In pop's Venn diagram, some of the most intriguing sounds fall into the smaller, less-celebrated segments. Anyone who has grown to love the English folk revival, who has thrilled to Vashti Bunyan's rediscovery and pines for more undiscovered Nick Drake, could do worse than investigate a lost corner of pop history called English baroque, which I have celebrated on a CD I have compiled called Tea and Symphony.
Its heyday ran from the tail end of psychedelia to the birth of punk and it made great use of string quartets, woodwinds, and summer-into-autumn melancholy. While it never grabbed the pop world as a chart-conquering genre, its velvety touch was never that far away. This was a sound informed by Paul McCartney's contributions to The White Album, the Zombies' Odessey and Oracle, Scott Walker's weighty chamber pop, and a dash of Crosby, Stills & Nash harmony. Just add a harpsichord, a pot of tea, a ginger cat on the windowsill, and you've got the picture.
In the UK, baroque's starting point was the Zombies' She's Not There, which didn't feature any oboes but stuck out rather dramatically in 1964, the year of You Really Got Me and Little Red Rooster. Singer Colin Blunstone's voice was menthol, his enunciation pure St Albans grammar. Also, the arrangement leant towards jazz, seemed almost medieval, and - when guitar rave-ups ruled - was most restrained. Shortly afterwards, the Zombies recorded a version of Summertime and made it sound more like Greensleeves than Gershwin. Clearly, it was in their bones.
In New York, a classically trained keyboard player called Michael Brown was paying close attention. She's Not There was a far bigger hit in the States, where, in the wake of Beatlemania, it was hip to drink tea, the milkier the better. The Zombies couldn't miss, and Brown was inspired. He formed a band called the Left Banke and roped in his dad, an arranger called Harry Lookofsky, to oversee their first single. The other players were rudimentary, so Lookofsky focused on Brown's harpsichord and the string quartet; Walk Away Renee was the first bona fide baroque pop hit at the end of 1965. The version you can most easily hear now is the Four Tops' cover, which stripped away all the baroque trimmings - the Left Banke's recordings are sadly out of print.
Anglophiles to a man, the Left Banke neatly predicted a sound that was soft but insistently sad. Like Colin Blunstone, the Banke's singer, Steve Martin, could belt out if he wanted to, but preferred the delicate touch, witnessed on their second hit, Pretty Ballerina. Titles such as Dark Is the Bark, Barterers and their Wives, and Ivy Ivy gave away their lyrical inclinations. In a 1972 letter to a fan, guitarist Rick Brand claimed their lyrics "were written as rather self-consciously beautiful musical whimsy, as you find in the latter 18th-century Romantic music, pre-Beethoven".
For a while in the mid-60s, harpsichords and string quartets chimed with the charts - the Stones cut Lady Jane, the Kinks Too Much On My Mind and Two Sisters, the Beatles melded Purcell with Truffaut for Eleanor Rigby. Possibly this was down to pop stars moving out of transit vans, away from package tour shows in Accrington and Aylesbury, becoming society players and gaining a taste for the high life. Also, it's impossible to overstate the search for newness; in 1966 things were moving so fast that each Beatles single seemed like a new era, and studio experimentation was a must. Bring on the clavichord, musicians cried.
This musical strand climaxed with Sgt Pepper, which mixed everyday lyrics with music hall and Edwardiana to create lysergically enhanced parlour music. But just months later, the Technicolor dreamcoats were put away, replaced by lank hair and soiled denims. With riots in Paris, Chicago and even Grosvenor Square, 1968's predominant trend was to get hairier, heavier, more long-winded.
A lot of writers felt disenfranchised. They had only just got to grips with the über-English trappings of homegrown psychedelia, especially its mournful evocations of Victoriana, its village green gentility, and its church bells softly chiming: like the Left Banke and the Zombies, they wanted to get softer rather than harder, and were not about to fly their freak flag. The majority of English baroque records were made as heaviness and hairiness became the norm between 1968 and 1973 - even as Led Zep ruled the student unions, the harpsichord trickle-down took its time to reach the provinces.
The quintessential English baroque group were Honeybus. Though they only had one hit - I Can't Let Maggie Go in 1968 - its melancholy air ("she flies like a bird in the sky") hung in the early 70s ether when it accompanied a woman in an air balloon advertising Nimble bread. They hailed from the badlands of Hackney Wick, a hotbed for bone-crushing plants and animal fat recyclers, but not renowned for pop groups, especially ones of such a gentle disposition. "We all liked Mozart and all that", recalls guitarist Colin Hare, who was actually born in baroque-friendly Bath. Singer Pete Dello "convinced us to use woodwinds and strings but we didn't need much persuading. It didn't bother us that nobody else seemed to be doing it because we wanted to do our own thing. We weren't easy to pigeonhole." Any chance of lasting success ended when Dello left while I Can't Let Maggie Go was still on the chart - he abhorred the idea of touring. Hare and bassist Ray Cane made like nothing had changed and turned out to be excellent songwriters themselves; they got as far as completing one great album, Story, in 1970, before folding.
What kept this genuinely underground sound viable in the hard-rock era was the advent of the singer-songwriter. In the hope of discovering the new James Taylor or Joni Mitchell, record companies were happy to lavish unknowns with string arrangements and the odd cor anglais. Nick Drake was a famous beneficiary, as were Honeybus's Hare and Dello, who both released solo albums in 1971. Most often, of course, the artist was granted the chance to cut one album (with the string accompaniment in place) and then vanished as the public failed to take note. Tales of fleeting luck and ill fortune are many.
Take Lea Nixon. At 17, he had just begun to play the folk clubs of his native Wigan when he spotted a songwriting competition in Disc - the first prize was £250 and the promise of a single release on CBS. He made it to the final 10, which entailed a trip to London. "I couldn't believe the quality of the performers on stage as I walked in, I actually thought it was CBS session musicians playing around. When I realised this was one of the entries I was shocked," he says.
No matter, he scooped first prize, presented by the unlikely trio of Colin Blunstone, Dave Lee Travis, and Miss America Lynda Carter, soon to become better known as Wonder Woman. The single was produced by ex-Zombie Hugh Grundy, who wasted no time in adding baroque stylings. Disc's review of the single revealed that CBS hadn't even told the magazine the record was coming out; with that kind of promotional oomph, it was unsurprising when it didn't sell. Unperturbed, Nixon continued to write, and eventually placed a song called Some Say on the soundtrack of the 2004 Disney comedy Zenon Z3. He still plays in a duo called the Pelican Babies, and is mildly mindblown that anyone would recall his brushes with fame and Wonder Woman.
It's too much to hope for an English Baroque revival to match the ever-explanding New Folk boom - the time may have passed when Noel Gallagher briefly lauded the Left Banke in an interview after a stranger pressed their music upon him in Buenos Aires. He ruled out any Baroque direction for Oasis, though, saying: "The idea of Bonehead dressed in a cravat and a frilly shirt playing a harpsichord doesn't do it for me." Yet a new EP by Colin Hare, paid for and arranged by teenage fans in - oddly enough - Spain, could be a first stirring. And as the season turns, one's thoughts do lean towards teacakes, honey, and cellos. Our climate was made for this stuff.
Tea and Symphony: the English Baroque Sound 1967-1974 is out now on Castle.