Family

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Introduction

Patrick Halling: A Voyage in Music is the second part of the epic biographical Tales from the Halling Valley centring largely on my own family. It continues the story of my father Patrick Clancy Halling, started in the previous two tales, and set against the background of five decades of music. It's heavily based on "From the Halling Valley River", which was first published at the Blogster website . I apologise for any involuntary inaccuracies contained in that first piece, as well as any that continue to exist, although everything expressed within it is the total and absolute truth to the very best of my abilities, and the story has been researched to within an inch of its life. And what a tale it is. Within its head-spinning sweep, there'll be references to the following individuals and institutions...Tom Jones, Donovan, Led Zeppelin, the Rolling Stones, Eric Clapton, the Beatles, the Who, Bob Dylan, John Williams, Paul McCartney, Richard Harris, Jethro Tull, David Essex, Charlie Chaplin, Bing Crosby, Pete Townsend, Enya, and many many many more legendary figures of our times. It's a tale not to be missed, cram-pack full of detail and anecdote, and with a strong spiritual essence, so...read it, print it, re-read it, circulate it...but above all, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy, enjoy it....

1.

Unless I'm mistaken it was in the early 1960s, a decade which witnessed an unprecedented explosion of popular and youth culture along with all the other revolutionary changes occasioned by that most totemic of decades that my father Patrick Clancy Halling moved into the musical session world where he was to record for film, television and above all popular music.
For much of his career, his main role was that of principal violin - also known as the leader or concertmaster - traditionally in charge not just of the string section but the entire orchestra and so answerable to the conductor alone, but he also served as the fixer contracted to recruit the players for a particular session.
According to what he's told me, he worked on early sessions for British musical sensations Lulu, Cilla Black and Tom Jones, as well as with superstar producers Tony Hatch and Mickie Most. Hatch wrote most of Petula Clark's hit singles of the sixties, some alone, some with his wife Jackie Trent, and she went on to become a major star in the US as part of the so-called British Invasion of the American charts, as did several acts produced by Most, including the excellent Herman's Hermits, featuring former child actor Peter Noone.
Pat became close to both Most and John Cameron, who arranged for the influential Scottish songwriter Donovan once he'd broken away from his early Folk style towards more Rock and Pop oriented songs beginning with an early psychedelic offering, the enigmatic "Sunshine Superman" (1966), which was a massive stateside hit, and the first produced by Most.
Among those session musicians who played for Most in the '60s were Big Jim Sullivan, Jimmy Page and John Paul Jones, who also arranged for him. Page went on to join seminal British Rock band The Yardbirds, which had been managed first by Simon Napier Bell, then by Most's business partner Peter Grant. When the Yardbirds collapsed in 1968, the two remaining members Page and bassist Chris Dreja set about forming a new band, also to be managed by Grant. Page's first choice as vocalist Terry Reid turned the job down, but he recommended a young 19 year old singer from the Midlands of England known as Robert Plant. Page duly travelled to Birmingham with Dreja and Grant to look the youngster over, and was impressed by what he saw. He then invited Plant to spend a few days with him at his home, the Thames Boathouse, in the beautiful little Berkshire village of Pangbourne for initial discussions related to the band...all this taking place in the summer of '68, just months before I joined the Nautical College situated a few miles from the village itself. So, the nucleus of the New Yardbirds came into being.
Shortly afterwards, a friend of Plant's, fellow Midlander John Bonham came onboard as drummer, and an old session buddy of Page's, John Paul Jones replaced Chris Dreja as the band's bass player, as Dreja wished to leave the music scene to concentrate on a new career as a photographer. Jones supplemented this role by helping Page with the arrangements, and performing keyboard duties. The New Yardbirds were now ready to fulfill their contractual tour of Scandinavia, which they began in September 1968.
With their first album - recorded at West London's Olympic Studios - not yet released, they made their debut as Led Zeppelin at the University of Surrey on October 15, 1968. This was followed by a U.S. concert debut on December 26, 1968, and so Led Zeppelin went on to become the most famous Hard Rock band of them all equalled only by the Stones in terms of legendary darkness and mystery.
It seems incredible that a force of such seismic power and influence as Led Zep should emerge from the relative innocence of the London Blues and session music scenes of the sixties. But then a similar thing could be said of British Rock as a whole. What was it that transformed an interest among young men of largely middle class origins in the bleak brooding music of the Blues into a musical movement which took America and the World by storm in the late '60s and early '70s? That's not an easy question to answer, but I'm going to give it some sort of go.
The Blues themselves may provide something of a solution, because they are believed to have begun life as a secularised version of the black Gospel music of the American south, with lyrics reflecting the sensuality, isolation and anguish of lost souls victimised by life and alienated from God, and they found fertile soul in the still repressed United Kingdom of the late 1950s and early sixties, and especially in the affluent south among men such as Brian Jones from the genteel spa town of Cheltenham in Gloucester, Eric Clapton from Surbiton - via Ripley - in Surrey, and Jimmy Page from nearby Epsom, also in Surrey.
But the Rock explosion was not just fuelled by the Blues. By the early '60s, an effervescent fusion of Rock and Roll, Skiffle, R&B, Doo-wop, Soul and even traditional Classic Pop had emerged from several British cities most notably the tough industrial towns of Liverpool and Birmingham, before going on to take the UK charts by storm. It was the sound of Beat, and no band encapsulated it quite like the Beatles.
The Beatles are seen by some as the inventors of modern guitar Pop. While this is debatable, they are without doubt the best known and most successful Pop group in history. Yet they themselves resisted being typecast as mere Pop, and could be said to have ultimately promoted a type of Rock with Pop elements which was yet no less removed from pure Pop than the Blues-based Rock of their chief rivals the Rolling Stones.
The overwhelming melodicism of their classic period of 1964-'69 was founded on a vast variety of musical genres including Trad Pop, Rock and Roll, Country, Soul, Classical, Folk and even the Blues, leading one to conclude that largely through the Beatles, Rock became the ultimate musical smorgasbord, a veritable Babel of musical styles. During their brief few years of existence, they informed the development of Rock to a greater degree than any other group or solo singer, including the Stones, whose more rythmic Blues-based music went on to form the basis of Hard Rock and Heavy Metal...yet even these have benefited from the Beatles. What's more, for a time the Stones themselves were at least partly a Pop group, facilitated by the multi-instrumental gifts of founder member Brian Jones.
Yet, while the Beatles remain indelibly associated with modern Pop, by about 1966, they were as much a Rock as a Pop group and this had less to do with their music than their lyrics. These had started to acquire an intellectual dimension by that totemic year significantly attributable to the influence of Bob Dylan.
Pop as a whole in fact had acquired a gravitas at odds with the innocent and sentimental music of the early Beatles, as well as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Freddie and the Dreamers and other bands within the outdated Beat genre as a result not just of Dylan's influence as the first great poet of Rock, but an increasing melodic complexity on one hand, and an increasing darkness on the other. This latter was significantly attributable to the growing influence of the Blues, pioneered by the Stones, and leading ultimately to the British Blues movement of the late 1960s, which birthed the first wave of Hard Rock.
The term "Rock" was somehow perfect in describing it, although when this moved in to supplant Pop as the main name of the wild new music, it's impossible to say. One thing is certain...as soon as it did, Rock became far more than a mere music form. I'd go so far as to say that it was a way of life of life almost from the outset, a philosophy, even a religion one of whose prime components was rebellion against the traditional Christian moral values of the West.
Could this be the reason - or at least one of the reasons - why the US and Britain came to be its spiritual homelands, given that these are the nations in which Evangelical Christianity have found the most fertile soil over the last few hundred years? Perhaps so. Whatever the truth, Rock is clearly more than just another form of Pop, a term first coined . Yet, in the modern sense of the word, Pop is intrinsically tied to Rock, or rather was...until about 20 years ago, when Rock surely started to decline as the leading medium of youthful rebellion, to be slowly replaced as such by other popular music forms such as Hip Hop and R&B.
Today, Rock is no longer the dark side of Popular Music...so much as just another one of its many faces, just another branch of the entertainment industry. After nearly half a century of social and sexual agitation, Rock has very little ability left to shock, although some are still offended by persisting lyrical darkness...myself for example...and I'm proud of that fact...of my continuing capacity for moral outrage. Yet, the damage has been done: Western society has been irrevocably altered by Rock Music and the socio-sexual revolution it led.
Had it not been for this devastating youthquake, Pop might never have moved beyond the kind of novelty song Tin Pan Alley was producing at such a furious rate in the early 1950s, such as Bob Merrill's wonderful "She Wears Red Feathers

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