Ian Matthews

IT is more than simple nostalgia and goes beyond déjà vu. Somehow, even today, when I listen to certain songs from my youth, I am, for a moment, transported back in time. I seem to feel the way I did as a teenager, and to be as much in awe of the music as I was then.

Sadly, it is impossible to sustain that sense of wonder that was an integral part of growing up in an era when wondrous things were happening in the world of music. It never happened with all the musicians of the time. Bob Dylan evoked a different kind of response. He was always a challenge to your intellect. You wanted to work out what he was saying, and at the same time enjoy the way his lyrics were couched musically, both during his acoustic and electric phases. Donovan, on the other hand, was someone whose work was simply sublime. I have had snatches of that mood his music evoked in me some 35 to 40 years ago when listening to his songs today – but it’s like as an adult one is no longer able to escape into that carefree world where you literally live for the moment. Which is why I can relate to Dave Cousins’s lyrics on Hey Little Man from Grave New World by Strawbs: “Wouldn’t it be nice, for maybe an hour, to not have a care?”

One man who slotted into those comparatively carefree days of my youth was Ian Matthews, a musician about whom, surprisingly, I could find rather too little on the Web. It was a weird experience, knowing that Matthews was one of the great icons of the late 1960s and early 1970s, yet his work – and especially his two superb albums from 1971 and 1972 – seem to be virtually unrecognised by the cognoscenti. Indeed, even the lyrics to the songs on those albums were unobtainable. No-one, in the big wide world, seems to have had such a passion for If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes and Tigers Will Survive that they have bothered to immortalise them, and Matthews, on the Web.

In fact, looking at the Wikipedia piece on him, it is as if he was something of a failure. Yet for a moment there, in my early high school years, his music, probably more than anyone’s, was capable of taking me to a higher plain, simply by virtue of its grace and beauty. Because he had a gentle, crystal-clear tenor voice that was literally sublime. And he played the acoustic guitar superbly.

Wikipedia tells us that he was born Iain Matthew McDonald in 1946 in Scunthorpe, Lincolnshire, England. And, as noted earlier in a piece on that group, he played for Fairport Convention during their early period when they were strongly influenced by American West Coast folk rock. Succinctly, we learn that he “later had a solo career and fronted the bands Plainsong and Matthews Southern Comfort”.

Interestingly, given his acute sensibilities as a singer and songwriter, he apparently grew up in a working-class family. He was the singer in several minor bands “during the British pop music explosion of the mid-1960s”, says Wikipedia, before moving to London in 1966. And where did he work? In a shoe shop in Carnaby Street. And he joined a pop band, Pyramid, with whom he recorded a couple of singles in 1967.

We then learn that he was recruited by Ashley Hutchings as a vocalist for Fairport, where he sang alongside the legendary Sandy Denny. Bizarrely, Wikipedia say that as Fairport’s music “veered more towards British folk influences, Matthews was booted out”.

This site tells us he teamed up with “Thompson, Nicol and Hutchings from Fairport, plus drummer Gerry Conway (of Fotheringay, and later to join Fairport) and pedal steel player Gordon Huntley” to form Matthews Southern Comfort, but doesn’t say when. I picked up a rare copy of the 1970 album, Later That Same Year in a second-hand shop, and of those listed only Huntley appears among the credits.

Wikipedia says the band’s sound was “rooted in American country music and rockabilly”. While I am obviously familiar with country music, this rockabilly thing has me baffled. Wikipedia, predictably, has reams to say, and I’ll no doubt be swamped with it when/if, I get to look at Elvis Presley’s life. But for now let’s go with their definition of rockabilly. They say it is “one of the earliest styles of rock and roll music to emerge during the 1950s”. The term is a portmanteau – nice word – of rock, from rock and roll, and hillbilly, “the latter a reference to the country music (often called ‘hillbilly music’ in the 1940s and ’50s) that contributed strongly to the style’s development. Other important influences on rockabilly include Western Swing, blues music, boogie woogie, and Jump blues. Although there are notable exceptions, its origins lie primarily in the American South.” Apart from Elvis, Carl Perkins and Bill Haley are mentioned in the article on rockabilly.

Later That Same Year

Wikipedia tells us that this band gave Matthews his “first significant experience as a songwriter, although it also covered the likes of Neil Young and Ian and Sylvia”. And I see that it “went through several different lineups and toured extensively for the next two years, to general critical acclaim”. Clearly, given that Later That Same Year is not a real classic, the albums to look out for are those including the Fairport members – though how they played for both groups is a mystery. Guitarists Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol, for example, both perform on Fairport’s 1969 classic album, Liege & Lief, as well as House Full, a live album from 1970. Nicol is still there on Babbacome Lee from 1971.

Anyway, Later That Same Year was not part of my experience of Matthews, since I only acquired it in the past few years. It features only three Matthews compositions, And Me and My Lady on Side 1 and Road to Ronderlin on the other side. One of the best songs on the album is their version of Young’s Tell Me Why. Wikipedia tells us the band had one commercial success – with a cover version of Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock, which reached No 1 in the UK. I have only heard Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young’s immortal version of a song commemorating that historic rock event.

In Search of Amelia Earhart

Now this is the part that gets me from Wikipedia. Under the heading, Plainsong, we are told that “after two solo albums on Vertigo Records, under the sponsorship of Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith and surrounded by a who’s who of likeminded British semi-folkies (notably another ex-Fairporter, Richard Thompson), he formed Plainsong …”. That’s it. The two seminal Matthews albums, If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes and Tigers Will Survive, are dismissed in a sentence. Sure, I’d love to hear Plainsong’s 1972 album, In Search of Amelia Earhart, which, says Wikipedia, “solidified Matthews’s songwriting reputation with the critics, if not with the general public”. This is where the story gets sadder. We learn that Plainsong collapsed due to “a bandmate’s alcohol problem”, and that now, based in Los Angeles, Matthews released several more albums with ad hoc bands, but none met with commercial success. Downgraded to a small label, Rockburgh, he finally scored a hit single in 1978 with Robert Palmer’s Gimme An Inch. However, the label folded the following year. Wikipedia quotes his official website as saying that at this point he “had been struggling for nearly 15 years now and was still living hand to mouth, with nothing to show for his efforts but a string of out-of-print albums, and the loyalty of those musicians and fans who shared his vision”. He moved to downmarket Seattle and formed a New Wave band, but neither that nor a stint at solo recording back in England improved his luck. But it pays to persevere. Because he later teamed up briefly, in the late 1980s, with members of Fairport and they cut an album through which he was hooked up with producer Mark Hallman. He brought out several solo albums on independent German labels, and finally came into his own as a solo performer. He later, in 1992, performed with Andy Roberts (who I know from The Liverpool Sound, about whom more much later), and this led to the reforming of several versions of Plainsong. This is beginning to sound like the Monty Python sketch about the rock band which undergoes a zillion name-changes. Nevertheless, it seems that since then Matthews has, as Wikipedia puts it, had a “moderately successful career”. Yet back then, back in 1971 when all the positive musical forces were coalescing in an orgy of creativity, Matthews brought out those two solo albums which remain absolute classics, beautifully crafted masterworks which will remain as glowing epitaphs to a man who clearly has not had an easy life.

Looking at these old album covers and comparing them to CD packaging, for me is a symbolic act. The album cover, often a gate-fold, is large, easily handled and the text – tracks, musicians, sometimes lyrics – is usually in a font size that makes it easy to read. Compare that with what you get on a CD cover. Firstly, the art is small, since it is only about one sixth the size of an album cover. Inside you may get a folded up piece of paper with more information on it, but even this usually contains text which is very difficult to read. In a way, to me this symbolises the way today’s music has lost its relevance to the youth. You can make a perfect copy of a CD on your computer. The best you could do with a vinyl disc was record it on tape, complete with the odd scratch. Often, kids today don’t even listen to the CD as such. It is immediately put onto the computer hard drive and then onto an iPod or other such device and listened to through earphones. It is another world. My world, back then, in 1971, was one where you snatched a moment of peaceful solitude, repaired to your room and put on If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes, by Ian Matthews. The room filled with his sound. Your mind, your body, soaked it up. It became part of your very soul. Which is probably why today, listening to it can still bring back that sense of being back there, in the past, as a teenager, listening to the album and marvelling at its beauty.

Okay, so I’ve now given myself a whole lot more work to do. I’ve spotted a link on Wikipedia to his official website – curses! – so let’s get the official word, complete with all the positive spin associated with such sites. Okay, so I’ve learnt that Matthews was his mother’s maiden name, and that McDonald was his step-father. And he did great things with the early Fairport.

Second Spring

He left Fairport in 1969, his site says, and did indeed form Southern Comfort with the aforementioned musos from Fairport – which still mystifies. It gets curiouser. The site says Matthews wrote or co-wrote half the album’s material, but doesn’t say which album. Presumably, MSC’s first, Second Spring, also from 1970, which includes the eponymous song, Southern Comfort. After the success of the single, Woodstock, Matthews was appalled at what he had done. “The success that he had so carefully orchestrated suddenly seemed to be the last thing he wanted, the antithesis of the artistic ambitions that had driven him away from Fairport Convention.” He quit the group, which folded a few years later after a few more mediocre albums.

This site, at least, seems to acknowledge the existence of those two 1971/1972 albums. It says he signed with Vertigo Records, and crucially, teamed up with Andy Roberts, who’d gone to art college in Liverpool and whose guitar-work I got to know so well on The Amazing Adventures Of The Liverpool scene, from the late 1960s.

It emerges that though Yardbird Paul Samwell-Smith was signed on to produce the album, Matthews eventually took over production, “and created one of the most acclaimed albums of his career in If You Could See Thro’ My Eyes (1971)”.

“Armed with original songs like Desert Inn and Thro’ My Eyes and backed by Roberts, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny, Keith Tippet (King Crimson), Tim Renwick (Al Stewart, Elton John, Pink Floyd), and other legendary British performers, Matthews seemed, for a moment, to have found a comfortable balance of autonomy, support, creativity, and success. He’d also discovered Richard Farina, two of whose songs (Morgan the Pirate and Reno Nevada) appear on the album.”

Now that is what I needed to read. The line-up for this album was indeed a who’s who of British folk-rock at the turn of the decade. Small wonder it was so good. And of course that masterful guitarwork was not all Matthews. With the likes of Roberts and Thompson backing him, he couldn’t go wrong.

The website continues: “Matthews recorded a highly regarded follow-up for Vertigo, Tigers Will Survive (1972), with Roberts and various studio musicians. Again, Matthews’s own compositions predominate, though excellent covers include Close The Door Lightly When You Go by Eric Anderson, Farina’s House Un-American Activity Blues Dream, and the Phil Spector/the Crystals chestnut, Da Doo Ron Ron, which became a minor hit in the US.”

I’ll discuss these albums a little later, but bizarrely, as was his wont, Matthews’s bad luck would haunt him. The band – Thompson had just left Fairport – toured the US, but Thompson then quit. This led to the formation of Plainsong – and so to the Pythonesque “white wine sauce” scenario. Anyway, his record label only wanted a solo album, so Journeys From Gospel Oak was recorded, but only appeared, it seems, in 1974. And so the story of his later years, admirable I’m sure, continues. Indeed, the Plainsong albums are surely worth a listen, although I picked up a solo album of his from the mid-1980s, and was highly disappointed in its bland content.

Matthews’ Southern Comfort

Looking at the comprehensive discography on the website, it emerges that Thompson and Nicol did indeed NOT perform on the Matthews Southern Comfort albums, as I suspected. But elsewhere on the list I find an album, Matthews’ Southern Comfort (1969) – with the apostrophe – which features the two, and on reflection was the first Matthews album I heard. That opening track rings serious bells: Colorado Springs Eternal, written by Steve Barlby, who co-produced the album with Matthews. The cover also looks familiar, with Matthews’s face shown large and translucent over a scene of a lake, while he is also shown standing on the left. This also includes the Matthews composition Please Be My Friend, which would again appear on If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes. And there we have first, that cover, of Matthews hand to mouth and looking out a window, and looking a bit like Donovan, and then that line-up of musicians. Significantly, I notice he is not even listed as a guitarist. Roberts, Thompson and Tim Renwick played guitars, and interestingly Sandy Denny and Keith Tippett played the piano on the album. But who cares? Matthews wrote all but two of the tracks, as mentioned earlier, and he did sing. As did Denny, on the title track, as I discovered when I chanced on a website about her. Sadly, as noted in an article on Fairport, she died very young, in 1978.

Released in a combination set with this album on CD in 1993 was the 1972 classic, Tigers Will Survive, which again featured most of those highly respected British musicians. So finally I think I have my ducks in a row, regarding those albums. So let’s give ‘em a fresh listen.

If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes

Wow! This was the first time in years, maybe decades, that I have really LISTENED to these two albums – and they are every bit as good as I thought they were.

Good acoustic guitar work is not a common denominator on all folk-rock albums. And shortcomings in this department are, like bad drawing, often glaringly obvious, leaving songs flat and boring.

On these albums, quite the reverse applies. The acoustic, and electric, guitar-work is superb, and often works in unison with the piano, a combination I particularly enjoy. For me, each song is a mini-miracle of understated excellence.

If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes starts sublimely with Desert Inn. A key element of Matthews’s songs is the free-flowing lyrics, articulately written and sung in a hauntingly beautiful, fairly high-pitched voice. "All the goodness seems to float up to the top / But it takes a while to push its way around / And a place like Desert Inn seems to help me keep alive and kicking . . .” The lyrics really do pour out, and, while this was probably the first time I had really tried to make sense of what he was saying, there are many immortal lines which have lived with me since the album was first released. Things like: “Like the time I was a Roman amphitheatre / And I thought the exercise would do me good ...” I mean, as they say, what was that all about? Or the following: “And I got involved in madman spaceship races, / As I landed hard it made me look a fool / But a place like Desert Inn was there to help me keep alive and kicking ...” The tempo changes, and I suspect the poetry analysts would have a field day with the following: “And I can’t run any faster now, / It’s hard to change your mind, / Much harder when you’re blind / And you’ve got no eyes to find / What you’re doing, what you’re doing...”

For some reason, I was unable, despite much surfing, to find a website with these and the other lyrics for these songs, so please bear with my half-baked reporting.

The next song is simply titled Hearts, which makes it hard to recall what it was about, until one starts listening. Here, in one of his most gentle, most soothing, moments, interspersed with superb guitar riffs, he discusses matters of the heart. Not all the words are easily captured, but the chorus goes: “Fly away from me, / Try, to find the reason / And in a day you’ll be wondering again ...” Elsewhere, a line goes, beautifully: “The light I find reflected guides the way among the hearts left by the road.” With superb acoustic lead guitar, this is a piece of pure musical magic.

The quality remains as high with Never Ending, another song whose title gives nothing away. Piano and acoustic guitar, along with harmonium (?), set the mood as Matthews sings: “Anyone here knows who goes forward who can stay / did you miss your call / you were having quite a ball, girl / You never noticed me at all ...” Then some lively, brilliant piano, before: “Messages were passed along the line down to the end / From hand to hand; / You were hard to understand, / You never saw what I had planned, / You never even tried ...” And then the following: “I must admit my life has only just begun / To take its toll / But it isn’t very old / I never saw you as a soul / As I watched you losing hold / and I’m getting too involved / I never thought it could be told ...” Few songwriters I can think of have written as sensitively about love and relationships – especially not male ones.

Reno, Nevada, while not a Matthews composition, remains one of the most powerful tracks on the album. “It’s a long, long way down to Reno, Nevada / It’s a long, long way to your home / And the ground underneath you is beginning to crumble / And you reap just about what you sow.” Again, wonderfully rendered, this song is testament to Matthews’s astute choice of songs and, probably more importantly, the sublime skills levels of those who performed it with him.

The next track, like many of those before, has an unmemorable title: Little Known. Yet, get those guitars humming and instantly you are animated by those first words: “All is not so black today / Doesn’t matter anyway / Ever since I fell away / the only thing I seem to say is, well ...” I love the gentle quality of these words, which are more than matched by the consummate musicianship backing them. “Little boy from Saturday / Came home in style / Still he wondered what he’d be / In a little while / He wondered well / He wondered well / Well, well, well...”

On Southern Wind the same elements of perfection combine: vocals, guitars, a beautiful melody: “I know you find this situation, funnier than me / There’s a certain way to look, but it’s up to you to see ...” The chorus contains the lines: “And like the southern wind, I blew into your town / Now it’s gone, and the song I wrote you down, it’s singing.” Anyone who grew up with this album will relate to these lyrics like they would to a long, lost friend.

That pure, pure voice is again evident on the next song, whose title for once is an instant reminder of its contents. It Came Without Warning ... “and not even a sound / A new kind of longing has brought me around / Lately that night, when asleep by the wall / I wonder if she thinks of me best of all / No kind of rest, without dreams anymore / When a big sun glows, you can find me on the floor / Then I’ll dress up warm and go out in the rain ...” Great electric and acoustic guitar-work are again a hallmark here.

Intricate guitar picking is again evident on You Couldn’t Lose. “Did you ever lead another life, / When you knew no-one could hear / did you close your eyes and thought awhile / Only then to find we’re all still here?” Despite the faulty syntax, this is another of those confusing songs about love and confusion. “Did you think to bow out graciously / when you still had time to choose / Were you leaving just as I arrived / only then you knew you couldn’t lose / Only then you knew you could not lose.”

Though again not his own composition, Morgan The Pirate is another classic Matthews song which rocks along quite splendidly. “Hello, hey buddy, want to thank you for the ride / Don’t know how I could’ve made it without you …” I was reminded of Magna Carta by some of the guitarwork here, which is such an integral part of the song.

The title track, If You Saw Thro’ My Eyes, again not a Matthews original, is a fittingly serious and sincere song with which to end the album. Indeed, it takes on the form of a prayer: “Lord in heaven let me know / If you saw through my eyes / Where would you go?” Sandy Denny’s piano and harmonising on this track make it one of the highlights of an album incredibly rich in musicality.

Tigers Will Survive

Tigers Will Survive, from 1972, with a brown cover featuring an old native American Indian leader, is almost a continuation of Thro’ My Eyes, but it includes a couple of songs which, by anyone else, would seem pretty incongruous. Instead, they add to its allure. I had some difficulty hearing the lyrics on the opening track, Never Again, which starts: “Thirty thousand people something … something…” Elsewhere a line goes: “Down along the highway there’s a gathering of … something…” I must give it a closer listen, but needless to say, this song is another masterpiece of guitarwork.

Anyone familiar with this album will recognise instantly Close The Door Lightly, which was written by Eric Anderson: “Turn around, don’t whisper out my name like a breeze / It would stir a dying flame and I’ll miss someone … / Close the door lightly when you go …” Is that the sound of an accordion or a harmonium accompanying the guitars? The lyrics are again beautiful, but deliberately opaque, concluding with the words “see you on the road sweet love of mine”.

Unamerican Activity Dream, by Richard Farina, is one of those songs which I found hard to reconcile with Matthews’s gentle approach. This is a seriously political song, performed with some aggression and a wonderful couple of instrumental sections led by the acoustic guitar, as well as slower sections. It starts boldly: “I was standing on the sidewalk with a noise in my head …” Again, a Web search failed to cough up the lyrics. It contains cutting lines, including: “When they ask you a question they expect a reply / Does it matter if you’re fixin’ to die?”

Good albums are carefully planned. It was essential to follow up a tearaway number like this with something gentle, and Morning Song fits the bill perfectly. Acoustic lead over strummed acoustic guitar is about as subtle as you’d want to get. “Early this morning brought a weight upon my head / Could have been silenced for the things you never said …” Later: “There’s nothing to get out of, there no lines to defend / Looks like you’ll be thinking of leaving …”

So good was Matthews’s choice of material that I had always believed The Only Dancer was his composition. Only now do I discover it was written by Pete Carr. Yet it is a quintessential Matthews song, with great guitar and harmonium work again providing the perfect backdrop to that immaculate voice. “I was the only dancer to the gay quadrille they played / And I was the man with the calloused hands / Who danced the night away…” Again, it is a song about love and love lost. There is a change of mood here. “And I knew if she came, that she’d never stay / And I knew if she came, she’d leave right away.” Then: “I was born to be happy, I was born to be sad / And I wasn’t born to be on my own – and that’s bad, bad, bad.”

The next two songs, both Matthews originals, are the defining works on the album, and indeed are interlinked. Tigers Will Survive features some exceptional, rapid guitar-work as he launches into: “Last night I had a dream, my friend / Though I’ve known it all along, / Believe me only tigers can survive.” Again, this song would take much analysis. One line goes: “I had a friend who struggled writing songs upon a wall / And he didn’t even know the day’d arrived …” Slow and up-tempo segments, with piano and guitar breaks adding to the tension, see the song lead seamlessly into Midnight On The Water: “Started out Sunday afternoon and I never thought anyone cared …” then later: “I saw her by the log pile singing a song / She didn’t think anyone heard …” And later still: “I swear by god it wasn’t my hand that took your life away / At midnight on the water …” This song seems to address a case of human tragedy, and reminds me of the brilliant Madman Across The Water by Elton John and Bernie Taupin.

Right Before My Eyes is another of those songs written by someone else (Peter Lewis) that Matthews made entirely his own – thanks, again, to the brilliant backing he receives. “I had a woman who passed me by, thought she knew the score / But as time rolls on I’m more aware of what she’s taking me for …” The lyrics have a Matthews-like quality to them, full of interesting phraseology. I like this from the chorus: “And I wonder / if the truth passed me by / Or if I just could not see / what was right before me eyes.”

We’ve all heard Da Doo Ron Ron, which was written by Spector, Barry and Greenwich, but Matthews’s version is just that bit special. This is a superb piece of a cappella harmonising – with one very rich bass voice in there for good measure – and was one of my mother’s favourites. She usually had little time for our music, but her ears would prick up (so to speak), with this song. To the accompaniment of hands clapping, Matthews sings from a woman’s point of view about a man named Bill – “looks so quiet but my oh my – da doo ron ron, da doo ron ron”. That was her late husband, my father’s name. Anyway, this song ends in a splutter of laughs before the mood switches radically into yet another lovely love-wrangle song: “If I could only tell you / Would you be surprised to know …” It’s called Hope You Know, it was written by Matthews, and it is a delightful piece, with the subtle use of saxophone adding a new dimension.

The final track, Please Be My Friend, continues the pattern of excellence. “Once I sang and I told everyone about you / But they laughed and they told me I’d never win …” The impassioned imploring of a young man uncertain about his lover’s affections is captured in those haunting lines from the chorus: “So won’t you please, please be my friend / Let’s forget what I’ve done, we can start again …”

Ian Matthews and Richard Thompson

For a period there, in the early 1970s, Ian Matthews joined the chorus of angels who had somehow emerged to entertain the youth of the world. These early albums will remain as monuments not only to his wonderful singing voice, but also to a special era when he was surrounded by musicians who knew, seemingly instinctively, how to show off his talents to their best advantage.