Early sixties music outside the charts; and, er, rugby league in Qatar

Nothing now surprises me given the events of the past seven years, but as mind boggling as Coventry City’s progress to the Championship play off final for promotion to the Premier League is surely the news that Qatar is giving serious thought to staging the 2025 Rugby League World Cup now that France have pulled out – that must be a strong contender for the most surreal story so far this year.  Perhaps not quite so surprising was how bad the Rolling Stones were when they started, notwithstanding the presence on drums of Charlie Watt.  This becomes evident from archival film footage included in Nick Broomfield’s latest documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, screened on BBC2 this week.  Here was surely a triumph of style over substance, with timing everything (The Yardbirds followed in the wake of the Stones but as is evident from their debut album, recorded live at The Marquee,  they were the more accomplished R and B band).  Looking beyond the Light Programme and the Top Twenty, early sixties music in Britain – from folk clubs to post-skiffle rhythm and blues bands – has yet to attract a comprehensive, well researched and genuinely insightful history.  David Kynaston in The Cusp signals just how much was going on by 1962, as does Juliet Nicolson in Frostquake, but in both cases it’s largely through a Beatles-focused prism.  Billy Bragg’s Roots, Radicals and Rockers rewrites teenage Britain in the fifties, but doesn’t take the story forward.  Colin Harper does in the early chapters of his Bert Jansch biography, Dazzling Strangers – he makes the important point that young musicians soon to enjoy fame and recognition refused to be labelled, and by way of example places uber-mod Pete Townshend in south London folk clubs.  It’s not surprising therefore that a powerful folk-jazz axis was established early in the decade, with Pentangle in due course the most high profile example of cross-genre collaboration.  Rob Young highlights this in Electric Eden, not hiding his preference for the compositional and performative complexities of Pentangle over the folk-rock theatricality of Fairport Convention.  Ironically, by 1971-2 Richard Thompson probably felt the same way, witness his decision to quit Fairport at arguably the peak of their fame.  All will be revealed when my short book on the making of Thompson’s debut album, Henry The Human Fly, is published this July.  Would I want to write a synthesis volume on the musical underground in Britain at the start not the end of the sixties?  Almost certainly no, not least as having written books on my two musical heroes, Dylan and Thompson, I’ve no desire to write another music volume.  My focus for the moment is back on sport, and rugby union; and in particular a paper for the conference Going Professional and Continental: Club Rugby in the 1990s and beyond at De Montfort’s International Centre for Sports History and Culture on 22 November: ‘Following the French? big money clubs in the English Championship’.  There are some interesting parallels – and contrasts – between Coventry, Jersey Reds and Ealing Trailfinders and Pro D2 clubs heavily dependent on ambitious benefactors with deep pockets like RC Vannes.  That’s my focus at present, but if a direct line is established from the M62 corridor to the Gulf states then that surely deserves close scrutiny!