Where to begin with Pete Atkin? For those of you who've known his work forever, bought those first private pressings or succumbed to later addiction, if your dog has all the albums, just skip straight to "BUY TICKETS".

What about the rest of you?

Well let's start with the mid 1960s and Cambridge Footlights (yes this is someone venerable, one of our entertainment elders). Pete joined and became musical director for the revues, moving amongst talents vast and multifarious and for the purposes of our tale the one we are looking at is Clive James. Pete beavered away and produced those first limited release albums in the late '60s before getting some interest and investment from 'the biz' resulting in the initial and then full on collaboration with writer, poet and later household name columnist and TV presenter Clive. Whilst the pair rapidly became critically acclaimed in the British music press, commercial success proved much more elusive. Their unique attempt to fuse the discipline and craftsmanship of Tin Pan Alley with the self-expression of rock, while refusing to accept any limitation on what constituted appropriate subject matter for lyrics, inevitably set them on a collision course with their record companies' marketing departments. An Atkin-James album could embrace a brief encounter in a railway carriage, the Vietnam War, and the lot of an aging session musician, while James' points of reference took in the full panoply of art, cinema, literature, and poetry, sometimes leaving his work open to accusations of being wordy and pretentious. In its own way, Atkin's music was just as erudite, drawing on every form of popular music from show tunes through folk, jazz, and rock. Both words and music, then, were no match for the blistering anti-elitism of punk when it arrived, and after six albums the partnership succumbed before the irresistible union of record company indifference and The Clash.

However those albums remained in people's hearts and after a successful career interlude as a BBC and then freelance producer (This Sceptred Isle anyone?) Pete was lured back into performance by fan-power at the end of the '90s which then led to a series of tours with Clive in the UK and abroad and the re-release of all their albums for a new era. Their final work together before Clive's death in 2019 was the album 'The Colours Of The Night'.

Pete will be accompanied by composer , pianist and multi-instrumentalist Simon Wallace who has many TV credits to his name and has worked with Fran Landesman , Lindsay Kemp, Barb Jungr, Clare Teal, Sarah Moule , Ian Shaw and The Waterboys amongst many others.

Fun Fact - Pete Atkin provided the voice of Mr Crock in 'Wallace & Gromit - The Curse of the Were-Rabbit'. If you come along on spec you have that in the bank!

DOORS OPEN 19.30 - MUSIC STARTS 20.10 - UNRESERVED SEATING

Photos courtesy of and copyright to Sean Kelly 2021 - www.seankellyphotos.com