Review of All On The First Day

Olden Yolk Shane Butler takes a quiet listen to a nearly-lost gem of cozy British folk music

Author: Shane Butler for Ad Hoc Magazine

One of the gems on Beach House’s 2006 self-titled record is “Lovelier Girl,” a song that fits perfectly into their well-crafted aesthetic. Yet the words are taken from a song about a love experienced before the members of Beach House were even born. The song is in fact a nod to an obscure track by British folk group Tony, Caro, and John titled “The Snowdon Song,” from their 1972 self-released record, All On The First Day. While the timbre of “The Snowdon Song” and “Lovelier Girl” boast different kinds of brilliance, they were both born out of a mutual ethos.

Akin to Beach House’s earlier home-recorded material, All On The First Day was made with an absence of funds and recorded on John Clark’s 2-track tape machine. They only pressed 100 copies, all of which had individually spray-painted covers. Hearing this, I imagine myself walking into an old flat in London in the early 1970s and seeing a sight similar to what I see now in DIY venues in Brooklyn: a group of post-college students innocently chugging away on their instruments, singing coming-of-age songs in an attempt to sort out their roles as adults and their relation to the rapidly changing political environs. Close by, a pile of self-packaged and spray-painted records await the possibility of becoming daily anthems for a small handful of locals.

Better-known contemporaries who shared similar sonic-registers—such as The Incredible String Band, Pentangle, and Pearls Before Swine—were singing songs that accessed mysticism, politics, and cultural transformations on a large-scale, while Tony, Caro, and John accessed these moments on a much more intimate one. Even the band’s name seems like a call for intimacy: simply three first names, one of which is a nickname (Caro for Caroline). Tony, Caro, and John were a gentle dose of home, and incidentally home is where their music stayed for many years until the beginning of the aughts when the German label Shadoks Music released a limited edition reissue of All On The First Day in 2001. Like Vashti Bunyan, whose music re-emerged in a similar way at the beginning of the last decade, it is unclear whether Tony, Caro, and John ever had any desire to do more than make music for their friends and the small college crowds they played for.

“Don’t sing this song, don’t try to sing along, we don’t need your appreciation, so don’t sing this song,” they sing on “Don’t Sing This Song.” This album cut sounds a bit ramshackle and brings to mind Arlo Guthrie’s film Alice’s Restaurant. That film is a visual piece which celebrated a small sub-stratum of the hippy generation through a series of incoherent moments based around a few characters, a restaurant, and an abandoned church. One could draw a similarity to All On The First Day, on which whole album seems to wander nomadically between various styles of the day while moments of honesty and revelation break-through for both lead singers Tony and Caroline. Both the film and the album deal with a confusion by identity that was common around the turn of the ‘70s.

Younger generations were being introduced to new concepts of political fervor (free love, and psychedelic drug use) while still on some level having to deal with the daily routine of mainstream life. What we see in both All On The First Day and Alice’s Restaurant, in both content and form, are the echoes of confusion and the desire to become grounded somewhere between new and old. In Tony’s own words, written for the insert of Gaarden’s reissue of All On The First Day, “A lot has been written about the sixties and seventies as a social phenomenon, as a time of upheaval of values. However, at the time we had no idea that we were in some kind of historical transition. We were just being there. For all we knew, the eighties and nineties were going to be equally radical, or maybe there was not going to be any eighties and nineties at all.”

Due to the lack of commercial support or even commercial obligation, All On The First Day was able to take some risks with eclecticism while the band kept its set-up basic. There is one acoustic guitar, one electric guitar, bass, drums, three vocals, and the twist of electronic drones and effects in a handful of songs. “Sargasso Sea” uses these effects as an aid in a simultaneously hilarious and mythic journey of a character Tony plays, traveling through what seems like the plains of both his mind and a lost C.S. Lewis novel. On the song, Tony sings, “I don’t look into mirrors now, I’m scared of what I’ll see / And every course is leading to Sargasso Sea,” followed by a plethora of electronic squeals cascading into the lyrics, “The elements are laughing…” To a valid cynic, this magical story may provide a good laugh and possibly a harsh judgment, but to someone who has undertaken some “mystic voyages” of her own, it may resonate on a deeper level.

The magic and individuality of this record, though, lies in the honesty of their lyrics about love. The male and female vocals provide an amazing dialogue throughout the record enabling one to see both sides of a story. Even if this love wasn’t romantically shared between Tony and Caroline, it feels like we are invited to read both of their love letters as if they were written to one another. On “Hole In My Heart,” Tony sings, “When I look inside your head, you see ‘Beware’ / When you look inside my head you see a mirror there / When you see my fears you’re seeing your aims / When I see our future I see only chains.” On “The Snowdon Song,” Tony again sings, “Step closer, into the light, I must have the sight of you, as I make love to you…” In unison Caroline and Tony sing, “Letters by goblin mail, feeling like the wind from the sea / Got to thinking bout’ my lonely trail, decided I must have you here with me.” Beyond their attempts at the mythic and political, when it comes to love it seems like the members of the band truly know what they are talking about. This knowing can be felt.

Towards the end of the album there is a 43-second acapella track titled “Homecoming,” that features the voices of all three members harmonizing the words, “I am coming home, I am coming home.” The all-familiar warmth and tonality of their voices access both an abstract idea of home and the feeling of home in all its literal manifestation. When you are in your twenties, as they were when recording this album, this idea can often be a confusing and enchanting one. The home they created on this record is not a traditional one, but more of a nomadic village in which the strongest feelings are found in individual tents and interstices. These cracks in the album are so powerful that they serve as a candlelight for listeners to access a place of familiarity within their own selves. The timelessness of their songs rests in the fact that we, as a species, seem to always be looking for this passage to this familiarity no matter how much the aesthetics to access these feelings may become endlessly uncertain. As Beach House showed with their rendition of “The Snowdon Song,” the feelings accessed through the songwriting of Tony, Caro, and John are as contemporary as ever.