Bert Jansch "Bert Jansch"

Bert Jansch Bert Jansch (4*)
Around ten years ago I was marvelling at the sonic beauty of Roddy Frame's Surf, recorded in his living room, allegedly on his iMac, but here, going back close to fifty years ago is a stark reminder that you don't need state of the art recording facilities to produce something that comes across crystal clear and moves in excess of 150,000 copies.

Recorded in producer/engineer Bill Leader's flat on a semi-professional Revox tape recorder with blankets and egg boxes for soundproofing, from the opening Strolling Down the Highway, it's a seventeen track ramble through fingerpicked originals with Jimmy Giuffre's Smokey River and two takes on Davey Graham's Angie (one of them a live performance) and a nod to Charles Mingus on Alice's Wonderland. A glance at titles like Oh How Your Love Is Strong, I Have No Time, Rambling's Gonna Be the Death of Me, Running from Home and Dreams of Love might suggest common or garden folk club fare but we're talking one of the guys who set the benchmarks everyone else would be judged against.

Needle of Death provides a blueprint for Neil Young’s Needle and the Damage Done and the basis for Ambulance Blues, a debt Young acknowledged by giving Bert the opening spot on his recent Twisted Road tour. Recommended if you've got an interest in the style and the starting point for what will be an extensive investigation of a substantial discography. $11.99 from iTunes.

Small Faces "From the Beginning"

While From the Beginning might have been an exercise in emptying the vaults and causing maximum disruption to the rival product on the Immediate label it ain't too shabby.

Admittedly I didn't really need the album, having already got the Decca hit singles (What'cha Gonna Do About It, Sha-La-La-La-Lee, Hey Girl, All Or Nothing and My Mind's Eye) on an earlier Faces compilation, but from the opening reworking of Del Shannon's Runaway it's a reasonably interesting collection, largely drawn from the band's stage repertoiire over the preceding year or two.

There's material from both versions of the lineup, with keyboard duties attended to by former member Jimmy Winston (interesting take on the Marvin Gaye cover Baby, Don't You Do It with a Winston vocal) and his replacement Ian McLagan. Other covers include readings of Don Covay's Take This Hurt Off Me and Smokey Robinson and the Miracles' You've Really Got A Hold On Me that underline what a great R&B vocalist they had in Mr Marriott.

Other tracks, like My Way Of Giving (rushed out as a single by Decca while it was still at the demo stage, an act that was largely responsible for the move to Immediate) were more or less works in progress. Tell Me Have You Ever Seen Me may well have actually been finished, but was re-recorded for the new label) or demos for material handed over to other singers (My Way of Giving was done by Chris Farlowe and re-recorded for the new label). There's a Booker T & the MGs style instrumental (Plum Nellie), a couple of interesting bits of semi psychedelia (Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow and That Man) a handful of dance floor numbers and the reissue comes with around a half dozen alternative tracks and BBC recordings.

Taken all together, while it mightn't have quite been in the same league as the classic albums from 1967 (The Doors, Something Else By The Kinks, or Disraeli Gears to name a couple of less obvious suspects from a very strong year)  it's not that far behind.

And, remember, it's the leftovers after a label switch. When you look at it in that light (not that the band wanted you to back then, going as far as discouraging the punters from investing in a copy in the advertising for the Immediate Small Faces) it, even at the time you could have done far worse...

And for $10.07? For mine, a no-brainer!

R.I.P. Bert Jansch

A long-standing interest in the British acoustic music that hasn't consistently translated into shelf space in the music collection meant that I picked up copies of Colin Harper's Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival and Rob Young's Electric Eden: Unearthing Britain's Visionary Music and devoured both in pretty quick time, figuring that they'd be pretty good starting points for a more detailed examinstion of that particular field.

At a stage where I'm investigating as much new music as I can find and filling in the gaps in a forty-year music collection those more detailed examinations aren't always going to be sitting at the top of the list of priorities and with the passing of Bert Jansch (3 November 1943 - 5 October 2011) that deferred investigation of an extensive discography is going to be posthumous.

When you're talking influences and strands running through genres it's difficult to think of many largely forgotten yet extremely influential artists than Bert Jansch. He'd been around for years, produced an extensive discography that's going to chew up an awful lot of credit card cash and shaped the playing of, among others, Jimmy Page and Neil Young, a rather interesting combination as far as Hughesy's concerned.

After all, when you think Led Zeppelin you tend to think in terms of thundering rifferamas, and while Neil Young can also thunder it out with the best of the turn it up to 11 crowd he's got an extensive array of fairly straightforward acoustic material, with Ambulance Blues being a pretty straightforward lift from Jansch's Needle of Death, which you can also hear echoes of in The Needle and the Damage Done. The influence was strong enough to have Young use Jansch as the opening act on his 2010 Twisted Road tour of North America. He was, according to Young, the acoustic equivalent of Jimi Hendrix.

Jancsh influenced plenty of others along the way, including Johnny Marr from the Smiths, the Incredible String Band's Robin Williamson (a former squatmate), Paul Simon, Pete Townshend, Donovan Nick Drake and, more recently, Devendra Banhart, Joanna Newsom, Espers, Babyshambles singer Pete Doherty, Beth Orton and Laura Marling.

A Scot of German extraction, Jansch was born in Glasgow, moved to Edinburgh as a child shortly before he fell under the spell of the guitar, Elvis Presley, Bill Haley and Lonnie Donegan after a primary school teacher in Edinburgh brought one into class. His parents couldn't afford a guitar, so he had a couple of goes at building his own before he came up with something that worked.

He worked as a nurseryman before becoming involved with the Howff folk club, where he took lessons from Scottish singer Archie Fisher and visiting American artists including Big Bill Broonzy and Brownie McGee, absorbed jazz and Arabic influences from London-based folk-baroque guitarist Davey Graham and more traditional input from singer Annie Briggs. He started writing his own material, influenced by Graham's eclecticism and moving away from the then-standard traditional and political repertoires.

There appears to have been a degree of natural flair involved, and according to legend it took only two lessons for Archie Fisher to teach him everything he knew. The second lesson was necessitated by the fact that much of the first was spent on the drink.

After a spell busking around Europe he moved to London, recording for the Transatlantic label and playing the folk club circuit playing an eclectic mixture of British folk and American blues in unusual tunings with plenty of improvisation, a fairly heady mix when you consider that, at this point, he didn't have a guitar of his own, content to use whatever instrument he could manage to scrounge temporarily at the gig and doesn't appear to have had a fixed address.

We're presumably not talking someone who spent hours in a garret honing his chops, and his first album was recorded in a kitchen on a reel-to-reel tape deck using a borrowed guitar..

His self-titled first album, which contained Needle of Death, appeared in 1965, followed later that year by It Don't Bother Me and collaborations with fellow guitarist John Renbourn (Jack Orion, Bert And John) the following year. 1967 saw the duo absorbed into ground-breaking folk supergroup Pentangle (with Jacqui McShee on vocals, bass player extraordinaire Danny Thompson and percussionist Terry Cox), an outfit that achieved commercial success between 1967 and 1972 with a string of successful albums, concerts characterised by extended solos and intensive improvisation and extensive radio and TV exposure.

Interspersed with the half-dozen albums recorded in the first incarnation of Pentangle (1968's The Pentangle and Sweet Child, 1969's Basket of Light, with Cruel Sister,  Reflection and Solomon's Seal following each year until 1972) Jansch recorded another three solo albums (Nicola,  Birthday Blues and Rosemary Lane) before the pressures of five world tours, recording and excessive alcohol consumption got too much for him in 1973, when he retreated to a farm in Wales.

There were occasional reunions through the eighties and nineties and into the twenty-first century, though from that point on Jansch remained essentially a solo artist who was, by all accounts, an introverted yet riveting performer, finger-picking in a style based around improvisation.

The albums, sixteen of them, followed at increasingly sporadic intervals through to 2006's The Black Swan, and along the way alcohol-related pancreatic illness prompted him to give up the drink ion 1987. International touring, Pentangle reunions,  and the reappearance of his back catalogue on CD ensured a continuing though largely under the radar presence, as did TV appearances and Colin Harper's biography, Dazzling Stranger.

Heart surgery in 2005 was followed by surgery for lung cancer in 2009, a circumstance that forced him out of some opening spots on that year's Neil Young tour, though he was able to rejoin Young on the 2010 leg of the tour, but the disease returned, leaving that situation where the examination of an extensive body of work is going to need to be done posthumously.

The examination, by the way, is about to start with an $11.99 download of his fifteen track eponymous debut from 1965 (padded out with a brace of bonus tracks).

The Izzys "Keep Your Powder Dry" EP (4*)

The world of blogs can lead you off in some unexpected directions, and I've been adding blogs that have regular items of interest to my Reading List on the site that hosts the various Little House of Concrete blogs.

Saves you bookmarking and actually going to check for updates, and all that…

Blabber 'n' Smoke, according to the banner, is a Glasgow view of Americana and related music and writings, and seems to have a knack for digging up albums that don't make it into the pages of Mojo, Rhythms and Uncut. Worth a look, if Americana floats your boat and you're inclined to look beyond the mainstream.

A recent  review of Mare Wakefield's Meant To Be sounded like something that might be worth investigating, and a quick check at iTunes revealed all five of her albums on sale for $16.99 a throw, which was a bit beyond what I was likely to spend on the basis of a single review, but it seemed worth keeping an eye out for other references which might sway things.

It was about that point when I noticed Blabber ‘n’ Smoke has a category labelled Downloads, which seemed worth a glance, and further investigation revealed this free download of an EP by The Izzys, who appear to have been around for a while operating in and around New York City.

This Keep Your Powder Dry EP is available over there on iTunes, by the way, along with several other releases, and based on an initial listen or three, they may well be picking up a bit of sales action from the Little House of Concrete.

With any number of echoes from the quality end of the past forty-something years. I heard a fair bit of Pete Townsend and Ronnie Lane in the opening Tear 'em On Down, but that may be the result of recent exposure to Rough Mix and it continues throughoutn, while the EP concludes with a reading of the Jerry Garcia Deal.

One to listen to with a fellow music freak and a decent glass of red while you do a bit of I'm getting a hint of with the wine and the music. Derivative, perhaps, but it sounds like they're operating from some pretty classy influences.

Reflection: Reviewing a Listening Paradigm

Just under twelve months ago, having just returned from the W.A. Odyssey, I posted a Reflection on The Music Pages concerning Hughesy's New Listening Paradigm. It was a time, in these parts at least, where New Paradigms were a topic of interest as Australian politicians worked through the implications of the August 2010 Federal Election, and it's interesting to return to the topic of New Paradigms now because, despite what's happening on the surface, there are deeper undercurrents in operation, largely out of sight.

As far as Australian politics goes, you'd probably be thinking that the Gillard government is currently going through its death throes, and you may well be right, and that they're having great difficulty getting anything done, which seems to be substantially wide of the mark.

They've actually managed to get a lot of legislation through the Parliament without anyone noticing, largely because everyone seems to have been watching the Abbot/Gillard media circus photo opportunities on the twenty-four hour news cycle.

So, you ask in your relentless quest for knowledge, what does this have to do with either Hughesy's listening habits (we were talking Hughesy's New Listening Paradigm weren't we?) or the world of music in general?

Well, for a start that reference to the twenty-four hour news cycle reminds me that we've undergone a major change in the way we consume/listen to music, and many of us might not exactly be working on a twenty-four hour music cycle, but if we're not it's probably because we have to sleep for a bit (assuming you don't have a speed habit, which means you've got three sleeps before Christmas or are looking to emulate Keith Richards and are looking to get through the decade without a kip).

Now, it might seem, on the surface, that not much has changed.

Certainly, if you're living next to a building site in these parts you'd be thinking that not much has changed as 4TO or HOT-FM blare out across the countryside, and, in that sense, not much has.

Commercial radio continues to be dominated by mass media dreck, but let's forgive the bastards for a minute and suggest that builders need a soundtrack, that they need to be able to hear it over the roar of sundry power tools and selecting a particular radio station and sticking to it cuts down on productivity issues related to constant changing of stations and arguments over whose musical taste is located in his nether regions…

Because they could, should they choose to do so, operate like some of us and have their own personal tailored to their own tastes radio station delivered through their preferred digital platform.

So as far as Hughesy's New Listening Paradigm is concerned, we're looking at the avenues through which we can manage the soundtrack that runs almost continuously from the ridiculously early hour when I get up while I'm in the environs of the office.

These days I tend to get started by catching up on the latest podcasts that iTunes downloads automatically, which usually fills in the time before the morning walk very nicely, and once I've had a chance to listen to as much of the latest news and current events as I can stomach it's time to cut the iTunes loose to provide the soundtrack for the rest of the day.

We're inclined to forget how much hassle was involved with listening to your own music back in the pre-digital era. Back before the five-disk CD changer, there were repeated and regular instances where the listener was required to physically walk over and add or remove recorded media from the player.

These days, of course, you add your material to your player of choice and let 'er rip.

Theoretically, you can go for twenty-four hours in shuffle mode without needing to change a thing, which brings the subject of organizing your music library into play.

Anybody who's visited the Little House of Concrete will be only too aware of the quantity of music on the shelves, and it probably comes as no surprise to learn that much of it has found its way onto the hard drive of the desktop computer, with selected subsets on the iPod and the iPad.

As far back as early 2008 I has around thirty-five thousand tracks on the hard drive of the old machine, and had actually heard them all at least once.

Then came the Great Computer Crash which didn't wipe out the whole library but did take out the associated metadata, which meant that the whole thirty-five thousand tracks (allegedly) hadn't been played.

The experience suggested thirty-five thousand tracks was just a tad excessive, and that the library needed to be substantially reduced, so over the next eighteen months some severe culling chopped it back by around eight thousand tracks.

But those tracks needed to be heard and sorted while the culling proceeded, which was, as you may have gathered, a major undertaking.

So how did we manage it?

The answer lies in the Smart Playlist side of iTunes, and worked on number-oriented playlists that the reader might care to consider if you need to sort out large quantities of digital music.

For a start you need a way to separate your latest acquisitions from all the other stuff in the library through an Unheard list (Smart Playlist Plays is 0) or a Recently Added list (Smart Playlist Date added in the last (say) six months Plays is less than 7, or whatever figure you specify). I like to have both, because Recently Added gives you a way to get to those recent additions after you've heard them once.

From there, I have a number of numerical Smart Playlists (named, predictably, One, Two and so on) (Smart Playlist Plays is whatever number you're looking at).

That's handy when you've been doing and adding the contents of all those CDs that come on the front of magazines like Mojo to the library along with everything you've bought or downloaded.

Downloaded material, in particular, can vary markedly in sound quality and performance and those CDs on the front of magazines can contain a certain amount of material that's surplus to requirements, and unless you're in a position to give that Unheard playlist your undivided attention there's every chance things you don't really need to keep are going to slip by unnoticed.

The numbered filters make it increasingly likely you'll catch the little devils, particularly if you've checked the Controls: Shuffle By Albums option). Not sure about the contents of the CD that came with Mojo? Well, here you go. Something like William S. Burroughs doing a number called Ich Bin Von Kopf Bis Fuss Auf Liebe Eingestellt (Falling In Love Again) might slip past once, but keep the playlists for the lower numbers as low as possible and you'll catch days the little devil eventually.

For that reason, I try to keep the lower-numbered playlists as small as possible.

It also means when you acquire something new you can hear it several times in fairly rapid succession, assuming Unheard, Ones and Twos are kept to an absolute minimum. I've found that you don't necessarily want to be working from Recently Added, since iTunes doesn't always download albums in the appropriate running order.

At the other end of the spectrum, you want some playlists that deliver good stuff you feel like hearing on a consistent basis. After deleting the stuff that doesn't quite meet your exacting standards you're still going to have a lot of material that's short of stellar quality, but judicious use of the Forward button in Shuffle mode will see the wheat separated from the chaff as you go along, and the higher you get in those numbered playlists you tend to find the dross turning up much less frequently.

I have a smart playlist called Top 1500 Most Played (Limit to 1500 items selected by most often played), individual artist best ofs (Artist contains whoever and Plays is greater than whatever you think is a fair thing) and similar genre-themed list (Genre contains whatever and Plays is greater than the number you've chosen in the previous instance). I've found it pays to increase the relevant numbers every so often as you go along as an extra way of filtering out the also-rans.

In between those two extremes, the numbered playlists (Plays is whatever) let you run through recent acquisitions in sequence provided you 're operating in Shuffle by album mode.

Those things take time, however, and in that article eleven months ago I noted that Ones were right on 1500, Twos were 10037 and falling) with Threes on 10079 and rising, which meant I was playing my way through the Twos, and once the counter hits the 10000 mark I was going to the next one up, looking for things on the Recently Added playlist that I needed to review.

Now, at the start of September 2011 on a Sunday morning when I'm about to hit the garden for an hour or so once I finish this, I've got the situation where there's an uncertain quantity of downloaded material (I haven't expanded the ZIP and RAR files yet) and a new Ry Cooder on the horizon, Unheard is sitting on twenty, including a Hatfield and the North EP that'll be the subject of some written activity in the future, while Ones number forty, including a Velvet Underground bootleg that's not likely to be played again, assuming it survives at all).

The Twos playlist that was sitting over the ten thousand mark a year ago now numbers exactly two thousand and will be gradually whittled further, with Threes and Fours hovering around the upper end of the ten thousands and everything above that reduced to a conveniently round figure that ends in a couple of zeroes.

Having worked through the lengthy process that has produced the result I've just finished describing, and with a couple of sources for new music filtering stuff into the bottom tier of the heirarchy, it now means that I might just be able to finish a couple of reviews that have been started at various points over the past six months, and should be able to get through the process of reviewing new acquisitions in a much more timely manner...

All of which means when that Ry Cooder Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down arrives on the hard drive it'll be played a couple of times in fairly rapid succession, and will subsequently work its way through those numbered playlists to the point where my favourite tracks find their way into the Top 1500 Most Played and there's a review here in the Music blog and over on the website as a backup…

We've got a few reviews and similar items in the process of being worked up at the moment, so if there's a sudden flurry of activity hereabouts, the astute reader will know what to attribute it to…

R.I.P. Jerry Leiber

They mightn't have been the first names that spring to mind when it comes to those questions about people you'd make interesting dinner party guests but anyone who's seen Jerry Leiber (25 April 1933 – 22 August 2011) and his songwriter Mike Stoller on one of those birth of rock or popular music since World War Two documentaries would know they'd have made a pretty good double act as dinner party raconteurs.

They weren't that shabby in the songwriting department either, but now that Jerry Leiber has left us it'd be down to Mike Stoller to recount single-handed the story about his holiday in Europe, paid for from the songwriting royalties from a song called Black Denim Trousers and Motorcycle Boots, covered as L'Homme à la Moto by Edith Piaf and another number called Bazoom (I Need Your Lovin') by The Cheers.

Stoller travelled with his first wife, met Edith Piaf while they were over there and returned to New York on the Andrea Doria, the liner that collided with the east-bound MS Stockholm off the fog bound coast of Nantucket, Massachusetts.

After the collision, with the ship listing heavily to starboard, half the lifeboats were useless, but the design of the ship allowed it to stay afloat for eleven hours, long enough to rescue 1,660 passengers and crew. Forty-six passengers were killed in the collision, but with the survivors being ferried into New York it would come as no surprise to find concerned family  members and friends at the disembarkation point to greet the survivors.

Leiber met Stoller with a dry suit and the news that they'd just scored a Number one hit with Hound Dog. The response from Stoller went something like What? Big Mama Thornton got to Number One?

No, Leiber replied. Some kid called Elvis Presley.

Given the extent and quality of their writing catalogue and their production work for Atlantic and their own Red Bird Records they'd undoubtedly have had a wealth of tales about The Coasters The Drifters, Ben E. King, Phil Spector, Jerry Wexler and Ahmet Ertegun.

And then there was their work with Mr Presley, including Jailhouse Rock and King Creole.

Born in Baltimore, Leiber met Long Island native Stoller in Los Angeles in 1950. Leiber was a high school senior working part time in a record store while the piano playing Stoller was a college freshman.
After his family moved west, Leiber had started writing lyrics, based on what he heard on the radio and his own childhood bacck east, but needed someone to write the music. A drummer friend recommended Stoller, a skilled pianist with a penchant for boogie-woogie, jazz and blues and the rest, as they say, is history.

They were capable of coming up with a song in a couple of minutes, and when producer Jean Aberbach and his brother turned up looking for the songs Leiber and Stoller were supposedly writing for the Jailhouse Rock movie, refusing to leave without them, Jerry and Mike knocked out four songs over the next couple of hours, including Jailhouse Rock and (You're So Square) Baby, I Don't Care.

They'd been too busy doing the jazz club circuit to get around to the writing any earlier.

Their first recorded effort was Real Ugly Woman, recorded by Jimmy Witherspoon and their first success came with Hard Times by Charles Brown in 1952. They also had minor hits with Hound Dog and Kansas City (first recorded as K. C. Loving) before Elvis took Big Mama Thornton's number to the top of the charts.

From there, of course, there was their work with The Coasters, theatrical little teenage vignettes like Charlie Brown, Young Blood, Along Came Jones, Poison Ivy (though an ocean of calamine lotion won't be much help in dealing with a social disease), Little Egypt, Searchin' and Yakety Yak.

In that fifties environment where black music was crossing over into the pop charts those songs, essentially rhythm and blues tunes with radio-friendly pop lyrics, were major landmarks, and from there they moved into the girl group era, working out of the Brill Building, producing their own material as well as songs churned out by a stable of writers including Doc Pomus and Mort Shuman, Carole King and Gerry Goffin,  Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil and influencing Phil Spector along the way.

A collaboration with Lester Sill (later the les in the Philles label partnership with Phil Spector) in Spark Records produced Smokey Joe's Cafe and Riot in Cell Block #9 by The Robins before Atlantic bought the label in a deal that brought Leiber and Stoller into the Atlantic stable while still allowing them to work for other labels as, effectively, the first independent record producers.

For Atlantic, they morphed The Robins into The Coasters, co-wrote and produced hits for Ben E. King (Stand By Me and Spanish Harlem) and came up with On Broadway (another co-write with Barry Mann and Cynthia Weil), There Goes My Baby and Dance With Me for The Drifters.

After Atlantic they produced and wrote records for United Artists including Tell Him by The Exciters and Love Potion #9 for The Clovers before setting up Red Bird Records, which released the Shangri-Las' Leader of the Pack and Chapel of Love by the Dixie Cups.

Things went relatively quiet after they sold Red Bird, but the pair continued working in an independent operation, working with artists as diverse as Peggy Lee (Is That All There Is?), Stealers Wheel (Stuck in the Middle With You), and Elkie Brooks before being inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame in 1985 and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1987.

There were, as you'd expect, any number of other awards along the way and in 1995 a musical, Smokey Joe's Cafe, based on that song catalogue, enjoyed an extended run on Broadway and the soundtrack album picked up a Grammy in 1996.

2009's Hound Dog: The Leiber & Stoller Autobiography, written with David Ritz is sitting on the iPad as I type, right at the top of the Read These ASAP list.

Son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, Jerry Leiber grew up on the edge of the Baltimore ghetto, where his widowed mother ran a grocery store and was the only shopkeeper in the area who'd extend credit to blacks, picked up his musical inspiration through exposure to black culture during his childhood and teenage years, was responsible, along with partner Mike Stoller for fifteen #1 hits by ten different artists, had songs recorded by, among others, The Beatles, Aretha Franklin, Willie Nelson, Otis Redding, The Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra, Barbra Streisandand James Taylor and died, surrounded by family, he died of cardiopulmonary failure in a Los Angeles hospital, survived by three children and two grandchildren and generations of music fans on 22 August 2011.

Three Period Pieces: Beyond the Fringe, Scaffold & The Liverpool Scene

Nostalgia, according to some, isn't what it used to be, but then again things in general ain't the way they used to be either, which is probably the point behind the whole nostalgia thing anyway.

I'm not sure about anyone else, but when I get nostalgic it's an exercise in recalling the way things used to be and figuring out how they've changed, which is basically the motivation behind my Interesting Times project as I try to make sense of some of the things that I've been on the fringe of over the past fifty-odd years.

Some of them, as the reader may imagine, were very odd indeed, and reconnection with Steve and Rhonda Doyle at Bloodwood brought back memories of JCUNQ Commem Week Revues, gentlemen named Charlie and Kimbo and Saturday night’s Underworld in St Matthew's Church Hall.

Underworld was the scene where Hughesy indulged in the odd spot of poetry reading, and while most of the source volumes are long since lost, I still have a copy of Penguin Modern Poets 10: The Mersey Sound and a slim volume of verse from Roger McGough.

I haven't revisited those recently, and haven't looked too far when it comes to tracking down copies of The Children of Albion anthology, Pete Brown's Let It Roll, Kafka, or Jeff Nuttall's Bomb Culture, all of which were key texts in that particular time and place but reminiscences of hirsute gentlemen proclaiming For mine brother Jacob is an hairy man had me heading over to the iTunes Store to check the availability of various early sixties British comedy.

A quick perusal had Hughesy purchasing the soundtrack from Beyond The Fringe (remarkable value for 42 tracks at $8.99), The Amazing Adventures of the Liverpool Scene ($35.99, but 33 tracks. over two and a half hours of material) and Scaffold At Abbey Road 1966 to 1971 ($10.99).

Now, what's under discussion here isn't going to be everybody's cup of tea, and playing through Beyond the Fringe seems to deliver sequential variations on the same sketch from different sources, but as content to throw some different elements into your shuffle mode listening it works just fine. If Hughesy was still polluting the local airwaves Bowen listeners would probably be subjected to repeated musings on Peter Cook's lack of Latin for the judging, and the memorable Peter Cook and Dudley Moore one-legged man auditioning for the role of Tarzan sketch.

We're talking close to fifty years after the act, which was topical at the time, so there's a certain amount of datedness kicking in, but a wander through the tracklisting is, at least as far as Hughesy's concerned, a chance to revisit some of the classic years of British anti-establishment humour.

Tracking down The Liverpool Scene and Scaffold, on the other hand, was prompted by a largely forgotten fascination with the poetry of Adrian Henri (Liverpool Scene) and Roger McGough (Scaffold) and it's interesting to note how the works of the two gentlemen have aged over the years.

The Mersey Poets were, largely, working in pop poetry mode, which was what made them ideal for Hughesy's Underworld readings, and a glance through the index of Penguin Modern Poets 10 reveals a preponderance of McGough over Henri when it went to pieces actually read.

Given the time gap there's no way of fathoming why that should be so, and using pencilled asterisks in the index isn't the most scientific research tool, but I suspect McGough's rather poppier offerings worked better in that setting than Henri's more consciously poetic approach.

Interesting, because forty years later a listen to both albums suggests Henri's Liverpool Scene have aged rather better than McGough's Scaffold.

Both, of course, need to be approached as period pieces that are very much a product of the times, with or without a substantial side serving of nostalgia and fond memory.

There's also (one suspects, in the absence of empirical evidence) a degree of difference in approach based on the presence or otherwise of actual musicians with actual chops, a significant variation in the sort of live work each outfit was able to manage and, more than likely, record company issues that differentiated between the EMI-signed Scaffold with the Beatle connection confirmed through Paul McCartney's brother Mike McGear as a member of the trio and the RCA-signed Liverpool Scene.

The third member of Scaffold, apart from poet McGough and singer McGear, was actor John Gorman (allegedly the most loony of the three).

Originated in a Liverpool arts lab, Scaffold found work around colleges, arts festivals but one suspects the recorded output was aimed towards a mainstream audience rather than the fringes around the colleges and festivals and much of the material on At Abbey Road 1966 to 1971 would have worked pretty well in environments like TV variety shows. Alongside the familiar hit singles (Thank U Very Much, Lily the Pink and Do You Remember, catchy little lightweight ditties that were almost guaranteed radio airplay) there's a strong element of Gang Show (Gin Gan Goolie) and Rugby song (2 Day's Monday) in a collection that is rather light on for the pop poetry I was looking for. Still, at $10.99…

Henri's Liverpool Scene, on the other hand, while emerging from the same arts lab scene, headed towards the fringes rather than the mainstream, featuring on underground DJ John Peel's radio shows and included guitarists Andy Roberts and Mike Hart, who had substantial musical chops and went on to develop solo careers.

You'll still find Henri's portentious poetics predominating the mix, but the vocal and instrumental contributions from the others add light and shade to something that's very much a product of its time but provides an interesting listening experience.

Given the price, it's a collection that needs to be approached with caution and sampled at length, but with over two and a half hours of material The Amazing Adventures of the Liverpool Scene weighs in as pretty good value for money as far as Hughesy's concerned.

Your own mileage, of course, may vary.