Twyford Down – Galliano

Before American rock music became my musical obsession, I mainly bought and listened to compilations of contemporary music, some of which was rock and some of which decidedly wasn’t.

One of the records I listened to most, which I loved wholeheartedly, was called Groovin’. It was woven together from a few different musical threads: contemporary West Coast hip hop (nothing too hard, though), slightly older East Coast hip hop, soulful R&B-flavoured pop, some very late new jack swing, and miscellaneous British tracks, most of which you could broadly call acid jazz.

The most famous group that ever got tagged with that label was of course Jamiroquai, whose Stevie Wonder-fetishising music is, if I’m forced to be polite, not to my taste at all. But if you’re not familiar with the term and want to know what the style sounded like, early Jamiroquai singles like Too Young to Die and Blow Your Mind encapsulate it pretty well: soul- and funk-derived music, led by bass and keyboards, with live drums and often lots of additional percussion.

Included on Groovin’ was a song by a band called Galliano, an early progenitor of the sound, but commercial also-rans compared to Jamiroquai, Incognito and the Brand New Heavies. I had no idea until around ten years later that the Galliano song on Groovin’, Long Time Gone, was actually a Crosby, Stills & Nash cover (and a David Crosby song at that). At the time, I liked it well enough, I suppose. But it seemed a bit earnest, in comparison to the more nihilistic gangsta stuff elsewhere on the CD or the more whimsical likes of De La Soul.

The following year, Polygram brought out a rather inferior sequel, The Essential Groove, containing tracks by many of the same artists who featured on Groovin’. Galliano were among the returnees, with another track from their 1994 record, The Plot Thickens.

This one, Twyford Down, made little impression on me, clearly, because I barely remembered it until I revisited the compilation last year. But, actually, it’s a bit of a belter.

In the early to mid-1990s, a spate of major road building under the Thatcher and Major Tory governments met with heavy, justified, resistance from protesters appalled at the disregard being shown to areas of sensitive environmental importance. The most famous of these protests was probably the one against the Newbury bypass, but Twyford Down was possibly even more significant, as the proposal to cut through the down (a Site of Special Scientific Interest) to make the M3 a continuous road drew a wide coalition of protestors, many of whom were solidly middle-class (conservative in every sense of the world) professionals of the sort the government and the right-wing media couldn’t simply dismiss as troublemakers, anarchists and hippies.

I didn’t know much of this at the time. Nor did I clock, aged 13, the references that Galliano were playing with in Twyford Down the song. OK, I got the opening quote from The Teddy Bear’s Picnic, but the resemblance of the fuzzed-out guitar riff to the style of Ernie Isley went straight over my head. As did the fact that the chorus – “Maybe it’s the time of year, or maybe the time of man, I don’t know” – is a more-or-less direct quote from Joni Mitchell’s Woodstock. Nor did I get the similarity of the massed backing vocals at the end of the song to the chant-like incantations you hear on, for example, Roy Ayers tracks like Everybody Loves the Sunshine. All these reference points were way beyond me. When I heard Twyford Down again last year and realised quite how much Galliano owed to Laurel Canyon rock as well as black soul music, I was surprised but also delighted.

The battle for Twyford Down was lost, of course, as these battles usually are in the end. But the protesters gave the government enough of a bloody nose to contribute to the  change in road-building policy in the UK. If you build more roads, you encourage more traffic, on and on, without end, until there won’t be any more green spaces to build roads through. The policy of building of yet more trunk roads, and the egregious proposal to carve another motorway through the Pennines, were dropped by John Major’s weakened government, and has not yet reappeared.

Galliano’s song stands as a monument to a time when the environmental battles we faced, or read about in the news, were localised, small scale and did seem winnable. Would that it were so now. As such, Twyford Down may seem almost quaint today. But we’d do well to listen, recognise its mix of cold anger and warm communitarianism, and learn from it. We need such songs more than ever.