Stuart Anthony and Larry Beckett - Love and Trial

  by Adrian Janes

published: 14 / 1 / 2019

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Poet Larry Beckett is renowned as the lyricist of many Tim Buckley songs, including ‘Goodbye and Hello’, ‘No Man Can Find the War’, ‘Starsailor’ and, most famously, ‘Song to the Siren’, covered by artists as diverse as This Mortal Coil, Robert Plant and George Michael. But since Buckley’s death in 1975 he has concentrated on poetry (a few of his poems feature here), only returning to songwriting earlier this century through a partnership with the Long Lost Band from Lancaster in the UK. It’s with one of that band’s former members, multi-instrumentalist Stuart Anthony, that Beckett has made this curiously intriguing album. About half is a return to some of the roots of Western culture, using his translations of hymns and poems from ancient Greece. Beckett sonorously declaims against Anthony’s skilful playing of the traditional Greek tambouras and baglamas (long-necked stringed instruments) and the santoor (an Indian instrument like a dulcimer). It’s a combination of words and music that is quite arresting, so foreign in space and time is it to what we commonly hear. Those translations from the Greek which Anthony has turned into songs he sings don’t always work so well. ‘Song Like Honey’ doesn’t really marry music with words like “First, I sang old Chaos, dark, the table of elements, and the heavens, finite and unbounded”, which admittedly would be a challenge for any composer. Yet there’s still a strange power despite the awkwardness. More successful as songs are three translations from the Cretan poet Vitzentzos Kornaros, notably ‘Wild Rose’, a duet with Jess Thomas, which is a kind of centuries-old precursor of Cave and Minogue’s ‘Where the Wild Roses Grow’, with all the romance but none of the violence; and the Cuban-French poet José-Maria de Heredia (‘Oblivion’), the latter’s allusions to “ancient gods” and “sirens” linking it well to the world conjured up elsewhere. The final satisfying link is a fine rendition by Anthony of ‘Song to the Siren’, apparently recorded on a ship sailing off the Greek coastline. The album concludes with the stark beauty of Beckett and Anthony’s ‘The Song’, a touching, acoustic guitar-based tune, the latter’s voice on the verge of cracking but just about making it. Appropriately, for an album that credits some tracks to the thinker Heraclitus, this concludes with its own bit of poignant philosophy for all singers and poets: “When the century/Is dust, what will/Be left of us?/Only the song.”

Track Listing:-

1 Tambouras
2 Hymn to Zeus
3 Worker at the Lyre
4 Song Like Honey
5 Charybdis
6 Hymn to Artemis
7 Spirit of Water
8 Temenos
9 Flux
10 Exile and the Kingdom
11 Wild Rose
12 I Was Proposing
13 Song to the Siren (Live on the Odysseia, Nidri, Lefkada)
14 In the Pitching Water
15 Oblivion
16 The Song

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