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The importance of being eccentric

By Chris Parker

 

Just occasionally, it's possible to be genuinely astonished by the sheer unexpectedness, the wholly original, quirky individuality of a piece of music.

The most obvious recent example is Joanna Newsom's extraordinary album Ys, which literally froze me in my tracks when I first heard strains of it issuing from my 18-year-old son's room; it was partly the unique timbre of the voice (which said son – approvingly – compares with that of "a baby on crack"), and partly the eloquent fecundity of the lyrics, steeped as they are in fairy tale, folk myth and a sort of enigmatic bucolic wisdom tinged with melancholy that for some unfathomable reason always reminds me of the novels of Willa Cather. This got me ruminating on the subject of genuine eccentrics and how elevating their music can be.

Perhaps the most eccentric (and almost wilfully obscure) figure in this category is Ed Askew, whose eponymous ESP album first swam into my ken courtesy of DJ Pete Drummond in the very early days of Radio 1. As soon as I heard "Red Woman", a tender little love song sung in a grainy, high-pitched drawling whine to the accompaniment of what I now know to be a tiple (a sort of South American mandolin-type stringed instrument), I was hooked. The rest of the album proved to be a great deal more unusual than "Red Woman": surreal songs about angels (in shades), gardens, unicorns, rivers, dreams – all sung in this uniquely affecting voice set against the hypnotic chug of the tiple.

Spreading the word about this discovery, however, proved problematic; friends were, indeed, so resistant to Askew's charms that I (shamefully) began to employ the record almost solely as a way of emptying my room of unwelcome late-night visitors. Askew recently (after over 30 years) issued another album, Little Eyes, which so far has evaded all my attempts to track down and purchase…

Not quite as eccentric (but close) is David Ackles, who made three Elektra albums: an eponymous debut, Subway to the Country and the (briefly) highly regarded American Gothic. Intensely personal songs about the vicissitudes of romantic love have always been the singer/songwriter's staple fare, but Ackles intersperses these with a series of mordant reflections on society's ills, seen from the perspective of a somewhat romanticised "wayfaring stranger"-type troubadour, constantly on the move, peddling his songs town to town.

Everything from the treatment of the returning soldier ("Candy Man" – about a one-armed Vietnam veteran who takes his revenge on his community in a very unusual manner), through the loss of religious faith (an extraordinarily beautiful song, "His Name is Andrew"), to the world of heroin addiction ("Main Line Saloon") and informal prostitution and fetishism ("American Gothic") is grist to the late singer's mill. He has also produced the perfect love song; "Love's Enough" is the simplest of sentiments set to a characteristically attractive Ackles melody.

While we're talking uniquely distinctive, an album that contains highly unusual musical textures and the odd acerbic lyric ("St Nicholas Hall" is a satirical look at the alumnus begging letter, a topic rarely addressed by popular music) is Farewell Aldebran by Judy Henske and Jerry Yester (on Straight). Which brings me to another one-time Straight artist, Tim Buckley.

Although Goodbye and Hello, with its anti-war songs, social commentary and fey romanticism, marked him as a folkie, his restless musical spirit didn't allow him to settle in any comfortable groove, and Happy Sad and its successor, Blue Afternoon, are the quintessence of jazz-folk, masterpieces of moody, melancholic, yearning beauty, in which the Buckley voice soars and swoops over a meltingly lovely backdrop of guitar, vibes and acoustic bass, all subtly propelled by Buckley's 12-string.

Again, there's a perfect song here: "Buzzin' Fly" is, like "Love's Enough", a simple sentiment, exultant, celebratory, tinged with regret, but it's irresistibly affecting and impeccably sung. Buckley was later to experiment with wild, jazzy arrangements (the fascinating Starsailor) and sex-rock (Greetings from LA), but even his most misguided forays into commercialism can't conceal one of the most versatile and flexible voices in the music, and his multi-talented son Jeff carried on the tradition into more overtly rock-based music in the 1990s, only to emulate his father (who died at 28, a victim of heroin) by also dying a senseless early death.

There's a great book about them both, Dream Brother (by David Browne, Fourth Estate), which attempts to explain some of the stubborn cussedness that characterised both men.

No gallery of musical eccentrics would be complete, though, without the Incredible String Band. Again, some might find them impossibly fey, with their songs about clouds and hedgehogs, but when they hit their stride with their masterpieces, The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter and Wee Tam and the Big Huge, they produced some of the most original songs of their era, mixing what is now irritatingly called "world music" promiscuously with Scottish (and Appalachian) folk, all infused with a sort of hallucinogenic hippie mysticism, two parts Kahlil Gibran to one part Shelley.

There are many reasons that the record industry should treasure and nurture such eccentrics – their initially weird-sounding music often turns out to be hugely influential, for one thing – but when it comes down to it, the best reason for championing them is simply that a world in which homogenised pap drowns everything else out is an impoverished, dull world.

 

 

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