England's Own Fair Son

By JAY COCKS

Alan Price moves between rock and pop, conscience and whimsy

Growing up, you heard fairy tales. Growing up in the north of England, Alan Price heard about the Jarrow March. The government shut down the shipbuilding yards, even blew up construction cranes. The workers were starving; their children had rickets. The people of Jarrow staged a hunger march, walked the 280 miles to London to confront a government that refused to see them. Some 30 years later, Price wrote a song for them. It was rilled with pride, a particular kind of chin-out toughness set to an easy melody fit for a pub choir, and it had a memorable chorus: "And if they don't give us a couple o' bob/ Won't even give you a decent job/ Then ... with my blessings, burn them down."

Price is not best known for the incendiary qualities of his music. His keyboard skills have been celebrated since his days as a cornerstone member of the Animals, one of the most vigorous of the Beatles-era British rock groups. His songs for Lindsay Anderson's mock epic of modern England, O Lucky Man (1973), stand as one of the decade's most original film scores. But the spike in his lyrics can be easy to miss: it is hidden neatly between a rich melody and a smooth delivery that owes as much to cabaret as to the Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park. Lately, too, his songs have grown rather more introspective and relaxed, concentrating on private dilemmas and domestic relations. A just released album called Lucky Day opens with a modified disco tune that flirts with frivolity. But the record closes out on a sardonic anthem in the old style, England My England. The song discusses the shortsighted lives of Lazy Eddie ("If the sea was beer he'd probably sign the pledge") and his benighted girlfriend and gives them their own little marching song: "England my England, my England, my my/ We are your children, oh England don't cry."

Lucky Day, ebullient and ironic by turns, is obviously an attempt to break some new ground, both a modification of what Price has called "diary music" and a tentative rapprochement with "have fun" tunes. It may seem like a transitional record. But first cut to last, it sounds like a good time, the restless work of a front-rank pop talent.

Price's gifts seem, to American ears, peculiarly English, and that may be one reason American ears have not been as responsive as the music merits. He brings rock to the music hall, overlays it with suggestions of '50s club jazz and well-shaken pop, and comes up with a sound that seems to fall between any two stations on your radio dial. You can drift easily along with an aged-in-wood Price ballad like i Love You Too and nearly not hear the scalding observation "Love only lasts until believers leave us" stashed between choruses like a serpent in the sheets. Price is a jaded romantic with a misfit imagination and a battered social conscience, a lapsed rocker who has taken the middle ground without losing his principles.

By the time he was 16 and attending the Jarrow Grammar School, Price had formed a blues and skiffle-based band that toured the northeast of England. Singer Eric Burden signed on, and the group came shortly to be known as the Animals, in commemoration of the fine frenzy of their performances. "In the beginning," Price told TIME'S Diane Coutu, "we had a kind of religious zeal about blues. We came from a depressed area, and that made us think we were England's Negroes." Success brought Price not only flat up against the hollowness of such self-mythologizing, but produced the usual tensions and conflicts within the group. The Animals turned out three albums, six singles and went on three different tours in one year, all without emotional or practical preparation. "From the day we turned professional we never had another rehearsal," Price says now. "We had to rely completely on material from our amateur years." He wrangled repeatedly with Burden. The group, once his, "turned into a collective. Then we turned into moneymakers. And ego freaks." Price broke away in 1965.

Price did not really come into his own until Director Lindsay Anderson persuaded him to write a full score for O Lucky Man. Abounding in cyanide and sentiment, O Lucky Man seemed to help Price set a tone for his own material. He now says: "That music was sort of a confession for me."

From O Lucky Man Price embarked on his own epic, a concept album called Between Today and Yesterday that contained Jarrow Song and attempted to reconcile his roots in the north with the strains and quandaries of his life in contemporary London. It was an altogether extraordinary piece of work, but the record created problems. "People thought of me as some sort of left-wing radical," Price says.

"It's a load of rubbish." Worse, the record failed to make any commercial impression in the States. Price changed record companies, but his work went unreleased in the U.S. By rights, Lucky Day should correct that situation and kick up some dust besides.

Price just put the finishing touches on a whole new album in Los Angeles and has returned home to London, where it is his particular, if perhaps not wholly serious, pleasure to affect some of the graces of a gent.

At 37, he shares "a whole organized life that has nothing to do with rock 'n' roll" with Actress Jill Townsend; his daughter Elizabeth, 8; and her son Luke, 6. "I'm a man who dreams continually of retirement," he claims. "I'm a member of a golf club and an art club. I play on the dart team at the local pub and I direct a football club."

His attitude is casual enough to make his music seem like an afterthought, and he might even get you to believe it. If the tunes didn't linger so long, that is.

And the lyrics didn't keep teasing and nagging at you. And if Price didn't repeatedly blow his own cover with the full force of his gift.

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