. There's also music from Joe Solo, Serious Sam Barrett, Martin Carthy, Cara Dillon, Amelia Coburn and John Smith. --- We rely on support from our listeners to keep this show on the road. If you like what we do please either... Become a patron and get great rewards: patreon.com/folkonfoot Or just buy us a coffee: ko-fi.com/folkonfoot Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot --- Subscribe to the Folk Forecast to explore all the gigs and album news we ran through in the show: https://thefolkforecast.substack.com/

In this week's episode Esther & Susie showcase talents even they didn't know they had. And they probably don't. Let's just say, Eminem does NOT need to worry... They discuss talent v success, and if baby is born with it or if it's maybe-learnt. Again, Eminem does not need to worry! Thankfully someone with a tangible talent is their special guest this week. Namely, musician Sam Sweeney. Sam has been described as 'one of the defining English fiddle players of his generation' (Mark Radcliffe) and this was cemented when he won Musician of the Year at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award in 2015 - his fourth time of being nominated. He is a veteran of folk juggernauts, Bellowhead, former and inaugural Artistic Director of the National Youth Folk Ensemble, a founder member of ground-breaking trio Leveret as well as a passionate and experienced educator. He has collaborated, recorded and performed with The Full English, Eliza Carthy, Martin Carthy, Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings, Fay Hield and Emily Portman as well as creating his own theatre production Made In The Great War. Sam's first two albums, The Unfinished Violin (Island Records) and Unearth Repeat (Hudson Records) were received with international acclaim. Sam is currently touring his third solo album, Escape That - tour dates. Sam's chat with the gals is wide-ranging and hugely entertaining. He tells them about joining the biggest folk band in the world aged 18, and how it feels to rock (folk) out at the Royal Albert Hall. He talks about his experiences in movies - Disney's live action 'Little Mermaid', and Richard Curtis's 'About Time'. There are some super questions from our wonderful listeners, and, as an extra treat, Sam performs live on the podcast! LTO's first live musical performance and it is magical. (Sam is available to tour when you need him, Arcade Fire - just putting that out into the universe!) With sketches, live music, surprising rapping and a joyful interview, this is an episode to savour. We hope you enjoy it!   OTHER USEFUL LINKS: SPIRO Watch - We Wish To Be Absorbed   Sign up to be an LTO Patron now at: Patreon.com/LimitedTimeOnlyPodcast LTO now has a PATREON page which means you can become an LTO Patron. Patrons get a raft of lush stuff including exclusive bonus content and access to exclusive LTO live events online and in-person. The next Patron-only LTO Live Online event is later this month! Details on Patreon! Susie & Esther are thrilled to be back in your ears. And over on Patreon too! Limited Time Only. A pick-me-up in podcast form.   Instagram @limitedtimeonlypodcast Twitter @limitedtimepod Facebook Limited Time Only Podcast Email: limitedtimepodcast@gmail.com   Music by Joel White aka Small Plates Listen to his music on Soundcloud Other sound effects from https://freesound.org

We dig deep to unearth some contemporary Celtic treasures from Martyn Bennett, The Murphs, and from The Imagined Village, Paul Weller from The Jam joined by Eliza and Martin Carthy, and there are plenty more sparkles where those came from. Join Patricia Fraser for another hour of Celt In A Twist. Logical Fleadh - Banish Misfortune INST Martyn Bennett - Blackbird Melisande - Au Chant De L'Alouette CANCON Natalie MacMaster & Donnell Leahy - The Case Of The Mysterious Squabby-Quash INST CANCON Willie Nile - The Day The Earth Stood Still Dropkick Murphys - The Auld Triangle Gangar - Sukkeri Er Sott Hannah Sanders & Ben Savage - Ryardine Paul Weller/Martin & Eliza Carthy - John Barleycorn Yoko Pwno - Long Bath Gordon Duncan - Lorient Mornings INST Derina Harvey Band - Portland Town CANCON Lunasa - Midnight In Aviles INST 57:48

This week's show, after a 1959 Little Willie John lilt: brand new The Bevis Frond, Plush Machine, Small Square, The Smile, Seablite, Anderson Council, and Tulipomania, plus The Coasters (The Robins), Rulers, Webb Pierce, Joe Simon, Martin Carthy, Blind...

In this episode, we drop in to Sankofa's on Sunday afternoon, where we soak up Dizreali's conversations and hear performances by Blythe Pepino, Martin Carthy and the one and only Congo Natty...https://www.dizraeli.com/https://www.blythepepino.com/https://alanbearmanmusic.com/artists/martin-carthy/https://www.instagram.com/congonatty_official/

Martin Carthy has undeniably etched his name into the annals of music history. Martin explores his formative years, The post Martin Carthy appeared first on The Strange Brew .

Episode 24.  The second half of the conversation with Séamus Finneran about his adventures in music promotion. Discussion includes the merchant navy, getting a resident visa in Australia, setting up a tour, Seamus Eagan - Sufferin' Gales, Willie Creedan, Martin Hayes, Michael Flatley,  Helen Bommarito, Davy Spillane, San Francisco Celtic Festival, Eddie Stack, Peter O'Neill, The Plough & Stars, Randall Bays,  Port Fairy Folk Festival, The Brunswick Music Festival, The National Celtic Festival, The National Folk Festival, setting up a tour from the opposite side of the planet,  Green Linnet Records, the importance of reflecting after booking a tour, Eilish O'Connor, Kieran Halpin, Jackie Daley, Maura O'Keefe, The Three Weeds venue Sydney, Dennis Cahill, The Guinness Tour, John Nicholls, Donal Lunny, Sharon Shannon, Altan, Mary Black, The Irish Echo paper, promoting gigs, hiring publicists, booking a tour, booking jazz clubs, The Basement Sydney, Lúnasa, being the inspiration for putting Lúnasa together, booking their first gig which was headlining a festival, Trevor Hutchinson, Donogh Hennessey, Blue Mountains Folk Festival, Bob Charter, Gaynor Crawford,  Jaslyn Hall, The World Music Show, Triple J station, Sydney Morning Herald, Seamus Begley, Jim Murray, John Dunford, Fergus Lenahan, Sydney Recital Hall, The Masters Of Tradition, Dave Power, Steve Cooney, Máirtín O'Connor, Cathal Hayden, Seamie O'Dowd, selling out the Sydney Opera House twice, Jim Murray, Jack Maher, Maureen, Canice Mills, Alan Connor, Paul Brady, Shooglenifty, Andy M. Stewart, Gerry O'Beirne, Breaking Trad, Donall Murphy, Niall Murphy, Mike Gavin, The Rambling Boys, Sean Smith, David Munnelly, Alan Burke, Gino Lupari, Capercaillie, Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, Dick Gaughan, Mary Coughlan, Balfa Toujours, Paul Kelly, The Lyric Theatre Sydney, Bruce Giles, Chris Richards, Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald,  Paul Brady and his most emotional concert, Crowded House, Seabill Hotel, Neil Finn, Mary Coughlan, James Delaney, Big Pond's foray into streaming, Monday, Clare O'Meara, Paddy Keenan, Sean Tyrrell, Susan O'Neill, Mick Flannery, The Landsdowne Club, Shooglenifty and more!

Collecting around 50 original, in-depth interviews, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (out June 27 on EWP Press) is the first look at Bob Dylan's career entirely from the perspective of the musicians standing a few feet away from him on stage – from his earliest days in the ‘60s all the way through the 21st century Never Ending Tour. With a few exceptions, these artists are not household names, but they have in many cases spent years making music with one of the most revered and mysterious artists in the world.The world of Dylan's bands and his road life has seemed fairly impenetrable for decades now. Many people in this book have never spoken before about their time with Dylan, or certainly not in as much depth. Interviewees span every era of Dylan's career, from Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Martin Carthy talking about the early folk scene up through Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua talking about recording Rough and Rowdy Ways. This guest list guiding the backstage tour also includes one-off sit-ins, behind- the-scenes touring personnel, and even a notable Grammy Awards stage-crasher.If Dylan is, as he famously put it back in 1965, a “song and dance man,” these are the people who have sung and danced alongside him.

Episode 23.  A conversation with Séamus Finneran about his adventures in music promotion. Discussion includes the merchant navy, getting a resident visa in Australia, setting up a tour, Seamus Eagan - Sufferin' Gales, Willie Creedan, Martin Hayes, Michael Flatley,  Helen Bommarito, Davy Spillane, San Francisco Celtic Festival, Eddie Stack, Peter O'Neill, The Plough & Stars, Randall Bays,  Port Fairy Folk Festival, The Brunswick Music Festival, The National Celtic Festival, The National Folk Festival, setting up a tour from the opposite side of the planet,  Green Linnet Records, the importance of reflecting after booking a tour, Eilish O'Connor, Kieran Halpin, Jackie Daley, Maura O'Keefe, The Three Weeds venue Sydney, Dennis Cahill, The Guinness Tour, John Nicholls, Donal Lunny, Sharon Shannon, Altan, Mary Black, The Irish Echo paper, promoting gigs, hiring publicists, booking a tour, booking jazz clubs, The Basement Sydney, Lúnasa, being the inspiration for putting Lúnasa together, booking their first gig which was headlining a festival, Trevor Hutchinson, Donogh Hennessey, Blue Mountains Folk Festival, Bob Charter, Gaynor Crawford,  Jaslyn Hall, The World Music Show, Triple J station, Sydney Morning Herald, Seamus Begley, Jim Murray, John Dunford, Fergus Lenahan, Sydney Recital Hall, The Masters Of Tradition, Dave Power, Steve Cooney, Máirtín O'Connor, Cathal Hayden, Seamie O'Dowd, selling out the Sydney Opera House twice, Jim Murray, Jack Maher, Maureen, Canice Mills, Alan Connor, Paul Brady, Shooglenifty, Andy M. Stewart, Gerry O'Beirne, Breaking Trad, Donall Murphy, Niall Murphy, Mike Gavin, The Rambling Boys, Sean Smith, David Munnelly, Alan Burke, Gino Lupari, Capercaillie, Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, Dick Gaughan, Mary Coughlan, Balfa Toujours, Paul Kelly, The Lyric Theatre Sydney, Bruce Giles, Chris Richards, Bruce Elder, Sydney Morning Herald,  Paul Brady and his most emotional concert, Crowded House, Seabill Hotel, Neil Finn, Mary Coughlan, James Delaney, Big Pond's foray into streaming, Monday, Clare O'Meara, Paddy Keenan, Sean Tyrrell, Susan O'Neill, Mick Flannery, The Landsdowne Club, Shooglenifty and more!

Collecting around 50 original, in-depth interviews, Pledging My Time: Conversations with Bob Dylan Band Members (out June 27 on EWP Press) is the first look at Bob Dylan's career entirely from the perspective of the musicians standing a few feet away from him on stage – from his earliest days in the ‘60s all the way through the 21st century Never Ending Tour. With a few exceptions, these artists are not household names, but they have in many cases spent years making music with one of the most revered and mysterious artists in the world.The world of Dylan's bands and his road life has seemed fairly impenetrable for decades now. Many people in this book have never spoken before about their time with Dylan, or certainly not in as much depth. Interviewees span every era of Dylan's career, from Ramblin' Jack Elliott and Martin Carthy talking about the early folk scene up through Benmont Tench and Alan Pasqua talking about recording Rough and Rowdy Ways. This guest list guiding the backstage tour also includes one-off sit-ins, behind- the-scenes touring personnel, and even a notable Grammy Awards stage-crasher.If Dylan is, as he famously put it back in 1965, a “song and dance man,” these are the people who have sung and danced alongside him.

Notes: Songs can be career counselors, harmonizing means you don't have to memorize words, if you don't like to sing alone, then singing with others can unlock your voice, how to leave space for people, how to become a found family (food is involved) -- what other ideas might VoiceExchange have to share with you? This quintet of singers improvised their way through the pandemic -- learn how they honed their ability to play even when geographically distant (and hear an example at the very end, created on the fly with Zoom faces and Jacktrip sound). Improvisation can be a weird and wonderful world -- a chance to hear the unexpected. The song they shared is a tree speaking... and what a beautiful sense of embrace it creates. ​Songwriter Info: VoiceExchange initially formed as a practice group following a 2012 Bobby McFerrin Circlesongs workshop. As singers from disparate musical influences, they came together, connecting through a shared passion for vocal improvisation, and formed a unique a cappella group that blends diverse vocal styles into spontaneous harmonious arrangements. During the challenges of the pandemic VoiceExchange began a series of sequentially recorded collaborations for leading online circles. This resulted in a library of recordings, among them, Touch the Sky and Take My Hand. VoiceExchange members are Amado Ohland, Beth Lyons, Dina Torok, Joy Truskowski and Paris Kern. They can be found leading Circlesinging events in Maryland, Virginia, Massachusetts & Vermont as well as offering online and in-person workshops and providing spontaneous music to churches, temples and other community gatherings.  Amado Ohland began his semi-professional career as a jazz and blues vocalist shortly after graduating University of Maryland at College Park with a bachelor's in music composition and theory. He attended his first Circlesongs workshop in 2011, and has been leading circlesinging events since 2013 in Washington DC, Pittsburgh, and western Virginia. He has recently received a master's degree in music from Radford University. For his doctoral dissertation he is working on a participatory ethnography of circlesinging worldwide and a song cycle of pieces based on circlesinging techniques. Born into a musical family, Beth Lyons actually can't remember a ‘before' time when singing-in-community wasn't a part of her life. She currently performs improvised musicals with iMusical, the house musical improv team for Washington Improv Theater, performs and leads Circles with VoiceExchange, and leads online immersive Song Dive workshops and a Monday morning online choir named Coffee Choir. You can learn more about her offerings and sign up for her “Heads Up” notification/invite list at www.RiverChoir.org.   Dina Torok has sung in and been musical director for various a cappella groups from college through adulthood. She was a professional film and television session singer, performed in various pop/rock bands in Los Angeles, and recorded an original solo album and a piano/vocal album of show tunes. Dina found VoiceExchange and circle singing in 2015 and has been a grateful member ever since. Joy Truskowski is a singer-songwriter and community songleader. She has performed as a solo artist in the Roanoke, VA area for 13 years. You can find her original songs on Bandcamp under the name “Joy Tru”. She started Star City Circlesinging in 2019 and has been leading circles with other co-leaders in Roanoke ever since. During the beginning of the pandemic she started contributing to VoiceExchange's online circles. She fell in love with all of them, and they all asked her to marry them. She said, “I can't marry you, but I'll join your group!” And that was a fair compromise. So she officially joined in the summer of 2021. Paris Kern started performing traditional folk music at coffeehouses and concerts when she was 16 years old. She studied classical vocal performance in college, but her heart was always in the world of pure traditional folk traditions. In 2011, for reasons unknown to her, she was internally compelled to attend Bobby McFerrin's CIrclesongs workshop. Feeling like a fish out of water, surrounded by mostly Jazz musicians, she nonetheless was hooked by the magic of Circlesongs and the sensation that her heart was being sung back to her. She has been leading circles in Washington DC, and Baltimore and is now starting circles in Southern Vermont. Sharing Info: VoiceExchange would love to know if you plan to teach or perform Touch the Sky or another of their songs; drop them a line at info@VoiceExchange.org. And if teaching/performing their song is a profitable business for you, please share a bit of the profit with them via their donation link at https://voiceexchange.org. Links:  Paris mentions a Burl Ives recording, but we could only find a link for Patti Page's version of "How Much is that Doggy in the Window?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6rJo9yJxd5M Julie Andrews: https://www.biography.com/actors/julie-andrews Joan Baez: https://www.biography.com/musicians/joan-baez David Crosby: https://davidcrosby.com/ Martin Carthy: https://www.allmusic.com/artist/martin-carthy-mn0000367979 "It's a Small World After All" by Richard and Robert Sherman https://www.songfacts.com/facts/disneyland-childrens-sing-along-chorus/its-a-small-world "Diddle, Diddle Dumpling, My Son John" : https://allnurseryrhymes.com/diddle-dumpling/ Freddie Mercury: https://www.biography.com/musicians/freddie-mercury Somatic Voicework: http://thevoiceworkshop.com/somatic-voicework/ Bobby McFerrin Circlesinging: https://circlesongs.com/circlesong-school-2023/ Tuvan throat singing: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20210414-a-revival-of-indigenous-throat-singing All the Way In- Rhiannon: https://www.rhiannonmusic.com/all-the-way-in-home Motor, interlock definitions: http://songsofthemoment.com/category-rhiannon/ Take My Hand: Episode 104 on A Breath of Song: https://www.abreathofsong.com/episodes--show-notes/104-take-my-hand Vocal River by Rhiannon: https://www.rhiannonmusic.com/vocal-river Zuza: https://singers.com/vocal-coach/Zuza-Goncalves/ “Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience” by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/66354.Flow Tuck & Patti album 1988 Time After Time: https://www.discogs.com/release/10168223-Tuck-Patti-Time-After-Time Star City Circlesinging: https://www.meetup.com/Star-City-Circlesinging/ Musica do Circulo Brazil: https://www.playgroundforthearts.com/musica-do-circulo Amado on Bandcamp: https://naviarrecords.bandcamp.com/album/haiku-10 "She's So Unusual" by Cindy Lauper: https://www.allmusic.com/album/shes-so-unusual-mw0000194590 "The Game" by Queen: https://www.allmusic.com/album/the-game-mw0000650663 "Medicine Music" by Bobby McFerrin: https://www.allmusic.com/album/medicine-music-mw0000309576 Prince: https://www.prince.com Eagles: https://eagles.com Sting: https://www.sting.com Billy Joel: https://www.billyjoel.com Alanis Morisette: https://alanis.com "Blue" by Joni Mitchell: https://jonimitchell.com/music/album.cfm?id=5 "Abbey Road" by The Beatles: https://www.thebeatles.com/abbey-road Patrick Watson: https://patrickwatson.net Great interview with Martin Carthy: https://www.innerviews.org/inner/martin-carthy.html And here's a link to Martin singing “The Trees they Do Grow High”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SaKGeTmFqbE "Vocabularies" by Bobby McFerrin: https://bobbymcferrin.com/albums/vocabularies/ VoiceExchange on Meetup: https://www.meetup.com/circlesinging-dc/ Jacktrip Software: https://www.jacktrip.com VoiceExchange's quiet Website: https://voiceexchange.org Email: info@voiceexchange.org VoiceExchange on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/VoiceExchangeMusic?mibextid=LQQJ4d VoiceExchange on Instagram: https://instagram.com/voiceexchange?igshid=NTc4MTIwNjQ2YQ== VoiceExchange's Email: info@voiceexchange.org Amado's Website: https://amadomusic.com/ Paris's Website: https://www.pariskern.com Joy's Website: http://www.joytru.com Beth's Choir Website: https://www.riverchoir.org/ Song Learning Time Stamps: Start time of teaching: 00:05:10 Start time of reprise: 01:14:25 Improvisation at 1:18:55 ​​ Nuts & Bolts: 4:4, Major, 3-part harmony, 3-layer ​Join the A Breath of Song mailing list to receive a heads up as a new episode is released, plus a large version of the artwork, brief thoughts from my slightly peculiar brain... and occasional extras when they seem vitally important! No junk -- I will never sell your address. I read out all your names into my living room when I send new mailings... I appreciate the connection to you who are listening and singing these songs with me. Exchange energy with A Breath of Song with dollars at the Gratitude Jar (whoo-hoo!!!!), or by making comments, leaving reviews, suggesting songs or songwriters (including yourself) ..... your participation matters!

http://www.copperplatemailorder.com                                    Copperplate Time 437                                presented by Alan O'Leary                             www.copperplatemailorder.com                                          Music & Mischief1. Bothy Band:  Green Groves/Flowers of Red Hill.  After Hours 2. Trian: Humours of Ballyconnell/Reel Eboulemant/Richie Dwyer's. Trian 23. Seamus Maguire & John Lee:        The Road to Ballymac/Corrigea Grove/The Cloone Reel.                The Missing Reel 3. Planxty:   Accidentals/Aragon Mill. Retrospective 4. Liam Clancy:  Ten & Nine. Liam Clancy5. Dervish:    Jim Coleman's Set.    At The End of the Day 6. Johnny O'g Connolly:  Fear Inis Bearachian/Fear Londain/Fear Bhoston.  Fear Inis Bearachain7. Leonard Barry:         Kitty Got A Clinking/Sarah's Reel/The Bog Carrot   New Road 8. Catherine McEvoy:  Elizabeth Kelly's Fave/Kitty Come Down to Limerick.  The Home Ruler                                   9. Niamh Parsons: Clohinne Winds. Her Infinite Variety10. Crawford/Farrell/Doocey:         Aube Mauve/Mousein the Mug/The Cuil Aodh/Monaghan Twig.            Music & Mischief 11. Ralph McTell:   Interest On the Loan.     Streets 12. Ralph McTell:   River Rising.    Right Side Up13. Ralph McTell:   Harry (Don't Go).    Slide Away the Screen 14. Martin Carthy:    Scarborough Fair. Electric Muse 15. John Martyn:    Some People Are Crazy.   Grace & Danger 16. John Regan & Paddy Glackin       Maid at the Spinning Wheel/A Visit to Ireland. Let Down the Blade17. Mulcahy Family:  The Fog on the Hill/Dave White's/Peg McGrath's.  The Reel Note 18. London Lasses:  Dandy Dinny Cronin/Moving in Old Decency/Ballintore Fancy/Over the Bridge to Peggy.  LL 25   19. Bothy Band:  Green Groves/Flowers of Red Hill. After Hours

In this week's episode we look a little closer at how our Irish ancestors lived and worked through the 40 days leading up to Easter Sunday each year. This was a time known as "Lent". It was treated very seriously by the Roman Catholic church - who were very specific in their directions to the flock as to how they should live their lives over this time of penance, fasting and piety.We start with a letter that looks at something called "The Skellig List" and then focus on a Lenten letter that was read out from the pulpits across County Wicklow in the late 1800s.The music starts with a tune of celebration - "Chasing the Fox" (celebration/carnivale) - then moves onto a suitable religious song, the "Our Father" sung in Irish, before celebrating Easter (and the end of Lent) with "Easter Snow". We do hope you enjoy.Music featured in this episode:"Chasing the Fox" performed by The Chieftains."Ar nAthair" performed by Michael Nash."Easter Snow" performed by Matt Molloy and Martin Carthy.Support the Letter from Ireland Show:Thank you for listening to the Letter from Ireland show. To support the podcast, get lots of member-only features and follow Mike and Carina behind the scenes as they travel around Ireland go to ALetterfromIreland.com/plus .

In this week's episode we look a little closer at how our Irish ancestors lived and worked through the 40 days leading up to Easter Sunday each year. This was a time known as "Lent". It was treated very seriously by the Roman Catholic church - who were very specific in their directions to the flock as to how they should live their lives over this time of penance, fasting and piety.We start with a letter that looks at something called "The Skellig List" and then focus on a Lenten letter that was read out from the pulpits across County Wicklow in the late 1800s.The music starts with a tune of celebration - "Chasing the Fox" (celebration/carnivale) - then moves onto a suitable religious song, the "Our Father" sung in Irish, before celebrating Easter (and the end of Lent) with "Easter Snow". We do hope you enjoy.Music featured in this episode:"Chasing the Fox" performed by The Chieftains."Ar nAthair" performed by Michael Nash."Easter Snow" performed by Matt Molloy and Martin Carthy.Support the Letter from Ireland Show:Thank you for listening to the Letter from Ireland show. To support the podcast, get lots of member-only features and follow Mike and Carina behind the scenes as they travel around Ireland go to ALetterfromIreland.com/plus .

Musician Eliza Carthy was born into an English folk dynasty. The daughter of acclaimed folk singers Martin Carthy and Norma Waterson, she joined the family business at a young age as a singer and violinist, playing with her parents as Waterson Carthy and with her mother, her aunt Lal and her cousin Marry as The Waterdaughters. As a solo artist and bandleader, Eliza has explored the roots of folk and expanded the repertoire. Awarded an MBE in 2014, she was twice nominated for the Mercury Prize for album of the year, and in 2021 became the president of the English Folk Dance and Music Society. She tells John Wilson about the first time she attended the Vancouver Folk Music Festival in 1989, aged 13. Standing on the main stage at sunset overlooking the mountains and sea was a defining moment at the start of her career. She also discusses the influence that singer Billy Bragg and Scottish folk rock band Shooglenifty had on her music. Eliza also talks about the impact of the pandemic on the folk music community and the personal loss of her mother. Producer: Edwina Pitman

Philippa Perry joins Nikki Bedi and Richard Coles. The psychotherapist, writer, agony aunt and broadcaster is married to the artist Grayson Perry. Her works include The Book You Wish Your Parents Had Read (And Your Children Will Be Glad That You Did). Peter Lantos tells the story of how he survived the Holocaust as a small child in Bergen-Belsen. He offers an extraordinary perspective of not just living through terrible events, but on making sense of them as well. Sean Gandini is a renowned juggling artist and performer. He grew up in Havana, Cuba, where he developed a fascination with magic and mathematics, eventually leading him to take up juggling at the age of 16. Eliza Carthy chooses her Inheritance Tracks: Good Morning, Mr Walker by Mighty Sparrow and Killer Queen by Queen. It's been 21 years since a 12 year old Dani Harmer first appeared in children's drama The Story of Tracy Beaker, based on Jacqueline Wilson's books about growing up in a care home. Harmer has had a varied career outside the famous TV series, but explains why she's happy to see what Tracy's up to. The Boy Who Didn't Want to Die by Peter Lantos is out now. Sean Gandini with Kati will be performing The Games We Play as part of Mime London 2023 at The Place on the 20th and 21st of January. Eliza & Martin Carthy, and her band The Restitution, will be at The Barbican in London on Saturday 4th of February. The new series of The Beaker Girls starts on Friday 13th January at 6pm on CBBC and can be seen afterwards on BBC iPlayer. Producer: Claire Bartleet

Hurrah!  It's a brand new O3L, where we discuss our Top 5 EPs & Mini-Albums with singer/songwriter Paul Handyside.  We love the EP, or Extended Play, perched somewhere in between a traditional single and a full length album.  Sometimes they compile album tracks or previous singles, and other times they are conceived as complete works designed to stand up on their own.  Either way, they're short, they're fun, and leave you wanting more.  Other than beings short, sounds a lot like this podcast, eh?  ("Yes."  The correct answer is "Yes.")  Oh, and spoiler alert: We have the rare "triple crossover" in this episode.  Can you guess what it is? So join us for a rousing chorus of "Shubby Shubby Go!", won't you?   About Paul Handyside: Paul Handyside is a folk and roots singer/songwriter. His song writing style has been compared to artists as varied as Chris Difford, Billy Bragg, Robyn Hitchcock, Green Gartside, Elvis Costello, Jeff Buckley and Martin Carthy. He began his musical career with eighties indie darlings Hurrah! The jangle pop band had a run of classic singles (including Paul's "The Sun Shines Here", "Hip Hip", and "Sweet Sanity") and album releases on Kitchenware and Arista Records from 1982 to 1991, and toured extensively worldwide. During the nineties he toured and recorded with friend and Kitchenware labelmate Martin Stephenson. Handyside formed Bronze in 2001. Still embracing chiming, Rickenbacker driven pop, and increasingly alt country, they released two albums, The Statue in the Stone and A Common Prayer. His debut solo album Future's Dream, a combination of pop, country and modern day hymns was released in 2007 to great reviews. The second album Wayward Son followed in 2013 and further developed his own brand of folk-tinged americana. Tide, Timber & Grain was released in 2016 with elements of traditional British folk and sixties protest songs emerging in Handyside's now well established and diverse musical palette. The fourth album Loveless Town was released 21st of May 2021. As is evident in the title track he songs have an even stronger resonance with country and americana, the counterpoint to which is “Hartley Pit Catastrophe”, a true story from his native North East with its English folk sensibilities. Handyside is aided and abetted by long time cohorts Dave Porthouse on double bass and melodeon and by Rob Tickell, who also produced the album, on guitar and dobro.       

“The snow it is lying on Bewcastle Fell And the wind strips the skin from my face. The bare bones of a tree give some shelter to me But still it's a draughty old place.” Come to “the least populated area of the least populated county in England” and take shelter from the elements in the warm welcome of Stones Barn where Maddy Prior of Steeleye Span and her daughter Rose-Ellen Kemp are hosting one of their acclaimed singing weekends. Guest tutor Martin Carthy reveals how he discovered the joys of traditional singing when he was just seventeen years old – and Maddy and Rose-Ellen take us to Bewcastle Church to see the 6th Century cross commemorating St Cuthbert and sing in its glorious acoustic. --- Delve deeper into the Folk on Foot world and keep us on the road by becoming a Patron—sign up at patreon.com/folkonfoot. You can choose your level and get great rewards, ranging from a stylish Folk on Foot badge to access to our amazing and ever expanding Folk on Foot on Film video archive of more than 150 unique performances filmed on our travels. Sign up for our newsletter at www.folkonfoot.com Follow us on Twitter/Facebook/Instagram: @folkonfoot --- Find out more about Stones Barn at https://stonesbarn.co.uk/

In this special episode I look at the two speeches given by the British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Labour Party leader Keir Starmer. By reading through we can tell much about British capitalism and how the priorities of the ruling class are expressed by the politicians within the bourgeois state. Episode Outro is 'High Germany' by Martin Carthy

Bellowhead, Martin Carthy, Clash Vooar and Pauline Scanlon amongst others. Oh - and did John mention Bellowhead?!

Eliza Carthy is celebrating 30 years as a professional musician with a new album, Queen of the Whirl. She talks about this, the legacy of her musical family – as the daughter of Norma Waterson and Martin Carthy – the way traditional music develops, and her own song-writing, and performs live in the Front Row studio. Double Palme d'Or winning Swedish director Ruben Östlund tells Samira about his first English language film, Triangle of Sadness - a satire on the fashion industry, influencer culture, and the world of the super-rich. Plus the threat to brutalist architecture. Last year the Dorman Long Tower in Redcar was demolished, and now the Kirkgate Shopping centre in Birmingham is condemned too. Brutalist architecture provokes both love as well as hate, but around the country its buildings are in peril. Author John Grindrod and Duncan Wilson from Historic England discuss how much is being lost, and if it matters. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Julian May Photo: Eliza Carthy. Credit: Elodie Kowalski

Many of us know The Keeper as a slightly odd - but fun - song from our school days. All together now:JACKIE BOY!MASTER!No need to shout! reprimands a weary teacher.But away from the sanitised and bowdlerised versions of our childhoods lurks a dark song of sexual pursuit. You didn't really think all those does were female deer, did you?We talk about Camus, the band Andrew has been a part of for four decades, and explore its influences from the Northumbrian, Shetland and Irish traditions. The band's version of The Keeper combines different versions and makes some deliberate choices. They often run a competition for keen-eared listeners at their gigs, and if you listen to this episode you will get the answer, and if you then go to one of their gigs you'll win a free CD!As we talk about this traditional song and its themes, we also chat about the time that Andrew asked Martin Carthy about guitar tunings in a folk club toilet, and a rare sighting of Steve Roud at St Neots' folk club (but did he join in with the chorus?)Andrew is a Northumbrian piper and we chat about the way that the lockdown brought together the national and international Northumbrian piping community, creating such a surge of competition entries that the queen of Northumbrian pipes Kathryn Tickell herself had to get involved.If you've ever wondered how this podcast got started, stay tuned because all is revealed! This leads to a chat about children's songs on which Andrew – or Professor Burn as he's also known – is an expert. Will you, like me, suddenly remember those childhood skipping songs? And, in a world of wonderful diversity, what new songs from around the world can we hear in today's playgrounds? MusicThe Keeper (trad) performed live by Camus at the Ely Folk Club. You can see a video of this recording here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9uB0EVItk8wRoaring Boys (Brian Cleary) performed by Camus. You can see a video of this recording here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOxoCBwxaUQEquinox Hornpipe (Andrew Burn) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Optcf45MD_Q There are also excerpts from two sets of tunes from Camus' 2021 EP Time and Again:Da Day Dawn (trad), Christmas Day I' da Morning (trad), Da Alamoutie (trad). Three traditional Shetland tunes. Three Day Week/Alan Burn's Memorial Jig (Andrew Burn). Time and Again can be found on various streaming services, please visit the band's website for all the links, and there's a preview of the forthcoming album here.Other linksThe Mudcat thread that Andrew references, featuring Malcolm Douglas, can be found here.  The Opie archive can be found here.  You can find out more about Professor Andrew Burn's research interests here. 

It's another epic ballad this week as I catch up with Franz Andres Morrissey to learn more about this song, that was originally collected in Scotland. We also chat about the ups and downs of the Swiss folk scene, have a good old gossip about Robert Burns, and I learn where Martin Carthy gets his tunes from.Brown Adam, or Broun Edom, is a rare song with some old, even pre-Christian, themes and motifs. It unfolds in true storytelling style and includes such colourful characters  as a False Knight, a faithful Lady, and Brown Adam himself, a magnificent young Smith. Shenanigans ensue and there's quite a bit of gratuitous bird shooting before the story moves on. Who needs Netflix when you've got songs like this?Franz is an academic (though he carries it  lightly) and an experienced folk musician, and we talk about his book, Language, the Singer and the Song. We also discuss his play which tells the stories of slavery through words and song.His band Taradiddle (https://taradiddle.ch) has just recorded an album that will be out soon, and there's a rumour that there'll be tour dates announced shortly. You can hear more of Franz's music on Soundcloud.MusicBrown Adam was performed and produced by by Franz. The episode also features three live recordings by Taradiddle: Benediction Song, Who's The Fool Now, Hey Ca' Thro and Leaving Limerick. You can find more here. There's also a snippet of the song that Franz and I recorded together remotely, Now Westlin Winds.AcknowledgementsFranz and I met through The Barnstoners, a self-organising group of musicians who have all been to the fabulous Stones Barn run by Maddy Prior and Rose-Ellen Kemp up in Cumbria. It goes without saying that we're big fans of theirs and recommend them highly.

Saxophonist Camilla George and guitarist Sean Shibe take us on a global journey and beyond as they help choose the next five tracks for the playlist. Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye also explore the finer details with guests John Dillon, Cathy Jordan and David Owen Norris. Presenters Cerys Matthews and Jeffrey Boakye Producer Jerome Weatherald The five tracks in this week's playlist: Beauty in the River by The Ozark Mountain Daredevils The Green Gowned Lass by Dervish Taximen by Amadou Balaké Scarborough Fair by Incantation Jupiter from The Planets by Gustav Holst Other music in this episode: Spacer by Sheila Abasi Isang by Camilla George Wuthering Heights by Kate Bush Scarborough Fair by Simon & Garfunkel Scarborough Fair by Martin Carthy

This week's episode looks at “All You Need is Love”, the Our World TV special, and the career of the Beatles from April 1966 through August 1967. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a thirteen-minute bonus episode available, on "Rain" by the Beatles. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ NB for the first few hours this was up, there was a slight editing glitch. If you downloaded the old version and don't want to redownload the whole thing, just look in the transcript for "Other than fixing John's two flubbed" for the text of the two missing paragraphs. Errata I say "Come Together" was a B-side, but the single was actually a double A-side. Also, I say the Lennon interview by Maureen Cleave appeared in Detroit magazine. That's what my source (Steve Turner's book) says, but someone on Twitter says that rather than Detroit magazine it was the Detroit Free Press. Also at one point I say "the videos for 'Paperback Writer' and 'Penny Lane'". I meant to say "Rain" rather than "Penny Lane" there. Resources No Mixcloud this week due to the number of songs by the Beatles. I have read literally dozens of books on the Beatles, and used bits of information from many of them. All my Beatles episodes refer to: The Complete Beatles Chronicle by Mark Lewisohn, All The Songs: The Stories Behind Every Beatles Release by Jean-Michel Guesdon, And The Band Begins To Play: The Definitive Guide To The Songs of The Beatles by Steve Lambley, The Beatles By Ear by Kevin Moore, Revolution in the Head by Ian MacDonald, and The Beatles Anthology. For this episode, I also referred to Last Interview by David Sheff, a longform interview with John Lennon and Yoko Ono from shortly before Lennon's death; Many Years From Now by Barry Miles, an authorised biography of Paul McCartney; and Here, There, and Everywhere: My Life Recording the Music of the Beatles by Geoff Emerick and Howard Massey. Particularly useful this time was Steve Turner's book Beatles '66. I also used Turner's The Beatles: The Stories Behind the Songs 1967-1970. Johnny Rogan's Starmakers and Svengalis had some information on Epstein I hadn't seen anywhere else. Some information about the "Bigger than Jesus" scandal comes from Ward, B. (2012). “The ‘C' is for Christ”: Arthur Unger, Datebook Magazine and the Beatles. Popular Music and Society, 35(4), 541-560. https://doi.org/10.1080/03007766.2011.608978 Information on Robert Stigwood comes from Mr Showbiz by Stephen Dando-Collins. And the quote at the end from Simon Napier-Bell is from You Don't Have to Say You Love Me, which is more entertaining than it is accurate, but is very entertaining. Sadly the only way to get the single mix of "All You Need is Love" is on this ludicrously-expensive out-of-print box set, but the stereo mix is easily available on Magical Mystery Tour. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript A quick note before I start the episode -- this episode deals, in part, with the deaths of three gay men -- one by murder, one by suicide, and one by an accidental overdose, all linked at least in part to societal homophobia. I will try to deal with this as tactfully as I can, but anyone who's upset by those things might want to read the transcript instead of listening to the episode. This is also a very, very, *very* long episode -- this is likely to be the longest episode I *ever* do of this podcast, so settle in. We're going to be here a while. I obviously don't know how long it's going to be while I'm still recording, but based on the word count of my script, probably in the region of three hours. You have been warned. In 1967 the actor Patrick McGoohan was tired. He had been working on the hit series Danger Man for many years -- Danger Man had originally run from 1960 through 1962, then had taken a break, and had come back, retooled, with longer episodes in 1964. That longer series was a big hit, both in the UK and in the US, where it was retitled Secret Agent and had a new theme tune written by PF Sloan and Steve Barri and recorded by Johnny Rivers: [Excerpt: Johnny Rivers, "Secret Agent Man"] But McGoohan was tired of playing John Drake, the agent, and announced he was going to quit the series. Instead, with the help of George Markstein, Danger Man's script editor, he created a totally new series, in which McGoohan would star, and which McGoohan would also write and direct key episodes of. This new series, The Prisoner, featured a spy who is only ever given the name Number Six, and who many fans -- though not McGoohan himself -- took to be the same character as John Drake. Number Six resigns from his job as a secret agent, and is kidnapped and taken to a place known only as The Village -- the series was filmed in Portmeirion, an unusual-looking town in Gwynnedd, in North Wales -- which is full of other ex-agents. There he is interrogated to try to find out why he has quit his job. It's never made clear whether the interrogators are his old employers or their enemies, and there's a certain suggestion that maybe there is no real distinction between the two sides, that they're both running the Village together. He spends the entire series trying to escape, but refuses to explain himself -- and there's some debate among viewers as to whether it's implied or not that part of the reason he doesn't explain himself is that he knows his interrogators wouldn't understand why he quit: [Excerpt: The Prisoner intro, from episode Once Upon a Time, ] Certainly that explanation would fit in with McGoohan's own personality. According to McGoohan, the final episode of The Prisoner was, at the time, the most watched TV show ever broadcast in the UK, as people tuned in to find out the identity of Number One, the person behind the Village, and to see if Number Six would break free. I don't think that's actually the case, but it's what McGoohan always claimed, and it was certainly a very popular series. I won't spoil the ending for those of you who haven't watched it -- it's a remarkable series -- but ultimately the series seems to decide that such questions don't matter and that even asking them is missing the point. It's a work that's open to multiple interpretations, and is left deliberately ambiguous, but one of the messages many people have taken away from it is that not only are we trapped by a society that oppresses us, we're also trapped by our own identities. You can run from the trap that society has placed you in, from other people's interpretations of your life, your work, and your motives, but you ultimately can't run from yourself, and any time you try to break out of a prison, you'll find yourself trapped in another prison of your own making. The most horrifying implication of the episode is that possibly even death itself won't be a release, and you will spend all eternity trying to escape from an identity you're trapped in. Viewers became so outraged, according to McGoohan, that he had to go into hiding for an extended period, and while his later claims that he never worked in Britain again are an exaggeration, it is true that for the remainder of his life he concentrated on doing work in the US instead, where he hadn't created such anger. That final episode of The Prisoner was also the only one to use a piece of contemporary pop music, in two crucial scenes: [Excerpt: The Prisoner, "Fall Out", "All You Need is Love"] Back in October 2020, we started what I thought would be a year-long look at the period from late 1962 through early 1967, but which has turned out for reasons beyond my control to take more like twenty months, with a song which was one of the last of the big pre-Beatles pop hits, though we looked at it after their first single, "Telstar" by the Tornadoes: [Excerpt: The Tornadoes, "Telstar"] There were many reasons for choosing that as one of the bookends for this fifty-episode chunk of the podcast -- you'll see many connections between that episode and this one if you listen to them back-to-back -- but among them was that it's a song inspired by the launch of the first ever communications satellite, and a sign of how the world was going to become smaller as the sixties went on. Of course, to start with communications satellites didn't do much in that regard -- they were expensive to use, and had limited bandwidth, and were only available during limited time windows, but symbolically they meant that for the first time ever, people could see and hear events thousands of miles away as they were happening. It's not a coincidence that Britain and France signed the agreement to develop Concorde, the first supersonic airliner, a month after the first Beatles single and four months after the Telstar satellite was launched. The world was becoming ever more interconnected -- people were travelling faster and further, getting news from other countries quicker, and there was more cultural conversation – and misunderstanding – between countries thousands of miles apart. The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, the man who also coined the phrase “the medium is the message”, thought that this ever-faster connection would fundamentally change basic modes of thought in the Western world. McLuhan thought that technology made possible whole new modes of thought, and that just as the printing press had, in his view, caused Western liberalism and individualism, so these new electronic media would cause the rise of a new collective mode of thought. In 1962, the year of Concorde, Telstar, and “Love Me Do”, McLuhan wrote a book called The Gutenberg Galaxy, in which he said: “Instead of tending towards a vast Alexandrian library the world has become a computer, an electronic brain, exactly as an infantile piece of science fiction. And as our senses have gone outside us, Big Brother goes inside. So, unless aware of this dynamic, we shall at once move into a phase of panic terrors, exactly befitting a small world of tribal drums, total interdependence, and superimposed co-existence.… Terror is the normal state of any oral society, for in it everything affects everything all the time.…” He coined the term “the Global Village” to describe this new collectivism. The story we've seen over the last fifty episodes is one of a sort of cultural ping-pong between the USA and the UK, with innovations in American music inspiring British musicians, who in turn inspired American ones, whether that being the Beatles covering the Isley Brothers or the Rolling Stones doing a Bobby Womack song, or Paul Simon and Bob Dylan coming over to the UK and learning folk songs and guitar techniques from Martin Carthy. And increasingly we're going to see those influences spread to other countries, and influences coming *from* other countries. We've already seen one Jamaican artist, and the influence of Indian music has become very apparent. While the focus of this series is going to remain principally in the British Isles and North America, rock music was and is a worldwide phenomenon, and that's going to become increasingly a part of the story. And so in this episode we're going to look at a live performance -- well, mostly live -- that was seen by hundreds of millions of people all over the world as it happened, thanks to the magic of satellites: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "All You Need is Love"] When we left the Beatles, they had just finished recording "Tomorrow Never Knows", the most experimental track they had recorded up to that date, and if not the most experimental thing they *ever* recorded certainly in the top handful. But "Tomorrow Never Knows" was only the first track they recorded in the sessions for what would become arguably their greatest album, and certainly the one that currently has the most respect from critics. It's interesting to note that that album could have been very, very, different. When we think of Revolver now, we think of the innovative production of George Martin, and of Geoff Emerick and Ken Townshend's inventive ideas for pushing the sound of the equipment in Abbey Road studios, but until very late in the day the album was going to be recorded in the Stax studios in Memphis, with Steve Cropper producing -- whether George Martin would have been involved or not is something we don't even know. In 1965, the Rolling Stones had, as we've seen, started making records in the US, recording in LA and at the Chess studios in Chicago, and the Yardbirds had also been doing the same thing. Mick Jagger had become a convert to the idea of using American studios and working with American musicians, and he had constantly been telling Paul McCartney that the Beatles should do the same. Indeed, they'd put some feelers out in 1965 about the possibility of the group making an album with Holland, Dozier, and Holland in Detroit. Quite how this would have worked is hard to figure out -- Holland, Dozier, and Holland's skills were as songwriters, and in their work with a particular set of musicians -- so it's unsurprising that came to nothing. But recording at Stax was a different matter.  While Steve Cropper was a great songwriter in his own right, he was also adept at getting great sounds on covers of other people's material -- like on Otis Blue, the album he produced for Otis Redding in late 1965, which doesn't include a single Cropper original: [Excerpt: Otis Redding, "Satisfaction"] And the Beatles were very influenced by the records Stax were putting out, often namechecking Wilson Pickett in particular, and during the Rubber Soul sessions they had recorded a "Green Onions" soundalike track, imaginatively titled "12-Bar Original": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "12-Bar Original"] The idea of the group recording at Stax got far enough that they were actually booked in for two weeks starting the ninth of April, and there was even an offer from Elvis to let them stay at Graceland while they recorded, but then a couple of weeks earlier, the news leaked to the press, and Brian Epstein cancelled the booking. According to Cropper, Epstein talked about recording at the Atlantic studios in New York with him instead, but nothing went any further. It's hard to imagine what a Stax-based Beatles album would have been like, but even though it might have been a great album, it certainly wouldn't have been the Revolver we've come to know. Revolver is an unusual album in many ways, and one of the ways it's most distinct from the earlier Beatles albums is the dominance of keyboards. Both Lennon and McCartney had often written at the piano as well as the guitar -- McCartney more so than Lennon, but both had done so regularly -- but up to this point it had been normal for them to arrange the songs for guitars rather than keyboards, no matter how they'd started out. There had been the odd track where one of them, usually Lennon, would play a simple keyboard part, songs like "I'm Down" or "We Can Work it Out", but even those had been guitar records first and foremost. But on Revolver, that changed dramatically. There seems to have been a complex web of cause and effect here. Paul was becoming increasingly interested in moving his basslines away from simple walking basslines and root notes and the other staples of rock and roll basslines up to this point. As the sixties progressed, rock basslines were becoming ever more complex, and Tyler Mahan Coe has made a good case that this is largely down to innovations in production pioneered by Owen Bradley, and McCartney was certainly aware of Bradley's work -- he was a fan of Brenda Lee, who Bradley produced, for example. But the two influences that McCartney has mentioned most often in this regard are the busy, jazz-influenced, basslines that James Jamerson was playing at Motown: [Excerpt: The Four Tops, "It's the Same Old Song"] And the basslines that Brian Wilson was writing for various Wrecking Crew bassists to play for the Beach Boys: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Don't Talk (Put Your Head on My Shoulder)"] Just to be clear, McCartney didn't hear that particular track until partway through the recording of Revolver, when Bruce Johnston visited the UK and brought with him an advance copy of Pet Sounds, but Pet Sounds influenced the later part of Revolver's recording, and Wilson had already started his experiments in that direction with the group's 1965 work. It's much easier to write a song with this kind of bassline, one that's integral to the composition, on the piano than it is to write it on a guitar, as you can work out the bassline with your left hand while working out the chords and melody with your right, so the habit that McCartney had already developed of writing on the piano made this easier. But also, starting with the recording of "Paperback Writer", McCartney switched his style of working in the studio. Where up to this point it had been normal for him to play bass as part of the recording of the basic track, playing with the other Beatles, he now started to take advantage of multitracking to overdub his bass later, so he could spend extra time getting the bassline exactly right. McCartney lived closer to Abbey Road than the other three Beatles, and so could more easily get there early or stay late and tweak his parts. But if McCartney wasn't playing bass while the guitars and drums were being recorded, that meant he could play something else, and so increasingly he would play piano during the recording of the basic track. And that in turn would mean that there wouldn't always *be* a need for guitars on the track, because the harmonic support they would provide would be provided by the piano instead. This, as much as anything else, is the reason that Revolver sounds so radically different to any other Beatles album. Up to this point, with *very* rare exceptions like "Yesterday", every Beatles record, more or less, featured all four of the Beatles playing instruments. Now John and George weren't playing on "Good Day Sunshine" or "For No One", John wasn't playing on "Here, There, and Everywhere", "Eleanor Rigby" features no guitars or drums at all, and George's "Love You To" only features himself, plus a little tambourine from Ringo (Paul recorded a part for that one, but it doesn't seem to appear on the finished track). Of the three songwriting Beatles, the only one who at this point was consistently requiring the instrumental contributions of all the other band members was John, and even he did without Paul on "She Said, She Said", which by all accounts features either John or George on bass, after Paul had a rare bout of unprofessionalism and left the studio. Revolver is still an album made by a group -- and most of those tracks that don't feature John or George instrumentally still feature them vocally -- it's still a collaborative work in all the best ways. But it's no longer an album made by four people playing together in the same room at the same time. After starting work on "Tomorrow Never Knows", the next track they started work on was Paul's "Got to Get You Into My Life", but as it would turn out they would work on that song throughout most of the sessions for the album -- in a sign of how the group would increasingly work from this point on, Paul's song was subject to multiple re-recordings and tweakings in the studio, as he tinkered to try to make it perfect. The first recording to be completed for the album, though, was almost as much of a departure in its own way as "Tomorrow Never Knows" had been. George's song "Love You To" shows just how inspired he was by the music of Ravi Shankar, and how devoted he was to Indian music. While a few months earlier he had just about managed to pick out a simple melody on the sitar for "Norwegian Wood", by this point he was comfortable enough with Indian classical music that I've seen many, many sources claim that an outside session player is playing sitar on the track, though Anil Bhagwat, the tabla player on the track, always insisted that it was entirely Harrison's playing: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] There is a *lot* of debate as to whether it's George playing on the track, and I feel a little uncomfortable making a definitive statement in either direction. On the one hand I find it hard to believe that Harrison got that good that quickly on an unfamiliar instrument, when we know he wasn't a naturally facile musician. All the stories we have about his work in the studio suggest that he had to work very hard on his guitar solos, and that he would frequently fluff them. As a technical guitarist, Harrison was only mediocre -- his value lay in his inventiveness, not in technical ability -- and he had been playing guitar for over a decade, but sitar only a few months. There's also some session documentation suggesting that an unknown sitar player was hired. On the other hand there's the testimony of Anil Bhagwat that Harrison played the part himself, and he has been very firm on the subject, saying "If you go on the Internet there are a lot of questions asked about "Love You To". They say 'It's not George playing the sitar'. I can tell you here and now -- 100 percent it was George on sitar throughout. There were no other musicians involved. It was just me and him." And several people who are more knowledgeable than myself about the instrument have suggested that the sitar part on the track is played the way that a rock guitarist would play rather than the way someone with more knowledge of Indian classical music would play -- there's a blues feeling to some of the bends that apparently no genuine Indian classical musician would naturally do. I would suggest that the best explanation is that there's a professional sitar player trying to replicate a part that Harrison had previously demonstrated, while Harrison was in turn trying his best to replicate the sound of Ravi Shankar's work. Certainly the instrumental section sounds far more fluent, and far more stylistically correct, than one would expect: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Where previous attempts at what got called "raga-rock" had taken a couple of surface features of Indian music -- some form of a drone, perhaps a modal scale -- and had generally used a guitar made to sound a little bit like a sitar, or had a sitar playing normal rock riffs, Harrison's song seems to be a genuine attempt to hybridise Indian ragas and rock music, combining the instrumentation, modes, and rhythmic complexity of someone like Ravi Shankar with lyrics that are seemingly inspired by Bob Dylan and a fairly conventional pop song structure (and a tiny bit of fuzz guitar). It's a record that could only be made by someone who properly understood both the Indian music he's emulating and the conventions of the Western pop song, and understood how those conventions could work together. Indeed, one thing I've rarely seen pointed out is how cleverly the album is sequenced, so that "Love You To" is followed by possibly the most conventional song on Revolver, "Here, There, and Everywhere", which was recorded towards the end of the sessions. Both songs share a distinctive feature not shared by the rest of the album, so the two songs can sound more of a pair than they otherwise would, retrospectively making "Love You To" seem more conventional than it is and "Here, There, and Everywhere" more unconventional -- both have as an introduction a separate piece of music that states some of the melodic themes of the rest of the song but isn't repeated later. In the case of "Love You To" it's the free-tempo bit at the beginning, characteristic of a lot of Indian music: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] While in the case of "Here, There, and Everywhere" it's the part that mimics an older style of songwriting, a separate intro of the type that would have been called a verse when written by the Gershwins or Cole Porter, but of course in the intervening decades "verse" had come to mean something else, so we now no longer have a specific term for this kind of intro -- but as you can hear, it's doing very much the same thing as that "Love You To" intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] In the same day as the group completed "Love You To", overdubbing George's vocal and Ringo's tambourine, they also started work on a song that would show off a lot of the new techniques they had been working on in very different ways. Paul's "Paperback Writer" could indeed be seen as part of a loose trilogy with "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows", one song by each of the group's three songwriters exploring the idea of a song that's almost all on one chord. Both "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "Love You To" are based on a drone with occasional hints towards moving to one other chord. In the case of "Paperback Writer", the entire song stays on a single chord until the title -- it's on a G7 throughout until the first use of the word "writer", when it quickly goes to a C for two bars. I'm afraid I'm going to have to sing to show you how little the chords actually change, because the riff disguises this lack of movement somewhat, but the melody is also far more horizontal than most of McCartney's, so this shouldn't sound too painful, I hope: [demonstrates] This is essentially the exact same thing that both "Love You To" and "Tomorrow Never Knows" do, and all three have very similarly structured rising and falling modal melodies. There's also a bit of "Paperback Writer" that seems to tie directly into "Love You To", but also points to a possible very non-Indian inspiration for part of "Love You To". The Beach Boys' single "Sloop John B" was released in the UK a couple of days after the sessions for "Paperback Writer" and "Love You To", but it had been released in the US a month before, and the Beatles all got copies of every record in the American top thirty shipped to them. McCartney and Harrison have specifically pointed to it as an influence on "Paperback Writer". "Sloop John B" has a section where all the instruments drop out and we're left with just the group's vocal harmonies: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "Sloop John B"] And that seems to have been the inspiration behind the similar moment at a similar point in "Paperback Writer", which is used in place of a middle eight and also used for the song's intro: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Which is very close to what Harrison does at the end of each verse of "Love You To", where the instruments drop out for him to sing a long melismatic syllable before coming back in: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Love You To"] Essentially, other than "Got to Get You Into My Life", which is an outlier and should not be counted, the first three songs attempted during the Revolver sessions are variations on a common theme, and it's a sign that no matter how different the results might  sound, the Beatles really were very much a group at this point, and were sharing ideas among themselves and developing those ideas in similar ways. "Paperback Writer" disguises what it's doing somewhat by having such a strong riff. Lennon referred to "Paperback Writer" as "son of 'Day Tripper'", and in terms of the Beatles' singles it's actually their third iteration of this riff idea, which they originally got from Bobby Parker's "Watch Your Step": [Excerpt: Bobby Parker, "Watch Your Step"] Which became the inspiration for "I Feel Fine": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I Feel Fine"] Which they varied for "Day Tripper": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Day Tripper"] And which then in turn got varied for "Paperback Writer": [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] As well as compositional ideas, there are sonic ideas shared between "Paperback Writer", "Tomorrow Never Knows", and "Love You To", and which would be shared by the rest of the tracks the Beatles recorded in the first half of 1966. Since Geoff Emerick had become the group's principal engineer, they'd started paying more attention to how to get a fuller sound, and so Emerick had miced the tabla on "Love You To" much more closely than anyone would normally mic an instrument from classical music, creating a deep, thudding sound, and similarly he had changed the way they recorded the drums on "Tomorrow Never Knows", again giving a much fuller sound. But the group also wanted the kind of big bass sounds they'd loved on records coming out of America -- sounds that no British studio was getting, largely because it was believed that if you cut too loud a bass sound into a record it would make the needle jump out of the groove. The new engineering team of Geoff Emerick and Ken Scott, though, thought that it was likely you could keep the needle in the groove if you had a smoother frequency response. You could do that if you used a microphone with a larger diaphragm to record the bass, but how could you do that? Inspiration finally struck -- loudspeakers are actually the same thing as microphones wired the other way round, so if you wired up a loudspeaker as if it were a microphone you could get a *really big* speaker, place it in front of the bass amp, and get a much stronger bass sound. The experiment wasn't a total success -- the sound they got had to be processed quite extensively to get rid of room noise, and then compressed in order to further prevent the needle-jumping issue, and so it's a muddier, less defined, tone than they would have liked, but one thing that can't be denied is that "Paperback Writer"'s bass sound is much, much, louder than on any previous Beatles record: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] Almost every track the group recorded during the Revolver sessions involved all sorts of studio innovations, though rarely anything as truly revolutionary as the artificial double-tracking they'd used on "Tomorrow Never Knows", and which also appeared on "Paperback Writer" -- indeed, as "Paperback Writer" was released several months before Revolver, it became the first record released to use the technique. I could easily devote a good ten minutes to every track on Revolver, and to "Paperback Writer"s B-side, "Rain", but this is already shaping up to be an extraordinarily long episode and there's a lot of material to get through, so I'll break my usual pattern of devoting a Patreon bonus episode to something relatively obscure, and this week's bonus will be on "Rain" itself. "Paperback Writer", though, deserved the attention here even though it was not one of the group's more successful singles -- it did go to number one, but it didn't hit number one in the UK charts straight away, being kept off the top by "Strangers in the Night" by Frank Sinatra for the first week: [Excerpt: Frank Sinatra, "Strangers in the Night"] Coincidentally, "Strangers in the Night" was co-written by Bert Kaempfert, the German musician who had produced the group's very first recording sessions with Tony Sheridan back in 1961. On the group's German tour in 1966 they met up with Kaempfert again, and John greeted him by singing the first couple of lines of the Sinatra record. The single was the lowest-selling Beatles single in the UK since "Love Me Do". In the US it only made number one for two non-consecutive weeks, with "Strangers in the Night" knocking it off for a week in between. Now, by literally any other band's standards, that's still a massive hit, and it was the Beatles' tenth UK number one in a row (or ninth, depending on which chart you use for "Please Please Me"), but it's a sign that the group were moving out of the first phase of total unequivocal dominance of the charts. It was a turning point in a lot of other ways as well. Up to this point, while the group had been experimenting with different lyrical subjects on album tracks, every single had lyrics about romantic relationships -- with the possible exception of "Help!", which was about Lennon's emotional state but written in such a way that it could be heard as a plea to a lover. But in the case of "Paperback Writer", McCartney was inspired by his Aunt Mill asking him "Why do you write songs about love all the time? Can you ever write about a horse or the summit conference or something interesting?" His response was to think "All right, Aunt Mill, I'll show you", and to come up with a lyric that was very much in the style of the social satires that bands like the Kinks were releasing at the time. People often miss the humour in the lyric for "Paperback Writer", but there's a huge amount of comedy in lyrics about someone writing to a publisher saying they'd written a book based on someone else's book, and one can only imagine the feeling of weary recognition in slush-pile readers throughout the world as they heard the enthusiastic "It's a thousand pages, give or take a few, I'll be writing more in a week or two. I can make it longer..." From this point on, the group wouldn't release a single that was unambiguously about a romantic relationship until "The Ballad of John and Yoko",  the last single released while the band were still together. "Paperback Writer" also saw the Beatles for the first time making a promotional film -- what we would now call a rock video -- rather than make personal appearances on TV shows. The film was directed by Michael Lindsay-Hogg, who the group would work with again in 1969, and shows Paul with a chipped front tooth -- he'd been in an accident while riding mopeds with his friend Tara Browne a few months earlier, and hadn't yet got round to having the tooth capped. When he did, the change in his teeth was one of the many bits of evidence used by conspiracy theorists to prove that the real Paul McCartney was dead and replaced by a lookalike. It also marks a change in who the most prominent Beatle on the group's A-sides was. Up to this point, Paul had had one solo lead on an A-side -- "Can't Buy Me Love" -- and everything else had been either a song with multiple vocalists like "Day Tripper" or "Love Me Do", or a song with a clear John lead like "Ticket to Ride" or "I Feel Fine". In the rest of their career, counting "Paperback Writer", the group would release nine new singles that hadn't already been included on an album. Of those nine singles, one was a double A-side with one John song and one Paul song, two had John songs on the A-side, and the other six were Paul. Where up to this point John had been "lead Beatle", for the rest of the sixties, Paul would be the group's driving force. Oddly, Paul got rather defensive about the record when asked about it in interviews after it failed to go straight to the top, saying "It's not our best single by any means, but we're very satisfied with it". But especially in its original mono mix it actually packs a powerful punch: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Paperback Writer"] When the "Paperback Writer" single was released, an unusual image was used in the advertising -- a photo of the Beatles dressed in butchers' smocks, covered in blood, with chunks of meat and the dismembered body parts of baby dolls lying around on them. The image was meant as part of a triptych parodying religious art -- the photo on the left was to be an image showing the four Beatles connected to a woman by an umbilical cord made of sausages, the middle panel was meant to be this image, but with halos added over the Beatles' heads, and the panel on the right was George hammering a nail into John's head, symbolising both crucifixion and that the group were real, physical, people, not just images to be worshipped -- these weren't imaginary nails, and they weren't imaginary people. The photographer Robert Whittaker later said: “I did a photograph of the Beatles covered in raw meat, dolls and false teeth. Putting meat, dolls and false teeth with The Beatles is essentially part of the same thing, the breakdown of what is regarded as normal. The actual conception for what I still call “Somnambulant Adventure” was Moses coming down from Mount Sinai with the Ten Commandments. He comes across people worshipping a golden calf. All over the world I'd watched people worshiping like idols, like gods, four Beatles. To me they were just stock standard normal people. But this emotion that fans poured on them made me wonder where Christianity was heading.” The image wasn't that controversial in the UK, when it was used to advertise "Paperback Writer", but in the US it was initially used for the cover of an album, Yesterday... And Today, which was made up of a few tracks that had been left off the US versions of the Rubber Soul and Help! albums, plus both sides of the "We Can Work It Out"/"Day Tripper" single, and three rough mixes of songs that had been recorded for Revolver -- "Doctor Robert", "And Your Bird Can Sing", and "I'm Only Sleeping", which was the song that sounded most different from the mixes that were finally released: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "I'm Only Sleeping (Yesterday... and Today mix)"] Those three songs were all Lennon songs, which had the unfortunate effect that when the US version of Revolver was brought out later in the year, only two of the songs on the album were by Lennon, with six by McCartney and three by Harrison. Some have suggested that this was the motivation for the use of the butcher image on the cover of Yesterday... And Today -- saying it was the Beatles' protest against Capitol "butchering" their albums -- but in truth it was just that Capitol's art director chose the cover because he liked the image. Alan Livingston, the president of Capitol was not so sure, and called Brian Epstein to ask if the group would be OK with them using a different image. Epstein checked with John Lennon, but Lennon liked the image and so Epstein told Livingston the group insisted on them using that cover. Even though for the album cover the bloodstains on the butchers' smocks were airbrushed out, after Capitol had pressed up a million copies of the mono version of the album and two hundred thousand copies of the stereo version, and they'd sent out sixty thousand promo copies, they discovered that no record shops would stock the album with that cover. It cost Capitol more than two hundred thousand dollars to recall the album and replace the cover with a new one -- though while many of the covers were destroyed, others had the new cover, with a more acceptable photo of the group, pasted over them, and people have later carefully steamed off the sticker to reveal the original. This would not be the last time in 1966 that something that was intended as a statement on religion and the way people viewed the Beatles would cause the group trouble in America. In the middle of the recording sessions for Revolver, the group also made what turned out to be their last ever UK live performance in front of a paying audience. The group had played the NME Poll-Winners' Party every year since 1963, and they were always shows that featured all the biggest acts in the country at the time -- the 1966 show featured, as well as the Beatles and a bunch of smaller acts, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Yardbirds, Roy Orbison, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, the Seekers, the Small Faces, the Walker Brothers, and Dusty Springfield. Unfortunately, while these events were always filmed for TV broadcast, the Beatles' performance on the first of May wasn't filmed. There are various stories about what happened, but the crux appears to be a disagreement between Andrew Oldham and Brian Epstein, sparked by John Lennon. When the Beatles got to the show, they were upset to discover that they had to wait around before going on stage -- normally, the awards would all be presented at the end, after all the performances, but the Rolling Stones had asked that the Beatles not follow them directly, so after the Stones finished their set, there would be a break for the awards to be given out, and then the Beatles would play their set, in front of an audience that had been bored by twenty-five minutes of awards ceremony, rather than one that had been excited by all the bands that came before them. John Lennon was annoyed, and insisted that the Beatles were going to go on straight after the Rolling Stones -- he seems to have taken this as some sort of power play by the Stones and to have got his hackles up about it. He told Epstein to deal with the people from the NME. But the NME people said that they had a contract with Andrew Oldham, and they weren't going to break it. Oldham refused to change the terms of the contract. Lennon said that he wasn't going to go on stage if they didn't directly follow the Stones. Maurice Kinn, the publisher of the NME, told Epstein that he wasn't going to break the contract with Oldham, and that if the Beatles didn't appear on stage, he would get Jimmy Savile, who was compering the show, to go out on stage and tell the ten thousand fans in the audience that the Beatles were backstage refusing to appear. He would then sue NEMS for breach of contract *and* NEMS would be liable for any damage caused by the rioting that was sure to happen. Lennon screamed a lot of abuse at Kinn, and told him the group would never play one of their events again, but the group did go on stage -- but because they hadn't yet signed the agreement to allow their performance to be filmed, they refused to allow it to be recorded. Apparently Andrew Oldham took all this as a sign that Epstein was starting to lose control of the group. Also during May 1966 there were visits from musicians from other countries, continuing the cultural exchange that was increasingly influencing the Beatles' art. Bruce Johnston of the Beach Boys came over to promote the group's new LP, Pet Sounds, which had been largely the work of Brian Wilson, who had retired from touring to concentrate on working in the studio. Johnston played the record for John and Paul, who listened to it twice, all the way through, in silence, in Johnston's hotel room: [Excerpt: The Beach Boys, "God Only Knows"] According to Johnston, after they'd listened through the album twice, they went over to a piano and started whispering to each other, picking out chords. Certainly the influence of Pet Sounds is very noticeable on songs like "Here, There, and Everywhere", written and recorded a few weeks after this meeting: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "Here, There, and Everywhere"] That track, and the last track recorded for the album, "She Said She Said" were unusual in one very important respect -- they were recorded while the Beatles were no longer under contract to EMI Records. Their contract expired on the fifth of June, 1966, and they finished Revolver without it having been renewed -- it would be several months before their new contract was signed, and it's rather lucky for music lovers that Brian Epstein was the kind of manager who considered personal relationships and basic honour and decency more important than the legal niceties, unlike any other managers of the era, otherwise we would not have Revolver in the form we know it today. After the meeting with Johnston, but before the recording of those last couple of Revolver tracks, the Beatles also met up again with Bob Dylan, who was on a UK tour with a new, loud, band he was working with called The Hawks. While the Beatles and Dylan all admired each other, there was by this point a lot of wariness on both sides, especially between Lennon and Dylan, both of them very similar personality types and neither wanting to let their guard down around the other or appear unhip. There's a famous half-hour-long film sequence of Lennon and Dylan sharing a taxi, which is a fascinating, excruciating, example of two insecure but arrogant men both trying desperately to impress the other but also equally desperate not to let the other know that they want to impress them: [Excerpt: Dylan and Lennon taxi ride] The day that was filmed, Lennon and Harrison also went to see Dylan play at the Royal Albert Hall. This tour had been controversial, because Dylan's band were loud and raucous, and Dylan's fans in the UK still thought of him as a folk musician. At one gig, earlier on the tour, an audience member had famously yelled out "Judas!" -- (just on the tiny chance that any of my listeners don't know that, Judas was the disciple who betrayed Jesus to the authorities, leading to his crucifixion) -- and that show was for many years bootlegged as the "Royal Albert Hall" show, though in fact it was recorded at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester. One of the *actual* Royal Albert Hall shows was released a few years ago -- the one the night before Lennon and Harrison saw Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Like a Rolling Stone", Royal Albert Hall 1966] The show Lennon and Harrison saw would be Dylan's last for many years. Shortly after returning to the US, Dylan was in a motorbike accident, the details of which are still mysterious, and which some fans claim was faked altogether. The accident caused him to cancel all the concert dates he had booked, and devote himself to working in the studio for several years just like Brian Wilson. And from even further afield than America, Ravi Shankar came over to Britain, to work with his friend the violinist Yehudi Menuhin, on a duet album, West Meets East, that was an example in the classical world of the same kind of international cross-fertilisation that was happening in the pop world: [Excerpt: Yehudi Menuhin and Ravi Shankar, "Prabhati (based on Raga Gunkali)"] While he was in the UK, Shankar also performed at the Royal Festival Hall, and George Harrison went to the show. He'd seen Shankar live the year before, but this time he met up with him afterwards, and later said "He was the first person that impressed me in a way that was beyond just being a famous celebrity. Ravi was my link to the Vedic world. Ravi plugged me into the whole of reality. Elvis impressed me when I was a kid, and impressed me when I met him, but you couldn't later on go round to him and say 'Elvis, what's happening with the universe?'" After completing recording and mixing the as-yet-unnamed album, which had been by far the longest recording process of their career, and which still nearly sixty years later regularly tops polls of the best album of all time, the Beatles took a well-earned break. For a whole two days, at which point they flew off to Germany to do a three-day tour, on their way to Japan, where they were booked to play five shows at the Budokan. Unfortunately for the group, while they had no idea of this when they were booked to do the shows, many in Japan saw the Budokan as sacred ground, and they were the first ever Western group to play there. This led to numerous death threats and loud protests from far-right activists offended at the Beatles defiling their religious and nationalistic sensibilities. As a result, the police were on high alert -- so high that there were three thousand police in the audience for the shows, in a venue which only held ten thousand audience members. That's according to Mark Lewisohn's Complete Beatles Chronicle, though I have to say that the rather blurry footage of the audience in the video of those shows doesn't seem to show anything like those numbers. But frankly I'll take Lewisohn's word over that footage, as he's not someone to put out incorrect information. The threats to the group also meant that they had to be kept in their hotel rooms at all times except when actually performing, though they did make attempts to get out. At the press conference for the Tokyo shows, the group were also asked publicly for the first time their views on the war in Vietnam, and John replied "Well, we think about it every day, and we don't agree with it and we think that it's wrong. That's how much interest we take. That's all we can do about it... and say that we don't like it". I say they were asked publicly for the first time, because George had been asked about it for a series of interviews Maureen Cleave had done with the group a couple of months earlier, as we'll see in a bit, but nobody was paying attention to those interviews. Brian Epstein was upset that the question had gone to John. He had hoped that the inevitable Vietnam question would go to Paul, who he thought might be a bit more tactful. The last thing he needed was John Lennon saying something that would upset the Americans before their tour there a few weeks later. Luckily, people in America seemed to have better things to do than pay attention to John Lennon's opinions. The support acts for the Japanese shows included  several of the biggest names in Japanese rock music -- or "group sounds" as the genre was called there, Japanese people having realised that trying to say the phrase "rock and roll" would open them up to ridicule given that it had both "r" and "l" sounds in the phrase. The man who had coined the term "group sounds", Jackey Yoshikawa, was there with his group the Blue Comets, as was Isao Bito, who did a rather good cover version of Cliff Richard's "Dynamite": [Excerpt: Isao Bito, "Dynamite"] Bito, the Blue Comets, and the other two support acts, Yuya Uchida and the Blue Jeans, all got together to perform a specially written song, "Welcome Beatles": [Excerpt: "Welcome Beatles" ] But while the Japanese audience were enthusiastic, they were much less vocal about their enthusiasm than the audiences the Beatles were used to playing for. The group were used, of course, to playing in front of hordes of screaming teenagers who could not hear a single note, but because of the fear that a far-right terrorist would assassinate one of the group members, the police had imposed very, very, strict rules on the audience. Nobody in the audience was allowed to get out of their seat for any reason, and the police would clamp down very firmly on anyone who was too demonstrative. Because of that, the group could actually hear themselves, and they sounded sloppy as hell, especially on the newer material. Not that there was much of that. The only song they did from the Revolver sessions was "Paperback Writer", the new single, and while they did do a couple of tracks from Rubber Soul, those were under-rehearsed. As John said at the start of this tour, "I can't play any of Rubber Soul, it's so unrehearsed. The only time I played any of the numbers on it was when I recorded it. I forget about songs. They're only valid for a certain time." That's certainly borne out by the sound of their performances of Rubber Soul material at the Budokan: [Excerpt: The Beatles, "If I Needed Someone (live at the Budokan)"] It was while they were in Japan as well that they finally came up with the title for their new album. They'd been thinking of all sorts of ideas, like Abracadabra and Magic Circle, and tossing names around with increasing desperation for several days -- at one point they seem to have just started riffing on other groups' albums, and seem to have apparently seriously thought about naming the record in parodic tribute to their favourite artists -- suggestions included The Beatles On Safari, after the Beach Boys' Surfin' Safari (and possibly with a nod to their recent Pet Sounds album cover with animals, too), The Freewheelin' Beatles, after Dylan's second album, and my favourite, Ringo's suggestion After Geography, for the Rolling Stones' Aftermath. But eventually Paul came up with Revolver -- like Rubber Soul, a pun, in this case because the record itself revolves when on a turntable. Then it was off to the Philippines, and if the group thought Japan had been stressful, they had no idea what was coming. The trouble started in the Philippines from the moment they stepped off the plane, when they were bundled into a car without Neil Aspinall or Brian Epstein, and without their luggage, which was sent to customs. This was a problem in itself -- the group had got used to essentially being treated like diplomats, and to having their baggage let through customs without being searched, and so they'd started freely carrying various illicit substances with them. This would obviously be a problem -- but as it turned out, this was just to get a "customs charge" paid by Brian Epstein. But during their initial press conference the group were worried, given the hostility they'd faced from officialdom, that they were going to be arrested during the conference itself. They were asked what they would tell the Rolling Stones, who were going to be visiting the Philippines shortly after, and Lennon just said "We'll warn them". They also asked "is there a war on in the Philippines? Why is everybody armed?" At this time, the Philippines had a new leader, Ferdinand Marcos -- who is not to be confused with his son, Ferdinand Marcos Jr, also known as Bongbong Marcos, who just became President-Elect there last month. Marcos Sr was a dictatorial kleptocrat, one of the worst leaders of the latter half of the twentieth century, but that wasn't evident yet. He'd been elected only a few months earlier, and had presented himself as a Kennedy-like figure -- a young man who was also a war hero. He'd recently switched parties from the Liberal party to the right-wing Nacionalista Party, but wasn't yet being thought of as the monstrous dictator he later became. The person organising the Philippines shows had been ordered to get the Beatles to visit Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos at 11AM on the day of the show, but for some reason had instead put on their itinerary just the *suggestion* that the group should meet the Marcoses, and had put the time down as 3PM, and the Beatles chose to ignore that suggestion -- they'd refused to do that kind of government-official meet-and-greet ever since an incident in 1964 at the British Embassy in Washington where someone had cut off a bit of Ringo's hair. A military escort turned up at the group's hotel in the morning, to take them for their meeting. The group were all still in their rooms, and Brian Epstein was still eating breakfast and refused to disturb them, saying "Go back and tell the generals we're not coming." The group gave their performances as scheduled, but meanwhile there was outrage at the way the Beatles had refused to meet the Marcos family, who had brought hundreds of children -- friends of their own children, and relatives of top officials -- to a party to meet the group. Brian Epstein went on TV and tried to smooth things over, but the broadcast was interrupted by static and his message didn't get through to anyone. The next day, the group's security was taken away, as were the cars to take them to the airport. When they got to the airport, the escalators were turned off and the group were beaten up at the arrangement of the airport manager, who said in 1984 "I beat up the Beatles. I really thumped them. First I socked Epstein and he went down... then I socked Lennon and Ringo in the face. I was kicking them. They were pleading like frightened chickens. That's what happens when you insult the First Lady." Even on the plane there were further problems -- Brian Epstein and the group's road manager Mal Evans were both made to get off the plane to sort out supposed financial discrepancies, which led to them worrying that they were going to be arrested or worse -- Evans told the group to tell his wife he loved her as he left the plane. But eventually, they were able to leave, and after a brief layover in India -- which Ringo later said was the first time he felt he'd been somewhere truly foreign, as opposed to places like Germany or the USA which felt basically like home -- they got back to England: [Excerpt: "Ordinary passenger!"] When asked what they were going to do next, George replied “We're going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans,” The story of the "we're bigger than Jesus" controversy is one of the most widely misreported events in the lives of the Beatles, which is saying a great deal. One book that I've encountered, and one book only, Steve Turner's Beatles '66, tells the story of what actually happened, and even that book seems to miss some emphases. I've pieced what follows together from Turner's book and from an academic journal article I found which has some more detail. As far as I can tell, every single other book on the Beatles released up to this point bases their account of the story on an inaccurate press statement put out by Brian Epstein, not on the truth. Here's the story as it's generally told. John Lennon gave an interview to his friend, Maureen Cleave of the Evening Standard, during which he made some comments about how it was depressing that Christianity was losing relevance in the eyes of the public, and that the Beatles are more popular than Jesus, speaking casually because he was talking to a friend. That story was run in the Evening Standard more-or-less unnoticed, but then an American teen magazine picked up on the line about the Beatles being bigger than Jesus, reprinted chunks of the interview out of context and without the Beatles' knowledge or permission, as a way to stir up controversy, and there was an outcry, with people burning Beatles records and death threats from the Ku Klux Klan. That's... not exactly what happened. The first thing that you need to understand to know what happened is that Datebook wasn't a typical teen magazine. It *looked* just like a typical teen magazine, certainly, and much of its content was the kind of thing that you would get in Tiger Beat or any of the other magazines aimed at teenage girls -- the September 1966 issue was full of articles like "Life with the Walker Brothers... by their Road Manager", and interviews with the Dave Clark Five -- but it also had a long history of publishing material that was intended to make its readers think about social issues of the time, particularly Civil Rights. Arthur Unger, the magazine's editor and publisher, was a gay man in an interracial relationship, and while the subject of homosexuality was too taboo in the late fifties and sixties for him to have his magazine cover that, he did regularly include articles decrying segregation and calling for the girls reading the magazine to do their part on a personal level to stamp out racism. Datebook had regularly contained articles like one from 1963 talking about how segregation wasn't just a problem in the South, saying "If we are so ‘integrated' why must men in my own city of Philadelphia, the city of Brotherly Love, picket city hall because they are discriminated against when it comes to getting a job? And how come I am still unable to take my dark- complexioned friends to the same roller skating rink or swimming pool that I attend?” One of the writers for the magazine later said “We were much more than an entertainment magazine . . . . We tried to get kids involved in social issues . . . . It was a well-received magazine, recommended by libraries and schools, but during the Civil Rights period we did get pulled off a lot of stands in the South because of our views on integration” Art Unger, the editor and publisher, wasn't the only one pushing this liberal, integrationist, agenda. The managing editor at the time, Danny Fields, was another gay man who wanted to push the magazine even further than Unger, and who would later go on to manage the Stooges and the Ramones, being credited by some as being the single most important figure in punk rock's development, and being immortalised by the Ramones in their song "Danny Says": [Excerpt: The Ramones, "Danny Says"] So this was not a normal teen magazine, and that's certainly shown by the cover of the September 1966 issue, which as well as talking about the interviews with John Lennon and Paul McCartney inside, also advertised articles on Timothy Leary advising people to turn on, tune in, and drop out; an editorial about how interracial dating must be the next step after desegregation of schools, and a piece on "the ten adults you dig/hate the most" -- apparently the adult most teens dug in 1966 was Jackie Kennedy, the most hated was Barry Goldwater, and President Johnson, Billy Graham, and Martin Luther King appeared in the top ten on both lists. Now, in the early part of the year Maureen Cleave had done a whole series of articles on the Beatles -- double-page spreads on each band member, plus Brian Epstein, visiting them in their own homes (apart from Paul, who she met at a restaurant) and discussing their daily lives, their thoughts, and portraying them as rounded individuals. These articles are actually fascinating, because of something that everyone who met the Beatles in this period pointed out. When interviewed separately, all of them came across as thoughtful individuals, with their own opinions about all sorts of subjects, and their own tastes and senses of humour. But when two or more of them were together -- especially when John and Paul were interviewed together, but even in social situations, they would immediately revert to flip in-jokes and riffing on each other's statements, never revealing anything about themselves as individuals, but just going into Beatle mode -- simultaneously preserving the band's image, closing off outsiders, *and* making sure they didn't do or say anything that would get them mocked by the others. Cleave, as someone who actually took them all seriously, managed to get some very revealing information about all of them. In the article on Ringo, which is the most superficial -- one gets the impression that Cleave found him rather difficult to talk to when compared to the other, more verbally facile, band members -- she talked about how he had a lot of Wild West and military memorabilia, how he was a devoted family man and also devoted to his friends -- he had moved to the suburbs to be close to John and George, who already lived there. The most revealing quote about Ringo's personality was him saying "Of course that's the great thing about being married -- you have a house to sit in and company all the time. And you can still go to clubs, a bonus for being married. I love being a family man." While she looked at the other Beatles' tastes in literature in detail, she'd noted that the only books Ringo owned that weren't just for show were a few science fiction paperbacks, but that as he said "I'm not thick, it's just that I'm not educated. People can use words and I won't know what they mean. I say 'me' instead of 'my'." Ringo also didn't have a drum kit at home, saying he only played when he was on stage or in the studio, and that you couldn't practice on your own, you needed to play with other people. In the article on George, she talked about how he was learning the sitar,  and how he was thinking that it might be a good idea to go to India to study the sitar with Ravi Shankar for six months. She also talks about how during the interview, he played the guitar pretty much constantly, playing everything from songs from "Hello Dolly" to pieces by Bach to "the Trumpet Voluntary", by which she presumably means Clarke's "Prince of Denmark's March": [Excerpt: Jeremiah Clarke, "Prince of Denmark's March"] George was also the most outspoken on the subjects of politics, religion, and society, linking the ongoing war in Vietnam with the UK's reverence for the Second World War, saying "I think about it every day and it's wrong. Anything to do with war is wrong. They're all wrapped up in their Nelsons and their Churchills and their Montys -- always talking about war heroes. Look at All Our Yesterdays [a show on ITV that showed twenty-five-year-old newsreels] -- how we killed a few more Huns here and there. Makes me sick. They're the sort who are leaning on their walking sticks and telling us a few years in the army would do us good." He also had very strong words to say about religion, saying "I think religion falls flat on its face. All this 'love thy neighbour' but none of them are doing it. How can anybody get into the position of being Pope and accept all the glory and the money and the Mercedes-Benz and that? I could never be Pope until I'd sold my rich gates and my posh hat. I couldn't sit there with all that money on me and believe I was religious. Why can't we bring all this out in the open? Why is there all this stuff about blasphemy? If Christianity's as good as they say it is, it should stand up to a bit of discussion." Harrison also comes across as a very private person, saying "People keep saying, ‘We made you what you are,' well, I made Mr. Hovis what he is and I don't go round crawling over his gates and smashing up the wall round his house." (Hovis is a British company that makes bread and wholegrain flour). But more than anything else he comes across as an instinctive anti-authoritarian, being angry at bullying teachers, Popes, and Prime Ministers. McCartney's profile has him as the most self-consciously arty -- he talks about the plays of Alfred Jarry and the music of Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio: [Excerpt: Luciano Berio, "Momenti (for magnetic tape)"] Though he was very worried that he might be sounding a little too pretentious, saying “I don't want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on" --

Many consider Simon & Garfunkel's third studio album to be the breakthrough album.  The tracks on Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme were written primarily by Paul Simon during his time as a visitor in England in the prior year.  The songs maintain the folk feel of previous albums, and are heavily tilted towards acoustic instrumentation.  Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel met in elementary school in Queens, New York, in 1953.  They had their first minor hit as teenagers in 1957 under the stage name Tom and Jerry.  They began by emulating the sound of The Everly Brothers, but moved towards a folk sound as that genre gained in popularity.  Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme was a follow-up to their second album, which had been a commercial success, but which the duo felt was rushed.  Simon insisted on control of the recording process, and they took nine months to craft and record the album.  The result would be both a critical and commercial success, peaking at number 4 on the Billboard Pop Album Chart and eventually achieving Triple Platinum status with the RIAA.The duet would go on to record five studio albums before growing apart and breaking up in 1971.  The duo would reunite several times afterwards, perhaps most famously for their concert in Central Park in 1981. Scarborough Fair/CanticleThe opening track originated from an English ballad that had its roots in a Scottish folk song from at least the 1670's.  Simon learned it from Martin Carthy in London, and set it in counterpoint against a song he had previously written in 1963.  It would appear as a single after being featured in the film "The Graduate" in 1968.Homeward BoundThis song had previously appeared on the UK version of the duo's second studio album before appearing on the this American release.  The single hit number 5 on the Billboard Hot 100 earlier in 1966, and was on the charts for 12 weeks.  SImon wrote it after returning from England in 1964. The 59th Street Bridge Song (Feelin' Groovy)The name of this song is from a bridge in New York, also known as the Ed Koch Queensboro Bridge.  The theme to the television series "H.R. Pufnstuf" originally considered composed by Sid and Marty Kroft, was found to be too similar to this song, and Paul Simon was given writing credits to this theme after a court suit.A Simple Desultory Philippic (or How I Was Robert McNamara'd into Submission) This song is considered a parody of Bob Dylan's "Subterranean Homesick Blues," which was released the year before.  The lyrics name-drop many contemporary politicians, musicians, and celebrities, including Art Garfunkel.  Robert McNamara was the U.S. Secretary of Defense at the time the album was released. ENTERTAINMENT TRACK:The theme from the television series "The Saint" Roger Moore starred as Simon Templar in this British spy series.  His work in The Saint would propel him to a future role as James Bond in the 007 movie franchise. STAFF PICKS:Psychotic Reaction by Count FiveWayne walks down the psychedelic path to open our staff picks.  The song name came from a professor in the lead singer's college psychology class.  The lyrics are about losing your mind due to heartache.  While this is a one-hit wonder, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame lists this song as one of the "500 Songs That Shaped Rock."You Keep Me Hangin' On by The Supremes Brian's staff pick was written by Holland-Dozier-Holland, authors of the Motown sound.  This song was written specifically for The Supremes, and details the tragedy of a relationship in which a man cannot let go of the woman, but can't commit to her either.  This was one of a string of four number 1 songs by The Supremes.Walk Away Renee by the Left BankBruce brings us a little baroque pop, complete with harpsicord and strings.  co-writer Michael Brown claims he wrote the song about Renee Fladen-Kamm, who was the girlfriend of The Left Bank bassist Tom Finn, and with whom Michael Brown was infatuated.  Co-writer Tony Sansone contradicts Brown, saying it was a French girl's name selected at random, inspired by the Beatles' song "Michelle."A Hazy Shade of Winter by Simon & GarfunkelRob's closes out the staff picks with a famous Simon & Garfunkel single that was recorded during the studio sessions for the album, and was on the charts at the time, but which did not appear on this album. COMEDY TRACK:Boy Wonder, I Love You by Burt WardThis strange piece is a weird collaboration between Burt Ward (who played Robin in the 60's "Batman" series) and Frank Zappa.  

New York City-based bassist Mark Lewandowski originally hails from Nottingham, England. His interest in the bass took him to London to study at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Whilst studying at the school Mark was rapidly producing a strong name for himself on the London scene; playing regularly at the world famous Ronnie Scott's Jazz Club by only his second year in the capital. He was also awarded the Yamaha Jazz award, and is now continuing his studies in New York City as part of the celebrated Artist Diploma programme at the prestigious Juilliard School. He has been lucky to perform with a diverse range of musicians including such names as John Surman, Wynton Marsalis, Buddy Greco, Sheila Jordan, Henry Grimes, Steve Wilson, Paul Dunmall, Vic Juris, Martin Carthy, Jean Toussaint, Tcha Limberger, Julian Joseph, Bobby Wellins, Peter King, Soweto Kinch, Zoe Rahman.Support the show (https://www.buymeacoffee.com/thejazzpodcast)

‘Dives and Lazarus' may seem like an odd song to look at in early April, given that it's commonly thought of as a carol. But that's the nature of The Old Songs Podcast. If the guest wants to discuss Christmas carols in April, then who am I to question their motives?It's another unusual episode, recorded in the confines of coronavirus lockdown. My guest today is one of my favourite natterers – a man who could talk the folkie legs off Martin Carthy's donkey, and also one of the chaps who helped me come up with the concept for this podcast. You heard him on the very first episode, in fact. It's Nick Hart, broadcasting to you from what sounds like the rather rapid descent into utter madness. We'll get on to that shortly. What's lovely about ‘Dives and Lazarus', or Roud 477 to give it its official number, is that it also gives us the chance to explore how these old traditional songs influenced a generation of classical composers, not least Ralph Vaughan Williams. And that's not somewhere I think we've been before. So, without further ado, let's get stuck in by opening a window onto the technical difficulties involved in recording a podcast in two different regions while under lockdown, not to mention the subtle art of synchronised clapping. You'll see what I mean.    

Matthew Bannister on Bamber Gascoigne, the broadcaster and author best known as the long serving host of the TV quiz show 'University Challenge'. Norma Waterson, the revered singer who was part of the Waterson Carthy dynasty that played a leading role in the English folk revival. We have a personal tribute from her husband Martin Carthy and daughter Eliza Carthy. Claire Tomlinson, who broke down barriers to become one of the UK's best polo players. Thich Nhat Hanh, the Vietnamese-born Buddhist monk known as the 'father of mindfulness'. Producer: Neil George Interviewed guest: Christina Gascoigne Interviewed guest: Wasfi Kani Interviewed guest: Martin Carthy Interviewed guest: Eliza Carthy Interviewed guest: Mark Tomlinson Interviewed guest: Brother Phap Huu Interviewed guest: Jeff Wilson Archive clips used: BBC Radio 4, Desert Island Discs 01/11/1987; Granada TV, University Challenge 01/09/1987; BBC Two, The Young Ones - Bambi 08/05/1984; Granada TV, The Christians e03 The Birth of Europe 16/08/1977; BBC Radio 3, Music Matters 31/03/2018; BBC Radio 4, The King of Games 21/08/1984; BBC SOUND ARCHIVE, Hurlingham vs Scotland 02/09/1980; YouTube / Is Secret, Namo Avalokiteshvara Plum Village Chanting 13/08/2014; BBC Two, Arena: Stories My Country Told Me 14/07/1996.

I didn't have to travel far to meet this week's guest, my friend, kinda neighbour and fellow Whitchurch Folk Club organiser, Paul Sartin. In the wider folk world he's probably best known as a member of Faustus, Belshazzar's Feast and, or course, a former member of Bellowhead. But it's Paul's encyclopaedic knowledge of traditional folk music, and, in particular, songs from in-and-around Hampshire, that make episode 5 of The Old Songs Podcast particularly special. Regular listeners will notice that we've returned to a few topics we've already covered, and we re-meet characters that have cropped up before, but it's so worth it when you're with someone as scholarly as Paul. In particular, it's his knowledge of the folk song collecting process that took place close to 120 years ago. As a direct ancestor to Edith Sartin and Marina Russell, two particularly noted source singers, Paul has spent a lot of time looking at the biographical detail of these people and what these songs meant to them. While we're ostensibly discussing ‘An Acre of Land', the song allows us to touch on a variety of other old songs. In the course of this episode you'll hear performances from Eliza Carthy & the Gift Band, PJ Harvey, Martin Carthy, Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, Tom Newman, Spiers & Boden, and, of course, the mighty Faustus. Here, then, is my friend and yours – Paul Sartin, freshly dosed on good coffee, hoeing down hard on ‘An Acre of Land'. Who featured in this ‘An Acre of Land' podcast?A quick recap of the songs you've just heard. Clicking on the links below will take you to places to buy the songs.The podcast opened with ‘An Acre of Land', performed by Faustus on their eponymous album.You heard Eliza Carthy & The Gift Band taking on ‘The Elfin Knight', which appeared on the Anchor album.PJ Harvey sang ‘Acre of Land' with Harry Escott on a standalone single.You heard Martin Carthy's seminal performance of ‘Scarborough Fair' from his debut album.Cohen Brathwaite-Kilcoyne's brilliant, rousing performance of ‘Country Carrier' is from his solo album, Outway Songster.The source singer you heard was Tom Newman, singing ‘All For Me Grog' or ‘My Old Hat That I Got On' to Mike Yates. For more on this song, see my blog post.Spiers and Boden performed ‘The Quaker / Brighton Camp' on their Through and Through collection.And the two songs you heard from Faustus were, of course, ‘An Acre of Land' and a clip of ‘Next Stop: Grimsby' (which I mistakenly called ‘Last Stop: Grimsby' – my apologies, both from their Faustus album (see the link above). That's all for this week's episode. See you in a couple of weeks with… well, you'll have to wait and see. So many people to speak to, so little time! 

Episode one hundred and thirty-five of A History of Rock Music in Five Hundred Songs looks at “The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel, and the many records they made, together and apart, before their success. Click the full post to read liner notes, links to more information, and a transcript of the episode. Patreon backers also have a ten-minute bonus episode available, on "Blues Run the Game" by Jackson C. Frank. Tilt Araiza has assisted invaluably by doing a first-pass edit, and will hopefully be doing so from now on. Check out Tilt's irregular podcasts at http://www.podnose.com/jaffa-cakes-for-proust and http://sitcomclub.com/ Errata I talk about a tour of Lancashire towns, but some of the towns I mention were in Cheshire at the time, and some are in Greater Manchester or Merseyside now. They're all very close together though. I say Mose Rager was Black. I was misremembering, confusing Mose Rager, a white player in the Muhlenberg style, with Arnold Schultz, a Black player who invented it. I got this right in the episode on "Bye Bye Love". Also, I couldn't track down a copy of the Paul Kane single version of “He Was My Brother” in decent quality, so I used the version on The Paul Simon Songbook instead, as they're basically identical performances. Resources As usual, I've created a Mixcloud playlist of the music excerpted here. This compilation collects all Simon and Garfunkel's studio albums, with bonus tracks, plus a DVD of their reunion concert. There are many collections of the pre-S&G recordings by the two, as these are now largely in the public domain. This one contains a good selection. I've referred to several books for this episode: Simon and Garfunkel: Together Alone by Spencer Leigh is a breezy, well-researched, biography of the duo. Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn is the closest thing there is to an authorised biography of Simon. And What is it All But Luminous? is Art Garfunkel's memoir. It's not particularly detailed, being more a collection of thoughts and poetry than a structured narrative, but gives a good idea of Garfunkel's attitude to people and events in his life. Roots, Radicals, and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World by Billy Bragg has some great information on the British folk scene of the fifties and sixties. And Singing From the Floor is an oral history of British folk clubs, including a chapter on Dylan's 1962 visit to London. Patreon This podcast is brought to you by the generosity of my backers on Patreon. Why not join them? Transcript Today, we're going to take a look at a hit record that almost never happened -- a record by a duo who had already split up, twice, by the time it became a hit, and who didn't know it was going to come out. We're going to look at how a duo who started off as an Everly Brothers knockoff, before becoming unsuccessful Greenwich Village folkies, were turned into one of the biggest acts of the sixties by their producer. We're going to look at Simon and Garfunkel, and at "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] The story of Simon and Garfunkel starts with two children in a school play.  Neither Paul Simon or Art Garfunkel had many friends when they met in a school performance of Alice in Wonderland, where Simon was playing the White Rabbit and Garfunkel the Cheshire Cat. Simon was well-enough liked, by all accounts, but he'd been put on an accelerated programme for gifted students which meant he was progressing through school faster than his peers. He had a small social group, mostly based around playing baseball, but wasn't one of the popular kids. Art Garfunkel, another gifted student, had no friends at all until he got to know Simon, who he described later as his "one and only friend" in this time period. One passage in Garfunkel's autobiography seems to me to sum up everything about Garfunkel's personality as a child -- and indeed a large part of his personality as it comes across in interviews to this day. He talks about the pleasure he got from listening to the chart rundown on the radio -- "It was the numbers that got me. I kept meticulous lists—when a new singer like Tony Bennett came onto the charts with “Rags to Riches,” I watched the record jump from, say, #23 to #14 in a week. The mathematics of the jumps went to my sense of fun." Garfunkel is, to this day, a meticulous person -- on his website he has a list of every book he's read since June 1968, which is currently up to one thousand three hundred and ten books, and he has always had a habit of starting elaborate projects and ticking off every aspect of them as he goes. Both Simon and Garfunkel were outsiders at this point, other than their interests in sport, but Garfunkel was by far the more introverted of the two, and as a result he seems to have needed their friendship more than Simon did. But the two boys developed an intense, close, friendship, initially based around their shared sense of humour. Both of them were avid readers of Mad magazine, which had just started publishing when the two of them had met up, and both could make each other laugh easily. But they soon developed a new interest, when Martin Block on the middle-of-the-road radio show Make Believe Ballroom announced that he was going to play the worst record he'd ever heard. That record was "Gee" by the Crows: [Excerpt: The Crows, "Gee"] Paul Simon later said that that record was the first thing he'd ever heard on that programme that he liked, and soon he and Garfunkel had become regular listeners to Alan Freed's show on WINS, loving the new rock and roll music they were discovering. Art had already been singing in public from an early age -- his first public performance had been singing Nat "King" Cole's hit "Too Young" in a school talent contest when he was nine -- but the two started singing together. The first performance by Simon and Garfunkel was at a high school dance and, depending on which source you read, was a performance either of "Sh'Boom" or of Big Joe Turner's "Flip, Flop, and Fly": [Excerpt: Big Joe Turner, "Flip, Flop, and Fly"] The duo also wrote at least one song together as early as 1955 -- or at least Garfunkel says they wrote it together. Paul Simon describes it as one he wrote. They tried to get a record deal with the song, but it was never recorded at the time -- but Simon has later performed it: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Girl For Me"] Even at this point, though, while Art Garfunkel was putting all his emotional energy into the partnership with Simon, Simon was interested in performing with other people. Al Kooper was another friend of Simon's at the time, and apparently Simon and Kooper would also perform together. Once Elvis came on to Paul's radar, he also bought a guitar, but it was when the two of them first heard the Everly Brothers that they realised what it was that they could do together. Simon fell in love with the Everly Brothers as soon as he heard "Bye Bye Love": [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Bye Bye Love"] Up to this point, Paul hadn't bought many records -- he spent his money on baseball cards and comic books, and records just weren't good value. A pack of baseball cards was five cents, a comic book was ten cents, but a record was a dollar. Why buy records when you could hear music on the radio for free? But he needed that record, he couldn't just wait around to hear it on the radio. He made an hour-long two-bus journey to a record shop in Queens, bought the record, took it home, played it... and almost immediately scratched it. So he got back on the bus, travelled for another hour, bought another copy, took it home, and made sure he didn't scratch that one. Simon and Garfunkel started copying the Everlys' harmonies, and would spend hours together, singing close together watching each other's mouths and copying the way they formed words, eventually managing to achieve a vocal blend through sheer effort which would normally only come from familial closeness. Paul became so obsessed with music that he sold his baseball card collection and bought a tape recorder for two hundred dollars. They would record themselves singing, and then sing back along with it, multitracking themselves, but also critiquing the tape, refining their performances. Paul's father was a bass player -- "the family bassman", as he would later sing -- and encouraged his son in his music, even as he couldn't see the appeal in this new rock and roll music. He would critique Paul's songs, saying things like "you went from four-four to a bar of nine-eight, you can't do that" -- to which his son would say "I just did" -- but this wasn't hostile criticism, rather it was giving his son a basic grounding in song construction which would prove invaluable. But the duo's first notable original song -- and first hit -- came about more or less by accident. In early 1956, the doo-wop group the Clovers had released the hit single "Devil or Angel". Its B-side had a version of "Hey Doll Baby", a song written by the blues singer Titus Turner, and which sounds to me very inspired by Hank Williams' "Hey, Good Lookin'": [Excerpt: The Clovers, "Hey, Doll Baby"] That song was picked up by the Everly Brothers, who recorded it for their first album: [Excerpt: The Everly Brothers, "Hey Doll Baby"] Here is where the timeline gets a little confused for me, because that album wasn't released until early 1958, although the recording session for that track was in August 1957. Yet that track definitely influenced Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel to record a song that they released in November 1957. All I can imagine is that they heard the brothers perform it live, or maybe a radio station had an acetate copy. Because the way everyone has consistently told the story is that at the end of summer 1957, Simon and Garfunkel had both heard the Everly Brothers perform "Hey Doll Baby", but couldn't remember how it went. The two of them tried to remember it, and to work a version of it out together, and their hazy memories combined to reconstruct something that was completely different, and which owed at least as much to "Wake Up Little Suzie" as to "Hey Doll Baby". Their new song, "Hey Schoolgirl", was catchy enough that they thought if they recorded a demo of it, maybe the Everly Brothers themselves would record the song. At the demo studio they happened to encounter Sid Prosen, who owned a small record label named Big Records. He heard the duo perform and realised he might have his own Everly Brothers here. He signed the duo to a contract, and they went into a professional studio to rerecord "Hey Schoolgirl", this time with Paul's father on bass, and a couple of other musicians to fill out the sound: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Hey Schoolgirl"] Of course, the record couldn't be released under their real names -- there was no way anyone was going to buy a record by Simon and Garfunkel. So instead they became Tom and Jerry. Paul Simon was Jerry Landis -- a surname he chose because he had a crush on a girl named Sue Landis. Art became Tom Graff, because he liked drawing graphs. "Hey Schoolgirl" became a local hit. The two were thrilled to hear it played on Alan Freed's show (after Sid Prosen gave Freed two hundred dollars), and were even more thrilled when they got to perform on American Bandstand, on the same show as Jerry Lee Lewis. When Dick Clark asked them where they were from, Simon decided to claim he was from Macon, Georgia, where Little Richard came from, because all his favourite rock and roll singers were from the South. "Hey Schoolgirl" only made number forty-nine nationally, because the label didn't have good national distribution, but it sold over a hundred thousand copies, mostly in the New York area. And Sid Prosen seems to have been one of a very small number of independent label owners who wasn't a crook -- the two boys got about two thousand dollars each from their hit record. But while Tom and Jerry seemed like they might have a successful career, Simon and Garfunkel were soon to split up, and the reason for their split was named True Taylor. Paul had been playing some of his songs for Sid Prosen, to see what the duo's next single should be, and Prosen had noticed that while some of them were Everly Brothers soundalikes, others were Elvis soundalikes. Would Paul be interested in recording some of those, too? Obviously Art couldn't sing on those, so they'd use a different name, True Taylor. The single was released around the same time as the second Tom and Jerry record, and featured an Elvis-style ballad by Paul on one side, and a rockabilly song written by his father on the other: [Excerpt: True Taylor, "True or False"] But Paul hadn't discussed that record with Art before doing it, and the two had vastly different ideas about their relationship. Paul was Art's only friend, and Art thought they had an indissoluble bond and that they would always work together. Paul, on the other hand, thought of Art as one of his friends and someone he made music with, but he could play at being Elvis if he wanted, as well as playing at being an Everly brother. Garfunkel, in his memoir published in 2017, says "the friendship was shattered for life" -- he decided then and there that Paul Simon was a "base" person, a betrayer. But on the other hand, he still refers to Simon, over and over again, in that book as still being his friend, even as Simon has largely been disdainful of him since their last performance together in 2010. Friendships are complicated. Tom and Jerry struggled on for a couple more singles, which weren't as successful as "Hey Schoolgirl" had been, with material like "Two Teenagers", written by Rose Marie McCoy: [Excerpt: Tom and Jerry, "Two Teenagers"] But as they'd stopped being friends, and they weren't selling records, they drifted apart and didn't really speak for five years, though they would occasionally run into one another. They both went off to university, and Garfunkel basically gave up on the idea of having a career in music, though he did record a couple of singles, under the name "Artie Garr": [Excerpt: Artie Garr, "Beat Love"] But for the most part, Garfunkel concentrated on his studies, planning to become either an architect or maybe an academic. Paul Simon, on the other hand, while he was technically studying at university too, was only paying minimal attention to his studies. Instead, he was learning the music business. Every afternoon, after university had finished, he'd go around the Brill Building and its neighbouring buildings, offering his services both as a songwriter and as a demo performer. As Simon was competent on guitar, bass, and drums, could sing harmonies, and could play a bit of piano if it was in the key of C, he could use primitive multitracking to play and sing all the parts on a demo, and do it well: [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "Boys Were Made For Girls"] That's an excerpt from a demo Simon recorded for Burt Bacharach, who has said that he tried to get Simon to record as many of his demos as possible, though only a couple of them have surfaced publicly. Simon would also sometimes record demos with his friend Carole Klein, sometimes under the name The Cosines: [Excerpt: The Cosines, "Just to Be With You"] As we heard back in the episode on "Will You Love Me Tomorrow?", Carole Klein went on to change her name to Carole King, and become one of the most successful songwriters of the era -- something which spurred Paul Simon on, as he wanted to emulate her success. Simon tried to get signed up by Don Kirshner, who was publishing Goffin and King, but Kirshner turned Simon down -- an expensive mistake for Kirshner, but one that would end up benefiting Simon, who eventually figured out that he should own his own publishing. Simon was also getting occasional work as a session player, and played lead guitar on "The Shape I'm In" by Johnny Restivo, which made the lower reaches of the Hot One Hundred: [Excerpt: Johnny Restivo, "The Shape I'm In"] Between 1959 and 1963 Simon recorded a whole string of unsuccessful pop singles. including as a member of the Mystics: [Excerpt: The Mystics, "All Through the Night"] He even had a couple of very minor chart hits -- he got to number 99 as Tico and the Triumphs: [Excerpt: Tico and the Triumphs, "Motorcycle"] and number ninety-seven as Jerry Landis: [Excerpt: Jerry Landis, "The Lone Teen Ranger"] But he was jumping around, hopping onto every fad as it passed, and not getting anywhere. And then he started to believe that he could do something more interesting in music. He first became aware that the boundaries of what could be done in music extended further than "ooh-bop-a-loochy-ba" when he took a class on modern music at university, which included a trip to Carnegie Hall to hear a performance of music by the avant-garde composer Edgard Varese: [Excerpt: Edgard Varese, "Ionisation"] Simon got to meet Varese after the performance, and while he would take his own music in a very different, and much more commercial, direction than Varese's, he was nonetheless influenced by what Varese's music showed about the possibilities that existed in music. The other big influence on Simon at this time was when he heard The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan: [Excerpt: Bob Dylan, "Girl From the North Country"] Simon immediately decided to reinvent himself as a folkie, despite at this point knowing very little about folk music other than the Everly Brothers' Songs Our Daddy Taught Us album. He tried playing around Greenwich Village, but found it an uncongenial atmosphere, and inspired by the liner notes to the Dylan album, which talked about Dylan's time in England, he made what would be the first of several trips to the UK, where he was given a rapturous reception simply on the grounds of being an American and owning a better acoustic guitar -- a Martin -- than most British people owned. He had the showmanship that he'd learned from watching his father on stage and sometimes playing with him, and from his time in Tom and Jerry and working round the studios, and so he was able to impress the British folk-club audiences, who were used to rather earnest, scholarly, people, not to someone like Simon who was clearly ambitious and very showbiz. His repertoire at this point consisted mostly of songs from the first two Dylan albums, a Joan Baez record, Little Willie John's "Fever", and one song he'd written himself, an attempt at a protest song called "He Was My Brother", which he would release on his return to the US under yet another stage name, Paul Kane: [Excerpt: Paul Kane, "He Was My Brother"] Simon has always stated that that song was written about a friend of his who was murdered when he went down to Mississippi with the Freedom Riders -- but while Simon's friend was indeed murdered, it wasn't until about a year after he wrote the song, and Simon has confused the timelines in his subsequent recollections. At the time he recorded that, when he had returned to New York at the end of the summer, Simon had a job as a song plugger for a publishing company, and he gave the publishing company the rights to that song and its B-side, which led to that B-side getting promoted by the publisher, and ending up covered on one of the biggest British albums of 1964, which went to number two in the UK charts: [Excerpt: Val Doonican, "Carlos Dominguez"] Oddly, that may not end up being the only time we feature a Val Doonican track on this podcast. Simon continued his attempts to be a folkie, even teaming up again with Art Garfunkel, with whom he'd re-established contact, to perform in Greenwich Village as Kane and Garr, but they went down no better as a duo than Simon had as a solo artist. Simon went back to the UK again over Christmas 1963, and while he was there he continued work on a song that would become such a touchstone for him that of the first six albums he would be involved in, four would feature the song while a fifth would include a snippet of it. "The Sound of Silence" was apparently started in November 1963, but not finished until February 1964, by which time he was once again back in the USA, and back working as a song plugger. It was while working as a song plugger that Simon first met Tom Wilson, Bob Dylan's producer at Columbia. Simon met up with Wilson trying to persuade him to use some of the songs that the publishing company were putting out. When Wilson wasn't interested, Simon played him a couple of his own songs. Wilson took one of them, "He Was My Brother", for the Pilgrims, a group he was producing who were supposed to be the Black answer to Peter, Paul, and Mary: [Excerpt: The Pilgrims, "He Was My Brother"] Wilson was also interested in "The Sound of Silence", but Simon was more interested in getting signed as a performer than in having other acts perform his songs. Wilson was cautious, though -- he was already producing one folkie singer-songwriter, and he didn't really need a second one. But he *could* probably do with a vocal group... Simon mentioned that he had actually made a couple of records before, as part of a duo. Would Wilson be at all interested in a vocal *duo*? Wilson would be interested. Simon and Garfunkel auditioned for him, and a few days later were in the Columbia Records studio on Seventh Avenue recording their first album as a duo, which was also the first time either of them would record under their own name. Wednesday Morning, 3AM, the duo's first album, was a simple acoustic album, and the only instrumentation was Simon and Barry Kornfeld, a Greenwich Village folkie, on guitars, and Bill Lee, the double bass player who'd played with Dylan and others, on bass. Tom Wilson guided the duo in their song selection, and the eventual album contained six cover versions and six originals written by Simon. The cover versions were a mixture of hootenanny staples like "Go Tell it on the Mountain", plus Dylan's "The Times They Are A-Changin'", included to cross-promote Dylan's new album and to try to link the duo with the more famous writer, and one unusual one, "The Sun is Burning", written by Ian Campbell, a Scottish folk singer who Simon had got to know on his trips to the UK: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sun is Burning"] But the song that everyone was keenest on was "The Sound of Silence", the first song that Simon had written that he thought would stand up in comparison with the sort of song that Dylan was writing: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence (Wednesday Morning 3AM version)"] In between sessions for the album, Simon and Garfunkel also played a high-profile gig at Gerde's Folk City in the Village, and a couple of shows at the Gaslight Cafe. The audiences there, though, regarded them as a complete joke -- Dave Van Ronk would later relate that for weeks afterwards, all anyone had to do was sing "Hello darkness, my old friend", for everyone around to break into laughter. Bob Dylan was one of those who laughed at the performance -- though Robert Shelton later said that Dylan hadn't been laughing at them, specifically, he'd just had a fit of the giggles -- and this had led to a certain amount of anger from Simon towards Dylan. The album was recorded in March 1964, and was scheduled for release  in October. In the meantime, they both made plans to continue with their studies and their travels. Garfunkel was starting to do postgraduate work towards his doctorate in mathematics, while Simon was now enrolled in Brooklyn Law School, but was still spending most of his time travelling, and would drop out after one semester. He would spend much of the next eighteen months in the UK. While he was occasionally in the US between June 1964 and November 1965, Simon now considered himself based in England, where he made several acquaintances that would affect his life deeply. Among them were a young woman called Kathy Chitty, with whom he would fall in love and who would inspire many of his songs, and an older woman called Judith Piepe (and I apologise if I'm mispronouncing her name, which I've only ever seen written down, never heard) who many people believed had an unrequited crush on Simon. Piepe ran her London flat as something of a commune for folk musicians, and Simon lived there for months at a time while in the UK. Among the other musicians who stayed there for a time were Sandy Denny, Cat Stevens, and Al Stewart, whose bedroom was next door to Simon's. Piepe became Simon's de facto unpaid manager and publicist, and started promoting him around the British folk scene. Simon also at this point became particularly interested in improving his guitar playing. He was spending a lot of time at Les Cousins, the London club that had become the centre of British acoustic guitar. There are, roughly, three styles of acoustic folk guitar -- to be clear, I'm talking about very broad-brush categorisations here, and there are people who would disagree and say there are more, but these are the main ones. Two of these are American styles -- there's the simple style known as Carter scratching, popularised by Mother Maybelle Carter of the Carter family, and for this all you do is alternate bass notes with your thumb while scratching the chord on the treble strings with one finger, like this: [Excerpt: Carter picking] That's the style played by a lot of country and folk players who were primarily singers accompanying themselves. In the late forties and fifties, though, another style had become popularised -- Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, the most well-known player in the style, but he always called it Muhlenberg picking, after Muhlenberg County, where he'd learned the style from Ike Everly -- the Everly Brothers' father -- and Mose Rager, a Black guitarist. In Travis picking, the thumb alternates between two bass notes, but rather than strumming a chord, the index and middle fingers play simple patterns on the treble strings, like this: [Excerpt: Travis picking] That's, again, a style primarily used for accompaniment, but it can also be used to play instrumentals by oneself. As well as Travis and Ike Everly, it's also the style played by Donovan, Chet Atkins, James Taylor, and more. But there's a third style, British baroque folk guitar, which was largely the invention of Davey Graham. Graham, you might remember, was a folk guitarist who had lived in the same squat as Lionel Bart when Bart started working with Tommy Steele, and who had formed a blues duo with Alexis Korner. Graham is now best known for one of his simpler pieces, “Anji”, which became the song that every British guitarist tried to learn: [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "Anji"] Dozens of people, including Paul Simon, would record versions of that. Graham invented an entirely new style of guitar playing, influenced by ragtime players like Blind Blake, but also by Bach, by Moroccan oud music, and by Celtic bagpipe music. While it was fairly common for players to retune their guitar to an open major chord, allowing them to play slide guitar, Graham retuned his to a suspended fourth chord -- D-A-D-G-A-D -- which allowed him to keep a drone going on some strings while playing complex modal counterpoints on others. While I demonstrated the previous two styles myself, I'm nowhere near a good enough guitarist to demonstrate British folk baroque, so here's an excerpt of Davey Graham playing his own arrangement of the traditional ballad "She Moved Through the Fair", recast as a raga and retitled "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre": [Excerpt: Davey Graham, "She Moved Thru' the Bizarre"] Graham's style was hugely influential on an entire generation of British guitarists, people who incorporated world music and jazz influences into folk and blues styles, and that generation of guitarists was coming up at the time and playing at Les Cousins. People who started playing in this style included Jimmy Page, Bert Jansch, Roy Harper, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Nick Drake, and John Martyn, and it also had a substantial influence on North American players like Joni Mitchell, Tim Buckley, and of course Paul Simon. Simon was especially influenced at this time by Martin Carthy, the young British guitarist whose style was very influenced by Graham -- but while Graham applied his style to music ranging from Dave Brubeck to Lutheran hymns to Big Bill Broonzy songs, Carthy mostly concentrated on traditional English folk songs. Carthy had a habit of taking American folk singers under his wing, and he taught Simon several songs, including Carthy's own arrangement of the traditional "Scarborough Fair": [Excerpt: Martin Carthy, "Scarborough Fair"] Simon would later record that arrangement, without crediting Carthy, and this would lead to several decades of bad blood between them, though Carthy forgave him in the 1990s, and the two performed the song together at least once after that. Indeed, Simon seems to have made a distinctly negative impression on quite a few of the musicians he knew in Britain at this time, who seem to, at least in retrospect, regard him as having rather used and discarded them as soon as his career became successful. Roy Harper has talked in liner notes to CD reissues of his work from this period about how Simon used to regularly be a guest in his home, and how he has memories of Simon playing with Harper's baby son Nick (now himself one of the greats of British guitar) but how as soon as he became successful he never spoke to Harper again. Similarly, in 1965 Simon started a writing partnership with Bruce Woodley of the Seekers, an Australian folk-pop band based in the UK, best known for "Georgy Girl". The two wrote "Red Rubber Ball", which became a hit for the Cyrkle: [Excerpt: The Cyrke, "Red Rubber Ball"] and also "Cloudy", which the Seekers recorded as an album track: [Excerpt: The Seekers, "Cloudy"] When that was recorded by Simon and Garfunkel, Woodley's name was removed from the writing credits, though Woodley still apparently received royalties for it. But at this point there *was* no Simon and Garfunkel. Paul Simon was a solo artist working the folk clubs in Britain, and Simon and Garfunkel's one album had sold a minuscule number of copies. They did, when Simon briefly returned to the US in March, record two tracks for a prospective single, this time with an electric backing band. One was a rewrite of the title track of their first album, now titled "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" and with a new chorus and some guitar parts nicked from Davey Graham's "Anji"; the other a Twist-beat song that could almost be Manfred Mann or Georgie Fame -- "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'". That was also influenced by “Anji”, though by Bert Jansch's version rather than Graham's original. Jansch rearranged the song and stuck in this phrase: [Excerpt: Bert Jansch, “Anji”] Which became the chorus to “We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'”: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "We Got a Groovy Thing Goin'"] But that single was never released, and as far as Columbia were concerned, Simon and Garfunkel were a defunct act, especially as Tom Wilson, who had signed them, was looking to move away from Columbia. Art Garfunkel did come to visit Simon in the UK a couple of times, and they'd even sing together occasionally, but it was on the basis of Paul Simon the successful club act occasionally inviting his friend on stage during the encore, rather than as a duo, and Garfunkel was still seeing music only as a sideline while Simon was now utterly committed to it. He was encouraged in this commitment by Judith Piepe, who considered him to be the greatest songwriter of his generation, and who started a letter-writing campaign to that effect, telling the BBC they needed to put him on the radio. Eventually, after a lot of pressure, they agreed -- though they weren't exactly sure what to do with him, as he didn't fit into any of the pop formats they had. He was given his own radio show -- a five-minute show in a religious programming slot. Simon would perform a song, and there would be an introduction tying the song into some religious theme or other. Two series of four episodes of this were broadcast, in a plum slot right after Housewives' Choice, which got twenty million listeners, and the BBC were amazed to find that a lot of people phoned in asking where they could get hold of the records by this Paul Simon fellow. Obviously he didn't have any out yet, and even the Simon and Garfunkel album, which had been released in the US, hadn't come out in Britain. After a little bit of negotiation, CBS, the British arm of Columbia Records, had Simon come in and record an album of his songs, titled The Paul Simon Songbook. The album, unlike the Simon and Garfunkel album, was made up entirely of Paul Simon originals. Two of them were songs that had previously been recorded for Wednesday Morning 3AM -- "He Was My Brother" and a new version of "The Sound of Silence": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "The Sound of Silence"] The other ten songs were newly-written pieces like "April Come She Will", "Kathy's Song", a parody of Bob Dylan entitled "A Simple Desultory Philippic", and the song that was chosen as the single, "I am a Rock": [Excerpt: Paul Simon, "I am a Rock"] That song was also the one that was chosen for Simon's first TV appearance since Tom and Jerry had appeared on Bandstand eight years earlier. The appearance on Ready, Steady, Go, though, was not one that anyone was happy with. Simon had been booked to appear on  a small folk music series, Heartsong, but that series was cancelled before he could appear. Rediffusion, the company that made the series, also made Ready, Steady, Go, and since they'd already paid Simon they decided they might as well stick him on that show and get something for their money. Unfortunately, the episode in question was already running long, and it wasn't really suited for introspective singer-songwriter performances -- the show was geared to guitar bands and American soul singers. Michael Lindsay-Hogg, the director, insisted that if Simon was going to do his song, he had to cut at least one verse, while Simon was insistent that he needed to perform the whole thing because "it's a story". Lindsay-Hogg got his way, but nobody was happy with the performance. Simon's album was surprisingly unsuccessful, given the number of people who'd called the BBC asking about it -- the joke went round that the calls had all been Judith Piepe doing different voices -- and Simon continued his round of folk clubs, pubs, and birthday parties, sometimes performing with Garfunkel, when he visited for the summer, but mostly performing on his own. One time he did perform with a full band, singing “Johnny B Goode” at a birthday party, backed by a band called Joker's Wild who a couple of weeks later went into the studio to record their only privately-pressed five-song record, of them performing recent hits: [Excerpt: Joker's Wild, "Walk Like a Man"] The guitarist from Joker's Wild would later join the other band who'd played at that party, but the story of David Gilmour joining Pink Floyd is for another episode. During this time, Simon also produced his first record for someone else, when he was responsible for producing the only album by his friend Jackson C Frank, though there wasn't much production involved as like Simon's own album it was just one man and his guitar. Al Stewart and Art Garfunkel were also in the control room for the recording, but the notoriously shy Frank insisted on hiding behind a screen so they couldn't see him while he recorded: [Excerpt: Jackson C Frank, "Blues Run the Game"] It seemed like Paul Simon was on his way to becoming a respected mid-level figure on the British folk scene, releasing occasional albums and maybe having one or two minor hits, but making a steady living. Someone who would be spoken of in the same breath as Ralph McTell perhaps. Meanwhile, Art Garfunkel would be going on to be a lecturer in mathematics whose students might be surprised to know he'd had a minor rock and roll hit as a kid. But then something happened that changed everything. Wednesday Morning 3AM hadn't sold at all, and Columbia hadn't promoted it in the slightest. It was too collegiate and polite for the Greenwich Village folkies, and too intellectual for the pop audience that had been buying Peter, Paul, and Mary, and it had come out just at the point that the folk boom had imploded. But one DJ in Boston, Dick Summer, had started playing one song from it, "The Sound of Silence", and it had caught on with the college students, who loved the song. And then came spring break 1965. All those students went on holiday, and suddenly DJs in places like Cocoa Beach, Florida, were getting phone calls requesting "The Sound of Silence" by Simon and Garfunkel. Some of them with contacts at Columbia got in touch with the label, and Tom Wilson had an idea. On the first day of what turned out to be his last session with Dylan, the session for "Like a Rolling Stone", Wilson asked the musicians to stay behind and work on something. He'd already experimented with overdubbing new instruments on an acoustic recording with his new version of Dylan's "House of the Rising Sun", now he was going to try it with "The Sound of Silence". He didn't bother asking the duo what they thought -- record labels messed with people's records all the time. So "The Sound of Silence" was released as an electric folk-rock single: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] This is always presented as Wilson massively changing the sound of the duo without their permission or knowledge, but the fact is that they had *already* gone folk-rock, back in March, so they were already thinking that way. The track was released as a single with “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” on the B-side, and was promoted first in the Boston market, and it did very well. Roy Harper later talked about Simon's attitude at this time, saying "I can remember going into the gents in The Three Horseshoes in Hempstead during a gig, and we're having a pee together. He was very excited, and he turns round to me and and says, “Guess what, man? We're number sixteen in Boston with The Sound of Silence'”. A few days later I was doing another gig with him and he made a beeline for me. “Guess what?” I said “You're No. 15 in Boston”. He said, “No man, we're No. 1 in Boston”. I thought, “Wow. No. 1 in Boston, eh?” It was almost a joke, because I really had no idea what that sort of stuff meant at all." Simon was even more excited when the record started creeping up the national charts, though he was less enthused when his copy of the single arrived from America. He listened to it, and thought the arrangement was a Byrds rip-off, and cringed at the way the rhythm section had to slow down and speed up in order to stay in time with the acoustic recording: [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "The Sound of Silence"] I have to say that, while the tempo fluctuations are noticeable once you know to look for them, it's a remarkably tight performance given the circumstances. As the record went up the charts, Simon was called back to America, to record an album to go along with it. The Paul Simon Songbook hadn't been released in the US,  and they needed an album *now*, and Simon was a slow songwriter, so the duo took six songs from that album and rerecorded them in folk-rock versions with their new producer Bob Johnston, who was also working with Dylan now, since Tom Wilson had moved on to Verve records. They filled out the album with "The Sound of Silence", the two electric tracks from March, one new song, "Blessed", and a version of "Anji", which came straight after "Somewhere They Can't Find Me", presumably to acknowledge Simon lifting bits of it. That version of “Anji” also followed Jansch's arrangement, and so included the bit that Simon had taken for “We Got a Groovy Thing Going” as well. They also recorded their next single, which was released on the British version of the album but not the American one, a song that Simon had written during a thoroughly depressing tour of Lancashire towns (he wrote it in Widnes, but a friend of Simon's who lived in Widnes later said that while it was written in Widnes it was written *about* Birkenhead. Simon has also sometimes said it was about Warrington or Wigan, both of which are so close to Widnes and so similar in both name and atmosphere that it would be the easiest thing in the world to mix them up.) [Excerpt: Simon and Garfunkel, "Homeward Bound"] These tracks were all recorded in December 1965, and they featured the Wrecking Crew -- Bob Johnston wanted the best, and didn't rate the New York players that Wilson had used, and so they were recorded in LA with Glen Campbell, Joe South, Hal Blaine, Larry Knechtel, and Joe Osborne. I've also seen in some sources that there were sessions in Nashville with A-team players Fred Carter and Charlie McCoy. By January, "The Sound of Silence" had reached number one, knocking "We Can Work it Out" by the Beatles off the top spot for two weeks, before the Beatles record went back to the top. They'd achieved what they'd been trying for for nearly a decade, and I'll give the last word here to Paul Simon, who said of the achievement: "I had come back to New York, and I was staying in my old room at my parents' house. Artie was living at his parents' house, too. I remember Artie and I were sitting there in my car one night, parked on a street in Queens, and the announcer said, "Number one, Simon & Garfunkel." And Artie said to me, "That Simon & Garfunkel, they must be having a great time.""

Kate Molleson presents a live edition of Music Matters from the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival in Coventry, featuring live music and a panel of guests discussing the parallel rhythms and sounds of music and language from the ancient oral tradition of folk music to right through to the contemporary sounds of today. Kate's guests include Netia Jones, Liz Berry, Martin Carthy and Andy Ingamells.

Pianist Igor Levit talks to Tom Service about his latest epic recording project – three and a half hours of music by Dmitri Shostakovich and the Scottish composer Ronald Stevenson. No stranger to large-scale works he live-streamed Erik Satie's Vexations during lockdown playing 840 repetitions over 16 hours as part of his online House Concerts. He discusses the huge challenges on every page of Stevenson's Passacaglia and the contradictions of his life as a pianist and his political beliefs. Folk singer Martin Carthy and former High Court judge and part-time song collector Stephen Sedley join Tom to talk about their new book, ‘Who Killed Cock Robin: British Folk Songs of Crime and Punishment', which explores the legal and moral basis of some of the most moving songs in the folk traditions of the country. We hear recordings by Martin Carthy, Shirley Collins, Rachel Newton and a 1953 archive recording of Ewan MacColl singing ‘McCaffery', provided by the School of Scottish Studies Archives. As Russians go to the polls, we look at what the recent decline in freedoms means for artists and musicians in and out of the country. Tom speaks to Masha Alekhina, co-founder of the musical and protest collective Pussy Riot, who has just been sentenced to a year of ‘restricted freedom' for promoting protests in support of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny. We're also joined by the BBC's Moscow correspondent Sarah Rainsford who was recently expelled from Russia after more than 20 years of reporting from Moscow, and pianist Katya Apekisheva who, alongside hundreds of other classical musicians, signed a letter to Vladimir Putin in February calling for the release of Alexei Navalny. And composer Joseph Horovitz shares stories from his life in music. Having fled Vienna as a child in 1938, he began his musical career in Britain as a music lecturer for the army before working as a ballet conductor and finally a composer. His music draws on a huge range of styles, especially jazz, as can be heard in his Jazz Harpsichord Concerto which was performed by Mahan Esfahani and the Manchester Collective at this year's Proms. He talks to Tom about how his deeply personal fifth string quartet reflects his experiences of escaping Vienna, and how he finds new inspiration every day from the music around him.

Jason Wilson is a two-time Juno-Awards nominee, Canadian Reggae Music Award winner, four-time Reggae Music Achievements Award nominee and Best-Selling Canadian historian from Downsview, Ontario. In 2007, Wilson became the first recipient of the Karl Mullings Memorial Award for commitment to reggae in Canada. The protégé of Studio One keyboardist Jackie Mittoo, Jason has performed and recorded with UB40, Alanis Morissette, Sly & Robbie, Ron Sexsmith, Ernest Ranglin, Brinsley Forde, Pee Wee Ellis, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick. Wilson is a multi-instrumentalist though is perhaps best known for piano and voice. An Adjunct-Professor of history at the University of Guelph, Dr. Wilson has six books to his name, including the Toronto Maple Leafs' official centenary book. – jasonwilsonmusic.com/

Jason Wilson is a two-time Juno-Awards nominee, Canadian Reggae Music Award winner, four-time Reggae Music Achievements Award nominee and Best-Selling Canadian historian from Downsview, Ontario. In 2007, Wilson became the first recipient of the Karl Mullings Memorial Award for commitment to reggae in Canada. The protégé of Studio One keyboardist Jackie Mittoo, Jason has performed and recorded with UB40, Alanis Morissette, Sly & Robbie, Ron Sexsmith, Ernest Ranglin, Brinsley Forde, Pee Wee Ellis, Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick. Wilson is a multi-instrumentalist though is perhaps best known for piano and voice. An Adjunct-Professor of history at the University of Guelph, Dr. Wilson has six books to his name, including the Toronto Maple Leafs' official centenary book. - https://jasonwilsonmusic.com/

Front Row joins Radio 4's celebration of Bob Dylan, who will be 80 on Monday. John Wilson joined by Bob Geldof, to consider the art and influence of Bob, on Bob. Ann Powers, music critic for National Public Radio joins from somewhere on the Nashville Skyline. On Bob Dylan's first trip to Britain, in the winter of 1962, he and the great English folk singer Martin Carthy, met, became friends and performed together in small clubs such as the Troubadour (still going!). Bob Dylan acknowledges the influence of Carthy, whose versions of Scarborough Fair and Lord Franklin, for instance, inform songs of his such as Bob Dylan's Dream and Girl From the North Country. It will be Martin's 80th birthday on Friday, he's three days older than Dylan. Front Row drags him away from his celebration (and a rehearsal - Carthy, like Dylan, is still a hardworking musician) to remember those early days, and a winter so cold he and Bob chopped up an old piano for firewood. Kerry Shale stars with Richard Curtis, Lucas Hare and Eileen Atkins in Dinner with Dylan, the afternoon drama on Radio 4 on Saturday. Shale,a famously versatile voice actor, is intrigued by Dylan's voice and how it has changed or, rather, he has changed it. Using songs recorded over decades Kerry analyses how folky young Bob becomes hip, sneery Bob, then mellow country Bob, dangerous angry Bob finally exhausted Ancient Mariner Bob. 'I Contain Multitudes', Dylan says, using the famous phrase of Walt Whitman as the title of one of his songs. Poet Caroline Bird does some close reading of 'Visions of Johanna' and the writer Fred D'Aguiar, esonance of Dylan's early work in the wake of the murder of George Floyd Presenter: John Wilson Producer: Julian May

                                  Copperplate Time 357                                Presented by Alan O'Leary                              www.copperplatemailorder.com                  1. Bothy Band:   Green Groves. After Hours 2. Paddy O’Brien/James Kelly/DaithiSproule:                 Monaghan Twig/Sean sa Cheo.   Shanachie 34014 3. De Danann:  Kitty’s Wedding/ The Rambler.             The Star Spangled Molly4. Jerry Lycch:    Hard Times.   The Dimming of the Day 5. Kevin Taylor: The Curtin Twins/Knights of St Patrick.             Kevin Taylor & Mary Conroy 6. John McEvoy & Gay McKeon:  Humours of Carrigaholt/Aconry Lasses/Hairy Chested Frog.              Traditional Irish Fiddle 7. John Wynne: The Orphan/The Cow That Ate the Blanket/              Winnie Hayes.  Like The Wind8. Ciara O’Sullivan:   I Live Not Where I Love.    Humours of Scariff 9. Cillian Vallely:  O’Reilly from Aithcarne/Willie Clancy’s/               Leitrim Thrush.     The Raven’s Rock 10. Johnny Og Connolly:    Ceiliur na Spideoige/Ben’s Arrival.               Fear Inis Bearachain11. Brian Conway:  Keys to the Convent/The Knockawinna/               Teviot Bridge.   Consider The Source 12. Pat Connolly: An Draighneán Donn.              Trad Songs in Irish                                                  13. Ciara McElholm:  Norwegian Breeze.  Amergin Fire 14. Dan Brouder & Angelina Carberry: Curlews in the Bog/Tommy Peoples/Monsignor’s Blessing. A Waltz for Joy 15. Aly Bain: Spey in Spate/Pottinger’s Reel/Dowd’s Reel.              Lonely Bird 16. Paddy ‘Brien & Seamus Connolly:               Rigney’s/Ambrose Moloney’s. The Banks of the Shannon 17. Martin Carthy:  Scarborough Fair.  Essential 18. Bob Dylan:  The Girl from the North Country.                   Freewheeling Bob Dylan Ground 19. Ralph McTell:  West 4th St & Jones.  Hill of Beans 20. Oonagh Derby:   Silver Shoes.   Harmony Street 21. Bothy Band:   Green Groves/Flowers of Red Hill.    After Hours

The song still stands up today as one of the great singles of the 60's See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The song still stands up today as one of the great singles of the 60's     See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

A celebration of the Bard of Avon (and Shakespeare, too) by such diverse artists as Laura Marling, Dave Alvin, Richard Thompson, The Arrogant Worms, Emerson Lake & Palmer , Jocelyn Pook, Enrico Caruso, John Cale, Martin Carthy, Peter Blegvad, The Vienna Art Orchestra, Cleo Laine and (quelle surprise) The RSC Orchestra. So pull up a posset, fill you goblet with doublet and hose yourself down whilst you enjoy music and lyrics which celebrate our national treasure (and Shakespeare).

                          Copperplate Time 347                                                        Presented by Alan O'Leary                    www.copperplatemailorder.com                                  1. Bothy Band:   Green Groves/Flowers of Red Hill. 1975 2. Hendry/Mullholland/McSherry:              Fox in the Town/in the Tap Room/The Belfast Traveller.                        Tuned Up 3. Christy Moore:     Home By Bearna The Early Years4. Johnny Leary:    The Brosna Slise/The Scartaglen Slide.                  Music For The Set 5. & Aoife O’Brien & Emer Mayock:             The Cup of Tea/The Kerry Lassie.                    More Tunes from the Goodman Manuscripts 6. Niamh Parsons: Sweet Daffodil Mulligan.   Kind Providence 7. John McEvoy & John Wynne:                 The Strayaway Child.   Pride of the West8. Paul Brock/Moving Cloud:               Cape Breton Dream/Champions Jig.       Foxglove9. Pat McMahon & Ned Coleman:                 Pat McMahon’s Jigs.      Trad Music From Galway10. Aggie Whyte & Paddy Fahy:   Sean Ryan’s HP.   Aggie Whyte 11. Eilis Kennedy:   Boots of Spanish Leather.  One Sweet Kiss 12. Kevin Burke: Humours of Castlefinn/The Ewe Reel/McFadden’s. Sligo Made 13. Frankie Gavin  .  Early Breakfast/Scotch Mary.  Compilation 14. Caoimhin O’Fearghaill: Mary McMahon/Reel of Mullianvat.                Uilleann Piping from Waterford 15. Martin Carthy:   Willie’s Lady.  DGreen Linnet Compilation 16. Karen Matheson:   Still Time.  Still Time 17. Davy Spillane:  Daire’s Dream.  Masters of Their Craft 18. Kate & Anna McGarrigle:           Talk to Me of Mendocino. Kate & Anna McGarrigle 19. John Keehan: Pearl Shaughnessy’s/Eddie uffy’s Barndances.                 The Humours of Scariff 20. Padraig Rynne:   Mulhaire’s/Pinch of Snuff/Molloy’s.                     Bye A While 21. Andy Irvine/Patrick St:   King of Ballyhooley.  GL Compilation 22. Bothy Band:   Green Groves/Flowers of Red Hill. 1975

We begin a twelve-part series tonight featuring the cities in which Dylan recorded his studio albums over the decades. Part one begins in London; Dylan only recorded two songs in London that made their way to one of his studio albums, but London has nevertheless exerted his influence on his songwriting and we take a look at that, as well as playing his London-recorded songs and the music of fellow travelers. In "20 Pounds of Headlines" we round up news from the world of Bob Dylan, which includes the publication of a new book about Bob Dylan in London...talk about serendipity. We also mourn the passing of Mary Wilson of the Supremes, who died on Monday, February 8th. In "Who Did It Better?" we ask you who did "A Couple More Years" better: Willie Nelson (with Waylon Jennings) or Bob Dylan.

PODCAST: 31 Jan 2021 01 Summer Is A-Comin’ – Merry Hell – The Ghost In Our House And Other Stories 02 Cricklewood – Christy Moore – (BBC Live Session From ‘As I Roved Out’ / 1979) – The Early Years: 1969-81 03 Pound A Week Rise – Monkey See Monkey Do – The Night Out 04 Farewell Shanty – Ninebarrow – A Pocket Full Of Acorns 05 Carbolic Rag – Scottdale String Band – Rags, Breakdowns, Stomps & Blues 06 The Diggers Song – Chumbawamba – English Rebel Songs 1381-1914 07 Lowlands Of Holland – Trad Arr – Further Tales Of Love Death And Treachery! 08 McGoldrick’s / The Gallowglass / Whelan’s / O’Brien From Newtown – Trouble In The Kitchen – When The World Was Wide 09 Pay Day – The Unwanted – Pay Day 10 A Million Miles Away – Steve Tilston – Such Times  11 Nothing To See Here – Steve Tilston – Such Times 12 My Mystery Train – Steve Tilston – Such Times 13 The Steam-Boat / The Winter’s Night Schottische – The Twagger Band – Sound The Bugle Blow The Horn 14 Mole In A Hole – No One Stands Alone – Blue Murder 15 Who By Fire – Bob Jensen – For The Sake Of The Song  16 Wildflowers – We Banjo 3 – Single 17 Lad O’Beirne’s Hornpipe/The New Century – Randal Beys & Joel Bernstein – The Pigtown Fling 18 The King & Queen Of England – Sandy Denny – Circle Dance 19 Coal Not Dole – Swan Arcade – Circle Dance 20 Eanach Mhic Coilin / The Music Room – Pat Walsh – Simply Whistle 21 The Lowlands Of Holland – Martin Carthy – Second Album 22 Man Of The Earth – The Teacups – In Which…  23 A Proper Sort Of Gardner – June Tabor – Aleyn 24 The Slip Jigs And Reels – North Crag – Mi Daza 25 Half Wild – Kitty McFarlane – Single 26 Girls Are Crazy About Me – Boo Hanks With Dom Flemons – Buffalo Junction

Steve's brand new album is available here from AmazonUncovered by Steve HarleySTEVE HARLEY was born in Deptford, south London, on February 27th 1951, the second of five children.Due to a childhood illness, Steve spent almost four years in hospital between three and sixteen years, undergoing major surgery in 1963 and 1966. Aged 12, while in hospital recovering from surgery, Steve was first introduced to the poetry of Eliot and Lawrence, the prose of Steinbeck, Woolf and Hemingway, and the music of BOB DYLAN and realised that his life was likely to be preoccupied with words and music.Close to Christmas 1964, during that same nine months' hospitalisation at Queen Mary's Hospital for Children, Carshalton Beeches, Surrey, the ward welcomed the young ROLLING STONES who were on a goodwill PR visit.Charlie Watts spent quite a time chatting with us kids, but the others seemed more interested in joking about the huge poster of THE BEATLES pinned to a wall.Steve was a pupil of EDMUND WALLER PRIMARY SCHOOL, in Waller Road, New Cross, London, a short walk from his parents' home at FAIRLAWN MANSIONS, New Cross Gate, between the ages of five and eleven.He attended HABERDASHERS' ASKE'S HATCHAM GRAMMAR SCHOOL, Telegraph Hill, New Cross until seventeen. He left school without completing his Advanced Level exams. Steve later took an A-Level in English in his mid-30s.Steve's first guitar was a Christmas gift from his parents when he was ten-years-old. It was a Spanish, nylon-strung instrument.He took classical violin lessons from the age of nine to fifteen and played in his Grammar school orchestra.But he has always admitted he was a hopeless reader of music, so “must have been bluffing a lot of the time”.In the spring of 1968, Steve got his first full-time job, as a trainee accountant, at the DAILY EXPRESS newspaper in Fleet Street, London, in spite of gaining a mere 24% in his mock O-Level maths exam. But his heart was set on a career in Journalism, so being at the industry's heart was a useful stepping-stone for the nascent reporter. Interviewed by several newspaper editors, Steve finally signed indentures to train with ESSEX COUNTY NEWSPAPERS in Colchester, Essex. After three years working within the group, including stints at the Essex County Standard, the Braintree and Witham Times, the Maldon and Burnham Standard and the Colchester Evening Gazette, Steve moved back to London to work for the EAST LONDON ADVERTISER, then based in Mile End Road, in the heart of London's East End.Among many of Steve's contemporaries who have gone on to successful careers in national Journalism are JOHN BLAKE (now Managing Director of BLAKE PUBLISHING) and RICHARD MADELEY, of daytime TV fame. It was Madeley who actually took over the desk relinquished by Steve at the ELA in 1972."So, if you hadn't given it up to become a rock star," Madeley has told Steve, "I may never have got my chance to become a reporter."Steve began his singing career "floor-spotting" (singing for free as a member of the audience) in London folk clubs in 1971/72. He sang at LES COUSINS, BUNJIE'S and THE TROUBADOUR on nights featuring JOHN MARTIN, RALPH McTELL, MARTIN CARTHY and JULIE FELIX, all leading lights of the London folk movement at the time.He later joined folk band ODIN as rhythm guitarist and co-singer, which was where he met the first COCKNEY REBEL violinist, JOHN CROCKER. However, the folk scene proved a little tame for Mr Harley and, as he was constantly writing songs, formed COCKNEY REBEL as a vehicle for his own work. It was here that Steve and STUART ELLIOTT first met and worked together. Stuart drums with Steve's band on record and on tour from time to time to this day.The band signed to EMI for a guaranteed three album deal in 1972 and released THE HUMAN MENAGERIE early in '73. From this collection, a single, SEBASTIAN, became a huge European hit, staying at NUMBER ONE in HOLLAND and BELGIUM for many weeks. Other COCKNEY REBEL and/or STEVE HARLEY albums are: THE PSYCHOMODO, THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, TIMELESS FLIGHT, LOVE'S A PRIMA DONNA, FACE TO FACE (LIVE), HOBO WITH A GRIN, THE CANDIDATE (all EMI), YES YOU CAN (1992), POETIC JUSTICE (1996) and THE QUALITY OF MERCY released in late 2005, plus 2 other Live acoustic CDs, STRIPPED TO THE BARE BONES TO THE and ANYTIME!One Steve Harley and Cockney Rebel single, MAKE ME SMILE (COME UP AND SEE ME), reached NUMBER ONE in 1975 in the UK and many European countries and is regularly voted among the top singles in the history of the charts, which covers six decades of releases. The Performing Rights Society has confirmed MAKE ME SMILE one of the most played records in British broadcasting.The song has been covered MORE THAN 100 TIMES in seven languages and has been featured in several movies including THE FULL MONTY (whose soundtrack album went TRIPLE PLATINUM in the UK, and PLATINUM in the USA and Australia), VELVET GOLDMINE, BEST and SAVING GRACE. The song has also been used on more than twenty TV and radio advertising campaigns around the world.Steve's other chart singles include, JUDY TEEN, MR SOFT, MR RAFFLES (MAN, IT WAS MEAN), HERE COMES THE SUN, LOVE'S A PRIMA DONNA, IRRESISTIBLE, PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (with SARAH BRIGHTMAN) and A FRIEND FOR LIFE.During the eighties, Steve took time out from the rock world as his two children were going through their formative years but did perform on stage, albeit the legitimate stage. He starred as the C16th playwright Christopher Marlowe, in the musical-drama MARLOWE, which ran off-Broadway and in London. Steve's performance was described by one leading critic as "a major and moving performance."This has been taken from https://www.steveharley.com/biography.htmlSupport this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/that-millwall-podcast/donationsAdvertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brandsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

En Islas de Robinson nos echamos a caminar el nuevo año con folk británico, ideal para templar el ánimo y la cocotera sin prisas. Suenan: ANNE BRIGGS - "FIRE AND WINE" ("THE TIME HAS COME", 1971) / BERT JANSCH - "SYLVIE" ("ROSEMARY LANE", 1971) / BARRY DRANSFIELD - "LILY'S BALLADE" ("BARRY DRANSFIELD", 1972) / MARTIN CARTHY - "HIS NAME IS ANDREW" ("LANDFALL", 1971) / LAL AND MIKE WATERSON - "NEVER THE SAME" ("BRIGHT PHOEBUS", 1972) / C.O.B. - "MUSIC OF THE AGES" ("SPIRIT OF LOVE", 1971) / SHIRLEY & DOLLY COLLINS - "ARE YOU GOING TO LEAVE ME" "("LOVE, DEATH AND THE LADY", 1970) / STEELEYE SPAN - "THE BLACKSMITH" ("PLEASE TO SEE THE KING", 1971) / TREES - "EPITAPH" ("THE GARDEN OF JANE DELAWNEY", 1970) / EXTRADITION - "A WOMAN SONG" ("HUSH", 1971) / MAGIC CARPET - "FATHER TIME" ("MAGIC CARPET", 1972) / DERROLL ADAMS - "LOVE SONG" ("FEELIN' FINE", 1972) / Escuchar audio

Following the casting of Tilda Swinton as a character originally identified as Tibetan in the recent film Dr Strange, and the furore surrounding the casting of a new production of Howard Barker's play, In The Depths of Dead Love - Kumiko Mendl, Artistic Director of Yellow Earth Theatre, and Deborah Williams, Executive Director of Creative Diversity Network join Samira to discuss the issue of 'Yellowface' - the practice of non-Asian actors playing Asian roles. Sarah Crompton reviews the film Jackie, directed by Pablo Lorrain and starring Natalie Portman as Jackie Kennedy, which focuses on the immediate aftermath of JFK's assassination in 1963. The Transports is a ballad opera telling the true story of two convicts who fell in love in prison as they were waiting to be sent on the First Fleet to Australia. They had a child, were cruelly separated, but thanks to a kind gaoler, were eventually united. It was recorded in 1977 by giants of the folk world - June Tabor, Nic Jones, Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson. 40 years on a new generation of folk stars - Nancy Kerr, Faustus, the Young'Uns - are touring their new production. Samira meets them as they rehearse and finds The Transports has plenty to say about exile and migration today.Britain's most prestigious award for poetry, the TS Eliot Award, is announced this evening. The prize is for the best collection of poems published in 2016, and Front Row will have the first interview with the winner. Presenter: Samira Ahmed Producer: Rebecca Armstrong.

Kirsty Young's castaway this week is Martin Carthy.A highly influential figure in the world of traditional music, about fifty years ago he was at the forefront of the English folk revival - inspiring not just his fellow countrymen, but Bob Dylan and Paul Simon too.Now he's part of a folk dynasty. His wife is the celebrated singer Norma Waterson and their daughter Eliza is as renowned for her fiddle playing, as she is her voice.Martin, on the other hand, was brought up in an atmosphere that encouraged him to rise above his station - there was music in his Anglo-Irish background, but it wasn't encouraged and rarely if ever talked about.He says, "In my opinion there is no such thing as bad music. There may be bad players or bad singers but I don't like the idea of inferior music".The producer was Isabel Sargent.