I am sat in Preston Guild Hall, enraptured by the lyrical brilliance of the guitar duo my Dad has taken me to see. I can’t be more than 12, I could be at Madison Square Gardens or the Hollywood Bowl (except I don’t yet know they exist because I live in Lancashire). I am here to see the incredible lyrics of two men singing in close harmony with the unique sound of gentle guitar accompaniment, listening to songs that are surely going to change popular music.
How does someone just wake up and write about the unique pain of being young like this? And I’ve not even been anywhere to be homesick yet, but ‘Homeward Bound’ blows me away with what such a thing might be like. Just wait till the rest of the world, or anyone outside of Preston, gets to hear them. How can that song describe what feeling lonely and misunderstood is like in so few words and so many notes? As ‘The Boxer’ washes over me, I know I’m falling in love with the way the lyrics and the music are entangled, this is it. Right here. And my Dad took me to see them!
My Dad loves music, and I know he’s proud that I wanted to come with him to see an actual gig. And, as the night goes on, if I perceive even a slight variation in the consistency of the duo’s songs, I don’t remember it. There is a special feeling of being allowed at a grown up event, though it seems fairly sedate compared to what I’d imagined. Everyone is seated nicely with programmes on their laps, there is no one rushing the stage. Everyone seems calm about the promise that the music holds.
And though I don’t understand this yet, the reason they’re sitting quietly is because I’m not at a Simon and Garfunkel concert, I’m at a ‘Phil and John’ concert. Since the internet doesn’t really exist yet, I’ve only heard these albums on cassette tapes, which means I have no idea who wrote any of these songs, it’s just Phil and John’s music. My Dad, who has since his youth been in love with Christian music, thinks I’m completely in love with the songs of a Christian folk rock duo. And in a way, I sort of am.
Phil and John, otherwise known as Phil Baggaley and John Hartley, were a Christian folk duo from Mansfield, near Nottingham, who were at their peak between about 1982 and the early 1990s. They wrote their own songs alongside covers of classics of 70s folk rock, by 1992 they were releasing secular music as The Wood Thieves, when they recorded ‘The Day the North Left Town’ with Grimethorpe Colliery Band. Re-encountering their early albums on YouTube (on channels like ‘ChristianHardtoFind’) has been an odd experience, it’s sent me down rabbit holes of religious folk artists, all slightly unsure if I’m chasing my Dad or the music.
I found a recording of the concert I remember, in 1993, Phil and John released it as ‘Live’. Relistening to it thirty years later, I discover I somehow still know all the words and the rhythm of the jokes between the songs. We must have had this on tape, we must have listened to it on car journeys, no wonder the whole evening feels so vivid. My Dad died seven years ago, and as anyone in the Dead Dad Club will tell you, sometimes it’s fine, and sometimes it’s a little less so. My strange connection to the music of Simon and Garfunkel pops up surprisingly often, and all of a sudden, there I am, back in Preston Guild Hall in the early 1990s, sitting next to Dad, clutching the program.
If some kind of intelligent being could have formed a band with the express purpose of luring my father, the coming together of Phil and John would have been their great achievement. With just enough covers of folk rock classics, just enough material about their own experiences of navigating being young men growing up in a secular world, all that and they were from the midlands – my Dad had at least two copies of most of their albums, one for the car and one for the house.
The glove box of Dad’s various falling apart cars were always full of 70s Christian music. He loved it all, the music of his generation without the sex and the drugs. He was born in 1956 and hit the 1970s at a point when music was experiencing an epidemic of greatness, Simon and Garfunkel’s Bridge Over Troubled Water (1970) came out when he was 14. By his early 20s, the album charts groaned under the weight of best sellers: Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours (1977), sat alongside Stevie Wonder’s Songs in the Key of Life (1976). David Bowie was at his creative peak with The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars (often shortened to Ziggy Stardust (1972), and Simon & Garfunkel had released each of the five studio albums that they ever would. Dad did have copies of most of these. I was born in 1982, and he waltzed me around to Stevie Wonders ‘Isn’t She Lovely’. But his heart was really with music like
Keith Green’s For Him Who Has Ears to Hear (1977). Green was another folk rock evangelical Christian, who gave copies of his music away to spread the Good News, before tragically dying in a plane crash at 29 leaving behind a young family. Such a loss was in my Dad’s world very much ameliorated by the promise of reunion in heaven.
When I started digging through Phil and John’s back catalogue, I started unravelling the names of musicians that Dad would definitely have known and were somewhere at the back of my memory. Phil and John’s recording of ‘Fools Wisdom’ sent me to another British Christian duo: Malcolm and Alwyn and the so-called ‘gospel beat’ music that arrived in the UK in the mid 70s. This genre had been fed by songs like US musician Larry Norman’s 1970 release ‘I Wish We’d All Been Ready’, a song about the aftermath of an imminent second coming, warning any non-Christian listeners to act fast lest the prediction befall them, that ‘you’ve been left behind’. My Dad, who had found Pentecostal Christianity at a youth club in Blackpool, ardently believed in the Good News and being born again, and the very real threat (or promise) of the rapture.
Songs in this genre are both curiously familiar and purposefully unsettling. Malcolm and Alwyn’s ‘Tomorrow’s News’, sounds like a Simon and Garfunkel B Side you’ve never turned over. It imagines car crashes with disappeared (enraptured) drivers. The chorus of gentle ‘La la la la la’ is somewhat undercut by the ‘let’s fly away’ hook. In this music hell is not only real but dangerously possible. Malcolm and Alwyn’s warning ‘time will tell, heaven or hell’ means — decide now or risk paying the price for eternity.
Phil and John’s music, at least as I remember it, seem rather gentle in comparison. There’s a teenager who wishes he was a ‘teenage millionaire’, then realises he doesn’t need money with Jesus. The more conversational song ‘Child of My Time’, reveals a singer who talks about finding Christianity and his church when all his friends are at rock concerts, no wonder my Dad loved it. The chorus line ‘please don’t give up on me’ and the way the male character retains some sense of hesitation is genuinely poignant, far more so to me than the scary threats of post-rapture lyrics.
But their music is also deeply British. I’d forgotten how much they also play up their east-Midlands-ness, self-deprecating jokes about their music success. I don’t think I’m doing anyone a disservice by saying that while they were not Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, there is a beauty in Phil and John’s material, as well as a persistent silliness that undercuts it all.
Recordings capture Phil telling mournful stories about his childhood – watching black and white TV through brightly coloured Quality street, with comedy songs that respond more to a music hall tradition than they do to folk rock: ‘Tommy the Turtle’ who gets run over by a Ford Cortina. Their double act has more than a hint of Morecambe and Wise: Phil as straight man is asked by John ‘Why do you have to ruin everything we do’, Phil replies in a heavy Mansfield accent ‘Because we plan it all before we go on’.
Sarah Whitfield 