ahab in a perfect storm

Seeing ahab on stage at the Wychwood festival the other weekend was a bit like watching the taper on a firework being lit. A really big firework.

Driving home, the CD on the car stereo was their EP, called kmvt. "Rumour has it that stands for 'kill my valour tonight'," said Cal Adamson, who plays 12-string guitar and bass. "Or it could be 'kiss me vile troubadour'." Ha ha. "Or kill my vintage tiger."

I couldn't decide by this stage whether he was being playful or irritating (because he was irritated with me). There had been an ambiguity during the interview because I'd learnt, while poking around on the net, that his father was the late Stuart Adamson, of Big Country, something that stunned me, because of his untimely death and because I own four Big Country albums, saw them play god knows how many times and know most of the words. 

But despite some fairly heavy handed prompting Cal had said nothing to address this. (Me: "You father's a musician then? Anyone I would have heard of?" Him: "No.") Awkward. On the one hand, why should he? ahab's four-part harmonies and Lyle Lovetty song-writing had hooked me without the back story, which I didn't discover until I'd already decided to write about them. But Nashville, where he spent time after his father moved there, is pivotal to the band's history, as well as their Americana sound, and my professional twitchiness and fear of seeming to have over-looked something important meant I couldn't not mention it. So: his dad was Stuart Adamson and he has a sister, who's also a musician. That's all. I'm sure he has his reasons for not wanting to talk about it.

Because ahab is interesting enough without the ghoulishness. It started with Adamson (left) and Dave Burn (second from right), when they were in their early 20s, five years ago. "I heard Dave open for the band I was with one night soon after I arrived in London and it was a case of 'he's great, my band's not'. Not a hard decision."

They came up with the name during an evening in an unfortunate hotel in Winchester. "Dave and I had gone away to write some songs. We got drunk, messed up a hotel room and re-enacted the scene in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas in which Johnny Depp brandishes a curtain rail, saying 'Don't fuck with me now, man. I am Ahab.' There was £380 worth of damage."

Multi-instrumentalists Luke Price and Seebs Llewellyn joined when Adamson and Burn received an invitation from Nashville in 2009 to play at a festival. "We didn't want to be a quiet little folk duo - we wanted to make some noise. We spent two weeks over there and had a blast." 

Then when they got back they started busking on Brick Lane, soon getting into trouble with the police for drawing the kind of crowds that upset the local market traders' business. Then a video - possibly the one linked in the previous sentence - found its way to the organisers of the Cropredy festival, someone dropped out and they ended up playing to 17,000 people on the main stage last summer.

Bob Harris heard them and booked them to do a session on Radio Two. John Leckie, who was there to see Bellowhead, heard them and invited them to record with him, telling Navigator records that he had a band for them and they wouldn't be cheap for long. They also acquired a manager - Gareth Williams, who is Cropredy's festival director - a record label and a top-notch PR and agent - Stevie Horton at Iconic Media - as a result.

So now they're  surprisingly well tooled up, professionally speaking, for a band that has only had people paying to see them for around six months. Seventeen more festivals this summer should sort that out.  

Adamson says that the songs are a joint effort. "Someone brings a pick-up or a verse and then we all work on it. We're a very democratic bunch." If their drummer, Griz (or Graham, more prosaically), seems slightly semi-detached that might be because he has outstanding work commitments with Bonnie Tyler (!) 

They sing three-minute twangling Americana as if their lives depended on it, which in an understated sort of a way they do. Seeing them play the Scolt Head in Dalston last week - to check I hadn't imagined the whole thing - was odd because the audience was split between drunk youngsters shouting through the music and the slack-jawed and spellbound, who couldn't quite believe what they were hearing on a week night in a back room.

That's the point they're at. The fuse has been lit. But it has to be said that the odds are stacking up very substantially in their favour...

* Here's a post about ahab from the Cropredy festival in August.

* And another about borderline obsessive fandom from the Bristol festival in 2012.

* 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

Naturist morris dancers on bicycles?

Just a quicky. Peruse this picture at your leisure...

It was taken by me this afternoon at around 5.15pm at the junction between Charing Cross Road and St Martin's Lane in central London. It's got something - everything - to do with World Naked Bike Ride, which seems to do pretty much what it says on the tin.

There are lots of questions that arise from this photograph. Yes, yes. I know. Double entendre a-go-go. And yet the one that keeps insisting itself to me concerns the gentleman on the right. If you need to see the picture in greater scale to understand what I'm getting at, try here.

You can see quite clearly that he's wearing a morris dancer's hat. So the part of me that possesses a social sciences degree is demanding to know: what kind of a crossover is there between morris dancing and naturism?

That's all. The world needs to be told. Or at least to be given the opportunity to worry about it...

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The Wychwood festival at Cheltenham

Approaching the Wychwood music festival for the first time is a slightly bizarre experience. It's in the beautiful grounds of Cheltenham race course, which has a really imposing stand, producing the sensation that one should be wearing a big hat and preparing to shout "move yer blooming arse" at the top of one's voice, rather than trying to figure out which way is upwind from the chemical toilets.

It turns out that the festival is not, after all, named after a beer but after a forest that used to cover much of the area. And what an area it is. When the sun shone - which it did on Friday evening and a little on Saturday - the scenery was breathtaking. The racetrack's on a gentle slope so you can see for many miles in several directions and was set off by hundreds of standards and pennants fluttering briskly over the campsite, like medieval bunting.

The music was, at first glance, rather long on fellas from the 1970s and up-and-coming acts. 3 Daft Monkeys had already been and gone by the time the tent was pitched and Cornershop were pointing out that everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, which under the circumstances sounded like a missed opportunity for a novelty camping device...

After a warm sunset and a cold beer, the conversation revolved around the programming that put Rook & the Ravens on at the same time as their older, more famous fellow Mancunians, The Charlatans; and whether the squaddy who was upsetting everyone with his alleged stand-up comedy in the BBC tent (eventually getting booed off) would ever be any good? Nothing like a good scrap to raise the interest level.

Wedged in a tent later - the car was parked elsewhere so everything we needed had been decanted - it raised a smile when we figured out that the shouting in the style of Bohemian Rhapsody coming from the other end of the site was the silent disco. Then excitingly - sorry about this, but I couldn't not mention it - in the morning we awoke to discover that a crime against camping had been committed.

The down sleeping bag my friend Sheridan had brought, and which had last seen service in the Australian outback, had burst during the night, turning the inside of the already overstuffed tent into a kind of anaphylactic snowdome. A new one was procured for a tenner locally but I was still looking unusually fluffy several hours later.

Brushing distractedly at my clothing, there was just time to appreciate the sunlit view of a nearby wold with a tree on top shaped like a shark's fin, before the weather started to deteriorate. Welcome distractions from this included a terrific young ukelele band called The Ukelles (above) busking on site instead of revising for their GCSE maths at nearby Bournside school on Monday. Good luck to Sarah White, Francesca Fiorentini and Leah Collins with their fun fun fun. Perhaps someone will give them a stage and a microphone next time?

The first amplified treat of the day was the Eliza Carthy Band, during which Ms Carthy swooped and waltzed around the stage with her fiddle in stately fashion, rhymed vicar with knickers in a song called Wings and caused me to dwell on the lyrics of the epic party song Blood on my Boots. At the risk of getting a wickedly aimed swipe from her bow, I was left puzzled by how the blood gets on the boots?  Why would cocaine in your champagne make your nose bleed? Suggestions on an email...**

Then - oh joy! - there was Sarah Savoy, the self-style Cajun queen of white trash, and her Francadians, who appeared to be ruled by her with a rod of iron. She claimed to be six foot two in her floral housecoat and when she sang Folsom Prison Blues it didn't seem entirely implausible that she had once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. We set out to validate her height claims (see above) by measuring her against a benchmark (Sheridan, right) but I'm scared to post the results. Far safer to say that I was sorry to have missed the cookery demonstration that sometimes accompanies her gigs. You can catch that in Bristol at the beginning of July and possibly at Cecil Sharp House in London on July 1.

I had to stop watching Robyn Hitchcock because his stylised meanderings about what he described as "all this shamanistic stuff" stirred in me a strong desire to punch him in the face. But I expect he gets that a lot. For my lights, he was right up there with the man who spent the weekend shouting about biscuits on a microphone (selling Oreos) as contender for most annoying feature of the festival. Perhaps if he hadn't spoken between songs?

Interesting tidbits of gossip from an unnamed festival source included that the man operating the bouncy slide had turned up with three of the contraptions instead of the one that had been agreed and attempted to bring a small army of people with him, which hadn't gone down very well with the festival organisers and led to threats involving the application of a stanley knife to rubber. Also, I heard that some of the festival staff were staying in accommodation inside the racing stand but that it's designed for jockeys, making it hard to doze off with one's lower legs hanging over the end of the bunks. I was told later - by a reliable source in the queue for the showers - that jockeys' accommodation usually comes with a sauna for last-minute weight loss, so swings and roundabouts.

Saturday evening drew on and I realised that I like Elfynn more every time I see them, and really didn't understand why they weren't on the main stage. And then there was Urusen, over in the BBC Introducing tent, who I first wrote about a couple of years ago and who have recently been recording an album at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios. They generated some real excitement and quite right too: their songs sound as if they are perpetually on the cusp of breaking out into Mumford-style stompers but only get there often enough to leave you wanting more. They were transcendent.

Seeing The Waterboys was also a *significant musical experience* for me. I've owned three of their albums over the years, all of which have been nicked. And as a youngster I read a review of The Whole of the Moon in Melody Maker, by a journalist called Chris Roberts, which made such an impression on me that I thought for the first time that writing for a newspaper might be a good way to earn a living. I can't find a copy of that review anywhere, despite having spent quite some time looking.

So forget Robyn Hitchcock: for shamanistic endeavour Steve Wickham would win hands down. The Waterboys' fiddler looks as if he knows stuff about music, an impression that was enhanced by, as far as I can remember, his saying nothing at all. When they played that song a little knot in my gut undid itself and I might as well have floated off into the night sky. Thank you and a very good night to you too.

On Sunday morning the first thing I really noticed was a man dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow buying coffee, closely followed by a woman dressed as a banana holding hands with a child dressed as a child. There was a 24-hour cafe on the campsite called In the Night Garden, which coupled with the "family friendly" nature of Wychwood and the fact that it's not noticeably any different from any other festival I've been to - just more munchkins - made me wonder whether there is something about festivals that addresses the changing position of children in British society?

I mean, I know it's good for adults and children to enjoy things together but is it right to take children camping in an environment where there is so much drinking going on? And aren't parents making a rod for their own backs by taking their kids somewhere with so much potential for pester power? Every child there, although they were a well-behaved lot, appeared to be in some kind of pricey-looking festival outfit. And what will they do as teenagers to distinguish themselves socially if they've already done the festival circuit with their mums and dads? I just ask the questions...

Roddy Woomble was, I think, mistakenly introduced as Roddy Womble (relating to the above). I had to get closer to the stage to realise that Woomble was the one sitting unassumingly to the side and not, as I'd prejudged, in the middle. His bass player had a lovely Aran waistcoat and when they played a song about Scotland they made it rain. I liked them so much I bought a CD.

Segue of the afternoon was from Woombles to Wurzels. But sadly I missed them doing I've got a brand new combine harvester because I was in the big top tent mesmerised by Chapelier Fou, one of two French acts sent on a grant to show us how it's done over there. He sampled his own fiddle playing, mixed it with electronica and topped it off with perfect English grammar. "I am French. But do not worry: I will not be singing. Please may I have fewer lights?" Carla Bruni would have been proud of the ambassadorial qualities that he and Moussu T et les Jovants - the second French act - displayed. Women appeared involuntarily to gravitate, fascinated, toward Chapelier Fou's brand of uninhibited geekiness, until there was a sizeable crescent of them gathered around the front of the stage.

I tore myself away in time to catch The Wurzels' brilliant version of Ruby (originally by The Kaiser Chiefs), which had a chorus that went Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby, ooh-ah ooh-ah ooh-ah. Laugh? I nearly burst my smocking.

Eddi Reader had told me earlier that she became a musician out of loneliness. "I relied on singing to keep myself company when I was very small. That and the guitar I acquired when I was ten became my lifelong solace and companion through the vagaries of dealing with the human race."

But she's obviously had some practice with people since, for one of her audience was clamouring for her attention so loudly that she told him to take off his fright wig before she did it for him and stuck it up his a*** At that point the wig was tossed on stage, where Reader put it on and then did a passable impression of Susan Boyle singing Memory from Cats. The frightfully drunk owner of the wig was twice seen being escorted form the grounds by security but had clearly dug a tunnel in preparation for this eventuality, as he was back again for the finale.

Transglobal Underground were very exciting. But the last big noise of the weekend for me was ahab, a five-piece country-and-western-style boy band from Hackney and thereabouts - not to be confused with a German "doom metal" outfit of the same name - who were invited to play their first festival at Cropredy last year. Someone had dropped out and a video they'd submitted of themselves busking on Brick Lane was unearthed. Wychwood was only their second festival but they and their plaid shirts stormed the big top and one can very easily imagine a future in which they get taken to the bosom of Nashville. They sing important-sounding songs about girls, do four-part harmony as if they were born to it and come highly recommended by The Glamour Cave.

For them, I should think it was the second of a million festivals.

* 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

** This just in from Eliza Carthy on Twitter: "The blood gets there after the rufie in your drink causes you to fall on your nose. As if my nose needed further squashing."

How to get yourself on Later With Jools Holland

At the moment there's one dedicated music programme on British terrestrial television with more credibility than any other and it arrives in series, with lengthy gaps between them. The folk bands that have made it to Later With Jools Holland are extremely thin on the ground, which is a shame, particularly because it's a taste-former.

This makes it exciting - not everyone who appears on it has a record deal or label - but also, in these days of infinite internet variety, a kind of promised land. So how does one appear on Later?

Harriet Simms, of Glass Ceiling PR, does press and marketing for Bellowhead, who've hit BBC Two's sunlit musical plateau three times, including one new year's appearance on Hootenanny. "There are two people whose opinions count more than anyone else's on that programme and they are the producers, Mark Cooper and Alison Howe. But there's no set way to get their attention," she said.

"The way it worked for Bellowhead was that I sent a CD and then followed it up with press information and an invitation asking whether they'd like to come to a gig. But the producers of Later are very difficult to plug in the conventional sense because they're very aware musically and already know what they like. I was quite fortunate that Bellowhead struck a chord, so to speak.

"They seem keen on every show having a sort of rhythm or theme, which I don't think always makes sense to the viewers. But there is method there.

"It's hard for folk musicians to get on because not many of them are on the kind of labels that have dedicated TV pluggers and are competing against bands that do." I was momentarily thrown by that, but Harriet said yes, TV plugger is a real job, made possible by the large amounts of money that a band can generate with the exposure that results from appearing on TV (the kind of tautology that could drive a struggling musician to drink). "Being on Later can make a huge difference in terms of profile, CD sales and gig attendance. I know that Bellowhead's sales rocketed after their first appearance, even more so after the second.

"It's more likely that a band with control over its own destiny would dabble in having a dedicated TV plugger to see whether it's worth the money. I think Seth Lakeman had one for a while - but it's very time consuming to get artists noticed.

"If you've been on Later once, though, and proved you can work a room I think there's a strong chance you'll get invited back. It seems to me that folk artists have an edge there, since they generally know their instruments and are used to playing live. So in that respect the show works well for them."

Others who have appeared include The Unthanks, Eliza Carthy and The Imagined Village - which is interesting because Simon Emmerson recently told me that their first album didn't make much, suggesting that Later is, for all its promise, no magic wand.

During the course of our conversation Simms indicated that it might be worth trying to catch up with a woman called Karen Williams, who owns an agency called Big Sister, to get a perspective from farther uphill. "She's usually to be seen in the studio audience when you watch the show because she's a dedicated TV plugger who has someone on nearly every week. She has the reputation of being the very best."

"Ha! I'm usually hiding from people round the corner in makeup," said Williams, when after several days pestering I finally got hold of her. I was aware - because I'd been told - that the reason she was elusive was because she'd had meetings about the Arctic Monkeys and Kaiser Chiefs. She, like Simms, emphasised the suzerainty of Mark Cooper and Alison Howe at Later.

It was Williams who represented Seth Lakeman for a while. "I'm not sure that Seth did Later though... he did the Mercury Prize and it was that which turned people's heads. But I was brought in by Relentless, which is part of Virgin - although I believe he brought the Mercury nominated record out himself, didn't he? I think Relentless thought of me because I'd done KT Tunstall, which was as close as I'd been to anything folky then."

Talking to Williams was illuminating as much for what she didn't say as what she did. There was an evasion in her answers that, as a younger person, I used to mistake for an arrogance towards the press that sometimes comes with success. But these days it's clearer that succeeding in highly competitive fields - such as the one that in which Williams is a big fish - is largely about the quality of the relationships you form. That being the case, expressing strong opinions about your work environment is usually unwise. Shark infested waters.

"It's a ridiculous way to make a living, isn't it?" she laughed. "I think I at least know of all the people in the country who do my job. I got here through the secretarial route - though I don't know whether someone could do that any more. I worked at RCA as a secretary and went to the marketing department, where I started to help out with television. I've done it now for 20 years at various different companies, before setting up on my own.

"The television landscape has changed a lot in that time. Later is the one that all the musicians want to be on. But there used to be Saturday morning kids' shows [that featured bands]. They've all gone now. And they've been replaced by Alan Carr and Graham Norton.

"The demise of Top of the Pops was a great shame from my point of view. But there's still a chart, which you can hear on Radio One. It's just come to be dominated by Simon Cowell." Ever pragmatic, she refused to be drawn much on the subject. "If Ollie Murs is what gets a 14-year-old girl into music these days, then her tastes will probably evolve as she grows older," she demurred.

She made all the expected noises about how lucky she is to work with so many talented musicians and how she needs to feel passionate about a band in order to work with them. But the real questions are how lucky and how passionate? After all, everyone has to make a living. I found myself wondering whether she'd take someone on just because she liked them? "It would be foolish for me to suggest that spending money on a TV plugger, and on me in particular, wouldn't be money well spent, wouldn't I?" she said, truncating the possibility of that conversation.

So then, what'll get you on Later with Jools Holland is money and luck: nothing much to knock your socks off there. I could have asked Williams how much she charges, but she was very good at marking her territory - I'd already got it in the neck once for my persistence in getting hold of her - and I doubt very much that she would have answered me. It felt like a case of if you have to ask you can't afford her... Power has its own logic.

* If you enjoyed this, you might be interested in How Seth Lakeman's music ended up on Coast

* 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

Folk crime of the century becomes Alan Ayckbourn script

So to recap. Tim Plester, writer and director of Way of the Morris, complained that after the 5,000 Morris Dancers event at the Southbank Centre last year he saw Eliza and Martin Carthy making off into the velvet night with his signed cut out of a Morrissey Dancer, one of David Owen's limited editions, given to him by the artist. He'd left it outside a bar. Yes, yes, I know. But it was too big to take in, he says.

Anyway. Eliza Carthy initially put on an innocent face with big eyes, before it emerged that it was, in fact, Simon Emmerson of The Imagined Village - who may or may not have been three sheets to the wind and who was with she and her father that evening - who had committed the folk crime of the century and half-inched the cut out believing it to be his own signed print. It went into his car, driven by Carthy junior, hence the confusion.

This, Emmerson originally maintained, would be easy to sort out since he could look at the cut out, which was sitting pretty in his studio - well, as pretty as an image of Morrissey is ever likely to get - and see whether it was signed or not. It was pointed out to him that since both prints were allegedly signed this might not necessarily help. However that appeared to be an end to it. Owen has been the picture of stifled amusement throughout.

However - you'll be pleased you've read this far - in a twist akin to discovering that the Titanic is in fact grounded at the edge of the Sea of Tranquility,  Emmerson reports that the cut out in his studio doesn't appear to be signed.

Oh noes...

So, by my reckoning this means that Plester and Emmerson's signed prints were both nicked, during that evening when there were hundreds of Morrissey Dancers (and morris dancing Stormtroopers) scattered around London in a guerilla marketing campaign, and that someone - someone - replaced the signed one left by Plester with a less desirable unsigned one, only to have it nicked by Emmerson.

Obviously this means that what was originally a crime story has descended into the kind of farce that usually involves a french window and an ironic script by Alan Ayckbourn. Oh. And there's this

which is Emmerson's new profile pic on Facebook. I'm going to miss this story when it's gone...

* By the way, if you'd like to be notified when there's a new post on this blog, you could like its Facebook page and they will automatically go into your feed.

Jane Taylor's shaggy mouse story

I've always had a soft spot for a good mouse story, perhaps because The Glamour Cave is in a terrace and small rodents are a perennial feature of life here. So when Jane Taylor (pic below by Neil Bonnett, info@neilbonnett.co.uk) told this one at the Bristol Folk Festival the other week I felt a blog coming on.

It was early afternoon on Saturday and Taylor's soulful, bluesy, award-winning songwriting was filling me with the feeling you get when a festival is picking up some serious momentum and you realise you're *really enjoying yourself* Trouble's brewing up some tea, Pouring out a cup for me she sang. Then in between numbers...

"I lost my mobile telephone recently," she said, retuning her guitar. "I was pretty sure I'd left it on the side in the kitchen but it just wasn't there. I looked around... nothing. Then I had a call from a fiddle player I was working with - the last person I'd called from the phone - to say that they'd heard from a farm on the road where I live and that they had it.  She'd also had a text message saying that there was a problem in the area with mice stealing mobile telephones and they'd found a whole nest full of them.

"I thought about it for a while, then realised it was too weird and had to stop. I mean, how would a mouse carry a mobile telephone?" At this point Taylor mimed being a mouse, holding its little paws in front of it, then dismissed the gesture. "But I was busy and away from the house, and didn't have the time to go down there, though my boyfriend - Lee - promised he would in the morning.

"Then the next morning I had an email from Lee, who said he'd been looking into it. And there was a link attached to a news story on the BBC website, about genetically altered mice that had escaped from a lab at a nearby university. There was a photo attached to the story of two mice playing chess with each other and I was - predictably - outraged. 'That's wrong. How could they do that to mice, etc..'

"But I couldn't stop thinking about it and then picked up a landline and called the farm. 'Hello. I'm Jane. I think you've got my mobile phone?' 'Oh. Yes.' 'Um. Could you tell me a bit more about these mice please?' And there was a pause at the other end, before the other person said 'Jane. Who do you believe you're talking to?'  And it was Lee, who'd found the phone in the folds of a bed sheet and thought that instead of giving it back he could have a little fun. He'd spent the night mocking up a page from the BBC website. I couldn't believe it. That's my man..." Sounds like a keeper.

I'm hoping to get hold of a link to the fake BBC page, if it still exists, so watch this space.

* 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

Folk crime of the century, an update

Oh, the intrigue. Since posting about the strange case of the missing Morrissey dancer and folk's first family earlier in the week, several extra bits of information have come to light about events on the South Bank on the evening of September the 5th last year (goes into plod mode... 'ello, 'ello, 'ello etc). Here they are in no particular order.

* On the day in question there were 1,000 Morrissey dancers and 1,000 Stormtrooper morris dancer cutouts in London, left around the city as part of a guerilla marketing campaign for the 5,000 morris dancer event at the South Bank centre. Many of them were on the South Bank.

* Simon Emmerson of The Imagined Village and Walking with Ghosts was with Eliza and Martin Carthy during the events described in my earlier blog.

* Some ale had been consumed over the course of the weekend.

To the keener among you it may be apparent from scanning the tripartite list above that when you place the first and the third together there becomes some room for confusion, arising from a kind of "I'm Spartacus" situation. However, this will not defeat me.

After a certain amount of coyness from Eliza Carthy on Twitter (follow her on @elizacarthy and me on @emma1hartley) along the lines of "I wouldn't want to implicate anyone else in this crime", it eventually emerged that she and her father were not alone that evening and that Emmerson was - ta da! - the accomplice. Then this morning I awoke to this message posted by Emmerson under the previous blog.

"I have just been made aware of the mystery of the stolen Morrissey dancer. Can you tell Tim that the Morrissey cutout that Martin and Eliza put in my car was, as far as we know, the one David Owen signed and gave to me the night of the gig. Eliza was driving my car because I was 'on the ale' that night. I do vaguely remember going to the loo and leaving it outside, as Eliza does... when a switch may have happened. I can check once I am back in my studio to see if mine is signed, in which case it is the one David gave me. If it is not then someone has my signed copy (which I would like back please) and I may have taken Tim's by mistake - if he's absolutely sure he saw us pick his one up?? People were half-inching the cutouts all over the place that night. Regardless, I am in contact with David [Owen, the artist] and will see if I can get Tim a replacement. I do understand these things have sentimental value. I will not rest until this case is solved. Simon the super sleuth."

You see what he's done there? Cleverly turned himself from the criminal into the sleuth... he may never have to spend money on a PR person again.

So a fuller picture is beginning to emerge. I suspect that the flaw in this plan is that both cutouts were signed by the artist and that therefore Emmerson will inevitably conclude, when he checks his, that he has the correct one. But I've had an email from David Owen saying that he's got a spare Morrissey dancer in any case, so whoever doesn't get the one in Emmerson's studio can have another.

When Tim Plester is finally reunited with his cutout, or one very like it, I think I'm going to have to get some photographic evidence. So please watch this space. I'm going away for a week on Saturday, so there may be a hiatus.