Lyrics

For more than forty years, off and on, I have written lyrics for the music of Pete Atkin. Though our songs never made a fortune back in the days when a musical act had to earn big money or else fold its tent, there has been a revival of our work in recent years, with a loyal audience big enough to make a travelling song-show a viable theatrical venture. In 2003 we toured Britain, in 2004 Australia, New Zealand and Hong Kong, and in 2005 Britain again. (A sample of what our touring show is like can be found in the Audio section.) During these travels, people have been kind enough to ask where they can read the lyrics. There was once a booklet called A First Folio with some of the early lyrics featured, but it has been out of print for a long time. A much larger selection is included in my verse collection The Book of My Enemy (2003), which is still in print. But the easiest way to read all the lyrics written up until the time when we resumed work around the turn of the millennium is to click through to the Pete Atkin website. In the Discography section of the site, the entry for each album opens up onto a transcription of all its lyrics. The site also contains a shop where the Pete Atkin CDs can be bought on line. These CDs include the latest, released in April 2008: Midnight Voices. Further links on this page [see menu at left] lead to other material relevant to our partnership, although “long working holiday” would be a better descriptive term.

— March 2008

[ Note to the clivejames.com Website Archive : Not all of Clive's lyrics are recorded, either in music or in print. As well as the songs of love, joy, loss and regret, the tragic, the serious, the allegorical, the jokey, the ironic and the just plain sad, he wrote or co-wrote numerous comic songs as show numbers for revue sketches, and not all of these have survived. For each of the 150-plus song lyrics of Clive's that we know, I have added a page to this Lyrics chapter of the 'Poetry' section, containing the complete lyric. These are listed on the Menu side-bar at left, in approximate order of first recording date, though some early unpublished songs (not all of definitive attribution) are tacked onto the end of the list. Most of Clive's lyrics were set to music by Pete Atkin, who also sang them on record. To each of their pages I have added a 'Play' button which opens an audio player and streams Pete's rendition of the song. Some of Clive and Pete's first 'serious' songs were recorded only by Julie Covington — they were written with her voice in mind — or in duet or ensemble with Julie. Their lyrics are included, but we do not have permission to audio-stream Julie's recordings. Greyed-out 'Play' buttons indicate versions not available for general streaming via this archive.

Pete Atkin's latest CD album is now The Luck Of The Draw, released in 2023 — SJB ]