Lyrics section's 2005 homepage

For almost forty years, off and on, I have written lyrics for the music of Pete Atkin. Though our songs never made a fortune back in the days when a musical act had to earn big money or else fold its tent, there has been a revival of our work in recent years, with a loyal audience big enough to make a travelling song-show a viable theatrical venture. In 2003 we toured Britain, in 2004 Australia and Hong Kong, and as this note goes to press there is another tour of Britain scheduled for late 2005. During these travels, people have been kind enough to ask where they can read the lyrics. There was once a booklet called A First Folio with some of the early lyrics featured, but it has been out of print for a long time. A much larger selection of lyrics is included in my verse collection The Book of My Enemy (2003), which is still in print. But the easiest way to read all the lyrics written up until the time when we resumed work around the turn of the millennium is to click through to the Pete Atkin website, www.peteatkin.com. In the Discography section of the site, the entry for each album opens up onto a transcription of all its lyrics. The site, beautifully constructed and maintained by Steve Birkill, also contains the best way of all to encounter my lyrics for anyone who should feel the urge: there is a shop where the Pete Atkin CDs can be bought on line. They will arrive anywhere in the world within days of the credit card transaction, and when played they will demonstrate, far more convincingly than any explanation I can now concoct, why I originally wrote a lyric instead of a poem. Most of the CDs are, or were, re-issues of the original vinyl albums. I say “were” because by now some of the CDs are sold out, so that the previously unavailable has become unavailable all over again. But there are also more recent CDs, made with a smaller budget than their commercial ancestors, but perhaps with more integrated results. The double album called The Lakeside Sessions is my personal favourite among the recordings of the earlier material: done decades after the early songs were first written and sent to market, its approach is much more relaxed. There is also an album of the songs we have written since the revival got under way. (Some of the songs were actually written on tour.) The CD is called Winter Spring, and, with due allowance for a couple of allegedly clever upbeat numbers that are perhaps not quite as cunning as I thought they were when I wrote the words, I count my share of it among my proudest achievements. If that sounds like boasting, I can only say that we have never had the luxury of lying back and looking pure while other people barked for our wares.

On the right of this text, the click-through button leads to the Pete Atkin website. Later on I hope there will be further buttons leading to other aspects of my work in the field of the song lyric. Some of that work was done in the form of criticism. In the late sixties and early seventies I wrote articles about recent songwriters whose words I found interesting. The great Tin Pan Alley and show-song traditions had been well taken care of by scholars such as Alec Wilder, but not much had been written at the time about how the new singer-songwriters such as Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan and Randy Newman chose and set their language. A lot has been written on the subject since, but when I look at my own pieces again — most of them were written for the glossy but doomed magazine Cream — I sometimes find the argument put at least as well as I could put it now. I might have got smarter later, but earlier I was keener. Unfortunately the pieces will be the devil to scan and correct. Meanwhile some of them can be found, strangely intact, in the endless ice-field of my Google entry. There is probably a song to be written about that, too. For now, I am glad to steer the visitor towards the lyrics for songs already written: most of them between thirty and forty years ago, when we were young.