I’m just about old enough to remember a time when The Beatles were still together and making records but while they might have been bigger than Jesus back then they weren’t a major presence in our house when I was growing up. The only record of theirs my Mum had was a 45 of “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” which I don’t remember her ever playing (though years later I would discover the lovely “This Boy” on the b-side and play it to death) and to be honest I preferred it that way, I’m glad I grew up thinking Sinatra was God and not John Lennon.

The only other Fab Four-related record in the house was this Wings single my sister bought in 1977 and I would like to congratulate her on her good taste, if she had to buy only one I’m glad it was this. When the day comes that Sir Paul is up in heaven with Lennon and the two of them are sitting on a cloud arguing about who wrote the best post-Beatles song this one should be top of Paul’s list, especially this live version. One listen to this and John would concede defeat.

Download: Maybe I’m Amazed – Wings (mp3)
Buy: “Wings Over America” (album)

How many folk singers does it take to change a light bulb?
Two. One to change the bulb and the other to write a song about how good the old one was.

As you might have gathered from reading this blog, being an ageing expat living on the other side of the Atlantic from home makes one rather sentimental and wistful about olde Blighty and it’s culture, even for things I once found faintly ridiculous. As an urban London sophisticate I used to think quaint rural traditions like Morris Dancing and Folk music were a bit of a joke (see above), the domain of men with beards wearing chunky Fair Isle jumpers who smoked pipes and drank Real Ale, or hippy Renaissance Faire types who’d read “Lord of The Rings” too many times — it was all a bit too Hey Nonny Nonny for me.

But last summer I saw some Morris Dancers on Boston Common (no idea what they were doing there) and I found myself coming over all pastoral, getting warm and fuzzy thinking about village greens, maypoles, willow trees and dandelions. Seeing them prancing around among the grass and flowers with their bells and sticks, lit by a golden halo of bright afternoon sun, it was like a vision of a vanishing England had appeared before me and I was quite touched by it. It was the England of eccentric, ancient customs which by rights have no real place in the modern world but suddenly seem worth cherishing as we’re losing all the other peculiar, dusty old things that made us English.

Folk music drinks from the same old, rusty well of England and when I hear the exquisite voice of Sandy Denny singing with Fairport Convention it’s like a sound from another country and era, clear and pure as a church bell ringing out over a country fair with the scent of lavender, foamy beer and mint sauce.

Download: Who Knows Where The Time Goes – Fairport Convention (mp3)
Download: She Moves Through The Fair – Fairport Convention (mp3)

Denny is generally considered to be the greatest English female folk singer (sadly she died in 1978) but I’ve always had a fondness for the voice of Steeleye Span‘s Maddy Prior, even when I thought Folk was beyond the pale. Their big 1975 hit “All Around My Hat” isn’t exactly trad Folk with it’s big pop production but it is very Hey Nonny Nonny with its merry, skipping around the maypole vibe that makes you want to sink a pint of cider, grab the nearest rosy-cheeked wench, dance a jig with her and have a roll in the hay afterwards.

Download: All Around My Hat – Steeleye Span (mp3)

I may not have cared much about the English countryside and it’s way of life before, but at least I knew it was always there, but sadly I’m not so sure anymore and now I’m the one writing about how good the old one was. Not that I’m about to grow a beard and take up pipe smoking or anything.

Having already confessed to loving ELO, Queen, Chris Rainbow and Dollar you’d think that I wouldn’t be able to drain any more water out of the street credibility pool. But no, in 1977 at the white-hot height of punk rock I bought a 45 of the hippy dippy song “Wondrous Stories” by those wizards of Prog Rock, Yes. Not only that, but unlike with ELO I didn’t turn off it once I got hip to punk, the awful truth is I never stopped liking it and would merrily play it alongside The Clash and Joy Division records. I know it’s wrong but the damn thing sure is pretty.

Glad I got that off my chest.

Download: Wondrous Stories – Yes (mp3)

Download: Auntie Aviator – John & Beverley Martyn (mp3)
Buy: “The Road To Ruin” (album)

It’s probably just me but I think there’s something about the name “Gaye” that is very 1970s. Like “Jackie” or “Tracy” it reminds me of girls with long, centre-parted Susan Dey hair, wearing pop socks, a stripy tank top (note to American readers: in the UK a tank top is a sweater vest) and high-waisted Crimplene flares who listened to Radio Luxembourg in their bedrooms at night and dreamt about David Essex.

“Gaye” was also the only hit for Clifford T. Ward who is the epitome of the sensitive and mopey 70s singer-songwriter. It’s a very pretty record but the lyrics are really soppy (“You’re the tray of nice things I upset yesterday”) and Ward sounds so wet it’s almost twee – Gilbert O’Sullivan could probably beat him up.

These days, girls in England are given old-fashioned names with Victorian snob appeal like Olivia and Emily which lack the council estate glamour of a Gaye or Tracy. You wouldn’t catch an “Olivia” having a snog in a bus shelter.

Download: Gaye – Clifford T. Ward (mp3)
Buy: “Home Thoughts From Abroad” (album)
Photo from the Paynes Cafe Royal Reunion website.

The 1972 hit “Lady Eleanor” by Geordie folk-rockers Lindisfarne used to give me the willies when I was a kid. It wasn’t the sinister mandolin (yes, a mandolin can sound sinister) or menacing atmosphere that did it, but the lyrics that spooked me because I hadn’t a clue what it was all about and the imagery put all sorts of funny ideas into my innocent, 10-year-old head. Even reading the lyrics in a copy of Disco 45 was no help, what was I supposed make of this at that age?

Bashee playing magician sitting lotus on the floor
Belly dancing beauty with a power driven saw
Had my share of nightmares, didn’t think there could be much more
Then in walked Roderick Usher with the Lady Eleanor

She tied my eyes with ribbon of a silken ghostly thread
I gazed with trouble vision on an old four poster bed
Where Eleanor had risen to kiss the neck below my head
And bid me come along with her to the land of the dancing dead

I knew that it was probably a bit naughty, but that was one the many unexplained and murky things about the adult world beyond my experience, something to do with what was on BBC2 late at night when my sister and I were in bed. Kids these days are so terribly worldly and sophisticated, what with their wireless computers and stereophonic telephones. They spend their evenings ripping out other people’s spinal cords in video games and have a whole world of sexual perversion at their fingertips on the internet, so they’d find it highly amusing that my generation was so innocent something as cheesy as The Daleks could make us leap behind the couch in terror or that I’d be perturbed by the imagery in a pop song.

Over 30 years later I know that Roderick Usher is a character in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of The House of Usher.” There are several, real life Lady Eleanor’s, the best known being the 12th century Eleanor of Aquitaine, wife of both King Louis VII of France and Henry II of England, and quite an interesting woman who went on Crusades and was a believer in Courtly Love. Then there’s the half-gypsy aristocrat Lady Eleanor Smith, one of the so-called Bright Young Things who inspired Evelyn Waugh’s 1930 novel “Vile Bodies” and led an eventful, bohemian life which involved running off to the circus and writing supernatural novels about gypsies and flamenco dancers. None of these people are connected in any way and the “secret” of the song I was looking for doesn’t really exist. It’s just surreal, all-a-dream nonsense, a Gothic-novel sex and horror fantasy. Basically, this is what you get when folk singers take drugs — it’s all Bob Dylan’s fault.

Download: Lady Eleanor – Lindisfarne (mp3)
Buy: “Nicely Out of Tune” (album)
Photo: “Mrs. Edward Mayer as Medusa” by Madame Yevonde

Between 1975 and 1977 my sister went from worshipping the Bay City Rollers and the ground they walked on to thinking The Clash were the greatest thing since sliced bread. That’s quite a big leap from “Shang-a-Lang” (or “Shag-a-Slag” as we called it – what wits we were!) to “White Riot” but she didn’t make it in one bound. In between the two she had a fling with The Steve Miller Band and their “Fly Like An Eagle” album which she bought because she liked the “Take The Money and Run” single from it. There’s no logical connection between Scottish teenyboppers, American soft rockers, and guttersnipe London punks but we probably all have these “stepping stone” records as we mature and go looking in all directions for new experiences as restless teenagers are wont to do. My sister’s fellow Rollermaniac friend Sue had a dalliance with Nils Lofgren before diving headlong into punk, orange hair and bondage trousers, and I got from ELO to The Jam via Bruce Springsteen.

“Fly Like An Eagle” is actually a pretty good album, a mix of catchy, Fleetwood Mac-esque soft rock and trippy electronics – what Miller called “space blues” – held together by a lazy, hazy vibe which suggests everyone got very high making the record. My favourite track “Wild Mountain Honey” is a very pretty ballad that floats along sprinkling fairy dust as it goes. Listening to it is like sinking into a warm bubble bath. The title track is fairly well known but this is the longer album version with the dreamy “Space Intro” beginning which is all electronic bleeps and wooshes that wouldn’t sound too out of place on a Tangerine Dream album. Its spacey groove makes it sound very modern today, though back then they probably used steam-powered synthesizers.

Download: Wild Mountain Honey – Steve Miller Band (mp3)
Download: Space Intro/Fly Like An Eagle – Steve Miller Band (mp3)
Buy: “Fly Like An Eagle” (album)

Even though I’ve been a graphic designer for nearly 20 years now I’ve never done a record sleeve (magazines are my business) but, as they say, I know what I like. The older I get the less impressed I am with over-cooked typography and trendy effects so I love the clean simplicity and understated beauty of covers like Peter Gabriel’s first solo album from 1977. It might just be my favourite sleeve ever.

This is the work of Storm Thorgerson and his studio Hipgnosis who are best known for their high-concept and elaborate sleeves for megabands like Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin. With their extravagantly-produced photography, shrink wraps, die-cuts, and fancy gatefolds I used to think those were the epitome of everything that was wrong with music pre-punk: bloated and not a little full of themselves. Now I’d kill for the kind of budgets and creative freedom they must have had back then. You won’t be able to see it at this small size (nor on the CD probably) but most of those water droplets are fakes, painted in by hand with the highlights created by scraping off the paint with a scalpel blade. One thing some of you kids might not realize is that there was no such thing as Photoshop back in 1977 – in fact, there were no computers in design at all! Imagine that – and designers had to actually create things by hand using paintbrushes, pens, paper and glue. Shockingly primitive I know, but somehow we managed. I can’t tell you how many manual skills I’ve lost in the digital age.

Gabriel had just left his high-profile gig as frontman of Genesis and was clearly desiring a modicum of low-key anonymity, hence the decision to name all his first four solo efforts simply “Peter Gabriel” (very confusing that) and not to have a conventional portrait of himself on a cover until the fifth one. On Solsbury Hill he sang about leaving Genesis – “I was feeling part of the scenery/I walked right out of the machinery” – but the ghost of the band seems to be hanging around the Proggy opening track “Moribund The Burgermeister” which is a rather bizarre song about a medieval plague driving a town to hysteria. It’s the sort of eccentric, character-driven thing he used to do a lot and if he had done this with Genesis no doubt there would have been a silly costume to go with it.

Download: Moribund The Burgermeister – Peter Gabriel (mp3)

I’m throwing Gabriel’s second album in here just because I wanted an excuse to post the track “White Shadow” which I absolutely adore. Not that the sleeve isn’t very good too, it’s another powerfully simple idea executed with no fuss (Hipgnosis again.) The ripped paper could be a little reference to punk as the first single from the album “DIY” was seen as a salute to the indie sprit of the times – “When things get so big, I don’t trust them at all/You want some control, you’ve got to keep it small.” Unlike some of his Prog Rock peers Gabriel had open ears to what was going on in the late 70s and even got Paul Weller to play guitar on his new wavey third album.

“White Shadow” is a dreamy, floating mini-epic with some particularly obscure lyrics. God knows what it’s about but it sounds wonderful. The high point of the track is a fiery guitar solo by the album’s producer Robert Fripp who lets loose with the sort of Fripptronics he contributed to Bowie’s “Heroes”. Great stuff from an underrated album.

Download: White Shadow – Peter Gabriel (mp3)