Once again Lost Folk Tapes is returning to Derbyshire, courtesy of another of John Terry’s live recordings. This time it’s a short set by Paul Richardson, formerly of Saga, whose first two albums are highly prized by record collectors. The recording we’re featuring was made in 1979 at the Priesthouse Folk Club, which Paul was running at the time, and features versions of The Jolly Beggar, The Drowned Sailor, The Lancashire Lads and The Seeds of Love. Paul is still living in Derbyshire, so we tracked him down and he kindly agreed to give us an interview.

LFT: Could you begin by telling us how you first came to be involved in playing music? 

PR: I’ve always been someone who’s fallen into things. When I was about sixteen a vacancy came up for a rhythm guitarist in a rock band, the Trekkas Beat Group. As I knew four chords, including importantly, a minor chord, I was in. I had my first practice on the Wednesday, and by Saturday I was supporting Geno Washington and the Ram Jam Band at the Matlock Pavilion, which was a pretty big venue. It’s the only time I’ve ever mimed with an electric guitar strapped round my neck, because I only knew how to play about half of the songs. I’d been with the band for about two months when I was invited to take over on lead vocals after the singer went to jail – not for anything serious, I should add! We were gigging regularly, and on one occasion played at the Tower Ballroom in Blackpool supporting The Ashes, who were the remnants of Wayne Fontana's and the Mindbenders. We ended up splitting up for all the normal reasons – jealousy, basically. Most of the band members had girlfriends by this point and there was a lot of unhappiness about other women ‘looking at my boy’ on stage. The bass player was first to go and it all fell apart from there.

LFT: So how did you get involved with folk music?

PR: My first musical heroes were Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran. Around the time the Trekkas fell apart, I cottoned on to Bob Dylan, who was my first major folk influence. He still is – as far as I was concerned he was the  one to drag folk music into the 20th century. Then my friend Chris Mordey  introduced me to the Boathouse Folk Club found between Matlock and Matlock Bath. The Halliard – Nic Jones, Dave Moran and John Raven - were playing that night, and the amount of energy, skill and personality they had was simply grand – I was completely knocked out. Their album was the first folk LP I ever bought. Nic has remained one of my folk music heroes, along with Martin Carthy and Sandy Denny.

The upshot of this was that Chris and I formed our first folk group, the Quarrytown Four, with two blokes called Dave Wright – known as Flash and Texas Ben to tell them apart. At the time, I was known as Richo or Gun and Chris was JH Crint – don’t ask! There are still people about who know us by these names locally. Our set was made up of songs like The Sinking of the Reuben James and All Off to Dublin in the Green – we'd sing anything for a pint! We ended up splitting up due to work commitments. The photo was taken when we entered a talent contest at a Nottingham night club. We were voted last. The winner was Big Chief Silver Cloud, a fat bloke in silver trunks and silver cape who ate razor blades and walked on broken light bulbs - a huge talent!

LFT: Your next group was Saga. How did that come about?

PR: At that time I was living in Derby where I had attended and got kicked out of art college for being a rebel without a clue. Chris joined me in Derby, and we teamed up with Roger Warren and John Gibson - we were all lived in the same house - as an early version of Saga. John played double bass, but didn’t play with us for long, as he wanted to do his own thing and in any case, was often working away. Sadly, he died about five years ago. After that, we met John Squires, who was a hugely talented fiddle player. When he joined we started getting more serious about what we played and how we played it, where we sourced material and how we thought about arrangements. John was coming up with fiddle tunes and I began to write songs. Basically we started with traditional music but were soon adding our own material to the mix.

LFT: Can you tell us about the albums you recorded?

PR: Out of the blue we got offered a record deal. I was playing a pedal harmonium, which came from an old Methodist chapel, and weighed half a ton, which gave us an incentive to get a van. The harmonium rattled, squeaked and groaned and proved very hard to record – I think when we recorded we tested the limits of the sound engineer’s ability! The label we recorded two albums for was called Westwood and was based somewhere near Manchester. I can’t remember how we came to sign with them – someone from the label must have seen one us play. We were starting to make a bit of a name for ourselves as a live act – we were a bit different and we had a lot of fun when we were playing. 

I think the first album, which was just called Saga, sold fairly well. I designed the cover, by the way. The label was keen for a follow up, so we arrived in the studio to record what became Sweet Peg O’ Derby.  We went through the stuff we had for the album, and the engineer said, ‘is that it?’ It turned out we were two songs short. That’s why there ended up being a couple of tracks on the album I’m not so proud of. Nonetheless it was well received.

LFT: Were you mainly playing around Derbyshire or did you venture further afield?

PR: Saga played at folk clubs all over the north of England, including Jacqui & Bridie’s club in Liverpool. We also started to play a fair few University gigs. We never ventured very far south – I think the furthest south we got was Worcester, and I remember playing at the college there with Boys of the Lough and Shirley & Dolly Collins. We may have played at Stainsby Folk Festival one year, but I’m afraid my memories of that one are somewhat conveniently vague!

LFT: Can you tell us about the album Saga made with Mike Raven and Joan Mills?

PR: After we’d done out own two albums we were approached by Mike Raven who asked if we were interested in doing a collaboration based on The Jolly Machine, a collection of Black Country songs. Saga recorded eight songs, which made up one side of the album, with Mike Raven and Joan Mills on the other side. It’s been reissued on CD with along with tracks by the Halliard and the Black Country Three, so in a funny way things have come full circle. The songs on the Jolly Machine were very much a reflection of the hard times from whence they originated and were the laments and grievances of Black Country working people.

LFT: So do you still look back fondly on this era?

PR: We had a lot of fun with Saga. We weren’t exactly straight-laced - we had a bit of a rock and roll attitude. For instance, we used to do quite a bit of stuff for Jack King’s folk show on Radio Derby. There was one time we somehow ended up at a farewell champagne punch party for one of the guys from the show who was leaving. We ended up imbibing quite a bit more than we should have, considering we had a gig that night at a folk club in Nottingham. We turned up rather the worse for wear and the place was packed to the rafters. Some how we survived it – I think it’s fair to say we were never stressed when we were playing live! It helped that we had two outstanding musicians in Chris and John, who could play anything in any state. Our practice sessions tended to be fairly short affairs – we got so we understood as a unit what we wanted. The two Saga albums are pretty representative of us as a band. 

LFT: What happened next?

PR: We carried on playing, but by the late 70s things started to drift apart both musically and in terms of friendship. I got married in 1977, for instance. We were all that bit older and other relationships were starting to become more important than the group. John had started playing with John Leonard and that was brewing up nicely for them. We played our last ever gig at Peasmouldia Folk Club in 1978. We played as a trio – Roger Warren couldn’t be there for some reason. I remember the place was packed and we went down a storm. There is actually a bootleg around of this gig - I only found out about it a few years ago. Someone contacted me to ask about the band and he mentioned it, so I made him send me a copy and it looks quite authentic, even down to the Westwood Records logo.

LFT: What did you do once Saga split?

PR: I went solo for a while and signed up with an agency called Snatchaband, which was run by the then wife of Steve from the Lonesome Travellers, who were quite big on the Derby and Nottingham scene at the time. Playing solo was generally good, apart from when I ended up working a strolling minstrel for medieval banquets! I also played for two or three years with Dave Perkins, who’d previously been part of The Travelling People and who is now a canon at Derby Cathedral. Tony Clarke also played with us for a while – we went out as Rich Perks. Some recordings of us exist; including one of our last ever gig, which was at Winster Folk Club in the  late eighties.

Inevitably, as time when by family and work commitments meant that music began to slip into the background. I was self-employed by then, making a living as an illustrator. I used to do a few illustrations for the folk scene, as it happens – for a magazine called Singabout that Mick Peat’s then wife ran and some work for Free Reed. 

Around the time of the recording you have here, I was running the Priesthouse Folk Club – I ran it from about 1979 to 1982 after Dave Perkins. We put on the Battlefield Band, Derek and Dorothy Elliott, Nic Jones, Jake Thackeray, Cosmotheka –it was one of those clubs that always had a good calibre of guests combined with a discerning audience.  In the end the pressure of having a young family meant it wasn’t possible to keep running it, though, so I passed it on. Saga had been involved in running clubs, too. In the early days we ran the Uttoxeter Folk Club, probably for about five or six years. We also ran the Over Haddon Folk Club at the Lathkill Dale Hotel in the White Peak.

LFT: Any final thoughts?

PR: I’m still proud of some of the Saga recordings, particularly Adieu Sweet Lovely Nancy, The Lark in The Morning, Arthur McBride, The Wizard of Alderley Edge and King Cotton. Amazingly, I saw a copy of the first album for sale on the internet a few months back for £127…  and me, I just have the one copy, darn it! I still regard Chris Mordey as the one of the best folk vocalists of our time and he was no mean guitar player either. John Squire on fiddle could bend his elbow to anything.  And Roger Warren always kept us on task. No regrets.

The next recording we’re featuring at Lost Folk Tapes is Manchester-based singer Geoff Higginbottom’s first and only vinyl album, Flowers Tomorrow, released on the independent Dragon Records in 1987. This is a studio album, but it provides a representative snapshot of Geoff’s live performances at the time, featuring traditional and contemporary material alongside his own compositions. The selections we’ve put on the music player were chosen to reflect the broad scope of the album and of Geoff’s repertoire: we start with the traditional song A Week Before Easter, move onto Dominic Williams' Tommy's Lot, then the traditional Battle of Sowerby Bridge,  and finish with the title track, Geoff's own Flowers Tomorrow. Geoff tells the story of his formative years as a folk singer below.

I first went to a folk club at Christmas 1975 with my big sister Judith, who had been active on the local folk scene before going to University. We went to the Heaton Moor Rugby Club Folk Club, where the guests that night were the McCalmans. After this I became a regular visitor to the Deanwater Folk Club, which rose from the remains of the Rugby Club in 1976. In November 1978, when I’d been playing guitar for about a year, I decided to pluck up the courage to do a floor spot at the club. It was always a big club, and that night the guests were Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators supported by Johnny Coppin. Talk about being thrown in at the deep end - there were about 250 people there! Anyway, several more floor spots followed at the Deanwater. 

One day at work, listening to the radio, I heard an advert for the Wellgreen Folk Club in Hale. That night the club featured a man I'd seen and enjoyed before called Nigel Mazlyn Jones. I decided to pay the club a visit and an interesting thought entered my head. If I took my guitar and offered to do a floor spot, I might get in for nowt! I was welcomed with open arms at the Wellgreen. Apart from the residents - The Cheshire Folk and Pete Wilmott - they were very short of floor singers. I began to visit and play at The Wellgreen virtually every week and was elected official club idiot. My first residency, I suppose. Sadly, the Wellgreen closed in 1982 but a few weeks later I found another club on my doorstep, The White Swan at Fallowfield. After a couple of visits, I was invited to become a resident and it was here that my folk education began in earnest. I got to see most of the folk greats at that time and saw them work at very close quarters. I was always particularly drawn to Vin Garbutt, who seemed to be able to perform a wide variety of material and keep the audience amused at the same time. 

In 1985, I entered a folk ‘talent’ competition organised by Warwick Folk festival. I won the Manchester heat and came third in the final at Warwick Festival, where so many people congratulated me on my performance, I began to believe that maybe I could make a career of it. In my case, the word ‘career’ seems to have meant hurtling out of control ever since! 1985 also saw the release of my debut album, Songs From The Levenshulme Triangle, a cassette produced by my old mate Dave Howard. It was also around this time that I became friends with the late great Johnny Collins. Many times we would start an impromptu session at the Poynton Easter Festival and I learned so much from him. On one occasion he said he really liked singing with me. When I asked him why, he said I was the only person he could sing at full tilt with without fear of drowning me out. To this day I've never been quite sure if this was a compliment!

Early in 1986 I embarked on my first tour. Ian Bembridge, who at the time was organising tours in the Hertfordshire area for the Unicorn group of folk clubs, arranged it for me. I took a week off work and enjoyed nearly every minute of it. The one dodgy bit was when a wheel fell off my van on the way to Leighton Buzzard, but Ian bailed me out and managed to get me to the club only a little bit late! 1986 also brought an invitation to the Sidmouth Folk Festival, a great honour for little me. Two things of note happened that week. Firstly, I realised that the day job, which had been getting on my nerves for some time, was actually driving me mental. With encouragement from many friends, it was decided that I would quit the day job and have a stab at being a full time musician. On returning from Sidmouth, I handed in my notice and joined the ranks of the self-unemployed. Secondly, I met up with John Heydon from Dragon Records, who expressed an interest in recording me. This duly came to fruition in 1987 with the release of Flowers Tomorrow, my only vinyl album. 

When I look at the cover of that album I can't believe that I used to be that young. My old mate Mike Billington took the photos. The front cover shows the remains of Openshaw Technical College in East Manchester. The shots of a wasteland seemed to fit in with the theme of the title track, which I had written the previous year. Most people have never realised that the window frame I sat in for the front cover had a thirty foot drop behind it - it took me all my time not to look terrified for the photo! The content of the album was a mixture of material because that's what I do live. I've always enjoyed music from the full spectrum of the folk genre and my live performances have always reflected this. I also wanted people who bought the album to find that it mirrored what they heard from the stage, so I tried to keep overdubs and guest musicians to a minimum. If they bought the album at a gig they should expect it to sound like me when they got it home. 

When it comes to choosing material, lyrics have always been important to me. I've always been drawn to the story telling aspect of folk music and when it comes to writing songs, I tell stories the way I see them. For centuries folk song has been the means of expression for the masses: an alternative history from that in the history books written by the intelligentsia of the day. I see my own songs as carrying on that tradition and believe that writing songs in that tradition is almost as important as the preservation of the old songs. And when I say preservation, I mean by usage – that is, by singing them - and not simply by locking them away, museum like, for people to look at. This is how I end up with such a mixture of material both ancient and modern.

 My career has continued ever since that fateful day in 1986 and I can honestly say I have lost count of the number of gigs I have done. Highlights include trips to Guernsey, Jersey, France, Belgium and Holland as well as the many folk clubs and festivals throughout the British Isles. As well as performing solo, I also work with a couple of bands. Three Sheets To The Wind comprise myself, Keith Kendrick and Derek Gifford, singing mainly maritime material. The Phatt-B’Stards are myself George Wilson and John Scott-Cree - we can be found at Broadstairs Folk Week every year for our annual get together.

As well as Flowers Tomorrow, Geoff has released a cassette-only album, Songs From The Levenshulme Triangle and numerous CDs: More Than Pounds and Pence; Island In The Sun; The Flowers Of Manchester; Peterloo; Live at Gregson Lane and Full Circular Pies (surely one of the best album titles ever!). He has also released All Tide Up with Three Sheets to the Wind and a live album with the Phatt B’Stards. You can contact Geoff or find out about his current activities via Facebook.

In change to our usual scheduling, we are now going to bring you something completely different. Not folk music this time, although there are some songs on the tapes, but a peep into the arcane world of folk plays. On the sound player you will find audio recordings of the Knaresborough Mummers performing two plays - King Arthur and the Saxons, recorded in November 1977, and Tom's Wooing recorded in Easter 1978. The sound quality of these recordings is fairly basic, but hopefully should be good enough to give you a flavour of the Mummers in full swing. Below, Max Johnson interviews John Burrell, who has been an integral part of the Knaresborough Mummers since their inception in 1974.  First, however, he attempts the heroic feat of attempting to sum up the essence of the mummers' play in a single paragraph...

A Rough Guide To Mummers’ Plays

Mummers’ plays are short, costumed plays, usually performed in rhyme. The performers’ faces are frequently ‘blacked-up’ or otherwise obscured, to disguise the performer. The plays are performed in public, usually with humour and sometimes local, topical references, and are generally structured around particular themes. Perhaps the most common theme is that of a Hero, such as St George, King George, Alexander or Robin Hood, battling such worthy foes as Bold Slasher or a Saracen knight. Others feature a Recruiting Sergeant and might take the form of a ‘wooing’ play which includes one or more wooing scenes. Each will be accompanied by their own cast of characters, some of whom are ubiquitous: for example The Quack Doctor almost always appears to 'resurrect' the dead hero or villain of the piece, whilst characters like Beelzebub and Little Wit may appear in minor roles in any play. In different parts of the country plays may be associated with a sword dance and include songs to introduce or finish the play. 

If you would like further information, we recommend that you visit the Folk Play Research Home Page.

For more detailed research please take a look at Master Mummers.

LFT: The Knaresborough Mummers first formed in 1974. Who started the Knaresborough Mummers, and why? Who was in the first team?

JB: I started a Folk Club in Knaresborough that October with my old mate Richard Hardaker, down at the Royal Oak at Bond End.  He suggested we perform a one-off play that first Christmas at the Singers Night party and we persuaded two other regulars, Graham Bickerdike and Arthur Jackson, to join us to form the four core characters of a basic hero combat play – the Jester, St George, Bold Slasher and the Doctor.  We also added optional characters Little Devil Doubt and Beelzebub, enabling other participants to join in at short notice. These parts at first were taken by Dennis and Dominic Ward, and also Dave Dearlove, who was to become a team stalwart for the next twenty years. Due to the positive response, other performances were arranged at local pubs over that Christmas, further members were recruited and regular appearances started from Easter 1975.  The current tally shows that 38 performers have passed through the ranks over the years, but Jim Mayer, Stuart Rankin, Chas Marshall and Henry Ayrton were most influential in shaping the team in the early and hey-day years.

LFT: Do you just perform at Christmas and Easter?

JB: Initially we did, but as we became more entertaining, there was a demand to do folk clubs, village fetes and then folk festivals.  There was a period when we were going out just about every week or fortnight and the team performed at venues from Carlisle to Towersey and many points in between.

LFT: What are the sources of your traditional plays? How much of what you perform is traditional and how much do you write yourselves? 

JB: The first play was based on William Walker’s chapbook The Peace Egg Play and later adapted with text from other chapbooks to accommodate more characters.  Chapbooks and booklets from the Alex Helm, Tiddy, Chambers and Cawte collections were our initial sources, but we soon began to branch out as our own humour crept in, though we nearly always kept a traditional text as the basis, be it a wooing play from Lincolnshire, for example, or a Robin Hood play.  For a special show, Jim Mayer wrote a play in the Mumming style which we supplemented with appropriate folk songs, all about the historical characters of Knaresborough.  Most of us were brought up on a diet of the Goons, Tony Hancock, Monty Python and the like – this influenced our portrayal of the various characters in the plays.  We thought that plays should continue to evolve, just as they seem to have done in the past, with historical heroes and villains appearing at significant times in history.  We wanted to continue this process rather than perform the plays as a 'slice in time' museum piece.  The Sherlock Holmes play is all our own work – I was in the garden one day and I got the idea of the death and resurrection being represented by something horrible and lumpy dying, but then a butterfly bursts out of this chrysalis to end the play.  We then worked backwards from there to make it a Sherlock Holmes mystery!  In the late 70s we met regularly as mates in the World's End pub and we were always bouncing ideas off each other to make the plays that bit different. 

LFT: Some of the Knaresborough Mummers are local singers. Have you always performed songs in the plays?

JB: I think there’s only one play that hasn’t got a song at the end.  We used to have a different song for every play, the task usually falling to me to perform it.  These days, I usually get away with the last verse of the song that goes with the wooing play!

LFT: Has there been much change in the line-up over the years and how much has your style of performance changed? How difficult is it to encourage youngsters to join?

JB: The original team was made up of guys that were interested almost exclusively in the performance of song and folk drama, who wanted to perform at as many places as possible.  This lasted for about 10 to 15 years, but gradually changing commitments and re-location saw most of that team gone.  New recruits tended to come in from a Morris Dance background, their priorities being to their dance teams rather than the Mummers – so we do a far smaller number of performances these days.  Let’s just say the current team aren’t as extrovert as the old team!  I think the character of the folk scene has changed from that of the 70s and 80s and although young people are most definitely interested in the song element at festivals, certainly in our area, recruitment to Morris and Mumming is very difficult.  Our youngest is 40!  Young people are very often puzzled and don’t know how to react when they see us – is it “cool” or is it not “cool”?  Perhaps if it was on Eastenders!...

LFT:  What are the most memorable moments? 

JB: We got a big break when, having been busking in Whitby on the final day of the festival, we were hastily called up at the final ceilidh in the Spa to perform whilst New Victory Band set their gear up.  Our Robin Hood play went down a storm.  We did the same gig some years later as the booked festival team and did the same play, but modified it to include Graham as Robin Hood, who picked his wife out of the audience and performed an exhibition standard jive as I sang Blue Suede Shoes with piano and drums!  We often incorporated hastily thought up gags for added amusement – once we tied the Farmer’s Boy’s whip to a pile of chairs which then yanked him back as he made his dramatic entrance!  One of our props for Guillemar in King Arthur and the Saxons was a duck that Jim Mayer appeared to be riding, with false legs dangling over the front.  This was balanced by a kettle full of stones which, with perfect timing in the debut performance, decided to work loose and drop to the floor with a cartoon-like plop, pitching the whole duck forward and bringing the house down.  I think it was the same tour, when taking the play up to the Miners Arms at Greenhow, up a very steep hill, the back doors of the van burst open and the legs fell out, much to the horror of cars following behind!  Jim was always looking for the most dramatic entrance and once finished up getting stuck climbing in with the duck through a window.  We certainly had some fun!

LFT: The Knaresborough Mummers are the only group interviewed by Lost Folk Tapes so far to have a beer named after them!

JB: Being a lifelong CAMRA member, myself and the team having made, let’s say, a substantial investment in the brewing industry! We did a bottled beer called Bold Slasher to celebrate the first 10 years.  On the 30th Anniversary, we persuaded Sean Franklin of Roosters to supply the Tap & Spile in Harrogate with one of his beers re-branded as King Slasher, which was available when we did our Christmas tour.

LFT: How long have there been mumming teams in North Yorkshire? Historically, were any local to Knaresborough?  

JB: Evidence from the existence of plays in chapbooks suggests at least 150 years, but there were plays associated with sword dances that have been documented probably going back to the late 1700s.  From the beginning we were interested in finding something directly linked with Knaresborough, so Chas and Stuart did a lot of research in the various collections.  Their research led them to identify a particular type of play in and around the Vale of York which was based on the basic hero combat style, but had its own characteristics and was called the Blue Stots play.  This had been recorded as being performed in Knaresborough and Harrogate, as well as many villages to the east. We first performed the Blue Stots in 1980 and have been doing so ever since, performing five different tours from Christmas to Epiphany.  Chas and Stuart went on to publish a booklet called 'Return of the Blue Stots' documenting their research. 

LFT:  What are you doing these days? 

JB: We are still here, though since the 70s and 80s, as members have moved on and the folk scene has gradually throttled back, regrettably no younger members have come through to fill the ranks, and current members have many other commitments, particularly to folk dance.  However, the team has survived to the present day not only performing the Blue Stots over the Christmas period, but also resurrecting one of the longer plays when the occasion demands and members’ availability allows.  We appeared at the 2011 Beverley Festival which gave The White Boys and Tom’s Wooing an airing during the course of the weekend. 

LFT: Tell us about The Knaresborough Mummers’ charity work.

JB: We have always made collections, which usually go to a number of local charities which benefit every year from the Blue Stots Tours.  We also support one off appeals, like North Yorkshire Air Ambulance or funding an overseas aid worker we know.  We always try and keep an eye out for local appeals when they are in the news.  I think we’ve raised about £7000 over the years.

LFT: Who is Eric and where does he fit in?

JB: You mean Eric the Horse?  Eric - probably named after the late Eric Binnington, landlord of Mummers HQ, the Worlds End in Knaresborough - was constructed by Dennis Ward for Tom’s Wooing way back in 1976.  Unlike some of the props (we are on our third duck) he has survived the passage of time and has appeared in a number of plays spanning hundreds of years, from being a Victorian doctor’s horse to carrying one of Thomas Becket’s murderers, Hugh de Morville, from Canterbury to Knaresborough!  He had major spinal surgery some years ago to enable him to fit in a car boot, but he got over that and still has his outings! 

For the third and final part of our interview with Max Johnson, we turn our attention to the Dead Sea Surfers. On the player we have four songs from Don't Say Aloha... When I Goha, their 1987 album  -  Lazarus, Yellow Sun, Glad Rag Doll and Come Go with Me. For this part of the interview, Max is joined by Anne Darby (formerly Wiseman) from the group. 

LFT: Threadbare Consort split-up in 1978, yet before long, you and Dave Mitchell were reunited in The Dead Sea Surfers.

MJ: Although the odd occasion arose when Dave and I weren't communicating perfectly, we'd known each other for a long time and were pretty much on the same wavelength. We understood each other and shared a sense of humour and an approach to the audience. Dave and John wanted to form another quartet when Mrs Spinks disbanded. Threadbare split up at about the same time, and although I’m no Marshall Cligman, who was one of the best bass singers I’ve heard, I could sing bass-baritone. We all agreed that we needed another voice, preferably female. We’d heard Anne Wiseman sing and we knew it would work and so we approached her. To our astonishment she agreed to join us.  

LFT: How important was humour to your approach? Was there an element of reacting against the somewhat serious image of some elements of the folk world?

MJ: With all our groups, humour was very, very important. We felt that there was no point in doing it if we weren’t entertaining the audience and that meant more than just singing songs. We wanted to do a show. But as well as the humorous material and the Hawaiian thing, we did a lot of serious songs and the music always came first. Saying that, though, I do think we were good at comedy. None of us ever had the notion of reacting against a traditional establishment. We'd all been part of it individually and to an extent we still were. A few people, and only a few I think, didn't like us because we weren't particularly traditional. Which is fair enough - we were a bit weird, I suppose. The Surfers were entertainers working in folk clubs; we sang traditional songs and contemporary folk and blues, and Dave and Anne were both writers. We started doing jazz and doo-wop simply because we liked singing it. Most clubs seemed to enjoy what we did and we much preferred playing at folk clubs for folk club audiences, but if they hadn’t liked what we did we’d probably have moved to other types of venue. Anne, John and Dave were all working regularly in folk clubs separately from the Surfers. 

LFT: Your only album ‘Don’t sing Aloha… When I Goha’ was released in 1983. Did it represent your live set, and was it a success?

MJ: An interesting question, and it’s another of those to which you might get a different answer from each of us.  My answer is, no, it didn’t truly represent our live set… but it might represent where we were going with the live set. We performed different songs in different venues, like most people. In a Folk Club, say, most of our set would be traditional, some Music Hall, a standard, and usually a doo-wop to finish. In a concert, or a big celidh we’d probably do more standards and doo wops with fewer traditional songs because it provided the audience with a contrast. You don’t actually have to vary it much to give a completely different’ feel’ to the set. The audiences seemed to enjoy it, anyway. There were fewer folksongs on ‘Aloha’ than would normally be in our live set partly because Chris Newman’s guitar and Brillo’s bass simply presented us with the opportunity to be more upbeat, I suppose, and we took it. For that reason, the traditional songs on the album, to me, seem to me to be almost an anomaly. Also, of course, there was a lot of visual comedy in our live set that was just never going to transfer successfully to vinyl.  When the album first came out, I remember Dave saying ‘Do you want the good news, or the bad news?… I’ve just seen ‘Aloha’ in Virgin Records on Oxford St. The bad news is that it’s in ‘Easy Listening’. Thankfully, it sold fairly well, helped by some great reviews, one of them in the American ‘Fanfare Magazine (‘The magazine for serious collectors’!), and we were one of Bolton Evening News’ Records Of The Year, and we’d never even played in Bolton (luckily).

LFT: Why did the Dead Sea Surfers come to an end when it did? 

MJ: The catalyst was Anne getting married and wanting to stop and also wanting to pay more attention to her career. Perhaps the main reason we didn't continue, though, was that after over fifteen years and literally thousands of gigs and rehearsals, we simply needed to do other things.

AD: I always thought we became like an old and tired married couple – the 4 of us. It all became less exciting, etc.

LFT: Did anything else happen musically after the demise of the Surfers?

MJ:  Dave formed the excellent Spring Chickens, who in addition to folk clubs worked on the periphery of the ‘alternative’ scene, the Edinburgh Fringe and that sort of thing. He also used to be a pretty tidy jazz guitarist. The Dead Sea Surfers re-formed for a while in 1992, when we did a few selected gigs and festivals. It happened when the Adastra Agency wanted to get all the people who did the first Beverly festival to reappear on its 10th anniversary. So we said that if they would get us a few more festivals for not too much hassle, we'd reform for a while, even though we were spread all over the country by then from Yorkshire to Dorset. Adastra came up with the goods and we did clubs, concerts and festivals throughout the summer but it was never intended to be a long term project – It was great fun though! 

After that, Dave went to America for a while.  Anne had a high-powered nursing job, but she’s now writing and gigging again.  We’ve temporarily lost contact with John, but it’s difficult to imagine him not singing. I haven't performed in public very much since the Surfers’ split, but I sing with friends whenever the opportunity arises.

AD: After Spring Chickens – Dave and I formed a duo called Boston at the Back. I loved it, but it didn’t seem to take off, and I was building a career in A&E. 
 
LFT: Apart from ‘Wearing Thin and ‘Don't Sing Aloha...When I Goha’, did you make any other recordings?
 
MJ: All our recordings pre-dated digital, so a lot have been lost. There are some quite nice demo and rehearsal cassette tapes somewhere. There was a great set of Elizabethan-type songs that we recorded at South Hill Park but I’ve no idea what happened to them. We also occasionally did some backing vocals on other people's albums.  


LFT: What do you think of it all when you look back on those years?
 
MJ:  It was a privilege to be a part of the revival during all those years, and to be close to so many wonderful people, so much wonderful music and to have more fun than anybody should be allowed.  It was absolutely the best time of my life. 

AD: I miss it like crazy!... I don’t think I have laughed so much ever ever ever…

Continuing our interview with Max Johnson, we now turn to the short-lived Threadbare, a group that existed in the period between the dissolution of Threadbare Consort and the formation of the Dead Sea Surfers. The group never released a record, but they did record a demo with Nigel Pegrum, the former Steeleye Span drummer, who by this point was running an agency and record label, Plant Life. We bring you four tracks from the demo - Now Is The Month Of Maying, Mars For Evermore, Lazarus and The Silver Spear, the latter of which features Dave East on concertina and Norman Western on fiddle. We hope you agree with our opinion that these never-before-available recordings are a bit of a treat!

LFT: When Threadbare Consort split up, two groups came out of the split, Threadbare and Mrs Spinks. You formed Threadbare. Can you tell us about the group?
 
MJ: When Threadbare Consort disbanded they still had about a year’s worth of bookings left in their diary, including a highly lucrative month in Germany and, as that was my only source of income at that time, I didn't want to waste them. With the approval of the other members of Threadbare Consort and the encouragement of our agents I approached Dave East, Celia O'Neill and Norman Western and we formed Threadbare with the main purpose of working to clear the existing bookings and obviously any others that we picked up within that period. 

LFT: Was there a difference in direction between Threadbare Consort and Threadbare? 

MJ: There was practically no difference in the sort of material we performed. Consort had an eclectic repertoire and so did we. What was different, and particularly enjoyable for me was the fact that Celia (and later, Mary Fookes), and Dave and Norm were all good instrumentalists. We didn’t often use instruments, but now and again we would accompany a song, or just play a tune. This was a new experience for me!  Also a female voice in the group allowed greater versatility in arrangements and also of course the songs we could sing. Consort’s four male voices had placed constraints on the way we arranged. The wider range of voices was now quite liberating in many ways; on a personal level I was now singing bass which I found I enjoyed, and I didn’t have to sing as low as Marshall Cligman! 

LFT: What are your favourite memories of your time with Threadbare?

MJ: We had a lot of fun with Threadbare, the highlight definitely being the long Forces Folk Federation tour in Germany. Celia had taken an opportunity to move to Canada by then, and so Mary Fookes joined us, on loan from the a cappella group Heritage. A lot of folk performers will have fond memories of the British Army of the Rhine tours. Some real characters ran the Forces clubs, and a lot of the squaddies were very talented performers. They tended to have a lot of contacts with local German folk, blues and jazz clubs, and gigs were usually arranged at the clubs for the nights we weren’t playing on a base. What a blast! It was a lot of miles but a very popular tour – and those guys really looked after you.

LFT: Did you ever record an album?

MJ: Sadly, no. But fortunately one recording survives: a single cassette tape, copied from a short demo recorded by Nigel Pegrum in his home studio on a 4-track TEAC in 1978. 

LFT: When did Threadbare disband?

MJ: We went our separate ways with a cheery wave in 1979 having had a lot of laughs. Celia O’Neill is now a singing teacher and choirmaster in Vancouver, Dave East runs the Court Sessions folk clubs in South London and Norman Western lives and works in Lancaster where we occasionally meet up for a pint in the John O’ Gaunt. We’ve lost touch, sadly, with Mary. Perhaps she’ll see this and get in touch!

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.

No guide to the folk music of Derbyshire would be complete without a chapter on the mighty Muckram Wakes. Over the years, the group has served as a who’s who of the county’s folk scene, including at various times in its ranks John Tams, Helen Watson, Roger Watson, John Adams, Suzie Adams, Keith Kendrick, Ian Carter and Barry Coope. As Lost Folk Tapes continues delving into Derbyshire’s folk history, courtesy of John Terry’s wonderful archive of live recordings, it’s fitting that one of our first stopping off points is not only Muckram Wakes, but the original line-up of John Tams and Roger and Helen Watson. John Terry doesn’t remember many of the details of this particular recording – it was, after all, made nearly 40 years ago – but he thinks it was probably 1973 and that the concert definitely took place in Derby Cathedral. The sound quality isn’t brilliant – but it’s easily good enough to get a flavor of what was clearly an excellent performance by a group who have sadly left little recorded evidence of their existence – the one album released by the original line up, A Map of Derbyshire, is long since out of print and has never made it onto CD. And despite being in the middle of recording a programme commemorating the 200th anniversary of the Luddites due for broadcast by the BBC later in the year and preparing for a trip to the States, John Tams very kindly took time out of his schedule to talk to Lost Folk Tapes.

We began by asking John what if anything he remembered of this concert. “I really have no recollection of the Derby Cathedral concert or what it was for,” he admits. “It might have been something we did for Radio Derby. It’s lovely to hear Gilliver, though, which was one of the great songs written by Roger Watson. And the Holmfirth Anthem came as a bit of a surprise, because I don’t remember us singing it in concert – I’m sure we used to sing it in the car on the way to concerts, though!”

LFT: Going right back to the early days, what was it that first attracted you to folk music? 

JT: I think it was the language of folk song that first drew me to the music. I was drawn to the sorts of information the songs contained and the way that they told certain truths. History books tended to be written in a style that accommodated the views of the day – but the folk songs seemed to tell a different, more basic truth.”

LFT: In the mid sixties, you and a group of friends decided to set up a folk club. Could you tell us a bit about that?

JT: It was in Alfreton in Derbyshire. We had to sort out a team who could run the club and a team who could perform at the club. As my organisational skills weren’t that great, I became part of the team of performers and singers. From this, over time we grew a band, who came to act as the club’s residents. We had some great guests at the club – every Thursday we had people like Mike Harding, Anne Briggs, Nic Jones and Martin Carthy coming through. Not bad for a small market town!

After a while, we started getting enough attention and interest to be invited to play at other clubs – often in the form of exchange visits with the residents of those clubs. We began to get about a bit. We played clubs both locally and further afield – I recall us visiting Nic Jones’s club in Chelmsford on one occasion. We started to get quite successful: we were working as a quartet by now and we had quite an unusual line up of instruments for the time – melodeons, fiddles, even a bouzouki. I was playing the anglo concertina – my grandfather had played and it was his concertina that I played.”

LFT: And was it was around this time that Muckram Wakes was born?

JT: Yes, it was. Roger was playing in a duo with Colin Cater at the time and we used to book them for the club. Roger and I decided we should form a trio with his girlfriend, Helen Wainwright, or Helen Watson as she became. We toured extensively from the early to mid-seventies and had the opportunity of becoming professional, or at least semi-professional musicians, which was quite an experience for us. 

LFT: What about the name, Muckram Wakes? Where does that come from? It almost sounds too good to be true… 

JT: The name Muckram Wakes comes from a real place. I spent my early years living in a pub run by my parents in Somercotes, which was a coalmining area. There was place nearby called Pennytown, which is famed for being the smallest town in the world – it has just two houses! The area around Pennytown is known as Muckram. Lots of members of my family are from round there, including my Uncle Roland, who was a hedger and ditcher. In fact, everyone in the area called him Uncle Roland, but he really was my uncle. I always liked the name Muckram – for a start off, it’s got ‘muck’ in it - and ‘ram’ has the obvious Derbyshire connotation. And I’ve always been fascinated by the wakes – in fact I used to work on the fairgrounds for a while when I left school. 

After I left the group, I was very pleased that the others kept using the name – and quite a lot of people went through Muckram Wakes over the years, including, at one stage, Barry Coope, who I perform with now. 

LFT: So was the exploration of your Derbyshire roots an important part of what you did? 

JT: The Derbyshire connection was always important to us. I used to go to a club in Chesterfield run by a wonderful and saintly man by the name of Frank Sutton. He was a great songwriter but he was also a collector. One of the most important things he told me was to ‘look in your own backyard’ - go out and find the songs from your own area. And so I did, looking in local libraries and collections and archives and doing some song collecting myself. In a way, that was what the album, A Map of Derbyshire, was all about – we were trying to encourage other revival singers to do the same sort of thing we were doing. I met a singer called George Fradley and from him I collected some of the songs that we sang on A Map of Derbyshire: he gave us Mrs Merry’s Ball and Fifty Years Ago. He was a great reliquary of songs – he knew many traditional songs but he also had songs that had been made by members of his family, particularly his father, Albert, who by all accounts was quite a prolific maker of songs.

LFT: How did A Map of Derbyshire come about?

JT: Bill Leader had heard about us. He invited us down to Cecil Sharp House in London where he had a four-track studio set up in the basement. We recorded the album with him in two, at the most three, days. It was time of real joy for us, making that album - and especially so because we were celebrating the songs of our own neighbourhood. 

The collection and celebration of our local songs is still going on. I’m part of a group called the Derbyshire Volunteers. There are about twenty of us, and we get together to play for charity – it’s an opportunity for to sing and dance and drink together. We have set up a charitable fund and we distribute the money we make to a variety of causes – we’ve recently sent some to the fund for the victims of the tsunami in Japan and we sent some to Christchurch Folk Club following the earthquake they suffered - we’ve got links with them stretching back for years. And we’re still investigating and researching the songs and tunes of the county.

You can find out all about John Tams and his current activities at his website. There are a couple of videos of the Derbyshire Volunteers in action up on Youtube that you can find here and here. The photo of John Tams is courtesy of John Terry and was taken one cold Easter on a narrowboat heading from from Market Harborough to Oxford and back. 
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We've managed to get in touch with Helen Hockenhull, who has given her blessing to us making this recording available, but we still haven't spoken to Roger Watson. So if by any chance you're reading this, Roger, please do get in touch with us at contact@lostfolktapes.com.

We continue our series of John Terry’s live recordings from Stainsby Folk Festival – where for many years he looked after the sound – with this excellent set from contemporary folk singer-songwriter Bernie Parry, recorded in 1978. Bernie is best remembered for his 1981 debut album, Sailing to the Moon, released on the Free Reed label and now available on CD in an expanded version. Lost Folk Tapes got in touch with Bernie and sent him a copy of John’s recording. We were very pleased to hear back from him that he was delighted with the recording and happy to be interviewed for the website.

LFT: When did you first started making music and what were your early influences?

BP: I started playing the violin age the age of eleven, so from an early age I realised I like acoustic instruments. In 1964, I was listening to the Beatles, who were definitely an early influence, but then I saw Bob Dylan on the telly with just a guitar and a harmonica and I thought ‘I can do that!’ I remember putting loads of pressure on my mum to buy me an acoustic guitar and happily she agreed.

LFT: We were very pleased to read on your website that you share our admiration for the Incredible String Band.

BP: I loved the Incredible String Band. The fact that they acted as if there were no rules to making music appealed to me - yet they still managed to be melodic. And I’ve always loved Robin Williamson’s voice - that definitely influenced my singing style. I also liked their use of different guitar tunings and the sense of freedom that came across in what they did. I wasn’t really influenced by their lyrics, which were all a bit airy-fairy for my tastes. I’ve always taken more of a storytelling approach to my own lyric writing, which I think comes from my Celtic roots - I’m half Welsh, a quarter Irish and a quarter Romany.  

LFT: Were there any other key influences?

BP: Strangely, I was later also influenced by a band called Sailor, who released four wonderful albums in the mid-seventies. They definitely affected the way I thought about playing the guitar and I started to incorporate more jazzy and poppy elements.

LFT: What first attracted you to the folk scene?

BP: When I first discovered them, what I liked about folk clubs is that you could just get on the stage with a guitar and play your songs. You didn’t need a PA system or anything. The first club I was involved with, at Easington in County Durham, had a resident singer by the name of Jim Pritchard, who had a vast repertoire of traditional songs. Through listening to him, I seemed to absorb something of the spirit of traditional song almost by osmosis, and though I’ve written songs in all sorts of styles - jazz, blues, modern folk, for instance - I have found myself writing in the style of traditional song on occasions: The Goblin’s Riddle might be an example of this.

LFT: Did you encounter any resistance to performing your own, rather than traditional material?

BP: I think I was lucky in that the club at Easington had a pretty open-minded approach. This was also the case at Trimdon Folk Club, where I was one of the residents, along with Jez Lowe and Ged Foley. If you could sing there, you could sing anywhere! It was the sort of place that got totally packed out and had sweat running down the walls. During this period I was also briefly a member of the Trimdon Folk Band with Jez. He was one of the first people to record one of my songs – he put a version of The Dark Shores on his first album.  The very first,  though, was Johnny Collins, who put a couple of my songs on his Johnny's Private Army album.

LFT: Did you get much of a chance to play gigs outside of your local area?

BP: In the early seventies, I started spreading out from the North-East, getting gigs all over the North of England and the Midlands and some in the South. I got taken on by Ogilvy and Winder during the last couple of years of their existence, too. They were the biggest booking agency in the folk world at the time and they got me into all sorts of places I wouldn’t have had the opportunity to play otherwise.  I played quite a few festivals at that time – my first was Durham, but I also played at Stainsby, Poynton, Fylde and even Cambridge, as part of Plexus, in front of 8000 people. I was only ever briefly in Plexus: I like to think it was so I could play at Cambridge!

LFT: How did Sailing to the Moon come about?

BP: Actually, not long before I was given the opportunity to record the album, I’d decided to retire from performing – this would have been in 1977. My parents were running a hotel down in Devon, so I moved down there. I had a final gig commitment to fulfil, which was at Barnsley Folk Festival. In the audience there was someone who was working as an assistant to Neil Wayne who ran Free Reed Records. She really liked what I was doing, so she got in touch with Neil, who offered to put an album out. It was recorded in 1978, but it wasn’t actually released until 1981. I think that the delay was basically down to money – Neil had just released two lavish double album packages – Peter Bellamy’s The Transports and the Tale of Ale compilation and between them these had left him pretty broke. 

LFT: On your website, you mention that you were singer in residence at Darlington Arts Centre and Radio Teeside around the same time. What was all that about?

BP: They had a competition and I was invited to put in for it. I went along and won! I was up against some good competition too, including Robin Dransfield and Dick Gaughan. I think it helped that I was a local lad. The judges included Dave Cousins of the Strawbs and a journalist from the Melody Maker. I ended up moving up there for a year and writing loads of songs. Practically everything I wrote was recorded and broadcast. Some of the songs were for themed shows – I did a concert of children’s songs called The Fish and The Stars, where Plexus played with me. I also did a series of songs called The Bully Beef Diaries. These were based on a true story. My father-in-law had been a prisoner of war during the Second World War and during that time he had kept a diary, which he wrote on toilet paper and hid in an old corned beef tin.

LFT: You released another album in 1983, Playing With Words. What can you tell us about it?

BP: My second album featured a broader range of styles. On the one hand, it was more bluesy, but I also branched out and included instruments such as the Irish pipes. Jez Lowe helped out, too. It was nearly a lost album. It was recorded in a freezing cold studio up on the Yorkshire Moors on very poor quality tape. I took it to Pennine Radio, where my friend Nigel Schofield managed to transfer it to decent tape and save it. I must say, it was actually quite difficult for me to sell albums at gigs back then. I didn’t have my own transport, so you can imagine what it was like trying to hump 50 vinyl albums about!

LFT: So what happened next?

BP: Of course, whilst I was an artist in residence, I wasn’t able to tour because I was spending all my time at Darlington. It was hard to get back into touring after that. My wife and I had been talking about running a pub, so in the late eighties I retired again and spent four years as a publican.

After this I didn’t do anything more till around 1995, when Dave Malinson approached me to do a song book. I said that I’d rather make an album, which he agreed to put out. He insisted it was called Man of the Earth, after what was probably my best known song. I wasn’t over keen on this, as it felt like this was looking back towards something that was now behind me, but it was a decent album and sold a fair few copies. I recorded it at Rob Van Sante’s studio. I then released Random Fandangos, but the sales of this were fairly poor. I started recording again in 2004, when I bought myself a digital recording studio and recorded Songs from Stony Rock. This was a collection of all new songs, except for ISB’s October Song, which I’ve been singing for most of my life. I went on to release an album of instrumentals, Earth Apples, and Interpretations, which is an album of other people’s songs that I wished I’d written. Having my own studio was really liberating. And I do everything myself - the artwork, producing the CDs and so on– - it’s a proper cottage industry. I’ve also done a few gigs here and there, but in some ways I think I’ve always been more of a songwriter than a singer. 

LFT: Will we be hearing any further new music from you?

BP: I’ve finally retired now, for good this time. I had a bad fall four years ago, which resulted in permanent nerve damage to my fingers. This means I can no longer play the guitar to a standard that I deem acceptable. I’m not playing guitar at all anymore, but I have taken up the hurdy-gurdy.

I was talking to my wife about Stainsby -– I can’t remember playing there in 1978, but I do recall they had me back a couple of years later and it went down a storm. I’ve enjoyed listening to the recording of the set from the festival. I wasn’t half bad back then, was I?
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Bernie has a website at www.bernieparry.com, where you can find out more about the man and his music and buy copies of all his CDs. He also has a Youtube channel where you can watch videos of him revisiting many of his best known songs.

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.

Next up are the Amazing Catsfield Steamers. After over thirty years, the Hastings-based band are still going strong as purveyors of traditional British music for social dance. On the music player, we’ve featured four tracks from their privately released 1981 album United Friends. At the time of the album, the band had 16 members, including five melodeon players as well as concertina and piano accordion! The tracks we’ve chosen give you some idea of the range of the Steamers’ repertoire and their roots in the worlds of Morris and folk club singarounds and sessions. Will Downes, who has been involved with the band since its inception, talked to Lost Folk Tapes about its origins. 

LFT: So how did it all begin? Your line up and the sheer size of the band suggests to us that  you never set out to be anything other than a bunch of people playing for fun in the back room of your local pub…

WD: Around about 1978, Mad Jacks Morris was formed. The side had both men and women's teams who met and practiced together in the back room of The White Hart pub in the small village of Catsfield in East Sussex. When we went out dancing, the men danced only with men and the women with women. There was great enthusiasm amongst the people involved, which still continues today. The side is largely responsible for the revival and ongoing organisation of the now famous Jack in the Green Festival, which takes place in Hastings every May Day weekend. 
 
After tours of dancing, the side would often gather in the practice room at The White Hart for a very informal ceilidh, where anybody who could get a tune out of something would play, and others might sing. We also started to regularly gather on a Sunday night for a music session in The United Friends, a pub in Ninfield, just up the road from Catsfield. This session became so popular with the locals and visiting musicians that you could hardly get in through the pub door!  The session soon developed into a band that, with great courage, decided to hire the village hall at Ninfield to put on a country dance. There were one or two Jonahs in the band, who said we would never sell any tickets and that we would lose money, but we sold 300 tickets and since then we’ve never looked back. The band was huge in those days, with anybody who wanted to play just coming along. Most gigs had a bar then, and we used to visit the pub running it to fill a five gallon barrel of beer which stood on stage for the refreshment of the players. Those days are gone!

LFT: So how did you come to release an album?
 
WD: I can't remember where this took place, but on one occasion when we were playing for a dance, a chap called Richard Hill turned up with his young family. They absolutely loved the music and the dancing, and he introduced himself to us. He was an accomplished classical trombone player who played with an orchestra, with a contract that allowed his release to play with the Gabrielli Brass Consort whenever they went off around the world to perform. I believe he was also an A&R man for EMI Records. He was soon to be found playing trombone with the Steamers - we could hardly believe it.
 
Richard decided to make the album United Friends, and arranged for a mobile recording studio to be sent from EMI to record the tracks. I remember that we also visited Essex Studios in Soho for more recording and for the mixing - and Ralph McTell was there at the same time. Very exciting. About the same time we recorded a series of tracks for a library album, which I believe are still being used today. Richard Hill did a lot of work at the time promoting the album nationally. We received some pretty good reviews, including one in Southern Rag, the forerunner of fRoots.

LFT: Did the reception to the album lead to you touring or playing at festivals?

WD: We played, and still play, mostly in Sussex and Kent, with a few notable exceptions. We had a long weekend playing for dancing in Wales - hence we can claim to have toured abroad! We did a posh wedding in Leamington Spa. We have played at the Teignmouth and Tenterden Festivals and Hastings Jack in the Green, where we’re due to play for the Friday night dance this year. The costs for playing at more distant venues for a band the size of ours can very quickly spiral out of control, so we’ve never really pushed for these sort of gigs.   
 
LFT: Thirty years down the line, the Steamers are still going strong. What’s your secret?

WD: Whilst it’s now in a much reduced form, the band continues to play today - and nobody has ever left under a cloud. A few years ago we had a 30th birthday celebration, inviting all past and present musicians to take turns on stage at our fabulous local arts centre, The Phoenix. Once again it was sold out. I think one of the things about this band is that we were never really about going out and doing original research into folk music traditions. We really were just a bunch of people who got together in the pub and played whatever tunes anyone brought along. In that way, we’ve always had a lot in common with traditional musicians. And above all, it’s always simply been about having great fun making music together. 

You can find out more about the current activities of the Catsfield Steamers at their website www.catsfieldsteamers.co.uk. The band have recently reissued the United Friends album  in a download version, which is available via their website from Amazon, iTunes and eMusic.