Pete Atkin

Pete Atkin (born 22 August 1945) is a British singer-songwriter and radio producer notable for his 1970s musical collaborations with Clive James and for producing the BBC Radio 4 series This Sceptred Isle... He studied Classics and English at Cambridge University where he was a member of St John's College. In 1966 he joined Cambridge Footlights, becoming the musical director for the revues.

Atkin did, and still does, write his own lyrics, but it was the collaboration with Clive James that produced his most famous songs. Pete Atkin and Clive James recorded six albums in the 1970s, as well as writing an album for Julie Covington, best known for her number one hit "Don't Cry for Me Argentina" in 1976. However, despite Atkin's popularity on the college performance circuit the records did not sell in any great numbers. After this James became a well-known television personality and Atkin became a radio producer. Their music catalogue went out of print until all six original albums were re-released on CD in the 1990s. (Read more at Wikipedia)

Links to Peel
After Pete Atkin's first single, "Master Of The Revels", had picked up some Radio 1 airplay, notably on Kenny Everett's show and the singer had recorded sessions for Radio 1, he was booked to do a Top Gear session in March 1972. It was the first of nine Peel sessions between 1972 and 1975. The sheer number of sessions shows that Peel was impressed by Atkin's work, but it appears that he was also among those critics who complained that Clive James's lyrics were sometimes "just too clever by half", as the NME Encyclopedia of Rock (1977, p.14) put it. Peel's own words have not been traced, but James responded to the DJ's comments in typically forthright fashion in a 1975 interview with Ian Macdonald in New Musical Express:


 * I don't have to because, right now, that's what John Peel says I need. He's saying Clive James is a very intellectual fellow and he's trying to impress us with his knowledge. To which the answer is Clive James is not an excessively intellectual fellow — and I'm certainly not trying to impress him with my knowledge. If I were trying to impress him with my knowledge, the songs would be very different. What John's missed out on is that he's acting harder than I am. He's really straining his brain in an effort to appear stupid. Which he certainly isn't — in fact, we've got a hell of a lot to thank him for.

After Atkin and James quit the music scene, they disappeared from Peel's playlists, but when there was a revival of interest in their work in the late 1990s he was happy to narrate a Radio 4 programme, Pete Atkin and Clive James: Smash Flops in 2000.

Sessions

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 * Song title / Song Title / Song Title / Song Title

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Other Shows Played
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 * DD Month YYYY: Song (single/album) Label