accompanied blues on bottleneck guitar, these performances rarely appeared on his albums: an exception is an attenuated version of Robert Johnson's "Stones in My Passway", on the Young Tradition's Galleries. A hiss redolent of an old 78 record was added, but this joke misfired: a Transatlantic Records press officer later told interviewer Michael Grosvenor Myer that quite a few copies were returned as 'faulty' as a result! In 2009 Topic Records included in their 70-year anniversary boxed set Three Score and Ten "When I Die" from Both Sides Then as track nine of the second CD. Recording Kipling's ballads Bellamy started his exploration of Kipling as a source for songs, not with the Barrack Room Ballads but with the songs from Kipling's Children's books, (Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies) from which he produced two albums, Oak Ash and Thorn and Merlyn's Isle of Gramarye. Kipling's Barrack Room Ballads were published in 1892, and Bellamy started setting them to music in 1973. He was struck by people's misconceptions about Kipling, who many perceived as (in Bellamy's words) "one of the reactionary old guard, and therefore obviously a writer of no merit whatsoever". In reality, Kipling had captured a real insight into the attitudes of the ordinary soldiers, such as their contempt for those civilians who would shrug the soldiers off during peacetime but will encourage and cheer them on when the soldiers are leaving for battle: It's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' 'Chuck him out, the brute!' But it's 'Saviour of 'is country' when the guns begin to shoot. An' it's Tommy this, an' Tommy that, an' anything you please; An' Tommy ain't a bloomin' fool – you bet that Tommy sees!" (Tommy) When composing the musical settings for Kipling's poetry, Bellamy had a theory, shared with many others, that highly metrical poets like Kipling used song tunes to keep their poems flowing properly. Some of Kipling's contemporaries confirm that he was in the habit of humming and whistling as he composed. It has, for example, been claimed that in The Loot, there is a "hidden" tune being worked to, and that nothing else can explain the strange refrains. Bellamy became excited when the line in "Dutch in the Medway" "our ships in every harbour...." reminded him of the line in the song "Cupid's Garden" "Twas down in Portsmouth Harbour...". This observation suggested the tune for the