The idea of pairing Rowan Williams and me on stage was Andrew Taylor’s. I hadn’t known that Rowan’s a published poet, but, since I hardly ever turn down an invitation to sing Clive’s and my songs, I immediately said yes.
The difference between songs and poems has always fascinated me, and I look forward to learning something new from Rowan and to hearing him read his own poetry. It strikes me that his criticism is wonderfully astute. With a bit of luck, we may even give each other some ideas.
I have long shelves of poets, both old and recent. My tastes go wide, starting with Thomas Wyatt, who, I think, was the first poet to write sonnets in English. Among more modern poets, there’s Auden and Larkin, but also less conventional ones, like Billy Collins. I love the way he manages to turn almost a sidelong glance at something into a poem. He writes very well about jazz and popular music. I’m also a huge admirer of Simon Armitage. He has an immediacy about his writing.
Clive James and I were students together when we met in the late 1960s. He’d always loved songs, but he wasn’t musical in a practical sense. Our shared attitude to the possibilities of songs, the way words and music could do something together which they couldn’t do on their own, meant we drifted organically into a lifelong songwriting partnership. If it can be considered successful — in view of our failure to write any commercial, known-by-everybody hits — perhaps it’s because we were always on the same wavelength.
I started violin lessons at eight at my state primary school, which taught me to read music; and I’d pick out tunes I heard on the radio, and learn guitar chords, on my grandmother’s piano. I started writing terrible pop songs long before I met Clive, and wrote silly songs for the Cambridge Footlights, which is where he first heard me.
I’ll fiddle around with music, not going with the very first thing that strikes me. You can write a tune to anything and then add harmony — like that phrase we’d all say: “Have you got a Biro I could borrow?” Maybe Rowan and I could do that with the audience.
I’ve never planned anything. My whole working life has depended on an improbable sequence of lucky breaks — like meeting Clive. By the time I left university, we’d written so many songs it seemed crazy not to try to do something with them; so we approached music publishers, which led to some demonstration recordings, which then happened to be played on the radio and released as an album, which led to me becoming a performer.
The songs of my own that I like best, that I sing to myself, aren’t the most successful ones. There’s the “The Shadow and the Widower”, based on Gérard de Nerval’s poem — quite an elaborate metaphor for lost love, set to quite an aggressive rhythm. I like the way the key of the song changes. I’m always a bit prone to doing that . . . and then I’m faced with the challenge of how to get back to the home key for the next verse. One of the joys of writing songs is sometimes putting driving, upbeat music with reflective lyrics, and flowing, melodic tunes for passionate lyrics. The contrast can sometimes work surprisingly well.
I’ll always come up with a new list for a gig, which might include some I’m often asked to sing: “Beware of the Beautiful Stranger”, “Girl on the Train”, “Have You Got a Biro I Can Borrow?” But I like pulling songs I’ve forgotten out of the back of the cupboard, and I’m surprised by them very often. It’s as if it’s written by somebody else.
Once you’ve finished something and it’s out there, it has a life of its own. There’s a kind of guilt: you’ve stolen it; it belongs to where it came from — although you wrote it.
Everyone hears a song in their own way, which is perhaps quite different from your own. I’m often surprised by people’s comments about a song after a gig. Whoever knew that it would have a meaning to them I never even dreamed of?
Eventually, I became a radio producer because I needed to pay the rent, and surprised myself again by how much I enjoyed it. But the songs never went away; so I went back to writing and performing with Clive again, after he’d given up being on the telly.
The hardest thing was making myself work. I’m so fundamentally, congenitally lazy that I crave a deadline.
The making of This Sceptred Isle came about almost casually, just as I was leaving the BBC staff in the 1990s. Michael Green, then the Controller of Radio 4, needed a long series to fill a regular 15-minute gap after the Daily Service on Long Wave only, following an extended reading of the Bible and of Pilgrim’s Progress. Christopher Lee (the one who used to be the BBC’s defence correspondent, not the actor), with whom I’d worked on several comedy and drama series, offered to write a narrative history of Britain from the Romans up to date, aimed at an adult audience, which would show how everything joined up. Its success took everyone aback: well over 300 episodes. Sales of cassettes and CDs broke records, and it’s been repeated many times.
I’m always obsessed with whatever it is I’ve done most recently. Then, something new comes along, and whatever I was doing before gets forgotten. I am always flattered and embarrassingly pleased when anyone remembers anything I’ve done.
With every recording, whether it’s a song or a radio programme, the audience I’m imagining is always a single person, because every audience, of however many millions, consists only of individuals. Performing a song live is different, though. No matter how often I’ve sung it before, each new performance is always a kind of world première.
As technology continues to develop, the licence fee makes less and less logical sense, which is why some people say it should be scrapped. But, paradoxically, it’s at the root of what’s made the BBC unique and uniquely valuable. Preserving that uniqueness continues to be one of the hardest and most important jobs the BBC now has. What it produces is at the heart of our national identity, isn’t it? I don’t think that’s an exaggeration. The BBC’s in constant danger, and we mustn’t take it for granted.
What work am I doing now? Overcoming inertia. Facing that blank piece of paper.
I grew up in council estates on the fringes of Cambridge. Both my grandfathers worked on the railway. The 11-plus got me to grammar school, and grammar school got me to university. University, by an admittedly roundabout route, got me into the music business, and here I am, still mucking about.
Any experience of God hasn’t yet happened to me. Not to my knowledge.
What makes me happiest is making a connection with other human beings, whether it’s simply being together, or by witnessing their achievements, through music or stories or art or buildings or gardens or cooking or whatever.
Anger’s usually a wasteful, unhelpful, impractical feeling, not something that contributes to getting things done.
Faith in human nature is what gives me hope — in spite of everything.
If I pray — and it’s a big if — it is only ever to myself, and it’s mostly me urging myself to get on and do something.
My first thoughts for a companion in a locked church are all writers. Maybe they’d be funny, and I’d hope to learn something. Sir Thomas Wyatt — a mighty and underrated talent, with an awful lot of story that we don’t know? Ben Jonson, not least because he could finally pin down the facts about Shakespeare? Maybe Michel de Montaigne, surely one of the most entertaining people who ever lived? Mark Twain, ditto. That’s just for starters. And what about the women?
Pete Atkin was talking to Terence Handley MacMath.
“Words and Music, Poems and Songs — Rowan Williams and Pete Atkin in Conversation and Performance” is on Friday 4 October in St Andrew’s URC, Montpellier Street, Cheltenham, beginning at 7 p.m. For information: pipandjims.org.uk/concertsandevents.