The learning curve
The Academy Pop-Lore According To… MORGAN BLUE TOWN, 1969
It’s rare that this feature entertains a former nude revue dancer and Ready Steady Go! compere who also has the UK soap operas EastEnders and Eldorado on her CV. But in 1969, Polly Perkins found herself fronting a charming, haunting chamber-pop oddity with jazzy cadences and psych leanings, lyrically of a piece with Scott Walker’s early solo albums, populated by society’s outsiders in a decidedly less-than-swinging part of ’60s London. It fell on deaf ears. “For years, I’ve heard people call it ‘The Lost Album’,” Perkins sighs. Born Gillian Nessie Arnold, Perkins debuted as a ‘saucy’ Windmill Girl in the West End before she met agent/manager Lena Davis, who’d steered Ricky Valance to the chart summit in 1960 with timeless teen tragedy cover Tell Laura I Love Her. Perkins’ own run of gimmicky 45s – from I Reckon You, an ‘answer’ track to Mike Sarne’s Come Outside, to You Too Can Be A Beatle – was less notable, while her Ready Steady Go! gig was usurped by the beatnik charms of Cathy McGowan. By 1968, Perkins had turned to stage/ TV acting. She and Davis were living together in north London when guitarist Richard Cobby – who recalls playing in “various jazz bands, big bands, little quartets, the usual run-of-the-mill gigs, while teaching” – followed a mutual friend’s advice to contact Davis, who had penned lyrics for Perkins, Joe Brown and Kathy Kirby. “Richard played me a piece of music,” Davis recalls, “that seemed very Jewishfolk to me, as many ’40s and ’50s songs were, like Gershwin and Irving Berlin. It had never occurred to me to write anything other than a pop song, but something inside made me write Yellow Star, about members of my family, on the train from their village in Germany, to the gas chambers.” Davis contacted a business pal, Monty Babson, co-founder of Morgan Studios, and its label offshoot Morgan Blue Town. “We played Yellow Star and Monty burst into tears,” says Davis. “He asked if we had more. I said, I don’t want to write more like this, and he said, ‘Write what you want, let’s do an album’.” Perkins knew Scott Walker through her friend P.J. Proby, but Davis says her only influence was Anthony Newley – “a genius” – though she also loved Janis Ian. Another song, Poor Jean, depicted “the woman who lived opposite, taken away to a mental home in front of the whole street.” Quiet And Gentle described, “a man who loves his mother, and when she dies, decides to follow.” In She Returned Home, a mother momentarily abandons her family, while The Girl In His Mirror out-bolds Scott Walker’s Big Louise by addressing transvestitism with male pronouns. “In person, Lena was bombastic, not gentle, but her words were beautifully written, totally poignant,” says Perkins. “I don’t know where they came from,” says Davis. “Some were like sketches, others more finished oil paintings. But talking to you now, I can see a lot were about loneliness. We’re born lonely and we die lonely. Outsiders? Yes. When I’d toured with Lance Fortune and Dickie Pride, we couldn’t find digs. The signs said, ‘No blacks, no Irish, no Jews, no gays, no showbusiness.’ We ticked all the boxes!” To record her and Cobby’s songs, Davis advertised for musicians. The guitarist recalls “a one-armed flugelhorn player” auditioning, but they only hired woodwind player Dicky Walter, a National Youth Jazz Orchestra member who had begun writing for BBC Radio. “Lena wasn’t interested in, to use the phrase, a popular beat combo,” he says. “Groups like Pentangle proved it didn’t have to have to be about volume or grooves.” They auditioned drummers but decided against a rhythm section, says Perkins. “We thought it was perfect as it was. I brought in Damon Hardy, who I’d met singing in a big band at the Streatham Locarno, to sing harmonies. It came together really well.” Album intro Enrol With The Academy was a manifesto: “If you feel outside of things, if you don’t belong, come in here, and join us, on this album,” Davis explains. Inside it wasn’t all loneliness and trauma. Rachel’s Dream bottled the post-WWII hope of the Jewish issue, about emigrating to “the promised land”, with a Russian-sounding melody sharing roots with Mary Hopkin’s Those Were The Days. Polly Perkins Loves You Georgia Brown was, for 1969, a bold and jazzy lesbian love song, while single Munching The Candy was, “a psychedelic poem about drugs”. The BBC banned it, and not playing live didn’t help. “Richard didn’t want to play shows, he didn’t like the music business,” Davis says (Cobby disagrees with this view). “Where would we have toured anyway?” Dick Walter agrees they faced certain difficulties in this regard. “It would have had to be intimate, theatrical spaces, and there weren’t really venues like that then,” he says. “Late-night Radio Two, which used a lot of studio groups, would have been perfect for The Academy, but I wasn’t qualified to suggest it.” Pop-Lore According To The Academy was reissued, 37 years later, on CD in Japan; in 2011, UK label Secret reissued it, with four extra tracks, none of which the band recall making. “They must be old demos!” says Perkins. “They’re terribly naff – and nothing to do with what the album’s about: all these important, true stories.” Still, The Academy has endured. “It was a marvellous time, I’d love to live it all again,” says Perkins. Davis agrees: “A lovely, self-indulgent thing to do. I listen to it sometimes, and don’t feel it’s me, it’s just got a life of its own. And then we all moved on to other things. Which, for me, explains what it was about.”
This month’s prize found on rock obscuria’s barren plain of flytipped mattresses and dead fridges, a pop-jazz Beeb-banned outsider suite. “SINGLE MUNCHING THE CANDY WAS, ‘A PSYCHEDELIC POEM ABOUT DRUGS’.”