Recently, the marvellous vocal trio, Coope, Boyes and Simpson, released their latest album As If, on which they have included their version of the Pete Atkin and Clive James song, A Hill of Little Shoes, a moving account of what it feels like to consider that one has grown up at a time when the children of the holocaust never got a chance to.
This song, which was written in the last decade of the twentieth century and which I first heard on the Pete Atkin album Winter Spring gives lie to the to those who suggest that a song written in the popular idiom is generally at a loss do full justice to serious subject matter of this kind.
This YouTube ( “with”, I was reminded by an interested party, ”the last verse edited off for some reason”), gives the listener a good idea of what can be achieved when the composers are in the business of being serious about what they write, as James and Atkin are and have always been.
