Book Review: Alan Tyler “How To Never Have A Hit: The Confessions of an Unsuccessful Singer-Songwriter”

The epiphany for writing this book occurred while Alan Tyler was listening to random recordings of the Complete Hank Williams on the Bakerloo Line on the London Underground. Chancing upon the audio of ‘How To Write Folk and Western Music To Sell’, a book Hank had sold for a dollar a time to share the secrets of his songwriting success, Tyler concluded: “perhaps I, a songwriter who has never written a hit could share the secrets of his failure in a book sold for considerably more?”

Alan Tyler frequently admits that the principal conceit of the resulting book he’s written is flawed in as much as he isn’t really the great failure the title would suggest, having survived a forty something year recording career that has included a considerable number of the following: album releases, published songs, live performances, and critical acclaim. But in purely commercial terms, it’s hard to argue with him when he says that 12 albums into his career, he has been nothing other than “absolutely unsuccessful”.

Born in 1961 in Kenton, Harrow, Middlesex, Tyler still lives in the family home. His maternal grandfather and his mother were said to have been fine singers, and both his parents were involved in amateur operatics, so performing was obviously in the genes, which led to his own involvement in a number of low key productions. Between times, he was a fan of Nicky Horne’s radio programme, ‘Your Mother Wouldn’t Like It’, a radio show whose title would make no sense to youngsters in the modern era who attend the same concerts as their parents. Tyler suggests it was appearing in the musical, ‘Oklahoma’, which featured some hastily home made gingham shirts and other farmer and cowboy attire, that influenced his later country music inclinations.

As a choirboy, Tyler’s first brush with fame was in a Stars On Sunday Christmas Special on ITV in 1972. The film, ‘Stardust’, featuring ’70s heartthrob and pop star, David Essex, also included a number of his fellow choristers – and it’s clear that its story about the rise and fall of rock singer, Jim Maclaine, made a real impression on him. Jonathan Richman’s album, ‘Home of the Hits’, was another fundamental keystone in his burgeoning love of popular music, while Rough Trade in Notting Hill became the centre of his universe for record buying.

As someone who has seen many Alan Tyler and Rockingbirds’ performances, what certainly came as something of a surprise to read in the book were his initial forays into swing jazz in the early 1980s, with the band Take It, whose members he met through the London Musicians Collective. His love of jazz tap dancing led to him busking to tunes at London tube stations, and his dancing was sufficiently good enough that he eventually won a national jazz tap dancing competition.

It was all change by the end of 1987, by which time Tyler had a philosophy degree from North London polytechnic and had learned to love cosmic American country music through his college buddy, Myles, a thirty something Irishman. A desire to write his own songs resulted in an early incarnation of The Rockingbirds. A subsequent move to Camden Town saw a group of like-minded individuals and musicians coalesce around The Falcon pub, and the formation of The Rockingbirds mark II, who came to the attention of Jeff Barrett and Heavenly Recordings. The resulting self-titled debut album in 1992 received great music press, but this failed to translate into album sales (around 12,000 copies).

The Rockingbirds were essentially a band ahead of their time; too early for the Alternative Country and Americana scene which started to emerge towards the end of decade, and falling into, what Tyler accurately describes at the time as that “nowhere realm” between pop, indie and country. He’s also honest enough to acknowledge his naivety in failing to accept soon enough that being in a band was actually a job, and that releasing a debut album wasn’t an end in itself. However, in another sign of how much things have changed in the music business, he acknowledges that: “The truth is….the music industry has paid out more to us than we have ever earned for them”.

Lack of commercial success resulted in the band losing their record deal, and in order to secure the release of sophomore effort, ‘Whatever Happened to The Rockingbirds’, a tie up between Heavenly and the Cooking Vinyl label was required. Although their second album was a more than creditable effort, it too failed to set the world alight, and resulted in the demise of the band.

Paid employment with a media monitoring firm and the Civil Service didn’t detract from Tyler’s longstanding commitment to putting on a live music event called ‘Come Down & Meet The Folks’, which from 1996 onwards took root in a variety of hostelries across London, before eventually fetching up at its current location, The Betsey Trotwood in Farringdon. If “The Folks” afforded nothing else, it gave Tyler a place to play every week and also allowed him time for his songwriting. This led to the release of his solo album, ‘Faithful‘ in 2002, before he formed Alan Tyler & The Lost Sons of Littlefield, with an eponymous release in 2006, and an acoustic collection, ‘So Far‘. The former record includes a song for which he’s rightly lauded: ‘Middle Saxon Town’. It’s an example of what Tyler does best – a terrific toe-tapping number, which draws on his upbringing in ‘Metroland’ to chart the history of his home town in London, through the birth of the railways in the nineteenth century, and how they transformed what was previously a rural village – with its Roman, Saxon and Norman antecedents – into the part of the modern metropolis it is today. It’s proper country music, but with a quintessentially English flavour.

In 2008, Heavenly asked The Rockingbirds to participate in their 21^st birthday celebration, at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, with Edwyn Collins. Thinking that he was more likely to enjoy success with a rejuvenated Rockingbirds, Tyler started to assemble new material, which resulted in ‘The Return of The Rockingbirds’ album, which came out on the Loose record label.

Other releases have followed in the years since – ‘The Alan Tyler Show’ in 2015, ‘William Blake’s Songs of Innocence’, in the same year (faithful recordings of all 18 of the visionary artist’s poems), ‘El Tapado‘ in 2018, the final Rockingbirds release, ‘More Rockingbirds’ in 2019, and lastly – ‘Made In Middlesex‘ – from 2021. Tyler is of the view that his more recent writing is superior to earlier efforts, and it’s fair to say that the standard he’s achieved in the last ten years or so is at least the equal of the best of his Rockingbirds songs.

Several of Tyler’s compositions have their lyrics presented in their entirety in this book – and justifiably so. Numbers like ‘Down On Deptford Creek’, a song in which London’s social/natural history and heritage are beautifully explored, would be considered something of a minor classic if written by the likes of Shane MacGowan.

It’s entirely understandable why Tyler considered the decision by the Americana Music Association UK to award him the Grass Roots Award at its third annual awards ceremony in 2018 (for his efforts with Come Down & Meet The Folks) as something of a slight, as well as an honour at the same time. Essentially, the Grass Roots award is for people working in Americana in a capacity other than as an artist, and the award obviously didn’t accord any recognition for the fact that Tyler had been slogging away as a singer-songwriter and performer for decades. In the end, he agreed to accept the award provided it recognised the contribution of other people with Come Down and Meet the Folks, such as Steve Arlene.

Terry Staunton in Record Collector magazine once said: “As frontman and chief writer of ’90s Camden cowboys, The Rockingbirds, Tyler flew the flag for Brit country higher and for longer than almost anyone”. Crucially, too, he was also just about the first person to do so, at a time in the early 1990s when country music had very little traction in the UK. He’s someone for whom anyone with an interest in Americana, roots and country music should have the utmost regard given his enormous contribution to the scene, and this book is, for the most part, a highly enjoyable, informative, and entertaining read.