Introduction – about 'The Shelley Story'.

The rationale for this project is – for those who are coming to the subject new - to provide an accessible introduction to Shelley's life, work and ideas. Behind this is a belief that Shelley has a relevance to contemporary life - in political and spiritual terms, and also as an example of the power an individual can exert. I also hope that it will prove to be useful for students of the Romantic movement, i.e. that it has an educational role. For Shelley admirers it's a hour long immersion, which renews an acquaintance, gets his spirit across, and maybe adds something new. Speaking for myself I find that though I'm familiar with all the material I still find it's refreshing to revisit. There's a dynamism and creativity in Shelley that rubs off on you; also, great poetry offers up new meanings over time and as life flows on new perspectives present themselves.
For those who don't like Shelley it's meant to act as a fair minded basis from which Shelley can be criticised. It's not as if he was perfect or beyond criticism but something has to be understood before it can be criticised.

Mainstream attacks on Shelley

I'll just give two little examples of the kind of obtuse criticism that Shelley's been subjected to. T.S. Eliot for example apparently referred to Shelley's line 'The earth doth like a snake renew/Her winter weeds outworn'. What a ridiculous and inappropriate image 'weeds' was, he commented, typical of Shelley's carelessness and slapdash imagery. Apparently he didn't realise that in Old (Shakespearean) English usage 'weeds' means clothes.

Another is more recent; a few years ago I attended a (very good) lecture on rock 'n' roll by the conservative philosopher Roger Scruton. But he takes the Norman Tebbit view on rock 'n' roll, that it is basically (as he calls it) 'transgressional' and has destroyed valuable social structures. Afterwards I defended rock 'n' roll to him on the grounds that it constitutes a form of poetry and that, as Shelley had said in his 'Defence of Poetry', poetry was capable of renewing society when it had succumbed to 'an excess of the calculating principle'. In other words the 1950s had got a bit boring and materialistic (See Philip Norman's 'Buddy Holly' pp. 193 – 199, for a personal account of this) and rock n' roll had given new impetus and vitality to western society.

Instead of responding to the argument (as a philosopher should) he shouted 'Shelley was a fool !' - a pity because Shelley's argument is subtle and deserved a reasoned response. Interestingly enough, Shelley's friend Thomas Love Peacock contrasted Shelley with 'eminent men' he had known 'with whom conversation was impossible. To oppose their dogmas, even to question them, was to throw their temper off its balance'. In contrast he wrote of the 'perfect good humour and openness to conviction with which he responded to opinions opposed to his own … They were discussed with freedom and calmness, with the good temper and good feeling which never forsook him in conversations with his friends'.

The basic reason for both T.S. Eliot's and Roger Scruton's (and FR Leavis's) attacks on Shelley is political: Shelley acts as a mighty opposite to their worldviews. There's an infuriating history of what Paul Foot in 'Red Shelley' called 'criticism by subterfuge' – a dislike of Shelley's politics then dressed up in spurious literary criticism.
So there's a tendency to underestimate Shelley and also to attack him dishonestly which I hope 'The Shelley Story' will do something to counteract.

The political motivation

The political point of this project is to focus attention onto Shelley's 'love of liberty' and the way his work went to strengthen democracy in Britain. After his death his work, especially the pirated editions of 'Queen Mab' contributed to the ending of a deferential social order, helping to undermine the heirarchy of 'Lord – Squire – vicar – working classes'. His work also inspired leading suffragettes. So his posthumous influence went on to help include excluded groups in political and social life in Britain. After his death Claire Clairmont, while talking to someone about Shelley - who was saying 'oh yes he was a good poet; it's a pity he spoilt it with all his political interests', replied that without his feeling for humanity he 'would not have been the great poet you admire'.

Benjamin Zephaniah

Benjamin Zephaniah is of course Britain's premier 'dub' poet, a Rastafarian and a vegan, with two honorary doctorates to his name. He also writes novels and plays and has recorded with the Wailers. He has always found Shelley a resource, and is something of a 'soldier for Shelley', talking about him in schools and co-writing a fantastic BBC Pebble Mill film in which Shelley (and Mary Shelley, Byron and Keats) appear after lightning strikes the train in which he (and a Sun reader, played by Timothy Spall), is travelling.

I asked Benjamin if he would like to do the narration because the book he chose to take to his desert island (when interviewed on 'Desert Island Discs') was the complete works of Shelley. I'd also seen C.L.R. James on TV telling poets Michael Smith and Linton Quesi Johnson that their brand of radical poetry was in the Shelley tradition. Benjamin Zephaniah also represents that tradition, so to have him tell Shelley's story makes an important point about who Shelley was – and that his work shouldn't be limited to academia, or seen as perpetuating White Anglo-Saxon Protestant values. Thank you Benjamin, and may you flourish.

History of the project

The Shelley Story began in Norwich in 1975 when I discovered that Shelley lyrics went well with the kind of guitar music then current. I had grown up going to folk clubs with performers of traditional English songs but increasingly leavened with songs about contemporary situations. The music of the Beatles, Bob Dylan and other British and American bands of late sixties/early seventies were key musical influences which largely superceded the folk influence, but the folk club tradition of absorption in an emotion lingered on.

Anyway, by the time glam rock came along in the early 1970s the time of unconscious influence was past, and I began to start writing my own songs and performing in local clubs. I also worked nights in a bread factory and bought a tape recorder, and in the mid 1970s began learning to record music. I met Dave Eastoe, and we began recording together: I remember on our first session he played a delightfully deft linking melody over a chord sequence. I was hugely impressed and in fact we've never stopped recording things together. We also played live – our finest hour being when we supported John Martyn at a gig in Nottingham in 1976 (when we were given the name Brindaband); we also recorded our own songs, and experimented with the Keats and Shelley lyrics that occasionally had turned into songs.

The number of Shelley songs grew, though they weren't forced. The lyrics could be edited together by theme; through absorption in the original emotion the music would come. I like to think of them somehow as autonomous pieces of work – art or artisanship, it's not for me to say. In 1987 I booked a studio on an industrial estate in Norwich and with Dave and friends – Ruth Murray, Bodhi and Steve Homes – we spent four days recording the eight songs there were. It was great to get them all together, under one roof as it were, and the results were released on cassette as 'Shelley in Italy'.

Over the next ten years three more Shelley songs appeared, Spirit of Delight, The World's Great Age and Immortal Deity - which all added significant aspects of Shelley to what was already there. In addition, technical developments meant that I began to want to re-master the original tapes. The music had sounded so crisp in the studio, but when it had been bounced down onto quarter inch tape – and then transferred to cassette – it had, disappointingly, lost a lot of edge. The development of digital technology meant that it could be retrieved.

It was actually the war over Kosovo and the 'ethnic cleansing' that made me actually begin on this. What was happening seemed so foreign to Shelley's ideal of a world where 'all shall live as equals and as friends'; it seemed his message was as necessary as ever. So re-mastering began, with Dave adding new instrumentation where necessary – particularly to Wild Spirit, where some drama was required. Benjamin arrived for the recording on the anniversary of the writing of the Ode to the West Wind, October 25th 1999. Keith Parker, a fine tenor I'd heard in London – going through his voice warmup routine in the downstairs loo ! – kindly came and sang the narrative song representing Shelley's friend Edward Trelawny.

One last note: now I'm living in Oxford and Dave came to visit when I'd made a rough edit of the whole thing. Later we went to an exhibition of Tibetan sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum, beautifully worked statuettes of deities in silver decorated with turquoise. It struck me that perhaps the work we'd put into The Shelley Story over two decades was on similar lines, somewhere between artisanship and artistry and with a feeling for an inner life.