As part of the celebrations to commemorate
the 25th anniversary of the death of the celebrated poet Philip
Larkin, the Hull City Arts Unit has sponsored the recording
of a CD, All Night North and the Philip Larkin Society
asked twelve local Hull bands to set one of Larkin's poems to
music. Each band was given a day in our studio to record and
mix their piece with engineer John Spence and the CD was released
in June. Marrying poetry with music isnt that easy and there
will always be a difference in form between what is poetry and
what are lyrics. Really understanding Larkin's poems so that
they can be treated sympathetically can be a hard task but the
bands that were chosen have made a great attempt at bringing
the two forms together. Larkin is one of the country's greatest
poets and was even offered the post of Laureate which he turned
down. His poetry is filled with references and literary devises
that aren't the stuff of the average pop song but the essence
of his poetry and the secret of his success as a poet is that
he loved and wrote about commonplace events and the lives of
ordinary folk "Common People". Listening
to the album it's clear that some poems lend themselves better
to this type of treatment than others and while there are a
few near misses, overall it's a great attempt at popularising
his poetry and bringing it to a new audience. We will be putting
up more of the Larkin sessions over the next few months but
start off with Man-made Noise and their brilliant version of
"Mr Bleaney"
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In this short video Jim Orwin and John
Spence talk about the general background of the Larkin
Society's involvement in the production of the CD All
Night North. We will be featuring a lot of these
sessions in the coming months with the usual breakdown
of how they were tackled. These were tough on John in
that the whole track had to be recorded and mixed in
a single day but it's a great idea and a rare opportunity
for young new bands to be commissioned to compose music
for such great writing.
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Philip Larkin's Music
Many of
you know that we are based in the northern English city of Hull
a once great maritime port and centre of the deep sea fishing
fleet but like many of our industrial cities, Hull has fallen
into decline in recent years and in a poll to find the crappest
town to live in the UK, Hull was easily voted
into the number one slot by its own residents! But the accolades
for Hull don't end there and it now boasts the lowest scores
in the UK's educational league tables, the highest incidence
of teenage pregnancies in Europe ( not just the UK see ) the
highest rates of obesity in the UK and less people attending
church than any other city (don't know if that's actually that
bad) Not really awash with literary greats or musical giants
( notable exception David Bowie's stunning band the Spiders
) one voice stands out as a true talent.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.
Philip Larkin is now considered as one of England's
greatest post war poets and though not his city of birth, Hull
was to become his adopted home. It was during the thirty years
he worked at the library at Hull university that he produced
the greater part of his published work and Larkin's poems from
this time sit easily in the dreary post war austerity
of a Hull ravaged and down from extensive war time bombing.
Larkin obviously drew from his surroundings and the local people,
famously pre-empting Morrisey's miserabalism by decades. Offering
an explanation for the source of his poetry "unhappiness"
and the source of his popularity "writing about
unhappiness", Larkin told an interviewer
late in his career that deprivation was for him what daffodils
were for Wordsworth. But Larkin had another passion apart from
his writing.
He had discovered jazz when he was at school in Coventry between
the wars when jazz represented the music of decadence and danger
and it must have seemed unbelievably exciting and revolutionary
set against his background of a repressed middle class England.
By the 50s jazz had become the music of youth rebellion in the
UK and whilst never a Beatnik, Larkin belonged to a
group of jazz record enthusiasts who scoured record shops in
search of rare imports.
In 1961 Larkin was asked to write on jazz for the Daily Telegraph
and though he didn't feel particularly competent in the undertaking,
he took it anyway admitting that he didn't really have any specialist
knowledge but rather "an ability to write smart journalism
that makes a record sound attractive or unattractive as the
case may be"
A huge amount has been written about Larkin's love of jazz but
it's an uncomfortable relationship in that while he adored the
early blues based jazz of players like Armstrong and Duke Ellington,
when Jazz mutated into bebop and more experimental forms Larkin
jumps ship. In the last letter he wrote before his death he
defined his jazz tastes as almost anything after Jelly Roll
Morton and before Charlie Parker. He liked Bix, Armstrong, Ellington,
Pee Wee Russell and Eddy Condon but he hated the post war experimental
jazz of John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Ornette Coleman and even
Miles Davis. I have a mate who shares Larkin's hatred of modern
jazz and I love winding him up by playing Miles's Kind of
Blue album. There's a bit in "So What"
where Mick tells me in exactly the same place where Miles "goes
wrong"..... priceless. You either get modern jazz or you
don't and there's no doubt that Larkin didn't get it.
So while Larkin was undoubtedly a lover of early jazz he was
a pretty bad choice as jazz critic for a daily newspaper
though he wrote beautifully about the very narrow band of jazz
he loved. His wry sense of humour and craftsmanship as a writer
really give his reviews an edge that makes for great reading
and you can imagine him really enjoying slating some of the
later jazz greats. Typical of his acerbic reviews is this about
Coltraine : 'metallic and passionless nullity gave way to
exercises in gigantic absurdity'. Of Miles Davis:"
his lifeless muted tone, at once hollow and unresonant,
creeps along only just in tempo......." Not really
a fan then but Larkin's never easy to pigeonhole and he's actually
very fair and occasionaly even eulogistic about some of the
music of Davis and even Coltrane though admiting it's not his
cup of tea.
So while he had an uneasy relationship with these later jazz
innovaters his love of early jazz and one jazz musician in particular
is significant: the black New Orleans clarinetist and soprano
sax master Sidney Bechet, for whom Larkin's enthusiasm
knew no bounds: "There are not
many perfect things in jazz, but Bechet playing the blues could
be one of them", he wrote in the Guardian
in 1960. A look at a recent compilation of Larkins' jazz
choices all serves to underline the fact that deep down while
he was a jazz fan in his head he was clearly a blues man at
heart. Larkin was bewitched by the imagery and romanticism of
jazz, the dance halls, the drugs and sex and the black experience
but musically he was tied tightly to the blues progression underpinning
early jazz music and in fact some of his most affectionate Telegraph
reviews are for blues recordings.
Of Sonny Terry and Brownie
Mcghee's "Down Home Blues" Larkin writes " This
music is as natural as breathing and one wants it to go on as
long". but perhaps his most eloquant advocacy for
the blues comes in another review "No one would
contest that the blues are fundamental to jazz. This simple
twelve bar chordal progression- common, subdominant and dominant
seventh- underlies the Ellington concerto and the Parker experiment
as much as the exuberances of a 1920 jug band or the balladry
of an itinerant guitarist. Yet for all its formal simplicity
it is rarely monotonous. Somehow in this most characteristic
music of the American Negro has been imprisoned an inexhaustible
emotional energy. You can go on playing or listening to the
blues all night"
Blind Lemon Larkin anyone?
