Buried Treasure
Written by Ian Harrison
Mojo Magazine Dec Issue 2024
Surprise, Surprise
This month’s rediscovered jewel: an abstract painting in folk-rock clothing.
Juliet Lawson
Boo SOUVENIR, 1973
In 1971, London-born singer-songwriter Juliet Lawson was looking at a five-album
deal with Island Records. “I did a wonderful session one afternoon with Paul Samwell-Smith, the first time I’d ever been into a studio,” she says today. “Then he left to produce a Carly Simon album in America, and it all fell through...”
Had the Island deal come off, and put her in the company of John and Beverley Martyn, Nick Drake and Fairport Convention, it’s likely Lawson’s debut album Boo would have found itself a celebrated strand in that storied, folk-informed moment of British music. Instead, it sank without trace.
In her early twenties, Lawson says she had only the vaguest notions of making it in music. Having listened to Broadway musicals as a kid, she was fully turned onto music by The Hewes aged 13: her first guitar arrived when she was 15, and her own songs followed. The influence of US singer-songwriters—Carole King, Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell among them — completed the picture, as did doomed American-in-Europe Scott Walker.
“I used to cry listening to those early Scott Walker albums,” she says. “I like orchestras and the emotion that can produce. I was flirting with, I suppose, somewhere between The Beatles and Scott Walker.”
With the assistance of her manager and later husband Simon Crocker, she signed with EMI subsidiary Sovereign and went into Mayfair Studios on South Molton Street in early 1972, with producer and ex-Trees guitarist David Chests She recalls writing five of the songs in a weekend on a Tascam reel-to-reel, and that “the album went very quickly too, just two or three weeks probably. DavidCosta had quite a clear-cut vision for it, but nothing was changed in my songs. I enjoyed it but I was intimidated. I remember feeling like I was fitting in with everybody else, being called in at the last minute to do the vocals, which did jar with me a bit. I didn’t really have any input about mixing or anything like that, but it was such a live album that sort of took care of itself.”
Also working fast were string arranger Tony Cox and backing vocalists Thunderthighs, who famously furnished the doo-de-doos on Lou Reed’s Walk On The Wild Side. Adding saxophone was Lol Coxhill, who was briefly rendered mute by some rogue razor blades lodged in his instrument.
There is little muted about Boo, though. Blending the British folk-rock and West Coast styles of its era, it’s the agreeably wayward sound of a young writer unrestrained by over-thinking, prone to moody introspection and equally at ease with melodious accessibility and more loosened moorings. The latter songs are delicate smash and grabs of intrigue and stimulating confusion: audition-anxiety opener Dear Fool finds percussion rattling and scraping as her voice trills and whirls over troubled piano, with a detour into quotes from King Lear hinting at the singer's secret desire to act. Also curious is Who is India?, with solo guitar and voice seemingly recorded outdoors declaring, “l wish I could order time” before unbridled howling begins. “I’ve worked on my voice a lot over the years,” says the singer, “but not in those days. I wrote sometimes out of my range, maybe.”
Other songs are more direct. The reflective, sweetly pained Rolling Back, with its threadbare talk of hearing the news today and things happening in Lancashire, plus notions of sunny Europe, approximates a meeting of A Day In The Life and Joni’s California. Its elegance leavened by Coxhill’s antic reeds, The Weeds In The Yard also reflects on time, as the self-harmonising singer wonders, ‘‘maybe I owe you a whole lot of something I just haven’t got.”
“There’s something very intuitive and instinctive about the writing,” says the singer
“There’s no narrative, it's just a whole lot of poems strung together. Somebody likened it to an abstract painting something you don’t have to explain.”
She recalls it being released in February ’73, coinciding with a gig in Aberdeen, but despite some approving reviews, Boo failed to take flight “I would have liked more recognition,” she says, “but I really never thought I belonged, at all. Frog In The Jam is about being a misfit, certainly in the music business. I was too sensitive to what people said... and now, I couldn’t give a monkey’s!”
Coincidentally, there was a cartoon of a monkey on Boo’s cover, though Lawson cannot recall its significance. A second album, which a 1974 issue of Record Mirror named as Tomfoolery, went unreleased (Lawson calls it, “a calamity, and how not to make an album”). Busy with life thereafter, she kept on writing, sometimes recording at north London’s Pathway studios. Now a painter, she continues to make music.
This month Boo is available on a new release on the Soul Jazz label, with two songs
added from the Island demo sessions. One, Rincén Da Luna, concerns an Argentine cattle ranch owned by the Bovril company before it was sold in 1971. “Bovril was our family business,” she says. “My great-great-grandfather was a food scientist in Edinburgh in the 1860s and he invented it for the soldiers in the Boer War.”
As for Boo, she’s pleased it’s getting a polish. “It’s like listening to a kid sister or grandchild and I love it unashamedly,” she says. “I don't think it’s like anything. That always gets my vote.’
As told to Ian Harrison
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