Derbyshire-based folk performers Keith Kendrick and Barry Coope worked together for about twelve years from 1974, both as a duo and as part of the all-singing-all-dancing English country dance extravaganza, Ram's Bottom. As a duo, despite touring all over the country, they never released an album. We hope that these home recordings from 1981, now available for you listen to here at Lost Folk Tapes with the blessing of both Keith and Barry, will go some way towards compensating for this omission. The recording was made by John Terry, Ram's Bottom's sound engineer, in the front room of the cottage he was living in at the time. We hope you enjoy it!

For more background information, have a look at the interview with Keith Kendrick at Lost Folk Tapes. Keith also has a page at the Wildgoose Recordings website. Barry is currently part of the trio, Coope, Boyes and Simpson as well as performing with John Tams.

Uncovering the labyrinthine world of Derbyshire’s folk scene would probably tax even the skills of such a master excavator of music-related historical ephemera as Pete Frame, the creator of Rock Family Trees. You’d have to include The Druids, Muckram Wakes, Ram’s Bottom, Roaring Jelly, to say nothing of the various duos, trios and solo artists - and that’s just for starters. Over the coming months, thanks to sound engineer John Terry and his ever-present tape recorder, Lost Folk Tapes is in serious danger of becoming Lost Folk Tapes Mainly from Derbyshire. We’re not complaining though: it’s all marvellous stuff. And what better way to kick off this festival of Derbrerian delights than with a live recording from February 1981 of Ram’s Bottom performing The Compleat Ram’s Bottom? We caught up with Keith Kendrick - a man whose name is synonymous with Derbyshire folk music and who has at least some of the responsibility for the county’s musical equivalent of Spaghetti Junction - to find out more. And just to add our own two-penn’orth to the confusion, the photographs of Ram’s Bottom, kindly provided by John Terry, are not of the line-up featured on the recording, but of the earlier version of the band! 

First of all, though, a little background. After following the path trodden by many teenagers in the mid sixties – listening to the Everly Brothers, Bob Dylan and Peter, Paul and Mary via Radio Luxembourg, learning a bit of basic guitar and how to play a Donovan song – his eyes and ears were blown wide open by his discovery of folk clubs, courtesy of school friend and fellow singer, John Squires. He was soon captivated by the sound of the traditional and revival singers he was exposed to, and come 1965 was in his first group, The Waysiders, alongside Mick Hennessy and Susan Oates. Next came The Springhill Singers, with John Adams & Bob Fairbrother, which by 1969 had metamorphosised into the Druids. Initially they were a trio of John Squire, Keith, and John Adams, later adding Mick Hennessey and losing John Squire at the same time. By 1970 they had added fiddler Dave Broughton and singer Judy Longden. They served as the resident band at the Druids Folk Club, which they ran at the Chestnut Tree Pub in Normanton and whilst their repertoire included a wide range of traditional songs and dance tunes, they became best known for their four-part harmony singing. It was whilst playing at the club that they were approached by Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, who recommended them to Argo Records, where they released three albums – Burnt Offering, Pastime With Good Company and Songs & Music of the Redcoats, the latter a collaboration with Martin Wyndham Read and the Band of the Scots Guards. 

After two years of recording, touring, festivals and ceilidhs, the Druids called it a day. For a brief period, Keith concentrated on guising plays and Morris dancing, joining the Derby Morris Men and co-founding The Northworthy Folk Dance Club. In 1974, he started performing again as part of TUP, a three piece acapella group with Jim Boyes and Lester Simpson, now of Coope, Boyes and Simpson. TUP turned out to be short lived, following a call from Dave Brady to reform Swan Arcade for a continental tour that had come up.  Around the same time, Keith formed a duo with the third future member of Coope, Boyes and Simpson, Barry Coope, which continued for the next twelve years, only ending when he relocated to Kent in 1987. 

During the same period, he also was the driving force behind the Ram’s Bottom Dance Band - or Ram’s Bottom, as they eventually became known. Although they started out as a standard-issue folk group, by the late seventies, under Keith’s direction, they had transformed themselves into a unique force on the UK folk scene, incorporating songs and ballads, Morris and ceilidh dancing, guising plays and tall tales, along with a crash course in Derbyshire dialect into their shows.

“The original line up,” Keith recalls, “was me on concertinas, Bryan Dawson on fiddle, Lester Simpson on melodeon, Alan Squires on guitar and banjo, Mick Hennessy on double bass and Barry Coope on drums and percussion. Our caller was John Bloor. The second line up, where The Compleat Ram’s Bottom was born, was me on concertinas again, Barry, now playing melodeon, Trevor Hopkins on banjo and Ron Cossor on cello. Our caller was now Ian Carter and we had Rick Scollins on percussion and, in the role of Derbyshire dialect expert, singer and all round genius. The Morris dances we danced were The Wheatley Processional, which we danced on with, Beaux - Badby, Pram-Pushing (Highland Mary) - Bampton and Bonny Green Garters, which we danced off to. The guising play was based very loosely on a play collected by Rick in Kirk Hallam. Great memories!”

One of the questions intriguing Lost Folk Tapes is what led to Ram’s Bottom transformation from being a straight ahead folk group to the all-singing-all-dancing show band we encounter on The Compleat Ram’s Bottom. “All except Mick from the original line-up were members of the Derby Morris Men,” Keith explains. “My interests were moving more towards the dedicated English dance band sound, as opposed to the very eclectic mix of English and Celtic music we were playing up to then. I saw a need to expand the band to allow for more relevant instruments to reflect this and I also saw then that Morris and guising could form part of what we did at gigs. My desire to do this coincided with Bryan, Lester, Mick and Alan taking up invitations to join other outfits: Lester formed Ginger’s Street Theatre, Alan joined Ginger’s and Corn Bread Rough, Bryan left to progress with his teaching career and Mick joined Roaring Jelly. Barry had just joined us on percussion, so Ram’s Bottom were reduced to just him and me! Also, by this time, Barry’s then wife Sue had bought him a one-row 4-stop melodeon for his birthday and he made such fast progress that we decided to form another band from members of the Derby Morris Men who we knew played appropriate instruments and voila! The Compleat Ram’s Bottom was born.”

It’s clear from listening to the recording that the band was very much about live performance, the music forming only a part, albeit an important one, of the full-on Ram’s Bottom experience. Keith expands on this: “We were out every Friday and Saturday night once the word got around. Well, we were kind of unique in what we were doing and the standard of dance, between us, was sufficiently high as to match the sound of the band. And we all had meaningful contributions to make to the song side of the group. We did a few festivals like Sidmouth (twice), Whitby, Towersey, Chippenham, Wareham and Ely. Had it not been for the lack of promotional admin skills between us, we would have done a lot more, but we were busy enough doing work outside of the folk world, so I guess the energy and motivation wasn’t really there to justify putting the extra work in just to change where we played and who we played for. That line-up and enterprise lasted about 10 years in all. We had another line-up change after the first album, but we never quite matched up to the momentum of the previous one, though we all still had a great time doing it, until my marriage broke up and I moved to Kent to marry again. After that, we really only met for the odd re-union gig. Over the years Ram’s Bottom had over 30 interchanging members, which included Fi and Jo Fraser, John Adams, Jim Boyes, Steve Palethorpe, Ian Smith, Barry Whittamore, Ian Fisher, Alan Harris and Simon Hopper and lots more besides. What a time that was!”

Ram’s Bottom released their only album, The Young May Moon, on Traditional Sound Recordings in 1981. We asked Keith how the album came about and what sort of reception it got when it came out. “Brian Horsfall of TSR happened to be listening to a Radio Derby interview, during which we bemoaned the fact that we couldn’t attract a record deal at the time. He rang me up that very evening and the rest, as they say, is history. I’ll always be grateful for that phone call and the support he showed us at that time. The album sold its first 1000 pressing in just a few months, so I guess we made some sort of impression - and the reviews were pretty good, as I recall. We still get the odd play on a variety of local radio and internet radio stations, including in Australia, New Zealand, America and parts of Europe. The rights to the album are now owned by Fellside and Paul Adams kindly trickles out the odd track on his samplers, which is nice.”

In the meantime, however, the latest line up of Muckram Wakes had split up, and John Adams invited Keith, Barry and Ian to make up a new Muckram Wakes with him on a full-time basis. “Barry had a bit more sense than the rest of us and declined to give up his job – albeit he left it a bit late to decide, as Ian and I had already taken the plunge. The band became just me Ian and John for about four years until we all had to accept that a folk band at that level could never sufficiently support three families, never mind four, and finally folded. My stint with Muckram Wakes was from 1980 to about late 83 or early 84. I left Derbyshire for Kent in late 87 and Ram’s Bottom had slowly but finally dissolved by 1990. Just a couple of years later, Rick sadly died from a triple pacemaker failure. We would never have considered reforming after that as Rick was really the epicentre of the original concept and enterprise and couldn’t ever be replaced.”

Keith expands: “Rick turned out to be the principle inspiration for the direction of the second version of the band. We’d first met at Derby Morris Men practices while the first line-up was still just about in existence and at that time he and his colleague, John Titford, were producing an audio recording of their collection of dialect offerings from characters old and young from all over Derbyshire. They wanted some musical involvement to make it a bit more attractive to potential punters. Rick had come across my recorded work before as a member of the Druids - Songs & Music of the Redcoats of course! - and he was gob-smacked at bumping into me at Derby Morris Men, so we got the job! We became very close friends and shared that interest in all things Derbyshire. Rick was also an actor and a fine artist and a military historian who was constantly in demand for illustrations for military magazines, as well as private commissions from all areas of society. He was Ram’s Bottom’s percussionist and one of the principle singers and wrote songs for the band, as did Ian Carter.  Ram’s Bottom hosted about three of Rick’s Il’s’on Evenings which were grand affairs with singing and dancing and not forgetting George Stafford’s (supplier to the Crown) black puddings and savoury duck and Marston’s Pedigree in copious supply for the fayre. I can taste it all now!”

John Terry adds: This recording was the last line up of Ram’s Bottom I worked with – Keith Kendrick, Barry Coope, Ian Carter, Ron Cossor, Rick Scollins and Trevor Hopkins. Rick was a Derbyshire dialect expert, and the occasion was one of Ram’s Bottom’s Il’s’on Evenings - Derbyshire-speak for Ilkeston - which was a mixture of performance and ceilidh. It’s a bit rough around the edges, with a bit of distortion, but a worthy reflection of the band’s lively and enthusiastic approach to the material! The full Ram’s Bottom show included English country dancing, a song spot, more dance, a Mummers, or guising play, and then more dance, interrupted by a full blown Morris performance as all the band members danced the Morris.  This was made possible, because I had pre-recorded the music for an extended Cumberland Square Eight, which Ian would demonstrate and then call – one by one the band would all leave the stage, leaving the audience dancing to the taped music playing - indistinguishable from the real thing - only to dance on minutes later as a full Morris side!