/ 28 January 2021 1474 Views
There is some archival footage, made for Danish TV in 1968, of Patrick Campbell-Lyons and Alex Spyropoulos, popular music’s only Greek-Irish pairing of astral-baroque crusaders, collaborating together very naturally on piano and autoharp in Alex’s fourth floor flat on Elsham Road near Holland Park. It is an evocative piece of film, finding the pair at ease, and complementing one another’s strengths as musicians and songwriters. But within 12 months of the film’s making, Nirvana had been unceremoniously dumped by record label Island before delivering the final chapter of a three-album deal. The subsequent reversal of fortune, if not quite analogous to a corpulent prince being ejected from an ostentatious banquet and forced to squat in a Bruce Robinson-like hovel of damp walls, blackened fingernails and empty fridges, nevertheless must have felt like such at close quarters.