Jim Causley writes:
So this is all very exciting for me. The best bit for me is that I'm getting the opportunity to work with musicians who I wouldn't normally get that chance to. Especially the Scottish half of Under One Sky, why isn't this sort of collaboration done more? (Because it's expensive?)
Jim Causley writes:
Ooh what a busy boy I am! After a month of Mawkin and living on Dave Delarre's sofa during touring/recording new album in October, I was blessed with a couple of weeks at home in surprisingly sunny Devon and then off on a Flybe from Exeter to Glasgow (I sat next to the rear gunner) for Under One Sky.
It shows you how long ago this happened - it was a cassette that a bloke gave me, so even though I can't remember the date, it was in those long lost days of the C90 on which you could, more or less, get an album a side. He was a complete stranger, a Scot, heading north on the M6 and, like me, filling up at Knutsford services.
'Check this band out,' he said 'they're great' and then he was gone off into the murk of that December night.
I was listening to Desert Island Discs the other day and my mind went back to the time I did the programme in London with the most affable Roy Plumley, who of course devised the programme. (It was Roy by the way who got the great jazz fiddler Stéphane Grappelli out of Paris in a BBC helicopter as the Germans were stamping down the Champs-Elysées - but for that Grappelli could well have ended up in Auschwitz.)
The All New Electric Muse is a 3 CD box set, part of a long line of Electric Muse CDs that looks at the history of folk rock in this country. As well as such groups as Steeleye Span, The Albion Band and Fairport Convention, the box set includes tracks from Richard Thompson, Ralph McTell and that little known folk rocker Lonnie Donegan.
Mixing Rock and Folk
John McCusker writes:
I'm writing this from high up in the sky, I'm flying to
John McCusker writes:
The last few weeks have found me stuck at my computer with my partner Heidi in the other room at her laptop...both of us booking flights, rehearsal rooms, vans and loads of other stuff, trying to organise the logistics for a tour that will take 14 people on the road for a project called 'Under One Sky'...in our spare time we've been doing gigs and recording as well!
Jon Boden of Bellowhead writes:
One of the paradoxes of earning a living as a full-time folk musician is that it makes it very difficult to spend any time playing real folk music. Like many folk musicians myself and the other folkies in Bellowhead all started off playing music in pubs for fun. That, indeed, is how we all met.
To Whoever is Out There
Paul Sartin of Bellowhead writes:
I've just finished a day teaching kids in Andover primary schools about their local music traditions and heritage. What a contrast to the Bellowhead tour, only three days hence. Or is it?
Pete Flood of Bellowhead writes:
It's the day after the latest Bellowhead ten-date tour of Britain, and I'm a broken man - grey complexion, red-rimmed eyes and aches all over - not a good look to take back home to my girlfriend and daughter. It's shameful really, considering that many bands have a tour schedule that makes us look like hobbyists, but there's something of a collective frenzy that happens on a Bellowhead tour, particularly onstage, where we'd feel like we were cheating an audience if we didn't spend much of the gig jumping around like fools.
The late A. L. Lloyd, whose 100th Anniversary is to be celebrated in a special one day happening at Cecil Sharp House, is one of my great heroes.
Like Tom Stephenson, the man who devised the Pennine Way and Benny Rothman, who spent six months in jail for his part in the Kinder Mass Trespass, A.L. (Bert) Lloyd worked away quietly and doggedly for the greater good of the common people. Like Benny and Tom he was a lifelong Socialist, when Socialism wasn't a dirty word.
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