Oh, how did it start? Way back in 1966, at the City of Coventry Boarding school, Cleobury Mortimer aged 15. It was not long after Bob Dylan and Donovan arrived on the scene with Times They are a Changing and Catch the Wind and the arrival of the Pirate radio stations, changing the course of popular music from it’s simple love songs to experimenting and mixing different forms of roots music blues, R & B and folk with folk poetry and socially aware lyrics. It was an exciting period that opened up new worlds, New opportunities, new directions, a feeling that young people were going to change the world through the power of their music and creativity.
On Saturdays, we were allowed out of school and could walk the three miles to the nearest village, Cleobury Mortimer, Shropshire and I used to pick up the latest music papers,Melody Maker, Record Mirror,Disc and Music Echo, the Beatles and the Elvis magazines and a little publication called Record Songbook, which had the full lyrics to all the latest and upcoming hits. It was Record Songbook that got me started on writing song lyrics.
I didn’t know much about poetry or lyric writing but through reading the lyrics each month in Record Song book and hearing the songs on the radio, I internalised the basic structures. Boarding school life was quite regimented and tough and there was quite a bit of emotion floating around, being away from home and dealing with all the flak and bullying. I was good at English and creative with it and I needed some form of self expression in which to channel that emotion and creativity.
One Saturday afternoon,sitting in the study reading various editions of Record Songbook, I noted two song lyrics for contrast.The first was by the Troggs – With a Girl Like You and the second was The Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkle. The Paul Simon lyric stood out a mile with it’s magnificent imagery. I didn’t pretend to understand it back then but later bought all the Paul Simon songbooks and albums to see what I could learn from them.Meanwhile I just wanted to see if i could write a lyric, something much less ambitious. The Walker Brothers latest single was playing on the radio in the next Baby You Don’t Have to Tell me and so the experimental lyric became Baby I Can Tell. A first effort and i think I nicked the line ‘Superficial sighs’ from Dangling Conversation. It was just an experiment to see if I could write one at all.
I probably wrote and 9 or 10 in the 9 months left at school.
Note – To be completed,work in progress.