Muse and music: Bridging the gap

A titan of French literature is the font as acclaimed American poet Larry Beckett combines with maverick British musician Stuart Anthony to marry evocative words with a rock chanson soundtrack

APOLLINAIRE and American verse, chords flavoured with English folk rock and a certain Gallic flair, plus ripples of a certain Tim Buckley. No one can suggest that Mirabeau Bridge, the latest album collaboration between a West Coast poet and a British musician, is anything less than eclectic.

It is far from the first time that writer Larry Beckett and guitarist Stuart Anthony have found common ground – the two have shared several cooperative projects going back to 2014 – but the recording, which recently surfaced, takes the duo into fresh waters and fills the air and the ears with a unique French flavour, transatlantic inspiration via the streets and steps, bridges and banks, of bohemian Paris.

Beckett and Anthony, who play a rare live set in London next month, have worked together regularly, most often with the songwriter’s former group the Long Lost Band. But the new collection sees the duo forge another chapter in their fertile association and this fresh intermingling of sounds – poems, vocals, melodies – possesses a quality that is both genuinely touching and unquestionably haunting.

The ghost in the machine, the beating heart, behind this collection is the great poet Guillaume Apollinaire, a Parisian who, at the end of the 19th century and the start of the next, wove a dazzling body of modernist writing that would delight and shock the creative elite in equal measure. An heir to the Symbolists, a promoter of Cubism and a forefather of Surrealism, he was wounded in the Great War then tragically died in the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.

Pictured above: Guillaume Apollinaire

‘Le Pont Mirabeau’ (‘Mirabeau Bridge’) was an Apollinaire poem written in 1912. It appeared the following year in a volume entitled Alcools. The verse work was a reflection on his ruptured relationship with the painter Marie Laurencin. The bridge across the Seine becomes both a metaphor of both connection and disconnection.

Beckett revives the piece on record, under a hypnotising wash of ambient sound, breathing contemporary life into Apollinaire. The American evocatively summarises the links they are attempting to rekindle in this ambitious celebration: ‘The bridge: between banks of the Seine, between Apollinaire and his lovers, between the Belle Epoque and now, between languages, between music and lyrics, between Anthony and Beckett.’

The Portland-based poet has had a significant recent few years. His magnificent and massive American Cycle, an epic gathering of Beckett’s wide-ranging ruminations on US history and myth, decades in the making, finally emerged in 2020. It has gathered luminous notices.

Pictured above: Larry Beckett

His early poems, from the mid-1960s, became the lyrical vehicle for vocalist and guitarist Tim Buckley. Beckett was a drummer with an interest in the Beat Generation writers. Buckley died in the 1970s and his one-time sticksman would turn to the word rather than the song as his principal artistic pursuit. He published poetry, wrote a book called Beat Poetry about that literary school along the way, and later renewed his rock associations through Anthony and his group of the time.

On Mirabeau Bridge, Beckett finds different ways to entwine past and present, poetry and music. With Anthony, he creates a new setting of a Buckley song suitably titled ‘Moulin Rouge’ and also includes a poem of his own set in the City of Lights, so the French threads are richly woven.

But the sonic colours which Anthony, from Lancaster in England’s north-west, brings to the table are variegated and often vibrant. Guitars lead but accordions, zithers and drums construct a sound world in which the spirit of an older Paris is lovingly and deliciously concocted, suggestions of Metro buskers, nods to bar-room chansons and hints of gypsy rhythms permeate the canvas.

Pictured above: Stuart Anthony

Produced by Paul Walmsley and featuring some percussion contributions from Allan Gardner plus translations from the French by Larry Beckett, this 14-track record is a fine addition to the extended, if perhaps esoteric, tradition of popular music and poetry speaking directly to each other and discovering an eloquent dialect.

Note: Larry Beckett and Stuart Anthony are performing poetry and music at the Cavendish Arms, 128, Hartington Road, Stockwell, London, on Friday, June 24th, 2022, from 2-4pm

Also, Rock and the Beat Generation is home to other articles about Beckett – ‘Interview #3: Larry Beckett’, November 27th, 2021; ‘Radio review: #1: “Song to the Siren”’, December 8th, 2021; and ‘Radio date for McGough and Beckett’, January 9th, 2022.