More than halfway through his set for the Green Note at The Old Queen's Head on Monday night, Richard Shindell said: "I would like to thank Steve Knightley for the loan of his guitar. He was supposed to bring my CDs from his shed to my gig in Wiltshire yesterday: he was supposed to bring them to the festival that I came from this morning.
"And he didn't.
"And he felt so badly about it that I felt bad for him for feeling so bad. We both felt very bad.
"So I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself. I said 'lend me your guitar for two weeks'."
Shindell, you see, lives in Argentina and for some reason or other had not brought an acoustic guitar with him despite it being his instrument of choice.
"And Steve said," with rising intonation, as one pleading for it not to be the case, "'Really?'
"I got a text message from Steve Knightley just before I came on stage. I was afraid it would say something like 'Don't use my guitar tonight'.
"So I didn't read it."
Ha!
* The pictures on this blog were taken by the very talented David Firn, who could be reached here, if you were interested in his work.
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At The Old Queen's Head in Islington, where he was doing a Green Note gig last night, he asked whether there were any Doctor Who fans in the house and, after receiving a slightly muted response from an audience of folkies wary of being hailed as geeks, explained that he was one himself, as is his daughter.
"Did you know that there's a project on Kickstarter to send an actual functioning satellite into space in the shape of the Tardis?" he asked.
"I've donated $300 because that's the threshold above which you get all kinds of loot: T-shirts, a blueprint of the satellite and - best of all - five megabytes of space on the Tardis's hard drive. I'm going to upload this song of mine about satellites. I'm going to do this because it's an excellent use of $300."
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Earlier this week a CD slid on to the mat at The Glamour Cave that soon began a career on my stereo, making end-to-end appearances. It's a debut and when I found the band in question was going to be at the Warwick folk festival I resisted posting about it then and there, thinking that it might be a bit more interesting if I waited until after I'd met them.
Tandem are a three piece - Dave Malkin on guitar (centre), Charlie Pell (right) on fiddle and sampler Ben Corrigan - although they've been presenting at Warwick as an acoustic two-piece: they'll be playing live with Ben later on this summer.
Initially they reminded me of Lau, but with interesting vocals - which identify them as being not from Scotland despite early indications to the contrary - and sudden excursions into a world of digital noise that seem not at all out of place despite the traditional sound it's built around.
It turns out the Lau-ishness is not a coincidence, as they once supported Lau.
However, they're young - in their early twenties - and Dave is finishing at Trinity music school in the old naval hospital in Greenwich imminently. When I saw them on Friday, sweating it out in temperatures that must have been soaring towards the high 80s on the Plaza stage, which is basically a concrete playground, they happened to mention that they should have met each other much earlier than they actually did.
"I had grandparents on my mother's side who were extremely eccentric," said Dave, over a moderate amount of luminous orange hallucinagenic cider. "They amassed a huge collection of mechanical organ instruments. They had two fairground organs, one of which we sampled for the album, a whole load of music boxes and gramophones, and about 7,000 shellac records. When they died I got the lot.
"Charlie's father is the last remaining mechanical organ builder in the country and he'd done some work for my grandad.
"Then my father's side of the family are publicans and their pub, in Whaplode Drove, was three doors up from Charlie's house. But we never met - and it gets weirder.
"We were at school together and still didn't meet: we were both at Spalding grammar school in Lincolnshire and Charlie was a couple of years above me."
A school concert after Charlie had already left eventually provided a catalyst for their musical relationship. These days they're both in London and had the album launch the Cutty Sark pub in Greenwich the other day. However, Charlie's family interest in steam gives him a legacy that could turn out to be useful for music festivals.
"We've got an enormous caravan that the whole family can fit in and we used to go out together to steam fairs and the like: until you've seen the Great Dorset Steam Fairyou haven't lived. On the last night they get all the traction engines in a massive line and they toot their horns at midnight. I believe it's bigger than Glastonbury."
And it may have been the hallucinogenic cider but when I asked Charlie to draw a diagram of the caravan he did...
From Good Stock is a subtle, intriguing and melodic debut. I'd urge you to have a listen.
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The launch of Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's wonderful Fire & Fortune at The Forge in Camden last night was one of those evenings with a little bit of magic about it. Not least for the support act, Samantha Whates, who - when she sang harmonies during the main set - had a crystalline voice that could have been Josienne's overdub.
Her own set included something that she said she'd written for Josienne's wedding a year ago. "It doesn't really have a title," she said later. "Although at the moment it's going by I Am A Tree. I always think songs are a bit like pets, in that once you've named them they are truly yours."
Since this one was written for Josienne and her mystery man - who until last night, despite having been to lots, I'd never seen at one of their gigs - I guess that makes sense. Name the song and it will be Samantha's rather than theirs.
"Yes. I am the mystery man, " the mystery man agreed. "I stay in the background and am mysterious. But this suits me in some ways because I can't bear to come to the gigs. I get too emotional listening to Josienne sing. I wish I didn't but unfortunately I do."
On the bright side, when he's overcome by emotion, it might not be immediately apparent to onlookers...
* You can listen toFire & Fortune here and then - bearing in mind that these early CDs may be worth a bit one day - buy your own copy.
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Ordinarily this wouldn't matter very much but I got the sense that he'd just finished another telephone interview and was therefore thoroughly warmed up, talking-wise, whereas my shorthand takes a while to crank into gear. I mention this because while we were out of sync he was saying some interesting stuff, so it's a shame that you'll be missing some of it...
I saw him and his Bad Shepherds - Troy Donockley and Andy Dinan in the band's present incarnation - at Folk by the Oak in 2011 and had the exact experience that he describes to me during our conversation: despite their performance being freighted with the expectation that it would be funny, I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the musicianship and impressed at how hard they were working to subvert my expectations. It was a beautiful afternoon and they played versions of punk-era songs on traditional instruments, including Uilleann pipes, with Edmondson on mandolin. Then they made me laugh harder than I've laughed at a folk festival before or since by doing a punk version of All Around My Hat with a lyric that ran like this...
"We used to do that version of All Around My Hat because I was embarrassed that people would want comedy," he explained. "But the more we took the funny stuff out, the better the gig became because the more people actually listened to what we were playing.
"What we're aiming for is joy rather than humour. People hear things at our gigs that they are vaguely familiar with" - they usually start with Anarchy in the UK - "and then there's a difference between what they are used to and what they remember - and it amounts to something different again. There's this great thing that happens at festivals: people come to us with an expectation that it's going to be shit and then we win them over. It's like fly fishing."
Edmondson as Vyvyan in The Young Ones is an edgy childhood memory for me that eventually shaded into warmth, though I never came round to Bottom, in which he worked again with his university friend Rik Mayall. "A lot of women say that," apparently.
There was, however, a level of hysteria to his television characters that bumps awkwardly against his present, fly-fishing orientated, media incarnation, in which he presents a TV show called Ade in Britain (see what they did there?) that follows him as he goes around the country being nice to people, and plays in a folk band. I put it to him that he may have turned into a codger.
"Have I got a codger in me?" he deliberated. "I think of a codger as someone who is full of their own self-importance."
Ah well then, we should define our terms. I think of a codger as a man of certain age who wears a hat.
"Well, I do wear a hat, I think the world was a better place when we all wore hats. I like looking at pictures of men walking to Wembley stadium in the 1930s, all of them wearing hats, and wondering why on earth we stopped wearing them?"
Did umbrellas become the cheaper option? Hats seem quite pricey these days...
"I like them because they frame your face, especially if you've got a head like mine that looks like an onion. I started wearing them to keep my head warm because I don't have much hair, but think that they frame my face and make my features look better."
And is tweed your jam? (I may have been encouraging the hat-talk.)
"I have a couple of tweedy flat caps and then a black one because I like to change my mood now and then. Also, you should wear a hat in this weather," he said as the temperature outdoors crept into the low 80s "to prevent your head splitting open like a tomato."
I've noticed that ordinarily when interviewers ask how you ended up being in a folk band, you tell them that it was an accident.
"It is slightly disingenuous to say that it was an accident. I have a history of enjoying folk. I'm in my late 50s and the pop charts of my youth were full of folk instruments. Rod Stewart... there was mandolin all over everything. And then the drama department at Manchester University had this pub we all went to that was an Irish session pub. So we'd go from watching a session there to the squat, where we'd watch punk bands wearing bin liners. And these kinds of music seemed very similar to me, equally thrilling."
Do you still find it thrilling?
"I love watching The Unthanks."
Well, yes. But I read that you don't relate to the bucolic side of folk?
"I don't quite understand the reason for singing songs about blacksmiths and jolly milk maids. It seems a bit anachronistic - unless it's a timeless metaphor that actually means something else." I've had similar thoughts myself,which set me off.
I waffled on for a while about how the act of recording music has changed its nature and how these days, because of digitisation, bands are competing against every other band that has ever existed rather than just the ones that are fighting to get into the chart that week. I mentioned the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury and how all the teenagers knew the words to their music. I may also have mentioned the coconut tree.
"I heard another brilliant story about Keith Richards falling off a ladder in his library," Edmondson giggled. "It was good not just for the idea that Keith Richards has a library... but that it is so vast that he needs a ladder for it.
"It would be interesting, though, wouldn't it, to find out what songs we'd all know if recording studios had never been invented? We wouldn't be able to listen to Jacques Brel, we'd be relying on whoever was keeping the songs alive by performing them.
"I don't know really what it means to be a young musician these days. Everyone is recording themselves all the time."
I ventured that all this recording may have elevated the role of the promoters and middle men. I mean, when everyone can record because the technology is no barrier to entry, the scramble becomes for other people's attention and it becomes much more important to understand the buttons and levers of the industry. Hence, perhaps, the number of musicians who are also graphic designers who have cropped up on this blog recently. Their trade - graphic design - is all about commodification and promotion.
However, being famous for something else is another way of getting a band off the ground, I suppose?
"I wouldn't recommend it as a way to become a musician: pretending to be a comedian for 30 years. Although the notoriety is kind of a plus, trying to persuade people that you mean what you're doing is difficult. Getting them to listen is quite hard: you wouldn't believe the number of interviews I do with people who haven't listened to us and never will."
How ambitious are you for The Bad Shepherds? Is there anyone in particular you'd like to play with?
"I'd like to get Andy Cutting into the band, though he doesn't know that yet."
Glad to be of service. I detected from reading your blog that you're not a massive fan of camping? For instance, you said that the Glastonbury festival smells like human excrement...
"Ah. That must have been from a few years ago. We didn't go this year, I just haven't got around to updating the blog much."
Good to see that you're really getting the hang of being a folk musician then...
"I don't camp unless I can help it because it hurts your bones. I'd go as far as to say it's bad for your bones. I wouldn't mind being in a big camper van but I really can't camp because it's so hard on the hips. People roll out those thin little mattresses... Ouch. When the kids were small" - he has three daughters with his wife Jennifer Saunders - "we had to pretend to enjoy camping. But I like hotels.
"What I do enjoy, though, at festivals is teasing people from the stage about the fact that they're camping. 'It was raining last night, wasn't it? It was really banging on my hotel window', that kind of thing. We've done a lot of festivals, this band, and we like to arrive a day early and then stay a day later, wobble around and get drunk. But we stay in a hotel nearby in order to do it.
"Glastonbury was like some kind of hippy refugee camp. You know, we used to get paid in cash when we started out and once, at Glastonbury, Troy left the van open and there was a bag in the back of it with about fifteen grand in it in cash and no one nicked it. How we laughed about that - before we punched Troy in the face. That was back in the days when we didn't trust promoters but we've got ourselves a better agent now."
Oh right. Who's that then?
"Matt Bartlett. He was a promoter and we were so pleased with him that we turned him into a manager. There's so much work connected with gigging that isn't actually gigging... Getting contracts out and that kind of thing."
Ah yes. The whole trying to get paid shenanigans.
"We've been to court from time to time to try and get a contract enforced but the trouble with that is that even if you win you still end up with nothing because of all the fees you have to pay. We've tried chasing them but these days we just deliver a lot of paper."
I also read in that rather-out-of-date blog that you once managed to lock yourself out of a hotel room when you were completely naked?
"That was at the Ibis in Liverpool. There had been a lot of drinking, as you would probably expect, and the toilet door was on a curved wall. I was trying to feel my way to it in the dark and went through the wrong door. If it wasn't for the fact that the staff there were all foreign" and presumably therefore didn't know who Edmondson was "I'm sure that video would have ended up on YouTube. It was all caught on CCTV. I walked boldly into the foyer covering myself with my hands."
You didn't try sticking your head around the corner first? I think I probably would have tried that...
"No. There was only one way to do that particular thing unfortunately."
I mentioned to a couple of people that I was going to be interviewing you and they both said the same thing, which was: "He's married to Jennifer Saunders, you know." I understand she's been unwell: is she OK these days?
"Yes. She's been very well for a couple of years now, though I don't think you ever get the all-clear from breast cancer. They just keep doing tests every once in a while."
And all this stuff about John Inverdale over the weekend: the casual sexism of the BBC's Wimbledon coverage. As the father of three daughters was there ever anything you said to them that was an attempt to prepare them for that kind of thing?
"I don't tell them anything about men. They are all grown up and have left home now: one is married and the other two have permanent boyfriends and I think they've all chosen extremely well. They're lovely blokes. In fact I think for the lot of them there were only two bad boyfriends in 30 years and that's not bad going, is it?
"I think you live by example, don't you? I sometimes wonder whether we've been strict or liberal parents but I actually feel that my daughters are such perfect people that we must have done all right. I really don't understand these men who say 'Three daughters? You must have been at the door with a shotgun!' I mean, why would you not want your daughters, who are in their twenties, to have fulfilling sexual relationships? That's what life is all about, isn't it?"
And what about Mumford & Sons? Any strong feelings one way or the other?
"We saw them at Cambridge a couple of years ago. They were first on the bill and we were headlining that time. Ha! We were supported by Mumford & Sons... I watched them from the side of the stage and thought they were fucking brilliant. I downloaded their stuff from the web and listen to the original - it was from before they rerecorded the first album - and love it. I know people who hate them but they've got a great vocalist. I love his singing."
Ade in Britain: what came first, the idea for the series or the title?
"I came up with the series idea and they came up with the title. I'd had an awful name for it originally though I can't remember what it was. I'd done the Dales and they asked whether there was anything else I'd like to do, so I came up with something based on this book called England in Particular by Sue Clifford and Angela King. Quite often the programmes include folk bands and I must be the main conduit for morris dancing on national TV. In 50 episodes I think we've had seven or eight morris sides."
So what's next on the telly?
"There's a short series on beer in development. I'm trying to convince BBC2 to take it."
Can I recommend a blog by a friend of mine that's about that exact thing?
"I've read it. It's a bit historical in places but it was one of the first things I looked at when I started doing some research. It's fascinating to think beer was invented in Iran..."
* Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds have a new album out on August the 19th called Mud, Blood and Beer and will be touring to promote it in November and December.
* 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 Walker and Josienne Clark have a new album out soon and this makes me wish I could write more eloquently. I'll elaborate...
I think that folk is process, not a genre. Every traditional folk song worth its salt was once a pop song: a pop song that people liked enough to sing over and over again. I was thinking this while listening to the Rolling Stones at Glastonbury the other night and noticing that the audience, predominantly of teenagers, already knew the words to most of their songs.
Covering a song is applause writ larger. It is an expression of the folk process, in that it keeps a song alive, introducing it to a new audience or reinforcing its value to an existing one.
In opposition to this, the idea of "perfect pop" - often held up in the media as something to which one should aspire - makes me very impatient, as there is an assumption that for a pop song to be any good there should be something transient about, that it is a bubble that will burst and that therein lies its value.
In fact, what is "perfect pop" but a marketing construct that takes music and makes it a commodity for capitalist use: something to be consumed, discarded and replaced as if there were a finite amount of it? You could argue that life is transient and we should therefore embrace transience. But there is another way of viewing it.
If a pop song is any good people remember it and recycle it. Music has the power to transport you to the time and place in which you last heard it and so it endures. This 80s revival that I've found so depressing - they've repackaged my childhood while I'm still enjoying large chunks of it - is an expression of the opposite: a need to fall back on the reassuringly familiar in times of economic woe, a passive process of comforting by the mass media that involves transporting the eighties to you. Music is the other language we all know - even if we don't speak it fluently - and it is a language all about emotion. Understanding this will make you freer and it is one of the reasons certain regimes ban certain kinds of music. The Talibans of this world fear music's power to move people because every action is provoked at some level by an emotional need and once you go stirring people up who knows what will happen?
Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's music speaks to me because, in their precision and discernment, they seem to understand all of this. I'm projecting, I know, but the thoughtfulness of their sound has led me to develop these thoughts. They're inspiring.
Their new album, Fire & Fortune is a thing of great beauty, something exquisite that it would be anathema to throw away. Whether they're covering traditional songs - My Love is like a Red, Red Rose, Green Grow the Laurels - or introducing something of their own - Fire & Fortune - they apply the same sky-high standards of musicality and production. They are deliberate, distinctive and outrageously talented.
The album's title track is embedded at the top of this post with a memorable video and here is another version of it, remixed by Pete Flood.
"Yes. I'd told Glenn ages ago that I was interested in remixing," said Flood. "To be honest it's the song that's good. The remix just builds a fairly obvious Portishead-y treatment around it. I'd sooner not deflect any credit from what should be Ben and Josienne's moment of glory."
Is this the first remix you've done?
"No. I did a remix of a track by Massukos from Mozambique, under the Sesutbun Bean Unit name. And way back in the mists I used to remix dance tracks by friends. This is the first remix I've done in which I was consciously aiming for a radio-friendly sound. Maybe not Radio Two, but certainly Late Junction or similar."
Flood says that he hasn't yet seen Josienne and Ben play live, which is quite thought-provoking. I've sometimes wondered how strong their sound would be if they had percussion.
"There may be something in that. In the opinion of an expert they're rubbish at stamping on floors," he joked.
It sounds as if Navigator may already be offering serious added value to their new recruits.
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Dave Swarbrick chases unicorns. Our hour-long conversation was notable for glimpses of a series of unattainable objects of desire.
But first he wanted to make it clear that he is in good health. "I'm not so bad at all," Fairport Convention's former fiddler said, in a tone that lightly implied that even if he was, he was buggered if he was going to tell me. "The hearing's pretty good these days: I've had the [hearing] aids for a long, long time, which has given me a chance to get used to them. I had the double lung transplant in 2004 but I was asleep so I don't remember much about that... I like to say that I'm mainly 72 years old but parts of me are much younger. Tell them all that I'm ever so good."
(Here he is looking impressively healthy in a snap taken recently by Chris Bates. Our interview was on the telephone, he was verbally on fine form and would never have guessed he was using hearing aids, except to say that there are few people I know in their 70s with hearing that good.)
In fact he's embarking on a world tour, beginning with the Cambridge festival with Martin Carthy this July, a series of gigs in Canada in August, followed by a UK tour with Carthy later this year and then in the new year he's going to South Africa.
"That's not like anything I've tackled before," he said. "There are 53 of us, musicians from all over the world and we're each going over there to stay for a week and spend time with an African musician - could be folk or jazz, anything. You team up as buddies, eat together and what have you. Then you go out and meet some of the up-and-coming artists who live near by. At the end of the week a film is made by a South African TV station and with any luck it should go all round the world."
He's also recently agreed to become patron of Folkstock, a September festival - new this year - being set up by the redoubtable Helen Meissner, whose impressive badgering skills also roped me in to do this interview. As a chartered badgerer myself I can recommend Helen to anyone who wants something folky done. Once named Hertfordshire's businesswoman of the year, she has both Swarb and I on the run, which in this context is a good thing. There is also a solo tour planned for next year under the Folkstock umbrella.
I once heard Dave sayin an interview that the reason he loves the fiddle is because it allows him to be "dirty" and after a few minutes consideration came to the conclusion that he meant musically? "Yes. If you have just the one line of melody you can play it however you want. Once you make a fiddle electric you can do nearly anything with it: there are all kinds of gadgets that will really dirty it up. So if there's something enchanting, like Tam Lin, that requires you to be off-the-wall, spooky and mysterious you can really do it with a wah-wah pedal."
He's fond of his gadgets. We'd already established that he uses an iPad and likes a piece of software called Sibelius, which can be used for composing. And then there are the fiddles themselves. "Every violin player is searching for the perfect fiddle. But it doesn't exist." Unicorn number one crashed around in the undergrowth a little way off.
Is that a kind of mirage then?
"The fiddle is a very expensive mirage because it leads you on to try better and better instruments. I was watching a film about Heifetz the other night and there was some footage of him playing in the 1920s. One of the many things that struck me about him was that whichever period of his life the footage was from, he always played the same fiddle."
So not every violinist embarks on this quest?
"Ah... You don't know how many he had at home. They are just wonderful things, fiddles. They're not like any other instrument: a violin is like a living thing. It changes over its life but then you change as well. Even if you have normal hearing, you're not going to have the same hearing on a dry day as on a wet day. Your ears change slightly all the time."
He'd clearly given the matter a great deal of thought, especially as the loudness of his electric fiddle has been partially blamed for his hearing loss. Life can be cruel.
So what was with the three-year trip to Australia in 1994? "I went there because I got married and I came back because I got divorced. I loved Australia."
There was the sound of hooves again...
"I went there a lot. And knew it even before I went there because I used to record with AL Lloyd and he would tell me about it. We made three or four albums of Australian songs together and then I finally went there in 1971 - and about 20 times after that. I met an Australian woman called Paula Crane at a gig one day and we fell in love. And I thought 'That's handy because I like Australia'.
"She was an heiress to a fortune that was made in plugs, tiles and mines, and I'd say the money had something to do with the breakup. It made the arguments a touch more intense. And when we split up I got a place on my own in the Blue mountains in New South Wales. I was being a bit of a hippy but the eighteen months I had there were wonderful - the scenery was just breathtaking. I'd come back to the UK and tour a bit and then go back - the money would go so much further over there. You could buy a whole tray of avocados for three dollars.
"So I lived in the mountains in this house that was built on stilts to keep the snakes out. Australia has the top eight most dangerous snakes in the world, you know? And there were funnelweb spiders. But none of them got into the house the whole time I was there. Then after a while it started to pall and I wanted to come home... they would have made me leave eventually anyway, when my visa ran out."
Apparently being divorced from an Aussie doesn't cut much ice with immigration.
"It was not an amicable split but I saw her again three or four years back and I don't regret marrying her at all. I thought it was worth a try... and I had some wonderful times, saw some fantastic wildlife. You know, once I counted 26 cockatoos in a tree in my garden. I really really love the place."
When he came back to Blighty he lived with Alistair Hulettin Herefordshire for a while and there was revolutionary politics in the air at their house. I asked whether there are any protest songs from that period and what he made of the relative quietness of the folk scene on the subject of our present ills... I can only think of Show of Hands' Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed, though would be happy to stand corrected.
"I must be contented these days," he mused. "I haven't written any protest songs for a while now. They would have to come from the young... There's Billy Bragg, but he's not really young... sorry Billy. I don't know what the young are doing really: they should be writing protest songs. There's a lot to protest about.
"The difference between when I started and now is that back then nobody had really heard of folk music, they didn't really know what it was. It used to be all about Centre 42, which was related to the TUC resolution that the arts should be taken to the masses. The trouble was that the masses didn't want it."
This rang a bell with me because I grew up partly in Norfolk and we read Arnold Wesker's Roots at school, which was about this exact thing.
"But now folk music is so prevalent among the young that it's become cut-throat. Not cut-throat in a nasty way. Everyone seems very nice, they're a lovely bunch of kids. But there are a lot of them all chasing after the same gigs, so they have to be a bit careful not to upset anybody. But someone who really upset everybody... they could still succeed."
Wise words.
"The trouble is that the media is the same now as it was in the old days. If you were a communist you didn't get much airplay."
Well, that was a long time ago - before the end of the cold war changed a lot of things - and a lot of anger with the system has become mainstream since 2008. But Swarb's right. You don't see a lot of anger in the folk scene these days - unless it's of the peevish variety on internet message boards - and it could be fear of upsetting people that holds the youngsters back. That, and the vast amount of debt they have all accumulated as a result of getting a university level education. Now there's something to get angry about: being financially oppressed by your parents' generation.
The conversation turned to Sandy Denny.
"You've got to understand, I have never got over her dying," he said. "It's very hard to listen to her stuff. I did thesetwo Sandy tours and I found it very hard. You know it occurred to me the other day that if she was alive now she would have grandchildren, possibly she'd be a great grandmother... and it was very weird. It seems weird because Sandy was one of those who fell in the war. 'Age shall not weary them as we that are left grow old' and all that. She'll never be any older than she was." Pics below courtesy of the lovely Andrew Batt and www.sandydenny.org.uk
Were you close?
"Very close."
Were you her boyfriend?
"Yes, I was her boyfriend... Well, I wouldn't call myself a boyfriend. It was more casual than that. She had a fierce upbringing, you know. Her mother was a fierce woman and Sandy herself was very unsure of what she was doing. She didn't have a lot of confidence. She was the kind of person who if you said 'I really liked that, Sandy' she would say 'Why, didn't you like the other?'
"She was very loving and super smart, she saw through people very quickly: she was a real character."
A lot of her lyrics are about loneliness.
"Well yes. But to an extent most touring musicians are lonely and if you are a woman it's worse because probably you're torn between being at home and being on the road. Admittedly Sandy often toured with her husband... but that brought its own difficulties. I've been in bands with other women and it's always been difficult for them. I mean, what do they do? Do they become one of the boys?"
So what's your idea of a good time these days?
"Probably going out antiquing. I collect English watercolours, from Georgian stuff in 1750 to 1900. It was a glorious time for English watercolours and you'd be surprised how cheaply you can pick them up. I love to go out hunting and then finding a frame for them. One day I'll find a Samuel Palmer. He lived from 1805-81."
A white horsey flash thundered past, very close this time, as he spelled out the painter's name.
"I printed them out and sold autographed copies with RIP on them for one or two pounds. But then my partner got a bit superstitious about it and I got a letter from the Telegraph telling me to stop because it was a breach of their copyright."
Cheek!
"Yes. So I wrote back saying that I loved legal trouble and they should bring it on. A paper in Yorkshire printed a whole big story about it..."
I explained that I used to work at the Telegraph and vaguely remembered being there when the whole thing happened. He asked whether it wasn't a bit odd for someone with my family background to be working at a right-wing paper and I ended up explaining - as I often do - that the division of labour is such on a newspaper that unless you happen to work on the comment desk your personal politics are irrelevant most of the time.
"I've got a copy of the Telegraph in front of me right now," he admitted. "I buy it for the crossword."
I'd been told to ask him about the Dalai Lama story...
"I was in hospital, post-op, and one of the Fairport fellers, Chris Leslie who plays the fiddle, was in Australia with the band at a festival. And one of the events was a bunch of Tibetan monks doing a demo of something or other. At the time there had just been a benefit for me at Birmingham town hall and Chris was wearing a T-shirt saying 'Swarb Aid' and sitting in the front row. After the event one of the monks came up to Chris and asked him 'How is Swarb?' And Chris was absolutely gobsmacked and said 'I think he's OK, recovering in the hospital.' And the monk said 'Please tell him that the Dalai Lama is praying for him'."
Hmmm.
"And Chris comes back and he's all full of it and he tells my partner and somehow - I don't know how - it ended up in the local paper in Coventry. "Dalai Lama prays for Swarb" I had a particular consultant who was always telling me to walk around the ward, so I put that cutting over my bed in an attempt to get him off my back. Walking around the ward was very tiring..."
And I hear you've been inducted into the Coventry Hall of Fame?
"Yes! It's a plaque and it went up about three months ago in the two-tone complexon the Walsgrave Road. There was a little ceremony, there was a group of us. We got the plaque and gave a little speech, then stood around in the rain and had our photo taken. I asked them to only put it 3'6'' up the wall so I can go along and polish it now and again."
And how is the biography coming along? Is your wife still writing it?
"It's all been handed over to Dr Jason Wilson in Canada, who is a published author and a serious writer. Anyone who's got any information they think should be included can still hand it over to us but we'll forward it to him. I didn't want it to just be made up of loads of anecdotes, you see? I wanted something more serious about where the music came from... so it will probably come out after I'm gone."
Why? Are you planning to go any time soon?
"No. But I think he might be a bit of a slow worker. He's an academic."
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