Lesley Duncan (slight return)

‘Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be’, so say a host of waggish graffiti artists and they could be right as nostalgia only really works in certain circumstances. Music has long been known to be the conduit by which we can revisit the past and relive past glories (or not). Songs that we remember from specific events can sometimes trigger memories buried for decades but the effect isn’t very consistent.


My theory has always been that in order for this effect to work with any certainty, the song in question must be linked directly to a specific point in time and then forgotten until rediscovered long after the event. This must be so otherwise all my favourite songs, and there are many, would all transport me back to their point of origin – but they don’t. And they don’t because they are not fixed to a specific point in time but many points in time, that is, all the times I’ve played them since. The only real memory joggers tend to be those songs that either I don’t own or don’t play much.

Which is why I’ve been wallowing in a warm pool of nostalgia over Lesley Duncan’s ‘Sing Children Sing’. You will recall that I posted about her a few days after her death in April this year and subsequently dug out my tatty copy of her debut album which, in all honesty, I have not played since about 1973. But that’s the point. Because it has not been a regular on ye olde turntable, it is still firmly fixed to the person I was and the circumstances that applied nearly 40 years ago.

In 1971, my music collection only numbered about 6 LPs so this was a time when I was starting out in the music buying business and every purchase held huge meaning. It reminds me of a time when the somewhat earnest young me still lived at home and spent too much time in my room listening to records and trying to learn the guitar. Playing this album now has a strange effect on me as it tries its best to reconfigure my brain into the way it was during that time with all the thoughts, images and sounds that are associated with it. For some reason it is summer and the sound of my Dad mowing the lawn is infiltrating my window. I can see the sun drenched street from my window and wonder why my own room is so cold.

The album itself is very sparsely arranged with just guitar or piano on most tracks and a basic band on others in a way that music is not recorded today. Its simple nature harks back to simpler times but has a sort of honest truth about it that today’s sophisticated recording techniques don’t really convey. It is both a little sad and very uplifting at the same time and to me that is what nostalgia is all about.

Lesley Duncan, Singer Songwriter (1943 - 2010)

The musical dynamic that exists between Britain and the USA is one that has propelled music throughout the last 50 years but never more so than in the early years when rock/pop was a blank sheet stretching away to the horizon.

First there was the initial blast from the States in the 1950s to be answered by the British Beat Boom of the 1960s and so on back and forth throughout the 70s and 80s, a rivalry which has seen the emergence of some of the best music this century. But whereas the Brits had the upper hand in the 1960s when it came to floppy haired beat combos, they sadly lacked in the field of singer-songwriters and especially female singer-songwriters.

In the early 60s when A&R was God, performers and writers were kept firmly at a distance from one another but by the end of the decade, the writer inmates of the Brill Building had formed an escape committee and had tunnelled their way from under the piano to freedom. Thus we had a whole host of new performers who actually wrote their own stuff and on the distaff side the USA led with the likes of Joni Mitchell, Carole King, Laura Nyro, Joan Baez and many others. Here in the UK we had…er…well, no one really.

On this side of the pond, the 60s was a hard time for women in rock. Whilst we had some great performers – Dusty Springfield leading the way, and one or two that wrote a bit but generally performed within a band context like the mercurial Sandy Denny, there were no true singer-songwriters who wrote and performed solo. Whilst there were a few false starts (Lyndsey De Paul, anyone?) it would not be until a teenaged Kate Bush crashed onto the scene in the late 1970s that Britain had a truly talented female SS in its ranks. Or did it?

Back in the early 70s there was a candidate that may lay claim to being the first British female SS and her name was Lesley Duncan. By the seventies, Lesley was not exactly a newcomer as she had spent much of the sixties in a backing singers' co-operative with fellow would-be pop stars Madeline Bell, Kiki Dee and even Dusty herself, singing on each other’s albums. But by 1971 she had written, recorded and released her debut album, entitled ‘Sing Children Sing’. It contained one true hit, ‘Love Song’, covered by Elton John on his ‘Tumbleweed Connection’ effort but her nervousness over live performance rather stymied any commercial success that was her due and her star never rose despite further LPs in the mid seventies. It seems she preferred the anonymity of session work and can be found in the chorus of many well-known albums including ‘Dark Side of the Moon’.

As far as I know, her first two CBS (and best albums) were not released on CD until the early 2000s and even now you’d be lucky to find copies of them and that’s a shame. It seems pioneers never benefit.  Worse, the shocking news has just reached me that Lesley died on 12th March, aged just 66.  As a tribute, here's a video of Lesley singing 'Earth Mother', the title track from her second LP and below that, a glimpse of the 'Backing Singers Co-operative' in action supporting Dusty Springfield at the NME Pollwinners concert in 1966.  From L-R Madeline Bell, Lesley Duncan and Kiki Dee.

Rest in peace, Lesley.





And if you'd like to read more about my views on music, don't forget my book, 'Memoirs of a Music Obsessive'.