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 SEÁN KELLY |
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PETE ATKIN...
...was born a long time ago — so long ago that they had a celebratory party in the street. It turns out that what they were celebrating was the end of the Second World War, but never mind.
Pete’s musical education consisted first of picking out tunes on his grand-parents’ piano, and then having some violin lessons at school at the age of about eight. He never got to be specially good on the violin, but it did teach him to read music, which helped a bit when it came to thrashing out Shadows’ and Ventures’ tunes with some friends who had guitars, and working out how to sing Buddy Holly and Everly Brothers songs with his friends Colin Rose and Alan Sizer.
Pete was born in a Cambridge family that had no connection with the university. He was what they call a ‘townie’. Thanks to the Eleven-plus and getting a place at the Perse School, he did end up going to the university, though, and that led to several enormous bits of good luck. These included, in 1966, meeting Clive James, an Australian post-graduate student, who loved songs almost as much as Pete did, and who was looking for someone to collaborate with in writing them. This turned out to be a life-long relationship.
By the time they’d left university they’d written several dozen songs, and made a couple of privately-produced vinyl LPs from home-made recordings of them, some sung by Pete and some by Julie Covington, another student contemporary of theirs, whose exceptional talents as a singer and an actress were already obvious to everyone who saw and heard her.
Having written all these songs, it seemed logical to try to get somewhere with them, so they set out trying to interest music publishers. One of these, David Platz at Essex Music, was foresighted enough to invest in getting Pete to make some demo recordings.
In the meantime, Julie Covington had made recordings for EMI: a single of Pete and Clive’s song “The Magic Wasn’t There”, followed up with an album, The Beautiful Changes, which contained seven or eight of Clive and Pete’s songs.
This was 1970, at a time when Kenny Everett presented the nation’s highest-profile record show of the week, on Saturday mornings on Radio One. Kenny heard Pete’s demos and started playing a couple of the tracks every week on his show, crediting them at first to “the mystery singer,” because they weren’t then available to the general public. This kind of high-profile attention led to these recordings being released as an album, Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger. It was only after the LP came out on Philips Records that Pete started appearing in folk clubs and elsewhere as a singer.
Meanwhile, Clive and Pete were still writing together, and Pete started making an album a year, each one with a slightly bigger budget and involving more and more famous musicians (Chris Spedding, Herbie Flowers, Ray Cooper, Kenny Clare, and many more).
Pete went on to record many sessions for John Peel’s Radio One show, among others, which did a great deal to increase his loyal fanbase. And having played support sets for the likes of Al Stewart, Man, the Kursaal Flyers, Lou Reed, and others, his gigs expanded into universities and larger venues.
Clive meanwhile was building up his journalism and television career. His weekly TV review column for The Observer on Sundays revolutionised the way television was written about, and helped to boost his own television career.
In 1975, Pete and Clive toured together for the first time to promote Pete’s sixth album with a show they called, perhaps a little ironically, “Together At Last”.
But with the arrival of punk, Pete’s musical career dwindled a bit. He carried on gigging, but started writing other things for TV and radio and for the theatre. His play about musicians, “A&R”, was commissioned by the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, for the 1977 Edinburgh Festival; it received a second production in 1978 by the Royal Shakespeare Company, with a cast which included David Threlfall, Barrie Rutter and Nicholas LePrevost, and which ran for six months at the Company’s Donmar Warehouse theatre in London.
In 1980, he finally got a proper job, as a producer in BBC Radio’s Light Entertainment department, where he went on to spend the eighties producing panel games (“My Music”, “My Word”, “Just A Minute”, etc.) and scripted comedies (“After Henry”, “Yes, Minister”, “Uncle Mort”, “Jarvis’s Frayn”, “Legal, Decent, Honest & Truthful”, etc., etc.)
In the nineties he moved to Bristol for the BBC, and with the development of digital technology he went back to being a freelance. Among other things, over the next few years he produced “This Sceptred Isle”, for Radio 4 (396 episodes altogether — yes, that number is correct) a huge narrative history of Britain, written by Christopher Lee (the other one, not the actor), and featuring Anna Massey, Juliet Stevenson, Paul Eddington, Peter Jeffrey, and many others. He also produced and directed many comedies and dramas, some of them by the likes of Frederic Raphael and Peter Nichols, and dozens of Richmal Crompton’s “Just William” stories with Martin Jarvis.
The nineties also brought the internet. One of Clive and Pete’s long-time fans, Steve Birkill, started a website about their songs which enabled their fans to find each other, and which encouraged Clive and Pete to start performing and writing and recording again.
It also created a demand for the re-release on CD of Pete’s six albums from the seventies (initially on See For Miles records).
After the turn of the millennium, Clive decided to call a halt to what was by then his major television career, mainly because it was taking up so much time that he was unable to complete all of the writing he wanted to do. This meant that it was now possible for him to fit in touring with Pete again. They put together a flexible, portable two-man show which they toured successfully all around the UK three times, and all around Australia in 2003.
Unsurprisingly, all this song-based activity also revived their song-writing. Pete launched into several new recording projects, including The Lakeside Sessions and Winter Spring. It also led to another CD reissue of all Pete’s 70s albums, this time on Demon/Edsel Records, an exceptionally beautiful and well-documented set.
In 2007 Pete hooked up with Simon Wallace, an outstanding pianist who had been a fan of the songs since the early seventies. They were rehearsing with a band for a live performance when they decided it was going so well that they should record what they were doing, not least since the original recordings were no longer available. The result was Midnight Voices, a collection of new versions of many of Clive and Pete’s best-remembered songs, which proved how well they still worked both for long-time fans and for new listeners.
This was followed by The Colours of the Night, a CD of new and previously unrecorded songs, with a band that included the return of Chris Spedding on electric guitar, who after forty years as a hugely successful session man in America had lost none of his impact and originality.
In 2016, Ian Shircore published “Loose Canon”, a book which explored the stories behind many of Clive and Pete’s best-loved songs, and how the unique combination of Clive’s lyrics and Pete’s music justifies their reputation as ‘the British music industry’s best-kept secret’. (Stephen Fry, in his introduction to the book, calls the songs “funny, sad, beautiful, true.”)
Clive died in 2019, after several years of increasingly severe health difficulties, but Pete continues regularly to perform the songs, both on his own, and with Simon Wallace on piano. Pete’s latest recorded album, The Luck of the Draw, is the result of this continuingly productive collaboration. Some of the songs on this album have never been recorded before, but all of them come up fresh, as if brand new, with the help of another superb group of backing musicians.
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