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.