Penelope Tree goes on a trip

About 80 pages into Diana Melly's memoir Take A Girl Like Me, which I'm currently reading, Melly mentions how, at a certain moment in her life, she had "a new friend, Penelope Tree". Oh, Penelope Tree! Yep, the 60s model, who looked, says Melly, "like something wonderful from outerspace". The same Penelope Tree (could there ever be two people with that name?) immortalised in one of Felt's greatest songs. Dig it, man: 

Yeah, never mind Primitive Painters, this is the real deal. One of those times when Felt got pretty much everything right: breathy, anguished and super-mannered vocals from Lawrence, dinky but strangely high-in-the-mix drumming, beautiful guitar figures, exquisitely-beautiful backing vocals (female ones? if so, by who?), lovely mysterious lyrics. And a great cover. Not just one Penelope Tree, but two, headshot images overlapping like a Warhol screen test. A girl from another planet, indeed. Melly met Tree while volunteering at Release, the drugs charity co-founded by Caroline Coon. It's just one example of how in the 1960s, 70s and 80s, Melly (married to George Melly) kept crossing paths with big-name figures: Jean Rhys, Jonathan Miller, Bruce Chatwin, Sonia Orwell, Jasper Conran, Edna O'Brien, Francis Wyndham and er, Jeremy Paxman. For what it's worth, I think Melly generally comes across quite well in Take A Girl Like Me. Impulsive and wrong-headed at times (especially in having affairs with dodgy men), she's also extremely loyal to her apparently exasperating husband, and works hard to help people (including Chatwin when he was dying of AIDS) and to care for animals. And she seems fundamentally unsnobby. The names she mentions don't seem to be dropped for effect. Having bonded with Penelope Tree in 1973, Melly takes a trip to the USA to take part in a cross-country road journey with the apparently super-impractical Tree, who "couldn't drive, was too shy to book a motel room, couldn't do up her safety belt and couldn't understand maps". She apparently also kept getting cassettes jammed in the car's cassette-player and kept dropping her boxes of tapes onto the floor of motel rooms. Hmm, these one-time super-models, eh? At the culmination of this rather chaotic five-week continental road trip, Melly and Tree get to see "a very fat Elvis Presley in a white suit" at one of his desultorily-glitzy shows in Las Vegas, then catch Bette Midler in San Francisco, followed by Bob Dylan at the Winterland in San Francisco. All in all, quite the trip I suppose. After this episode Tree seems to have more or less faded out of Melly's very crowded life, decamping to Australia. I imagine he's spoken about it at some time or another, but I've always (half-) wondered why - back in 1983 - Lawrence would have latched onto a largely forgotten sixties model as the subject for a song. The lyrics are typical Lawrentian "poetry" ("I didn't want the world to know / That sunlight bathed the golden glow / Loneliness is like a disease / Triggers off my sense of unease / I was lonely till I found the reason / The reason was me / Oh, Penelope Tree ...") and Tree is there but not there. Maybe it was simply that Lawrence had a thing for sixties waif-like models, eg Clare Shenstone on the poster for Warhol's Chelsea Girls (in turn borowed for the cover for The Splendour Of Fear): 

Alan Aldridge's design for the promotional poster for Chelsea Girls (1966)

Or maybe Lawrence just liked the name, Penelope Tree, which is, I must admit, kind of wonderful. I dunno, does it even matter? The lyrics to Penelope Tree make no sense whatsoever, but that's precisely why they're so good. One second we seem to be in the midst of an existential dilemma ("What are we doing and why are we here? / Why must we die?"), then we jump to the (mockingly?) simple-sounding "Oh, no no no, that's easy, so easy for me / Oh, that's easy for me / You know that's easy for me / Oh, Penelope Tree". Ha, she's the answer to these deep questions of life and how to live it. Perhaps the meaning of life is that it's all surface beauty and nothing else? (Or not). No, if you're looking for depth and meaning in Felt's achingly-beautiful indie-pop, you're almost certainly barking up the wrong tree ...