CHUCK FLEMING REMINISCES  

By Brian & Su Childs 

Someone once said Chuck has more stories than the Empire State Building! Following on from his ‘Life & Times’ in the last issue, here are some of those stories - all culled from real life.

 Fiddlers in Skye

When I think about the generations coming up now I’m always reminded of the story of a woman from the South who was advised by her doctor to go and live in the North of Scotland to get fresh air because she had some sort of lung impediment. 

She moved to Skye in 1968, and was interviewed in the 1990s on the radio in Skye. The guy was saying to her “Do you like living in Skye? Has it been a big change for you?”. She says “I love the fiddle music up here. I love to hear the fiddles being played. I’ve fallen in love with the music”. So the guy says “Is there any down side to living up here?”, and she says “Well, I cannae get a plumber! I can get a fiddle player - nae bother, but I cannae get a plumber.” 

 Getting started - the old way 

The late 1970s was the time when the pop rock bands were coming up. The two lads in Oasis looked on the dole like an Arts Council grant! They went to the dole, then rehearsed all week and played. This was the way they freed themselves up from being unemployed. 

People like the Corries, like Bob Geldorf’s band the Boom Town Rats, they didn’t start by going onto the phone and look for gigs. They had to set up their own gigs at first. They were people who could lay their hands on resources. It takes a lot to set up your own gigs. 

 Tools of the Trade

A friend of mine laughed at me once. I was doing a gig somewhere, and as I was taking my fiddle out some guy made a comment about ‘the tools o’ the trade’. And I said “That’s really what it is. It’s basically the plasterer’s trowel”. 

But if the work for the music is thin on the ground I would never want to be a starving artist sitting in a garret somewhere suffering for my music. You have to do what you can in between times. After leaving school, I first trained as a commis chef. Later I worked as a conductor on the buses, and at times on building sites, or did gardening, putting up fences, or a host of other manual labouring jobs.

There’s nothing greater than working out in front of an audience and playing your instrument … and having the privilege to do that. And it gets more of a privilege as you get older. It’s just a matter of how long you can survive. 

 Stéphane Grappelli

I always think of Stéphane Grappelli. You know, Grappelli never had a recording contract until he was 64 years old. People say ‘Oh, but he played with Django Reinhardt in London!’ Yes, but they were ripped off. People were recording them, but they never got any real money for it. It wasn’t until Yehooudi Menuhin heard him play in a hotel in Paris when he was 64, and then his career took off. Sometimes it’s just who you know!

 Learning an Instrument - the Irish Way!

There are so many stories about Ireland. Amazing stories. Stories about the National Schools where they couldn’t afford to get teachers to teach the kids to play. So some wise guy brought in a fiddle, a tin whistle, an Anglo concertina and something else, and just laid them at the front of the class. And he says “If anyone wants to try these, they’re there”. At the end of the lesson all the instruments had gone. And people like John Bowe, like John O’Shea in London, that’s how they learnt. They taught themselves to play. 

 Scotland & England as it used to be

I remember Sandy Bell’s pub in the late 60s - you’d get Mike Whellans and Aly Bain, you’d get Barbara Dickson, the McCalmans, Hamish Imlac would be in there … you’d get a whole plethora of people singing say Leezie Lindsay at the top of their voice, or even When Jones’s Ale Was New. There was no demarcation between English and Scottish in those days.

 Swarbrick & Carthy visit Glasgow

In the ‘revival’, I remember Carthy coming up one Saturday night in the early days with Swarbrick for a late night gig just outside Glasgow, after I’d been recording at the BBC all day. It was a rowdy crowd in there, a real West Lothian crowd. The main guy gets up on the stage and says “Noo listen you lot, these lads’ve come aall the way up frae England to play and your sittin’ there making noise. I’m gonna get the police in if ye dinnae shut up.”

 At this point the stage curtain wavers and a wee guy comes from behind the curtain, with his long hair, stripy trousers and a mandolin. It was Dave Swarbrick. He walks up to the microphone and whispers “Ssshhh” and the whole place just goes … quiet. He plays the Trumpet Hornpipe on the mandolin (‘diddle-de-dee, diddle-de-dee …’ and so on), and the whole place just takes off and starts clapping. And then his mate comes on … he must’ve thought “Well, he’s calmed them down now, so I’ll be coming on now”, and out comes Carthy.

 A trip to Ireland

Sometimes when you’re young you put yourself into a situation where you got hit early by the tradition … you weren’t listening to records and you weren’t listening to tapes, you were meeting these people.

I went to Ireland. I followed Ted Fury, Finbar’s father to Ireland after hearing him play at Sandy Bell’s at the Festival in Edinburgh. I was working as a bus conductor at the time, but I went to this pub at lunch time in my time off, and I heard Ted play … and it was real, the guy was sitting there playing. 

 So I went to Ireland and I walked into O’Donoghue’s pub in Merion Row and I said to this bloke “I’m looking for Ted Fury” (this was a lad called Gerry McCartney who played banjo mandolin). He says “Oh, he’s gone to Belgium”. 

 Then he says “Ha’ ye got a fiddle there?”. I said “Aye”. So he says “Where are ye going?”. I said “Well I might as well go back to Edinburgh, then”. So he says “Well, de ye want to play at a wedding?” … so I went to a wedding! But I didn’t know that many tunes at the time, you know. 

And then they decided to put me up for the night. He says “Here’s a bedroom here - go and sleep in this bed”. This was like something out of Moby Dick! He says “That’s actually Seamus’s bed, but you sleep in it. When Seamus comes back at three o’clock in the morn’, he’ll have been fishing. He’ll have his fiddle with him”. It was Seamus Creagh, who played with Jackie Daly who was in De Dannan. 

 Now, I’m eighteen year old, and I waken up and there’s this guy sleeping on the chaise longue at the bottom of the bed. And he opens his eyes so I say to him “Have you got your fiddle?”, and he says “Sure I have ‘n’ all”. We were just sitting talking so I say “Can you play me the Mason’s Apron?”. And he lifts the fiddle, sits up on this chaise longue, and he plays his fiddle. 

 And it was like … for someone like me from a classical background, seeing somebody do this … this was like the real thing! All the crans and rolls on the left hand that you could hope to see in one tune, all done spectacularly well. It was just incredible to see that so early in my life. 

It was as far removed from the classical fiddle tradition as you could ever think about. You were seeing things musically that you would never learn in a million years of listening to records. 

 But then, the bottom line is: ‘Did you pick much of it up?’, and the answer is no, not really. You pick up tunes and bits of style along the way, but in the end you do things your own way! 

 The arrival of traditional fiddlers in Edinburgh

Swarbrick was actually in Edinburgh before Bain arrived. I think Bain came in 1968, and Swarbrick just pre-empted Bain coming. I think Dave Swarbrick kept a lot of young people out of jail - he was such a character, a magnetic character with the fiddle, you know.

When Bain came down, that was the time when people started to think “Ah, this is not revivalist any more, this is tradition”. There’s a difference between a revivalist musician and a traditional musician … which Bain was. He was from the Shetland tradition - from a long line of the Shetland tradition.

 A Strange Way to Learn

I went through many, many years of fiddle playing learning on the hoof, because I wasn’t a traditional player. You learn things, you pick things up as you go along. But all that stuff that I’m talking about is now an academic subject - it’s all now on computers and in books. 

I was playing in a pub in Edinburgh with Bobbie Eaglesham just before he died. I played with Bobbie in Five Hand Reel, and I toured a lot with Bobbie in Europe. We even once did a gig for Gerhard Schroeder, the German Chancellor. Anyway, Bobbie and I are playing in this pub in Edinburgh and this woman comes up and says “My son was classically trained on the fiddle” and she quoted his name, and Bobbie says “What was that kids name? … Oh, aye. Aa’ve heard him play - he’s brilliant - plays Irish music”. 

 Then she tells us that her son bought Matt Crannich’s Fiddle Tutor book, got the tape, and he went from one end of the book to the other and learned absolutely everything in it, and he come out the other side as this amazing Irish fiddle player! All done not through oral transmission or through life experience, but through looking at a book! A bit like learning how to be a chef by reading a book … like ‘This is how to make Blancmange,’ … ‘This is how to make Eggs en Cocotte’ … really strange! 

 The Irish Music of London

Reg Hall has just produced a series of CDs about the history of music in the London pubs. You think to yourself “Bloody Hell, man. These people, they’ve brought all this Irish music to London with them in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s. They’re building the country and the roads, and they go to a pub in the Goldhawk Road on a Friday night near the Elephant and Castle and come out on Sunday night and go straight back to work after playing music all weekend!” 

 Lovely stories about ordinary people just playing their music.