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They're getting fewer and further between, I hear you cry (well, in my head I do) and you are correct. This year has been a whirlwind throughout - since my last Cropredy, Peggy and I have strutted many boards the length and breadth, the Johnnies have begun a slight return, duos with Pete Scrowther, a surprise one with Chris Leslie (!) and solo gigs have been my lot; Birthday Bashes (Peggy's and mine), Blues Bands (just the one with Neol Davies, Roger Inniss and Clive Bunker at Sheringham) and Folk Festivals from Norfolk to Massachusetts have distracted me, dear reader, from the creaking Remington (typewriter, not rifle .. oh all right then, word-processor). This year, after Peggy frogmarched me onto a USA-bound airliner, To be continued asap
Lady P, in lighthearted moments around the house, currently hums a somewhat satirical version of Cover of the Rolling Stone, a Dr Hook song. This was prompted by her discovery, no doubt thanks to a typesetter's error, that my face was beaming out of the cover of Warwick Folk Festival's programme in the exalted company of Seth Lakeman and Altan.
She is further reinforced by the appearance of Dai Jeffries' article on PJ in the new issue of Rock'n'Reel magazine with attendant name-on-the-cover situation. I have, of course, nothing but the highest praise for said magazine, which deals in what Richard Thompson describes as "un-popular music" – all things rootsy, quirky, bluesy, and particularly, folk-rocky. A top-notch publication.
'A Night Off with Peggy & PJ' finished its current tour a fortnight ago at Twinwood Aerodrome, near Bedford – home not only of the Glen Miller Museum (for it was thence that the WW2 swingmeister-in-uniform left the ground for the last time) but also of Jim Driver's excellent Rhythm Festival. It's the second time Dave Pegg and I have been on the bill (the Dylan Project played there last year). This year's star turn, for me, was Dr John's Band. A particularly honourable mention for his understated, tasteful, pause-laden guitarist, John Fohl. The Dr himself did a bit of that dancing without really moving very much, so beloved of the American South. The sun blazed down – this just a week after Gareth Turner (melodeon, pub) arrived with a pump to remove 24 inches of rainwater from the cellar at PJ Towers.
The sun, despite logic and precedent, continued its miraculous blazing from the Sunday of Warwick Folk Fest, where not only did I enjoy a fab slide guitar workshop (a classroom full of Muddy Waterses, anyone?) but an hour's solo spot in the Bridge House Theatre, and a jump-up on mainstage with my ancient colleague, Steve Tilston (it's the friendship that's ancient, not Steve – we met in Leicester in '67, when he was the Young Pretender to Mark Newman's crown of 'Top Leicester Guitar Folkie').
Cropredy week dawned sunnily. The Oxfordshire/Northants borderlands dried steadily through the week, rendering the festival more feasible with every steaming day. On the preceding Saturday we met up with Tom Kohn from Rochester, New York, and on Sunday collected Pete Scrowther from Banbury bus station. Tom and Pete subsequently replayed unwitting outtakes from 'High Fidelity' – they're both archetypal vinyl-heads. We passed the stricken Mill Arts Centre, whose theatre had suddenly become part of the inland waterways system due to flooding the previous week (a reminder of the 'curse of the Johnnies' – Little Johnny England was due to play there the day after the flood struck).
Pete Scrowther and I then attended three of the pre-Cropredy warm-up concerts – excellent entertainment as always. On the Tuesday, we spent the evening in the company of BBC Radio Oxford in the garden of the Great Western Hotel at Aynho, Oxfordshire. Three Scrowther/Wright songs were recorded and were broadcast on Saturday night's BBC Oxford 'Download' programme. As anyone remotely interested was probably at Cropredy, it's a good job that some bloke invented 'Listen Again' on t'internet.
The sun continued throughout the finest Cropredy I can remember, although I didn't actually take to the stage myself. That's me above, chatting with Maart Allcock who is no doubt wondering why I have two empty glasses in my hand. The picture below shows me holding another empty glass in the company of Chris Leslie and (sitting) Pam McShee, Jacqui McShee, and Mark Ellen (editor of The Word magazine) and his companion.
Despite not playing this year, I found I had more than enough to do at the bar. A big 'thank you' to everyone who said hello – I'm sorry about the slurred speech, just a bit of sunstroke ...
Despite extensive trailing on radio and advance publicity filling the printed media, upon awakening the sight of that unmistakeable white glow behind the curtains yielded ten seconds of intense childish excitement. Then "Ta-Daaaaa" – behold, the wonderland of winter.
The tradition in Nether Bagwash is to use any but the lightest snowfall as an excuse for a day off. But the three or four inches of the very best construction snow – the sort that creaks – that settled upon us overnight did, in fact, seal the exits to the world long enough to force Lady P to work from home. Log fires were stoked and Pickwickian scenes straight off dodgy Christmas cards sprang to mind.
The second part of the village tradition is that the Day at Home should contain some Healthy Walking and use of The Sledging Field. Having purchased (not without an amount of self-interest) a spendid digital camera on the occasion of Lady P's last birthday, I took it along on the Healthy Walk, snapping away like 35mm film was going out of style – which, of course, it has – while trying not to get snow in the little speaker-holes from where we hear the reassuring plop of its virtual SLR mirror.
As an aside, to get us to purchase electric cars, apparently they will have to seduce us with an artificially-generated "vroom-vroom" sound system. But I can remember being told at junior school how much leisure I would have to deal with in my life, all that sitting about with fizzy drinks and food pills dispensed by personal robots when they weren't whizzing around the house cleaning it and so forth. And look what happened there.
Having somehow disposed of a rather splendid wooden toboggan in the last house-move, I merely hovered at the edge of The Sledging Field as a non-combatant. A couple of horses gazing at the frantic activity before them seemed to shake their heads and roll their eyes heavenward – "Humans, what are they like?"
The day passed all too quickly, Lady P's work at the computer screen was abandoned for a couple of hours' more Healthy Walking, warming soup was supped, photographic evidence downloaded, the ritual Let it Snow by Aaron Neville, and Donald Fagen's Snowbound played (rather too loudly, I fear) from the Christmas 1998 tape from Texas, (thank you again, Hans).
Warming to the overall Christmassy theme and weather, the tape, now Benny Goodman's Jingle Bells, now White Christmas by, according to Pete Hillier, Bong Crisby, I located a small Christmas pud with attendant jar of brandy butter. Leaving aside any thoughts of Bernard Matthews (don't get me started), I leave you with Tony Bennett's version of Merry Christmas, cocktail piano tinkling away like fairy lights...
A Wery Merry Christmas, dear readers, and Gawd bless us all at this happy time.
What ho! We are now in full-blown summer fecundity round these parts – on a quiet Tuesday afternoon you can hear the gentle straining and creaking of stuff growing.
Lady P has had a couple of days off from her employment (good timing) and we are taking full advantage of the current balmy spell, moving outdoors for such functions as are possible (eating, dozing, some light gardening). Last Saturday's extended totter through fields and lanes ended in a carefully synchronised horsefly ambush – three of the little rotters, five bites, one clegg dead (ritually disassembled and stamped into the dirt), one maimed; two interrupted (and therefore lesser) bites on the left hand.
But my right hand was deeply bitten by the one that got away: for two days it resembled a boxing glove ("Ladies and Gentlemen, a big hand for PJ ..."). On the third day – the full Morris On rehearsal as it happens – my hand miraculously deflated.
Due to the recent lack of rainfall the grass has stopped growing, causing a noticeable hush to descend upon aforementioned Tuesday afternoons. The sturdy green Qualcasts remain in their sheds and outhouses, and the overall look of the landscape takes on Mediterranean hues – shades of string have replaced the more usual lush greens.
Much overdue, the green shoots of recovery are finally bustin' out all over this quiet corner of Warwickshire. Nether Bagwash rings with the sounds of sturdy green Qualcasts freshly oiled for the year's first mow. The village postmistress sports a lighter, brighter print frock beneath the stout cardigan as she pedals purposefully past.
Spring is here, the curate's bicycle glints in beams of low sunshine that dances with tiny flies, distant sheep bleat, pigeons coo, birds twitter – the full wossname. And it's the first evening the fire isn't lit.
Colonel Briggs walks more jauntily, further enhancing his resemblance to Wilfred Hyde-White both in appearance and mannerism. The cricket pitch will be enthusiastically rolled and tended by red-faced village lads, and I, dear reader, am tilling bits of the Earth's crust and biffing the Walkman to learn the Morris On show.
I'm on the road with Fairport Convention and all's very well indeed. Apart, that is, from a case of Van Buttocks, an acknowledged medical problem caused by a lack of upholstery depth, causing a compression of soft tissues and a squaring-off of the lower bunular region.
The symptoms of Van Buttocks become acute after about two hours; as I write, we have been on the road for ninety minutes so all our bottoms await the onset with a resigned dignity as befits our chosen wossname.
I think I've finally got the hang of Meet on the Ledge – such as singing the correct verse and not just standing about enjoying listening to it. It's a big responsibility, that one, but I enjoy playing Simon Nicol's Stratocaster (a clear winner in the recent World's Heaviest Strat tournament – it's apparently machined from a solid block of plutonium for the sustain, you know).
I'm greatly enjoying my opening half-hour set. Most audiences have been responsive and discerning – meaning that they laugh at my jokes. Being joined onstage firstly by Ric, for Peter Brown's Fancy and then by the rest of Fairport for Lily of Barbary has been musically transcendent on several occasions.
Singing my stuff with just an acoustic guitar in large rooms would, I'd thought, be very daunting. However, it's made easier by the PA sound and onstage monitoring being so good ('thank you' to Rob, Geoff, Buff and t'other Rob for their nifty work). In fact, it's more like playing to a huge folk-club audience that I can't see very well. I wonder what the raffle prizes are? More than a box of Cadbury's Roses, I'll bet.
As an aside, being on tour together has given Peggy and me a chance to start assembling material for the duo gigs we will be doing in June and July of this year. The show will be called 'A Night Off With Peggy & PJ', a title which I think gives you a clue to the nature of the entertainment.
I've run out of time for now: But I hope soon to have time to tell more of the glamour of travelling Fairport steerage-class, and respond to questions I've had about my album Hedge of Sound and the fictional Warwickshire village where I live, Nether Bagwash.
Phewee! It's been a busy few months. Recording a CD obviously involves the creation of the raw material – the songs. In my case, over half the album already existed – a first solo album tends to deal with stuff that's 'on the table', material gathered over several years. The recording process itself tends to spark off more stuff, and, with a bit of luck, the resulting album hangs together artistically.
With music completed and mixed, cover artwork done (thanks Andy), paperwork filed, CD manufactured and that fabulous (we hope) first listen after pulling off the shrinkwrap, you tend to forget that it's only just begun. But it's now the hard part starts – the sales and promotion.
The recording process began a couple of years ago with some exploratory backing tracks at Blue Moon Studio. These featured just Brendan Day on drums and Roger Inniss on bass. Both of them were with me in the Steve Gibbons Band line-up a decade ago.
I've long admired and enjoyed Brendan's sense of fun, funk and musical wit. In fact, most of the drummers I like best place the backbeat 'rumpside'– a fraction late – which links the 'feel' of people such as Ritchie Hayward, Jim Keltner and Dave Mattacks. However, Brendan has a more 'unlaid-back' edge which I thought would drive the rockier songs. I also asked him not to stint on the tom fills (listen to his barmy play-out on 'Skin').
Roger, besides being one of the world's nicest blokes, is a supreme bass technician as you will hear on 'Wait for Whistle'. He is also a tear-jerkingly emotive player – just listen to his melodic lines on 'Madeleine'.
Anyway, back to the recording. The initial half-dozen rhythm tracks were transferred to hard-disk in my home studio. I toyed with them sporadically over a period of months interupted by a Little Johnny England tour of the USA and some Scandinavian festivals with The Dylan Project. however, much of my free time was eaten up by my house move last spring.
Bouts of emergency DIY and ad hoc forays into the burgeoning new garden meant that even after the move I had little time for my studio. However, once the tyranny of summer's labour-intensive horticulture had calmed down, I returned to the nascent 'Hedge'. I started building the tracks in earnest, calling in expert help from people whose records I have played on, such as Anna Ryder, and from band colleages like Tom Leary and Gareth from the Johnnies.
I had heard Jude Rees of Isambarde, a young band from Warwickshire on their CD, and jammed along with her a couple of times in pub session. You don't hear many blues licks played on the oboe – she brought along a bombard (a more para-military ancestor of the oboe but with even less sense of responsibility).
Jude and her bombard formed the leading edge of 'the Bagwash Horns,' a virtual brass section whose other members, dear reader, are a multitracked me playing tenor and soprano saxes (a pragmatic legacy of my soul band days), whereas her oboe lends a dash of pastoral classicism to the riffs of 'Skin of Teeth' and 'Random Acts' The horns may only just be audible, Jude, but that's the way I like it!
Pete Scrowther came up with a rattling seventeenth-century yarn that needed a folkier approach – a thousand thanks to Fairport's Ric who diligently worked on 'Barbary Lil' (which led to 'Peter Brown's') and Fairport's Dave who offered to fling some bass at 'Lily' (parts of which I find totally beautiful), which then led to a much busier bass part for the electric morris of the 'Bagwash' tuneset (parts of which I find totally deranged!).
At this point I must mention the glaring lack of accreditation in the CD's sleevenotes for D Pegg's bass on 'Bagwash' – I increasingly have trouble with my, er, memory, and lack of... wossname... er... absent-mindedness. It's an age thing. But plying DP with curries – two so far – should eventually make amends. Sorry mate, you have every reason to be very proud of those notes (in the right order and everything).
I can't offer enough praise to everyone who played on 'Hedge' but a special mention goes to Jonny Boston, a young jazz saxophonist from Northampton's wonderful Ginger Pig Band. This band has a very fluid line-up, never less than eight players – at least three horns, percussion, Hammond, glamourous chanteuses and so on. They play New Orleans-style music – jazz, funk, pop songs and more, all with that Southern 'bump and grind' feel. On a good night it is a glorious, slightly shambolic steam locomotive of a band for which I play guitar all too occasionally. Incidentally, Jonny has just released a CD, is doing gigs with his own band and plays very sweet tenor and soprano saxophone.
Further honourable mentions go to fiddle players Guy Fletcher and Tom Leary. Guy was sampled, reconstructed and shamelessly digitally spoonbent: Tom was rather bemused when I asked him to play some strange, slurred lines in seventeenth-century Arabian chamber orchestra stylee (he also bought me lunch and a pint at the Hollybush – thanks Tom, I'll get you one in at Christmas).
Finally, the mighty Scrowther himself, who occasionally visits UK for a quick duo tour with me, was pressed to a couple of vocals, the only remains of which are some world-weary "Oh well"s and "Never again"s on 'Electric Railway,' which is typecasting at its finest. The Glumster of Zurich is not noted for being a heel-clicking, whoopee-cushion kind of chap.
The bucolic field recordings you hear between tracks are of the sleepy Warwickshire hamlet of Nether Bagwash. The first is Saint Leonards' bellringing practice (Mondays, 8.15pm) abruptly ended with a significant slam of the famous churchyard gate. The second is a sunny evening by the fishpond (where honey is still for tea).
Closing highlights of the recording process were two trips to Port Isaac in Cornwall. Mick Dolan (Show of Hands' noiseboy) has a delightful studio setup there with wonderful views along the coast to Tintagel Head. Mick mixed the last Little Johnny England CD, 'Mercs and Cherokees,' and he is a top chap. Incidentally, he lives a stone's throw from my old partner-in-country-rock, Dave Penhale of The Flying Tortellinis).
The album's front cover photograph was taken by Stevie Horton and shows me lurking purposefully in a shotgun shack. Actually, it's my very own bike shed – it was once a lean-to but over the years has sort of yearned for a new, more southerly postal district. It was re-perpendicularised by myself (emergency DIY, see above) using wire, nails,vinegar and brown paper. Contact me via this website for details. And, yes, those guitars are actually sticking out of the hedge – none of yer Photoshop trickery here!