Cover design by Barbara Fry

Cover Notes for CD re-release

Even those of us who love the period could be forgiven sometimes for feeling that, over the last few years, every obscurity from the late 1960s has been disinterred, dusted down and re-evaluated by fans and critics alike. Nevertheless, a few releases of genuine quality from this over-analysed era remain ignored, unknown and, it would seem, resolutely buried. The 1968 album Diversions!, a solo album from the otherwise anonymous Barry Booth, is a case in point: only the fact that the lyrics were penned by Terry Jones and Michael Palin has ensured the album any kind of place in the history books, and that merely as a brief footnote in the Monty Python’s Flying Circus story, where it nestles alongside such deathless Python-related vinyl projects as Funny Game, Football.

Which, aside from being a bit of a shame, is also rather curious. For Diversions! is one of the hidden treasures of late 60s British pop – a witty, gentle and quintessentially English collection of words and music cloaked in a series of ornate, baroque arrangements so beloved of the immediately post-psychedelic UK studio sound. Let’s hope, then, that this first-ever reissue – assembled with the active co-operation of the artist, by the way – manages to redress the balance somewhat and introduce a few new converts to the album’s considerable charms.

Barry Booth began a lengthy and varied career in the arts by training at the world-famous Royal Academy of Music in London, where he studied composition, harmony and counterpoint with Patrick Savill and pianoforte with Leslie England. He then spent two years as the musical director on a variety of pop package tours in the early 1960s, including a stint as MD for Roy Orbison in mid-1963 on a bill that also included the fast-emerging Beatles. Orbison was sufficiently impressed to appoint Barry as his personal music director, though Booth was also employed as the arranger/MD on the long-running TV series Five O’Clock Club, which featured the Alexis Korner Band. During this period Booth and Korner co-wrote an award-winning cinema commercial jingle for Bri-Nylon, while Booth (together with co-author Nat Joseph, better known as the boss of the Transatlantic label) also penned a song that was recorded by Orbison.

Booth was continuing to make a living as, in his own words, “a jobbing musician" when he first came into contact with a couple of Oxford graduates – Terry Jones and Michael Palin. After a directionless start (Palin’s first post-university job had been as the presenter of NOW!, a trendily-titled teenage pop show broadcast through 1965/6 by Television Wales West), Terry and Michael had recently established themselves as a promising writing partnership, working together on The Late Show (for which they had written and performed a pastiche of Antonioni’s Blow-Up), The Frost Report and Late Night Line-Up, the resident arts show on the new ‘culture’ channel, BBC2.

It was on the last-named show that the hitherto-divergent paths of Barry Booth and the Jones/Palin team first met in 1967, as Terry Jones now recalls. “Late Night Line-Up was an instant crit of programmes that had been on that day, and also previewed shows that would be on the following day. One Friday evening they brought me in to do a comedy review – we did some stuff with musical accompaniment, and Barry was employed on that side".

The peripatetic pair of Jones and Palin had previously been approached to write a musical, The Love Show, which was to be based on the sexual revolution of the mid-60s. Sadly that project had just been aborted (no pun intended) when Booth asked them if they would be interested in writing lyrics for him. Working independently of each other, the two men quickly came up with the goods. "I did have one or two things already written that I thought would fit the bill", admits Jones. "Henry Smith Addresses A Butterfly was some verse that I had lying around, and Sad-Jolly Song was initially meant for a children’s book that I’d written but which was never published". One or two lyrics were new, however. "After The War was inspired by my father, though it was mainly fictional – he didn’t have a lisp, for example! I’d written it after coming across a telegram that he’d sent during the war to reassure us all – "After the war we’ll go and pick blackberries again", that kind of thing."

So did Terry have serious aspirations in terms of songwriting? “Aspirations is too strong a word, but I’ve always enjoyed it – I wrote a few songs for Wind In The Willows a few years ago. Poetry was my first vocation really – it was only writing verse that kept me going through childhood!"

By way of contrast, Michael Palin’s contributions were all written specifically for Booth, with one song in particular still holding strong memories for its author. “Barry said that Roy Orbison would be coming over, and he might be interested in recording anything that we could write that was suitable. With that in mind, I wrote The Last Time I Saw You Was Tomorrow, which I thought had the kind of heartwrenching drama that he specialised in! I remember Barry taking it to Orbison’s hotel room and playing the demo for him. I could scarcely believe it – he was playing my song to Roy Orbison, who was up there with the Beatles as far as I was concerned. For a while after that, I did allow myself to entertain delusions of a songwriting career!"

With pop lyricists like Paul Simon, Ray Davies and Lennon/McCartney achieving a level of profundity that was entirely lacking in the traditional hit record, there was, of course, no reason why a couple of university graduates couldn’t make their mark. “It was an exciting time", admits Palin. “Pop songs had become more than just romantic ditties for teenagers at parties. A character sketch like Vera Lamonte obviously owed a debt to people like McCartney, but there are lines in it that would have fitted nicely into the monologues that I used to perform at Oxford."

Duly setting their work to melodies, Booth recorded a quartet of numbers quickly and cheaply, adding his own guide vocals to what were purely intended as rough songwriters demos (which is to say that the demos were rough, not the songwriters). Though he’s not quite sure of the circumstances, one set of recordings somehow ended up in the possession of Pye producer Tony Hatch. Probably the leading UK A&R man of the era, the not easily impressed Hatch was immediately smitten – not just by the songs, but by Booth’s vocals and skeletal arrangements. “They weren’t the kind of thing he was normally associated with", admits Booth. “I can only think he was looking to broaden his horizons. But what surprised me was that he wanted to sign me as a performer – all I’d wanted to do was place the songs with someone else. I certainly didn’t consider myself to be a singer, so I had fairly mixed feelings about the whole thing. Apparently Tony Hatch went home to his wife, Jackie Trent, and told her “I’ve just met the coolest guy ever! I’m offering him a recording contract, and he’s not bothered at all!" But it really wasn’t what I was looking for."

By the end of 1967, reluctant vocalist Booth had entered Pye Studios with a total of fourteen songs. With Hatch as producer and Barry himself as musical director and arranger, the musicians (including such experienced hired hands as Pentangle’s Terry Cox and the ubiquitous Herbie Flowers) set to work on a collection of witty, urbane songs that were occasionally reminiscent of a number of contemporaneous acts – “End of the Season"-period Kinks, Giles Giles & Fripp and Deram-era Bowie spring to mind, though any singer/songwriter/pianist performing erudite material to an orchestral backdrop clearly has more than a little in common with Randy Newman – but really occupied their own thoughtful, highly idiosyncratic territory.

As might be expected from their pedigree, the lyrics were particularly impressive, with a level of erudition and wit that, notwithstanding the likes of Ray Davies, were still uncommon in British pop. At turns bittersweet (the moving After The War), joyous (Sad-Jolly Song), atmospheric (The Hottest Day of The Year), sympathetic (A Concise History of Harry Shoes, with its neat twist-in-the-tale ending) and self-analytical (Somebody Make My Mind Up, which surely addresses the diffident dilettantism of Palin’s early career), Diversions! would be of interest were it purely a collection of verse.

But there is much to commend the album on a musical level as well: the charming Mole, a suitably sultry The Hottest Day Of The Year and the opening track, He’s Very Good With His Hands, all contain consummate melody lines bolstered by some splendid chamber pop arrangements, while one or two playful touches - After The War leads off with the opening piano motif of Georgie Fame’s recent hit “The Ballad Of Bonnie and Clyde", while “Henri Dupont" employs a suitably Gallic accordion backdrop – confirm that it wasn’t only the lyrics that were tongue in cheek. Mention should also be made of Booth’s resolutely English vocals which, despite the artist’s reservations, are excellent throughout – it’s not difficult to imagine a young Peter Gabriel listening to Diversions! with a light-bulb glowing above his head (I’m speaking figuratively, of course).

Supported rather optimistically by a single release (He’s Very Good With His Hands b/w The King’s Thing), Diversions! appeared in the opening weeks of 1968, housed in a fabulous Beardsleyesque sleeve design from Barbara Fry (wife of Martin Fry, a sousaphone player who’d been a friend and colleague of Booth’s at the Royal Academy of Music). The album received a commendation in Punch from Miles Kington who, clearly noting the wry, baroque Englishness of the album and its sympathetic, slightly skewed vision of suburban life, included it in a double review with the Kinks’ latest. Kenny Everett was also an admirer, inviting Barry onto his Sunday morning show on Radio One to discuss his work, while Michael Palin recalls that John Peel played He’s Very Good With His Hands on his influential late night show Top Gear and “said some very nice things about it".

But despite a second single midway through 1968 (The Hottest Day Of The Year b/w Vera Lamonte), Diversions! disappeared without trace, presumably not helped by the fact it was, as far as Booth was concerned, essentially a studio project (“I didn’t want to tour it", he now confesses, “though I was put under quite a lot of pressure"). By this stage Palin and Jones had moved on to the cult TV show Do Not Adjust Your Set, which led in turn, of course, to Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Briefly reunited with Palin and Jones as the composer of the theme music to the duo’s post-Do Not Adjust Your Set TV series, The Complete and Utter History of Britain (“He wrote a wonderful intro", Jones recalls fondly), Barry Booth continued to work behind the scenes on a wide number of disparate projects. He acted as MD/arranger for a couple of Rolf Harris vehicles, the TV series Rolf On Saturday OK? and the radio series Rolf’s Walkabout, also working in the recording studio with Harris, Kenneth Williams, Topol, Roy Orbison and a variety of Transatlantic label acts including Bert Jansch, the Johnstons, John Renbourn and Pentangle. In addition to writing songs for various TV, film and stage shows (including material for The Two Ronnies and the Sir Alec Guinness film Hitler: The Last Ten Days), he has also appeared as guest conductor in concerts of his own music with the symphony orchestras of London, Vancouver, Hamilton, Knoxville, Wellington, Christchurch and Queensland. He also appears frequently as guest solo pianist with the BBC Concert Orchestra.

As can be seen from the above CV, Diversions! was clearly just that – an entertaining but unscheduled diversion from Booth’s chosen path as he percolated through the soft white underbelly of the music and arts world. But sometimes the most unexpected and unlikely stops are also the most rewarding: for the right ears, Diversions! is a hugely enjoyable experience.

DAVID WELLS
December 2001

With special thanks to Barry Booth, Terry Jones and Michael Palin.

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