This is an extended version of the sleevenotes that Raymond Greenoaken, editor of Stirrings Magazine, has written for our Peter Bellamy tribute album, The Oak Ash and Thorn Project.

Confession: I am unhealthily immersed in all things Kipling-Bellamy and have been since I saw Oak Ash And Thorn in the window of Bradley's Electrical Goods in Haltwhistle, Northumberland in 1971, priced at 50p. I bought it on what I later discovered to be Peter Bellamy’s 27th birthday.

It was an impulse buy — I knew little of Bellamy at the time and had never heard him sing. The company he was keeping in Bradley’s window (Engelbert Humperdinck, Mantovani) hardly hinted at the idiom in which he excelled, that of hardcore English traditional song, which he delivered with a voice like that of a parade square Sergeant Major crossed with a lachrymose sheep. An unbeatable combination, though some may disagree.. I was hooked from the first syllables of Frankie’s Trade, and the hook remains fast nearly forty years on.

Bellamy had carved out something of an outlaw reputation as a member of The Young Tradition, along with Royston Wood and Heather Wood, for injecting an animal energy into the traditional repertoire. With just three unadorned voices and a swaggering rock’n’roll attitude, the YT drove a blazing coach and horses through the fustian earnestness of the Sixties folk world. In 1967 they played the Newport Folk Festival, scene two years earlier of Dylan’s electric apostasy; Bellamy appeared on stage wearing a cape, and trousers cut from William Morris curtains. 

The rear cover photo on Oak Ash And Thorn showed a flamboyant figure, a river of blond hair roped into a ponytail, fag hanging insouciantly from lip, brandishing a concertina like Keith Richards wielding a Les Paul. (He’s the only man who ever made playing a concertina look dangerous.) And yet the contents of the LP seemed a world away from such brash postures: a collection of musical settings of the poems of Rudyard Kipling, sourced from Kipling’s books of stories for children, Puck Of Pook’s Hill and Rewards And Fairies. Folk rebel and old-hat versifier: surely, in the words of Kipling himself, never the twain should meet.

But meet they did, and Peter Bellamy’s hundred-odd settings of Rud the Kip are, in the opinion of those that matter (well, me at any rate), one of the chiefest glories of 20th century English folk music. Bellamy turned them out in a series of LPs over a twenty year period, and had another couple of dozen ready for publication at the time of his untimely death in 1991. He was not the first musician to set Kipling, of course: a catalogue of such settings would fill a small book. Percy Grainger, another folksong enthusiast, produced over twenty in the early years of the century, scoring them for up-to-date-sounding combinations of guitar, harmonium and ukulele. But I’m willing to wager Bellamy turned out more than any other single composer, producing in the process a body of work that has no parallel in the folk revival.

To many, however, Kipling seemed like a perverse choice. In his heyday he was the best-selling writer in the world, but had fallen fairly completely out of favour after his death in 1936 (at least with the nabobs of literary taste: his books have never been out of print). By the 1960s he was a sort of folk memory, a cartoon reactionary whose wire-rimmed specs and toothbrush moustache were appropriated by that bar-room bigot du jour, Alf Garnett. To the left-leaning opinion formers of the revival he was beyond the pale. So presenting his verses in the form of folk songs was guaranteed to put noses out of joint wherever folkish types foregathered. 

But putting noses out of joint was the sort of thing Peter Bellamy loved to do. He just couldn’t help it. Taking a pop at revival orthodoxies, particularly leftist ones, was something he gleefully did throughout his career. So there may have been an element of pure mischief in the enterprise. But there was much more to it than that. Bellamy’s childhood was saturated in Kipling: not so much the Kipling of The White Man’s Burden or The Army Of A Dream, but rather The Jungle Books and the Just So Stories — and the poems and stories of the Puck books. "When I got older," he said in an interview in 1980, "I read the books he wrote for adults and yet somehow there I was singing folk songs and reading his poems and not making the connection. It clicked in 1970. I suddenly realised that nearly every single poem in the two Puck books was modelled with great precision and great skill in one form or another of an English folk song." 

What happened then has the patina of legend upon it. Bellamy — or so he claimed — sat up one night with a bottle of wine and a tape recorder, and by around 3am he had sixteen tunes that fitted Kipling’s verses like a handmade glove. For most of them he’d taken a line or phrase from an existing tune and sent it off in a different direction; for a couple he found a tune that he thought Kipling may well have had in mind himself. "Poor Honest Men," he opined, "is Spanish Ladies. It just is. There are no two ways about it. It's not guesswork. There are just so many pointers..."

There’s no question that Kipling had a working knowledge of folksong. He was immersed in the Border Ballads (Scott’s Minstrelsy Of The Scottish Border had been published in a new edition in 1902, four years before Kipling began work on Puck Of Pook’s Hill), and was an inveterate student of vernacular verse. But did he think in terms of songs rather than just words? There’s tantalising evidence that he did. "Ruddy was singing a new poem today," his wife Caroline noted in her journal, as though that was more or less normal practice for him. By all accounts he didn’t have much of an ear. But you don’t need to be able to hold a tune to be held by it; and Kipling made up for any absence of tonality with a profound response to rhythm and the inherent musicality of language. This made — and still makes — Kipling the most singable of poets: more so than Housman, more so than Clare... He’s as singable as McCartney!

An album’s worth of settings done and dusted, Bellamy took them to Argo Records, the folk and spoken word subsidiary of Decca, and ran them past in-house producer Fred Woods. Woods was immediately enthused and speedily obtained permission to publish from Kipling’s surviving daughter Elsie, latterly Mrs George Bambridge. Oak Ash And Thorn appeared in 1970 and was received somewhat warily in some quarters of the folk scene but warmly elsewhere. The editors of The Kipling Journal wrote in March 1971: "We had a delightful surprise last November when the Argo record company sent us, for review, a new stereo record comprising twelve poems from Puck Of Pook's Hill and Rewards And Fairies set to Folk Music, arranged and partly composed by the singer Peter Bellamy, who is described as 'probably the most respected traditional folk singer under thirty'... His elocution is excellent, every word comes clearly through, and the whole programme is a remarkable effort on his part... The programme has the approval of Mrs. Bambridge, and it is most pleasing that the whole idea seems to have emanated from these gifted members of the younger generation."

I love the old-bufferishness of "His elocution is excellent..." And who do you think was this crusty old codger, writing to Bellamy some time in late 1970?—  

   "Just a brief note to thank you for the admirable ‘Oak, Ash and Thorn’ L.P.

   "Having been a reader of Kipling since my childhood I was, at first, sceptical when I heard of your plan to set his magnificent poems to music. However the LP is a total success, the music is quite apt and the whole evokes for me what I deem to be the true spirit of Kipling.

   "I hope ‘Oak, Ash and Thorn’ will not be the sole venture of this kind you undertake and I look forward to featuring more of Kipling's poetry and your music on the radio."

The clue is in the last sentence. John Peel, no less! Peel had been a Bellamy fan since the days when he featured The Young Tradition on his left-field Night Ride show on Radio One.

Oak Ash And Thorn was a fairly austere recording by today’s measure: just the Bellamy voice and occasional concertina and guitar, with a bit of Barry Dransfield fiddle and three tracks featuring the harmonies of The YT, resuscitated for the occasion. Bellamy, however, was just hitting his stride, and two years down the road a further selection of the Puck poems duly appeared, Merlin’s Isle Of Gramarye, showing considerable development in the range and sophistication of the settings. Here we had, beside the standard trad-styled fare, a piece in the manner of Dowland with flute organ and lute, a Viking lament and a Neolithic chant (neither making any large claims to authenticity, but both stunningly effective in their own terms), and a convincing liturgical pastiche. Two tracks featured Dik Cadbury’s creamy countertenor, and the soundworld also embraced Viking bodhran and the scraping of flints. Though the YT were hors de combat, Bellamy, his wife Anthea and brother-in-law Chris Birch provided a more than servicable alternative on one track, Smuggler’s Song. Nic Jones scraped some sinuous fiddle, most notably on the scene-setting opening song, Puck’s Song; Chris Birch too on the stately The Heavens Above Us. Peter Hall (not the film director, I’m fairly sure) played lute, Dolly Collins brought along her distinctive flute organ and arranged two tracks; Fred Woods and Mike Edmonds provided a couple of rustic choruses; and Dave Arthur was the bodhran basher in the horny hat. 

Merlin’s Isle is probably my favourite Bellamy album. For me it works on every level: masterful vocals, spot-on arrangements, some of Bellamy’s finest tunes and Kipling’s most memorable verses. Uniquely, it features one track on which Bellamy doesn’t appear at all. On the Dowland-y The Queen’s Men, aiming for an Early Music flavour, he cedes vocal duties to Dik Cadbury’s countertenor. (I described Dik’s tones as creamy above: aptly enough — he is indeed a scion of the famed chocolate dynasty.) 

Permission from the Kipling estate had been slower in coming this time round, but Mrs Bambridge eventually gave the nod. The wind now fully in his sails, Bellamy set his sights on The Barrack Room Ballads, the biggest-selling book of poems in publishing history. He was more than satisfied with his twelve BRB settings, reckoning them his best yet. Certainly every one of them is a snug and satisfying fit, with an intuitive "rightness" that the many parlour settings essayed in the early 20th century never achieve. But this time Mrs Bambridge shut up shop and flatly refused to sanction their release. Bellamy managed to sneak them out in the US, where the 50-year copyright law didn’t apply; but when Mrs B died in 1976 and the estate changed hands, permission was swiftly vouchsafed. Barrack Room Ballads came out on Free Reed Records in 1977, and was followed in 1981 by the zestily-titled Keep On Kipling on Fellside (now available on CD on Fellside FECD162) and 1989’s Rudyard Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs on Dambuster, two "grab-bags" (his term) sourced from the whole range of Kipling’s oeuvre. In 1990 he self-released on cassette (some of you may remember cassettes...) Soldiers Three, an expanded version of BRB. There’s the odd piece of Kiplingiana on his non-themed releases, and as hinted at above he had at least another album’s worth at the time of his death.

And of course Peter Bellamy was only forty seven when he left this world. Had he lived on, here’s no doubt in my mind that he would have continued mining this same rich and glittering seam, and that the results would have been every ounce as excellent as the work he’s left us. Throughout the 1980s he performed a one-man show called Keep On Kipling, illustrating his settings with slides and commentary. It was aimed primarily at arts centres and libraries but was entirely suitable for folk venues. It wasn’t widely seen on the folk circuit, however, and this seems best explained by a lingering suspicion of Kipling among the folkiscenti. Outside of the folk bubble, the early Seventies had seen the beginnings of a critical revaluation of Kipling, which has continued apace ever since. He’s now recognised — in literary circles, at least — as a far more subtle and complex writer (and personality) than in the dog-days between the Thirties and Sixties. Within the folk scene, by contrast, opinion has been slower to shift, and the cartoon Kipling still casts its long shadow. No-one can deny he was emphatically a man of the political Right. He has been variously arraigned as an imperialist, a racist, even — somewhat anachronistically — a fascist. Of course, the key to his popular appeal was that he said things that a great many people believed to be true. But Kipling was always more complicated than he appeared at first glance. He was the laureate of empire, but also the prophet of its fall: "Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre". Similarly, for the charge of racism to stick you have to discreetly ignore poems like Gungha Din, Fuzzy-Wuzzy, The Ballad Of East And West, and stories like Without Benefit Of Clergy. As for the charge of fascist — George Orwell, who detested Kipling (though less because of his politics than his perceived "vulgarity"), nevertheless demonstrated with forensic exactitude that he was nothing of the sort; as Angus Wilson, one of his most perceptive critics, has noted: "There can be no doubt whatsoever of how much Kipling would have abhorred the form right-wing corporativism took under Hitler in Germany". Whenever you look closer at Kipling’s public postures, they seem to dissolve into confusing shades of grey. There’s simply much more to him than meets the casual glance. He contradicted himself, certainly, but he could afford to because he was a poet and not a politician. This may go some way to explaining why Bertholt Brecht, that lion of the Left, held him in such high regard — and why, when poems like A Pilgrim’s Way and The Land find their way into folk clubs wrapped in Bellamy’s masterful settings, they’re often construed as expressions of heartwarming socialist sentiment.

Certainly Kipling was no Tory, as his fable Below The Mill Dam and poems like The Islanders forcefully demonstrate. He was chummy with George V and Theodore Roosevelt, and lived in big country houses (Bateman’s in Sussex, Naulakha in Vermont). But as a young man he spent a few years in cheap lodgings in Villiers Street off The Embankment, overlooking Gatti’s Music Hall. He was an habitué of Gatti’s, mixing comfortably with its working class audiences; and his interest in working men and women lasted throughout his life. On his frequent ocean cruises he was as likely to be poking around the engine room as sunning himself on the passenger deck.

Nevertheless, Peter Bellamy did himself few favours on the folk scene by placing himself in the same frame as Kipling. By association, he was characterized as a rabid right-winger, which his habit of needling lefties did little to dispel. In fact, he had no partisan politics at all — he was "rather apolitical", as Karl Dallas put it in his obituary. His love of Kipling did not extend to an endorsement of his politics – "There are views of his that I personally find repellent", he confided with airy candour in an interview towards the end of his life. But give a dog a bad name… It’s a strange and somewhat unnerving fact that his father Richard Reynell Bellamy, who originally introduced him to Kipling’s works, was closely involved in the 1930s with Oswald Moseley’s Blackshirts, and is the author of the unpublished memoir We Marched With Moseley.

The Kipling establishment, perhaps surprisingly, took Bellamy very quickly to its bosom. His records were reviewed admiringly in The Kipling Journal, and in the 1980s he was elected Honorary President of the Kipling Society, an accolade he took great pride in. A representative of the Society delivered a fond and touching oration at his funeral in West Yorkshire in 1991.

For various reasons, including his alleged politics, Bellamy — like Kipling himself — had suffered an ebbing of his professional reputation, both prior to and after his death. In the early years of the new century, however, the tide began to turn. The epithet "late, great" suddenly attached itself to his name in the folk press; his recordings began fitfully to appear on CD reissue; and Jon Boden embarked on a one-man crusade to convince the folk scene that Bellamy is The Boss — even in absentia. The Oak Ash And Thorn Project suggests the momentum continues to grow.

I’ve often wondered why Oak Ash And Thorn mysteriously appeared in the folk-free zone that was Bradley’s shop window those many years ago. My theory is that somebody ordered it through the shop and, for whatever reason, neglected to collect it. And for that act — or non-act — of unwitting benevolence they have my eternal gratitude.