Cover design by Barbara Fry

DIVERSIONS
Barry Booth and Terry Jones

Featuring songs by ex-Monty Python stars Michael Palm and Terry Jones, ‘Diversions’ is a Sixties’paisley pop’ rarity. Paul Rigby spoke to singer Barry Booth and writer Terry Jones to discover more about this curious release...

ONE OF THE ODDEST discoveries of recent times, the album ‘Diversions’, was buried in the dark depths of the Sixties psychedelic movement but has attracted recent attention because of its Monty Python connections. Although eventually written by both Terry Jones and Michael Palin, the story of the album begins with Barry Booth, who had played on the same bill with a young group called The Beatles and has written songs for the legendary Roy Orbison.

Having garnered the experience and confidence that comes from writing a song for a living legend, Booth moved on to theatre (as musical director for the original Grease, starring a young Richard Gere) and the BBC, appearing on popular shows featuring Rolf Harris, Tom Jones and Topol.

Whilst attached to the BBC, Booth met up with Michael Palm and Terry Jones, as Jones remembers. "I was working for a BBC2 show called Late Night Line-Up, writing funny material for the Friday night show. Mike was performing the funnies and Barry did the music. I think it was the first time Mike and I had written lyrics specifically for a record although we had had songs recorded at Oxford — songs we’d written for revues.

Booth set Michael and Terry’s songs in demo form, which somehow fell into the hands of Tony Hatch who promptly offered a bemused Booth a contract.

"I thought he would place them with somebody and get them to record the songs because he was the A&R man for Pye. I had no idea that he assumed that I would actually record them," Booth says. Jones had similar foggy intentions regarding his lyric writing.

"Well I never intended to be a recording artist if that’s what you mean. But I love the idea of songs and lyric writing."

The final album, Diversions (now re-released via Sanctuary Records) is a collection of quaint songs featuring Booth’s suitably warbly voice (the liner notes compare it to ‘early Peter Gabriel’). Lyrically impressive, with a Kinks-like quality, the album is full of pop-hooks that also reflect an early Bowie style. Two singles were released from the album; ‘He’s Very Good With His Hands’ and ‘The Hottest Day Of The Year’, a song about a streaker.

Full of promise and packed with potential it may have been but the album, upon release, promptly died. Booth has a theory about that.

"I’m not sure if Pye was on its last legs at this time but, when the record first appeared, I was concerned that the record pushers, who get the record played and placed, were primarily interested in pushing glasses in the pub. Which meant that the resultant album remained a pretty well kept secret." As did the album’s original artwork.

"It’s beautiful sub-Beardsley work but was stolen from the I art department at Pye. The art was created by Barbara Fry, the wife of Martin Fry, a sousaphone player I met when we were students who later found fame with The Temperance Seven Band."

TERRY JONES’S initial experience with the recordable medium bore fruit when he later became involved in the aural side of Monty Python, "I think the change of medium was seen as a fun challenge rather than a problem," remembers Jones. "It meant having a good time with sound effects and so on."

Probably Python’s most innovative use of vinyl was the popularization of the double track technique utilized within Monty Python’s Matching Tie And Handkerchief. It was Jones’s idea.

"...although my original thought was to have five tracks — so that when you first played the LP it would only last about five minutes and you’d say ‘That was a bit short!’ Put it on again and get something totally different and then different again."

After Jones had the idea, the Python team discussed the technicalities of it. -

"I then discovered that the same principle had been used in the 1930s for a novelty record, which was a commentary on a horse race. You put the record on and were supposed to take bets on the - result because you never knew which horse was going to win."

Jones mastered the record at Apple and spent days "or rather nights trYing to get i~ to work but the installed recording machine had a ‘variable pitch’ which meant th~ the angle at which the track wet towards the centre hole varied, which d many technical problems.

"We were told that if we could find an old Sd) machine we might be able to tracks as we wanted but, alas, we couldn’t so five tracks sadly turned into two. The other idea of mine that I was rather pleased with was the crossed out cover for Another Monty Python Record. That started a sort of fashion for crossed out things."

Jones even hinted of a possible store ol: unreleased Pythoq work, gathering dust.

"I think Andre Jacquemain, who recorded most of our stuff, has got a hoar of unreleased material. I seem to rememb he circulated a tape of some of it a couplez of years ago. Some funny, some not..."

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