By Chris Davey
On 22 July 2024, John Mayall died, aged 90. For anyone not familiar with his work, Mayall was a British blues musician, influential in the genre from the 1960s onwards in UK and more widely. He has been called the “father of British Blues” (though that title has also been bestowed on Alexis Korner). He led his band, the Bluesbreakers, through many line-ups, with a leader’s authority, but also with generosity. For example, as a birthday present, he paid for studio time for Peter Green, then the band’s lead guitar player, to develop his own music, as it was clear he wanted to spread his wings – indeed, the Bluesbreakers was a training ground for many young musicians in the 60s who went on to better – well, other – things. The band that resulted from Peter Green’s liberation was the first line-up of Fleetwood Mac, whose 1968 “dog-and-dustbin” album was my own introduction to the blues.
When I revise periodically my list of “eight gramophone records” for Desert Island Discs (no of course I’ve not been invited, but it’s an interesting exercise), one track by Mayall is always on the list, Marsha’s Mood, from the album The Blues Alone. It is a piano instrumental, with just a little gentle drumming from Keef Hartley, and I have loved it since I first heard it in 1967. But on hearing of his death, it was Mayall’s 1970 album, USA Union, that popped into my head. Side 1 Track 1, as we used to say, is the song Nature’s Disappearing (“and we are guilty of this massive crime”) – and so I began to think about “eco” songs…
The obvious one I suppose, for most people, would be Joni Mitchell’s Big Yellow Taxi, in which she talks about our having “paved paradise, put up a parking lot”, and wanting spots on her apples if she can still have the birds and the bees; and perhaps most tellingly “you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.
Another favourite of mine is an obscure track recorded by Stackridge, titled No-One’s More Important Than The Earthworm. Its lyrics are somewhat surreal, but clearly there is a strong eco theme to the song. Break for some music trivia – it was in fact written not by the band, but by Gordon Haskell (1947-2020), the guy who replaced Greg Lake in King Crimson, when the latter went off to Emerson Lake & Palmer – Haskell went on to have commercial success fairly late in his career, with the song How Wonderful You Are, for some years the most requested song on Radio 2.
Neil Young’s After The Goldrush is another fairly cryptic environmental ode, which Young later confirmed was an environmental song, albeit one where inhabitants of the Earth leave it in spaceships… hmm, not an option for us at the moment, and anyway, “there is no Planet B”.
My early guitar heroes were the Shadows, and I bought their number one hit when I was ten in 1961 – Wonderful Land. Ten years later, Shadows’ lead guitarist Hank Marvin wrote a little-remembered eco song, Silvery Rain, which was first recorded by Marvin, Welch and Farrar, but also separately by Cliff Richard and Olivia Newton-John. The “silvery rain” refers to drops of pesticide from a crop-spraying aeroplane – inspired by Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring perhaps?
There are of course more examples; but calling a halt to the rock/pop nostalgia, the question that occurred to me, was just how much of an effect such songs have on public consciousness, let alone governments’ policies… certainly they will have added to the general groundswell on environmental awareness, but to what extent and with what effect, we’ll never know. We are making some progress on these issues, e.g. the percentage of fossil fuels in the UK electricity generation mix is falling all the time – but for people like me, much too slowly!
Nobel prize-winning physicist Neils Bohr said “prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”. Well this certainly applies to climate and other environmental issues, given that there are various scenarios as to what will happen and how fast. But we do know that climate breakdown causes or exacerbates extreme weather events, which are already affecting food production, as well as threatening lives and livelihoods. Biodiversity loss is the other side of the coin – species are suffering as their environment changes, as well as the “silent spring” agrochemicals issue I mentioned earlier. As Mayall pointed out over five decades ago, we have committed crimes against nature, and need to get serious on these issues pretty quickly.
