We had a great gig at the Ram in July when Hans Theessen played there. A Dutchman who lives in Vienna, Hans plays remarkably un-European blues guitar. On the night in question, which was particularly memorable for the way he turned many of the more well-known blues standards into singalongs, he was playing a black-painted Martin D28 which he had bought from the late Gerry Lockran in the mid-Eighties, when Gerry was down on his luck and in need of the £500 Hans paid for it.
It was the last time he would play the guitar, Hans explained, because after the gig he was giving it back to the Loughran family. (Gerry changed the spelling of his surname for stage purposes back in the mid-Sixties.) In the audience as well as Gerry’s family were his old friends Cliff Aungier and Royd Rivers, who with Gerry in 1965 began running Folksville, the highly influential folk and blues club at the Half Moon, Putney. Gerry’s son Jason told me: “It was Gerry’s first Martin. I hope I can do it justice – I’ve been practising!” Jason and his wife Sammy run an excellent website dedicated to Gerry’s memory. Their goal is to release some of Gerry’s recordings on CD, and there is a tantalising snippet of him singing ‘John Henry’ as you load the home page. That’s all you need to hear to know that he was one hell of a guitarist. The biography is a mine of information for anyone interested in the blues boom of the Sixties – or in the life of someone who sounds a truly remarkable man, not least for having both ups and downs.
Our national radio service is notorious for sparing as little time as it can to all things folk, so thank goodness for Internet radio. One of the best established sites is based around Mike Regenstreif’s Folk Roots/Folk Branches radio programme on the Canadian station, CKUT. The playlists are a treasure trove of folk heroes – a random click of the mouse took me to the last show of 2000, where Jez Lowe was rubbing shoulders with Pete Seeger, Si Kahn and Doc Watson. The downside is that the show is broadcast on Thursday mornings in Montreal, so the live RealAudio feed is only accessible during the afternoon in the UK.
Another good radio show is Ron Olesko & Bill Hahn’s Traditions, on WDFU – the global voice of Fairleigh Dickinson University, it says on the home page – which is broadcast from the New York area for the Windows Media Player, which you will almost certainly have if you use a Windows PC. You hear the same calibre of musicians, but the beauty of Traditions is that it is broadcast on Sundays from 3pm to 6pm Eastern Time, which is five hours behind GMT, so not only does it make for good Sunday evening listening, but also the cost of the phone call is cheaper at the weekend.
There are even some shows archived at the Mudcat Cafe, so you can listen to them at any time. With any of these Internet radio sites, if you don’t have the required software to listen, you will be offered the chance to click to the site where it can be downloaded, such as RealAudio or Microsoft. The basic version – which is all you need – will be free, and will install itself once downloaded, at which point you can just click on the programme you want to listen to, and Bob is quite probably your uncle...
I mentioned Martin Carthy’s duet with Paul Simon on ‘Scarborough Fair’ at Hammersmith back in issue 87, and anyone who has been looking into the “Carthy Chronicles” boxed set and website I applauded in the following issue will be aware that a recording was to be made available on the website. The good news is – the wait is over. It is now on the site, along with Mr Simon’s introduction. As far as the arrangement goes, or the harmonies, or even the singing of the same words at the same time, it’s a bit of a mess. But as a British folk scene event, it sends shivers down the spine. Now if only Mr Simon could make it up with that nice Mr Garfunkel! The page also includes a links to Paul Simon sites (if Martin can forgive him, who am I to interfere?) and a very useful collection of Carthy sites – Carthy.com – so it’s well worth a return visit.
I’ve been a fan of Roger Wilson’s singing and playing ever since his days with Sara Grey and Brian Peters in the Lost Nation Band. He played a fine gig at the Ram in April. But in all these years I never realised he had trained as a graphic artist. As soon as you arrive at his website you can see the same level of style and taste laced with humour that you get from Roger’s fiddle and guitar playing. And you can get that too, as there are MP3s of a few of his songs which you can download, and which he promises will change from time to time, so this is another site worth going back to now and again.
Judie Tzuke before began her musical career by singing around the London folk scene in the late Sixties before moving off into the big time. I’ve mentioned her website before, but it is always worth a revisit, as it is kept up to date with news of where she is playing and what she is up to in the studio. There is a plentiful supply of audio files to download, though as this is a commercially orientated site, even though independent, they are only clips rather than full songs. But the reason I mention Judie this time round is that she has a live concert out on DVD – which is the other reason apart from the Internet that a PC is such an invaluable chunk of machinery.
Recorded in 1985 at Fairfield Halls, Croydon, it features 18 songs from the “Cat Is Out tour”. It was originally shot on videotape for the television market, so the picture quality is not as spectacular as we usually expect from DVD. The concert itself however is terrific, and you get a real sense of the atmosphere of the occasion, both band and audience clearly having a great time. And if you have ever been to a gig at the Fairfield Halls, you will be surprised – oops, perhaps I meant delighted, no, surprised it is – to learn that the sound quality is excellent. Being a DVD, you can rerun your favourite songs as often as you like without screwing up the tape, and you can even flip the disc over and it becomes a CD. Aah – the wonders of technology!