D-Day and The Gunners of Spring

Alan Butler – 82 today! – recalls D-Day, when soldiers camped in the front garden of 14 London Road, and the woods became a military zone… 

from the collection of A.H. Butler 

We had Italian Prisoners of War in the area where I was. Where they were billeted, I don’t know. They weren’t billeted in the village, but they used to turn up on a lorry, and then go off to the different farms where they were allocated. We never saw any German Prisoners of War. 

Tanks at Horndean

It could have been a month or six weeks before D-Day that the troops arrived. Several times they were moved on and then you found them at another part of the village. They got them to pack all their gear and depart and ride around and come back. 

Some soldiers were actually billeted with us. They had their tent in the front garden of 14 London Road (I suppose it was about 18 foot square). They’d put a big tarpaulin up, or several tarpaulins up, and would sleep under these tarpaulins in their sleeping bags in a big makeshift tent. 

There was only one time when they slept in the house, when a sudden shower came on, and the sides of the tarpaulin were rolled up for headroom, and all their bedding got wet, or some of them. So my mother said they could sleep in the house. 

My dad was a policeman and when he finished his shift, in the early hours of the morning, he couldn’t get into the house, because there were soldiers asleep on all the chairs and settees, on the staircase, and some were sleeping on the dining room table, and some under the dining room table. The house was full of soldiers. They didn’t go upstairs (they might have gone upstairs to use the toilet), and we boys and my mother – my grandmother was there at that time – had our own bedrooms. My dad came in, found out he couldn’t get upstairs to use the bathroom or go to bed, so he went back to the police station, which was only two doors away, and had a little kip there, until all the soldiers departed. 

My grandmother Mary Harcourt did her bit for the war effort, so my father said, by teaching the British army how to play Mahjongg. I’ve known my grandmother at the table with three soldiers, and, because only four can play at a time, other soldiers were sitting on chairs there waiting for their turn to have a game of Mahjongg.

The Home Guard 

14 London Road was a open house for soldiers, and Cowplain generally was very soldier-friendly. Some families adopted some of the soldiers. My second cousin, Joan, married one of the soldiers, Bill Starkey. He was in the woods, The Queen’s Inclosure, and because he was good at football, he had to be got out, so he could play football for the army football team. He had to be found a job. What his job was in the woods, I don’t know. They knew all the plans, more than likely, for when D-Day was going to happen in there. 

So Bill came out, and the only job they could think for him was as a military policeman, so they gave him the job of making some village roads one-way. My second cousin Joan was driving her father’s grocer’s van, and objected to being stopped by Bill and told she couldn’t go down this road. From these inauspicious beginnings they started a relationship, and during the war, when Bill was still in the army, he came home on leave and they got married. It was rather a rush wedding. My mother gave one jar of cherished preserve fruit in a kilner jar to help with the wedding breakfast. He survived the war and eventually lived next door to my parents. He finished up his playing years with the Cowplain football team. 

from the collection of A.H. Butler

My mother charged accumulators. Accumulators were the power behind batteries for wirelesses, and they had to be charged up nearly once a week. An officer would come along to my mother and have his solid pack accumulators charged up for his wireless. My mother was horrified one day when he turned up at the side door of 14 London Road (there were three doors to 14 London Road) escorted by two military policemen. My mother thought that he was in trouble. But he wasn’t. He simply had to come out of the woods, which was a secure area, to collect the battery. The policemen were to make sure he didn’t talk to anybody about what was happening in the woods. Normally he collected a battery and left one, but this time he didn’t leave any.

from the collection of A.H. Butler 

Just before D-Day the soldiers were all issued with French currency, and my mother was given two of these franc notes, which I have in my collection. And then, at Christmas, some soldiers sent my mother Christmas cards, which I’ve got in my collection too. One reads “To Reggie, Michael and Alan,” that is, the children in the household, “with best wishes, John”. And this from the 20th Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery: “To our good friends of Cowplain, with every good wish for Christmas and the New Year from the Gunners of Spring, 1944.” That phrase, “the Gunners of Spring”, suggests that soldiers were in Cowplain earlier than I thought: if D-Day was in June, they must have been in the village at the back end of spring.

from the collection of A.H. Butler

That’s how much they thought of us. A couple of things were always in short supply at our house: sugar (we went through an awful lot of sugar), and tea too was very scarce. The soldiers gave my mother either one or two big bags of tea. The tea they were issued with didn’t come in packets, they were in small bags, about nine inches square,  and it was full of tea, with a draw cord at the top, to keep it fresh. My mother was given two of these bags as a parting gift. Whether they gave her any other food out of their supply, I don’t know, but I’ll always remember the tea. 

My mother would let the soldiers use the bath. Because they had none or very basic washing facilities, a cold shower perhaps, she let them have use of the bath. And one day a lieutenant came to the door, a complete stranger, and said to my mother, “I understand that this is the house that I can have a bath at.” And my mother said yes. And so he left her sixpence to pay for his bath. The soldiers she didn’t charge at all, but she took the sixpence from the lieutenant.

from http://resources.woodlands-junior.kent.sch.uk/homework/war/evacuation.htm

Cowplain took evacuees from London and Portsmouth. I can remember an endless stream of cars and wheelbarrows coming out of Portsmouth one evening, when I was a child. Halls and churches put them up. They would accommodate them until they found somewhere to live. 

Huts were built in some spare ground in Hart Plain Avenue (where Hart Plain Avenue joined Silvester Road) for more evacuees, but the evacuees never came. They stayed empty for a long time, and then it was decided to turn these wooden huts into a junior school, because we had no junior school in the village, and when the war started, it was overwhelmed by children. 

I’d been moved to the senior school. In Cowplain you had a huge great senior school that had a catchment area of Waterlooville, Purbrook, Denmead, Widley and went as far as Rowland’s Castle but didn’t include Havant. It was a funny old radius actually: it went to the top of Portsdown Hill. And then the other way it went to Denmead, Hambledon, Horndean, Clanfield, Lovedean. At one time it was mixed, but then they divided it so you had girls in one half, and boys in the other half. Separate provision was made for the girls and boys. There was no contact with girls that I can remember. 

When there was an air-raid, we, the juniors, went up to the shelters. And it was a good old walk to get to the air-raid shelters from the school, about 200 hundred yards, and we were allocated the first one, because we couldn’t walk very fast. We were only little tots. And the senior boys went to the classrooms we had just vacated and trusted to the blast walls to protect them. Luckily, it only ever happened once as far as I can remember. We had dummy runs, but there was actually only once we had an air-raid and were evacuated to the shelters. 

from Google Images 

So there was one air-raid when we were all summoned there, and the other ones were dummy runs. And you had to put your gas mask on, and they were the most unpleasant things going, because they would steam up in no  time at all. I would hate to have to wear one in a gas attack. Any rate, it never happened, thank goodness. 

These wooden huts, as I say, had been built, and never used, and then, as I say, it was decided to turn them into a junior school. And so about 1942 (yeah, it would have been about 1942), we were moved from the senior school over into the huts. They were terrible. All you had was a big stove in the middle, and it was the job of somebody in the class (there was big buckets of coal there: I think it was coal, it might have been anthracite) to keep these stoves topped up in the winter. And the classrooms were still cold even with the stoves on. We had to wear our coats in class, they were that cold. Because the stoves radiated a little bit of heat, and beyond that, nothing.   

I think there are four or five junior schools in that village now. I wouldn’t like to say. 

This map shows our house – the red is 14 London Road (that’s the length of our garden) – and the territory the army took over. 

Have you got the photograph I took of the bombs? The drawing pins are the bombs we had. One landed on a poultry farm and killed hundreds of chickens, and the other was at the top of Park Lane. See that square building there? That was one of the old tram sheds. Fodens had it –  I didn’t know this until recently virtually – and they were storing torpedoes in there, for submarines. Perhaps I didn’t notice them come, or perhaps they all travelled at nighttime, I don’t know, but somebody knew about them, and the Luftwaffe tried to bomb it, and they were just that little bit out: they bombed the other side of the road (the corner of Park Lane), the bottom of our road and a field. We were lucky. They were the only bombs we had in Cowplain.  

As I say, the soldiers were often on the move, and the HQ, we found out afterwards, was Southwick House, which was five miles by road. It’s a museum now, with the layout for D-Day. 

Of course, D-Day was cancelled at the last minute, because the weather was that bad. The weather was blowing a storm and it was just impossible, so D-Day was put back a day to the 6th of June. The weather people were involved for a long time to predict a good day for the invasion, but they got it completely wrong. Meteorology then was not the advanced art it is today. 

So they all departed. The village was quite empty of tanks, vehicles and guns. We did have some tanks: there were a lot of Bren Gun Carriers (you had a trailer behind the Bren Gun Carrier, and then a small field gun towing behind the trailer). And they all departed. What made my parents’ property quite attractive, was the very wide piece of grass from the edge of the road to the fence of the house (at one time the Horndean Light Railway tram ran along there), and so they army was able to park their vehicles well off the road. Now it was empty. 

It was the evening of the 5th of June and suddenly there were aeroplanes in the sky. We looked up, and there were Airspeed Oxfords (they were mainly Oxfords) towing Horsa gliders. They went over the house and we had a good view from the back of the house because the ground dropped a bit. The woods were three quarters of a mile away, and visibility ceased after the woods. But you can imagine, the sky was full of planes. As far as we could see to our right, and as far as we could see to our left, the whole sky was full of aeroplanes and gliders, spaced quite apart but limitless. That’s when we realised that some action was going to take place. 

This was getting dusk, at ten o’clock or eleven o’clock at night, so it wouldn’t be long before it would be dark, and then they would fly across the Channel into France, and the planes would shed their gliders, and the gliders would land with the airborne troops inside them. 

Mind you, that happened again several weeks later. They wanted to secure a bridge in Holland. They didn’t succeed actually. They couldn’t secure it and the Germans took the bridge, but they did their best, and again the sky was full of Oxfords and Horsa gliders. 

Further reading: http://www.portsmouth.co.uk/news/defence/horndean-s-wartime-past-1-6573671 – source of Tanks in Horndean and Home Guard pictures. 

Coming soon: Bicycle Ride to Love 

The best jazz critic in the world (except sometimes)

Ronnie, Nina, B.B. and Me: My Jazz Interviews  

The following is the script of a talk Mike Butler gave to Manchester Jazz Society on 22 January, if not the talk itself. Audience participation is noted in square brackets, and the bits in italics indicate passages omitted for space reasons. 

Photo: Mike Black

A note of autobiography to set the scene: In 1989 I’d been out of Art College for three years. I was part of an artists’ studio group, MASA (Manchester Artists Studio Association) and edited a little magazine for the Friends of Castlefield Gallery. This was consistent with the general pattern of my life, which is to say, ineffectual but overall quite enjoyable. Anyway, I was living in a student household which had such a nice atmosphere that it stayed even after everyone had graduated (this was 44 Norman Road, Rusholme). A co-resident, Karen Morley, happened to be editing the Women section of Manchester’s what’s-on magazine, City Life, and one day she said to me, “The person doing the jazz page doesn’t even like jazz. You’d be far better at it.” The person doing the jazz page was in fact, Agraman, the Human Anagram. He was also doing the folk page. Really, his thing was stand-up comedy. Agraman (real name John Marshall) became a very successful  comedy promoter.

Some three weeks later I visited the office and was handed the jazz folder and directed to the nearest available Amstrad and that was it, I was hired. 

I wonder about that three week gap. Granted, I was always easy-going about the professional, paid world of work, and the word ‘employability’ had yet to be coined in 1989, but three weeks seems to be relaxed even by my standards. The following is just speculation, but it might be significant that I made my debut in City Life #122, which covered the dates April 19-May 4, 1989 (City Life was fortnightly). That date, April 19th, 1989, is quite significant in Manchester jazz history. Does anyone know what happened on April 19th, 1989? 

[Chris Lee gets it. “Didn’t Miles Davis play at the Apollo about then?”] 

Precisely… Miles Davis played his second night at the Apollo Theatre, Manchester, on Wednesday April 19th, 1989.  

[Chris Lee berates Manchester Evening News for not letting him review the concert. Tim Stenhouse was there,, but says that Miles was in better form in Nice a few years later.]

So I made my public appearance in town on the same day as Miles Davis. For practical purposes, I just missed him, because magazines have to be planned a bit in advance. So the question is, did I delay my debut until Miles Davis was safely out of the way? If there was any possibility at all of interviewing Miles, however slight, I know I would have been there ready to duck the challenge. The prospect was just too scary. What would a know-nothing like me say to a legend like him? This is the spirit with which I’ve approached most of my interviews. 

Let’s stop for some music. A bit of Miles Davis, I think, to commemorate a missed opportunity. This is what Miles sounded like in 1989. 

Miles Davis, ‘Amandla’ (fade after 1:42) … 

I managed to defer my first professional interview until the following year, March, 1990, in fact. Although most of my interviews took place over the phone, this one happened to be a one to one encounter. In 1990 the Ronnie Scott Quartet played at the Bury Met (Greater Manchester). An earlier date on the same tour took in the Kirklevington Country Club, near my home town of Middlesbrough. Aware that I was in Middlesbrough at the time, my editor despatched me to Kirklevington to get the interview. 

So it happened that at tea-time on the evening of the gig, I was ushered into the dining-room of the Kirklevington Country Club, which was completely empty except for a solitary table of diners. Ronnie Scott was not amongst them. There were the guys in the Quartet. I tentatively approached them. “Are you with Ronnie Scott?” I said, explaining that I’d come for an interview. A burly fellow stood up, raised himself to his full height, and said, “If you knew anything about jazz, you would know who I am.” This wasn’t what I wanted to hear. 

I’ve mentioned that I was pretending to be an artist, a painter, and this new sideline, jazz criticism, was compounding the fraud. I lived in perpetual fear of being exposed as someone with no expertise in his area of expertise. And Martin Drew had seen through me at a glance. All the same, I couldn’t help but think that these were very haughty words for a man with a mouth full of sherry trifle. 

Martin Drew (as I know now) was a mainstay of the Ronnie Scott Quartet, and served as Oscar Peterson’s drummer for some thirty years, and went on to lead Celebrating the Jazz Couriers, a tribute to his old boss, with Mornington Lockett and Nigel Hitchcock in the twin-tenor roles of Ronnie Scott and Tubby Hayes. 

It was decided to do the interview in the dressing-room during the interval. The other fellows around the table, by the way, were pianist John Critchinson and bassist Ron Matthewson.

This comes from the published article, City Life #146, March 28 - April 12 1990. 

      I asked about Club Eleven, a tatty basement called Mac’s Rehearsal Rooms in 

     Windmill Street, which opened in 1948. John Dankworth and Tony Crombie 

     were amongst its members. “It was all new to us. We were enthusiastic and very 

     young.” In 1950, Club Eleven, now charging admission on the door, moved to 

     Carnaby Street. How did it end? “Very inauspiciously. We were raided by the 

     police. We got nicked and the thing fell apart after that. It was drink, drugs… 

     and sex.”   

     The name of Zoot Sims came up. “Well we weren’t bosom pals exactly but we 

     enjoyed seeing each other.” Scott and Sims were together when the American 

     astronauts first landed on the moon. Sims said, “Jesus! They’re walking on the 

     moon and I’m still playing ‘Indiana’.”… “Zoot. I loved Zoot,” Scott told us. “He 

     was the first American player who gave a concert at Ronnie’s. He was a jazz 

     musician’s jazz musician.” 

I wanted to play something which displays Martin Drew to advantage. The next track is from a CD called Ronnie Remembered. The saxophonist is Pat Crumly and that’s Martin on drums. The tune is by Crumly and it’s called ‘Excuse Me Do I Know You?’ 

Ronnie Remembered, ‘Excuse Me Do I Know You?’ (4:57) 

He has in common with the USA drumming greats (like Jo Jones or Kenny Clarke) that ability to play urgently without making a lot of noise. He was an extraordinary drummer… [Enquiries about the piano player] That’s John Critchinson on piano, Pat Crumly on tenor saxophone, Leon Clayton on double bass, and Martin Drew on drums. 

At one point I sat down and wrote the names of all my interviews I could remember. They might number 300 musicians or thereabouts (not all jazz). [Eva says that, in the heat of the moment, I claimed I interviewed 300 musicians a year! This is an exaggeration. A sum total of 300 might be more accurate.] So you see, I eventually got over my shyness. It happened that City Life editor Chris Sharratt was headhunted by Metro and he took me with him. It was at a time when the coverage of arts and music events in the regions was part of Metro’s remit, and because there were several regional editions, I was kept quite busy. (Now everything is handed down from London and regional arts coverage and listings have been scrapped, so Metro has lost any purpose it had, apart from providing instant litter in trains and buses.) Anyway, I became quite a seasoned interviewer and sometimes spoke to itwo or three musicians a day. On one morning – 21st November, 2002, to be precise – I interviewed both Martin Drew and Benn Clatworthy back-to-back. 

Benn Clatworthy is a saxophonist wild man and grandson of Gertrude Lawrence. From London, and based in Los Angeles, Benn is a frequent visitor to the UK. It was a nice conjunction, because Martin and Benn were regular playing partners. Sadly, that’s the past tense. Martin Drew died in July, 2010.

[I mention how Tommy Melville regaled the audience of The Rhythm Station, “Yes, Picasso was knocking off his grandma,” as Benn smouldered. “It’s a good job I’m taking an anger management course, Tommy,” he said. Chris Lee says that Benn can’t have been that upset, because he invited Tommy to play saxophone at his wedding. I omit to mention that I was invited to the wedding too, but didn’t go because I had another event in London to attend on the same day. It was February 15, 2003, and the day of the great anti-Iraq War march.]   

It might be interesting to crosscut between the interviews. 

What music were you listening to when you were growing up, Benn? 

“I was listening to soul music, like most kids, and then the Beatles… It’s funny man, I don’t recall childhood a lot.” 

Did the Gertrude Lawrence connection have an impact? 

“No. It’s never affected me directly at all. Because she was dead three years before I was born. She was a very extravagant woman, Gertrude Lawrence, and my mother got screwed out of her  inheritance by her agent or lawyers or something. It’s kind of strange because it’s so close but it’s so distant.” 

It wasn’t like show tunes were being played about the house constantly? 

“We were dancing, yeah, doing routines. No nothing like that at all. Here’s a little bit I don’t want in the thing but you know my parents were separated and I got really mad and I was crazy and I got out of control and I got sent off to this place, Finchton Manor. And that’s where I heard the first thing that really struck me when I was around 13 and it was a guy called Harold McNair. He was playing flute on the track that got me really excited about that music. But I don’t want it mentioned that I was in trouble, y’know. I don’t like sounding like I was a hard-done-by child because my life wasn’t hard at all. Y’know what I mean?” 

Sure, rely on my discretion, Benn. 

“But I heard Harold McNair when I was around 13. Cut all that other stuff. I’m just telling you because it’s the story, man.” 

I think he died young. 

“Yeah. Do you think it will help me? Am I still in time? I better not leave it much longer, eh? I won’t be young if I leave it much longer.” 

Martin: “I have many, many memories, great memories of playing with Oscar, playing with Ray Brown, playing with Joe Pass. Sometimes I pinch myself that I’m working with such incredible jazz legends. I’m fortunate in saying that I’ve had many wonderful nights with Oscar and hopefully they’ll continue. Oscar is amazing because as you know he just has the facility of his right hand because of the stroke that he had and he’s 77 years old, but he still gets up there and does it. He still gets up there and goes for broke. You have to admire someone who does that. You have to have that kind of dedication. Musicians will understand what I’m saying. You don’t just get up there and make it up as you go along… there’s a lot of work and study that you can spend years [on], and most musicians do. 

Benn: I don’t have a choice. This is what I do. I supposed I’m obsessed with it really. I’m always checking to see what’s happening. It’s not right. It’s a complete ****ing neurosis, you know? I was playing sax on the train back from Manchester in the toilet the other day. I’m in the toilet with the saxophone. I was. It’s absolutely mad. I don’t want to upset people. Oh Jesus! And they’ve got all this weird shit coming out of the toilet. It’s ****ing mad, man. I can’t go anywhere without the sax. I’m not sure if it’s healthy or not but I just can’t help it. 

4 West featuring Benn Clatworthy, Linda’s Lament (4:37)  

This is 4 West, Benn Clatworthy’s LA group, paying homage to his first influence, Harold McNair. With Benn Clatworthy on flute, Pablo Calogero on clarinet, Chris Colangelo on bass and Jim Paxson on drums. It was recorded in 2002. 

And here are Drew and Clatworthy on the differences between USA and British jazz. 

Martin: “Jazz essentially is an American art-form anyway. It came from the black American negroes and developed from there. It’s probably the only thing that America has that is truly original. It’s an indigenous product, you know? 

“The excellent players over here, in a lot of cases, are mostly the equal of our American cousins. People like John Coltrane, Charlie Parker, and latterly Michael Brecker, are unsurpassable. But as far as the regular standard is concerned, people like Mornington Lockett, Steve Melling, Andy Cleyndert, Nigel Hitchcock, they give nothing away to the Americans.” [This, you’ll note, is the line-up of Celebrating the Jazz Couriers] “I have had the fortune, as I said, of playing with a lot of fantastic American musicians. I’ve also played with a lot of rubbish as well. While they have the best, they have a hell of a lot more of the worst. What tends to be the thing, when they come over here because they have an American accent everybody automatically assumes that they’re great players. And I’m here to tell you that a lot of them are, of course, but a lot of them are not.” 

Benn: “I think people come out to listen more here than they do in the States. You actually get better audiences here. I think most American audiences would say that too.” 

“Are the musicians better in the States? Is there a qualitative difference between the musicians?” 

“I can’t say that, Mike. I mean between you and me…” 

“Off the record.” 

Off the record, I prefer American musicians. I prefer their attitude. I prefer their groove. I mean Martin Drew can play a medium tempo groove on the drums like an American, but you can’t find half a dozen people in England who know what that is. Although there are some great musicians here, man. I’m just a ****ing saxophone player. There’s great musicians here, man. Can we cut all of this out, because it’s just not fair.” 

Ronnie Scott forewarned me about Nina Simone. 

“She worked at the club once or twice before we fired her. She’d always been difficult. That last time, I was away in Australia. It was in January. She’d been in the club about a week or so when I got a call from Pete King, my partner, who said, ‘she’s driving me mad. I’m going to have a nervous breakdown’. So I talked to him about it and it appears that what she was doing – she’s got a very big following, a cult following, and the place was packed every night – was she’d turn up twenty minutes after she was supposed to go on, and she’d walk through the crowded club with a fur coat and a Tesco’s shopping bag, and she’d put her bag down, play for quarter of an hour and pick up her shopping bag and walk out. That was it. We were getting quite a lot of complaints and when I came back it was my job to answer them all. But what can you do? So I just said to Pete the best thing you can do is get rid of her. Unfortunately.” Ronnie added, ‘She’s not playing with a full deck.” 

Martin Drew chipped in with, “All the lights are on but there’s no-one at home.” 

And then everyone in the dressing-room was running with the metaphor. 

“A few sandwiches short of a picnic.” 

“One sausage short of a full English breakfast.” 

I have to say, this was not my experience of Nina. Not on the first occasion I interviewed her anyway. Let me play one of her songs and then I’ll tell a story about it. 

Nina Simone, ‘A Single Woman’ (3:33)

In December 1977 I went to see Nina Simone play at the Drury Lane Theatre (I was living in London at the time) . She appeared quite vulnerable and fragile. And she sang the song which you’ve just heard, which I didn’t know. It moved me deeply. Flash-forward to April, 1991.  Nina Simone herself is on the line from Amsterdam, talking to City Life’s jazz person to publicise her forthcoming appearance at the opening night of the Nia Centre in Hulme. I mentioned the song. It was something about a woman looking back over the love in her life, and then questioning her memory and wondering if the love ever existed. Does she remember the song? And Nina sang it to me. Naturally, my editor (Mike Hill, back then) headlined the piece My Baby Just Sings For Me. 

Not many of my interviews from this era have been preserved. It was to do with the economics of the cassettes, which we used in that primitive stage of technology. But I hung on to the Nina Simone tape. That moment is preserved on tape. If you’ll bear with the terrible sound quality… 

Excerpt from tape: [singing] “…’I can’t remember when, the house was full of love. But then again it might have been imagination’s plan to help along a single woman.’ It’s called ‘A Woman Alone’ [sic] and I learned that from Frank Sinatra.”  

[Chris Lee says that a friend remembers the Nia concert as the gig of a lifetime. And it was so good because Nina was energised to be playing before a predominantly black audience. I know, I said, I was there. Indeed, she was ecstatic. She constantly mentioned about “playing to my people”. The story goes that a gang of black kids stood guard over Nina’s Mercedes car parked outside. This is almost a certainly an urban legend. Who tours in a Mercedes? If anyone did, we agree, it would be Nina. (Actually I couldn’t remember the car brand so I made up the Mercedes bit. It honours the spirit of the story. Any posh car will do.)]  

Nina acted more to type in our second interview together. It didn’t start well. She was clearly very tired and grumpy. “I’ll give you ten minutes,”  she barked. As clear as I can recall, it was her 1999 UK tour and Nina was booked to play Bridgewater Hall. The promoter had booked her into a health farm in Amsterdam (she was living in Amsterdam) in order to get her into shape for the tour. She was hating every moment. City Life had been offered an interview, but at the very last minute. I’d already filed my piece, which explains why there aren’t any direct quotes. City Life #375 contains an overview of her career instead. But, rather than miss the opportunity, I decided to go ahead with the interview and talk instead about Nina Simone And Piano, one of my favourite albums, and then hawk the piece to Mojo, the music magazine, for consideration as a Buried Treasure, a regular column devoted to forgotten classic albums. 

The plan was actually very successful, although Nina was so grumpy and uncommunicative that all I could salvage was a single quote. I said,  “Would you rather be remembered for ‘My Baby Just Cares For Me’ or…” Nina finished the sentence: “…I’d rather be remembered for Nina Simone And Piano!” 

And that was all it took. I penned my Mojo piece and it was gratefully received. And there was a happy sequel, because someone from Sony read Mojo and assigned me to write the sleeve-notes for the 1999 CD reissues of Simone’s RCA back-catalogue. It was all thanks to a heavy-handed prompt to a grumpy prima donna. It’s a fatuous remark anyway. For one, ’My Baby Just Cares For Me’ is a song, and Nina Simone and Piano is an album, so it’s not comparing like with like. And ’My Baby Just Cares For Me’ is a fantastic performance and one of the all-time wow factor records. Note I say performance, rather than song, because the song is a poor thing in the original by the Tommy Dorsey Orchestra. No, it’s what Nina does with it, and her vivid mix of delight and glee and incredulity. The song captures the euphoria of falling in love like nothing else. The piano solo is irrepressible to the point of jokiness. And that distinctive bouncing, descending riff is nowhere in Tommy Dorsey. Nina borrowed it from Count Basie. Let me refer you to the piano introduction of ‘Everyday I Have the Blues’, track one, side two of  Count Basie Swings, Joe Williams Sings…

Count Basie, ’Every Day I Have the Blues’ 

Actually, as the late Joe Sample told me in an interview in October 2008 for Metro, “Count Basie probably learnt that riff in the twenties when he got stranded in Oklahoma and found his way to Kansas City, where he joined the Bennie Moten Band. But I’m sure the riff was created in the late nineteenth century when black pianists discovered the blues.” 

It was her debut studio session, in 1958, and Nina was never so happy again. Nina Simone and Piano is something else. Let’s face it, romantic euphoria is always going to appeal more than remorse and self-laceration. But I don’t think I’ve heard anything quite as affecting as ‘I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes)’. The piano playing reminds that Nina was one of the best.  

Nina Simone, ’I Get Along Without You Very Well (Except Sometimes) (4.37)

Everyone will tell you that that song was written by Hoagy Carmichael. It’s not quite so straight-forward. Hoagy Carmichael wrote the tune, right enough, but the words come from a poem that was handed to him on a scrap of paper, at Indiana University sometime in the late twenties – my source are the excellent liner-notes by John Edward Hasse for the Hoagy Carmichael box set The Classic Hoagy Carmichael: “The poem was signed only J.B. The song was copyrighted with the credit line, “Words inspired by a poem written by J.B. (?)” Finally, the author was located in Philadelphia – Mrs Jane Brown Thompson. Dick Powell introduced the song on national radio, but Mrs Thompson died the night before.”     

I’ve heard the song a few times by different people from Duritti Column to Margaret Whiting (it’s her version in the Hoagy box set), but I haven’t heard anything quite so profound and poignant as Nina’s version. As with any song she essays, Nina’s is the definitive version. [Lorraine Barnet begs to differ: she likes the Nina version but holds out for Frank Sinatra.] 

And I love the use of parenthesis. ‘(Except Sometimes)’ is the ultimate qualifying statement and should be borne in mind every time anybody, including myself, makes a blanket statement. 

Oh, like ‘Nina Simone was a reasonable woman (except sometimes)’. 

[“Well I don’t want to over-run. Shall we save B.B. King for a later occasion?” I say to ready agreement. The following is a draft of how it would have continued.]   

‘B.B. King is the most modest of bluesmen (except sometimes)’. 

   

I only included B.B. King because I liked having an internal rhyme in my talk title, and also because I’m an inveterate name-dropper. 

I interviewed B.B. King, rather late in the day – in June 2009, for Metro – and it was very hard to get beyond the “aw shucks” humility he adopted as a public facade. His charm was damn near impregnable. For example, “A bandleader once told me that if he see one person patting their feet or nodding their head, that’s the person he would play to all night.” And, “We in the country in Mississippi love to do one thing. We love to shake hands with people. I hope I’m able to shake your hand.” Just occasionally the mask would slip to give a glimpse of the ego which drove B.B. from sharecropper to Boss of the Blues. One obstacle to prevent me shaking his hand, for example, was that he was only playing arenas on that trip. I hinted that the natural habitat for the blues was surely a club. “Well I always thought that I was good enough to do like some of the other people of the generation today. I thought I was good enough to play in the big arenas like they do.” In other words, if U2 can do it, so can B.B. King. 

On the other hand, is there another artist who could hold audiences of 25,000 upwards whilst playing in a wheelchair? Let’s remember him in his youthful prime with ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’, the second ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’ of the night (though a different song).   

B.B. King, ‘Every Day I Have the Blues’ 

I was in the habit of painstakingly transcribing all my interviews, which was strictly  unnecessary, when only 300 or so words would appear in print. Sometimes, not wishing to waste my effort, I would send transcriptions to my friend, Pete Bocking. Pete Bocking was a jazz guitarist possessed of a sharp wit and ready imagination. He was soon sending back imaginary interviews which accurately parodied my interviewing technique, 

Here, courtesy of Pete Bocking, is my interview with J.S. Bach.  

MB: Well Joe, you are the foremost Baroque composer of all time. 

JS: Well Mike, I wouldn’t quite put it in those terms. I mean Buxtehude is more my idea of baroque. I don’t like to be pigeon-holed. I like to think that my music has freer, more modern elements. 

MB: Yes, you have certainly done more to establish the dominant seventh with a flattened ninth chord than any previous composer. 

JS: Are you a musician? 

MB: No Joe, but I’ve got all your albums.   

Pete pinpoints the most common question I get asked by interviewees, “Are you a musician?” or “Do you play an instrument yourself?” Never, never own up to playing an instrument to a musician. Besides, my pedestrian piano playing is of no interest to anyone. And, in the interview situation, anything which distracts from the subject must be avoided. It’s the iron rule of journalism, and no ‘except sometimes’. 

The Gondwana Story: Retro and Future Jazz Sounds

A small jazz label doing adventurous work is as newsworthy as dog bites man, I know, but to the roll-call of the worthy independents ASC, Babel, Basho, Candid, Edition and F-Ire, can be added the name Gondwana, which came about when Manchester trumpeter Matthew Halsall sat in at Matt and Phred’s jazz club, and decided that the talent on display needed an outlet. 

Releases so far include four from Halsall, and three from saxophonist Nat Birchall. “When I first saw Nat play,” recalls Halsall, “he was playing ‘Journey in Satchidananda’, the Alice Coltrane tune, and I was [thinking], this guy’s exactly on the same wavelength as me.” The affinity between the two musicians is strong. They regularly appear on each other’s records and tend to draw on the same pool of players, including harpist Rachael Gladwin, bassist Gavin Barras, and pianist Adam Fairhall, giving the label an identifiable sound - the modal explorations of Miles and Trane reflected through Halsall and Birchall’s own deep feelings - and titles such as Birchall’s Sacred Dimension suggest a ready classification: Spiritual Jazz. 

Halsall has no problems with the term. “I studied at the Mahareshi Meditation School, so I did a lot of meditation and studied a lot of philosophy and Indian meditation, and I’ve also studied Buddhist meditation, and Nat’s partner teaches Yoga, and he’s into all sorts of spiritual philosophies. So it definitely is a part of who we are as individuals, and it’s become part of the sound of the label.”

And, bucking the trend of the jazz economy, the venture is gratifyingly successful. “We haven’t lost a penny yet,” says Halsall. “We’re in profit on every single record and we’ve had enough profit to continue making future releases. The first ones from Nat and me made enough to get our money back and make another record. And then each time we’ve made another record it’s made more money, so we’re getting more and more money each time. Apart from slowing down, it seems that sales are increasing on every release.” 

It helps that the music is immediately attractive: serene, quietly yearning, marked by restraint and space. Halsall’s latest, Fletcher Moss Park, embellishes with the textures of flute and harp and string quartet. If it sounds bucolic, it may be because the pieces were composed in nature’s bower: “I like to make music in different environments, so I’ll make music in the park, or in a nice pub somewhere. Wherever I take my laptop, I’ll make music there.”

Hence, the title of the album: much of the music was actually conceived in Fletcher Moss Park, Manchester’s most prominent botanical garden and wildlife habitat. But does he favour the nicely cultivated garden or the wilder bits?  

“Both,” says Halsall. “Some of it was written in the top bit where the cafe is, because I like a good cup of tea, so I sit in the cafe area looking down on the botanical gardens, and then I’ll also write down in the wilder bits further up.”

Halsall elaborates on his working methods.”I tend to not think about what I’m creating. I just go with my gut instincts. If I’m liking the sounds of the notes I’m playing on the piano, or on a laptop than I go with it. Each month I’ll have ten tracks that really stand out and they’re the ones that I’ll take into the studio. They’re just ideas at that stage, bare melodies, bass lines and chords. Luckily, there’s always about six that work.” 

If I have a criticism, it might be that the music offers a gloss on Miles’ Kind of Blue, and Kind of Blue is now more than half a century old. Halsall concedes the point and explains: “The artists I listen to, they always started in something that was either of the moment or [distilled from] past moments, and then they start to mould it into their own thing, expanding their influences and listening to new music. I’m still finding my way with various technologies and all sorts of new techniques with my trumpet. I want to make a stand-out record that people will look back to like they did with Miles’ electric, groundbreaking projects. But I’m not rushing to make the new sound because I want it to be really special when it comes out.” 

Halsall’s trio project, utilising trumpet, electronics, Rhodes keyboard, and drums, is more obviously bound for the outer limits, but has so far not been recorded. However, the latest release on Gondwana, marking a departure for the label, does offer a future sound of jazz, and a crackling, vital future sound of jazz too. 

The rhythms heard on Fanfares by GoGo Penguin didn’t exist fifty years ago. Demonstrating that the piano trio is the most forward-looking vehicle in jazz today, Chris Illingworth’s rippling arpeggios vie with unexpected and spooky noises that can be traced to Grant Russell’s bass more by elimination than anything. Remarkably, Russell emulates electronic textures with just a bow, reproducing the shock without the synthetics. Drummer Rob Turner can turn rhythm on a hairpin, dividing and then sub-dividing the beat into discrete parts for spontaneous counterpoint. He is a marvel. Esbjorn Svensson is a reference point, yes, in the invigorating use of diminuendo and crescendo, but Queens of the Stone Age are in there too (their showstopping cover of ’Song for the Deaf’ is not included, alas). 

Techno and rock influences abound in a sound that is essentially simple, melodically-based and brimming with positive energy. How Manchester!  

Shirley Collins 2009 Interview

Shirley Collins’ half century as a heroine of English folk music is an incredible record. That wistful, pure voice is the sweetest sound to have emerged from the sixties Folk Revival, and, during her recording career (1959-1978), she anticipated most of the really worthwhile developments in homegrown roots music. The occasion was the eve of Folk Roots New Routes, a five-day festival at Southbank Centre, curated by Collins. The story was for Metro (London edition). Dateline 18.3.08

SC: Is that Mike?

MB: Yeah.

SC: Hello, how are you?

MB: Pretty good, thanks. not bad. I tell you, I’m doing this from home.

SC: Right.

MB: I’d rather do it from home than the office. But sometimes the reception is very poor when I come to do the transcription. Let’s see. Can I ask... (sorry about this, it’s a bit unprofessional really), I’ll ask you a sample question, see if you come through OK, and if you do, all’s well and fine. If not, I might have to decamp to the office, which about a ten minutes cycle ride.

SC: Alright. Let’s hope it works.

MB: well Shirley, how did you get the offer of the Folk Roots New Routes Festival. How did you get the gig?

SC: Well about eighteen months ago I gave a talk at the Purcell Rooms. It’s more than a talk, it’s a show, America Over the Water, which is based on my book, America Over the Water, which tells of the field trip I made in 1959 in the Deep South with Alan Lomax, the American folk song collector. I’ve written a show about it, with an actor and with music and with pictures. And they just liked it so much at the Purcell Room, that James [Beith?], who’s the booker, offered me this whole series, which is fantastic.

MB: Excellent. It’s a sort of Meltdown thing, is it?

SC: It is a sort of Meltdown thing, yes. Yes it is. It’s a generic title now isn’t it for...?

MB: You following on from Morrissey and Elvis Costello and Robert Wyatt, I think.

SC: Fantastic. Oh, and Patti Smith, of course.

MB: Let’s not forget Patti.

SC: Yes, I’m in great company.

MB: Shirley, I’ll see if it’s playing back OK, and I’ll ring you right back.

SC: OK. Bye.

...

SC: Is everything OK?

MB: Yeah, you’re coming through loud and clear. So, let me see. The festival is named after the album you made in 1964 with...

SC: With Davy Graham, yes.

MB: The title seems to indicate that you were aware of the importance of what you were doing at the time. That’s an album which begs the word ‘seminal’.

SC: That’s right. And it still holds up when you hear it today.

MB: I think so.

SC:DIt still sounds fresh to me. I mean, when I made the album with davy we weren’t aware that we were making a seminal album. We just did it. Although Davy was experimental anyway, with his influences of North African music and Indian music. It just worked somehow. I mean, it shouldn’t, on the face of it. Align that with English music and American mountain music, and it shouldn’t have worked. Although, in a way, the modes are the same. And in Davy’s hands, of course, he was a genius. It did work. It caused a lot of fuss at the time. Some people liked it, and some people didn’t. But it’s held its own over the years. It just seemed an appropriate title for the Meltdown series, because it’s music that’s going back to its roots but also looking forward as well, with some of the musicians I’ve chose.

MB: Yeah, it’s really appropriate. But Davy and nnot many of the sixties generation are playing. So is the emphasis very much on the emerging generation?

SC: No it’s not. It seems to be an equal share between older singers that I like, but not big names. I mean, they’re big names in the folk world, and I’ve got people like Linda Thompson on. And well established people like John Kirkpatrick, who is just the greatest of all the people who are doing folk music in the country as far as I’m concerned. But he doesn’t get to play big venues often, you know. And I think it’s about time he appeared on a bigger stage. He’s such a wonderful musician. I don’t know if you know him.

MB: I do indeed. He’s great.

SC: He is great. He’s great in his own right. And people like Martin Wyndham-Read. Again, a beautiful singer, but doesn’t appear on big stages. I just like their music better than I like the music of a lot of other people. So with The Close of Play concert, I actually have chosen people I love, people whose music I love. And I’m thrilled to bits that we’ve got Ned Oldham coming over from Virginia. Now he’s Bonnie Prince Billy’s brother.

MB: My researches hadn’t gone so deep actually, but that’s interesting. And then there’s the connection with Alasdair Roberts who did an album with Will Oldham.

SC: Alasdair is just lovely.

MB: Yeah, in fact... Let me tell you. I was kinda bounced into this piece just yesterday - I’m officially a freelancer. Didn’t give me that much time to prepare. But they did set up an interview with Alasdair that very afternoon, so I spoke to him yesterday.

SC: Oh good.

MB: He’s a very deep chap isn’t he?

SC: He certainly is, yes. I’m quite superficial.

MB: It’s just that he made me feel a glib, shallow journalist.

SC: I know. He slightly has that effect on me as well. He sent me a book that I found almost impenetrable. But don’t put that in the article. The point about him is that he has his own way of interpreting traditional music. I wasn’t ever sure how successful it was. I liked it and I liked him, but I think with his new album, The Amber Gatherers, which is all his own songs. They’re so absolutely beautiful. What somebody in Mojo said about it (which I can just ssee it, it’s on the programme now), it says ‘The whole album seems like some beguilingly beautiful charm against modern evils’. And I think that really hit the spot. But I have a lot of time for Alasdair anyway, so I really wanted him on. And I’m glad he’s on. And he’s sharing his concert with a new singer, Ian King, who is just making his debut album. What’s lovely about something like this is that you can give somebody new, who’s just starting out, an opportunity as well. So he’s supporting Alasdair. It’s incumbent on us older singers anyway to encourage the young, and help them out when you can, because I know how tough it is to get started.

MB: It begs the question, is folk music a pursuit for the young rather than the oldsters?

SC: Well it is. When you look at it, it was always the music of both young and old because it was passed on from older singers to the younger ones, who in their turn become old, you can’t help it, and the music just gets passed down through generations. But I think what’s lovely about the young singers is they’re so talented a lot of them. They’re really fine musicians as well, and they just bring a lot of energy and a new life to the songs, and it’s really important that they are encouraged.

MB: Do you see something of the youthful Anne Briggs in Lisa Knapp or, I don’t know, the youthful Robin Williamson in Alasdair?

SC: There’s a couple of tracks on Alasdair’s album, it does sound a bit like Robin Williamson. Riddle Me This sounds a bit like an Incredible String Band song, for instance. Close your eyes and you can almost see Robin there. But he’s not copied that. I think it must be come sort of Celtic thing that comes through perhaps... It may be that he hasn’t even heard the Incredible String Band. He’s not as whimsical as they are, or they were. He’s a strange combination is Alasdair. He really feels connected to the earth and to life, and he’s down to earth as well. There’s something quite magical about him, I think.

MB: Medical?

SC: Magical, not medical (laughs).

MB: Sorry. Oh dear. It’s all coming back. He said ‘archetypes’, and I said ‘architecture?’

SC: This is going to be a fascinating article (laughs).

MB: I said to him that you represented the bucolic, English, Copper Family tradition and did he represent some dour, dark Scots alternative? He demolished the argument in one line: Love, Death & The Lady.

SC: Yes. the Copper tradition is... What never quite gets said is that there’s such a dark heart at the centre of English music. I mean it goes back centuries and it’s not all sweetness and light. There’s some very, very heavy stuff going on. The traditional ballads, to deal with all the big subjects, and in a very straightforward way. He’s quite right.

MB: He’s right, but do the Coppers represent an alternative strand? Bearing in mind that you called your talk A Most Sunshiny Day? Pleasant and Delightful, and all that.

SC: ‘A most sunshiny day’ is a quote from one of the Copper songs. And the lines are, ‘There’s many a dark and cloudy morning turns out to be a most sunshiny day’. And it comes right at the end of the show. It’s a plea really to the young singers to make sure they listen to the proper traditional singers, in order to carry the true tradition on. Not just a version of it but the real thing. And I do feel optimistic about it, so there’s that little optimistic line in there.

So that’s why that’s there. Although the talk gets quite heavy as well. It deals with the first World War and it deals with how impoverished people were, the working classes in the countryside, and yet they managed to... They still had this spirit to keep this beautiful music going. I think it’s a huge achievement. But they didn’t necessarily do it consciously. It was just there as part of their lives. And I think the country would be a bit better off if it was stll part of people’s lives. I think music is so superficial these days. And this music just isn’t. And when you listen to... I’m doing the gypsy talk as well, talking about the gypsy music. It’s just stunning stuff. And again it is mostly old singers, the field recordings, because that’s how it was when the music was being recorded in the field. They sing some of the ancient ballads. They sing ancient carols, and they sing songs about what’s happening to them, and what’s happening in the countryside. The English tradition and the gypsy tradition exist side by side and share as well. The songs would have been given from one to the other, and then back again as they travelled to the work.

MB: I guess an important event was when Topic released Voice of the People a few years ago. That brought all that source material back into circulation.

SC: It did. Absolutely. I can understand if a lot of people find that difficult to listen to, because it is unaccompanied, and it is largely older voices, but if you listen past that, what you get from the songs is the truth of them, and the experience of the singers. The whole of their lives are in those songs. I just think that it’s a miracle. I just love the stuff.

MB: The siixties counterpart, was it called Folk Song of Great Britain?, that Topic again issued. I’ve got some of those too. There seems to be a shift of emphasis. Whereas in the old collection the singers represented an archetype - the farm labourer, the fisherman - listening to The Voice of the People the character of the individual singers comes across, and there’s more importance placed on the biographies of the individual singers.

SC: That’s true, and I think that’s the right way to go. Whenever I sang a song that I learned from the old singers I always said where I got it from. I always mentioned their names, because I figured that a lot of these people had really hard lives, coming from the labouring classes as they did, they had had such tough lives, and they had hadd their stuff neglected and despised for so long, and they’ve been exploited all their lives, you know. The least we can do is to honour them, I think, even by just remembering their names and where the stuff comes from. It’s just so important to me.

MB: So are a lot of songs that we know as ‘trad’, if people can be botherred to look, they have names attached.

SC: That’s right. If people can be bothered to look. That’s what I try and do, to encourage people to bother to find out. And you find out such fascinating things about the people as well. It suddenly comes alive, because it’s not come from a book or, ‘I don’t know where this came from, I just sing it’. There so many stories to be found out about the people and their lives as well, which is why I’ve written the talks really. It just brings it to life. It’s not just a dry history, it’s a living history.

MB: I guess the link in your case ws the Copper family. Bob Copper, perhaps?

SC: Yes it was Bob. Because when I was 16, and I lived in Hastings. My grandad was a gardener on a big estate there, and I listened to lots of... There were folk music programmes were on the radio at that time. Country Magazine and As I Roved Out. Both of which programmes had millions of people listening to them. And they played field recordings of the British Isles on them. And I just loved this music. And it was the music I was hearing at home as well from my grandad and my mum and my aunt. And when I was 15 I decided I wanted to be a folk singer and I actually sent a letter to the BBC to tell them. Idiotic as it sounds, it’s a great stroke of luck because - and this is back in nineteen-fifty-something - the BBC were then recording folk music. They had several collectors who were going out in the countryside and were recording what was left of the music. Someone at the BBC handed my letter to Bob Copper, who was recording in Suffollk and Surrey. And when Bob came down to Hastings to record the fishermen in the old town, he had this letter in his pocket and he just came up and knocked on the door, and there he was one day. He recorded one or two songs from my mum and from granddad. And then he asked me, because I had written the letter, and I said, well I’ve got to really impress this bloke, and I sang a Scottish ballad that I’d learned, and I think I tried to sing it in a Scottish accent (laughs). Bob luckily saw past this bit of flim-flam. He understood. He always had a great sense of humour, and he had teenage children of his own. Just a couple of years before he died Bob actually gave me his worksheet for that day, a copy of it, in which it said ‘Shirley Collins. Occupation: schoolgirl’.

It was lovely because it started a lifelong friendship with Bob, a friendship I kept up over the years, right until he died. An incredibly vaulable part of my life. So what started out as one of those silly things to do - to write to the BBC - turned out to be a great blessing.

MB: I was going to ask your opinion of Vaughan Williams and Percy Grainger, those guys. Did they emasculate the music when they made it suitable for singing in middle-class parlours?

SC: Well in a way they did. It is strange. I mean, I love Vaughan Williams and, of course, he collected so much stuff in Suffolk and Surrey, and he adapted a lot of the folk tunes from hymn tunes, because he was compiling the New English Hymnal at the time. And of course his greatest hymn, the Bunyan hymn, To Be a Pilgrim, he set to a tune that he had recorded in Sussex from a Mrs Verral. In the Hymn Book it says, ‘Tune: Monks Gate’, and Monks Gate was the name of the village that she lived in.

But he had such an ear for this music as well, and then he was able to re-interpret it in his bigger things, like Dives and Lazarus, and The Lark Ascending and the Greensleeves Suite. I don’t think you can fault Vaughan Williams. He did understand it. But Percy Grainger and Sharp, in their arrangements... Percy Grainger, for me, he did lighten it too much. He didn’t seem to understand that this is really quite profound music, with profoundly beautiful melodies, and he just did things like In An English Country Garden and stuff. A bit too slight for me. And people like Benjamin Britten didn’t understand traditional music. They can’t do the right thing with it. While Sharp collected this stuff, and thank god he did, otherwise so much would be gone because the generation that was wiped out in the First World War was carrying those songs, and a lot them would have died with them. So what Sharp did was absolultely invaluable. But in a way it felt like he was collecting for the middle classes. And when you hear a Sharp arrangement it is drawing-room stuff. It has very little to do with the people it came from. But his work was invaluable.

MB: Is this a state of affairs - if it doesn’t sound too grand, which I guess it does - but a state of affairs you were trying to rectify when you made Anthems in Eden with classical guys like Christopher Hogwood and David Munrow?

SC: Well I mean it’s robust music. And early music instruments are robust, and just slightly off-key sometimes. It just felt truer to me than piano or string arrangements, or flute. I can’t bear flute with folk song. It’s just the kiss of death, I think. I just love early music as well, you see. It’s another great passion of mine. And I just love the sound of those instruments. And I always thought English folksong should be accompanied by something more appropriate. Those seemed to me to be the right instruments. And, of course, my sister Dolly was absolutely so thrilled to be able to score for those instruments as well, and musicians like David Munrow. It was such a wonderful thing for her to be able to do. And for me to be able to sing with them as well.

MB: It’s such a distinctive sound: your singing, Dolly’s arrangements. Those were wonderful albums.

SC: Oh thank you.

MB: And I suppose that side of your interest is represented by Catherine Bott in the Purcell Rooms recital.

SC: Yes it is. Catherine and I have been friends for a long, long time, and at one point in the eighties at one of the early Meltdown things at the Royal Festival Hall, Jim Lloyd who used to introduce Folk on 2, he decided to give Anthems in Eden a new airing, and Dolly played and because I couldn’t sing at that point, Catherine sang the songs. And she understands them so beautifully. Although she’s a classically trained singer she can par herself down to just singing the songs as simply as they should be sung. But absolutely beautifully. I was just so thrilled when she accepted. She’s pretty famous and I just think it’s lovely for her to take this little step aside from her career and do this. But as I say, she’s done it, just as an act of friendship really. And she loves singing the songs anyway. I’m looking forward to that evening enormously.

MB: That should be good.

SC: And she’s got a little flute organ as well, and she has a wonderful accompanist. That’s all working out...

MB: They’re Dolly’s arrangements.

SC: They’re Dolly’s arrangements, yes.

MB: That should be good. I was going to ask too about your own experiences in the States. I must catch up with the book. But I have some of those Southern Folk Heritage records. It must have been absolutely extraordinary to hear the congregation belting out Jesus On The Mainlline, what was it, in Mississippi, in 1959?

SC: It was. The whole experience was remarkable and fascinating. You just get to hear so much contrasting music as well. Because while you’ve got the black congregations, as you say, belting out that stuff, and it’s really powerful. On the other hand you’ve got the white Baptist singers up in the mountains singing their hymns, which were based on the Scottish lining hymns. Their music comes across as so powerful, but so mournful and almost tormented,. And then other white religious singers, like the Sacred Harp singers. They were doing everythiing through a so-fa version and then they would launch out into the words, and that’s such a big sound as well. It gives me goosebumps still when I hear it.

MB: People are just catching up with that music now, post Oh Brother Where Art Thou, but to have been there in 1959...

SC: It’s a unique experience, and of course we discovered Mississippi Fred McDowell, the bluesman, which was... I can still see Fred. He’d been picking cotton all day, and we’d been recording some older musicians in a clearing where their tumbledown shacks were, and Fred came after work, and he just walked into the clearing carrying a guitar in his dusty old dungarees, and just sat down and started playing just unbelievably beautiful blues. We spent three days with Fred and his wife, and the people there, recording blues and spirituals from Fred, and children’s games, and music from other people that dates back to the Civil War: the fife and drum bands, the black musicians played. It was just... When I think about it, it just seems like a miracle that we found the people we did. I can talk about it endlessly (laughs).

MB: Ever since I noticed your name on those records, I wondered if, after the tape stopped rolling, did you sit around swapping songs?

SC: I did up in Virginia, and especially in the Ozark Mountains. There was a place we went through called Timbo, which was just almost as if the pioneers were still... Well, the pioneering spirit still existed there. In one house, the house of Oscar and his wife Ollie Gilbert, the men and the women were separated. The men all went off into one room, and I was sent off to join the women. When food was served the men ate first and the women ate when they were finished. It was quite extraordinary. But it worked in my favour because Ollie had an absolute fund of Ozark balld songs, and of course they’re all songs from the British Isles, that were taken over by the settlers. And I recorded Ollie for a whole afternoon and we did it. We did swap songs. And she was often amazed that I knew her songs, but in different versions, you know. We got on absolutely like a house on fire. She was just wonderful. She was in her sixties then, I guess. It was a great time. But Oscar... Oscar was a fine singer too, and a fiddle player. But he had murdered seven people in his lifetime.

MB: What!

SC: Over women and whiskey. Yes! And he was out of jail again, and had quietened down, I guess, because he’’d gone blind. Surprisingly, because he was a big and wild and aggressive man, but when he sang, he was so gentle. These gentle songs. Although he was singing a gentle song about Cole Younger and the James Boys, who were atrocious outlaws.

MB: it’s interesting that when you got back from that trip... Did it have the effect of reinforcing your English roots? There’s not a trace of Americana anywhere.

SC: You’re absolutely right. I did obviously have one or two American songs that I still loved and still wanted to sing. Because I love the Appalachian music. It is beautiful stuff. So with Davy, for instance, I sang Pretty Saro, which is from Tennessee, I think, and I sang Boll Weevil Blues, which we recorded from Vera Hall. So there was still part of me that hadn’t quite let that go, but after that, it was English all the way. And as it went further on I tried really to concentrate on the songs of Southern England. Because that’s where I’m from, and I understand them. Besides, when I was a young singer in the sixties and seventies, Scottish and irish music were just overwhelming everything else. It was a real struggle to be an English singer. But it was what I was, and it’s what I am, so I had to do it.

MB: Again, that situation is reversing now, I guess through the work of the Carthys, Martin and Eliza.

SC: Absolutely.

MB: What else? There’s so much. I’m never going to be able to use a fraction of this.

SC: I’m sorry. There’s an awful lot.

MB: There is, isn’t there? Well I suppose the obvious question, which you must be tired of people asking you, is will you ever start singing again?

SC: No, I don’t think so. I did actually lose my voice, and couldn’t sing, and still can’t really sing very well. I love the music too much to want to sing it badly. But what I can do is talk about it and... Especially with the talks. They’re about three topics that I really love. Are you going to be able to come to any of it?

MB: Well I’m based in Manchester. I’m strongly considering timing a visit around this. It sounds too good to miss.

SC: The America Over the Water talk is particularly good. I know we did a good show. There’s so much music in it, and so many wonderful pictures, and the story is just incredible really. If you did want to, you must let me know because I could certainly get you a complimentary.

MB: I might hold you to that. Thanks, Shirley. OK, we might as well call a halt, as we can go on for a couple of days and nights, and I’ve got a maximum of 450 words and Alasdair to fit in too. I’ve got my work cut out. But no, what a great thing. Well done and the best of luck with it.

SC: Thank you so much. It’s very nice, Mike. I just hope you get your piece done. I don’t envy you taking this lot down, I must say.

MB: The phrase, ‘embarrassment of riches’ comes to mind somehow.

SC: Anyway if it brings a few more people to the show, that will be fantastic. I really do think this is going to be a lovely week, and I think it’s going to be a bit of an eye-opener, or an ear-opener.

MB: That’s right. Again in that great folk tradition, you’re cutting across the generations.

SC: Not only that, but also to bring some people in who don’t get enough of a hearing. I know Eliza’s wonderful, but she’s so ubiquitous at the moment. You could hear her seven nights a week it seems to me, and other people are as good. I know Close of Play is going to be the most brilliant evening.

MB: You do well... Without wishing to appear condescending, but you do well to keep up because there’s such a tidal wave of emerging talent, isn’t there?

SC: (laughs) That’s true. I’m not sure I quite keep up, but I do my best. I love this music. It’s the thng that runs my life, so...

MB: And it’s in a fairly healthy condition right now.

SC: It is. It’s great, yes.

MB: Probably the best since your generation in the sixties.

SC: I think so. There’s just lots of vitality at the moment. That’s wonderful.

MB: Right, Shirley.

SC: Thank you so much, Mick. Erm, Mike. I really do appreciate it.

MB: I enjoyed our talk Shirley...