WOEBOT

I've had a burgeoning fascination with a certain nook of British music at the very tail-end of the 1960s. This must have something to do with having recently read four books which leave perpendicular tracks across the territory. Joe Boyd's recently published "White Bicycles", Ian Macdonald's "Revolution in the head", George Melly's under-rated "Revolt into Style: The Pop Arts in Britain" and Nik Cohn's unimpeachable "AwopBopaLooBopALopBamBoom".

Julie Driscoll, Brian Augur and The Trinity: Streetnoise (1969)

Cohn remarks right at the tail-end of his classic book (tellingly on page 228 of 229):

"During the same period there also emerged Julie Driscoll and Joe Cocker and The Incredible String Band. Julie Driscoll is a skinny girl from east London and she toured the circuits for years without getting anywhere in particular, until autumn 1967, she suddenly got herself a Jimi Hendrix hairstyle and called herself Jools and was launched as a new ultimate in London dollydoom, deadpan and strange and very freaked.....Joe Cocker was a fat ex-plumber from Sheffield and I liked him very much......Finally purely in my role as a chronicler, I should note the existence of the Incredible String Band, a folk duo whom several English critics described as the best songwriters since The Beatles. This mention made I will make no further comment."

There's a great sense with these paragraphs of the book's author standing at the very precipice of the 1960s, and without the benefit of hindsight, trying to offer up a definitive view of the decade. These acts merit inclusion on the same criteria that much of the rest of its contents do, that they were the manifestation of the buzz on the ground, but Cohn hasn't had a chance to digest them.

Melly's take on precisely this same era is also caught up in rabidly trying to codify an era which has yet to be inscribed in history. He surveys a broader view of the scene from the "extreme avant-garde fringe" (The* Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine) to the "Rabble Rousers of Quality" (The Cream and Jimi Hendrix). Melly also includes Driscoll and The Incredible String Band:

"But I could never see the point of the other great Underground rave of the period - Brian Augur and the Trinity with Julie Driscoll ('Jools' to the vast army of the uninitiated). She looked fey and sexy in the proscribed outer-space manner and swore a great deal if the dots in the interviews she gave were anything to go by, but she sang in such a cool little voice that I suspected it was to hide a total lack of any feeling at all.....There were other tendencies sheltering under the Underground's umbrella. The folk-poetic strain held its own headed by the Incredible String Band."

The Incredible String Band: The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter (1968)

I think Melly too, good critic that he is, is reacting to the groundswell of hype pumping these artists. There is a sense of a vacuum opening up in the music scene, one being created at once by the death of the counter-culture and the inexorable demise of The Beatles. Paul McCartney made "The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" his favorite record of 1968 and also arranged a "a session" with Brian Augur that same year. You get the sense that Paul felt these artists were snapping at his heels. But with hindsight who for a second would put ISB and the Oblivion Express on the same pedestal as The Beatles?

AMM: The Crypt (1968)

After "Revolution 9" and the rest of The Beatles experimental output British musicians must have felt there was suddenly a proper audience for the outre. "Czechoslovakia" from Streetnoise for instance has a widly avant-garde "free" section, no doubt intended to depict the chaos as Soviet tanks entered Prague. Julie Driscoll took the these tendencies further, married Keith Tippett and released the Prog-Jazz LP "1969".

McCartney had connections to another "free music" project. He'd tapped a coin against a radiator at an AMM get-together and even before "Revolution 9" with the unreleased "Carnival of Light" The Beatles had attempted a free music of their own. Ian Macdonald complains:

"The major discovery of his interaction with the mid-sixties classical and Jazz Avant-Garde was 'random' - the realisation that chance elements, with which The Beatles had already casually toyed, could produce striking results when actively sought after. The difference was that AMM - following the contemporary ideal of transcending the ego specialised in a sensitive form of collective improvisation in which players not only listened intently to each-other but interacted spontaneously with everything around them, including their audiences. In "Carnival Of Light", The Beatles merely bashed about at the same time, overdubbing without much thought, and relying on the Instant Art techniques of tape echo to produce something suitably far-out."

White Noise: An Electric Storm (1969)

The search for a "far-out" music which was "workable", in the way that the uncompromising AMM and Tippets projects could never hope to be, also made the scene ripe for another record which aimed to tap the freak market. The £3000 that Chris Blackwell gave to David Vorhaus, Delia Derbyshire and Brian Hodgson to concoct the White Noise LP was just such a probing bit of music industry research and development. The agent of change here was, not a revision of Folk, the aleatory, or Jazz but electronics and studio manipulation.**

Although it may seem wrong-headed and cruel, and please bear with me, it'd be tempting to view each and every one of these records as a failure. Not only did none of them sell many copies, they seemed to have no immediate cultural impact. The ISB's glorious "Hangman's Beautiful Daughter" might be the exception, reaching number 5 in the charts, but what followed it was some kind of disaster as Joe Boyd explains:

"(after the band refused to take the stage in the rain) We knew we had blown it; the extent of the error became clear in the months to come as the Woodstock film reached every small town in America and the double album soared to the top of the charts. Had they played in the rain that night, would they have made the cut in the film and on the record? I had nightmares about the might-have-beens: the ISB gloriously recapturing the acoustic spontaneity of their early years, their songs and voices perfect for the magical first night, their careers transformed by the exposure."

Boyd also discusses their later doomed trajectory, the blame of which he partly lays at the feet of L.Ron Hubbard:

"Scientology is not designed to engineer timidity....The group refused to contemplate the notion of failure and "U" (their stage musical) went ahead full-speed. The fact that it was a disaster artistically, critically and financially failed to dent their confidence, but it hastened my search for new challenges."

Brian Augur also seemed unable to capitalise on the momentum he had attained with Julie Driscoll. The Oblivion Express records of the 1970s are solid enough, loyal organ-led amplified Jazz, but they're nothing whatsoever on the glittering trans-generic triumph of "Streetnoise".

King Crimson: In the Court of the Crimson King (1969)

In his wrap-up Melly touches on another band who for me embody the very whiff of this era, the early King Crimson:

"Mainstream Underground music is for the most part the tough prolonged blues-inflected style with its roots in the Britsh Blues revival on the one hand and American acid/rock on the other, It's been comparatively static now for the last eighteen month - only the heroes change..... Currently (August 1969) they include Jethro Tull, the Family and this month's big deal, King Crimson; but in six months?"

It's surely King Crimson who provided the signpost to an ambitious music with a broad appeal. It was Prog's re-tooling of Classical music which provided the route forward to those "grown-up" music fans. I spent a lot of time last year praising Prog, and that probably disguised just how horrific I still find the music of Emerson, Lake and Palmer, Yes, Genesis and Jethro Tull. Perhaps it *was* the wrong path? Notwithstanding that I find it strange how accurate a picture of the entire music-scape of 2007 just these five records present. Listened together furthermore, they present a fantastic aural hallucination of what life must have been like in England, London even, at the cusp of the 1970s.

* The definite article is charmingly anachronistic doncha think.
** Not forgetting McCartney's trips to see Derbyshire at the BBC.....