BPS- Midlands Festival date 26th-27th July 2014

    Nahh! Not the one we've been excluded from for the last 35 years! Very little  chance of Hell freezing over, there, we've been told!   (Whatever!)  

     We will be appearing instead that same weekend(as we did last year) at another Midlands festival, outside our Home county of Warwickshire. With a stage, fully amplified via a sound system and all under cover.  A late bar will be offering 55+ real ales-as opposed to the handful or so available at any other midlands  festival.

   Our appearance will be at a  three day event, with  camping and caravanning available on site and nearby  There are a host of other activities already booked including Punch & Judy, Trade stands, Morris Dancing, hot and cold food and a Transport rally.  Admission will be 21 times cheaper than you-know-where , and for some it will be free.

  Depending on the scheduled times, we hope to recruit a few other  artistes or bands similarly excluded from entertainments over the border that weekend. We hope  to help arrange a programme of FREE folk and acoustic entertainment. Anyone interested in joining us-by all means get in touch using the usual channels.  
    Times and format are yet to be finalised, so we won't reveal details  just yet. Last year, there were big crowds at the event we are playing, and there will be possibly bigger ones this time round.  

    Incidentally, for the sake of accuracy-we make a request to play that "other" event annually. Not the Main event-we're not that up our own chuffs, and we know we're not big enough or famous enough to fill a main stage or a side stage. But we know there are Fringe events each year, which many local acts play. We'd be happy to play them for nothing, and each year, well in time, before programmes are finalised,  we offer to do so. Formally, filling out the appropriate paperwork, then responding to requests for info, sending contact details and demos. And each year we are turned down. 

Not Cross at Banbury

(There's a Blog Post Title that writes itself!)

      In light of the sad news about Rod Felton which I received this morning, my minor physical and emotional struggles in reaching the Banbury Cross last night pale into insignificance. Banbury Folk Club was a venue we had been meaning to return to for a long, long time. We'd left it too long-but there were reasons for this. When we'd played it last time it had been at a different venue. Afterwards we had been booked in to go back there. But this turned out to be the night my Mum died. Frankly, I don't remember much after that . I expect someone cancelled it on my behalf.

    We'd been in the canalside venue last time, along with fellow Cov & Warwicks band Isambarde. We knew them all quite well-both from the music scene and because several of us had worked with them before. It was all smiles together at the sound check when we got there. We sat supportively through their first set, and then when it was our turn they just all got up and decamped pointedly to the bar downstairs. That's star quality for you.

     The very last time I had visited Banbury, I was incognito, supporting a football team I'll bet none of you can guess the name of. We got soaked through to the skin and lost, ignominiously, to the mighty Banbury United. Fortunately we'd made a day of it. Banbury has some good pubs. We visited The Reindeer, The Bell,The Four Candles and The Banbury Cross before feeling anaesthetised enough to return home.
 

     So Banbury had some mixed memories to be erased. Due to a foot infection, complicated by a vicious onset of Gout, my plan to drive the band there foundered. No white horses to Banbury Cross for me, but Mick drove us there in the V.W. instead. A seamlessly chauffeured journey, as the Passat purred along the M40. I then had to hobble on crutches through an almost deserted Town Centre. This was the first time I'd been able to force a shoe on since Saturday. I made it (slowly!) to The Banbury Cross Pub. Which wasn't a bit cross at all, as it happened. A bit more hobbling then, through a series of pub corridors made it all a bit like an extract from The Crystal Maze, But it brought us into a large, bright high-ceilinged room. Festivities had already begun in there, and although the protocol always in Folk Clubs is to remain quiet whilst entering, especially if someone is singing, this was not humanly possible whilst clattering in on metal ware.

      The standard of performance from other guests was alarmingly high. We began to look at each other significantly. Warwick and Stratford are usually as far south as we travel nowadays, so all of these acts were new to us. We were treated to an eclectic mix of bands and solo performers, although the emphasis was on sad songs laments and angst. Which played straight into our chubby hands, really. I was also off beer and drinking water so as not to negate the various medications I was on. Would things go o.k. ?

    The hosts had very kindly (and very flatteringly) put us on last. So it fell to us to close this very enjoyable evening. A few of the audience had already begun to leave before we set up, which made us suspect they had perhaps seen us before. We'd noticed though, that this was an audience just craving to sing and so with me hanging onto a table (and otherwise unsupported), we lobbed our unique version of “ All Over Now,” into the gathered masses to see how they'd respond.
 

      Oh yes! They liked that, and they lobbed the chorus right back at us. We followed it up with “The Odeon” a song which rarely fails to please. They readily picked up that chorus too, and chuckled in the right spots. (It's near to Oxford you see, and they were obviously a bright crowd!). We had primed them, and softened them up for “Down Our Street” our newest song and barely a month old. It has won over every audience we've performed it to and this was no exception.

     By the time we pitched “Albert Balls” into their midst, there wasn't a dry eye in the house. So it was time to bring the euphoric mood down a little and to demonstrate that we could do straight folk. But instead, we did “Courting is a Pleasure” -our arrangement of a song which Nic Jones recorded on Penguin Eggs. We finished with our piece of resistance “ What a Folking Liberty.” This song is very much Son of Pheasant Plucker, with some tricky chorus warbling required if the pub was not to be closed down. I'm delighted to reveal that the entire song was performed with us all collectively getting our tongues safely round the myriad opportunities to mispronounce the words “Folk and “Folking.”

     We'd been introduced by debut host Di as a band who like to specialise in audience participation. (Impressive-someone had read our website!) As I was incapacitated however, audience participation on this occasion was limited to the odd delicate stagger and lurch amongst them. But if we ever get invited back, I'd love to see how they got physically involved with “The Whistler” and “At The Septic Monkey.” Our experience last night suggested they would be riotous.

    We even had an encore. A proper, demanded one. Not one we had engineered by truncating the set list. Comedy or pathos? We chose the latter-because Light and Shade is what we'd like to think we're truly about. So we slowed things down finally and gave them a genuine Love song to leave them sniffling their way home. Apt, because we had loved every minute there. “Need Your Love So Bad,” went well and as I sang “when the lights are low and it's time to go”-one lady on cue put her coat on and tried to surreptitiously sneak out. Probably hoping to catch the last bus to Charwelton. I could have told her it left in 1969. But it would have been insensitive not to involve her. If I'd been able-bodied I'm sure we would have had a waltz.

    The return journey home was not as easy. Banbury appeared closed, but once we'd negotiated various sets of roadworks and escaped the Town Centre, we hoped things would go smoothly. However, it took us longer to drive through and around Coventry than it did to get from Banbury to Coventry itself. The A46 was closed, and the A45 was a nightmare. As it will be for the next three years. Oh-and the Ring Road had been taken apart and was roped off too. Between them, the D.o.E. The Highways Agency and the Local Council have done their best to continue the work the Luftwaffe put into destroying this fine old mediaeval city in 1940. The press announced yesterday that the deranged council wish to enforce a 20mph speed limit on roads in the city. I can confirm that this is already well in hand. We queued past midnight, amidst jams of lorries stacking on the Kenilworth Road, as a fox sneeringly overtook us. I got dropped back home at 12.38am. I doubt Mick got into bed much before 1am.

    
    Yet it had still been a special night. We sold out of CD's despite only one song we'd done "live" from the set list being on it. We'd done every possible piece of wordplay around crutches crotches and supports. Di had triumphed as a compere and had the bonus of hearing a song with her name in it.Thanks also to  Mary, for indulging us, and to Geoff Phipps for the photos.  We had had some very kind comments afterwards from audience members, other musicians and the organisers. And I'd laid one unhappy memory finally  to rest.  

Rod Felton R.I.P. A Personal Tribute.

“JB Lenoir is dead and it's hit me like a hammer blow.” So wrote British Bluesman John Mayall, when he learned suddenly of the death of an artist who he admired greatly. That's how I felt this morning. When I heard suddenly. A hammer blow. I was still on a high over a job well done in Banbury Folk Club last night. Then I learned that Roddie, Roddy, Rod The Mod, Felton-they've all gone. That cheeky grin, that trademark long hair, the pony tail, the tie-backs headbands and headscarves. Those biceps, the earrings, the onstage (and offstage) outbreaks of cussing. The funny voices, the timbre, the way he would drop a vocal down and then rasp it across a big room without any amplification. The infectious laugh-the mix of sad, sweet, funny and downright brilliant songs-we've lost them all.

    Look, none of us are immortal, I understand that. We all have to go some time, and he had a longer run than many of us had expected, given his lifestyle. Coventry and Warwickshire has produced plenty of excellent singer-songwriters/musicians in his genre. Martin Jenkins, Mick Stuart, Dave Bennett, Rob Armstrong and Kevin Dempsey for example. But Rod Felton for me stood out, and he changed things, creatively for me. He has been a big influence on my songwriting, my vocal style and my public performance for nearly 50 years. Words like talismanic, iconic and legendary are overused. But he was all of those things. And more.

  I have no doubts whatsoever that with the right management, the right recording opportunities, the right production and some better advice he would have made it nationally. Possibly Internationally. He could be infuriating, unreliable and very rude at times. He had issues, he had demons which he occasionally bettered and kept subdued. He met some challenges which he only ever partly conquered. But his percussive guitar style, his anectdotes, his long and hilarious introductions to his own songs, that odd Coventry/Cockney accent, his appearance, his presence, that swagger, his demeanour-they were all engaging. And they could be mesmeric.

   Some, especially some of the “ladies” found him a tiny bit scary. I found him approachable, friendly, funny and very supportive. He could also be disarmingly honest. If he liked something-he told you. If he didn't, he had innate charm which could wrap it up a little-but he still told you. If he said,”Drop that,”or “Keep that” he was usually right. He adored “Vacuum Cleaner” and if he was ever at any of our gigs, he requested it. And got it.

    Rod lived in Tennyson Road, the street next to mine. I was aware of him whilst I was just leaving Primary School. Well before I first saw him playing. I first saw him perform in a pub in Primrose Hill Street. The Queen's Head? It was my introduction to “Live” Folk Music and I didn't think much of it quite honestly. I was into football, steam trains, girls and The Beatles. There was a lot of finger-in-the ear stuff that night, and only Rod Felton registered with me at all. I saw him again, a year or two later, in the City Arms, Earlsdon. Where (again) he stood out as a talented and charismatic performer. Later still, I got involved in an emerging if slightly sedate Jazz Blues Poetry and Folk scene in Coventry. First by reading poetry at The Umbrella Club. Then I started helping out with a Thursday Night Music and Poetry Club in Coventry Cathedral's International Centre. It was very Bohemian. A coffee bar:lots of pretty foreign girls from all over the world. Folk and acoustic music and Poetry. We started pulling local guests in . One of those listed factors attracted Rod. Often!

     I left school, moved away to London and so did he,I think. It was the mid-1970's before I saw him again. By which time we had formed Black Parrot Seaside. Evolving through various genres, we then tumbled via Rock and Punk into Folk. And our paths suddenly began to cross again.

    We began running a Folk Club in Brinklow at The Bulls Head. Rod was a regular. Either as the featured Act or just popping in for a noodle on the guitar, a smoke, a jam, a pint and a chat. If anything, he was even more outrageous than before. Sometimes he appeared as part of The New Modern Idiot Grunt Band with his mate Rob Armstrong. It became apparent that our tastes in music our creative writing and our sense of humour were not dissimilar. We got a record and management deal ourselves. We began bumping into Rod Felton at so many local venues. The Cheylesmore, The Rose & Woodbine, The Mercers Arms, The Barras, The Freemasons,The Pitts Head, The Grange, The Cornerhouse, The Woolpack, Nuneaton Arts Centre and beyond.

     Around 1982 BPS split up (amicably) and didn't play together again for many years. When we re-united in 2006, Rod was still out there! Still doing the circuit. Still entertaining people. He was delighted to see us back. Our paths had diverged, but whenever and wherever we met after that, the bone-crushing hug or powerful handshake, were spontaneous. The rapport was instant. Some people saw us as a threat to their own niche.(Some still do). Rod never did. He was far too smart to slip into that kind of trap. He saw us as complimenting his audience and warming them up for him so that he could take them on and charm them into utter submission. The last time we performed alongside him was at The Maudslay Hotel in Coventry. He had confided then that something was not right healthwise. He seemed not quite himself that night. Later we found out that he was seriously ill. He fought the illness and for a while he seemed to have got the drop on it.

     Whilst writing this, and sniffling a little, I was interrupted. I had to stop and switch off the computer, due to a sudden and spectacular thunderstorm. In March! Rod always was the Showman! And he always liked to let you know he was there.

Palaver at The Larder

     There's been a lively debate on Facebook over the last few weeks. In which some of those with an interest in organic, locally provenanced “live” music participated. It was triggered by the annual onset of the Radio 2 Folk awards. It considered the stratification of folk and acoustic music, into a growing diversity of compartments. And in a few cases (my own included) it carried a rant about the gentrification of Folk Luvvies and the growing gulf between them and grass roots circuit performers.

     This afternoon, Cafe Society in Atherstone, North Warwickshire, came face to face with “hands-on” music. No Dressing Room riders, no road crews, no Radio D.J. simpering about proper folk. There, in the Main Street, that delightfully-themed eatery The Larder  hosted its monthly music session. Those popping in for a sarnie or a teacake were treated to some live entertainment. Which they embraced, as they have since this event began last year.

     It is almost theatrical the way that music, performance and real life interact here. The performers stroll about like minstrels, skilfully avoiding the waitresses and customers seeking a table or ordering at the counter. They have to do this because customers come and go. Most seem thrilled to be entertained and the few that are merely bemused soon acclimatise. Indeed, most are joining in the chorus songs well before the session is over. Everyone is a winner. Customers dwell and spend more. Performers get a chance to sample the unique atmosphere (and delicious cuisine.)

      Doubtless the pavements of Stratford on Avon and Leamington Spa are used to cabaret and street art. But this is a hairy-arsed old Industrial town where they used to make hats. They don't **** about, Atherstone folk. Only yesterday the (single) Main Street was shut, as it is every Shrove Tuesday. The shop fronts are boarded up and hundreds of adults fight for several hours over a scruffy old piece of leather,once it has been tossed into the seething crowd. To an outsider this might look like an unpleasant mass scrap. The kind of public mayhem which once kicked off whenever Nuneaton Borough and Atherstone United met for a local derby at Manor Park or Sheepy Road.

     But the riot vans and coppers were not there to prevent what happened yesterday:only to oversee it and to ensure that the melee/maul/ruck passed off as peacefully as possible, and with serious injury minimalised. They've been doing this on Pancake day for the last 815 years. They reckon they've got it about right. So if Atherstonians go into their local cafe for Spam and Chips or Bubble and Squeak, and there happens to be someone singing or holding a guitar, they don't bat an eyelid. They listen AND participate, no bother.

    So it was that, as I reached the end of “Bonio Romeo,” an 80 year old lady(so she told me), forsook her walking frame, grabbed me instead and said,” You sing lovely you do,love. If I 'ad me teeth in I'd sing along with yer!” This same lady had earlier waved a Cuddly Mickey Mouse figure at me during another number. As I finished the rapidly-blooming “Down Our Street,” she noisily announced, “ Them milk 'osses did fart, an' all!” Magic. I bet she'll be back. I hope so.

     As kick-off time approached, I was the only performer who had arrived. A lady stirring her tea smiled. “ That's all right love-you'll just have to do it all on your own!” she explained. (And don't think I couldn't madam!) Steve Beeson, one third of Finger in The Jar then arrived, and between us, we started things off, hoping the Cavalry would arrive. They soon did, in the shape of Malc Gurnnham and Gill Gilsenan. And so a lovely time followed, with us taking it in turns, doing a couple of songs each. Even Catherine Cope, who had been hiding discretely behind a pillar, plucked up courage and gave us a spirited (and rather earthy!) rendition of Paul Simon's “ Fifty ways.”

     “ Bonio Romeo” was that rare thing, a Parrot request. And with “The Odeon” “and “If I were a Goat,” added, my personal repertoire was becoming heavily burdened with self-penned comedy/nostalgia songs. Time yet to redress the balance though, so I dished up  “Raglan Road,” and “Lakes of Ponchartrain,” getting a few diners sniffing into their serviettes whilst doing so.

    It was such a gradely afternoon that we were even given a post 4pm encore by the Management. The whole company present belted out “ Go Lassie Go" as a finale. It sounded divine inside, and you tell from the expressions of passers by that they were wondering outside just where the heavenly music was coming from.

 

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