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

Oberon in the studio, 1971

I were regularly playing together (again) along with Chris and his great friend Charlie Seaward. Robin and Chris both played guitar, Charlie played flute and I pounded the bongos and improvised lyrics. We’d play everywhere and anywhere, I remember the fives courts (with their echo) being a favourite place. Most of all we were friends having fun.

Here’s another window into the time. Just before we sat our O-levels we went for a last tutorial with our history master, Mr (David) Shipton. He’d invited us to his rooms in the mansion. He did his best to make us relax. He made coffee. We sat rather stiffly on every chair, stool and bench he could muster. When the teaching was over he produced an LP. On its cover two windswept figures were leaning against a snow-covered dry stone wall, woollen trousered, cloaked, one of them was bearded with a broad brimmed hat. Behind them was a clear blue winter sky. They looked like Coleridge and Wordsworth, re-incarnated as hippies, photographed on a fell somewhere high above Grasmere. When he played the record it was like nothing I’d heard before: strange exotic instruments – bowed gimbris, flute-organs, sitars, jews harps – wove around the more familiar guitars. The songs were half sung, half intoned. The lyrics drew from myth and nursery rhyme. They were called ‘The Incredible String Band’. I was an instant devotee. My improvised lyrics in the fives courts would have been a school-boy attempt to emulate that record – part poetry, part incantation, part song. At the same time I was imbibing Dylan Thomas, Ted Hughes, E E Cummings, John Clare alongside Chaucer, Shakespeare et al. Everything was percolating, composting, nourishing, everything was part of my education. I left Radley in 1970. At the end of the summer term we organized an outdoor ‘Poetry and Folk’ concert by the college pond. By now our little band was called ‘Oberon’. I remember Andrew Motion reading at that event. I don’t remember what we played, I think there was a (long lost) song called ‘The Ballad of the Search for Self’ and we certainly would have sung ‘Epitaph’, a song written in memory of James Gardiner, who had died earlier that summer in North Africa.

Over the next year I followed the evolution of Oberon through phone conversations with Charlie and Chris, and through Robin’s wonderful letters (each one a work of art, full of his brilliant madcap drawings). I heard that the band had expanded, now including Nick Powell on drums and Julian Smedley on violin (Nick, Julian and I had once played together in a very short-lived school band called ‘The Purple Greenhouse’). And then Jeremy Birchall was added on bass (a bit of a coup, Jeremy was a skilled keyboard player and singer, he taught himself bass to join the band). Later I heard that Julian’s girlfriend Jan Scrimgeour had been invited to add her voice to the mix. From time to time I’d send lyrics to Charlie – not knowing what became of them. And then I got wind that there were plans for Oberon to make a record. By now I was a year out of school and doing my own thing (to use the parlance of the time).

At the end of the summer term in 1971 all the members of Oberon stayed on at school for a few days. They now had a manager, school friend Roly Errington, who pulled all the strands together. He’d invited Colin Sanders – who ran an independent record label

called Acorn – to record the album. The band rehearsed in N2 while Colin (who would later become a seminal figure in digital recording technology) set up his equipment in N1 (the same block of classrooms where we’d listened to Dylan three years before). The arrangements were worked out in rehearsal, so that when recording began the songs were mostly recorded in one take. By all accounts the weather was perfect, there was swimming in the school pool, there were photo-shoots on the cricket pitches and (all but Nick having now left school) visits to the local pubs. Robin designed and illustrated the distinctive album sleeve, he cites Aubrey Beardsley, Richard Dadd and Alan Aldridge as influences.

I knew nothing of all this, and it wasn’t until autumn 1971 when 99 copies of the album had been pressed (100 would have attracted ‘Purchase Tax’) that I saw and heard it for the first time. I remember being hugely impressed by the artwork and the sound. There were traces of the music we’d been making a year earlier, but the arrangements were fuller and much more sophisticated. And it was thrilling to hear my lyrics embedded in the songs. What was on it? Here’s a brief account of each track.

Nottamun Town a traditional song, first heard on a Fairport Convention album, given an echoey haunting quality in this arrangement, which chimes with its strange contradictory lyric. Peggy played on solo guitar by Chris Smith. Chris was a huge fan of Bert Jansch and John Renbourn, you can hear their influence here. The tune was written about his dog. The Hunt is the most ambitious song on the record, full of time shifts and unexpected harmonies. You get a sense of the breadth of the sound palette the band was drawing from: jazz, modern classical, as well as the progressive end of rock. Jeremy, Charlie and Julian’s classical training is in evidence here. Syrinx by Debussy played by Charlie Seaward. Charlie is a brilliant flautist and here he was able to show his skill to great effect. Summertime by Gershwin. This is a standard that had recently been revived by Janis Joplin. It leads into an improvisation with Charlie’s flute and Julian’s violin weaving around each other, part ‘Jethro Tull’, part ‘It’s a Beautiful Day’. Time Past, Time Come is an instrumental written by Chris, inspired by the Four Quartets. I think we all agree this is the most fully realised track, a beautiful, yearning, atmospheric piece with a curious time structure. Whenever I listen to it I’m thrown back to a time when we were young and everything seemed possible. And it’s tinged with melancholy because of Chris’ early death. Minas Tirith was originally conceived as a setting of words by Tolkien. Copyright issues resulted in me writing new lyrics. It’s the magnum opus of the record. Julian described it as ‘a patchwork quilt of pieces with an improvised connective tissue’. Nick Powell gives it its obligatory drum solo with youthful gusto. Epitaph is Charlie’s setting of my poem for James Gardiner (mentioned above), sung and played by Robin.

Chris Smith

Julian, Jan & Charlie

Listening to the record now, I hear a very ‘early seventies’ take on English Pastoral. It’s of its time - a group of talented kids in their late teens carried along by the zeitgeist of their moment. Its mood is, I suppose, similar to what we find more fully realised in the music of Nick Drake (another English public-school boy of roughly the same age). It’s enigmatic and not quite grounded. I find myself wincing at my lyrics, but then I take a step back and just feel a tenderness for who I was – who we all were – then, more than fifty years ago.

After the record came out there was some brief talk of record deals and tours, but it all quickly came to naught. The records were sold or given away and we set off on the trajectories of our lives. From time to time I’d pull out a dusty copy of the LP and play it, to the amusement of my friends and the ridicule of my children - a period piece.

Then, sometime in the 1990s, I had a friend who was interested in collecting old vinyl. He had a catalogue. Out of curiosity I asked him whether there was any mention of a band called Oberon. He flicked through the pages. Yes there was. He looked up at me: ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream?’ I nodded. He said: ‘Guess what it’s worth?’ I hazarded a guess: ‘Ten quid maybe?’ I was wrong. It was listed as an extremely rare minor classic of psychedelic folk. Copies were exchanging hands for more than a thousand pounds. Not long afterwards I was contacted by someone from Japan, he was wondering whether I had any to sell. I had three copies - I sold him two and kept one. So began the first unexpected afterlife of the record. In 2011 some of us met up for a fortieth anniversary celebration. By this time several bootlegs had appeared. Then, a few years later, Jeremy Birchall was contacted by a major label ‘Cherry Red Records’. They were putting together an anthology of obscure folk releases from the late sixties and early seventies called ‘Dust on the Nettles’. They wanted to include ‘Minas Tirith’. This was followed in 2020 by ‘Sumer is Icumen in, the pagan sound of British and Irish folk 1966 -75’. This time they wanted to include ‘Nottamun Town’. Suddenly we found ourselves rubbing shoulders on the credits with some of our old heroes – Pentangle, Traffic, Fairport Convention and the Incredible String Band. The second afterlife had begun.

This year (2021) Cherry Red Records have brought out ‘A Midsummer’s Night Dream’ in its entirety. After a wait of fifty years Oberon finally have a record deal! And not only that, they’ve made it a double album. Jeremy found a recording of a concert that Oberon gave in School in March 1971, so there’s a live CD alongside the official studio album (if you can call a classroom a studio).

For myself, the central pleasures of the afterlives of the Oberon LP have been the periodic flurries of e-mails between old friends and a re-invigorated memory of a time when we were young, porous, curious, open to experiment and drawing influence from everything that touched us.

Hugh Lupton

Oberon – A Midsummer’s Night Dream is available from Cherry Red Records: https://www.cherryred.co.uk/artist/oberon/

An interview with the band can be found on: www.psychedelicbabymag.com/2013/03/oberon-interview.html

Hugh Lupton became a storyteller and writer. He still writes song lyrics and occasionally strums a guitar. www.hughlupton.co.uk

Charlie Seaward continued to play flute and keyboards, writing material for and playing with two bands - ‘Lost Jockey’ and ‘Man Jumping’. His son Joe (also an Old Radleian) plays drums with ‘Glass Animals’.

Chris Smith continued to write music until his death in the 1980s.

Julian Smedley: The Summer of Oberon set him on a 50-year exploration of musical improvisation. Although officially retired now, he continues to record, produce and perform with groups on the West Coast of the U.S. as a jazz-influenced guitarist, singer and swing violinist.

Jeremy Birchall worked for BBC Radio as a sound engineer and producer, then was a session/group/opera singer and CD producer. www.yantramusic.net www.sounds-special.co.uk

Robin Clutterbuck has continued with music, especially enjoying singing in an eight part a cappella group called ‘Parting Gesture’. He works as a museum consultant www.facebook.com/PartingGesture www.whiterook.co.uk Oberon 1971, (l-r) Nick, Jeremy, Charlie, Julian, Jan, Chris, Robin

Nick Powell is working for Highgate Cemetery and an unplugged version of his Americana/Blues band ‘Howling Owl’ (two albums on Spotify etc) is still playing hallowed North London venues like the Hope & Anchor.

Jan Scrimgeour: Charlie inspired her next band in London – ‘Barquentine’. They played in pubs for fun. After travelling and living in faraway places like New Zealand and Spain, learning to play the flute (inspired by Charlie of course) she acted, danced and sang her way back to old Blighty where she remains.

Opposite left: Robin’s drawing of the studio set-up, with doodles. E = engineer M = Manager (Roly Errington) D = Drums (Nick, in the storecupboard) B = Bass (Jeremy) G = Guitar (Chris) S&G = Singing and Guitar (Robin at left, Jan right) V = Violin (Julian) F = Flute (Charlie).

Right: Oberon reunion 2011, left to right Nick, Robin, Hugh, Julian, Charlie