Loose Canon: The Extraordinary Songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin by Ian Shircore, Stephen Fry (Foreword)
Requirements: .ePUB reader, 4.5 MB
Overview: Ian Shircore first got to know Clive James in 1970, when he was running a folk music club in Richmond, southwest London. Clive’s role then was as the lyricist in a fertile songwriting partnership with singer Pete Atkin.
In the last four years of Clive’s life, Shircore spent many afternoons at his house in Cambridge, talking with him about his lyrics, poetry and prose. These chats led first to Loose Canon: The Extraordinary Songs of Clive James and Pete Atkin (2016) and then to So Brightly at the Last, an intimate critical account of the brilliant Australian wordsmith’s long poetic career.
So Brightly covers sixty years of Clive’s life as a poet, from early successes like ‘The Book of My Enemy Has Been Remaindered’ to recent internet hits like ‘Japanese Maple’ and ‘Sentenced to Life’ and his last great epic, ‘The River in the Sky’.
The book includes many personal revelations. In it, Clive talks for the first time about his nightmare experience of being locked up in a mental hospital for two months – with the Trouser Thief and the Woman With Only One Song – when the drugs went wrong and caused a severe psychotic reaction.
Clive also looks back on his relationship with Princess Diana and explains why he ended his lucrative television career to concentrate on his books and his poetry, which became more and more important to him during his long ten-year battle against leukaemia, emphysema and a clutch of other life-threatening conditions.
Oxford Professor John Carey has called So Brightly ‘terrific’ and said he ‘read it with astonishment and learnt a huge amount’. For David Quantick, it’s a book that ‘works as commentary on its subject’s work, as biography and as a really good book about poetry’.
Clive was able to read a pre-publication copy (twice) in the weeks before his final illness. He called it ‘a wonderful book – energetic, informal and beautifully written.
Genre: Non-Fiction > Biographies & Memoirs
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