Procol mentions in The Times
William Mann in
The Times 29 May 1967
This is the famous
article by Times music critic William Mann, who was one of the first
establishment figures to accord to pop records the respectful attention and
scholarly language habitually reserved for 'serious' music. Nice to see how he
cites Procol Harum, whose record must have been fire-new from the mint while
Mann was penning this piece.
A few Saturdays ago on Juke Box Jury
Paul Jones let fall a remark about the depressing state of pop music; the
programme’s compère, David Jacobs, countered, a trace primly, that some people
considered the pop scene to be in unusually healthy condition. My sympathies at
the time were firmly with Mr. Jones. The quantity of nondescript songs then
figuring in the hit parade was sad even when one admits that dozens of boring
creations have to be sifted, in every field of art always, before something of
real quality is discovered. The picture looks much more gay now that the
Beatles have produced their new L.P., Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band. In fact it has not looked so cheerful since their last L.P.
Revolver. After listening to Sergeant Pepper, & c., I have been
reflecting what happened to pop music in the meantime, and some not unhealthy
and quite interesting trends do emerge; if they are connected with these two LPs
and with the excellent intervening Beatles single, Penny Lane and
Strawberry Fields, that is hardly to be wondered at.
Pop
music in the last few months, as for the last 12 years or more, has been
dominated by ballads and beat music, and not all are or have been potboilers.
There has also been a progressive broadening of interest in genres that could
appeal without necessarily dragging pop through the artistic mire: oriental
sounds, folk music, creative revivals of pop classis, novelty numbers and in
particular vaudeville as a style, creative raids on classical styles and idioms,
and looting (not always just vulture-like) of earlier experiments by the most
progressive groups. Spurring these varied developments is the recognition that
popularity has many faces.
ELOQUENT RESULTS
The young teenagers of 1963 who fell like hungry travelers upon the Mersey-side
Beat are now much older and more sophisticated, and more experienced in adult
ways. Pop music still has to cater for them and for the distinctive
characteristics they have by now assumed. Mod, rocker, intellectual, rebel,
permissive, careerist, all get comfort or inspiration from different music, and
the Beatles have held their supremacy because they can dip into all these
inkwells with equally eloquent results. There is still a faithful pop following
among the generations who cut their teeth on Tommy Steele, Alma Cogan, Vera
Lynn, Bing Crosby and George Formby, to go no farther back. And since 1963 a
new generation of young people has arrived, demanding (or maybe only
enthusiastically accepting) the pop music appropriate to its own age.
One can imagine a new pop group deciding
cold-bloodedly to concentrate commercially on appealing to one of these
age-groups. The creators of the Monkees do not deny having done so and even
virtuoso pop musicians are galled by the success of a group that was brought,
Frankenstein-fashion, into being without reference to musical talents. Their
songs are carefully modeled on early-Beatle style uncreatively but skilfully
manipulated. Their first single, Last Train to Clarksville, flopped in
Britain at first but zoomed up the charts as soon as the Monkees began to appear
in weekly short films on television (the manner of presentation heavily indebted
to A Hard Day’s Night). Just now the Monkees are idols of the
pre-teenage generation and are not quite despised by those approaching
O-Levels. This has been their year, in the absence of anything more remarkable,
and the
Showmanship involved has to be admired,
if not the musical artistry. I suspect that their songs were written by a
computer fed with the first two Beatle LPs and The Oxford Book of Nursery
Rhymes.
It has also been a period of nursery
lyrics. The Lennon-McCartney Yellow Submarine set the ball rolling and
of late we have had no end of songs whose words bring out the delayed
adolescence in all of us: the Alan Price Set’s Simon Smith and his Dancing
Bear, Manfred Mann’s Haha said the clown, Sandie Shaw’s Puppet on
a String (which alarmingly, though to the delight of unmusical patriots, won
the Eurovision Song Contest), the Hollies’ Lullaby for Tim, Dave Clark’s
Tabitha Twitchit. All these encourage separatists in their belief that
pop music is strictly for the pre-adolescent – not to mention a heavy-handedly
facetious number about a laughing gnome which was ecstatically plugged for
several weeks by the pirate stations but steadfastly remained the flop it
deserved to be.
The words of songs are as important as
the music: Monteverdi, Schumann, Wolf, Britten have all accepted this belief to
their advantage, and pop music has benefited whenever composers have done
likewise. The Moon-June syndrome is nowadays frowned on. There were skilful,
imaginative lyrics in the 1930s (think of Ira Gershwin and, earlier, of St
James’s Infirmary Blues). But the importance of the lyric in modern pop
songs owes more to Bob Dylan than to anybody. Dylan was part of the protest
folksong movement, and though nowadays this is in abeyance and Dylan a sick man
slowly on the mend, with only a very pop number about a leopardskin hat to keep
his laurels green, his influence on the content of pop lyrics is still strong:
think of the Bee Gees’ New York Mining Disaster 1941 (music essentially
early Beatles), and the Animals’ When I was Young, and Cat Stevens’s
Matthew and Son of a while back. Social comment is helpful to a pop song,
and some of these have deservedly done well in the charts. The sneering lazy
Dylan voice, and the folksong ballad type of tune he favours, are still much
copied. Folksong is very much a part of pop, as is testified by the success of
the Dubliners’ Seven Drunken Nights (a favourite Irish closing-time
number) and, on a slightly different wavelength, the Russian-derived OK
of Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich.
Folksong as an ingredient of pop is an
exhumation of the past (paralleled in straight music by the new popularity among
concertgoers of pre-classical music, and in art by the resurgence of Art
nouveau), and in the past 12 months there has been an even more prevalent
revival of the 1920s vaudeville number, Winchester Cathedral, by the New
Vaudeville Band, set it going last September. Since then we have had
Peek-a-boo and Finchley Central; and the Kinks, who had already moved
into the contemporary satire sphere, have lately jumped into a vaudeville with
their very likable Waterloo Sunset (part of a place-names cult, connected
with Penny Lane, perhaps with A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square
and even Let’s all go Sown the Strand or Basin Street Blues).
REVIVING VAUDEVILLE
The idea of reviving vaudeville is rather artificial, not to say escapist, but
it accords with a certain camp trend in fashions and in decorative art. It may
be thought by some people no more odd than the revitalized honky-tonk and
boogie-woogie of some Rolling Stones’ numbers in their recent turncoat L.P.
Between the Buttons (which includes one ultra-camp song, A Strange Thing
Happened to me yesterday). And there is the rare but often appealing grope
back to classical or baroque musical language, as in the Alberti string
figuration of the Beatles’ Eleanor Rigby (another song with a powerful
lyric) and the new, distinctly Bach-derived Whiter Shade of Pale by the
Procol Harum (whose name is supposedly Latin, even if it should be “procul”)
which has its pop parentage in some Animals’ numbers and is very beautiful
indeed. There is the growing allure of oriental, at present chiefly Indian,
music initiated by George Harrison of the Beatles, taken up by the Rolling Stone
and nowadays quite common as an accompanying texture (like the revival of the
harpsichord a few years ago). From the Beatles also came the current
preoccupation with more or less disciplined sworls of electronically manipulated
clusters of sound, famous through Tomorrow Never Knows, but audible on
all sides, and adopted in concerts by several groups spectacularly as well as
audibly. In some records by the Righteous Brothers and the Walker Brothers, and
in some of Jimi Hendrix’s songs, it is just an all-too generalized effect. But
in Strawberry Fields, and the Stones’ Paint it Black, it was
poetically and precisely applied. The vogue word for this is psychedelic music.
There remain the beat-songs and
ballads. Beat-music has, by natural evolution, become more varied and
occasionally more subtle than it used to be. It is no longer fettered to
unchanging two or four in a bar, nor need it be harmonized entirely diatonically
in root positions; the bass line can be vivid, like the words, but usually is
not. Most groups are content to put over something enthusiastic and with a big,
noisy sound, though the Rolling Stones, the Hollies, the Moody Blues, Manfred
Mann, the Who (these last two groups for the moment less actively) have shown,
like the Beatles, that beat music can be as diverse as any other sort. Ballads
are the despair of forward-looking pop students. Not that they are
irredeemable: there are cool ballads, and ballads with a vital pulse, and
ballads with distinctive tunes or interesting words. But again and monotonously
again the sticky, sweaty, vacuous ballad reaches to the melting hearts of
housewives who prefer the lowest when they hear it, and accordingly it soars to
the top like a jetplane made of golden syrup.
MASTER CLASSES
There is hope for all these pop genres, and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Heats
Club Band provides it in abundance. Two of the tracks are quasi-ballad:
Fixing a hole is cool, anti-romantic, harmonically a little like the earlier
Yesterday and Michelle; She’s Leaving Home is a slow waltz
reminiscent of old musical comedy but with a classically slanted accompaniment
for harp and string quartet, and with ironical words about a minor domestic
tragedy (the texts, which are of consistently lively poetic interest, are
printed in full on the back cover). There is a neat vaudeville number, When
I’m 64, which comments pointedly on this old-time vogue and its relevance
for modern beat song. George Harrison’s Within you without you carries
the manner of Indian music farther into pop than ever before though the tune of
the song is recognizably mixolydian; there are hints of Indian atmosphere in
some of the other songs (which are all by Lennon and McCartney).
Psychedelia can be diagnosed in the
fanciful lyric and intriguing asymmetrical music of Lucy in the Sky, as
well as in the sound effects of Lovely Rita (she is a parking meter
warden), and the hurricane glissandi of A Day in the Life which has been
banned by the BBC for its ambivalent references to drug-taking – though if
anything on the record is going to encourage dope it surely is the “tangerine
trees and marmalade skies” and the “girl with kaleidoscope eyes” in Lucy in
the Sky which contains none of these whoosh noises. I greatly enjoy the
five-bar phrases of Good Morning Good Morning which is something like a
novelty number; and the tidy simplicity and shapely bass-line of A Little
Help from my Friends, the only track that would have been conceivable in pop
songs five years ago.
Any of these songs is more genuinely
creative than anything currently to be hears on pop radio stations, but in
relationship to what other groups have been doing lately Sergeant Pepper
is chiefly significant as constructive criticism, a sort of pop music master
class examining trends and correcting or tidying up inconsistencies and
undisciplined work, here and there suggesting a line worth following. The one
new exploration is the showband manner of the title-song, its reprise, and its
interval song, Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite. These three give a
certain shape and integrity to the two sides, and if the unity is slightly
specious the idea is, I think, new to popsong LPs, which are usually unconnected
anthologies, and it is worth pursuing. Sooner or later some group will take the
next logical step and produce an LP which is a popsong-cycle, a Tin Pan Alley
Dichterliebe. Whether or not the remains of Schumann and Heine turn in
their graves at this description depends on the artistry of the compiler.
Thanks to John Lock for locating
this article, Jill McMahon for typing it all out!
More mentions of Procol Harum in The
Times