The Canterbury Sound in Popular Music by Asya Draganova Shane Blackman Andy Bennett

Author:Asya Draganova, Shane Blackman, Andy Bennett [Asya Draganova, Shane Blackman, Andy Bennett]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, Social & Cultural Studies, Social Science, Cultural Studies, Popular Culture, Entertainment, Music
ISBN: 9781787694910
Publisher: Emerald Publishing Limited
Published: 2021-02-19T05:00:00+00:00

1.3 ‘The Clarietta Rag’ (1969)

This is the first of Kevin’s occasional series of style pastiches of popular song genres. True to its title, it is, in rhythm, an authentic Ragtime two-step (somewhat reminiscent of The Beatles’ ‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ (1967) from Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band), and even boasts a ‘tailgate’ trombone in the arrangement, although otherwise the pastiche is not pursued in the instrumentation.

The 1960s had an intermittent but intense preoccupation with the popular culture of the previous generation or so: on the one hand, Victoriana and Edwardiana (‘Being for the Benefit of Mr Kite’ took its text bodily from a mid-nineteenth century circus poster); on the other, the music, clothing, visual art, commercial design and typography of the teens, 20s and 30s of the twentieth century. Old films and cartoons were regularly screened and eagerly consumed in clubs such as UFO in London’s West End, and Theda Bara, a somewhat ripe Hollywood starlet of the 1920s,7 made a plausible masthead mascot for the ‘underground’ magazine International Times given that aspects of the era’s sartorial style, hairdressing and application of makeup had been enthusiastically revived by young hippie women.

The incompletely pastiched musical style is appropriate. Clarietta, while clearly of her (and Kevin’s) time – and, indeed, despite its period quaintness, her very name suggests clarity – is in some respects an old-fashioned girl.8 There is a secondary suggestion in her name of ‘clarinet’, a staple part of the Dixieland front-line instrumentation along with the trumpet (or cornet) and trombone, although it does not feature in the arrangement here. She appears to be a kind of countercultural Zuleika Dobson, winningly careless of her hopelessly smitten suitors while zestfully patrolling – as I imagine it – the Serra de Tramuntana around Valdemossa and Deià on the island of Mallorca – where Kevin had, as noted above, sojourned in pre-Soft Machine days with Robert Wyatt and Daevid Allen – on her swift and highly manoeuvrable Lambretta.

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