Not to be confused with the Liverpudlian guitarist who played with ex-Fairport Convention singer Ian Matthews in Plainsong, this Andy Roberts is a roving singer, songwriter and guitarist from Cornwall. Andy spent much of the 1970s playing live music around Cornwall, interspersed with periods of busking in Paris. During this period he wrote many original songs, and when circumstances led to him hanging up his guitar in 1980, he used the opportunity of being stuck at home recovering from a bout of the flu to make recordings of 34 of them – more as an exercise in preserving and remembering them than with any commercial intent in mind. Lost Folk Tapes began by asking him when he first got involved with folk music and what inspired him to do so.

AR: I think most teenagers go through a highly charged relationship with personal taste in
music, usually starting with whatever is the mainstream popular music for their age group at the time. Folk music, in the form of young people playing acoustic guitars, was pretty mainstream in the late 1960s and early seventies. People like Donovan, Bob Dylan, Cat Stevens, Ralph McTell, Johnny Cash, Melanie and Joni Mitchell could be heard in the singles charts, on children’s TV and on Saturday night TV. This was before pop music became so much more compartmentalised. So there were early role models, if you like, and then a bit later when you listened to John Peel playing all kinds of avant garde music, heavy rock, underground weirdy stuff, there was always a fair amount of acoustic music in the mix as well, including folk rock and traditional folk songs played by electric bands. I was drawn to the live "In Concert" programmes broadcast on Radio 1 by John Peel and John Walters mainly, and I recorded those onto my Phillips cassette recorder by plugging a special cable into the underneath of my dad's radiogram: Tom Paxton, Joni Mitchell, James Taylor, Roy Harper, Loudon Wainwright and others, each concert lasting a whole hour that I could listen back to endlessly. So that was my early influence, and the other thing about acoustic music is that the wherewithal is relatively easy to acquire. A cheap Spanish guitar is all you need to get started, learn a few chords and suddenly the whole perspective changes from a passive point of view to the rush of excitement when a new chord becomes accessible or the key to a favourite bass line is unlocked. So I picked up a guitar when I was about 14 and studied the chord charts in "A Tune A Day", and discovered I could approximate one or two of those songs I'd been listening to over and over again on the tapes. 
 
LFT: Who were your early influences? Did anyone help or encourage you in the early days?

AR: My early influences were, and still are, Roy Harper and Loudon Wainwright as far as recordings are concerned. As soon as I started to venture out of my bedroom and into the local folk clubs then I started hearing the echoes of Ralph McTell and Michael Chapman, Wizz Jones, Pete Berryman and people who had been the mainstay of the Cornish folk scene in the 1960s, just before my time, but who still dropped in for a surprise visit from time to time. So many of the floorspot artists and residents were playing that kind of early American/British folk blues and ragtime, as well as all the traditional English and Celtic folk songs. Nobody helped me, as far as I recall, but John the Fish, who was the MC at the New Folk Cottage in Truro, was always encouraging me to play and told me if he liked a particular song. And my contemporaries, basically school friends, encouraged me. You have to realise that the average age of people attending folk clubs then was far different to today. Yes, there was a mixture of all ages, but in that mix was a large contingent of teenagers like myself. The people who had started up the folk revival, they had moved down to Cornwall with the beatniks fifteen years earlier, so they were middle aged by then, but young people were keen to learn and join in.

LFT: Were you always particularly attracted to folk music?

AR: When I listened to something like Roy Harper's Stormcock album, because he plays acoustic guitar it get classified as folk or folk-rock, but the complexity and depth of artistic merit in those ten minute long symphonic songs is just as progressive or avant-garde or experimental as anything that was happening in the other genres. I suppose I was drawn to the format of the song, where you can actually hear the lyric and it's a meaningful lyric that moves you. That's an area where folk music probably has the edge over most other genres. But I was equally inspired by some of the mainstream, like the Beatles double album, and the avant-garde like Soft Machine and Captain Beefheart… and some good old rock-blues like Hendrix and Rory Gallagher too.

LFT: Did you have a particular interest in the history or traditions or folklore of Cornwall?

AR: Not at all, I mean the way it was packaged – all piskies and cream- was somewhat embarrassing. The fact that all these great musicians and artists had decided to come and live in St Ives and Newquay and Zennor and Penzance, that was interesting. 

LFT: Did you see yourself as part of the folk club scene?

AR: I was happy to be included, I think. They're good people, doing something interesting. I'm sure I aspired to be something else as well, as a teenager you know, out on the edge somewhere special, but it's never been too much of a problem holding down multiple facets. All part of the rich tapestry.

LFT: Were you primarily doing your own material? Were you influenced at all by traditional song or by any particular songwriters?

AR: I was writing some of my own material right from the start and I knew I had one or two good songs, but at first it always seemed like the latest song was supposed to be that much better than everything that went before, so I was ditching them as fast as I was writing them, which wasn't all that fast anyway! I don't think I'd ever write anything that sounds recognisably like Loudon Wainwright, although I admire his songwriting tremendously and learned dozens of those songs as covers. Roy Harper on the other hand, not being American and coming out of the earlier UK contemporary folk tradition, has a style that I relate to easily and there have been times when I worried the influence might be just a bit too strong in some of my own songs. It's hard for me to know what my own style sounds like to my own ears, which are just too close to hear properly, I suspect. So I rely on my peers to let me know whether or not there is any such thing.

It's interesting that that back in those days there was a very clear line between traditional and contemporary folk music. If you introduced a song by saying "This is a traditional song that I wrote" it would get a laugh because that was a contradiction in terms, almost a fraud. You could make your own interpretation of a folk song, alter the lyrics and the tune a bit, but it was supposed to be something that had been handed down through the oral tradition. This has all changed now, with people like Kate Rusby and many others writing completely new and original songs that are very much in the traditional style. I see this as a good thing, and I wrote a few traditional sounding folk songs myself in the last couple of years - The Rowan Tree, The Wreckers Prayer and The Last Nail perhaps. 

LFT: Did you have any involvement with the scene around COB, the Famous Jug Band etc at the start of the 70s?

AR: Not directly, by the time the "New Folk Cottage" had moved from Mitchell to the back of the Swan Inn in Truro, few of them were still around. Whispering Mick was a regular character, and John The Fish kept us up to date with what Wizz Jones was up to, occasionally luring Pete Berryman or Ralph McTell to do a surprise guest spot.

LFT: Did you mainly play in Cornwall before your Parisian busking days or did you get around a bit?

AR: Yes, mainly Cornwall. I hitch hiked with a student friend and played at Keele University and did a little bit of busking in Plymouth and Cardiff. That's what gave me the confidence to head off to Europe with no other means of support at such a young age.

LFT: What took you to Paris? What was that scene like?

AR: Well, I had been in Amsterdam for a few weeks, busking in a shopping arcade there. It was hard going because I kept being interrupted by Hare Krishna, by the Children of God, by some guy with a very loud barrel organ and all sorts of crazy things taking place in the street there. Then another musician came up to me and asked if I'd been moved on by the cops at all. I hadn't, apparently I'd been lucky. A second opinion verified that the Amsterdam police had powers to confiscate your guitar, and they used it. The advice was to go to Paris and play in the Metro, where the police might move you on more often, but you always get to keep your guitar and the money. So after an overnight stop in Rotterdam and a very slow hitchhiking day I caught a train for the last hundred kilometres and arrived in Paris. I loved it. On arriving I set up in the first busy Metro tunnel I came across and made enough in a couple of hours to get a hotel room for the night. Much more comfortable than Vondel Park! So here, instead of consuming my meagre savings, I was accumulating, so I stayed right where I was, not having ventured very far from the Gare du Nord.  For that reason, I led a strange solitary busking life for several months before linking up with the other English speaking buskers who gravitated around the Cafe des Arts in the Latin quarter, and then later the famous Cafe le Mazet. 
 

And that’s where this part of the story ends. By the end of the decade, Andy was married and living in Dover. The possibilities for live music in the area were very different to Cornwall in the 70s: there didn’t seem to be any sort of local folk scene to get involved in, so after a while he simply gave up and stopped playing. It was then that Andy decided to record 34 of the songs he had written during the previous decade for posterity. He explains, “I was worried I might lose or forget all the old songs. One day I had some time as I was recovering from illness, nothing serious, just a bout of flu. The Andy Roberts Tapes were recorded on the latest state of the art Ghetto Blaster twin cassette recorder technology with built in stereo microphones and manual recording levels. You can't get them like that any more!”

More recently, Andy is playing live again and writing new songs. Some of the old songs have been revived and found their way back into his repertoire – notably The War is Over and the truly beautiful Joan of Arc. Meanwhile, he has made all 34 of the songs from 1980 recordings available as free downloads from last.fm at Andy Roberts Tapes

Andy Roberts' current projects include a weekly half hour podcast of about five songs per episode, mostly originals and some covers which can be played, subscribed to or downloaded from http://andyroberts.me and a songwriting community with an email course based at http://songwriterscircle.co.uk/