John Betjeman was a National Treasure before that term was in common use. His avuncular, teddy-bear-like presence in his many TV appearances saw to that. His poetry was hugely popular. Lightish, rhyming stuff that scanned, that you could understand, I remember older people saying. The poet of suburbia, of the everyday. In his campaigning for the preservation of Victorian architecture, he seemed to represent an older way of life that was being swept away.
But the themes of his poetry are the classic ones of all serious poetry – love and its absence, death, the existence or not of God. He can be very dark at times. Just think of Croydon, a poem that for me, speaks of the first world war without ever actually mentioning it directly. And there is a sexuality in some of his poems that is quite modern and that the Victorian poets he appeared to resemble would never have dared to publish.
In 1973, the year after he became Poet Laureate, he recorded the LP, Betjeman’s Banana Blush. This was not simply a record of him reading his verse, but placed his voice against music that had been specially composed for the occasion. There had been plenty of recordings of poets reading their work before. T S Eliot and Ezra Pound had done it. There was also the tradition of setting poetry to music, in which the poem became the lyrics of a song, such as John Ireland’s setting of John Masefield’s Sea Fever, or Charles Stanford’s setting of Henry Newbolt’s Drake’s Drum, familiar from the last night of the proms.
The Betjeman record was something a bit different, I think. The music, composed and conducted by Jim Parker, enhances the mood and tone of the poems. Thus, Indoor Games near Newbury, the story of a rather grand and chaperoned inter-war teenage party, alternates between a sort of fanfare-like tune and pastiche 1920s dance music. The melancholy piano, strings and French horn of Business Girls make the single women even lonelier. The slow melody of Youth and Age on Beaulieu River seems to glide like the sailing boat on the water. The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel is given a fast-paced treatment, creating a comic Victorian stage melodrama effect.
In The Cockney Amorist, the jazzy banjo and clarinet contrast with the tale of lost love. Perhaps most effective of all are the descending strings that open On the Portrait of a Deaf Man, where contemplation of the physical decay of his late father’s body leads the poet to question the existence of God.
It’s not really surprising that Jim Parker has gone on to have a very successful career as a film and television composer, including the theme for Midsomer Murders. The blend of words and music on the Betjeman record creates a sort of film in one’s mind.
Betjeman was sixty eight when he recorded this, but the overall effect makes him a strangely modern figure, having more in common with Ray Davies or Scott Walker, than John Masefield. After all, it’s not a million miles away from the sort of thing that John Cooper Clarke did only a few years later.
It appeared on Charisma Records, an independent company, whose label was a painting of the mad hatter. It was home to a roster of other English eccentrics such as Genesis. Betjeman was rather dismissive of his efforts here but this is a recording that has definitely passed the test of time.
I only discovered this marvellous recording a few years ago, but it certainly gave me a new understanding and appreciation of Betjeman’s poetry. If I not heard this, I might have been tempted to dismiss his writing as a bit “old hat”, as so many people did in the 1970s.
A Banana Blush is a cocktail, I believe, but I am not sure exactly what its ingredients are.
The Good Reader 