Harvest Home (The Hidden Genius of Chris Pitts)

Hello, this is the next in the series of Chris Pitt's A Hidden Genius. I want to talk today and introduce you to what I believe is Chris's masterwork, a track called Harvest Home, which he recorded some, initially some 20 odd years ago, but I think deserves wider recognition and wider understanding today. I'd just like to start off by playing you a couple of minutes from the track, and then I'm going to ask Chris a few questions about it, and then at the end of this podcast leave you to find it and explore for yourself. OK. Trails of Midnight, Christmas trailers, sold out on a dream when life was young. I can hear those church bells, ringing through those suffered cells. I can hear them so loud now. Where we walk together, with high end giver. Misty skies where the crows dine and the flights are dead. Where that old chandar, juggles the stars. Cross the plains on the sunset throne. Harvest home, across the valley. Harvest home, that last retreat. Don't lay me down, another blind alley. Don't leave me staring, at my feet. Walking away from you. Thank you Chris. So Chris, I know this track quite stunned me when I heard it, and it is a 20 minute track. 23 minutes. Thank you, 23 minutes. I left out the final chorus. 23 minutes, and yet it is an utterly immersive audio experience, and speaks to me and others about just being alive as a human being, but it is also very much located in your being a man of Suffolk, and in a particular canopy within Suffolk. So what led you to write this track? A lot of it, if not all of it, sort of lurking behind it all, is this strange experience of coming out of illiteracy. I like to call myself a butterfly that escaped the wheel, because I've been around people who have been totally disempowered. Most of my life I was around people that were totally disempowered by illiteracy. It's one of those things, one of the things I think gives your music an almost miraculous quality, is that as I understand it you were a functional illiterate, until about, you were about 22, and even thereafter your path wasn't always without blocks and obstacles, and you wrote this at a time of, you know, great personal trial I think. Well I'd come out from illiteracy, met my wife Mary in 67, we married in 73, and at the time I was hooked on some religious cults. Terrible time. Anyway, long and short of it is I went to a theological college in Birmingham after I got illiterate, and had a very bad time. And a lot of the Harvest Home, repetitive chorus, Harvest Home, Across the Valley, Don't Let Me See My Feet Walking Away From You, comes from those bitter experiences of being part of something that was destructive. Fundamentalism is destructive, there's just no doubt about it, and it's ruining the Christian faith. So there was yearning, when I was locked up in our room at night with Mary, it was a terrible, terrible experience of claustrophobia, and being shackled to a way of thinking. Now my guards were not up at that point, because I'd come through to have some reasonable vocabulary, and Mary taught me, we did everything by our arithmetic, I'm still totally finished on that. But you couldn't read music? No. So you've gone from not being able to produce beautiful sound to this, so how did that come about? It was in my head, it was always in my head, there was always something in my head, you know. The structure of the song, it has to be admitted, probably owes an awful lot to Dylan's Sad-Eyed Lady and Phil Oakes' When In Rome. Simply because they sparked off a kind of visionary landscape. Sad-Eyed Lady definitely sparked off a visionary landscape, but even when I couldn't read or write, or was deficient in all those areas, I still could feel the landscape. This kind of searching for a homeland, the warm fields of home, so to speak, you know. And round about that time, I started to listen to, my brother Nick actually first got me into John Betjeman, who wrote about locations, with tremendous depth, you know. And I also liked him because he didn't take himself seriously, I mean you've only got to listen to indoor games at Newbury to realise he didn't take himself seriously. Joan Hunter Dunn, Earliest by Aldershot, fun. I could feel this lagonda, you know, with the headlights and all that sort of thing. And it stimulated those parts of the brain that helped me to see the Stour Valley and that kind of thing, and the Suffolk landscape. When we came back from the theological thing, you know, I knew I'd come home. But where did you come home to, for those who don't know the Suffolk landscape? Well, we came back to, I forget where it was now, I think it was Stratford St. Mary, we had a flat above the post office. This is the village between Colchester and Ipswich? Yeah, that's right. But obviously, since we got married, you know, the first house we bought, you know, was at Burgott Road in Colchester, and then this one here, which is not in Neyland, my connection with Neyland, which I'm very happy about, is that I part own Number 1 Harbours Hill, where my brother still lives. And it's really the harvest, the experience, because I know you're also an agricultural worker, the experience of working on the land at harvest in Neyland. Working on the land, but also misery in the workplace, you know, because I didn't have a proper job until, I mean, I was always sort of seasonal land work and the occasional, whatever you call it, I don't know what you call it, you know, something like that. Or casual work. Casual work, yeah. I got a job as a cleaner and toilet cleaner at the Essex University, which was the first, this was 68, which was the first, left school in 63, and this is 68. You know, the first time I'd had a wage. So that kind of disempowerment set against it, you know. But by 10, 15 years later, you were in quite a successful band called Crippled Giant. Yes. And you still hadn't quite written this yet. No. But it was bubbling along. It went up my dissatisfaction with the whole rock thing, you know. I mean, folk rock was okay. I just about tolerate it now, but the lifestyle of the rock band, you know, to me, and the pretentiousness of it all and the ego and, you know, I just didn't want it. The lifestyle was bad enough, like going up to Lowestock, finishing at 11 o'clock at night, coming back at 3 o'clock, you know, going to work on the early shift the next morning was just too much. And eventually I had a breakdown, various reasons for that. I think I really underestimated the death of my mother because she was part of that Suffolk landscape. And my father, Billy Pitts, you know, I think one of the things that being part of a cult teaches you is to be triumphalist about everything. Well, I now know that's to be a load of shit, you know. And so all those sort of feelings were tied up in it. Looking back at the song, I wanted to put in the song as well. I wanted to put something about the suffering of the land workers and the people that work in factories making cement and all that sort of thing, you know. There's a couple or three lines in there about that. I haven't got them in front of me at the moment, but I know they're there. And I think this is one of the things that touches me. It's one of the few pieces of music that's actually also a record of what it was like to be, you know, a rural working class. A class that I think has almost been obliterated and certainly forgotten by people who should know better. And that's why I think it's a very moving piece of music. Well, thank you. I mean, it's probably the most personal thing I've ever done. Do you want to talk about some of the other influences within that song, some of the verse influences? Yeah, I can do. Can you? Okay, got it. Well, I'd rather be there than anywhere else I know. And I used to go out front like cotton in the sun of an escapade in a hand charade. What took us there? Without a care. Sometimes my memory can't take the weight to dream. Thanks, Chris. Right. So tell us about that second verse because that seems to be quite important to you. Again, we've got a bit of a crossover between the literal and the sort of images that it projects, you know, the loom of the light, footprints in the snow. Well, I can tell you where that is. That's the old street lamp. It's not, they've got one of those awful new street lamps now, just leads up to Court Street. In Neyland, yeah. So the loom of the light was that old lamp, which I think it was replaced with the old one. They've modernised it. And it's the road that leads up past Carriages Butchers on the right. That's where that lamp was. You can even talk about that, you know. And yeah, they led to nowhere, but I'd rather be there. I mean, you know, well, they did lead to nowhere. They led to nowhere at all, really, except a lot of hurt and a lot of unnecessarily, which you do when you're not matured properly, you know, unnecessary animosities and feelings, you know. But I'd rather be in that place because I feel secure in that place. I'd rather be there than anywhere else I know. So did you write most of it when you weren't living in Neyland or when you were living in Neyland? Can't be sure. I think I started it, I think I started it when I had my first paid job, you know, which was, put me up, you know, then soon after I met Mary. Yeah. So I think we're talking probably about 1973. When I first got the idea. And when did you actually come to record it? Oh, that was, I reckon about 15 years ago, about 10 to 15 years ago. So we're talking about 2008, something like that. I've met Scott Newstead again. And who is he? Scott Newstead, well, first of all, Scott Newstead is a very unassuming little man. Very, but the greatest talent I've ever known, ever. I mean, we got the bare bones of, once I've got it written, we got the bare bones of this down. I'm talking about the melody line, you know, there's a hell of a lot of putting the verses together. We got it down in about an hour. That's how good he was. And he played piano on there and he put the digital, I hummed in the digital instruments, you know, there. There's only one other, there's two live instruments there. One is the piano and one is the harmonica, which I play, not the piano. I couldn't do that. His feeling for the sensitivity on the keyboards is so, it's never, it's never been parallel as far as I'm concerned. So yeah, that's, you know, when you came back, you know, rather be there than anywhere else I know, the line is forgotten. Well, it's amazing how many lines you tell yourself when you're involved in something other than that pure flux of sensation, as I say, you know, of life and living, really. It's amazing, you know. Do you think that pure flux of sensation can be found today? No. Is that that we have changed too much? It's rather like, I'm going to try and disassociate it from the romantic thing, you know. But it's rather like, during the 60s, it's almost as if God lobbed a lot of stuff down, you know. And for a while, there was, people really did believe all you needed was love, you know, all in it. People really did believe it, you know, the colour of the time. But it was new. And because it was new, it had a sparkle about it. Obviously, people were still dying and all sorts of terrible things had happened. But because it was new, it was so recognisable when it passed. A lot of people put it down to the music industry selling out to commercialism and the market, you know, they say those sort of things. I think it was in people's hearts, really. I mean, certainly in America, the whole sort of love revolution and everything was nothing like it was over here. Over here, it was very, very different, you know, much more poetic, much more laid back, you know. It wasn't somebody singing, are you going to San Francisco, you know, with flowers in your hair. It was far, far... I met people during that time. Well, are you going to Manningtree? It doesn't quite have the same roof. No, no, no. So, that's why I don't think you can relive that again. I mean, who knows? In God's mind, if we seek, we find, you know, I don't know. But in Harvest Home itself, there is also looking back into that moment of possibly shared experience in the 1960s. And I guess, you know, the cynical 70s which followed. The 70s were terrible times. I can remember them. Again, I was working at the university as a cleaner and part-time porter, but mostly cleaner. Horrible job. I mean, I felt so great that I could actually get a wage, you know. I was literate enough to get into that. But it changed, you know. I mean, the whole atmosphere of working with the cleaners at Essex University, you know. They tried to bring in productivity deals, you know, splitting up the workforce and people hating each other. I just couldn't wait to get out. But I didn't get, as you know, that went on from Essex University to the Garrison Ordnance Support Unit, which was taking furniture around and general labouring. From there, I can't remember from there, yeah, I became an assistant caretaker at Monmouth Junior School, where I got the sack. And from there I went, that's right, from there I went on to Theological College, came back and went straight into severals. And I worked in care work from 1978 up to the time I retired in 2008. So Harvest Home is very much a picture of something which is... It's an inspiration. It's unattainable, I was going to say that. It's an aspiration to get somewhere where you've got peace. It's like a sort of... it comes across to me like a sort of personal heaven, but it also can speak to me and it can include my experience. Yes, I think it can, yeah. It's part of that mystical thing that your mind goes... it's an altered state of mind. I try... I didn't... I have told... people have told me that these sort of things, Harvest Home, can lead you to an altered state of mind, where you're more receptive to things, I suppose. And I think that's what good music should do, actually, whatever it happens to be, where it comes from. But yes, you don't always need substances to take you to that place. And so some 15 years after recording it, you're now re-releasing it? Well, yeah, I mean, I didn't realise... you see, when somebody says something's good, you know, and you come from my background, you have a very great difficulty believing them, you know. I just laid it aside, and Scott became quite ill, he's still quite ill, and I just laid it aside, because, you know, you get... I was writing all the time, and I just laid it aside, I don't know why, you know. And then I realised that, you know, from what people had said, you know... But I've never had it... I've never submitted it to any official organisation, the media or anything, I've never done that. It's a bloom almost too tender for that. You don't know whether anybody these days could even hope to understand a piece that's 23 minutes long. It's pure madness, but it is glorious, Chris. A folk symphony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, without any kind of negative connotation attached to that, it's something that needs to be heard and experienced. So where can people find this? Well, they can get it on my website, chrisfitz.co.uk, they can download it. If there's any difficulty, they can contact us, but I think you'll find that, you know, you can play it. It's there, you know, I've clicked on it loads of times, and it's played from beginning to end. It's on... Yeah, it's on an album called Looking for the Carpenter, it's also on an album called An Englishman Ignored. Great title, by the way, it's great, love it, love it. Right, yeah. Yeah, so I think what we'll do, we'll go out on this podcast, out just with another blast of Harvest Home. And if you are listening to this and want to follow it up, then do go and look for Chris's website. His is an amazing story, and out of that amazing story there is amazing music. Here we go. I can hear them so loud now Where we walk together With high end giver Misty skies when the clouds die and the planets are dead With an old chandler Chilling the stars Across the plains of the sunset throne Harvest Home Across the valley Harvest Home That glass green trees Don't bring me down Another blind alley Don't leave me staring At my feet Walking away from you Trials and pleasures Autumn treasures