Where the Halling Valley River Lies - Carl Halling (lightest ebook reader txt) 📗

past half century or so have been won…and that Rock and Roll stands tall among its victors.

Chapter Five – A Halling is a Halling Wherever He is

Incidents from an Infamous Year Zero

As the ‘70s proceeded apace, both Prog and Glam receded in terms of influence, although they’d experience periodic rebirths. Glam, for example, would be revived in the '80s through American Glam Metal, and the British Goth and New Romantic movements; and still exists to this day. However, given the extent to which the West has become inured to outrage, its power to shock has been reduced to zero.
By ‘77, it had been supplanted by Punk, a movement which, if it were at all possible, was even more scandalous.
While some years earlier, Soul, a melodic fusion of Gospel and R&B which had made a massive impact on the Pop charts, birthed a mutation known as Disco. And one of its major hallmarks was the liberal use of strings often played in a staccato style.
Thence, Pat was involved in several major projects at the height of the Disco era, including the international hit album “Symphony of Love” (1978) by Miquel Brown, which was produced by British composer Alan Hawkshaw. And another Hawkshaw production, “Again and Again” by Love De-Luxe, from the following year.
Pat also worked with Alec R Costandinos’s groundbreaking “Love and Kisses”, who produced three albums between 1977 and '79, which were massively successful at the time, yielding several US hit singles and helping to define the Disco sound.
And both Pat and Costandinos had worked with another French Disco pioneer Jean-Marc Cerrone on his hit album, "Love in C Minor" from 1976, produced at a time when Disco had yet to truly enter the mainstream.
While Pat played on several other Costandinos records, including an acknowledged Disco masterpiece "Romeo and Juliet" (1978), which has to be lauded for its subject matter. For while Soul in the seventies was as extensive as Rock; and every inch as sublime at its most artistic, Disco had a greater tendency to fixate on the pleasures of the flesh. And so was the ultimate music of the mid 1970s, at a time the values of the permissive society were seeping into the mainstream.
Yet at the same time, there were many exceptions, and Disco could be no less artistically exalted than Soul.
As well as “Look Out” and “Ordinary Man” for Bad News Travels Fast, both from ‘79, and Costandinos’ own “Sphinx” from ’77, and “Winds of Change”, also from ’79. While Melaphonia’s “Limelight Disco Symphony” from ’78 was a Disco tribute to Sir Charles Chaplin, who’d died the previous Christmas Day, produced by Franck Pourcel and Alain Boublil.
Boublil went on to write the libretto for the musical "Les Miserables" with composer Claude Schonberg, with John Cameron arranging.
And Pat was involved with the London production of "Les Miz" for many years as the leader of the orchestra, one of several highlights of a concert career which has seen him work with Pop legends as diverse as Ella Fitzgerald, Perry Como, Tony Bennett, Tiny Tim, Barry Manilow and Boy George of Culture Club…and tour with Tom Jones and Barrie White.
But it's his participation in Bing Crosby's final tour that is perhaps the dearest to his heart, as a personal fan of the Old Groaner’s.
In September ‘77, Bing, his family, and close friend Rosemary Clooney began a concert tour of England that included two weeks at the London Palladium. He recorded an album "Seasons", and a TV Christmas special with David Bowie and Twiggy, which featured a famous duet with Bowie.
And Pat actually managed to wangle an autograph from Der Bingel during what may have been a final recording session at Maida Vale studios. But the great man had initially objected to Pat helping himself to a piece of his sheet music, before relenting with the words, "he seems like a good man", and signing the music into the bargain.
His final concert took place at the Brighton Centre on the 12th of October 1977. For two days afterwards, following a round of 18 holes of golf on a course near Madrid, he died from a massive heart attack. And his passing came at the end of a year that had claimed a string of cultural giants including Groucho Marx, Joan Crawford, Maria Callas, Marc Bolan, Elvis Presley and Charlie Chaplin.
And amidst all this tragedy, Punk’s inexorable ascent to international notoriety showed no signs of abating. Yet while the London variant thrived, New York failed to capitalise on its initial promise as Punk’s true spiritual capital.
For lest we forget…Punk’s origins lie in the US among the so-called Garage bands of the 1960s. And their attempts to emulate the rougher acts of the British Invasion, themselves heavily indebted to American Rhythm and Blues. But it was the distinct New York variant of the early ‘70s that exerted the greatest influence on British Punk, and largely through the influence of a young entrepreneur by the name of Malcolm McLaren.
McLaren was born in London as the son of a Scottish father and Jewish mother, and raised by his grandmother, the daughter of a Sephardic-Jewish diamond merchant.
As an art student in the late 1960s, he was drawn to the subversive ideas of the Paris Situationists, believed to have played a part in fomenting the '68 riots, and were themselves offshoots of the post-war Lettrists.
Formed by the charismatic Isidore Isou in the late 1940s, the Lettrists were very much precursors of the Punks, and one of their number, Jean-Michel Mension, became infamous for scrawling slogans on his trousers as early as 1953.
In 1971, he and his then girlfriend, Vivienne Westwood, opened a clothing outlet specialising in ‘50s style Teddy Boy clothing designed by himself and Vivienne at 430 Kings Road, Chelsea. It exists to this day as “World’s End”, part of Dame Vivienne’s global fashion empire; but in ’71 it first saw the light of day as “Let it Rock”.
Four years later, he became the manager of the disintegrating New York Dolls, who’d created a sensation in the UK at the height of Glam with a combination of exotic image and corrosive three-chord Rock.
He designed some red leather outfits for them in tandem with a new pseudo-Communist image, but it was too late to save them, and they folded soon afterwards. But while in New York, he came across a former Sandford Preparatory student from Lexington, Kentucky, by the name of Richard Hell.
He’d taken his name from a famous prose poem by Arthur Rimbaud, and was at various times a member of several key New York Punk Rock outfits. And McLaren was especially impressed by his unique image of torn tee-shirt and spiky unkempt hair, allegedly inspired by the famous tousle-haired photograph of Rimbaud by Etienne Carjat, and so before long he’d decided to take it back home to London and promote an anglicised version.
Some time afterwards, he renamed his Kings Road boutique “Sex” and set himself up as the manager of a group formed by three denizens of the Hammersmith area of West London, allegedly at the urging of their guitarist, Warwick "Wally" Nightingale. And there is some evidence they were called the Strand, after a song on the second Roxy Music album “For Your Pleasure”.
McLaren agreed to be their manager, but only on the condition that founder member Wally, be ejected from the band; and so he was. Sadly, he died from complications related to substance abuse in 1996.
He was replaced by Johnny Rotten, a young London Irishman born John Lydon in London’s Finsbury Park in 1956. And with Rotten onboard as front man, the band was renamed the Sex Pistols; and so began the most infamous Punk odyssey of them all.
As as I’ve hinted earlier, Punk in the UK could be said to have been a final furious stand-off between the old-style Victorian values of the 1950s and the new values that had been ushered in a decade later. But while these had at first seemed to be comparatively benign, by the end of the sixties, they’d curdled into something far darker.
However, no sooner had Punk taken off, than it was slyly supplemented with those very elements it was reacting against; as a generation of musicians sought to fuse the attitude of Punk with the artistry of Prog.
And so the New Wave was born in the shape of a vast variety of acts and artists who while progressive in the truest sense, were content to ride the Punk bandwagon all the way into the Pop charts.
While New Wave threatened to supplant Punk at its crudest, other genres competed with it for the hearts and souls of the sybaritic young. Such as Reggae, which was Punk’s most serious rival as the music of choice for Punks themselves; and Electronica, which had been pioneered all throughout the ‘70s mainly by so-called Kraut Rock acts such as Can, Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream.
But Disco was its true competitor, even though it was still known as Soul for the most part as I recall; but then I was just a rube from the ‘burbs.
One thing is certain is that I was as much a lover of Soul as Punk circa ’77, and dressed more like a Soul Boy for much of that year. In fact, it was only in its final few months I started affecting the more flagrant trappings of Punk; such as spiked and dyed hair and drainpipe jeans.
So for me, ’78 was my own personal Punk Year Zero; and it was in that year, at the very height of Disco, that “Central Heating” by Heatwave, a rare classic of British Soul, was released.
Produced by former teen idol Barry Blue, and with arrangements by John Cameron, with Pat Halling serving as his concertmaster, it was a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic, ascending to number 10 on the Billboard 200. And yielding two hit singles in the shape of “The Groove Line” by Englishman Rod Temperton and “Mind Blowing Decisions” by American lead vocalist Johnny Wilder Jr.
Temperton went on to write for the best-selling album in musical history, which is Michael Jackson's "Thriller", produced by Quincy Jones in 1982.
He also wrote for Quincy on his own hit album "The Dude", with singer Patti Austin sounding remarkably like Jackson; as well as for Patti herself. While George Benson’s “Love X Love” was blessed with the same kind of stardust that helped turn Michael Jackson into the most famous Rock star on the planet.
Then towards the end of the ‘70s, Pat played what was possibly his most memorable ever solo for a television program. And this was for the stunning opening and closing theme to BBC’s “Life on Earth”, composed by Edward Williams and conducted by Marcus Dods.
As a solo it was so breathtakingly beautiful that Pat was compared by one devotee of the violin to Jascha Heifetz, whom many believe to have been the greatest violinist of them all. Quite an honour for the boy from the Tamar Valley.

From New Pop to Rap in the Crazy 1980s

The '80s was a potentially tough decade for session musicians such as Pat Halling as the synthesizer started threatening the world of recorded music as never before. And one of the fruits of this putsch was the so-called New Pop that arose in the wake of Punk.
And New Pop could be said