Oberon - 50 years on
OBERON 50 YEARS ON
Hugh Lupton (1966) explains how fifty years on from recording an album in a Radley classroom, he and his fellow Radleians landed a record deal for it. Here’s a window into another world. It’s Spring term, late February 1968. After a motorcycle accident and a long silence, Bob Dylan’s new LP has just been released in the UK. It’s called ‘John Wesley Harding’. Someone (I can’t remember who) has got hold of a copy, hot off the press. The word goes out to everyone ‘in the know’, it’s going to be played in N4 (one of the pre-fabricated classrooms by the music school) at such and such a time (maybe it was a Sunday morning). The time arrives and the classroom is packed, there are people outside the door in the entranceway. The record is played right through, first one side and then the other. From the first crackle as the needle touches the vinyl and the title song begins, to the final click as ‘I’ll be your baby tonight’ fades and the arm lifts from the record there is absolute silence, a thrall of attention, as though it’s not just the songs that are being listened to, but a missive, a long awaited testament from the voice of the moment. I’m remembering this episode because it’s emblematic of the curious double life some of us lived at Radley during the late 1960s. We were inhabiting a world that, in many ways, was little changed since the Edwardian era. There was still fagging, school discipline still allowed college prefects to cane younger boys, everybody was known by his surname, there were elaborate systems of privilege, but at the same time the world outside was in a state of cultural flux. And it was a flux - a restless dissatisfaction and striving for new ways forward - that was being led by young people. It was ‘adolescent’, it was chaotic, ecstatic, troubled and subversive, but out of it came many things that we now take for granted – the Women’s Movement, the Green Movement, Black rights, Gay rights, an engagement with world religions, wholefoods, a particular kind of community activism, and (if we listen to Bill Gates) the original egalitarian impulse of the internet - ‘the Creative Commons’ - which he traces back to the ‘Whole Earth Catalogues’ of the late sixties. So there we were, 16, 17, 18 year olds, at an English Public School, but aware that (to quote an earlier Dylan song) ‘Something is happening and you don’t know what it is…’ Well, we had an inkling of what it was and we wanted to know more. Most of that ‘more’ came to us through music. Go into a typical study in 1969 and look at the LPs stacked up on the desk. What do you see? Here’s a guess. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band by the Beatles, Electric Ladyland by Jimi Hendrix, Book Ends by Simon and Garfunkel, Beggar’s Banquet by the Rolling Stones, Blonde on Blonde by Bob Dylan… maybe something by King Crimson, Pentangle, John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers, Country Joe and the Fish, Leonard Cohen, Cream, Traffic, the Doors… then perhaps some flamenco from Manitas de Plata, ragas from Ravi Shankar, an African mass from Missa
Oberon’s first, and only, album - A Midsummer’s Night Dream. Luba, Fairport Convention’s reworkings of British ballads, some soul from Aretha Franklin or Otis Reddding… maybe some jazz from Miles Davies, or blues from Robert Johnson. If you were to listen to these records and examine their sleeves (as we all did religiously) you’d get a pretty clear impression of the spirit of the times. Alongside this, of course, the school was giving us ‘the canon’, the established repertoire, both musically and (in my case) through Peter Way’s wonderful English teaching. These things all combined to make the ‘crucible’ that we grew up in, and I, for one, still feel it working on me sometimes. Inevitably we didn’t only listen. We picked up instruments and had a go ourselves. I was in D Social, Peter Stuart’s house. I played a pretty fumbling guitar. Sometimes I’d jam with my friend Robin Clutterbuck (he was a much better player than me). Later he formed a duet with Jeremy North (they even looked like Simon and Garfunkel). Also in that house I remember James Gardiner singing the Cyril Tawney song ‘Sally Free and Easy’. Various members of the house were in a rhythm and blues band called ‘The Seven Pillars of Wisdom’. And then there was Henry Gunn. Henry had the best record collection I’d ever come across. He was also a very good guitarist. He had various bands that drew on talent from across the school. I think it was through Henry that I first met Chris Smith and Nick Powell. Anyway, to cut a long and tangled story short, by the time we were 16 or 17, Robin and the old radleian 2021
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