Sydney Carter/ Jeremy Taylor

Slim pickings at the boot sale this weekend but did pick up this rare LP on Fontana for a couple of quid. I have an LP with Jeremy Taylor and Spike Milligan which is fun so hoped this would be too. I certainly wasn't disappointed and happy to upload both sides. I could have done without the horrible Eton Boating Song at the end sung by lots of toffee nosed oiks but the rest is excellent despite the odd pop and crackle. Made in 1967 .

Wikipedia says of Sydney Carter-

"He studied at Christ's Hospital school in Horsham, West Sussex and Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in history in 1936. A committed pacifist, Carter joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit on the outbreak of World War II and served in Egypt, Palestine and Greece.

He worked as a lyricist for Donald Swann's revues and musicals in the 1950s and in 1962, produced an album Putting out the Dustbin with Sheila Hancock, with the song Last Cigarette on failing to give up smoking that became a minor hit."

The sleeve notes are as follows -

"Balliol is brainy but ugly, Trinity elegant but lackadaisical. They
stand side by side in Oxford. Each has a low opinion of the other
and lewd songs are sung over the dividing wall. Jeremy Taylor went
to one, Sydney Carter to the other. Look at their pictures and you'll
guess which came from which.
Both write songs and sing them. Anyone who does this now is
likely to be labelled "folk" unless (like Noel Coward) he plays the
piano. Taylor plays the guitar and Carter will often sing starkly
unaccompanied, for which reason he has been described (in The
/sis) as "traditional". He may be that, but his songs are not anony-
mous nor as ancient as some people think. He did not (as one Church
Organist seems to imagine) flourish around 1660; and Jeremy
Taylor did not write Holy Living ard Holy Dying (1651) though any
encyclopedia will say he did. The songs on this record should
dispel that notion.
Both have one foot in education and the other one in entertainment.
Carter pulled his out of education pretty early; after teaching for two
years at Frensham Heights he only did it after that from the safe
distance of "English by Radio" and the Schools Department of the
B.B.C. He found his way to folk song via Greece, where he spent
two years with the Friends Ambulance Unit, frequenting taverns
when he got the chance, dancing the hassapiko and listening to
the bouzouki. "Not that this was considered folk at all when I was
there" he says, "people told me it was low and Turkish. But I
breathed the pure mountain air of the klephtika as well".
Jeremy Taylor first taught in Johannesburg, where he sang in a
coffee bar at night. That is how he got mixed up with Wait a Minim,
the revue which was a smash hit in South Africa and had a two
year run in London before going on to Broadway. There it still goes
on, but Jeremy left the cast to stay in England. There he reverted
to education, teaching for a spell at Eton, but slipping up to London
now and then to do a folk song club or cabaret.
He is now back in the theatre. His Eton swan song was a concert in
the Art School, and this is it. Though no Etonian (even by associa-
tion) Sydney Carter sang as well. Martin Carthy was roped in to
play the guitar, Terry Brown to rattle chains and supervise."


S.Carter/J.Taylor - Side One

S.Carter/J.Taylor - Side Two