Connie Converse: Roving Woman

From an article on the BBC website by Thomas Hobbs:

Centring on an edgy, city-dwelling female protagonist unapologetically owning her sexuality, the brilliant song Roving Woman sounds like the work of a millennial musician. Evoking the smoky, airborne notes of a late-night Brooklyn bar, it contains lilting guitar harmonies that float in and out of focus like cascading cigarette smoke, while its melancholy vocal is reminiscent of popular contemporary folk musicians like Weyes Blood, Jessica Pratt and Angel Olsen. "Someone always takes me home!" the lead singer swoons.

Yet the truly remarkable thing about this track is it was actually recorded more than 70 years ago. Roving Woman isn't the work of some lo-fi singer-songwriter in their early 20s, but is in fact the forward-thinking creation of Connie Converse. She was a bedroom musician who wrote the bulk of her songs in early 1950s New York, years before Bob Dylan came on the scene and sparked a new singer-songwriter movement.

But she pulled back from her musical dreams at the turn of the 1960s and then, in 1974, aged 50, disappeared completely – never to be heard from again. It was only this century that this mysterious artist's work was rediscovered and has found a devoted audience, stunned by just how pioneering she was.

And:

Another one of Converse's fans is Martin Carr, the English folk musician and lead singer of the band The Boo Radleys, who has written several songs paying tribute to her. "Connie had a dramatist's eye – the ability to conjure a fully inhabited world from a single detail," he explains. "The fact that she named a song after a J.M. Synge play, or was capable of lyrics such as 'Spring seemed to linger in a little bunch of flowers he pressed into my hand', tells you she was reaching well beyond the American folk tradition."

Carr is also particularly impressed by Converse's guitar playing and believes it's extraordinary no matter what generation you come from. "Her guitar playing is phenomenal. I can't play her songs, they're too hard for me!" Carr enthuses. "Her playing reminds me of the way Paul Simon plays; orchestral arrangements for six strings. She was a true individual, an artist of no time."

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"This is a staggering death rate of 130 per 100,000 care leavers, a figure at least three times higher than the general population. It is hard to overstate the magnitude of the failure that has led to this point. There are a range of causes of death, but the single largest cause is suicide." Michael Sanders looks at a new government report that lays bare the tragedy of care-leaver deaths.

Keenan Malik says the Grenfell Tower fire has "exposed a social and legal landscape shaped by an exaggerated contempt for ordinary people. It is the story of a corporate world displaying, in the words of journalist Peter Apps, 'a callous indifference to anything – morality, honesty, life safety – that was not related to the bottom line."

Ed Conway explains why the cod on your plate has probably been round the world: "Follow this cod on its way and you begin to see why so many regions in Europe and America feel like they have been 'left behind'; you begin to see why it is so difficult to take on Vladimir Putin and the Russian economy... all from a simple pack of fish fingers."

"If you’ve had a sugary treat and you’re feeling good, you’re probably feeling good because you’re having fun with family and friends, rather than from the sugar." Talitha Best on the myth of the sugar rush.

"Suddenly, he was 43 years old with a solo career that plenty of pundits thought had reached the end of the road. According to his detractors, Simon’s signature sound had nowhere else to go and, based on where he went next, maybe they were right." Matt Fish considers Paul Simon and Graceland.

JacquiWine reads The Bell by Iris Murdoch, "a sophisticated, richly textured novel that explores complicated feelings between complex individuals, encompassing faith, guilt, resentment, anger, fear, and perhaps most importantly, love. Love can take many forms, from a pure, spiritual type of love to a platonic or romantic love to a more carnal, possessive love – and Murdoch touches on all of them here to a greater or lesser extent. It’s also a radical novel for its time, particularly as Murdoch centres her storyline on a provocative moral dilemma: what happens when a person’s sexual orientation (in this instance, their homosexuality) is at odds with their religious beliefs?"

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"The big red 'stop nudes' button is appealing because it’s a lot easier than investing in proper services to protect children and in the kind of education that will help them grow up in the world as it exists rather than the sterile bubble of Starmer's imagination. Bad actors will circumvent these measures while ordinary people's privacy is undermined, and health information and even art is censored. The design choices that have led to this environment are the same choices that the government courts when it tries to partner with these tech companies." Mic Wright looks at the media's uncritical coverage of government plans to prevent children viewing or sharing nude images online.

Claire Jones analyses the creeping misogyny of Reform's agenda: "To enshrine women’s demotion to second class citizens, Reform has pledged to drop the 2010 Equalities Act which provides legal recourse for maternity leave, sexual assault, domestic abuse and employment discrimination. Reform also plans to ditch the ECHR thus thwarting it’s use by women as another court of appeal. You can hear the sound of doors closing."

David Eddy asks who is protecting our drinking water as an energy company seeks permission to drill through the chalk aquifer beneath the Yorkshire Wolds in search of gas.

"You may heard that if you’re under 25, your brain isn’t fully developed yet. It's an adage supposing that individuals under 25 can’t think things through or make rational decisions, and so are less responsible than older folk. This logic has now formed the basis of official government advice, sentencing, and more. The only problem with this fact is... it’s not a fact. Never has been. No matter how many TikTokers insist otherwise." Dean Burnett takes aim at a scientific myth.

Oliver Bray has been to an exhibition at the Dickens Museum in London: "It reframes Dickens not only through the women he knew, but through the theatrical culture they collectively inhabited. Stepping outside, I felt his familiar voice linger, now joined by the sense that the women behind the scenes were finally stepping into the light – something the dramatist in Dickens might have appreciated." 

"On one level, this is a song about a man who, losing his mother, seeks to make his lover a surrogate maternal figure. On a larger level, it is about the need to find an escape, a haven, from the brutal realities of life. But it must be mentioned that this is a song about the power and necessity of movies... that was written for a movie." Another Paul on That's Why God Made the Movies, one of my favourite Paul Simon songs.

Aiye-Keta: Afro Super

Here's Steve Winwood in 1973 playing what came to be called "world music" more than a decade later.

"Aiye-Keta" (which means "the third world" or "the third life" in Yoruba) was a collaborative project between Winwood, who plays guitar and keyboards, the percussionist Remi Kabaka and Abdul Lasisi Amao, who plays saxophone and flute.

Remi Kabaka, who died last year, played with John Martyn, Hugh Masekela and, on Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon. He is the father of Remi Kabaka Jr, the drummer and producer of Gorillaz.

Abdul Lasisi Amao died back in 1988. He was a founder member of Osibisa, the London-based group that did much to bring African music to the wider world.

Together they produced one album of Afro jazz-rock. Perhaps because Winwood's name was not on the cover, it failed to sell. Later, if it was remembered at all, the project became confused in people's minds with the Jamaican reggae band Third World.

For me, they produced perfect music for weather like this.

Paul Simon: The Obvious Child

This is from Rhythm of the Saints, Paul Simon's 1990 follow up to Graceland. Just as the earlier album had drawn on South African music, so this one was inspired by South America.

It's less well remembered today, but still full of good things.

Paul Simon: One Trick Pony

 

I was in my favourite coffee shop the other day, when I found I half-recognised a song they were playing. Eventually, despite the ambient noise, I worked out what it was: Somebody from Paul Simon's neglected solo album One Trick Pony.

So I included a review of the album in my last The Joy of Six, and here's its title track, brilliant lyrics and all, as my Sunday music video.

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"The study, which examined nearly 300 child-arrangement case files and observed over 100 hearings, found that domestic abuse featured in almost nine in ten (87 per cent) of cases. Yet judges routinely treated it as background noise. In over half of those cases, courts ordered unsupervised overnight contact between children and alleged abusers." England and Wales's family courts aren’t just failing survivors, they are complicit in state-sanctioned abuse, argues Zoe Grunewold after a reading a report by two academics from Loughborough University.

George Foulkes says broadcasters are warping our politics by failing to subject Nigel Farage to the scrutiny that other politicians rightly experience.

"Along with restoring trust in the church’s safeguarding processes, Mullally must also heal divisions within the church’s hierarchy over leadership culture. In the weeks leading up to Welby’s resignation, both he and the archbishop of York, Stephen Cottrell, were accused of using 'coercive language' by the bishop of Newcastle, Helen-Ann Hartley." George Crozier on the many challenges facing the new Archbishop of Canterbury.

"Today, Denmark's wolf population is estimated to be just over 40 wolves, with at least seven breeding pairs known to have produced cubs. Yet even this small number has sparked fierce debates over livestock and public safety in one of Europe's most intensively farmed countries, with views on wolves seeming to reflect wider political divides across Denmark." Kristian Kongshøj and Troels Fage Hedegaard explain why 40 wolves have shaken Danish politics.

Ellen Hawley sets out the long history of curry in Britain.

Mike Taylor champions an undervalued Paul Simon album: "One of the most striking qualities of One Trick Pony as an album is how understated everything is. There are no big, heart-on-sleeve emotions, no vocal histrionics. Many of the songs have a stumbling quality, and almost all of them feel gentle. Every time a song starts to seem like it has a clear emotional shading, something undercuts it – whether it’s Simon’s idiosyncratic vocal delivery, a flash of colour from the band (and all of them are superb), or a switch in direction in a bridge or chorus."

Paul Simon: Born at the Right Time

Paul Simon issued his album The Rhythm of the Saints in 1990, four years after Graceland. It uses Latin American and South American music as its basis, just as Graceland had used South African.

Here the North American voice is not the introspective Simon, but a brash persona. And the song, for me, is about hope and redemption coming from the poor.

Now listen to the Brazilian drummers on The Obvious Child from the same album.

St Vincent: New York

St Vincent - the American singer-songwriter Annie Clarke - has featured here before. New York is a track from her fifth studio album, Masseduction, which came out in 2017.

Laura Snapes reviewed it on Pitchfork:

Presumably the first single from her forthcoming fifth album as St. Vincent ... it surprises by totally forsaking her cosmic guitar playing for simple piano, which blooms beneath her laments for the lost accomplice who made NYC more than just a pile of old bricks. 

Maybe it’s her noted hero Bowie, though Clark’s yearning, gasped entreats suggests a deeper intimacy than distant admiration: “So much for a home run with some blue blood,” she sighs, ruing the loss of “the only motherfucker in the city who can stand me” (possibly the highest compliment a New Yorker can pay).

The radio version of the song - New York did turn out to be the first single from that album - cleverly changes this to "other sucker".

Reader's voice: But do we need swearing at all? I mean, Paul Simon didn't write The Only Living Motherfucker in New York, did he?

Hear Joni Mitchell play a lost Leicester Market Place pub in 1967

What a find! And what a performance! Here's an hour-long bootleg recording of Joni Mitchell singing at the White Swan in Leicester on 16 September 1967.

The White Swan (sometimes called Ye Old White Swan) was in the Market Place, tucked away behind the Corn Exchange. You can see some photos of this pub on its page at Pub History Project.

Paul Simon also played The White Swan, which was demolished in 1973.

There's a great Twitter thread about unlikely Leicester concert venues by The Chisit, and you may also enjoy my post about The Latin Quarter, a short-lived venue in the city where the young David Bowie and Elton John both played.

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Timothy Garton Ash says Poland is learning that restoring democracy is even harder than creating it.

"The Tories are in arguably the worst state we’ve ever seen a major party in. They lead on just one major policy area, defence, and even then Labour came within a 1 per cent lead here in December. Dylan Difford has shown just how much worse the Tory position is than 1997 when they at least led on three major policy questions ahead of the election." James Austin explains why a Conservative wipe-out at the next election is becoming more of a possibility...

...which is an outcome for which Matt Carr, itemising the strange death of Tory England, yearns.

"When we were taking players from union – Jonathan Davies, Offiah – it was a real psychological body blow that forced them to change. We gutted Welsh rugby union. They fined Davies for saying he wanted to be paid so he could get a mortgage! Now it’s completely flipped." Anthony Broxton is interviewed about his book Hope and Glory: Rugby League in Thatcher's Britain.

Richard Williams reviews an album that celebrates Les Cousins, the Soho folk and blues club that flourished between 1964 and 1972: "It is, as you’d expect, a splendidly varied selection, starting and ending with big names — Bert Jansch and the Strawbs — and containing both even bigger ones (Paul Simon, Al Stewart, Ralph McTell, Nick Drake, Roy Harper and Cat Stevens) as well as many more of those whose reputations never really escaped the folk world, like the brilliant guitarists Davy Graham, Mike Cooper, John James, Sam Mitchell and Dave Evans."

"A good place to start is by acknowledging the snobbery - and misogyny - inherent in this question. Christie’s success tends to be viewed as a phenomenon, a freak of literature, which rarely happens with more highbrow writers, especially when they’re male. How often do people ask why the heck we still read F. Scott Fitzgerald? Or about the secret to Raymond Chandler’s continuing popularity?" Kemper Donovan responds to those who ask why Agatha Christie has sold so many books.

When a young David Bowie played a venue opposite the derelict Leicester Belgrave Road station

One of my favourite Twitter threads is one from The Chisit on gigs at unlikely venues in and around Leicester.

It reveals, for instance, that Joni Mitchell and Paul Simon both played Ye Old White Swan, a vanished pub that used to occupy a corner of the Market Place.

But it is the thought of David Bowie playing an obscure venue in Leicester as early as 1966 that really intrigues me, though not just for musical reasons.

The venue was The Latin Quarter in Belgrave Road and The Bowie Bible says Dave Bowie and the Buzz played there on Friday 12 August 1966. 

A few weeks ago I went to photograph it, and you can see my photo above.

Bowie played with The Buzz in 1966 and 1967. His first band, The Lower Third, had split with him because of a dispute with the management over pay. During their time together, The Buzz played on Bowie's fourth single You're Holding Me Down, which is a record that has not found its way on to YouTube.

The opening of The Latin Quarter was announced in a feature that took up the best part of a page of the Leicester Daily Mercury on Friday 27 May 1966, which announced:

New Teenage Night Spot

Opening Tomorrow

The Latest in Coffee Clubs and Restaurants 

A special all night live music session opens the Latin Quarter on Saturday night with local groups playing from 8 pm through till 6 am Entrance is in Belgrave Road by the lights junction with Abbey Park Road The tunnel of wicker hurdles through which grow ferns and down the stairs under the baleful watch of Pagan masks 

Not only is this to be a restaurant by day but will provide the ultimate in the city as a dusk-’til-dawn coffee club complete with most up-to-date Rock-ola Grand Prix Juke Box with stereophonic sound Meals will be served on occasional tables and diners on Design Centre chairs of a brilliant 'flame' colour.

The feature also promised:

Continuous Music by Local Groups

Every evening at eight ... that is the motto of the Latin Quarter for your entertainment entertainment that we know you will like all the best in the local groups provided by PS Promotions.

And to be fair to PS Promotions, among the bands announced for the venue's first week are The Farinas, who were soon to become Family, Leicester best band of the era.

The Latin Quarter was clearly meant to be a big deal - the feature has notices from its suppliers wishing well. I was intrigued to see that all the internal design work was by Derrick Knightley Associates of Leicester, because Derrick Knightley was an Independent member of Harborough District Council when I was a councillor.

All of which makes it rather sad that I can find no reference to The Latin Quarter after 1966. Among the non-Leicester bands who did play it that year were Bluesology, whose young keyboard player was Reg Dwight. He was to make a stage name from those of two other musicians who were members of the band: Elton Dean and Long John Baldry.

What interested me as much as The Latin Quarter is what was on the other side of Belgrave Road.

It doesn't look much today, but in 1966 this store and car park were the site of Leicester Belgrave Road station, the Great Northern Railway's old terminus in the city.

It had closed to passengers - by then it was mainly used for holiday trains to the Lincolnshire coast - in 1962, but the last railway buildings on the site were not demolished until 1985. The photo before shows the station many decades before that

So I like to think that David Bowie popped out for a fag and discovered the old station as a haunt of pigeons with its masonry stained green by leaking gutters and plants forcing their way from every crack and cranny they could find.

If I had a time machine, I might well set it for the evening of 12 August 1966.

The Seekers: Cloudy

As I wrote when paying tribute to Judith Durham, her bandmate from The Seekers, Bruce Woodley, wrote three songs with Paul Simon. (Woodley is on the right of the group as you look at the thumbnail above.)

One of them, Red Rubber Ball, reached number 2 in the US singles chart when recorded by The Cyrkle. That band also recorded Simon and Woodley's I Wish You Could Be Here.

Their third collaboration was Cloudy, which appeared on the Simon and Garfunkel album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, where it was credited to Paul Simon alone.

I love Paul Simon's music more than is decent, but it wasn't a wholly a surprise to read that this had happened.

All three Simon and Woodley compositions were recorded by The Seekers, and here is their take on Cloudy.

If I have a criticism, it's that this version isn't cloudy at all. It's pure sunshine - a reminder of how good Judith Durham's voice was and how good the male members of the group were as instrumentalists and close harmony singers.

The tinkly line on the piano (if that is what is being used) was probably played by Tom Springfield, who had much to do with the group's success as a songwriter and mentor. (His own folk-to-pop group The Springfields were the first British group to have a top 20 hit in the US,)

In writing this I came across two great facts about Tom Springfield (who was Dusty's brother):

• His baptismal name was Dionysius O'Brien
• Like Alan Bennett, Dennis Potter and Michael Frayn, he was a graduate of the Russian course at the Joint Services School for Linguists.

And that's where he came across the Russian folk tune that he turned into The Seekers' best-selling single, The Carnival is Over.

Farewell to Judith Durham

Judith Durham, the lead singer of The Seekers, has died in Melbourne at the age of 79.

The Seekers, were an Australian group who played pop tinged with folk, and enjoyed enormous success in Britain in the 1960s.

They won the New Musical Express poll for the best new group of 1964, were heavily played by Radio Caroline and had two UK no. 1 hits and three other top 3 singles before they returned to Australia in 1968. They were also the first Australian group to have major his in the US.

One of their members, Bruce Woodley, co-wrote songs with Paul Simon, who was around on the UK folk scene at the time.

But through it all it was Judith Durham's voice that made them distinctive. This performance is taken from their farewell (to Britain) concert, which I remember watching on television in July 1968.

Julian Lennon: Saltwater

People were talking about this song on Twitter a couple of weeks ago#, because it has turned uo on a vintage edition of Top of the Pops. I remember watching that edition and was shocked to learn that I had done so 30 years ago.

In those days I was still a serious chess player. Many of the county league matches took place in schools, and on the rare occasions I was in control of the game I would prowl while my opponent pondered and study the children's work on the classroom wall. My impression was that they had global warming and the hole in the ozone layer, which concerns Julian Lennon here, hopelessly mixed up.

Has the depletion of the ozone layer been solved? You don't hear about it now, but that may be because we have moved on to more urgent or more fashionable problems.

I remember when acid rain was a big worry. Again, you never hear of it today, but there are times when you are caught in a shower and rainwater tastes foul.

Like Jeff Buckley, Julian Lennon is always discussed in relation to a father who neglected him. Like Harper Simon, he cannot help sounding (or looking) like his father, even if Saltwater is always threatening to turn into Strawberry Fields Forever.

Wikipedia quotes Julian saying he remembers playing with Paul McCartney more than he does playing with his father.

McCartney wrote Hey Jude for and about him, but in his book on The Beatles Craig Brown records that John Lennon assumed it had been written for him.

Paul Simon: Anji

Composed and played by Davey Graham, Anji was the track that every acoustic guitarist wanted to master in the Sixties. 

Acoustic Guitar explains:

Singer-guitarist Wizz Jones recalled Graham playing it at the Continental Coffee Bar in London’s Soho district around 1960—Anji, the song’s namesake, was Graham’s barista girlfriend who worked there. “Other people have claimed that they’re the Anji the song was written about,” Jones says, “but they’re lying.”

For many players, “Anji” was the portal from simple folk to new possibilities. Its author was a cool, military-mannered bohemian of Scottish and Guyanese ancestry, who dazzled young solo guitar players such as John Renbourn, Martin Carthy, and Bert Jansch with his command of various idioms, from blues to Indian ragas. “Davey was the one—the guru—who really inspired a whole generation of European guitar players,” Jones says.

And here is Paul Simon demonstrating his mastery of the tune live on Granada in 1967.

Simon also performed tt on the Simon and Grafunkel album Sounds of Silence and sampled its introduction for "Somewhere They Can't Find Me" on the same record.

As we once discovered for this blog, Davey Graham was born at Bosworth Hall in Leicestershire.

Simon and Garfunkel: My Little Town

This single from 1975 is something of an oddity. Simon and Garfunkel had not recorded together for three years and My Little Town was not to appear on an album until the late 1990s.

Wikipedia quotes Paul Simon on the genesis of the song:

"It originally was a song I was writing for Artie. I was gonna write a song for his new album, and I told him it would be a nasty song, because he was singing too many sweet songs. It seemed like a good concept for him."

Maybe Simon was getting a bit old for this sort of adolescent angst, but My Little Town still sounds good.

Simon and Garfunkel: America

I've long been a little ashamed that the first album I bought with my own money was Band on the Run by Wings.

But I have no such feelings about the second, which was Simon and Garfunkel's Greatest Hits.

And as we have all been thinking about America these past few days, this seems a good time to choose one of Paul Simon's greatest songs. 

It has appeared here before, but I've decided that, as this blog has been running so long, repetition is a service to most readers.

Simon and Garfunkel: The Only Living Boy in New York

I don't know why, but I have been playing this song all week. The wonderful backing vocals are just Simon and Garfunkel singing and then multitracked about eight times.

Paul Simon wrote it in 1969 when Art Garfunkel had gone off to film Catch-22. He calls him 'Tom' as a relic of their early years recording as Tom and Jerry.

Paul Simon: The Late Great Johnny Ace

A song about three deaths: Johnny Ace, who killed himself in a shooting accident in 1954 when Paul Simon was 13; John F.Kennedy, assassinated in 1963; and John Lennon, murdered in 1980.

This live performance took place during the Simon and Garfunkel concert in Central Park in 1982, two years after Lennon's death.

When someone rushes on to the stage yelling "I gotta talk to you", there is real danger in the air.