Our Boy

This is the first of two albums originally recorded while Williamson was on tour of Europe in 1963. The other was a sort of unplugged album before it's time, with just Williamson on vocals and harmonica and M. T. Murphy on acoustic guitar; on this one he's joined again by Murphy plus drummer Billie Stepney and a superb, albeit uncredited, pianist. Some of the performances, including the wry and funny "Movin' Down the River Rhine" feature just Williamson himself, reminding you once again just how much music it's possible to get out of an unamplifed harmonica and a tapping foot. The album has been edited so that Williamson's off-hand, almost stream-of-consciousness narrative ramblings provide weirdly effective segues between songs…

Michael Tippett’s oratorio A Child of Our Time was composed between 1939 and 1942 as a direct response to the events leading up to (and including) the notorious Kristallnacht, in November 1938, in National Socialist Germany. Tippet first intended to write an opera, but quickly determined that this would inevitably be too literal, and that the (rather neglected) oratorio form lent greater scope for reflective and meditative interjections to the narrative. Hoping to persuade his friend and mentor T.S. Elliot to write the libretto, he sent the poet such an intricately detailed plan that Elliot responded by suggesting that Tippett, having thought so carefully about it, prepare the text himself – which he duly did. (He then went on to write his own libretti for all his future large vocal works).