In part 6 of this article series we look at one band and two singers who all released fantastic albums in 1970 but sadly either disappeared from the scene of fizzled out shortly after. Interestingly they have all enjoyed renewed interest due to CD releases of their music many years later. We start with one of my favorite bands of that era.
The story of Trees is unique among most of Britain’s folk-rock bands of their time. Many of their contemporaries started their career in small clubs and venues before they were discovered and signed to a record label. Trees did it backwards. As guitarist David Costa recalls, “We got signed to CBS before we’d really even got through much of a chord sequence together.” The quintet was made out of very talented musicians and singer, albeit without much experience of playing with other musicians or performing in front of an audience. Costa: “There was no grand plan, it was just clear that it was what we all wanted to do, because we all got on and because we were making quite a pretty noise relatively easily.”
You might think from listening to their recordings that the band was heavily influenced by British folk music, but their inspiration came from across the pond and West Coast bands like The Byrds, Quicksilver Messenger, Jefferson Airplane, It’s A Beautiful Day. Costa remembers one particular influence: “It was Buffalo Springfield that did it for me because of Stills’ Bluebird on ‘Buffalo Springfield Again’, where he’s playing lead acoustic and lead electric. That was a signal to me.”
In August 1969 Trees entered the studio to record their debut album. An important milestone for a young band with no experience, but they were faced with a difficulty. Costa: “It’s that kind of good news, bad news. Good news, you’ve just been signed to CBS. Bad news, you don’t have the first fucking idea what it is you’re supposed to do in the studio. We were very young. Bias was only 19, for God’s sake!”
Bias Boshell was the group’s bass player and main songwriter, as well as co-singer and acoustic guitar player. One of the songs he contributed to the album was the title track The Garden of Jane Delawney. The song goes back to an early age of the songwriter: “I was very, very young. I mean I was 13 or 14 or something. It wasn’t sitting down and going, ‘Oh’, I’ve got this idea for a melody, or I’ve got this idea for some words.’ They just came together. It sort of ended up finished. A picture of horror and beauty. I can’t think of any particular thing that I was reading. The name, I don’t know where that came from.” This sounds like a comment one might say about writing some forgettable pop song. Not so, for The Garden of Jane Delawney’s haunting melody is not far from what Trees’ contemporaries dug out of vaults in The English Folk Dance and Song Society in search for traditional songs. Not bad for a 13-year old.
Singer Celia Humphris, then only 18 of age, remembers the recording of the song: “It stands out for me mainly because I was suffering from bronchitis at the time and I was just glad to get through it without coughing!” Not only she did not cough, but she delivered one of my favorite vocals across this series of articles:
The band loved writing songs in the key of D, of which David Costa said: “It is at once the most sublime and haunting, with a decided willingness to cross to the dark side within the space of an open string or two. We found dissonance early on in the game, and tension, and with a dash of naiveté added to the mix, the results were often surprising.” Lady Margaret is a traditional song that the band adopted, giving it a lovely dramatic treatment. They first heard it performed by Buffy Sainte Marie, described as, “a rambling, warbling rendition full of dread and delivery, theatrical and arrhythmic.” Unlike some of their contemporaries, who viewed the traditional folk song as a sacred artifact handed by previous generations and not to be tempered with, Trees used these songs as a starting point for a contemporary rock arrangement. From David Costa’s description of the song’s lyrics, you can imagine their amused approach to the plethora of murder ballads and tales of horror in traditional songs: “Lady Margaret is a dark and sordid tale very much akin to all those other dark and sordid tales within the pages of Child’s Ballads, tales of Lady This and Lord That and Young Whatisface, where gratuitous violence, psychopathic misogyny and an utter failure of rational, mature reconciliation end up in mayhem and the point of a long sword.”
Celia Humphris – vocals
Barry Clarke – lead and acoustic guitars
David Costa – acoustic and 12-string guitars, design, cover painting
Bias Boshell – bass, vocals, acoustic guitar
Unwin Brown – drums
The Garden of Jane Delawney was released in April 1970, when Trees were still an unknown entity on the music scene. But the press was impressed. Karl Dallas described them in Melody Maker, June 1970 as, “artists who have an individual brilliance and a collective rapport that is nothing less than phenomenal.” Time Out wrote in August 1970: “Their two most striking distinguishing marks are their choice of material and the voice of Celia their singer.” The same month Beat Instrumental added: “I enjoyed listening to them as much as I have any group over the last few months. They’re nice people too, and it’s hard to see how they can fail to develop into one of our best bands. A lot of us are eagerly awaiting the next album.” They did not have to wait long, for the band’s second album followed only a few months later.
After the release of The Garden of Jane Delawney the band toured for most of the spring and summer of 1970. They opened for some of the era’s best bands, including the Scottish tour with Fleetwood Mac, gigs with Yes, Fotheringay, Faces, and even Pink Floyd. Costa said of that phase in the band’s development: “We had grown up in that six months. Life had become significantly harder. We were piling into our blue transit every night, we were crashing on people’s floors, we were living on oats. But we were actually beginning to listen to ourselves, and listen to what our strengths were.” Celia Humphris had to adjust her singing technique to match the amplified volume of her band mates on stage: “I started to sing in my chest range which is much stronger but totally different to the head range. I couldn’t move from one to the other without a yodel.”
The band started listening to ambitious artists who blended folk with other styles such as Curved Air and Renaissance. Humphris: “It did influence us a bit away from the solid folk into slightly more dreamy things. And Bias became fascinated by the rhythms of ragas.” Bias Boshell also started playing more keyboards, adding complex textures to the arrangements. The sound became darker and more psychedelic. And we come to the band’s second album and its masterpiece, On The Shore.
The song that brought back awareness of Trees to modern listeners many years later is Geordie, A traditional Child Ballad that was performed in the late 1950s by Ewan MacColl as well as Shirley Collins. The groove that guitarist Barry Clarke and drummer Unwin Brown play starting at 2:30 was sampled by producer Danger Mouse for Gnarls Barkley’s hit St. Elsewhere in 2006. If this is what it takes for new audiences to learn about music treasures of the past then so be it. The end justifies the means.
The song features excellent guitar work by Barry Clarke, who talked about a major influence of his: “There’s no doubt Richard Thompson led all of us down the path of the English lead guitar style. He showed us the ways and means to play sweeter notes and phrases.”
The centerpiece of the album is Sally Free And Easy, a 10-minute epic take on a song written by Cyril Tawney in 1958, who said about the song: “As well as breaking hearts, sailors also have them broken, and my output contains several in that vein. Inspiration came from various shipmates as well as my vulnerable young self. Submariners seemed particularly prone, and the accompaniment mimics a submarine’s diesel engine. Probably my most successful song. I’ve heard Bob Dylan, Marianne Faithful and many others singing it, but its initial popularity was undoubtedly due to Davy Graham.” Indeed Davy Graham’s version of the song is superb and may have been the version that made the band aware of it.
As you start listening to the song you immediately notice its significance with a rolling piano pattern, played by Bias Boshell. Celia Humphris: “Sally Free And Easy was brilliant. It happened after an all-night recording session. The guys were fiddling with a tune they’d always liked, and Bias moved to the piano. It was around five in the morning and we felt great afterwards. It’s my personal favorite. That was indeed a turning point.” The song starts softly but keeps building up and one can hear the ragas that influenced Barry Clarke. David Costa: “I was playing a configuration that was tuned in D with a capo, wrestling with a fake tremolo which is partly why my fingers gave up, which you can hear in the second verse. We had to double the tempo because I couldn’t keep on doing it. I went into a different pattern, everybody kicked in, and the build just picked up from there. None of us expected Sally Free And Easy to happen the way it did. We couldn’t quite believe what we were doing but knew it was a defining moment.”
One take is all it took to commit this masterpiece to tape. Drummer Unwin Brown: “Sally Free And Easy was the closest we ever got to delivering what we wanted to deliver, because it went down live. We’d never played it before. We toyed with it in rehearsal, decided we were going to do it and must have said ‘ok let’s give it a go.’ Bias was on keyboards, which opened out the band hugely, and producer Tony Cox stepped in on bass. We began to run it and it became completely apparent that it was going to work – so we went for it, did it in one take and clearly nailed it.”
Last words on this classic track by David Costa: “Sally Free and Easy was just the very best of our ability, because it went down live. The only thing we overdubbed was Celia’s voice, and then we chose to keep them both so it’s double live.”
We move on to two wonderful singers. In 1967 Vashti Bunyan found herself with no record contract and no prospect of making it in the music industry. She had a promising beginning in 1965 when she was discovered by Andrew Loog Oldham, who wanted to repeat with her the success he had with Marianne Faithfull. She recorded a number of songs, one penned by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. But the first few singles did nothing in the sales department and other recorded songs were shelved.
What’s a young girl singer to do in such a predicament? Of course, hop on a green wagon along with boyfriend, pull the reins and direct the horse north bound to a hippie commune in Scotland. The couple was frugal to the extreme. Bunyan: “I remember looking in a sweet shop window and it was like a psychedelic experience. They were so forbidden. We lived on brown rice and brown bread.”
Taking a break from their rural travels and visiting London, Bunyan reconnected with producer Joe Boyd and played him songs she has written on her journeys. Boyd recalled the first time he met her: “Early in my Elektra year I attended a poetry reading at the old Institute of Contemporary Arts in Dover Street. Singers were scattered through the declamatory line-up and one intrigued me. Her voice was small and delicate but the quieter she sang the more attentively the audience listened.” A few years later he jumped on the opportunity to record her. At the end of 1969 they entered the recording studio, accompanied by some of Boyd’s connections from his work with Fairport Convention, The Incredible String Band and Nick Drake. Robin Williamson, Dave Swarbrick and Simon Nicol are all on board, and most significantly, arranger Robert Kirby.
Earlier in the year Kirby wrote the wonderful string arrangements for Nick Drake’s debut album Five Leaves Left. Vashti Bunyan, an untrained musician, was in awe: “The way he had written the arrangements was kind of what was in my head for this album. He had written beautiful arrangements for the recorder for ‘Rainbow River’ but in the third verse he’d done some key changes to it and I didn’t like it. So the hippie who knows nothing about music at all said: ‘Don’t like that one, can you repeat what you’ve done in the second verse for the third verse.’ That’s what he did. And then on ‘Swallow Song’ he’d written this beautiful bit for a solo violin.”
Here is a fine example of Kirby’s work (recorder and string arrangement) and Vashti Bunyan’s delicate voice. The album opener, Diamond Day:
Just Another Diamond Day was released in December of 1970, after Joe Boyd returned to the US. He sent Bunyan an acetate of the album. She recalls her reaction to the album: “I was thunderstruck, having come from the Andrew Oldham days, where everything was very produced. There were lots of bum notes that didn’t need to be there, the strumming at the beginning of the a cappella bit in ‘Window Over The Bay’ was where I’d played myself some guitar notes to start off. They weren’t meant to be in there, but he’d kept them in. There were lots of things in there that I couldn’t bear, and the whole folksy nature of it: it felt like it had been recorded round a campfire. Which was obviously what Joe had the idea of, but I didn’t. I didn’t want it to sound handmade.” This quote surprised me when I first read it. The reasons Vashti Bunyan voiced for not liking the album are exactly mine for liking it. A lot.
Handmade or not, this is one of 1970’s gems. Joe Boyd said of the album: Vashti’s songs may seem unreal to urbanized listeners but they should listen with open hearts and minds. I have never known anyone whose music is so completely a reflection of their life and spirit.” Well said. Here is another great song, with Dave Swarbrick on fiddle and mandolin, and Simon Nicol on banjo:
Vashti Bunyan disappeared from the music scene after the album was released, the same trajectory (although for very different reasons) as Shelagh McDonald’s career. Singing in a folk club, McDonald was noticed by producer Sandy Roberton, who started his career in the exploding blues rock scene of the mid-1960s as a publisher of Chess Records in Britain, and then co-founded the legendary Blue Horizon label. Roberton found similarities in the dedicated following between the blues and folk scenes and started producing folk artists.
One of these folk artists was Shelagh McDonald, a delicate singer who benefited from that association by having the cream of the crop of musicians on the two albums she made. We are talking talent such as Danny Thompson on bass, Richard Thompson on guitar, Keith Tippet on piano, Pat Donaldson on bass and the list goes on. Recording sessions for Shelagh McDonald’s debut album, titled ‘Album’, took place between February and June 1970 and included a mix of original material and cover songs written by Gerry Rafferty, Andy Roberts and Keith Christmas. She also performed an interesting version of the traditional song ‘Let No Man Steal Your Thyme’. But the two tracks that stand out for me on the album feature again the wonderful string arrangements of Robert Kirby. Here is the first, Peacock Lady:
McDonald visited Kirby at his flat to review her songs, which he liked instantly. The result yielded some of his best work, and he later reminisced about that experience: “The principal thing I remember about Shelagh is how uncannily similar she was to Nick Drake – tall, slim, very beautiful, alabaster skin accentuated by beautiful dark hair. But I believe (heresy!) that she had the edge on Nick in the vocal department – her voice was beautiful, magical, haunting. The fact that she served her apprenticeship through the clubs showed in her professionalism. She also had a great speaking voice and a great sense of humor as well.” One of his favorites from the first album is Ophelia’s Song, a fitting arrangement for strings and woodwinds.
Shelagh McDonald’s debut album was released in October 1970 to favorite reviews. Karl Dallas wrote in Melody Maker: “We’ve been a long time waiting for a successor to Sandy Denny since she abandoned solo singing to join a band, but at last, in the lovely form of Shelagh McDonald, someone has come forward to fill the solo singer’s place.” Silly comparison, but respectable enough. Commercial success, though, was a different story. Like so many great albums of the period, it went mostly unnoticed. McDonald released one more album the following year, also great, before vanishing from the scene.
Sources:
Trees feature in Shindig! magazine, issue 109, November 2020
Liner notes by David Costa from the 2008 CD release of Trees – The Garden of Jane Delawney
Liner notes by Stewart Lee from the 2007 CD release of Trees – On the Shore
White Bicycles: Making Music in the 1960s, by Joe Boyd
Seasons They Change: The story of acid and psychedelic folk, by Jeanette Leech