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.
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Some of you know that last year I wrote quite a lot about the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. I hadn't intended to... it just kind of snowballed.
It started as a mild curiosity about how they're run and ended with an unsuccessful Freedom of Information request for the names of the judges - which are still secret - and the story being followed up in the Guardian and The Independent.
If you don't know what I mean and would like to find out, or if you'd like to recap, you can read about it here and follow the links at the bottom from one post to the next.
I'd always intended to do it all again this year if it didn't work the first time (and the names of the judges weren't made public), but this year with variations and a bit more creativity.
So a couple of weeks ago I wrote some emails and made a start. Then yesterday...
My phone went. The reception wasn't very good because I was on a number 214 bus heading up the City Road but it turned out that it was Fergus Dudley of the BBC Radio Two compliance department.
This was curious because I hadn't actually tried to contact him. I'd tried him last year but he'd never returned any of my calls so I'd given up, imagining an empty space behind a desk, perhaps a shirt lying Reggie-Perrin-like nearby.
Yes, he said. I'd emailed him about two and a half weeks ago and he was returning my message. I've since checked and my memory wasn't deceiving me. What had actually happened was that I'd emailed Kelly While at Smooth Operations - the contracted in private company that organises the awards for the BBC (and films the Cambridge festival for Sky, among many other things).
I'd also rung her twice in two days this week because, having left for it a decent period, it was time to follow up the email.
So my reward was a phone call from Fergus Dudley at the BBC. Since cynicism is useless in these situations, I'm trying to be surprised that the interests of a senior producer from Smooth Operations - who receive public money to make the folk awards for the BBC - and the person employed to hold the company to account find their interests so closely aligned that they forget who's who.
Anyway.
He was returning my call, he said.
Thanks. I was wondering whether the BBC will be making the names of the 170 judges of the folk awards public this year?
No, he said. You see (after a scramble through my bag the notebook was out) there was no need for this because the Brit Awards don't make the names of their judges public. And neither do the Oscars or the Baftas.
None of those three awards ceremonies are run by the BBC on public cash are they, I responded? So they're not subject to the same guidelines about transparency. We moved on.
To begin with it felt like a re-run of a slightly daft conversation I had with John Leonard, who runs Smooth Operations, last year. I suppose it's possible that Dudley had looked at the post I've just linked to - which is about that conversation - before ringing. "If the names of the judges were known," he said, "people would lobby them. And some artists wouldn't have the time or the money to do it."
"But, " I said, feeling trapped in a time warp, "the only way one could meaningfully lobby a folk awards judge would be with a copy of one's music. And sending something from Soundcloud or Bandcamp by email is completely free and it travels along broadband wires at the speed of light." What's next?
"Not everyone is across that technology. It's a small industry," he said, taking my breath away, before adding that he thought it was important that the 170 judges were "specialists in the folk area who have the reputation to make these decisions".
Why? Don't you trust anyone else to recognise good music when they hear it?
"You have to have have people who are involved in the industry."
Why? This means that your judges have a financial interest in the outcome. We got really stuck here. He didn't seem to accept that working in the folk world is the same as having a financial interest in it.
"I never said these people have to have a financial interest in the industry," he said. It began to feel as if the conversation was unravelling.
"They fill out a form declaring their interests," he continued, apparently unaware that this is not the same thing as making sure that they don't vote for any of their mates' bands. After all, declaring one's interests to person or persons unknown is valueless unless the information can be used to hold the judges to account for their subsequent decisions. And since we don't know who the judges are... Oh! Here we are back at the beginning again.
And then just when it was all starting to sound terribly, well, terrible...
"But there will be some changes this year."
?!
"We will be taking two of the awards away from the larger panel, to be decided by a smaller panel whose names will be made public. And one of the awards will be decided by a public vote. We are doing this because we'd like to make the awards more acceptable to the wider Radio Two audience."
Blimey.
"I can't be more specific about who the people on the smaller panel are at the moment. I don't need to tell you that and it hasn't yet been issued as a press release. But we've taken action following your considerable interest last year in the way these awards are run. We have opened it up."
Is this perhaps a prelude to making all of the names of the judges known in the near future?
"Every two years we review the way the process works. We will be reviewing it again next year and it's possible that we will make this list public. Maybe we will and maybe we won't."
And breathe...
This is good. It's promising.
However, fobbing people off with a small change after a larger one has been asked for is an age-old tactic.
Some observations.
Large organisations change slowly. I know I wasn't the only person to have raised the issue of the transparency of these awards over the years and don't deserve all the credit for these small changes. I hope they are the beginning of a larger change in the culture of the awards and will result in complete transparency about the judges' names next year. But it's also seems possible that the question of financial interest in the outcome will remain - since Dudley for one doesn't seem to understand that making one's living in any industry is the same as having a financial interest in it and that this, in turn, is a corrupt and conservative force on the awards. There must be other people at the BBC involved in the decision-making process and perhaps they do understand - Dudley wouldn't tell me who he answers to. But I'm guessing that the controller of Radio Two, Bob Shennan, is his line manager.
Secondly, when Dudley told me that what we were talking about was "a small industry" I thought uh-oh. If he thinks the folk awards have been catering only to a small number of people since they started in 2000, that accounts for a lot. The aim should surely be to show off the best of British folk, defined as broadly as possible without making the term meaningless, and promoting it to anyone who takes an interest. And by that I mean the world's music-lovers. The awards should feed people's souls while spreading the word about British folk, which will ultimately benefit everyone involved. And that means promoting fresh takes on old music with as much vigour, creativity and enthusiasm as we can muster. No more Don McLean and his ilk please... for any number of reasons.
This country's creative output is one of its great exports for reasons involving language, culture and history. We should see these awards in that context and be prepared for interest from everywhere. The British folk scene is stuffed with world class musicians who barely make a living and there's just no excuse for it.
Thirdly, the more transparent the folk awards are the better for all concerned. It's to be hoped that scrutiny will mean better communications, the weeding out of any judges who don't leave their homes or use the web, the resulting exposure of the judges to more and a wider variety of music and that they will not feel able to restrict themselves to voting only for the bands they've seen and heard the most of during the previous year.
There's something in the air. Let's see what it is.
* Read last year's posts about the folk awards starting with this one and following the links at the bottom to the next.
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There was something about the actor Stephen Mangan that had been bothering me since I saw Green Wing on television. Then when Episodes started on BBC Two, in which he appeared as a Hollywood screenwriter alongside Matt Le Blanc of Friends and Tamsin Greig of The Archers - and which I loved - it started to become seriously problematic.
You see, when I first watched him on TV I thought he was more famous than he was - kind of the opposite of that thing when you see someone from the telly in the street and start to say "hello" before you realise your mistake.
The suspicion crept up on me that we'd met.
There was this weird, fuzzy memory of an afternoon spent in Dublin in January 1995, where I was doing work experience. He was sitting, talking very fast in someone's flat - his own? - and was in the company of two other people, one of whom was on my newspaper course and is now a very well-known journalist. In fact, he's editor of The Times. I told you it was a weird memory.
So when there was a sudden downpour on Sunday at the Cambridge folk festival and I retreated into a tent only to find that the he was in there too, the responsible course of action was to ask, even if it laid me open to the possibility of discovering that I was losing it...
"Yes, that was me," he said, looking quite surprised, before adding that it was nice to see me again, thus demonstrating that he has good manners, since I know perfectly well that if I hadn't seen him on television in the intervening 17 years I probably wouldn't remember him either...
However, it was such a relief to find that my mind hadn't been playing tricks on me that I had to go and sit down for a little while before returning to suggest that since it was clearly going to rain for a long time would it be OK if I interviewed him? And since he was well-mannered (and trapped) he agreed.
It turned out he was there because he made a documentary, along the lines of reclaiming a forgotten love, about playing with Richard Thompson for Sky Arts last year. The marginalised object of desire was folk music. This year the channel, which media sponsors the Cambridge folk festival, had invited him back to be interviewed. He was also doing a guitar workshop with Martin Simpson and babysitting Simpson's daughter, who seemed very sweet.
Mangan swore faithfully that he wouldn't say anything interesting to Sky, leaving the field clear for me.
"I don't know why I like folk music," he said, "because my wife doesn't like it and my friends don't like it and it makes me an outcast in my own circle. But I'm from County Mayo in Ireland and parties at our house involved carpets and rugs being pushed back.
"The process of discovering folk was a lucky one that started in the late 80s and early 90s with John Martyn and Nick Drake, then had me stumbling from one thing to another. I went to America for a year when I was 18 and someone gave me a list of things to listen to. I started with Richard Thompson.
"Then in my early 30s I got into the hard stuff: Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan. But there's this feeling that because I don't have that many mates who are into it I'm like Uri Gagarin, heading out into the void. I'm here to make some friends who like folk music."
He took a bit of a conversational detour enthusiastically to praise Fionn Regan's song Dogwood Blossom, from the soundtrack of This is England.
"For some reason it speaks to me: maybe because I have a strong melancholy streak. I like depressing music but I'm an optimist who also likes storytelling. My wife is the opposite - perhaps we complement each other in this respect. She's a pessimist who likes dance music.
"So for a long time in our house folk was a four letter word that I dare not utter. It was desperately uncool - maybe it still is, but I don't care. Eventually you have to face up to who you are and I'm a folky.
"But I'm a folky with two young children and I'm in a play at the moment that's on nearly every evening," - Birthday at the Royal Court, in which he plays a pregnant man - "so I don't get to see films, plays or gigs apart from the ones I'm actually in. When I was asked, I jumped at the chance to come here again. I love nothing better than to bring myself to the point of vomiting with nerves in the company of Richard Thompson." Not that he'd have to do that this time around...
But standing on stage is what he does for a living. Why would singing with Richard Thompson make him nervous?
"If we were doing Othello it would be fun. In fact, I think Richard should give us his Othello at some point. But there's something very exposing about singing. The music is dictating to you - the song is its own lyric. Whereas with acting you're in control.
"Singing is the most popular art form in the world but it's totally about emotion, so it's very revealing. You're expressing something about what it is to be a human being in a very pure way. Which makes it all the weirder that I'd choose to stand on a stage and sing one of the most famous songs ever written - Who Knows Where the Time Goes - while the audience nudges each other and remarks that I look the donkey out of Shrek.
"But it's good to do things every once in a while that make you want to shit yourself with fear."
Why? Most people go out of their way to avoid that.
"It makes you feel alive - it was an amazing thing. I stood there at the side of the stage and heard Richard Thompson do one of the best sets he'd ever done and then say at the end of it 'And here's Stephen Mangan'."
Despite being from County Mayo, Mangan has one of those Irish accents that doesn't really sound like an Irish accent. Dick Gaughan, on the other hand, has some fairly pungent left-wing views. I wondered whether he was comfortable with that?
"Yes, I'm quite a lefty. it's hard not to be when you're an actor because you're dealing with people. They're your bread and butter, so you have to try and understand them."
I'm pretty sure Adolph Hitler thought he understood people.
"Yes, but I don't think Adolph Hitler thought of people as people. As an actor you are mainly about people and community, and what makes people tick. I always viewed left-wing politics as having a compassion to it: I deal with the fact that kings and dustmen are all on a level, they're all human beings. For my purposes I can't look at them from a status point of view. And once you're looking at everyone in the same way you're coming from an egalitarian point of view."
A bit of probing finds that he doesn't like Mumford & Sons and when I asked about Bellowhead - whom I love - he changed the subject. "Show of Hands. They're good. I just had a tweet from the Shrewsbury festival asking whether I'd like to go along this year because Richard Thompson is going to be there, so maybe I'll get to meet them.
"After the last time, Richard invited me to sing with him again in a general kind of a way. So for a while I toyed with the idea of turning up every time he played and saying brightly 'I'm here to do my song'. Now I'm thinking of faking an emergency appendectomy so I can go to Shrewsbury. We're going to be on a family holiday in Wiltshire at the time, which isn't too far away."
So if you're at Shrewsbury and you see Stephen Mangan, be nice to him. He's there to make some folky friends.
* You can buy tickets to see him in Birthday at the Royal Court here.
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On Friday night at the Cambridge Folk Festival The Destroyers packed a kind of nuclear punch - appropriately enough - all the energy of a show lasting at least half as long again folded into an hour. It. Was. Amazing.
I'm a pretty big fanbut believe me when I say that although the video's good, it doesn't do their live shows justice. There's a kind of maniacal passion to them that's the result of fifteen individuals leaping around as if they had several thousand volts going through them. Yes, you read that right. Fifteen.
There are tall Destroyers and short ones. Destroyers who like to lie down to play their instruments, some who stand and those who prefer to hang in mid-air. They move differently from any band I've ever seen: a rolling cloud of limbs and musical instruments emitting a cacophony of perfectly orchestrated noise that worked even better in a tent than it does in a room. I think this was because each of them can really play and there were fewer sounds bouncing confusingly off walls. On this occasion their non-conformity seemed to touch the soul of their Cambridge audience: it had taken six years of toiling to get to this festival and they made it count.
At the centre of it all was Paul Murphy (metaphorically speaking anyway - he's on the right there in the picture that I promised I would credit to eFestivals), the piratical, fez-wearing singer who, at 62, is about 30 years older than most of his band mates. On the one hand his presence seems the most natural thing in the world - but at the same time, when you think about it, it poses a few questions. So I thought I'd ask them and see how it went.
Despite all the leaping around he seemed remarkably calm and chipper as he glided out of the static caravan they'd been allocated behind stage two, moving like someone at least 20 years younger: I've been told that this is because he swims to keep fit.
So how did he hook up with this lot then? "It's an interesting scene in Birmingham," he said, sounding not much like a wild-eyed pirate after all and much more like a thoughtful, cultured pirate.
"At the epicentre of it was a house belonging to Astro from UB40: he was the landlord and he let it out to a group of musicians who made it the focus of a lot of experimentation. At that time my nephew Joel was at the (Birmingham) Conservatoire and he was into Balkan ska - there's a lot of sympathy between Balkan music and ska music. Lots of his fellow music students gravitated to the house and that eventually became The Destroyers. It was an instrumental outfit back then but it's always been big.
"Then about seven years ago they asked me to come and improvise with them and I ended up bringing vocals into the band.
"I write songs and play acoustic guitar - though I mainly sing with The Destroyers. Some of the lyrics we're doing now I wrote as long ago as 1967 - which is before everyone in the band except Mick was born. The Glass Coffin, for instance" (which they started the Cambridge show with) "has found a whole new lease of life. It's brought a gothic element that goes with the rest of what they were doing."
He waxed lyrical for a while about the rest of the band's abilities. "Gaz has already written two symphonies. Dan Wilkin has a deep and strong knowledge of African music that he brings to choral work. Max Gittings is all about Chinese music. This band has a wealth of stuff at its disposal. It is," he said in a considered fashion, "a juggernaut. And we're ready to take the whole thing up a notch."
However, a band of 15 is always going to struggle to make a living for its members, as I discovered when I interviewed Pete Flood from Bellowhead a while back - and there's only 12 of Bellowhead. The thought that he might mean they want to play even more loudly nearly made me giggle. But the marvellous thing about interviewing Paul Murphy is that he's been around the block a few times and already knew what I was going to say.
"Well, when you look at the history of art and music it's a fairly 20th century notion that musicians just turn up, go into a studio and record. Musicians traditionally have supplemented what they do by teaching and doing other projects. I mean, Renoir also did people's blinds. There are certainly a lot of challenges for a band like us - especially now the infrastructure of the music industry isn't there any more. I sold my first songs in 1966, very shortly after I moved to this country from Ireland, and the music industry was much more accessible then."
He told me a story about Ocean Colour Scene. "I was running a place at the time called The Songwriters' Cafe and that's how I met them. They'd been signed to a label and then at the start of the 90s they were dropped. But they reconstituted themselves and by the time they did their best known album, Moseley Shoals, they owned all the rights to their own music. So every time The Riverboat Song was played they got the money. I don't want to put off anyone who's interested in managing us," (they currently manage themselves) "but I don't trust big institutions."
So what's he been doing for the last 40 years or so? "I came to England in 1966 when I was 16, as a folk singer. I used to hang out with Lemmy from Motorhead - I'm probably the only folk singer mentioned in his book White Line Fever because we used to live on a farm near Blackpool. Lemmy was a member of a band at the time called The Rocking Vicars and there were two other bands living on this farm at the same time. I've always written, always performed..."
What's it like being with guys who are so much younger than him? "I'm used to being surrounded by a bunch of people who are older and younger than me. When I was a kid I used to be the youngest, hanging out with older people, so not much has changed. It's just the other way around."
Where did he get the fez? "I come with a bag of hats." This made me laugh out loud.
Career highlights?
"I always missed my own career highlights."
He mentions something about Van Morrison that I didn't quite manage to catch before adding that he has five kids. And a wife?
"My wife, Honora, died. That was 13 years ago. I released a solo album in December last year that was a kind of tribute to her. It was called The Glen and it was about the experience of love lost. It's available online." Have a look around that website... it's pretty interesting.
But best of all, before he had to leave and get in a van with the rest of the band, he explained that he's built a treehouse at his place in the King's Norton area of Brum. "It holds an audience of 40 and we do evening concerts there, then broadcast them online. There's a microphone embedded in the ceiling." It sounds as if this is an incarnation of his earlier Songwriters' Cafeand operates on a kind of invitation-only basis, although you can ask to be invited, either as a musician or a member of the audience.
"Musicians come along and have dinner, which I cook myself. I grow the veg in the garden and bake the bread and then we have a concert. Genevieve Tudor's been along and last week we had a couple of BBC producers. It's always good fun."
And with that, he quoted some Blake at me that I was far too mesmerised to write down, a fellow Destroyer came to fetch him and he had to go. Which was a shame.
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It's been a long year since I had the honour of meeting Forbes Legato at the 2011 Warwick folk festival. At least it has for me - he seemed remarkably untouched by the passing of time, cocooned perhaps by his legendary misanthropy.
There he is, nose in the air.
If you remember,Legato has several recording credits to his name - honestly, he does, I'm not joking, look at the CD covers - most recently arising from his association with Pilgrim's Way.
When I ran into Forbes's business associates, Jon and Gill Loomes, at The Music Room instrument shop at the Cambridge folk festival, I seized the opportunity to ask how he'd been?
"Drinking heavily," said the long-suffering Jon, who's given up trying to conceal Forbes's alcoholism - he's over-partial to tequila - and was avoiding looking towards the nearby shelf on which the crabby cat was perched.
"He's also been swearing a lot and generally giving us a hard time.
"But there's a new Pilgrim's Way album on the way - 'the ginger gits' as Forbes calls them. The tunes are all ready to go and Forbes has cleared some studio time for it in September."
Pilgrim's Way are playing at Cambridge this evening in the Club Tent.
Just don't ask about Legato's recent visit to Catford. Loomes says Legato had a narrow escape coming across the Isle of Dogs and he's been extra antisocial ever since. The cat's back.
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It looks as if the Cambridge folk festival will be taking place without a headline sponsor
this time around, which is a shame. Its association with the Co-op came to an end last year with professions of admiration all round, there are media sponsors and a handful of grants. But I guess the recession's taking its toll.
I've been curious for a while about Cambridge's change from the BBC to Sky Arts for its TV coverage since someone pointed out some Co-op banners to me and commented that the BBC would effectively be advertising the Co-op if it happened to include any banners in its TV coverage - though its charter theoretically prevented that.
Elaine Midgley, the arts and events manager at Cambridge City Council, told me: "The festival used to have headline sponsorship from BBC Radio Two. But they changed their policy recently and don't pay cash money for the branding of events any more, though they do still provide services in kind. So they switched in 2008 from being a sponsor to being a media partner.
"Sky is a sponsor and a media partner, in the sense that they are covering the event and paying for the branding benefits that its association brings. The BBC will be doing highlights programmes and live coverage but Sky has got exclusive rights to TV, whereas the BBC's will be on national radio.
"Sky started two years ago - in 2010 - and I think they're pleased with the results. Apparently Cambridge was the third most watched event of their festival programming last year.
"The BBC has strict guidelines about the terms of what it can and can't cover: the BBC will never be our sponsor again."
I wonder whether the BBC's decision to swap from sponsor to media partner was really provoked by adherence to its own guidelines, or whether it was about saving money? After all, I can think of at least one other part of the BBC's involvement with folk music where the rules have gone out of the window.
The BBC Radio Two Folk Awards has around 170 un-named judges, many of whom have close ties to a relatively small number of bands on the folk scene - and this despite crystal clear BBC guidelines about transparencyforawards. It strikes me that the Cambridge folk festival may simply have been unlucky: a victim of capriciousness on the part of a large, powerful organisation with poor internal regulation. The BBC seems to pick and choose when it sticks to its own rules, depending on what suits it at the time.
Midgley said: "Not having a headline sponsor has knocked a big hole in the festival's finances and we'll have to rectify it by finding sponsorship soon. The festival's run on a not-for-profit basis and this makes it hard to invest. We hope that the budget shortfall won't be evident at the front end of the festival - most of the cuts have been behind the scenes, in personnel."
An article in Metro last week suggested that folk festivals are bucking the downward trend in ticket sales. Wouldn't it be great if a new sponsor for Cambridge could be found before this year's event?
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A while back I wrote about some chancers calling themselves The FLK, who appeared at Cecil Sharp House one evening, pursuing some kind of marketing campaign on their own behalf that involved dressing up in cows' heads and not saying who they were.
Later there was a video on the web of them burning some copies of Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief, a reference to a band called The KLF who claim to have burnt a million quid in the early 90s.
It was annoying because of the nature of the marketing: no one likes to feel as if they're being played. Still, it was mildly intriguing as well as irritating.
Simon Nicol, Fairport's front man, said at the time that he'd been thinking about it but the point was lost on him.
Running into him at Cropredy, his position seems to have shifted slightly. I'd been wondering whether burning copies of someone's musical output was similar to burning books? Someone thoughtful on a message board made a good point when they said that the reason the burning of books is totemic is that for so many years - before printing presses - books were hand made so they represented hundreds of hours of labour, whereas records and CDs can be printed in a moment.
"It's not really in me to get too wound up about it," said Nicol. "Partly because that's clearly what they want, but also because I really don't think that whatever they're up to is going to make any difference to us in the long run."
According to someone who went to the Cambridge folk festival there were CDs for sale there by The FLK, but they didn't appear to be flying off the shelves and there doesn't seem to be any trace of it online. Is it a slow month in the FLK's marketing department (which I imagine as an office full of people wearing badger and pig masks, listening to slightly downbeat techno)?
"I'll look forward to setting fire to that then," said Nicol. "Though in the interests of fairness I might give it a listen. Then set fire to it."
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