THE LIFE & TIMES OF ... JEZ LOWE

By Brian & Su Childs

The Early Days ...

I grew up in Easington and went to school in Hartlepool - and left in 1973, and went straight into the folk music thing, because there were so many folk clubs in the North East then. 

The big folk club in Hartlepool was at The Nursery Inn, which had started in the sixties. There was a guest every week and they didn’t really have residents, so everybody who went there saw an amazing array of visiting singers from all over the world. I was playing with a lad called Ged Foley who was in my class at school, so we kind of served an apprenticeship right through the seventies going round all the folk clubs. 

I went off to college in Sunderland in 1973 to do Teacher Training and, back then, there were nine folk clubs in Sunderland ... so you could go to two a night if you wanted to! (This was before going to Newcastle or anything like that.) So there was Hartlepool because of school, and Sunderland because of college. We just gobbled it up - and we’d pick up all the songs. 

We went up to Scotland and met people like Battlefield Band and all of these people. We were all learning all the time - like an apprenticeship in traditional music and songs. Then gradually we came round to the local North East stuff.

I got involved with the Newcastle folk scene at the Denton Hotel ... Alan Fitsimmons, Jim McGeean, Annie Fentiman, and a whole crowd of people ... and they were all doing Joe Wilson stuff, and the Bards of the Tyne stuff. Alex Glasgow as well. Of course, everyone was already writing songs - Ed Pickford and Johnny Handle and so on - but I didn’t really get into song writing meself then. I’d done some very juvenile song-writing when I first started playing the guitar, but I left all that behind.

Traditional Stuff - and a start to song-writing ...

Traditional stuff - that was me main interest till I went off by meself (that would be 1980), and that’s when I started song writing. It was the big turning point, really - such a great time. There were still old folk songs being collected, and there were folk clubs all over the place. I never did unaccompanied stuff - it was always guitar and then ‘guitar-y’ type things ... mandolin, bazouki, and also Appalachian dulcimer. But it was always folk. I wasn’t coming from a pop or rock ‘n’ roll background - although I loved that, I never played it. It was just acoustic folk stuff. I was never into the folk rock thing either - I kept them all separate. I liked Fairport a lot.

I went to the Durham Folk Club ... and the Trimdon Folk Club (that’s really where I settled). There was the Durham Folk Festival in the mid-70s, and they were bringing people like Planxty, the Bothy Band, Christie Moore, Alex Glasgow and all those sort of people; there was Stu MacFarlane who played with The Fettlers and had his own radio programme - he was great cos you could go and record ... you could go to his studio on a Sunday and do a recording session and he would put it out on his show. Yes, that was a big deal - that was how I met Hutch and Roly (Nebula) and Vin Garbutt.

Ged could drive his dad’s car and I remember we used to go Jim Irvine’s club at the Marsden Inn. One night Jim said to me “You come here just once in a blue moon, why? We’re not very happy about that you just turn up every now and again”. I said “I live in bloody Hartlepool, you know!”  Jim said “I thought you lived in Roker!” I said “No, just twenty or thirty mile away!” Well, he didn’t realise that.

We used to go everywhere ... Newcastle, and then down to The Golden Cock in Darlington; every night of the week we’d be somewhere else. No social life at all! I met Benny Graham way back then, but never got to the folk club at Shotley Bridge - which is ironic really, because my father’s family came from up that way before they moved to the east side of Durham where I grew up. Folk was rife in the Shotley area; the whole Tommy Armstrong thing was going on where my grandparents lived - Pelton and Stanley and Tantobie. So that all got me totally involved in it all.

But then, when I went off on me own doing solo stuff and started up, I needed songs. I knew I wasn’t the best guitar player, and I wasn’t the best singer ... but I thought I had songs that nobody else does, and I’d already done a lot of stuff like finding old traditional songs in books (Christine from Hendon Banks worked at Newcastle University library, and they had a big archive ... so she used to let us in during the day we used to go in there and go through these books). I started putting tunes to some of these songs ... and to writing my own songs - this was kind of the next step.

There were nine clubs in Sunderland - The Glebe, The Ivy House (near the bus station), The George & Dragon (with Eric Maxwell), The Londonderry (just opposite the George & Dragon, with John Martin and people there), Ed Pickford was running one at the Ceofrith Arts Centre, we ran one at the Langham Towers College, there was one at The Bluebell, The Chesters (that one became The Davy Lamp Club), and The Belford House. Folk clubs just kept springing up all over.  

And the same in Newcastle ... The Cumberland Arms, The Denton, one in Byker, and there was one run by Benny at The Duke of Wellington (High Bridge), The County in Gosforth, the Gosforth Hotel. Stefan Sobel was also running one in the Post Office just up from the Black Gate - I remember going there to see Isla St Clare. Trent House was the University Folk Club; I saw Nic Jones there ... while all the other floor singers were on Nic was playing chess, of all things!

And then there was a club opposite the Central Station, in The Victoria and Comet ... which was often abbreviated to the ‘Vic and Comet’ ... but which was endearingly known locally as the ‘Spit & Vomit’!

‘Fred’s Festival’

Fred Brierley organised a folk festival in South Shields. The main venue for this festival was the Gateshead stadium, by the sea, and two things happened which were quite funny really.

First there was the big concert. There was a big stage with a sound system and the place was packed, about two thousand people there - mainly holiday makers. Now, Jim Sharp had a big influence on me, and I love Jim Sharp. They put poor old Jim on first turn and he started his first song in sunshine. Well, Jim used to shut his eyes to sing and, as he was singing (eyes closed), a thick sea fret rolled in. Nobody could see a thing and they all started to drift away. When Jim finished his song and opened his eyes there were only about 17 of us left!

Then we (Hendon Banks) entered the Folk Group competition ... I was really pissed off cos I didn’t believe in competitions. Anyway, we went along to a cinema somewhere in South Shields and sat. The judge was Johnny Handle, who turned up at ten o’clock with a dog and a flagon of cider. But it turned out that we were the only folk group that had entered, so we thought “Ah, that’s it then, we’ll just be off” ... but he said “No, no. Get on and do your stuff”. So we did our three songs - and he awarded us first prize, twenty quid! We won this twenty quid, and the festival was such a disaster that we turned out to be the highest paid act! Well, that was Fred’s festival! Fred was also instrumental in getting the Customs House in South Shields going, as well as running a folk club in the Wayfarer Inn at Haswell, west of Hartlepool ... in fact he owned that pub! He did a lot for folk.

What do I know anyway!

Hawthorne was good. There was this a bunch of lads who came to me in the late eighties and said “We’re thinking of starting a folk club”. I knew they’d run one in the King’s Head at Easington Village - they’d had money to do that, but it had fizzled out. They said “We want to run a folk club on a Monday night at the Staplyton Arms in the Hawthorne”. I said “Bad idea. There’s no bus on a Monday night ... and after the weekend people won’t come out on a Monday night”. They went ahead with it anyway, and it became a hugely successful club! It was just incredible. It was a bad room as well, but the club was so good that it became a focus for about the next three or four years. What did I know anyway?

Fellside Records

About that time (1980-ish) I was solo, singing by meself. I got involved with Fellside records and it became like a family really, cos we’d all help each other ... playing backing on each other’s records. I did an LP for them, which was a big deal at the time - we can all do CDs whenever we want now, but back then you had to use a recording studio. Most of the tracks were traditional songs, but I had a couple of me own songs on it (one was Sedgefield Fair), and one by Bernie Parry.

Bernie was a pal of mine going back to the beginning, really. He had a certain style, and I learned a lot about song-writing from him. I didn’t hang out with him though, ‘cos he was quite a bit older than I was, but it was good to have him as a focus; and he was very successful. He was all over the place singing his songs. He lived at Peterlee and in his ‘day job’ he was actually a welder or something like that, and I first met him ‘cos my best friend from school was his apprentice.

But once I’d got the LP out it gave us a bit of credibility, and I was able to spread me wings a bit. That first year I did Whitby Festival and Sidmouth Festival and, even if you weren’t making a full-time living, you could travel round the country doing different clubs. You had to be lucky though, and you had to be prepared to go anywhere and at any time.  At least 90% of the clubs then were run by enthusiasts, so they weren’t run as businesses. You couldn’t complain if you turned up to a gig and there wasn’t any sound system or if things weren’t ideal, because it was just people putting their own time and energy into it for no reward to themselves ... just for the love of it.

Spreading myself around ...

I’ve just been lucky, I’ve been really lucky, but I’ve also spread meself around. One of the first things I got involved with was singing with other people. The solo thing was the main thing for me, but I met a fella called Jake Walton who was another solo guy and we forged a sort of partnership which took us all over the world - Jake was already established and doing stuff. He was the first person to use a hurdy gurdy on British music, and we went to America and Germany ... we didn’t play much in England, though we did a bit in Scotland. Now I play with James Keelaghan, a songwriter from Canada - that’s an ongoing thing, and I also play with Steve Tilston - he was a big hero of mine when I was at school. Steve was making great records when I was a kid (he hates it when I say that!), so me and Steve we’re still doing stuff together and we did a CD together last year.

And Still Learning The Trade ...

So I like to keep like the solo thing going - but I have fingers in other pies, and I also get inspiration from other people. You learn a lot by listening to folks - I certainly have. The Tale of the Visiter, that was a big learning experience for me - just being around it to soak up everything that everyone did, and it all came together and it worked; I did The Tale of the Visiter twice, and then I was away the next time I was asked to do it.

The next big thing for me was the Radio Ballads in 2004 - that was a big turning point. It was John Leonard together with John Tams; they asked all these different people to be involved, and you’re basically following the ‘Ewan McColl way’ of doing it. They gave you a subject and you wrote songs about it, so that was another big learning experience - it really changed everything for me.

It’s the same with presentation - it’s kind of instinctive what you do. I learned at Trimdon Folk Club, seeing the way they did things. They had loads of people like Bert Draycott and it was almost like a music hall thing, that kind of variety, all those people from Durham and the stuff they did. And Vin Garbutt’s delivery - he was one of my heroes and I saw him a lot when I was really young. There were other people like that - Johnny Handle, Ed Pickford ... they could mix serious hard-hitting stuff with out-and-out comedy, or just be reaching out to the audience. That’s what the whole folk club thing was about.

One thing that gets my goat nowadays is that some of the younger generation (I sound like me dad now!) ... they don’t seem to be prepared to listen and learn from other people. Today, they have their peer groups - which is important. But going to clubs - sitting there, seeing how they talk up front, tune their guitar, what songs they do and so on (everything that we did in a ten year apprenticeship) - that’s how you see what actually works. I think nowadays they must do it a different way. Mebbe they learn from YouTube, or mebbe they go to festivals and see people, but that’s not the way we did it. Mebbe it’s just that it’s a different way now.

But still some nightmares!

Later on I did the main stage at Cambridge Festival with the Bad Pennies. It was a great disaster for me ‘cos when I tried to do it the way I’d been doing it everywhere else - it just didn’t work! You’ve got a field full of thousands of people, and the sound was terrible. But that’s not the worst thing. At that point (around 1998) I didn’t have the knack to handle a big stage. Then later on when we did bigger festivals ... you gradually learned and got used to it to a certain extent, but not in the way you see the really experienced ‘big stage’ players do it; it really is a skill you need to learn.

The ‘big stage’ doesn’t really interest me that much, but it’s still great to play those big places. We played Edmonton Festival in Canada with the Bad Pennies, and I think there were some 30,000 people on the big hill - it was just amazing. But by then we had a bit more of a knack ... we knew to wear bright clothes, and to do fast ones. You couldn’t get up and sing the Bonny Barque The Bergen. You need to punch - punch - punch, that’s what you have to do. But the early ‘big stages’ ... oh! ... I still have nightmares about the ‘big stage’!
Of ‘Stripes’ ... and ‘Stripes’ for ever more!

Bright clothes might have been fine for Edmonton, but the story of the ‘stripes’ is an old one. It goes back to Durham Folk Festival, when I had the LP out. I was walking along, and Peter Bellamy was there - he was a big hero of mine. I didn’t know him well, but I used to love the stuff he did. Back then everybody just used to wear casual stuff in the folk clubs, but that day Peter had a pink suit on, some sort of pink shirt with a cravat, and one of the big hats he always used to wear. He was like MISTER IMAGE. I had a stripey shirt on and he says “Jez Lowe?”, and I says “Yes.” He says “I wouldn’t have recognised you but you’ve got that stripey shirt on, the same as you’ve got on on your Poster.” Then he says “People are never going to recognise who you are unless you wear that stripey shirt.” So I just kind of laughed.

As it happened, there was a guy called Graham Whitley there from Hartlepool Folk Club.  He was a big Bellamy fan - he heard this story and thought it was hilarious. The next week I had a booking at the Hartlepool folk club. When I turned up everybody was sitting in coats ... and it vaguely resonated with me that the audience were all wrapped up like it was cold - but it was just August. So I got on stage ... turned and leaned over to pick me guitar up ... and when I turned back ... the entire audience had taken off their top coats and they were all sitting there wearing stripey T-shirts! So it became this huge joke, and the next gig somewhere in Middlesbrough everybody wore the same stripey T-shirts. That’s what started it. And here we are forty years later [pointing now to his stripey shirt!], I’m stuck with it - it’s embarrassing - and that’s all through Peter Bellamy. So that’s how stripey T shirts came about.

I’ve been very lucky ‘cos it’s always been my material, my band: Jez Lowe and the Bad Pennies. But they’ve always been really willing to put their energy into my stuff. They’ve always been great players over the years and now it’s kind of a floating line-up. 

We’ve got Andy May who’s a great piper and keyboards player (he also plays the guitar ... plays everything) - he’s been with us now for nearly twenty years. There’s Dave De La Haye on the bass - he’s great - he’s just produced my new CD. And then there’s Kate Bramley on the fiddle - again a great player and a good singer. Judy Dinning was with us   ... Bad Pennies (recent line-up)... for a few years; having Judy singing next to you on a stage was just amazing - a great singer! And it’s always been the same you know - they’ve always been really good players. But it’s become difficult to keep a band on the go, so it’s a bit of a floating line-up. We have another fiddle player Kari MacLeod (she’s great), and Chris Parkinson has sometimes played with us, and Becky Taylor (a piper originally from Teesside, she’s another Bad Penny, as and when). So trying to keep the solo thing going and the Bad Pennies going at the same time has been good. 

Foreign Languages ...

I studied languages at college in Sunderland for three years, but (unluckily or luckily) when I finished college there was no jobs! I graduated in 1976 and there was no teaching jobs. In fact there was just no work at all ... that was just great! 

So I did various kinds of office jobs, and also a bit of performing. As far as foreign languages go, I speak French mainly ... and Russian. I did Latin as well. I’ve played all over the world and, although French was the main language, I’ve only ever done one gig in France - so I’ve never been able to use me French (except if I go to Canada, in Quebec, and places like that). 

And I’ve never visited Russia! Every time I was due to go, there was a revolution or something, so I never got there! Once we were due to go when Andropov was the president (if you can remember him), and the week before we were due to go ... he died. So there were ructions on, everything was cancelled and we couldn’t go. Then the next time we were due to go to Russia a similar sort of thing happened, so I never got there then either. So I’ve kind of let the Russian language thing slide now. 

Nor have I ever written anything in a foreign language ... it takes me all me time to write in English! (And it’s nothing to do with the stripey French jumpers either!) But obviously, after learning the construction of languages, something rubs off on you, and it must help in putting words together in some way - something must sink in somewhere. 

America ...

I first went to America with Jake Walton and then by myself - that’s always been a ‘once a year’ thing. I was supposed to be doing a festival in New England this September, but that’s all off now because of Covid. That tour was usually a similar circuit each time, always the East Coast - which has developed into the hot spot for folk music. Then there was the West Coast. I had an agent and a manager there. That was a completely new thing for me, but again that’s kind of gone now. There is still an audience over there, but they’re more into Americana stuff now rather than traditional stuff. 

There was Chicago and the mid-west, which is very hot musically for folk music. It was mainly for singer songwriters but there was also traditional stuff. The ‘clubs’ in America are not really like British folk clubs. However, the San Francisco Folk Club was just like a British folk club. There was Alan MacLeod (Scottish) and Dick Holdstock (another Brit). I did it a couple of times and it was just ... well, it was just in a pub - in a very rough part of San Francisco, and there was a room at the back. They ran it just exactly like one of our folk clubs, with floor singers. 

The first time I did that club, Louis Killen was living in San Francisco - he did a floor spot, then Alan and Dick did a thing, and then some floor-singers, then I did my thing ... and it was just great. You’d think you were at home in the ‘civilised North East’ ... then you’d come out of the Club and it was rough. Alan is still around, but he’s not well at all now, and I don’t think that folk club exists anymore.

There were some really good little festivals ... one called the Old Songs Festival in Albany, New York. I’ve been doing New York State since the ‘80s (and I was supposed to be there this year) and, though they have singer songwriters, American stuff and blues, it’s very much old songs in the tradition. 

The folks who run it had a record company called Front Hall Records, and they used to put out lots of folk stuff. But they’re in their eighties now, and there’s a whole new set of people trying to keep the Old Songs Festival going. It’s a big hub - a bit like a Sidmouth-type festival or Whitby-type festival. Apart from the festival, there’s like also a hub the rest of the year for people to come back to. You meet people, and everybody’s there, like Tom Paxton - in there just with the rest of us - there’s no ‘star structure’ at all. It used to be like that across here years ago, didn’t it?

For me it would be hard work, because we’d sing in English, we’d speak in English, but the rest of the time you’d be bombarded by all this ‘noise’ of foreign language, night after night.

I don’t speak German or Dutch, so there would be this onslaught of ... just ‘noise’ coming at you. When you did this for say twenty five nights in a month, you were really worn out. We’d hear stories about people, biggish name singers, who would be having nervous breakdowns. But it was big money, and a big circuit, very popular Some Brit performers would not do any British gigs for years; they’d stay over there year after year after year and they’d just do Germany. But when the time came for them to come back here to try and break into the British folk club scene again ... well, it had completely changed, and they couldn’t get work any more!

So that was the way it went ... but that’s kind of more or less petered out now. What really happened in Europe was that they were really into the Celtic British folk thing, and that helped them to discover their own traditions. So suddenly you started getting people singing traditional Belgian songs - not so much German songs because (sadly) a lot of them had been taken over by the Nazis, and they’d rewritten the folk songs to be the ‘nationalistic’ stuff ... which is what some people are trying to do here now.

The Other Side of the World ...

I also went overseas to Australia and New Zealand. There was this great English fella Ray Downes from Cumbria. He’d moved to Australia when he was a young fella, and he brought us all over. He was the first person to take Vin Garbutt over to Australia - that was a big thing.

I went over and did all the festivals in the 90s and the early 2000s. That was tremendous, but again, it’s all moved on now because there’s a new generation doing their own Australian stuff. There are people trying to be full time folk singers - Australians, great singers - but it’s such a big place, and it’s difficult for them.

Australia - 10 years ago ...

I did a big, big tour of Australia about ten years ago, and the Union rule was that the venue had to have an Australian support act - so every night I played, there was a young Australian folk performer or trio ... and they were all good. But every night, they did their spot, then packed their instruments away and left!

In twenty gigs of that Australian tour, not a single one of them stayed on to hear me. There were no floor singers - just them and me. And never in twenty gigs did one of them stay - they’d just play, then go.

They weren’t doing it nastily, ‘cos they’d come and say “Best of luck” ... and then be off. I don’t know what they wanted - mebbe just to go to a pub and play loud. By and large at the end of this Australian tour I was fuming. It was so disappointing. They’re losing half of what it’s about.

Australia - 5 years ago ... the strangest thing ...

The last time I was in Australia was about five or six years ago, and there’s a great singer over there called Margaret Walters, who is a traditional singer. She’s been over here, and she used to sing with a fella called John Warner who’s a songwriter - straight out of our tradition, really, but they were doing Australian stuff. I’d stay with Margaret in Sydney, and at the top of the street every Tuesday or Thursday night there’s a shanty session in a bar ... and it’s the strangest thing.

Margaret took us there and we went in, and it’s just this bar - it’s not a pub, it’s just like a shop with a counter, like an Australian bar really, but a pub saloon ... and it’s full of people probably average age of about 23 to 27 or so, all these young lads who work in the city they work in Sydney in finance and whatever, and all these young women - stunning young Australian women of a similar age ... and they get together once a week and they sing sea shanties.

Whoever she’s got visiting Australia, Bob Fox or anybody, Margaret takes them there and it’s just the strangest thing. These people - they don’t know anything about the folk scene, but somewhere along the line they’ve discovered chorus songs (mainly shanties, but not all just shanties) and they just get together, get tanked up ... all the girls are there with their best gear, all eyeing each other up ... and then someone goes: “Right. Here we go, we’re going to sing ... er ... New York Girls”. One of them counts or something to keep the beat - that’s something unusual!

The whole of the place sings the song and then he’ll say “Right, we’re going to do Heave Away Haul Away.” And that’s what they do - it’s all unaccompanied and it seems to happen spontaneously. Margaret doesn’t know how it all started - she was just passing by one night and heard all these young people singing shanties. Nobody really quite knows how it happened.

They don’t go into a folk club or festival ... although they’re getting booked at some of the festivals now - they just go along and do the same thing in a bar at the festival! Margaret’s become their kind of matriarch, ‘cos she teaches them some songs now. This is in Sydney, in the district called Darlington, at the top of Margaret’s street, just outside the city centre. It was an eye opening thing. It’s just a little bar in a suburb of Sydney near the Redfearn Railway Station.

They’re all dressed up and eyeing each other up, but singing sea shanties, and they’re doing it properly - they’re not messing about. They’re good singers, and it’s like a festival bar chorus every week ... and I assume it’s still going. I think music cuts through a lot of social levels and class etc.

While I was doing it I also realised how much I miss the interaction with other people ... the harmony I would do on me own wouldn’t be the same harmony that Andy May would play on that Steve Tilston would play, and I miss that. It’s trying to keep a balance. But the way things are, will people still continue to buy CDs? I don’t know ... everything’s changed hasn’t it?

A lot of singers have ‘collections’, and from 1980 to 1993 I did six albums with Fellside Records. This March, Fellside brought out The  Jez Lowe Fellside Collection as a box set on five CDs, in a little slip case. Galloways and all that stuff, everything I ever recorded for them. I did some stuff in the mid-80s; we did an LP called The Penguin Book of Folk Songs with Martin Carthy and Roy Harris, so they’ve put me tracks off that on the CDs - everything I’ve ever done for Fellside they’ve brought that out in this box set. 

The ‘Old Songs’ ... Nowadays? ... Royalties?

To a certain extent, I do revisit songs and tweak them a bit to fit in with ‘now’. The main one I’ve done that with is Black Diamonds - I rewrote that for the Pitmen Poets. Just this week a Welsh shanty group wrote and said they wanted to call their new CD Black Diamonds, so I asked them which version they were doing. They’re doing the original - they must’ve got it off one of the LPs, but the version I do now meself is the rewrite. Black Diamonds was also covered by an American woman called Cindy Mangsen; she’s a very well-respected singer/songwriter and she recorded a great version ... rather like a gospel song. That was in the mid-1980s, and I’ve only ever met her once since then. I was already doing gigs in North America by that time. Things like that’ve kept me sort of ‘bubbling’ all the time.

On some of the other stuff, I change the music a bit all the time ... but lyrics less so - I tend not to change the words that much at all. Although lots of people have recorded my stuff, it’s never been just the one song all the time - not like Ralph’s Streets of London. A lot of people have recorded various songs ... Black Diamonds, of course, and The Bergen, Back in Durham Gaol, Greek Lightning and quite a few others.  They still do, and that’s been good for me.

Yes, you get royalties ... well, you do and you don’t! That’s not the way the folk scene works. We do the PRS  [Performing Rights Society]  thing, but it’s not the same as sales of Pop music.  Years ago, if you did a session for the radio or anything like that you’d get paid, and you’d get royalties and stuff - but that’s all gone now. It’s very rarely anything nowadays. I’m just glad to get the songs out there, so long as people don’t change them, and they say who I am - that’s as much as you can hope for.

A North East ‘Identity’

Writing and singing stuff from the North East - I’ve taken it all over the world. But it’s given me a grounding, a base. I always think that if I was trying to write songs without that ‘north eastern identity’ it would feel too ... wayward ... I wouldn’t really know what to write about or sing about.

Some people write songs about one particular thing, then something else happens in America so they write about that. But whenever I’ve done songs about things that happened elsewhere in the world, it has always been from the point of view of ‘me being from the North East of England’. In many ways it’s restrictive, but in another way it’s an advantage. It’s helped me to have a strong vision of what I wanted to do - an identity. I know there are great singer songwriters around, and it often seems to me that they just don’t have any real identity within themselves. It’s like they’re searching for an identity, their own identity ... so they might do a Bruce Springsteen type of song, then a Billy Bragg type song, or something else. I always feel it helps if, inside, you feel you know your own identity. That’s my take on it, anyway.

If you’re English, you don’t have that ‘Scottish identity’ ... or that ‘Irish identity’. You’ve got to find yourself. I always felt that I wasn’t going to pretend I was Irish - even though me family are Irish, I wasn’t going to pretend that I had some Irish roots that I didn’t really have. Like Vin Garbutt - he was very much from an Irish background, but he was very much a Teesside writer. Similarly, James Keelaghan from Canada (who I sing with) he’s got an Irish background but, he was born in Alberta ... so his stuff is very much Canadian, even though he’s got all those influences from way back.

Going for a Song

Writing songs has always been from ‘within me’. That was the way it was, even if there was a subject matter from outside, the song was always from ‘within me’. There was no real outside influence which drove the song, other than me wanting to do it and to make a song out of it. Yes, that was the way it was ... until I did the Radio Ballads!

When I started doing the Radio Ballads they would give me the subject matter - they would say “We want a song about the shipyards” or “We want a song about fox hunting” and so on. Or they would actually give me recordings of people talking about something, and I had to write about that. So I had very specific things to write about, and the trick was not to just put what they were saying into the song, but to kind of ‘walk round it’ and find some way into it. And then I discovered that’s really what I’d been doing all along!  

Sometimes the tune comes first. To get the tune for Shippersea Bay I had to circle it and circle it till I found a way of getting into it. It started as a guitar part, and then different phrases of the tune came to me ... like the flowing down vowel run. I knew I didn’t want to use six words for that so I kind of pieced it all together like a jigsaw somehow.

But at other times when, I get the words first (or an idea of the words), I keep away from the guitar or piano. I do what I call ‘singing to the air’. That way I get more of an unusual melody line than I would if I used the guitar (though the tune doesn’t always come all in one go, or even as phrases). So I come up with the melody ... then I record it (still no instrument), and then I put the instrument to it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t! I love the process of writing, and I always have done. I really get off on the words and the tunes!

The pen is mightier ...

Yes, the books. I got the idea for the first one (The Dillen Doll) from the song Dolia.  I did worry that if I started writing novels I’d lose the songwriting, but luckily that didn’t happen - the two worked on together. But when I finished the Dillen Doll I didn’t publish it ... I just sort of put it to one side ... and started to do another one, The Corly Croons. So when I was nearly finished the Corly Croons I thought ... well, I’d better do something with the first one, and published Dillen Doll. So I’m working ‘one in hand’ all the way.

Now that Corly Croons is out and I’ve already got another one more or less finished, though I need to go back over it. It’s in Northumberland again, and it’s called Piper’s Lonnen. Whereas Corly Croons is based on song (the bards of the Tyne), this is more about the pipe players in Northumberland ... and it’s a ‘follow on’. I went up there and found all kinds of legends and superstitions, and I just fed them all in. The Policeman in Corly Croons, he comes back and he has to deal with ... (but you need to read the book!). That was really a lot of fun. So Piper’s Lonnen is more or less finished now, but I don’t know when it’s going to come out ... if ever ...

But I’ve enjoyed it so much I’ve now gone on to another one! It hasn’t got a title yet, but it’s set in the same era (the eighteen hundreds) and is centred around a family that I’ve based on the Elliott’s of Birtley. Different name, different time - a family of people working at the pit, not singers, but they’ve got this song tradition, and so that’s what I’m working on.

And a strange thing happened ... I’m going up there to Andy May’s house (this was back in January time) and I’m driving up the A1. I’m thinking about the story about this family, and I’m driving past Chester-le-Street ... and there was the Birtley sign so I’m thinking about it ... and me phone rings ... and it’s Doreen Elliot. I can’t get to the phone but I can hear it and she’s saying “Jez, is that you? Jez, it’s Doreen here, Doreen Henderson. I’ve just finished your book and it’s bloody great!” So there’s me thinking of her family ... and here Doreen rings up! So the next time I saw Benny Graham I told him about it, and he said “That’s amazing, Doreen never uses the phone. She never goes near the phone.” So I was thinking, well, how weird is that? There’s times like that … amazing. A mate of mine is a Buddhist and he says that when things like that happen it’s not coincidence - it’s proof that you’re on the right path! Karma, yeah something like that. I never did phone Doreen back because she never left a number so I don’t know where she was ringing from.

So the writing is an ongoing thing. With the Dillen Doll there was a CD - it was traditional stuff and things I already had. The second one, Corly Croons, has done well, but it hasn’t done as well as the first one. It didn’t have a CD, and that was a mistake ... well, it wasn’t a mistake really, ‘cos I didn’t have any songs to go with it. It’s one thing buying a CD - people just put it on and get something from it straight away; but buying a book on its own and actually sitting down and reading it is an emotional investment. So for the third one a CD would probably help sales - although that sounds very materialistic, I think it helps the book. I think it helps the story, so for this next (Piper’s Lonnen), each chapter is the title of a pipe tune. So Salmon Tails up the Water might be the title of a chapter which fits in with the tune. I’ve got Andy May who’s like the President of the Piper’s Society now (or whatever he is) so I’ve said to Andy that when Pipers Lonnen comes out (if it ever comes out) we’ll do an album ... not with him backing me up as he does in the Bad Pennies but actually a joint thing, cos he’s got all that genius with pipe tunes and stuff, and there’ll be songs as well - but it’ll be tunes and I don’t know what else, but it will be a total conglomeration just me and him to go with Piper’s Lonnen. 

Just a ‘Splash’ of Teaching ...

And although I did teacher training, I’ve never gone into teaching either. I did some supply work in Hartlepool in the late ‘80s, but that was more as a favour to somebody I knew who needed a supply teacher. I enjoyed it well enough, but I didn’t do it for very long - about a couple of months. And I worked in a deaf school as well, in Teesside - near Thornaby. I was learning the sign language, but I’ve never really kept it up. Again, that was a bit of a favour for somebody ‘cos they were short of staff, but I’ve never really done any formal teaching.

Times have changed ...

I wouldn’t like to think I was starting my career again. To be honest, I think I was a bit lucky really. I was talking to John Tams about this - John is very erudite, very poetic - and he said “Jez, we had the best of times.” We certainly did have the best of times - we had audiences that were still relatively young, getting on to middle age perhaps, but still with lots of enthusiasm. Enthusiasm ... that’s the thing! And lots of venues.

Nowadays it’s a very different sort of dynamic. I don’t find performing at folk festivals as rewarding as playing at a club gig. It seems that a lot of people go to these big festival venues once a year and see everyone they want to see, so perhaps they don’t need to go to folk clubs as much now. It doesn’t bring them into the ‘folk family’ - there’s less participation. But that’s fair enough - it’s still valid that people go to festivals.

As a ‘punter’ at festivals I enjoy sitting around, just relaxing and hearing what’s going on. But it doesn’t engage me the way going into a little club and seeing people do things does. In a way people are spoilt for choice because there’s so much.

The only way to experience ‘folk’ in the past was to go to clubs - there wasn’t loads of CDs or LPs or things like that about. There wasn’t much on the radio, and certainly not much on the telly (other than the Spinners). If you wanted to experience folk music you had to go out - to see it face to face. But now it’s too easy in a way - if I want to see Spiers and Boden or Bellowhead, all I have to do is turn the laptop on and ... there they are. I’d much prefer to go and see them, or see The Young Uns, or see anyone in real life, and to have the company and to see how they play - if they tap their feet, and hear what they say. For that you need clubs to go to - to meet real people.

Bigger is better?

Shrewsbury is a big festival - thousands of people - and they have a massive marquee on site.  But they but they also have a smaller concert size venue, and a club singaround (the Wilsons have always been there doing that). It’s all enclosed on the old Showground, so kids can go round safely, and it’s really an ideal festival.

I did a big festival in America last year and there was some band (a bit like the equivalent of the Bon Jovi Bluegrass Acoustic Band) and they have these huge audiences. They have to get big acts in, but they’re like tribute bands. At Towersey Festival, the top of the bill was the Bootleg Beatles; they were great, but why have them at a Folk Festival when you can have proper folk artists doing proper folk?

The Pitmen Poets

One thing which has become a big deal (just accidentally) is The Pitmen Poets, with Billy Mitchell, Bob Fox and Benny Graham. This started very small and, to be honest, I wasn’t so sure about doing the whole ‘coal mining’ thing again.

It felt like that had had its day, and we all knew what we felt about what happened to the mines, and it was time to move on. So I was a bit reluctant to get involved.  But now I’ve seen it really for what it is - it’s not about glorifying the coal mines, it’s more using those songs just as protest songs for people today to relate to what’s happened since and what’s happening now. Then again, working with those three (Benny especially ‘cos I’ve always thought Benny so knowledgeable), when we’re singing together it’s really something else. I don’t know how it sounds ‘out front’, but certainly ... sitting next to them ... it’s terrific.

The Christmas Tour - Jez & The Bad Pennies

The Christmas Tour has also become a big deal. We started it very small, but it’s amazing how big a thing it’s become really. We know what we want and it can get a bit slapstick really. That’s especially true for the last two performances we do at the Sage - we always end up at the Sage doing two gigs (afternoon and evening) - and you never know what’s going to happen there.

For the performances at the Sage and at Cramlington we also do a little pantomime which we don’t do the rest of the tour. It’s something we’ve done every year, and I think that’s what people come for - they’re not bothered about what songs I’ve written for it, they just want to see Andy get dressed up as Elton John!