LFT: When did you get together as Threadbare Consort and were you making music before that? 

MJ:  Eric Leggoe and I were friends in Harrogate and had been singing together for several years locally, but semi-professionally as Max and Eric since the late '60s. We moved to London within year or so of each other - probably some time in 1970 - and we picked up the duo. Threadbare Consort started in ’72. I met Marshall Cligman at the Village Bookshop on Regent Street, where I ran the record department. He’d been singing with Dave Mitchell for a while and both groups had been looking to expand, so we decided to team up and see how it went. We had the same tastes and a similar sense of humour. And we started to use some less well-known material.

LFT: What were your musical influences and where did you see yourselves in relation to the folk scene? 

MJ: There are too many influences to list. On my first visit to a Folk Club in 1966 I heard the Yorkshire harmony group The Cropper Lads. I’d never heard anything sung in that way before, and suppose it must have been a pretty strong influence! Folk Clubs were very political back then, in a good way. We sang a lot of British and American union songs and most people had some of the Library of Congress recordings in their repertoire - Alan Lomax, Harry Smith and so on. The anti-war movement provided a lot of political songs. What we probably mostly sang, though, was British folksongs and traditional songs: Louis Killen, Shirley Collins, Ewan McColl, The Copper Family, The Watersons and the Young Tradition all influenced us. A lot of songs we simply lifted from other people's albums. The late Les Pope who ran the Saddletree Folk Club at the White Horse in Ripon welcomed and encouraged new singers. We owe him a lot. Threadbare Consort’s album Wearing Thin was dedicated to Les. 

LFT: Do you have any favourite memories of your time with Threadbare Consort? 

MJ: We had so many wonderful times during the seven years that Threadbare Consort were together, but if there’s room for just a couple... We were guests of the City of Bremen for four days at the Bremen Music Festival - we were flown there and back, put up in a flash hotel and we even had a chaperone to show us around, deliver us to venues and keep us out of trouble. I’d never been abroad and had never seen a duvet before, and wasn’t quite sure how it worked. Abroad was exciting! Eric and I discovered a taste for schnapps.

We enjoyed live radio and did quite a lot back then. One year we did Wally Whyton’s ‘Country Meets Folk’, broadcast live from the BBC Radio Theatre stage at Broadcasting House. What a privilege. A few months later, a weathered-looking chap came up to us at a gig and told us that he’d enjoyed listening to us on the BBC World Service while on board HMS Endurance in the Antarctic! 

The best memories are of the wonderful people that we were privileged to know and to work and laugh with.  

LFT: When did you introduce the Sacred Harp workshops?

MJ: We started the Sacred Harp singing workshops in, I think, 1976. Sacred Harp songs weren’t widely known in this country back then and I’d never heard of it or even shape-note singing until Mike Hockenhull and Clive Woolf played me a tape, and I was blown away. I’d attended a couple of Frankie Armstrong’s amazing ‘shouting’ workshops at around that time, and ‘borrowed’ her method to present the music and to get large groups of people singing Sacred Harp as it’s meant to be sung. These became hugely popular events at festival appearances. The first Sacred Harp song we taught was Russia.

LFT: In 1977 Threadbare Consort released an album called Wearing Thin that appeared to disappear without a trace. What happened there?

MJ: The album was released at the 1977 Bracknell Festival. Someone from South Hill Park Records listened to it and realised that the pressing was off-centre. Of course, they immediately insisted that it was withdrawn from sale, the plan being to get it re-pressed as soon as possible; but meanwhile due to the fact that they both died within a short space of time, all the pressing houses were busy pressing Elvis and Bing Crosby material. By the time they got less busy, Threadbare Consort was, very sadly, splitting, up so it never happened. There aren’t many copies out there. In the meantime, Dave East and I had asked South Hill Park, which by now was under new management, if they'd let us have the masters if they weren't going to use them. They said they would if we played Bracknell Festival again for free. I’d just formed Threadbare with Dave East, Norman Western and Celia O’Neill and we agreed, although we weren't really ready. Then after the festival, the shysters told us that the masters had already been destroyed and we let it go. In fact the master tapes hadn’t been destroyed at all, and recently turned up in a stable! Unfortunately, the years had taken their toll and the tapes were unusable.

LFT: Threadbare Consort split up in 1978. What happened there? And what happened to everyone?

MJ: There are usually several reasons why a group disbands. You might well ask all four of us and get four different answers. Threadbare Consort had spent a lot of time together for six or seven fairly intensive years.  Dave had ideas that he wanted to explore and formed Mrs Spinks with Marshall and John Spires. Dave and John brought some of those ideas with them to The Dead Sea Surfers later on. I formed Threadbare to clear the outstanding bookings after the split. Eric divided his time for several years between living in Switzerland and working as crew on Thames sailing barges. He’s now a qualified psychotherapist, practising in Suffolk. Marshall is currently the Chief Flying Instructor at Plymouth Flying Club. Until recently, Dave was Site Supervisor for the Imperial War Museum at Duxford.