The Revolt of the Pendulum (42 page)

‘Yer load sixteen
tons
. . .’ Australia still had tons in those days. Now it has tonnes. This in itself would be sufficient reason for my living here instead of there. Lyric
writers cherish their rhyme-words.

If Tennessee Ernie and ‘Sixteen Tons’ hadn’t done it for me, the Four Lads would have. In their hit song ‘Moments to Remember’ there was a soaring line that went
‘The night we tore the goal-posts down’, and the way an almost impossibly agglutinated set of consonants like ‘goal-posts’ could sit so comfortably on the musical notes
fascinated me. How could they sing so easily what I could barely say? Imitating a whole barbershop quartet, I sang the line repeatedly, arousing an intense public reaction in the area of Kogarah,
my home suburb. Property prices plunged after I made up a few extra lines to fit the same melody. ‘The night we kicked the dunny down’, I sang, in a mournful serenade to the moon.

More than half a century later, writing song lyrics is my favourite form of writing anything. I’ve never managed to become famous for it. In fact I’m almost entirely obscure for it,
and I fear that being attached to me has done a lot to prevent my musical partner, Pete Atkin, from reaching the degree of celebrity that he deserves. But for me, writing lyrics is up there with
writing poetry, the chief difference being that while writing poetry has always paid me little compared with writing prose, writing lyrics has paid me hardly anything at all. There are lyricists
who become millionaires. I’m not one of them, but lately I’ve found myself writing lyrics again, after a long lay-off that was really due to lack of attention rather than lack of
income. You can do without armies of raving fans, but not without a certain level of interest. I’m glad to say that the certain level of interest is not only back, but has gone up a
notch.

My colleague Pete Atkin, who composes the music for our songs and does the singing, has just brought out a new album called
Midnight Voices,
which Amazon is currently re-ordering hundreds
of copies at a time to meet the demand. They can re-order it from him. They don’t have to re-order it from a record company, and that’s the big difference between now and when we
started. Nowadays you can be in business for yourself. Hundreds of copies aren’t thousands, nor are thousands millions, but to reach only a minority market is no longer the killer that it
used to be, when only the majority market mattered, and if the record company wasn’t behind you, there was nothing in front of you except the void.

Today there’s a better chance of not being sunk by your own lack of immediate universal appeal. The old mass markets have been replaced by an infinity of niche markets, all reachable
through the Net, which also happens to be - by a mechanism nobody can explain - a surprisingly effective method of spreading news byword of mouth. Today you can reach the few thousand purchasers
that you need to keep your little fine-arts factory in business. You can always hope for more, but those happy few should be enough to keep a song-writer going if the song, and not the celebrity
status, is what he really cares about. This is probably true for all genuine song-writers, and especially for lyricists, who wouldn’t be trying such a second-fiddle thing unless they found it
so satisfactory to get right. You can hear the click when the words fit. If you find it hard to like Carla Bruni, listen to her first album, the one where she sings her own songs in French: the
neatness of the carpentry will impress you even if you’re famous in your family for having ordered the
pampelmousse
under the impression that it was a pudding. Maybe the President of
France married the right woman after all. You can imagine her singing him a little song.
Vous etes le President / Et moi, je suis une enfant . . .

There was a twenty-five-year stretch back there when Atkin and I didn’t write anything together because we thought there was no way of getting through to a public, no matter how small.
Pete still did gigs in the clubs, but ‘club’ can be a big name for the back room of a pub equipped with a sound-system from the Jurassic period. Now the public comes to us. Not a huge
public, but they seem to appreciate what we do, even if it has no classification. Back at the start, when we told the record-company executives that what we did was a blend of jazz, rock, pop, Tin
Pan Alley, Broadway and anything else except folk, they would purse their lips and suggest that we call it ‘Different’. The executive who called it ‘Folk’ we preferred to
ignore, which turned out to be exactly the way he felt about us. A pity: though he had a small brain, he had a large car, in the back of which we would sit with him while he told us that we would
get nowhere unless we wrote a hit. He was quite right, but times change.

For me, there was never any doubt that what we were doing was in a tradition going back to the troubadours, who were never in the hit parade either. The words mattered, but the music came first.
Long before I had met Pete in the Cambridge Footlights clubroom in the mid-1960s, I was already continuing my childhood researches into the way music gave an extra dimension to the simplest words.
There were countless examples of ordinary spoken phrases being made extraordinary when set to music. In his song ‘I’ll See You Again’, Noel Coward transformed the title line by
putting the musical emphasis unexpectedly on the word ‘you’. Nothing when read, but everything when heard.

When I finally found my own musician, I took delight in leaving him room, by the way I put the stanza together, to try the same thing with a lot of other simple phrases. I might have overdone
the supply of phrases that weren’t simple at all, but we probably would have been in trouble anyway, because even the most enthusiastic critics didn’t know what to call the results. The
word
chanson
rang no bells in the English-speaking countries. In France we might have done better. In France, the poets have always written lyrics, and at least one serious song-writer has
married the President, as I might have mentioned. We had to settle for less spectacular rewards, but some of them were gratifying. I remember one evening when Stephen Fry quoted one of my own
lyrics at me, and I was so pleased I couldn’t speak: for me, a rare condition.

Moments like that did something to offset the frustration. The only real cure for frustration, however, is work, and for the quarter of a century we were behind the moon I kept in shape by
writing poems, which have their own music, or should have. But I always missed the thrill of hearing a set of syllables being absorbed by a row of notes, in a kind of mid-air mating dance that
transmits a new emotion. Then, in the late 1990s, our music came back from limbo. The first generation of fans had found each other through the Net, and it turned out that there was a second
generation who had grown up with our songs echoing in the house. We went on tour in both Britain and Australia, and found that the audiences we played to didn’t just want to hear the old
stuff, they wanted to hear that we were still writing.

No problem there. We couldn’t stop, and gradually we realised that we had never stopped. The long hiatus had been part of the process. We had just been gathering our strength in the
interim, as a coalminer must sometimes pause and mop his brow. ‘If you see me comin’, better step aside/A lotta men didn’t and a lotta men died . . .’ What a lyric! There is
still a controversy as to whether Merle Travis wrote it or ripped it off. Either way, it made him a lot of money. Sigh.

Guardian
, April 1, 2008

Postscript

When
Midnight Voices
, the first album of the Pete Atkin/Clive James songbook, went on general release in early 2008, the
Guardian
kindly gave me the
opportunity to plug its advent by asking for an article about lyrics. Since the disc had no advertising budget whatsoever, the opportunity demanded to be taken, and I would have enjoyed writing
such an article anyway. In previous years, when we went on tour in Britain or Australia, I always answered any request for an article from the print media on route. Writing articles was harder than
doing interviews but there was a better chance of sticking to the point, which for me was always how the lyrics and the music blended so that you couldn’t get them apart. Songwriters can
avoid the press if they like, but unless they are massive, stadium-filling stars their fastidiousness will cost them. Jake Thackray, a learned and inventive troubadour in the
chanson
tradition which has so few English contributors, fatally restricted his career by feeling coy about pleasing the crowd, and today he is remembered mainly for his topical songs on the
Bernard
Braden
show, which were nothing like his best things. (His ‘Remembrance’ is an anti-war song that leaves all other anti-war songs in the dust.) Shyness and show business rarely mix.
Anyway, the media coverage that we secured for the
Midnight Voices
album couldn’t have hurt. At the time of this book’s going to press, all six of the early Pete Atkin albums are
due for re-release on Demon, Britain’s biggest independent label. Once again, sales will probably be small by rock-star standards, but after all this time it’s nice to be still in the
game.

FIVE FAVOURITES

‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’

A cocktail piano song of rare power, ‘You Don’t Know What Love Is’ combines a sweet melody by Gene de Paul with a bitter lyric by Don Raye, who started
out as a vaudeville hoofer, a suitable background for the man who wrote the peltingly rhythmic words for the Andrews Sisters’ swing hit ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’. In this more
plaintive number, however, he was out to affect the tear-ducts, not the feet. Billie Holiday was one of the many singers who knew they were on to something great when they sang the penultimate line
‘Until you’ve faced each dawn with sleepless eyes’. The trick is for the singer not to overdo it: the emotion is already in the words.

‘I Wonder What Became of Me’

The quiet titan of the American music business, Johnny Mercer sang with big bands from Paul Whiteman through to Benny Goodman before, as the founder of Capitol Records, he
became one of the formative talent scouts, a task in which it must have helped to have so much talent himself. His singing abilities probably lay at the heart of his gift for writing lyrics that
sound inevitable from line to line. Of the countless songs he wrote with Harold Arlen, none beats ‘I Wonder What Became of Me’. A couplet like ‘And they pour champagne / Just like
it was rain’ sounds so simple, but nobody ever wrote like that by accident.

‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’

Cole Porter was the man in the velvet mask. As a gay patrician who had to disguise the gender of his feelings, he often wrote regretful lyrics even to his most exultant
melodies, and when the melody was regretful the lyrics could be desperate. ‘Every Time We Say Goodbye’ is the complaint of someone whose heart is being broken not just once, but over
and over, so the little flashes of wordplay sound like tears being fought back. ‘When you’re near there’s such an air of spring about it / I can hear a lark somewhere begin to
sing about it.’ When Ella Fitzgerald sang this song the way it should be sung, plainly and without emphasis, she was up there with Edith Piaf singing ‘
Et moi
’, and Marlene
Dietrich singing ‘
In den Ruinen von Berlin
’. A song can be monumental.

‘Folsom Prison Blues’

When the vaunted personal expression of the singer/songwriter movement took over from the old-style songwriters who wrote for anybody, the distance between the best lyrics
and the average opened to the width and depth of the Grand Canyon. The time-honoured neatness of the well-crafted professional lyric, however, continued to flourish in an unexpected area: country
music. ‘Folsom Prison Blues’, written as well as sung by Johnny Cash, is only one of hundreds of country songs that become even more enjoyable when you look closely at how they are put
together. Cash was especially good at approximate rhymes, which are very tricky to do. ‘I hear that train a-comin’ / It’s rollin’ round the bend / And I ain’t seen the
sunshine / Since I dunno when’. ‘Bend’ and ‘when’ didn’t really rhyme, but they did when he sang them, because that’s the way he spoke.

‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’

A victim of palsy, Ian Dury had a lot more to offer on stage than his exemplary bravery. That twisted body of his was the incarnation of rhythm. One of his most vivid
flights of fancy, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’ hasn’t really got a melody, just a relentless forward drive, over which he speaks the lyric rather than sings it. Yet the lyric
is perfect in every respect. In a catalogue song that does nothing much except name the names of exotic places, he gets a wonderful air of adventure just out of the precision of his rhymes.
‘In the deserts of Sudan / And the gardens of Japan / From Milan to Yucatan / Every woman, every man . . .’ The effortless way the fragments of French and German are pieced into the
lyric is diabolically clever. If only the rap lyricists could write like that. There’s no way of telling, but among all the million musical moments on YouTube at the moment, Dury singing this
amazing song is probably the single most exciting thing. I tune in half a dozen times a day, wondering what I have to do to make my words even half that good.

Guardian
, April 1, 2008

Postscript

Requests from newspapers and magazines to supply lists of favourite things are generally to be avoided. It makes you look as if you think in crumbs. But when a plug is
part of the fee, suddenly the prospect looks more attractive. I contributed this list to the
Guardian
as an addendum to the preceding article, just because the editor wanted an eye-catching
featurette to offset the comparatively weighty-looking chunk of prose. Back in the 1970s, when I first had off-trail merchandise to publicize, it was made clear to me that editors would like
paragraphs as well as pieces. I tried to make a virtue out of necessity and pack the paragraph with as much action as I could. My aim was to write what my young Web colleague Nichola Deane calls
the bonsai essay. There was a hidden reward attached to getting better at it. When I finally realized that my website www.clivejames.com could expand infinitely sideways if I wrote enough short
introductions to jewels lifted from YouTube and similar sources, the techniques for saying a lot in a short space came in handy. Nowadays, short of time all round, I am usually turning out a few
bonsai numbers when not slogging away at something larger, and there is already a strange and previously unheard-of system of echoes building up between what I write for the page and what I write
for the Web. The above brief remarks on Ian Dury, for example, were the rehearsal for what I finally set down as his introductory paragraph in the Video Finds section of my website. It will be
interesting to see, in the future, how the two kinds of writing converge. Have they a different tempo? I hope they don’t have different standards. I won’t be here to do the seeing,
alas, so it’s all in the hands of a new generation of wandering scholars. Starting out from an academic fortress, they have chosen