Pete Atkin

It was in 1967 that Pete Atkin met Clive James, the late legendary Australian writer and broadcaster. Almost immediately they started writing songs together in what turned out to be a lifelong collaboration. Their songs were always entertaining, surprising, and memorable – “funny, sad, beautiful, true” was Stephen Fry’s memorable description – and Pete is back once again at PizzaExpress Live Chelsea, along with the brilliant pianist Simon Wallace, to entertain and surprise us with a new collection of old favourites and… unexpected items! Pete Atkin was born a long time ago in a Cambridge family that had no connection with the university, and in 1967 met Clive James, then an Australian post-graduate student, who loved songs almost as much as Pete did, and who was looking for someone to collaborate with in writing them. When they left university they found a publisher who was foresighted enough to invest in getting Pete to make some demo recordings of their songs, which were eventually released as an album, Beware Of The Beautiful Stranger. In the meantime, their friend Julie Covington had made recordings of several of them, included on her first album, The Beautiful Changes. Pete himself started making an album a year, and went on to record many sessions for John Peel’s Radio One show, among others. In 1975, Pete and Clive toured together for the first time to promote Pete’s sixth album with a show they called, perhaps a little ironically, “Together At Last”. In the nineties he went back to being a freelance, and produced “This Sceptred Isle” for Radio 4, a huge narrative history of Britain. After the turn of the millennium, Clive gave up his TV career, and he and Pete put together a portable two-man show which they toured successfully all around the UK three times, and all around Australia.