Diversions! by Barry Booth.

I have been listening to a most enjoyable album today. It is called Diversions! By Barry Booth. If you haven’t heard of this album or singer, don’t worry because I hadn’t either until four nights ago. What happened was this. I was listening to BBC Radio 6Music, it was the day that Terry Jones of Monty Python fame died. The presenter Gideon Coe said he was going to play a song as a tribute to Terry. It was a song he wrote in 1968 with Barry Booth called Henry Smith Addresses A Butterfly. It aroused my interest, I thought it was great. When the song ended Gideon said it was from an album by Barry Booth which was a lost classic album.

I wanted to hear more, so I looked on the internet and found that it had been re-issued in 2002 on CD. I ordered myself a copy and it arrived today.

 I have played it twice now and think it is wonderful. It is so rare there isn’t even a Wikipedia entry for this hidden treasure, so I’ll just give you a bit of background information from the sleeve notes.

Barry Booth attended the Royal Academy of Music where he studied composition and the piano. Then he became a music arranger on pop music tours including a stint as Roy Orbison’s piano player. By chance he met Michael Palin and Terry Jones who had just left Oxford University and were writing for TV programmes. Booth asked them if they would be interested in writing some lyrics, which he put to music, hoping to sell the songs to pop acts. 

They made a demo which found its way to the producer Tony Hatch who had also written some of the biggest songs of the day, such as Downtown by Petula Clark. He loved what he heard and insisted they make an album. Barry Booth had no intentions of recording the songs himself, but Hatch loved his voice. It was released in April 1968 and disappeared without trace. That was probably because it was never performed live and there was so much else going on in swinging London at the time it was quickly forgotten. Jones & Palin shortly after found fame and fortune with Monty Python and Barry went back to being a busy jobbing musician. His singing voice was never recorded again.

You can find most of the songs on YouTube. I shared the opening track He’s Very Good With His Hands to this blog page to give you an idea of the album. That song reminds me a bit of The Beatles during the Penny Lane period. The orchestration on the songs is excellent, very baroque in places. Vera Lamonte which is a poignant song about a female acrobat reminds me slightly of the wry songs of Jake Thackrey if you have heard of him. The King’s Thing has echoes of Anthony Newley or mid 60’s Bowie. The lyrics are very clever and witty, which is what you expect from Palin & Jones. The humour is shown in such songs as The Hottest Day Of The Year where Henry Watkins takes all his clothes off in a park to the cheers of bystanders. The Concise History Of Harry Shoes is a sad & funny song about a man with very poor taste. Henri Dupont has a nice accordion accompaniment. I won’t go through every song, but they are all great. I recommend you discover this album for yourself. I’m very glad I did.

He's Very Good With His Hands

When Heart Is Open.

When I came downstairs this morning the first thing I did was 30 minutes of meditation. Well, when I say meditation, I mean I made a cup of tea and stared out of the window for half an hour, trying to decide what to do with myself. That problem was decided for me when I looked at my emails and found I had sold a book.

The book was Counting My Chickens, a signed copy by Deborah Devonshire. She was the youngest of the famous Mitford sisters and known as Debo. She later became the Dowager Duchess Of Devonshire and lived at Chatsworth House which is one of Britain’s most famous stately homes. I parcelled that book up and replaced it in my shop with another signed book by Debo called Round About Chatsworth. Then I got dressed and headed for the post office. While I was up town, I had a quick look in the Dorothy House shop and found a biography of Paul Simon and an autobiography by Gloria Gaynor. I don’t think they are very valuable though.

I didn’t tarry for long uptown though because it was cold, and I hadn’t even had breakfast yet. A little later the post arrived and contained a book called Saint Dominic’s Flashback by Peter Wrench. As you can guess it is all about the album St Dominic’s Preview. I had a quick flick through it and read a little bit about Jackie Wilson and how there are some lyrics in his song Reet Petite which might have inspired some of the words to Van’s song Tupelo Honey, such as ‘Well, she's like honey from a bee’ etc.

I did a bit of cleaning in the kitchen while listening to Common One by Van. The track When Heart Is Open is very experimental and new-age and the lyrics are very Krishnamurti like. I think he would have enjoyed that track. So, maybe I did do some meditation after all.

A Quiet Sunday.

I was having a quick look through my Jimmy Webb book today and found out something quite interesting. You know how in the lyrics of McArthur Park where it says, ‘Someone left the cake out in the rain’, well, apparently that comes from a quote by the poet W.H. Auden when he was describing his own face. He said it looked like a wedding cake that had been left out in the rain. I thought it was quite interesting anyway.

It was sunny today, but cold. I ventured out into the garden and found my viburnum next to the shed had some white flowers on it which was encouraging. I thought I ought to go for a walk and set off in the direction of the White Horse, but I didn’t get very far. I didn’t fancy the walk uphill. In the end I just went to the supermarket and came home again. I read the first 40 pages of my Krishnamurti book. Van Morrison said that he saw K once in San Francisco. I looked that up and discovered that it was probably in March 1973 when K spoke at the Masonic Hall.

This evening I watched another episode of the Christine Keeler story and the snooker final and that was my Sunday. I’ll try and have a more interesting day tomorrow.