Moulettes are sexually deviant pagans, says Liverpool Echo

Word from the front: specifically Shepley spring festival, whose meagre springlike aspects are in immediate danger of being splattered by a wheelspin of muddy field. And yet what of it, I hear you say?

For Moulettes, who absolutely electrified the main tent on Friday night, recently got a review in the Liverpool Echo that they won't forget in a hurry.

Much as I enjoy watching Ruth Skipper, who bears an uncanny resemblence to Thelma from Scooby Doo, wearing a dirndl and playing a bassoon - or "doom stick" as she rather knowingly refers to it - the guy from the Echo was evidently even more overwhelmed.

"The review said we were sexually deviant pagans," she giggled, doom stick dangling. "And it wasn't even a busy night," added Hannah Miller.

Read all about it here and decide how much of it was going on in the head of the reviewer. For instance the, um, French horn (which is presumably what he thought the bassoon was).

If that doesn't pack 'em in, I don't know what will...

* You should really listen to this Moulettes song, Unlock the Doors.

* You might be interested in this interview with Moulettes' Hannah Miller from last year.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Guardian columnist Tim Dowling on Police Dog Hogan

First there was a kerfuffle with food that went on for an abnormally long time. My advice would be that if you go to a gig at the Halfmoon in Putney, eat somewhere else beforehand. Or take sandwiches: it would be the Halfmoon's karmic reward.

Anyway.

Hatful of Rain, who'd motivated my visit to west London on this occasion, turned out to be the support act, most of the audience made it noisily clear that it was there to see the other band and the other band, it turned out, was Police Dog Hogan.

I recognised at least one of them from the outset. Weirdly - though probably only for me - I used to work in an office with the mandolin player, Tim Jepson, and realised as soon as he bounded on stage that this accounted for the large number of my former Telegraph colleagues in the audience, most of whom appeared to be from the travel desk, if memory served.

On reflection, the weirdness was that I started this blog as a way of cheering myself up after leaving that paper, in part reasoning that I was unlikely to run into large crowds of people from it at folk gigs. So the end of that fiction was a bit of a moment for me. Folk is officially taking over the world.

On stage, Police Dog Hogan twanged impressively. There was a fiddle, a banjo and the mandolin, making the kind of noise that I would have travelled to hear. On purpose, I mean. There was also a niggling sensation that I'd heard of them, even if I hadn't seen them before.

Their age was unusual: the youngest of them is 49. But what of it? Digital music means that each of us theoretically has instant access to everything ever recorded, so the exact location of musicians on the space-time continuum isn't as important as it used to be. Word.

There was also an unusual shimmer of affluence about Police Dog Hogan. The rich timbre of the voices, their apparently glowing health, a surprisingly well-to-do audience. Early on, the singer told a story about his housemaster.

Then I noticed Tim Dowling, who was playing a banjo and lurking by the stack - and the penny dropped. I'd read about Police Dog Hogan in the context of his Guardian column. I'd even subbed one or two of them during shifts on the Weekend section earlier this year (I can tell you that he writes to length and spells better than me). I hadn't met him because he doesn't work in the office. But at that moment the work/life implosion was total. Big soggy mess.

When I spoke to him a few days later, he said he didn't think he'd ever mentioned the band by name in the paper.

"The whole idea is that the column is about me. Some people say it's about my wife, but I try not to write about my neighbours or my colleagues, as none of it is really their fault. I have to pay my kids if I write about them, I think the band would probably like it if I included them more often and so would Proper Records," which distributes Police Dog Hogan's stuff. "But it would be very wrong to try to promote the band through the column."

Why?

"The column is about me - that's the schtick - and everyone else in it simply gets in my way. Eddie [the fiddle player, who is also a barrister] once said to me that he could see I was in a bind because the column is about how miserable I am and how things go wrong. So in order to write about the band, something would have to go wrong. I learnt quite early on, though, that I shouldn't refer to us in print as a 'middle-aged man band'. You should have seen the long faces when I turned up to rehearsal after that one. Also, none of us has ever asked our work colleagues to a gig. I don't think I want to know what mine think of Police Dog Hogan..."

I didn't like to mention the Telegraph travel desk. By the way, that's the two Tims there. In person Tim Dowling, right, is hairier and more robust-looking than his byline picture suggests and he has a soft New England accent that comes in and goes away again a bit like a distant signal from a short-wave radio. He's funny, but you probably could have guessed that.

So what's Police Dog Hogan's story?

"It started with four guys - not me. It was the mandolin player, the fiddle player, the guitarist and James Studholme, our lead singer, who works in advertising. The first time I saw them was in a pub called The Metropolitan, in Westbourne Park, and I thought they were really good. I mean, everyone else on at that open mic night was a male singer/songwriter, all James Blunty, and I felt like I was doing the band a favour slightly by going down there. But actually they were good.

"I had a banjo that I'd been given for my birthday. My sister had given her partner one for Christmas and I'd just held it that day." He mimed speculatively holding a banjo. "I learnt to play off the internet. There are people out there whose greatest joy in life it is to teach you, through the internet, how to play the banjo. So I started with a style called frailing banjo, which is when you pluck the string with the back of your finger, and now I can do a bit of Scruggs style as well, though not very well. I do what the song requires."

He confirmed that it is, indeed, possible to learn nearly anything off the internet these days. "I just bought a £30 clarinet and am trying to learn that now. I'm not popular at home - it sounds awful.

"So having liked the band, I quite passive-aggressively inserted myself into it - I don't think it was a very popular idea at the outset. I was a friend of James's but they had this thing they called 'prairie dogma'. There were rules, like the dogme film rules. And bringing me in broke the first rule, which was that there were only supposed to be four members. All the other rules have been broken now as well: I think the last one was 'no electric guitar' and now we're a seven-piece with an electric guitar.

"We decided quite early on that it would be no fun unless we took it way too seriously. I mean, unless you're getting better and trying to get people interested, what's the point?"

Things have gone well in the intervening four years. They've toured, recorded two albums and an EP, done a few festivals and been sufficiently well-received to be invited back. "Festivals are good because you're playing to people who've already paid. But at the time of day when we're on, we're generally playing to an audience holding coffee cups. We'll be at Maverick for the fourth time this year and I think they've moved us half an hour later on each occasion. Our aim is probably to play at dusk - dusk comes very late in summer."

They get a lot of views on YouTube due to their  excellent videos. This has a lot to do with James Studholme's advertising business having an international film production wing. "He has an eye for people who are just starting out," explained Dowling.

In between the gig and the interview I was lucky enough to receive a Police Dog Hogan tea towel  through the post.

There it is in the kitchen at The Glamour Cave.

"There's a guy called Mik Artistik who's claiming that I got the idea for the tea towels from seeing his stuff at the Grassington festival last year. But James - who knows about these things - says that they're entry-level merchandising."

Are they aimed at women? I wondered about their targeted marketing when I saw this.

"If you go into the record tent at festivals you'll see that it's mainly women buying the merchandising. If I go in I'll buy CDs or nothing - I've usually just gone in just to see if our CD is there. Anyway, everyone has to do the washing-up."

The words on the tea towel are from a wacky religious leaflet that Dowling found on a New York subway. "Wherever it says 'Police Dog Hogan' it originally said 'Sister Catherine'. There's a whole American genre of leaflet with boilerplate writing like that."

So what about the band's name?

"Ah. That story has never yet been told in a way that the listener enjoyed."

Sure enough, it was quite complicated. But the upshot was that Eddie the barrister had once told them what was at the time an excellent story involving a police report. It featured a character called PD Hogan, who first cropped up when he was "retrieved" from a van and was later, mystifyingly, described as "vocalising". Finally it said that PD Hogan had bitten someone, at which point it became apparent that PD was short for police dog. Um. Unfortunately the problem with retelling the story, though, is that you know he's a dog from the outset because that's what the band's called - and if you didn't you wouldn't be asking. It's like an anecdote with a death wish.

Is this the first band you've been in?

"I was in three or four at college. What's weird about it now, though, is being in that dynamic with grown-ups. Being in a band when you're 20 is basically one huge argument: loads of egos and loads of clashing. We spent more time talking about what we were going to call ourselves than we did playing.

"Everyone now has that same male fragility, but everyone is simultaneously very appreciative of that and we hardly ever have arguments."

Hardly ever?

"Well, we take it in turns to throw our toys out of the pram but that's part of the fun. Everyone's afraid of going on stage and looking like a dick and that worry can manifest itself in worrying about whether a song is working or not. Maybe it's working in such a way that the audience wouldn't necessarily know that it's finished. So you and the crowd could be left at the end, in silence, just eyeballing each other over the footlights."

You're talking about the last time you started an argument, aren't you?

"Yes."

So what was the best gig you've done?

"Probably playing the Borderline just before Christmas. It was at the end of our tour with All the Fires and we got the gig by hassling the venue. When we played in Cornwall All the Fires topped the bill because it was their home turf but in London we led, it was a great time of year and there was the dawning realisation that we now have real fans who aren't related to us and who we don't know personally: people who travel quite a long way to hear us play, wear a T-shirt and know the words. Also, the Borderline's a wonderful venue. It makes you think "Where next?'"

And what about the most memorable gig?

"Ah... That's got to be the time we played at Maverick and we thought, since we were all staying the night in Suffolk, we'd do the open mic at The Fleece in Boxford. We thought we'd go there and blow them away because there were so many of us. But it was in the middle of the World Cup and there was a screen with an Ecuador match going on behind us. You look out at the crowd and you think 'I'm sure they're here to see us'.

'Anyway, there was a quiet moment when just the banjo part was playing. And suddenly this massive, drunk crowd leapt to its feet." He mimed an entire crowd leaping to its feet, shouting "YESSSSSS!" simultaneously, faces contorted. It was very convincing.

"There was just a split second of thinking that they liked my banjo."

What do the kids think of the band? He's got three sons, aged 14, 15 and 18.

"They're a little bit mortified. Obviously they're not in a position to think that it's cool. But in a way they do like it - because they've been to festivals as a result. At Cornbury, for instance, they got access-all-areas passes by mistake and basically went off to stalk all the people there who they'd heard of."

* Catch Police Dog Hogan at Bearded Theory, Wychwood and Maverick this summer, among other places.

* This song, Gone Away, is lovely but I couldn't get it to embed properly from YouTube for some reason.

* You can follow Tim Dowling on Twitter @IAmTimDowling

* If you particularly enjoyed this post you might also be interested in Geoff Lakeman: folk patriarch and newspaper man or A necessary outbreak of journalistic self-loathing.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Wilful Missing seeks drummer for maternity cover

Poking around on the web I came across this podcast last weekend, which drew me because of the interview with ahab but kicked off with something else rather striking.

Wilful Missing, it turns out, are a Bradford band whose music has been picked up by TV - they've had four songs on Waterloo Road - and while in the US this would be enough to make your professional career (check out the part in that interview about getting one song on Grey's Anatomy), in the UK this has simply meant slightly larger audiences at their gigs, which are quite rare as the band all have day jobs.

Also Wilful Missing are looking for a drummer because Ruth Viquiera is off to have a baby.

"It's been a bit of a revolving drum stool, really," said Albert Freeman, who plays bass and flute. "We had two male drummers, then a drum machine, which we used to call Catherine. In 2007 we found Ruth, who's been a stalwart of the band ever since. She designed all our artwork as well as playing.

"So including the drum machine we've had two female drummers and it's been great having a female member of the band. Ruth's provided a bit of balance and perspective, made the band a bit easier to be in. So who knows? Maybe we'll get lucky and find another female drummer - but I realise that we might have to settle for a man this time."

Albert said that they hoped Ruth would be coming back eventually, but who knows?

So, practicalities. Four of the band live in Bradford and one in Hebden Bridge; and they have a permanent rehearsal space at the Kala Sangam centre in Bradford.

"We don't gig really heavily because we've all got day jobs and the band has to fit around family life. I work for Bradford library service, Sam Kipling works for the Environment Agency, which is how come we've got a song about potash. Ruth works at Leeds Metropolitan University and Sam Lawrence makes Uilleann pipes for a living. When I met him he was at university but also apprenticed as a pipe maker.

"We're between 29 and 40 years old and technically we're looking for someone tight and creative: we'd like to have someone who can have a creative input into the songs. It's important that we all get along with each other but, also, we've never had a drummer with a car, which is kind of hard to believe because you'd think with that amount of kit it would be important. So having a car would be a bonus.

"The most technically complicated song we do for a drummer is probably Powerful Pill."

There's a studio version of it here. And the whole of their most recent album can be heard here.

"In terms of influences, the other band we all like the most is The National. We also like Fionn Regan and Bob Dylan. We've been played on Radio Two and Radio Six a few times and we went to London once, about four years ago I think, on tour."

If you're interested you should contact Wilful Missing through their website or on Twitter @wilfulmissing. Ruth's baby is due in a week or so and they've got one audition lined up already for next week, so don't hang about.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Hatful of Rain and The Hobbit himself, Martin Freeman

Jamie Freeman had just finished his set supporting Hatful of Rain at the Green Note, and there was quite a lot I wanted to ask really: what with him and his wife, Stevie, running the Union Music Store on Lewes, which is a shop - the kind that people travel to visit - and a record label. Hatful of Rain's record label, in fact.

Then I noticed with a rather uncool start, that there was an extremely famous actor standing at the bar, deep in conversation and wearing a tweedy jacket.

This is always a tricky moment for me. Like some kind of partly reformed junky, I used to work on several newspaper diary columns and am therefore potentially completely shameless about pestering people I've only seen on TV in pursuit of a funny anecdote. It's a habit I'm trying to wean myself off, the better to reintegrate myself back into civilised society. So I coped with the increased heart rate by thinking something along the lines of "Sherlock Holmes, The Office, national treasure, The Hobbit... Oh fuckety fuck. What's his name...?"

"That's my brother, Martin," said Jamie, helpfully.

Sorry for staring. That must be weird. Does he have hairy feet like a Hobbit? (Perhaps I was gabbling slightly.) Being his brother, I suppose you'd probably know...

He replied that veiny feet ran in the family. "Like a map of south London."

Anyway, that was sufficiently bizarre to satisfy my Pavlovian craving for celebrity, especially as I was assured that Martin Freeman wasn't a folky. "More of a soul boy really." Also he was having a night off from being famous.

Anyhow.

Hatful of Rain were marvellous. I had an inkling they might be after I tried to go and see them last Thursday at the Halfmoon in Putney but was unable to hear them properly over a shouty crowd that was there - unaccountably - mainly to see someone else. I'll save that story for another time...

Lyrically they're very strong, as you might expect from a band that chose such an arresting name. Seeing them mentioned on Facebook, a friend suggested that it could be a tribute to Del Amitri, which didn't sound very likely to me, but did have the unintended effect of eliciting the truth from Philip the bass player: it's from a Tom Waits song, which is obviously much cooler.

Chloe, the singer and lyricist, has an iconoclastic turn of mind, as well as a day job as a midwife. The latter led to a great story about one of the other band members phoning during working hours only to be told: "I'm sorry, I can't talk now. I'm practising mending perineal tears on a fake vagina." There was nothing about this gig that wasn't memorable.

When I say iconoclastic, I'm thinking of the bold taste in frocks...

(Thanks to Alex Pape for forwarding this picture, which is far better than anything I could wrangle out of my camera phone.)

... also the knack of turning a great phrase. A good way to make a bad man worse jumped out and stayed out.

And then there are the songs that sound as if they're just waiting to be covered.

But they also have a knack of picking excellent covers themselves. So we had Willin' by Little Feat, Gillian Welch's Caleb and White Freightliner by Townes Van Zandt.

All in all I can't recommend this lot highly enough. They're extremely classy and have excellent back-up in the form of Union Music Store. It was Jamie and Stevie Freeman who made the video for Way up on the Hill (top) that caught Bob Harris's eye. And I had a really interesting conversation with Stevie afterwards about how people are better at listening to things when they're also watching something, that led me to wonder again about the role that graphic design plays in the music industry these days. It's Jamie's background and it also came up in relation to Keston Cobblers Club the other day.

By the way, Amanda Abbington, who stars in the video for the lovely Exit Song (directly above), is a professional actress and Martin Freeman's girlfriend.

And inevitably, as I headed off towards Camden Tube station a bus sailed past wearing a big advert for The Hobbit that took the form of Martin Freeman's face. And, yes, it was heading for south London.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Ben, Josienne, The Young'Uns and Navigator Records

Two bits of news.

Firstly, I understand that the frankly marvellous Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker - for whom the expression "I don't usually like this kind of music but..." could have been coined - have been taken on by Navigator records for the purposes of their new and third album, to be released in July and called Fire and Fortune.

Navigator will be doing marketing, manufacture and distribution. I asked Ben how that came about?

"We met someone from Proper who was interested in distributing the new album. The two ways Proper would distribute it were if we were to self release, or get it released through Navigator... So we gave the CD with an introduction to Navigator, heard they weren't interested, then a couple of days later they called back and asked to meet up..."

What changed their minds then?

"They hadn't listened to it, then they listened to it..."

Yup, that would do it... There's an album launch in July at The Forge in Camden. Get them while they're hot etc.

And the second piece of news is that The Young'Uns, who I saw at Kings Place the other Friday and who made me laugh particularly hard after a long, long week, tell me that they are about to go professional. What does that mean, I asked David Eagle?

"We're all kind of giving up our jobs. Mike is signing up as a supply teacher, Sean will do his story telling and work in schools on a freelance basis, and I'll be doing freelance work too." David does radio work.

As luck would have it, The Young'Uns are also signed to Navigator, so did they have any advice for Josienne and Ben?

"Signing to Navigator is great for profile but you have to sell quite a few albums to make it work for you financially. They should make sure they read the contract and understand what the deal is. But that's great news for them."

What are the practical advantages of being signed to Navigator?

"Exposure, publicity, radio play, media coverage, prestige, complementary groupies..."

But the terms are not especially favourable for the band?

"It depends what you want. If you're as committed and as active as Lucy Ward then I'm sure it worked out brilliantly. But we were part time. It was still a great thing for us though."

It sounds to me as if what The Young'Uns learnt was that they needed to go professional in order to make the most of their Navigator deal.

What's next?

* The Young Uns are on tour at the moment. Check out their website for dates. You can also tweet them here and if you do, it's important to only talk to David, as Mike will then get an annoying ping on his phone every time you send a message but will be unable to do anything about it...

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

The Destroyers lose their front man

I was very sad to hear, on Genevieve Tudor's Sunday night BBC radio show, that The Destroyers have parted company with their charismatic front man, Paul Murphy. Here he is, interviewed at last year's Cambridge folk festival (while the Olympics opening ceremony was going on on TV - and presumably somewhere else in reality - in the background).

Although the band had previously existed as an instrumental group without him, The Destroyers and Paul Murphy were together six years and the combination was mesmerically entertaining, for anyone who missed it. There was something about a bloke with a microphone who sounds like a pirate, wearing a fez - among other extraordinary headgear - and telling stories with his whole body through the medium of song. That Paul was at least a generation older than most of the band gave a sense of breadth and liberation rarely encountered. He made them unique.

 

Here is what Paul said on his website. "I want to let you know, if you haven’t received our recent statement to The Destroyers’ mailing list, that I have parted company with the band. This has not been an easy decision, then separation seldom is.  Needless to say its been  a wonderful journey over the past six years and a privilege that we received  such great energy, appreciation and support.

"I’d like to say a personal thank you to audience members everywhere who helped fund our work, by coming to gigs, buying merch, Tshirts and badges, spreading the word and pledging towards our Hole in The Universe album; to the promoters who hosted us, to the reviewers, the radio and TV presenters, and especially for me,  those who sang along with such passion. As songwriter that was a wonderful accolade.

"I wish my talented partners well and [would be] happy to see them keep the name alive."

The Destroyers issued a similar statement on March 1 on their Facebook page, which I missed because Facebook seems to be becoming increasingly idiosyncratic.

Since neither side of the split gave a hint about what went wrong, a source close to the band said by way of further explanation: "Basically I think the working relationship between Paul and the others was pretty strained for a while and ended up breaking down bit by bit over a long period and they've reached the point where they don't want to continue like that.

"It's a massive shame of course, as they produced some brilliant work together, but as with all bands the amount of hours put in never add up to the financial return and if it gets to the point where it becomes hard work between personalities then something has to change if anything is going to continue. It's the end of an era for that collaboration but personally I hope that after a period of working separately all the problems will heal themselves and we might see a return to it... but I wouldn't expect anything in the near future."

Like my source there, I hope they work out their differences because Louis Robinson, The Destroyers' tall fiddle player, said that the band isn't looking for another front man - they'll be spreading out Paul's previous duties between existing band members - and they were a winning combo, a rare and exhilarating beauty.

The fact that all concerned are behaving with such consideration towards each other gives me hope that they'll sort it out.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Bob Dylan in Crouch End

I heard a great story the other day about Bob Dylan in London's glittering Crouch End, which I'm aware now - as the result of a friend from Crouch End groaning and saying "Not that old chestnut again" - has been doing the rounds.

The tale, as told to me by a genuine pillar of the local community, runs thus. About 20 years ago Bob Dylan was mates with Dave Stewart of Eurythmics, who owned and ran a recording studio in Crouch End called The Crypt. It has since been sold to David Gray, who in his rather dull way has been trying to have it converted into flats.

Be that as it may, Dylan apparently tried to get to the studio from an airport once by taxi. But instead of being taken to 145 Crouch Hill, which is the location of this rather wonderful building containing the studio,

he was dropped off at 145 Crouch End Hill,

which makes a fork in the road with Crouch Hill about 50 yards away. Dylan - I was told by my pillar-ish friend - rang on the door, which was answered by the lady of the house, whereupon he asked whether Dave was in. As it happened, the lady's husband was called Dave but had popped out to the shops, so she invited Dylan in and gave him a cup of tea. When her husband returned she greeted him at the door with the words "Bob Dylan's here to see you."

Boom boom tish!

It's just about teetering on the edge of plausiblity, isn't it? Isn't it?

Someone friendly sounding called Anthony Lerner answered the telephone when I rang the Crypt. "Aha!" he said, when I mentioned Dylan. "I think I know what story this is going to be."

He was right. "I heard it from the man who was Dave Stewart's chief sound engineer at that time," he said, promisingly.

There was nothing for it, I reasoned, but to go down there and knock on the door of 145 Crouch End Hill to ask the people who lived there whether it was true. Surely, even if the original occupants had moved, they would have mentioned it to the present owners while they were trying to sell them the place? That would nail it. After all, the story has many of the qualities of an urban myth while also being possibly the only one I've ever heard with the potential to be properly checked out. None of your crocodiles-in-the-sewers type will-o-the-wisps here.

Also, frankly, I thought it would be fun.

So on a chilly afternoon about a week ago I found myself trudging up and down Crouch End Hill, which is in an area where they sell things like this,

presumably because the locals like to buy them (don't get that kind of tat in Bethnal Green). Imagine my disappointment - and cold extremities - then, when I discovered that while Crouch End Hill has two schools, a church and several shops, there are very few residential properties and definitely not a number 145.

This made me sad.

So sad that I had to retreat sadly to Banners restaurant nearby, of which I had heard good things, for a beer. It has this mural on the outside.

If you look closely you can see that the little figure in the window is a representation of Bob Dylan and there is a bubble coming out of his mouth containing the words "Don't you know who I am?" (Now say that out loud in a Bob Dylan voice: "Don't you knoooow who I aaaaam?")

"Oh yes," said one of several waitresses within. "That's because back in 1993 Bob Dylan was here one evening and he wanted booze. But we're only allowed to serve alcohol with food, because of our licence. He didn't want any food, though, and he said 'Don't you know who I am?'"

Which is always worth a go, I guess, even if you're not Bob Dylan.

"He was sitting at this table," she explained, leading me toward the back of the restaurant, which was about half full of customers chatting to each other, to show me this.

Which is a plaque on the wall that is slightly easier to read in this.

Although for the avoidance of doubt the inscription reads "Bob Dylan sat at this table, August 1993". This was, I was informed, during the same visit when the incident with the taxi and the wrong Dave took place.

While I was having my beer there was a gentle discussion for my benefit between two other waitresses who were on their breaks, about the nature of urban myths in the area. "For instance," I was told, "we're always overhearing people saying things about this place that just aren't right... The other day I heard someone say that it was owned by Nik Kershaw, when they were just confused because the owner - Juliette Banner - used to go out with Andy Kershaw."

Which is worth knowing, I suppose.

Anyway. I can recommend their Nordic beer which is strong and served extremely cold. But not so much their quesadilla, which was much more like a big old pancake than I was expecting.

I also set to thinking how weird it must be to be Bob Dylan. I mean, I have difficulty sometimes with the idea that I did some of the things I did 20 years ago. Imagine what it must be like having people making stuff up, mythologising the things you did - or didn't do - simply because they enjoy the idea of you - as if life weren't confusing enough already.

And because I believe in doing this stuff in a certain way, I also put in a call to Dylan's publicist, a man called Tom Cording at Sony music, though for all the response I got, Cording himself could be a mythological figure.

However, I haven't given up hope and am thinking that if I send him a link to this blog he - or someone else - may be moved to forward it to Bob Dylan to see if he has any idea how this story got started?

Stranger things have happened.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley