 |
|
| Navigation: n Home Page n Peter Bellamy on Kipling n Kipling sound clips | |
|
|
|
 any of Peter Bellamy's most ardent fans got confused when he began to spend so much time on settings of the works of Rudyard Kipling.
Much of this confusion was based on a failure to understand the part played by Kipling, not only in English culture, but also in Peter's own life. And it was also a bad relic of the left's role as creator and, to a certain extent, as pilot of the directions of the folk revival. Surely, it was felt, this bad old apologist for imperialism had nothing in common with the humanistic aspirations of the revival. Well, actually, he did, though it was hard to see it at the time.This was 1970, remember, and Harold Macmillan's "wind of change" had been sweeping through Africa for ten years. India had obtained its independence in 1947 (though the vestiges of British "divide and rule" remained in the partition which is a source of conflict on the sub-continent to this day) and Kipling's world seemed a sad vestige of a bygone age when Peter's Oak Ash and Thorn challenged all our comfortable preconceptions. We could ignore the savagery of poems like The Widow at Windsor, depicting the declining years of Victoria's reign:
Even the patriotic posturing of Recessional, for all its (possibly satirical?) reference to "lesser breeds without the law", contains intimations of imperial mortality: "The tumult and the shouting dies; (Brendan Behan borrowed "the Captains and the Kings" for a notable song.) And of course, Danny Deever is redolent of the old hanging ballads, with a military twist to it that the old broadside hawkers would never have dared: "For they're hangin' Danny Deever, you can hear the Dead March play,
Also, there's an elitist strain in much of the left - "we know what's good for the workers, much better than they know themselves" - and as well as Kipling's supposed imperialistic mind-set, it was the populism of his lyrics, which got into the heads of his squaddie and non-com subjects better than we ever could, which we found so offensive.
"It was a strange thing to anyone who's not read him but only knows him by the reputation that's clung to him since the Thirties, shall we say, when he was considered one of the reactionary old guard, and therefore obviously a writer of no merit whatsoever," he was still complaining (with reason) a decade and a half later. "Because how could you possibly have the wrong politics and be able to write anything worthwhile? Naturally these two are exclusive." But did Kipling have the wrong politics? Yes, The White Man's Burden ("Your new-caught, sullen peoples,/Half devil and half child") fits poorly into today's world of political correctness, but he also echoed the respect of the British Tommy for his adversaries:
And what, after all, did that infamous poem actually say? The burden it spoke of, was simply
Isn't this an aim for most sincerely on the left? (Click below - left button - for the complete text, and on the right button for a contemporary response.)
And he caught, as none before or since, the contempt of the soldier for those who sent him off to fight and die: "It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' Kipling published Barrack Room Ballads in 1892, reflecting "smoke, the roar and the good-natured fellowship" of his seven years in India. Peter started work on his settings of them in 1973, often using traditional tunes that he thought were appropriate. In the case of Danny Deever, Peter said: "The tune I've used was used by the military in India; so there's every chance that Kipling would have heard it." In general, he said, "Wherever I could, I've used authentic traditional tunes. Sometimes I think I've spotted the right one." But in the case of Tommy, he later wrote, "Occasionally I've been stumped and I've had to write an authentic traditional tune. This is one of those." He recalled in 1990: "It had never occurred to me in my life to write a tune. Then I came to one poem that I couldn't find a traditional tune for, The Brookland Road, I think, and a tune that sounded jolly like a traditional English tune but was mine came out, and I found I had a facility for that. That's never been a difficult job for me." But if the folk world was a bit bemused by what seemed like something of an obsession for Kiplingiana, Peter was meanwhile cracking a much tougher nut: the serried ranks of the Kipling establishment. Peter's requests to record Kipling material had been blocked by Kipling's daughter, but permission was finally granted after her death in 1976, and Barrack Room Ballads was recorded by Bill Leader in Birmingham with Chris Birch and Tony Hall, on fiddle and melodeon respectively, coming out on Green Linnet in USA and Free Reed in UK. To everyone's surprise, they were far more receptive to his settings of the works of their hero than we had been, and he received their jealously guarded imprimata for his renditions. In 1982, Peter used a setting he had made of Kipling's We Have Fed Our Sea For 1,000 Years to open a suite of songs to accompany twelve paintings by Al Schmidt, featuring models of famous ships, photomontaged into historical backgrounds. As with his later Kipling show, Peter performed these songs against back-projection of the images that inspired them. The suite included traditional songs and other Kipling settings, arrangements by Dolly Collins, with Dolly on piano and Ursula Pank (cello). The show's sole performance was at Wensum Lodge, Norwich on October 10, 1982. It was recorded by the BBC and broadcast on Folk on 2 in two parts on December 28, 1982 and February 15, 1983. In 1990, he participated in the production of Tony Ferrin's Soldiers Three at the New Victoria Theatre, Newcastle-under-Lyme, based on his Kipling settings. To accompany the production, he produced a double cassette of new recordings of all the 23 Barrack Room Ballads. After his death, his settings were again used in The Widder's Uniform (an expression used in Tommy), a play with music set in England and India at the end of the 19th century. It would be tragic, after Peter had produced such a significant body of work - more significant, he tended to feel, even than The Transports - if the Kipling settings were to be left in the archives to moulder and grow dusty. Hopefully, the 18 songs in this celebratory compilation will suggest to other singers that they include them in their repertoire, so that they return to the place for them which Peter felt they deserved, in the great body of songs in the tradition which have entered into our collective memory. |
|||||||
| Kipling tracks on the CDs | |||||||
| Click on song titles to hear RealAudio Clips | |||||||
| A Three Part Song | My Boy Jack | ||||||
| Oak ash and thorn (A Tree Song) | We have fed our sea | ||||||
| The looking glass | Soldier soldier | ||||||
| Sir Richard's song | Cholera camp | ||||||
| The way through the woods | Follow me 'ome | ||||||
| Tommy | The Land | ||||||
| Danny Deever | Recessional | ||||||
| Gunga Din | Back to the army again | ||||||
| Bill 'awkins | A pilgrim's way | ||||||
|
Kipling plaque from the webpage of the Kipling Society. Cartoon, The White Man's Burden, from The Ram's Horn, Chicago, 1898. |
|||||||
We on the left missed this, and we also missed the fact that MacColl's inspiration, Germany's maverick communist playwright, Bertholt Brecht, had been one of Kipling's greatest admirers. Indeed, a song like his savage Kanonenlied could almost have been translated straight from Kipling's original verse. "It wasn't so much influence as theft, so far as I can see," said Peter.
He found this opposition frustrating and irritating. "I started running into people saying, Kipling? My God, how can you be doing Kipling? So I would enquire just what they were talking about, and how much they'd read, and of course what they were talking about was third-hand opinion on something they'd never read at all, so who cares?