February 2010

As a supplement to the article on spoken word recordings in the latest issue, we’ve created a playlist of some of the material discussed and hope it adds an additional dimension to the piece itself and will encourage readers to seek out the full recordings, all of which are very worthwhile: the playlist is in mp3 format, and runs as follows:

1: TS Eliot: The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock (Caedmon, 1955)

2: Edith Sitwell: Popular Song (Facade 1923, recording made by Argo, 1972)

3: Edith Sitwell: From A Far Countree (Facade 1923, recording made by Argo, 1972)

4: Dylan Thomas: Ballad of the Long-Legged Bait (Caedmon, 1955)

5: Louise Bennett: Jamaican Alphabet (Folkways, 1957)

6: Edward (Kamau) Brathwaite: from Rights of Passage - The Journeys (Argo, 1968)

7: Herbert Read: from Echoes of My Life – Exile’s Lament (Argo, 1968)

8: Joan Baez/Henry Treece: The Magic Wood (Vanguard, 1968)

9: The Open Window/William Blake: Priests of the Raven of Dawn (Vanguard, 1969)

10: BBC Drama Workshop/David Cain/Ronald Duncan: July (BBC, 1969)

11: BBC Drama Workshop/David Cain/Ronald Duncan: October (BBC, 1969)

12: The Liverpool Scene/Adrian Henri: Winter Poem (RCA, 1970)

13: Barrow Poets/Edwin Morgan: The Loch Ness Monster’s Song (Argo, 1972)

14: Barrow Poets/Miroslav Holub: How To Paint A Perfect Christmas (Argo, 1972)

15: Sir John Betjeman: Late Flowering Lust (Charisma, 1974)

16: Sir John Betjeman: The Licorice Fields at Pontefract (Charisma, 1974)

17: Peter Porter: The Sadness of the Creatures (Argo, 1975)

18: Peter Redgrove: From The Reflections Of Mr Glass (Argo, 1975)

19: Dave Dallwitz Jazz Band/Ern Malley: Stagnant Fragment (Swaggie, 1975)

20: Dave Dallwitz Jazz Band/Ern Malley: Patterns for Slatterns (Swaggie, 1975)

21: RS Thomas: Welsh Landscape (Oriel, 1976)

22: RS Thomas: In A Country Church (Oriel, 1976)

23: Cyril Rajendra: The Animal and Insects Act (Alliance, 1982)

24: Linton Kwesi Johnson: Di Great Insohrekshan (Alliance, 1982)

25: EA Markham: Don’t Talk To Me About Bread (Alliance, 1982)

26: Marie Osmond/Hugo Ball: Karawane (Rough Trade, 1993)

It’s around 70/80 minutes in total and the whole thing can be streamed or downloaded on this link.

Welcome to Staple’s new abode, and hope to see you here again soon!

The story of spoken word as a recorded medium really begins at the birth of the technology itself, with Thomas Edison reputed to have tested his earliest prototype phonograph cylinders in 1877 with his own recital of ‘Baa Baa Black Sheep’, and the technology was sufficiently advanced by 1890 for Alfred Tennyson to make wax cylinder recordings of around ten poems, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’ among them. In the years that followed 78rpm discs featuring Biblical readings and passages from Shakespeare were plentiful, and many examples of interest exist in the richly populated hinterland between music and poetry, the twisted ballads and song-poems of the ‘Old Weird America’ gathered on Harry Smith’s epochal Anthology of American Folk Music and the Red Bird ‘Poetry and Jazz’ sessions of Tony Kinsey and Christopher Logue among them.

Despite the riches available even before the full advent of the 12” LP record, however, it seems to be the 1950s that saw spoken word recordings really take off, and the births of such idiosyncratic labels as Caedmon in America and Argo in the UK were particularly significant in creating a commercial market for what were otherwise seen as largely educational and archival artefacts. In the selection created for Staple 72, we’ve gathered a mere 17 recordings to represent a cross-section through the many hundreds, perhaps even thousands, of possible inclusions, but they hopefully touch on key strands in the development of spoken word as a distinct literary medium, and offer an introductory gesture towards that larger story…and where better to begin than with one of the last century’s greatest poems, read by its author?

T.S. Eliot: The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock (Caedmon, 1955) 

The serious-minded Modernism of T.S. Eliot, and the poet’s drily ironic delivery of his own lines on records like this one, are often lazily condemned (in some circles, at least) as the antithesis of the spoken word scene’s more democratic energies. But any reader or listener who can’t see this 1955 reading of his early masterpiece The Love Song Of J Alfred Prufrock bringing down the house in a live setting with the same riotous force as the poem manages on paper is allowing Eliot’s forbidding reputation to get between the actual words and a more instinctive response to their effect.

The truth is that however dry Eliot’s reading seems, there’s real humour in the play between his high-serious tones and the absurdist doggerel of such iconic couplets as “I grow old, I grow old/I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled” and “In the room the women come and go/Talking of Michaelangelo”.

This LP – released as part of the Caedmon Literary Series in 1955 – opens our selection of recordings made between the 1950s and 1970s, all precursors of today’s spoken word scene, and many by poets more closely associated with the page than the stage. It’s partly a draft version of a feature we’re compiling on the Prehistory of Spoken Word for Staple 72: The Music Issue, but also, I hope, an attempt to bridge the gap perceived to exist between the realms of written and performed poetry in the UK. We very deliberately open proceedings with this recording of a man who is in many ways held up as the totemic ‘difficult page poet’ by both his supporters and detractors in the belief that Prufrock – first published in 1917 – unsettles that view at a very fundamental level.

It’s not just my view that Eliot bridges the divide between page and stage approaches, either: the poet’s love of music hall is well known (he even wrote an essay on Marie Lloyd) but perhaps more revealing is that during an interview I did with Linton Kwesi Johnson for The Big Issue in the North in March 2001, the renowned dub-poet mentioned in passing that he had himself recorded a reggae version of Eliot’s poem, to make exactly this point. At the time of writing, Linton Kwesi Johnson’s Prufrock remains unreleased, but it would be wonderful, and no doubt transformative, if Eliot’s estate were to one day relent and allow Johnson’s so far unheard dub take on Prufrock to take its place beside Eliot’s own reading.

Perhaps this Youtube mash-up of Eliot and Portishead makes the point well enough, and for other performative takes on Eliot’s lines, these two film-collage and animated responses to Eliot’s text also seem worth a look.