Pete Atkin

In the early '70s, the songwriting partnership of Pete Atkin and Clive James was held in high esteem by the British music press, yet commercial success proved much more elusive. Their unique attempt to fuse the discipline and craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley with the self-expression of rock, while refusing to accept any limitation on what constituted appropriate subject matter for lyrics, inevitably set them on a collision course with their record companies' marketing departments. An Atkin-James album could embrace a brief encounter in a railway carriage, the Vietnam War, and the lot of an aging session musician, while James' points of reference took in the full panoply of art, cinema, literature, and poetry, sometimes leaving his work open to accusations of being wordy and pretentious. In its own way, Atkin's music was just as erudite, drawing on every form of popular music from show tunes through folk, jazz, and rock. Both words and music, then, were no match for the blistering anti-elitism of punk when it arrived, and after six albums the partnership succumbed before the irresistible union of record company indifference and the Clash. The pair first met in 1966 as members of the Cambridge Footlights Revue that spawned so much British comedy talent, from the satire of Beyond the Fringe to the surrealism of Monty Python. (It was this connection that would later result in Atkin and James being invited to perform alongside the likes of John Cleese and Peter Cook at various Amnesty International benefits, subsequently released on DVD under the Secret Policeman's Ball titles.) James, recently emigrated from Australia, was a postgraduate student, six years older than Atkin, and already acquiring a reputation as something of a guru among the younger students. Though they...