Ade Edmondson on being a bad shepherd

He talks really fast.

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.

"And you don't believe that?"

It seems a bit unlikely. Here's a video they made in 2008 about how the band started.

"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?

"Is it the one with the funny name?"

Yes! Zythophile by Martyn Cornell. I used to work with him.

"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 enjoyed this post, you may also like this, which is an interview with actor and folky Stephen Mangan. Or this, which is a Desert Island (folk) Discs with David Oakes, star of The Borgias and The White Queen.

* 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

Josienne Clark and Ben Walker's Fire and Fortune

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.



I'm a fan of Flood's influence on the most recent Bellowhead album and wondered how the remix came about? Josienne said that it was the suggestion of Glenn Johnson at Navigator records with which they recently hooked up, and which is also Bellowhead's record label.

"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.

* Pre-order Fire & Fortune here. It is officially out on July 22.

* Or attend the official album launch at The Forge in Camden on July 19, with special guests including Jim Moray.

* 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

Dave Swarbrick on Sandy Denny, Australia and unicorns

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 say in 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 Hulett in 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 these two 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.

No Dave Swarbrick interview is complete without a question about the Telegraph obituary that was wrongly published when he was ill in hospital with emphysema in 1999. I'd heard that he took to selling signed copies of it at his gigs?

"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 complex on 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."

* 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

Spectator interview with Eurovision winner's folky mentor, Fraser Neill

Fraser Nelson, the editor of the Spectator, is a wise man. When he watched the Eurovision song contest the other night and saw Emmelie de Forest win he wrote this piece, suggesting that Denmark takes folk music seriously - its own and everyone else's - and this is why it won.

I got a call early on Monday asking if I would try to track down and interview the man he mentions in that blog - Fraser Neill, the Scottish folk musician who's been playing and performing with Emmelie de Forest in Denmark for the last five years - for this week's magazine.

24 hours later it was done, mainly through the magic of Twitter. I'd like to thank everyone who retweeted my request for information and particularly the person who runs the Tonder Festival's twitter account, because they directly facilitated my conversation with Neill.

And what a delightful man Neill is. The pride and admiration he felt at Emmelie de Forest's Eurovision win shone out of him during our 30 minutes or so on the phone.

Here's the interview in the Spectator that resulted. It appears as the arts lead in the this week's Spectator magazine; if there are any glaring errors I can try to get them fixed online.

I'd like to wish Fraser Neill the best of luck finding a deal for the unreleased album.

* You can follow the Tonder Folk festival on Twitter here.

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Moulettes are sexually deviant pagans, says Liverpool Echo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guardian columnist Tim Dowling on Police Dog Hogan

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

Anyway.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why?

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

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

So what's Police Dog Hogan's story?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There it is in the kitchen at The Glamour Cave.

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

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

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

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

So what about the band's name?

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

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

Is this the first band you've been in?

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

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

Hardly ever?

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

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

"Yes."

So what was the best gig you've done?

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

And what about the most memorable gig?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* You can follow Tim Dowling on Twitter @IAmTimDowling

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

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

Wilful Missing seeks drummer for maternity cover

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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