Lewes Musical Express

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LEWES musical express

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Second Issue Winter 2013

Hallelujah!

Leonard Cohen In Lewes?

Sir John Bob Tomlinson Copper

Brian James

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ROCK

Contents News: Musical SPaces Hot Bands The Lewes Festival Hendrix & Handel Reviews & releases

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Brian James

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70 YEARS OF VIC SMITH: A life in folk

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Lewes Musical Express

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LEONARD COHEN

First thought: Nice piece of Photoshop work. Wrong. This is the great man himself backstage at the New Leeds Arena on 7th Sept, with a wicked grin on his face, reading the first issue of the LME. How cool is that!

The photo is by Steve Arch, longtime Lewes resident, who has been travelling the world with the Leonard Cohen road-show for the last four years as his lighting crew chief.

THE COPPERS: FIRST FAMILY OF FOLK

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BOB COPPER (1915-2004) A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE

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Sir John Tomlinson

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Classical round-up

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Glyndebourne Encore

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Last Words

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LEWES musical express Second Issue Winter 2013

We literally bumped into each other by chance in the Lewes Arms when Steve was just grabbing some lunch before heading up North to rejoin the tour.

Later that day he met Pete Messer and it was his idea to photograph Leonard reading the paper. When Steve asked Leonard, who was coming off stage after a sound check, whether he would do him a favour and pose for this picture he said: “Yeah bro. Let’s do it”.

So we then set out to try and pin down a persistent rumour that Leonard Cohen had visited Lewes back in the ‘60s.

Comedy scriptwriter Kim Fuller, the author of this story, lays his memory on the line: ‘I have a vague memory of Leonard Cohen visiting Lewes County Grammar school sometime in 1968. As with all memories, after a while they retreat into some dusty cornercupboard of the mind where they decay and rot until the remnants eventually become indistinguishable from dreams or overheard conversations, or something you saw in a film or read in a book.

‘When this happens, one needs corroborating evidence to re-establish their credentials as full, bona-fide memories, stamped and validated as having the status of fact. My Leonard Cohen ‘memory’ is in the first category.

‘I was at Lewes County Grammar from 1965–1969 and it must have been around 1968 because I remember I was a prefect at that time and that was when one of the sixth formers started up an after-hours folk club at the school.

‘One evening I happened to saunter past the door as a gig was finishing and was told that Leonard Cohen had just performed. I looked in the room and saw a short, older guy holding a guitar, looking pretty cool and talking to a few boys sitting around him. I assumed this was LC himself. I think he might have been wearing a hat.

‘Now I didn’t go to the gig because I wasn’t at the time a massive Leonard Cohen fan, finding the tone and lyrics of ‘Suzanne’ somewhat depressing and thinking I was a bit too young to start slashing my wrists to a pop song.

‘I chatted to the boy who’d organised the event and he was in a state because there hadn’t been many people at the gig and they didn’t have enough money to pay LC his agreed fee.

Apparently LC was a bit miffed by this – quite rightly, I remember thinking – after all he was a big star and the fact that he’d deigned to travel all the way to Lewes to perform at the school at all was a massive honour – almost as massive as Catherine Deneuve coming round to re-enact those scenes from Belle de Jour in your bedroom. Anyway, not wanting to get involved, I offered my sympathies to the guy organising it

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and went on my way. Not sure where but probably to the Lewes Arms.

‘And that’s the memory. Or dream. Or whatever. I’ve asked a couple of old school chums if they remember Leonard Cohen coming to the school and they don’t. I admit the story sounds unlikely, in which case how did I remember it?

‘My job as a writer involves making things up all day, so perhaps I’ve confused reality with some script I’ve written, but if anyone can shed any light on this fragment, I’d be very grateful. If not, I’ll have to accept the possibility that some things I remember are, in fact, fictitious. There’s also the possibility that some things I remember as being fictitious are, in fact, fact. Scary. How many memories does that apply to?

Maybe those people I remember living with for so long weren’t my parents after all...‘ As a final coda to this piece, we tried to triangulate a date and time when Leonard Cohen could have visited Lewes with the help of a remarkable 546pp biography I’m Your Man by Sylvie Simmons [Vintage Books. 2013] – which is considered the definitive work. According to her, in 1968, Cohen went to stay in his house on the Greek island of Hydra and then made a promotional trip to the UK that summer.

This seemed to be the only date which fitted the bill.

However I then stumbled on the incredibly detailed LC website www.heckofaguy.com and discovered that Cohen was actually in the UK first on 27 January 1968 when he made an appearance on BBC2’s Once More With Felix, singing two duets with Julie Felix (see YouTube).

He then either stayed in the UK or made a second trip, as he recorded 13 songs, in the spring of 1968, at the Paris Theatre in London. Five were broadcast on the BBC on 31 August, eight others on 7 September. Both programmes were entitled Leonard Cohen Sings Leonard Cohen. He later also recorded four tracks for John Peel’s Top Gear at a session on 9 July (broadcast on the 14th). He recorded an additional track on 11 August (hear them all on YouTube).

So the conclusion must be that Leonard was in Britain for a longer period in 1968 than previously thought, making it more likely that he would have been able to make a trip to Lewes. We welcome further information.

Final note: The heckofaguy website page also contains a newly released download of Leonard Cohen: Live at Brighton Dome 1979. CF

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Old Foundry Studios ld Foundry Studios, tucked away next to the old North Street Garage, is a classic example of what Lewes might lose if developers exclude provision for the artistic organisations that have sprung up in recent years on the Phoenix industrial estate.

Officially opened in January, Old Foundry Studios was initially the brainchild of DJ Sebastian Letton, whose passion for reggae and ska led him to develop King's HiFi, a for-hire sound system.

The studio offers a voice booth and two large studios, complete with equipment for rehearsals and recording.

A large number of well-known musical names have strutted their stuff here, along with companies recording voice-overs and podcasts.

Bands include reggae artists Brother Culture and Ruban da Silva as well as the five-piece folk band the Moulettes. "They were very professional, came with their own sound engineer and manager, and were very particular about the setup,"

O we could restore the upper tier and even build a new west gallery with seats, perhaps with meeting rooms underneath."

For cultural and educational events requiring a smaller venue, moveable partitions are suggested. "The partitions would allow the full-size hall to be used for music, but then it can be turned into a community space for meetings and talks", says Billington All three churches affected by the proposal are discussing their responses.

Meanwhile, a feasibility study into the redesign of the church's interior, carried out by architect Peter Pritchett of Clarke and Partners in Eastbourne, has already begun. His report is due by the end of November 2013.

sub Castro, Stuart Billington, is optimistic that a local proposal to unite his parish with St John's Southover and St Michael South Malling, will be good for the church, and good for music in Lewes. He believes the financial savings would allow Chichester Diocese to transform the building while keeping it as a church.

"We could improve the interior to be more suitable as a concert venue by removing the fixed pews, and putting in chairs that can be arranged in many ways. You could even have music and opera in the round."

If the upper galleries could be brought back into use, concert-givers would be able to sell more tickets, and help fund future events instead of merely covering costs. "The galleries need safety rails and structural inspection, and there is an issue with fire escape regulations", says Billington. "But if funding can be released by the parishes combining,

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Sebastian said. "They said they felt right at home here."

Local band Rotator, who play what they describe as "original, genre confused, instrumental music", have also played here, and the band's drummer Paul Andrew even helped build the place while Sebastian and business partner Matthew Baker were converting it from Seb's private playpen into a commercial venture.

The legendary Arthur Brown has also recorded here and while I was talking to Matt and Seb, guitar maker and player Chip Mobbs – who also helped with the rebuild – was rehearsing in the big studio upstairs. Other giggers include Half Built House, part of Lewes's Starfish youth music project, and Dende, a 10-piece band playing Afro-influenced calypso, ska, dub, reggae and Latin.

So the Old Foundry Studios is a busy, commercially successful venue with plenty of experience of bands large and small. However Matt and Seb face an uncertain future, Matt knows that affordable housing is essential to keep Lewes alive. "I love this community space but we may have to relocate and that will be a challenge."

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Phoenix Development

St John Sub Castro

ewes' most celebrated concert venue could be transformed into a modern performance space while remaining a church and retaining its much-loved acoustics. The plan is part of a proposal to combine three of the town's Anglican parishes.

For generations, large choirs such as the East Sussex Bach Choir have performed with orchestras in the St John Sub Castro church, enjoying its resonant, sympathetic acoustics. But modern safety regulations have closed the upper galleries, reducing ticket sales, and the box pews on the ground floor can't be moved.

Meanwhile, the church, which can seat 300, sees an average of only 30 worshippers each Sunday.

The vicar has retired, and no direct replacement will be appointed.

The treasurer of St John

he big question mark regarding musical spaces in Lewes is the future of the Phoenix industrial estate which, in recent years, has become a base for musicans, artists and makers. It is now owned by The Santon Group who have renamed the site The North Street Quarter.

They plan to demolish existing structures and create new housing, leisure facilities and commercial properties.

This will mean that over the next two-years, the town could lose Starfish, the Old Foundry studios (see left), the performance spaces at Zu studio and the recording and rehearsal space at Cafe des Artistes.

Santon commissioned and paid for ‘An Audit of Cultural Infrastructure in Lewes’ which was approved and developed in collaboration with Lewes District Council (LDC).

One of its main recommendations was that : ‘Attempts should be made to retain the creative essence that has developed in the North Street Quarter, where this is economically viable and any proposals for providing creative spaces should be developed in conjunction with the town’s creative community.’

The Audit has led to the creation of a Cultural Forum of interested parties, under the auspices of LDC,

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LEWES FooTball Club

aving successfully saved Lewes Football Club from bankruptcy and converted it into a communityowned club that is now the best supported non-league club in Sussex, ambitious plans are afoot to expand and develop the Dripping Pan site into a Sussex Youth Network Centre (SYNC) over the next three years as a ‘7-Day-A-Week community village focussing on youth provision.’

As well as renovating the clubhouse, the bar and adding new changing rooms and a new all-weather pitch, the site will include a theatre space, a tv-media studio, a fitness centre, cafe and retail units plus a recording studio and rehearsal space.

This £5m project, developed in conjunction with the architects BBM Sustainable Design will go before the planning committee in January 2014.

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Arthur models his psycho sonic stage headgear

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THE LEWES FESTIVAL he largest musical event in Lewes’ history, held on the weekend of 19-20 July 2013, is now a fond memory. The weather was kind, the event went off almost without a hitch – the main problem being the long wait to get in and out of the arena – and the general view was that Lewes done good.

These great pictures by Carlotta Luke capture the ambience of the event which may be one of the last gigs Mumford & Son will play for a considerable amount of time.

In the July 26 edition of the Sussex Express, it was reported by Lewes District Council that initial feedback on the economic benefit of the festival to the area could be between £2.5 and £4 million. Attendance was 24,000.

At a meeting the LME had with the LDC, we were told that 70 per cent of the visitors came from outside the local postcode area and that 5,000 people camped over.

The event generated revenue via retail, pubs & restaurants, hotels and B&Bs and raised the profile of the town and boosted tourism. LDC inferred that there would be no festival next year on that scale but possibly another in 2015.

In his Viva Lewes column, Norman Baker MP asked: ‘So should we do it again? My feeling is yes we should.

But we need all the right ingredients to be right, especially the right mix of bands. Topping the Mumfords will be a tall order.’

The LDC have more recently informed us that: ‘a full economic impact assessment has been carried out and will form part of a more detailed report to the cabinet councillors on 18 November. We are collating all the information and feedback we received from the festival and the report to cabinet will make recommendations on future festival plans as well as including a detailed summary of the success of the event.’

T MARCHING BANDS

Two of our local marching bands have been in the news of late as well as performing their annual duty with the Bonfire Societies on 5 November.

The Expedient Band The Expedient Brass Band, which has been going since the early ‘60s, regularly march with South Street Bonfire Society and are one of the few New Orleans-style marching bands left in the country. They were additionally called on this year to lead the funeral cortege for Keith Austin, one of the most important figures in modern bonfire history. The procession went from the The Dorset Arms to Southover church and was followed by a wake in The King’s Head, Keith’s local.

The Lewes Glynde and Beddingham Brass Band The LGB, who march with Commercial Square and perform annually at the Proms in The Paddock, had a record year in 2013 when, at the National Brass Band Championships at Cheltenham in September, they were crowned Third Section National Champions of Great Britain. As a result they will be a Second Section band from January 2014. www.lgbbrass.co.uk

Legendary pioneer of rock performance Arthur Brown has succeeded in his first attempt to play musical instruments by electrical brainwaves alone.

In a private rehearsal in Lewes, collaborating with leading neural feedback artist Luciana Haill and observed by the LME, Arthur was able to control his brain sufficiently to bring a synthesizer under his direct control.

Luciana, who is Artist in Residence for the Centre for Computational Neuroscience and Robotics at Sussex University, attached a set of electrodes to the musician's forehead and ear. Then, dividing Arthur's brainwaves into frequency bands, she was able to hand over a portion of the electrical patterns to control a digital synthesizer.

Arthur remarked that his extraordinary ability to control his Theta and Beta waves: “was a technique taught to me by Native Americans". Also in this experiment, an unexpected correlation was seen between Arthur's chanting of long notes, and specific brainwave frequencies: this will be investigated further.

He told the LME that the first application of brainwaves in his stage show will be during his next tour, during the Hard Rock Hell Festival in Pwllheli, Wales, on Thursday 28 November.

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hot bands SCOT FREE

This cracking blues/rock band, whose members are aged between 17 and 21, mix a set list of original tracks with classic covers – including tracks from Led Zeppelin, Elvis , Chuck Berry, Daft Punk and Free. Their new EP will be featured at a Con Club gig on Saturday 30 November. Expect to hear much more of them in the coming months. Left to Right: Seb Cole (keyboards), Hugo Bowman (drums), Kyle Brown (vocals), Jamie Hernon (bass), Max Gibson (guitar)

Kiss My Disco

LME

Arthur Brown BRAINWAVE SUCCESS

DJ Nick Carling runs six-week DJ workshops for local people with learning disabilities and then stages a ‘Kiss My Disco’ event [usually at The Volunteer] to provide them with a platform to show off their newly acquired skills to their peers and the community at large. He writes to the LME: ‘These events are open to everyone in the belief that integrating both 'learning disabled' and 'nonSuper 8 are, simply but not leastly, a great funk band playing learning disabled' old-school ‘70s dance-your-ass-off material – a guaranteed communities has a lot to offer dance floor filler. Check them out at the Starfish benefit gig both parties. It's fun and a at All Saints. 7 December. Left to Right: (Back) Ian Angell (bass), huge confidence booster to Andy Ferguson (sax/flute), Alice Hawkes (keyboards), Matt the individuals involved.

Woodruff (guitar); (Front) Helen Cane (trumpet), Poppy The music is eclectic, from Schjerve (vocals), Joe Ellis (drums), Steve Franklin 'Soul Boy Perry' spinning (guitar/congas). Missing in action: Peter Thompson (trombone).

7" Northern Soul singles to Matt, the ex-raver who suffered brain damage and has found rehabilitation though reconnecting with the music he used to love (and more importantly still does).’

Nick one of the finest DJs in his own right, also runs the Fruitful Soundsystem and gigs in various corners of Lewes.

Check www.freshtrack.org facebook/kissmydisco twitter/kiss_my_disco

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(Main/Lower Right) Mumford & Sons; (Right) Mystery Jets; (Below) Vampire Weekend; (Below Main) Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros; (Bottom Left/Right) Vaccines/White Denim.

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John Agard

LME

reviews Nigel Horn

JIMI HENDRIX AND GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

Under One Roof

shadow on the day

Some sonorous and finelywoven instrumental textures and sequences characterise Nigel Horn’s full-length album shadow on the day (the performer eschews upper-case letters). The aromas of 1970s acoustic guitar heroes such as Gordon Giltrap, and chord-painters like David Gilmour, infuse much of the album, though the pace of Horn’s structures is sparser.

Horn, a self-taught singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist living in East Sussex, is at his best when he breaks out of traditional song patterns. The lights come on when he leaves behind effect-pedalled, awkward and conventional blues angel of mercy for the stark rainin’, one of two bravely successful duets for muted trumpet and voice. Here, his style shines. Indeed, the purely instrumental pieces, which evoke space and longing through modal harmonies and textural development, are worth hearing alone.

There is emotive compositional and instrumental talent to appreciate on this CD and Horn will surely seek a broader vision for his obvious musical sensitivity in the future.

The disc is available from Skylark in the Needlemakers and Octave Records for £10, of which £1 goes to the Emile Faurie Foundation for children.

Strange how the centuries evaporate when transatlantic ghosts become housemates and summer 1723 puts on the swinging sixties.

Hendrix on guitar. Handel on harpsichord.

Spread the word, music lovers, spread the word.

It’s the hottest gig this side of the afterlife.

One sports a powdered wig, one a western hat.

London’s Mayfair heart is where the action’s at.

Follow the riffs and quavers and you can’t miss it.

Neighbours swore they’ve seen on a mid-summer’s rave Mini-skirted sopranos tip-toeing the Georgian staircase and they know they weren’t hallucinating.

Idmonster/ be more like water

Once in the attic a guitar erupted into fire while the study below was belting out Messiah.

O that Brook Street terrace with the two blue plaques.

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A question I often torment people with is, "Would you rather go blind or deaf?" On the new idmonster album be more like water (a Bruce Lee maxim), the kaleidoscope of found sounds, distinctly manipulated in the modern age, weights the answer heavily in favour of losing sight.

Boundless creativity of the sort the

Rumour has it a pair of ghosts, one white one black, would flutter over chords and choral counterpoint.

Sometimes they’d share a hug, sometimes a joint.

But you know how gossip multiplies the truth.

Mostly H & H spoke of hippy rugs and lost love days when childhood’s oratorios bloomed in a purple haze.

Hendrix moved in to 23 Brook Street, Mayfair, with his English girlfriend Kathy Etchingham in 1968. More than two centuries earlier in 1723 Handel had moved to 25 Brook Street. The two houses have since merged into one as the Handel House Museum with two heritage plaques commemorating both the composer of Messiah and the rock guitarist who lived there.

EwordsLEjohn warburton

BBC Radiophonic Workshop would have sold a Dalek for, causes this album to be a standout high-fidelity feast that hops across the genres of electronica, basement tempo and chill, with the occasional nod toward noise filtered through tonality. If Rick Wakeman and Brian Eno fathered a son, with the members of Efterklang as midwife, Pendle Poucher, the Sussex composer and selfdescribed "lover of funny noises" who is the "idmonster", might be him.

Like the people who recorded the Dr Who theme in 1963, idmonster’s work is layer upon layer of very odd instruments, several over a century old, and other natural sounds, but they are manipulated in complex seawaves of dense ensemble and digital acoustic that Delia Derbyshire could only speculate upon. Yet the balance is so fine that whatever elements are needed to help the listening ear find its way remain clear.

From a magical steam train pounding into the greatest musical railway shed of your dreams to powerful harmonies echoing into space, separated in time as delicately as the dialogue in a Terence Rattigan play, this album explores one’s mind as much as the space between one’s loudspeakers. Play it alone, play it late at night, play it to be surprised by the beauty of structured sound.

Available for £10 from Octave Music or on-line (with 1GB of free sound samples included).

LME

new release

The Jamie Freeman Agreement/ 100 Miles from Town 100 Miles From Town the new album by The Jamie Freeman Agreement is released at the end of November on the Union Music Store label. The band aside, it features guest appearances by members of Larkin Poe and The Good Lovelies + others + UK pedal steel legend BJ Cole – with Mark Chadwick doing a bit of mentoring, it says here.

Full review on LME blog. See also: www.jamiefreeman.co.uk

The new ‘Baroque and Roll String Orchestra’, an initiative by Violinist Julia Bishop and cellist Catherine Black, aims to reach children who normally wouldn’t take extra music lessons and show them that old music is as full of rhythm and rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle as today’s pop.

They seek funding to buy copies of Baroque bows for playing stringed instruments, to put on performances in authentic costumes and to provide teaching from experienced professionals. The orchestra meets each Monday at Church House, St Michael’s Church, High St, Lewes at 4.15pm. Find them on Facebook.

This poem is included in John Agard’s latest poetry collection Travel Light Travel Dark which is published by Bloodaxe Books [2013]

See: www.neetapedersenarts.com

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BRIAN JAMES

Being an account of a rock ‘n’ roll journey featuring Rat, The Captain, Iggy, Stiv, Duffy, Johnny, Mani, Wayne, Mick and an audience of thousands s our mutual friend rock writer Nick Kent would put it, I’ve known Brian since the get-go - in the late 60s when we were running an arts lab called the Worthing Workshop and we used to book bands including, from Crawley, The Mysterious Babies and a band called Blues Crusade with Brian, Malcolm Mortimer and Dave Searle. The two bands merged to form Train but then Brian heard Iggy and The Stooges and left to start a hard rock band called Bastard. Perhaps unsurprisingly, at that time of pub rock and glam, getting gigs in Britain proved difficult. When their singer was offered a tape-op job in Brussels, at the first 24-track studio in Europe, the band went too.

“We got a regular gig at a place called Florio’s and people came in from miles around to see this crazy English band

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playing straight in-your-face rock ‘n’ roll but then things gradually happened, people met women and got married and I found myself kicking my heels and I thought that’s about the size of this one.

What am I going to do now?”

LONDON SS & THE DAMNED “So I went home to my parents on Christmas primarily to see my folks and to eat and I saw an ad in Melody Maker which mentioned The Stooges and it was band who called themselves London SS which was Mick Jones who went on to do The Clash and Tony James who went on to do Generation X and so I got my amp and guitar back from Brussels and teamed up with them guys.”

According to Jon Savage’s brilliant punk history England’s Dreaming Malcolm McLaren, who had already got the Sex Pistols going, tried to create

another band with Rat Scabies, Dave Vanian and Chrissie Hynde to be called Masters of the Backside.

Meantime London SS had split into two factions. Brian and Rat had met and got on straight away. “It was just an energy that sometimes happens between musicians. Some kind of telepathy goes on and you know instinctively what you’re going to do together.”

They invited Ray Burns (later named Captain Sensible – who Rat met when they were both cleaning the Fairfield Hall’s toilets - to join them. Brian says: “We asked him whether he wanted to go on bass and cut his hair off .” They began rehearsing with Chrissie Hynde but when she left, they auditioned Dave Vanian and became The Damned.

“The name... was Brian’s idea” says Ray. “We were damned really: everything that could go wrong did.”

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They invited Ray Burns (later named Captain Sensible - who Rat met when they were both cleaning the Fairfield Hall’s toilets - to join them.

Brian says: “We asked him whether he wanted to go on bass and cut his hair off.”

In October 1976, the band released the first English punk single New Rose and the first punk album (Damned Damned Damned) both produced for Stiff Records by Nick Lowe. Virtually all the songs were written by Brian. The following year they became the first British punk band to tour the US and that March they opened for T. Rex on their final tour. A second guitarist called Lu was hired and the expanded line-up recorded the Music For Pleasure album which was produced by Floyd drummer Nick Mason. Rat left the band before the album came out to be replaced by John Moss, later of Culture Club. The album tanked and after a short tour the band broke up in early 1978.

Brian reflects on those days: “It was a really good band for a while. For a magic six months no-one could touch us as far as I was concerned. We were firing on all cylinders. Rat left because he had a nervous breakdown although he won’t admit it He was building a fucking bonfire in his hotel room after the gigs, drinking a couple of bottles of brandy. It was a time of excess and everything goes. Somebody’s fuse had to go first and it was Ratty. He was the drummer and was doing all the physical work and he was probably the craziest of us all. It was like a Keith Moon-ey type thing but at a much more street level. Once he went it just wasn’t the same band at all. It was like a corpse that had had all the life-blood taken out of it. So I said to Vanian and Sensible I want to knock it on the head.”

“I wanted to rebel against the rebellion of the punk thing. A ‘fuck-you’ to the thing I helped start. In the beginning we wore leather jackets, tight black jeans, skull and cross-bones insignia. You’d see somebody walking around dressed like that similar to you and you’d think that guy’s on the same wavelength as me. It was a special thing. It was cool. Then all of a sudden it became a uniform. You’d go to a Clash gig and it looked like a recruitment thing for the army. It had just become another fucking fashion and those things I held dear to me had gone straight out the window.”

again. It was very cool. The band was a bit of an all-star cast because we had Glen Matlock [former Sex Pistol] on bass, Ivan Kral from the Patti Smith band on keyboards and guitar and Klaus Krüger (aka Klaus Krieger) from Tangerine Dream who was steady as a rock, a really great drummer.

LORDS OF THE NEW CHURCH Brian’s next venture was a band called Lords of the New Church. How did that come about?

“I met Stiv (Bators) in ‘77 in CBGB’s in New York when The Damned went over and did three or four nights with his band The Dead Boys. We both did two shows a night and both bands became really good friends and Stiv and I decided one day we were going to do something. So when I was passing through New York with Iggy we hung out and talked. By then Stiv ‘s band had split and he’d recorded a solo album (Disconnected) and had some solo gigs around the East coast and he wanted me to come over and play guest guitar which worked out fine.”

Bators then came over to London about a year later and formed a band called The Wanderers with Dave Tregunna, the ex-bass player of Sham 69 and produced an album Only Lovers Left Alive released in May 1981.

According to AllMusic.com: ‘This album remains one of the most foreboding records ever released and plunges the listener into a world of Bolshevik plots, duplicate Popes, and a Third World War that is so close you can smell it.’

Brian recalls: “I was managed by Miles Copeland at the time. I knew his brother Stewart (drummer with The Police) and we’d put out a couple of singles together. Stiv and I started working stuff on our own project together and Miles put his clout behind it. Stiv introduced me to Dave whose playing was good and he really fitted in personality wise and then we found this drummer Nick Turner who played in The Barracudas (an English/Canadian surf/garage band). He was running almost like an S&M rock ‘n’ roll club and was really into Cramps sort of stuff mixed with the bondage scene and he played in the style of Jerry Nolan of the Talking Heads with not so much snare and cymbals and high hat but a lot of toms. It was just what we needed.”

The Lords were launched in 1982 their first ever gig was in France - and they toured the States non-stop, year on year, gradually building it up and playing bigger clubs each time. The band recorded three studio albums and one live album.

“We went through phases and lasted about seven years. It was another totally crazy band but it was a lot of fun. Stiv was a very wild little fucker but at the same time one of the funniest guys I’ve ever met in my life. He just had me creased up and he’d just play pranks on everybody. He didn’t care who you were,

IGGY CALLING After a short spell in a band called Tanz de Youth he was rescued by a phone call from Iggy Pop asking whether he wanted to come and play guitar on a North American tour to promote his New Values album. A rock ‘n’ roll fairy tale.

“Well that was a fantastic thing. I’d never met the guy before but I adored The Stooges. He never told me how he’d picked me but I’ve heard three stories: one that Johnny Rotten had recommended me; one that Elvis Costello had recommended me; and the other that Iggy had come down to see The Damned at one of the Roundhouse shows we did and he’d really got off on my playing. I don’t know but it’s one of those of those things that you never think could possibly happen. It just fucking floored me I can tell you.

“It started off being a six-week tour of the States starting in October 1979.

We flew into New York and worked our way across to the West Coast but the tour proved so popular with the kids we just went back and played New York

Iggy never told me how he’d picked me but I’ve heard three stories: one that Johnny Rotten had recommended me; one that Elvis Costello had recommended me; and the other that Iggy had come down to see The Damned at one of the Roundhouse shows we did and he’d really got off on my playing 9

Such fun included the infamous incident during a Lords show when he looped the microphone cord around his neck which resulted in his being clinically dead for several minutes. he’d fuck you over if he could.”

Such fun included the infamous incident during a Lords show when he looped the microphone cord around his neck which resulted in his being clinically dead for several minutes.

In the end, the Lords split acrimoniously after a concert on 2 May 1989 at the London Astoria. Brian returned to his mews flat off Portobello Road. He did a solo album with ‘New Rose’, a label in Paris named after his song, toured a little bit and then, he says, “various things happened”.

“Stiv died in 1990 (of injuries incurred when he was hit by a car on the streets of Paris), my parents died within 24 hours of each other, another friend Johnny Thunders (of The Heartbreakers) died as did Pegleg Pete, a personality from round Portobello. People were dropping like flies.

“When my wife gave birth to our son Charlie we decided to get out of London so we moved to France for about six years. It was Duff who played in Guns N’ Roses who was responsible for enabling me to move to France on the proceeds of their recording of New Rose (on their 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident?). He was a huge Damned fan”

MAD FOR THE RACKET I told Brian that my son Louis and I saw him play on 14 December 2000 in one of the very few gigs he did with the band Mad For The Racket. He was playing with Wayne Kramer of the MC5 on guitar, Mani from the Stone Roses on bass and Clem Burke from Blondie on drums. That was a most excellent night.

“When we moved back to Brighton I didn’t know what to do so I called my old mate Ian Grant who suggested I make a list of old friends who I would like to play with but hadn’t actually got it together.”

The resultant album The Racketeers was written jointly by Brian and Wayne and featured Clem Burke and Stewart Copeland on drums with Duff McKagan on bass. Without going into all the details, there was a wrangle over who was going to release the record and the whole project ground to a halt. Says Brian: “It was a shame because it was a good band and it had a lot of potential.

We started talking about doing another album but it just put the fucking kibosh on it and that was it.”

Since then Brian has done his own thing. He reformed the Lords of the New Church with Dave Tregunna (20022003) and released a solo album with his band The Brian James Gang in 2006. He and Scabies did a one-off gig at the 100 Club in 2007 and played a number of gigs in the UK, US and Japan in 2012 – the 35th anniversary of the original Damned release – when he also put out a solo acoustic album Chateau Brian with Lords’ keyboard player Mark Taylor.

A new Brian James Gang record is in the making. CF

EwordsLEjohn may There’s still a trace of a Scottish burr in Vic Smith’s voice. We’re sitting in opposing armchairs in a Lewes front room crammed with carefully-shelved CDs on a slightly overcast morning. When it comes to matters folk Vic has been there and done that many times over; one folkie described him to me as ‘omnipresent’. He’s been running traditional folk clubs since the 60s, plays in a long-lasting barn dance band, and knows or has met many of the important and significant figures in the scene. He has jointly edited ‘The Folk Diary’ magazine for more than 40 years and has written extensively for academic and popular magazines and journals. He also presented the BBC Radio Sussex folk music programme ‘Minstrels Gallery’ for 25 years. He and his wife Tina, childhood sweethearts, have shared this long journey together, run one of two long-standing folk clubs in Lewes and form part of the committee that organises the Lewes Folk Festival which celebrated its fourth year this October.

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A life in folk

ic’s musical memories stem from his childhood in Edinburgh (b.1943) where there was always singing at family parties. Neither of his parents were musical but he did have two musical uncles – one of whom played fiddle and banjo or drums (when necessary) in a barn dance band and had a good collection of Scottish dance music, particularly of accordionist and dance-band leader Jimmy Shand (1908–2000) - and a grandmother from Aberdeen, whose repertoire of traditional songs would stay in Vic’s head. One of them in particular proved pivotal in triggering his interest in folk roots.

But first came trad jazz. When his father left the Navy, Vic’s family moved to Portsmouth where, in 1956 at the age of 14, he saw live music for the first time and got into the local trad jazz band scene which was strong in the Portsmouth/Southampton area.

Around 1957/58, following the end of the bitter dispute between the UK and US Musician’s Union, which prevented American musicians playing in the UK (and vice versa), these trad bands hosted American guests like trumpeter Kid Sheik from New Orleans, saxophonist Emanuel Paul and trumpeter and vocalist Henry ‘Red’ Allen. Vic also saw some of the bigger concert tours featuring Louis Armstrong and Ella Fitzgerald and many concerts by the Chris Barber Band, who featured and promoted such American musicians as Sonnie Terry & Brownie McGhee, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Mahalia Jackson.

Vic credits his history teacher, who also played clarinet in a trad band, with introducing him to the folk clubs which ran alongside the jazz gigs, often in the same pubs like The Railway Hotel and the Cobden Arms. His first exposure was a revelation: “There was an American banjo player (I really can’t remember her

name) who sang ‘Married girl/Married girl/Worried all the time/Single girl/Single girl/Dressed oh so fine/Oh lord I wish I was a single girl again.’

And I thought that this was the same song my Grannie sang in a different form: ‘When I was single/I used a powder puff /Now I’m married I canna afford the stuff/Oh what a life/A weary, weary life/It’s better to be single than to be a married wife.’ See the similarity, the connection between them? I was hooked from that moment. I thought what’s going on here, this is really interesting, the fact that the same idea, basically the same song, had somehow travelled across to America and started to take on a different form. It had resonance for me.”

In due course Vic went to London, worked for Boots the chemist for 18 months before going to teacher’s training college in Eltham, south-east London, getting married to Tina, running folk clubs in Woolwich and Blackheath, and starting to sing and play himself.

He played in a trio with Murray, an old school and college friend, and Tina playing concertina. “She came from a musical family and had played clarinet and piano so she had a much stronger grounding in music than I had. I didn’t have any musical instrument training when I was a kid and only started when I was in my twenties. The first instrument I started learning to play was the guitar but it didn’t really reflect the music I wanted to play. I did play a bit of fiddle but when we put our own barn dance band together I ended up playing guitar, banjo and/or the mandola, which is an octave deeper than a mandolin with a longer neck, alongside the fiddle, accordion and concertina.”

When I ask Vic why he’d got involved in running folk clubs, was it because

70YEARSOF

he was good at organising things, it touched a nerve: “You’re coming to an actual crucial central point and something I feel very, very strongly about. It was pretty common in those days that if you were a folk performer you did gigs but also ran a folk club. It was considered part of what you did. If you didn’t actually organise it, you were a committed resident singer every week.”

As well as playing and organising, Vic and Tina often travelled into central London to check out the Soho folk scene of the day.

“At that time in the mid-1960s, we went to both folk clubs and jazz clubs – mainly in Soho, places like The Roundhouse pub, Bunjies and Les Cousins- and met people like Shirley Collins and Martin Carthy, who we would later get to know well when we moved to Brighton in 1968 and began booking them regularly – which meant they stayed at our house.”

In 1968 Vic and Tina went to the National Folk Festival held at Keele University. “I was absolutely knocked out by it. It was my cup of tea. It was a gathering of the older traditions. I loved every aspect of it.” As a result, they began to spend every summer going round Scotland seeking out old singers and players.

“It was such a voyage of discovery, learning and recording their songs, their tunes and their stories. Many of the traditions were in decline because society was changing quite rapidly but there still were patches where it was very strong, particularly on the fringes of society and in the more rural places.

There was one small village in Aberdeenshire call Fetterangus which was largely populated by settled travellers along this one road – Robin Hutchinson, Elizabeth and Lucy Stewart, Jane Turriff - absolute paragons of the Scot’s tradition all living in the same street.

“I knew there were other people doing this kind of thing. I was most influenced in Scotland by Hamish Henderson who had done a lot of this work and, when we came down south, by one of Hamish’s former colleagues Isabel Sutherland, an outstanding singer and song collector, who lived with her actor husband Joby in Rotherfield. They took us under their wing and played us all their recordings. We learnt an awful lot from them about how to approach people and engage with them, how to show an interest in what they said and when to shut up and listen to what they had to say.”

The move to Brighton came about because Tina wanted to take a library course at Brighton Polytechnic. “Tina

had a place at college and I had got a job in a junior school in Lancing having qualified as a teacher by then. So in August ’68 we came down with our tent and we had to find a flat to live in, and a pub to run a folk club in, and we managed to do both in one weekend.”

The club was at The Gloucester right in the centre of Brighton, which subsequently became the Bird’s Nest disco and is now a nightclub venue.

There were, says Vic, already two wellestablished very good folk clubs - one at the Stanford Arms in Preston Circus and one at the Springfield Hotel on Springfield Road.

“The folk club scene was probably at its strongest at that time and these folk clubs – on Wednesday, Friday, and Sunday – were all packed There was a very strong folk tradition down here and it wasn’t long before we got in touch with people like the Copper family and lots of other traditional singers from Sussex who had good repertoires like George Belton, George Spicer and Johnny Doughty. We encouraged the old guys to come to our club and we had special ‘Sussex Singers’ nights when we put on nothing but them. Karl Dallas, the Melody Maker journalist, came down and recorded some of them and there were releases of that stuff.”

Martin Carthy came down to play in 1969 under the auspices of a grassroots organisation that was the precursor of the Brighton Festival committee and stayed at Vic and Tina’s flat as did many other performers including the legendary Davey Graham.

“He stayed with us. I liked him. He was a very strange man, brilliant but odd. In retrospect, I would say that he had some undiagnosed autistic-type syndrome. Drugs ruined him. For a couple of years he was married to an American singer called Holly Gwynn who was the making of him. She put him back on the straight and narrow and he started going back to swimming.

He had actually made Olympic times as a butterfly swimmer and to see him swimming was phenomenal.”

It was around this time that Vic and Tina first got involved with the folk club in Lewes. “From 1968 or 1969 the folk club at the Lewes Arms had been run by Terry Masterson, a great friend of ours.

He was a professional singer and he’d had an offer to go on tour of the States and asked us to run the club for three months while he was away. He ended up staying for almost 18 months so, by the time he came back, it wasn’t his club anymore. It was a great scene in Lewes at that time and, at its height, was packed out every week. We had Seamus Ennis the great Irish piper, the Reverend

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EimageLEjohn warburton

Traditional Sussex Morris dancers and their musicians danced in the Old Ale in Harvey’s Yard for its autumn release at the start of the festival on 5 October 2013.

2013 Lewes Folk Festival

Gary Davis, Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick, June Tabor – so many names it’s easier to tell you who didn’t play there.”

“We were running the club on a Saturday night but then, in the early 1970s there was a big boom in barndances and we started our own band which just took off – we had eight bookings before we’d even played in public – and it got to the stage where we were running the club by proxy because we were always away doing gigs. So we decided to move it to a Thursday night but many people wanted to keep it on a Saturday. So the late Fred Baxter took it over and then Valmai Goodyear. We moved our club to the Brewer’s Arms, then the Laughing Fish at Isfield and finally back to the Royal Oak in Lewes in 1990 where we have been ever since.”

I was curious as to why barn dances took off in the early 70s and this led us into an interesting conversation about English and American culture.

“In America, the folk scene started with people like Woody Guthrie,

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Pete Seeger and in Britain there was this movement which Ewan McColl and Bert Lloyd were part of, saying, have a look at your own culture. There was a reaction against American cultural imperialism.

“When the Queen went to Canada in 1951, she attended a couple of square dances over there and that set off a square dance craze in Britain. Then people were saying we should not be playing ‘Red River Valley’ and all that stuff, we’ve got our own stuff and there was an upsurge of bands playing oldfashioned English music learnt from the surviving musicians. “ln Sussex a key figure was Lewis ‘Scan’ Tester, who played a concertina amongst other instruments. I got to know him very well and we celebrated his 85th birthday with a party at the Lewes Arms. He had a huge repertoire of tunes. Then there were bands like the Old Swan Band, Flowers and Frolics and the New Victory band and there was a huge surge of doing English dances.

“My generation were great ones for looking for the historical evidence about where these songs and dances came from. Cecil Sharp went to Appalachia and discovered versions of old traditional English songs that had been turned around. These came back to Britain with their American players.”

As to the current scene, I suggested that what seems to be happening now is a rise in hard-times roots music which people return to when economic times go bad, a rise in Americana and a broadening of what is meant by the term ‘folk’.

Union Music Store promoted several gigs at this years’ Festival including a concert at All Saints featuring these three Canadian singers: from top, Cara Luft, Awna Teixeira, Brandy Zdan

“It is cyclical except what’s happening now is less concerned with authenticity. People are far more concerned with making their own songs in the vein of traditional songs.

Stylistically they’ve not gone so deeply into it and partly it’s because people who were easily accessible to us are no longer around. Martin Carthy will say don’t listen to me, listen to where I got it from. That’s pretty common amongst our generation. We don’t want to take the credit.

“When I came in to the folk club scene, there was a much broader age range in the audience than there is now.

There are some young performers but there’s not that many in the audience unless the band brings some of their mates with them. I’m 70 years old and I don’t think 18-year olds are going to want to come to something run by me but I’ll share any enthusiasm I have with anyone showing any sign of being keen on the music. I’ll be after them like a shot.” CF

EimagesLEbob russell

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EwordsLEjohn may Since the early 18th century to the present day, generations of the Copper family of Rottingdean have been singing the old songs of Sussex. More importantly, some of the family started writing down the words and later recording the tunes thus ensuring their survival for the future.

THE COPPERS: FIRST FAMILY OF FOLK

I am in a spacious and beautiful house – fine-timbered, airy and light with views to the garden on a perfect sun and blue sky day – in the hills above Peacehaven. I’m in the company of Shirley Collins, who has arranged for me to meet brother and sister Jill and John Copper, whose father Bob is the focus of much of the conversation. The family, together with Jill’s husband Jon Dudley, have just re-published their father’s memoirs A Man of No Consequence under their own Copper imprint. This was the last of a string of well-regarded books that Bob produced in his life – many of them published by Heinemann whose logo is coincidentally the Rottingdean windmill. Taken together, they document Bob’s intense interest in all aspects of the old ways of the people of the South Downs and the area’s natural beauty. All of these came into focus in the songs which he and his forbears collected and documented for the first time and then performed in Britain and America to great acclaim.

It’s a remarkable story

he story of the singing and recording of the old Sussex songs that the Coppers have become most famous for, dates back at least three generations and features six key figures – although Bob records in his book that one of the oldest songs Shepherd of the Downs ‘we know was sung by George Copper, my great-great grandfather who was born in Rottingdean in 1784.’

Where did this song come from?

Not from George himself. He would most likely have heard it and learnt it at a sheep fair or in a tavern. Who composed it no one knew or cared; it would have passed from mouth to ear, from memory to memory, from village to village.

None of these songs were written down until the 20th century. It was 1936 when Bob’s dad Jim set out on the laborious task of writing down ‘just over 60 of the songs he remembered being sung by his father and uncle and other old village men when he was younger.’ These were not all folk songs but were mixed up with

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music hall tunes and other popular ditties of the day.

Jim’s father (Bob’s grandfather) was James “Brasser” Copper [1845-1924] , the bailiff of a 3,000 acre downland sheep farm, who would sing with his brother Tom [c. 1847 – c.1936], a head carter on the same farm and later landlord of the Black Horse in Rottingdean, then the King’s Head in Chailey, before he retired to Lewes.

John brings a metal suitcase to the long table, opens it and passes me a tall, thin hardbound old farm account book – the very one Jim used for the task – and one of the few Copper treasures that is not now in the University of Sussex Archives. Here are the songs, with red titles and blue text, written in pen in a fair copper-plate hand. These were the precious words but, to Bob’s knowledge at that time, no one had recorded the tunes.

“Brasser” Copper had two sons – James also known as Jim [1882-1954], who became the farm bailiff after his dad retired and John [c.1879-1952] who was head shepherd there.

Left to Right: Bob, Uncle John, Cousin Ron, Dad Jim (c.1951)

Each had one son – respectively Bob [1915-2004] and Ron [c. 1913-1979].

Bob worked in numerous jobs before joining the army then the police force, before he left to take over the Central Club in Peacehaven, now run

by Bob’s son John. Ron was a carpenter before he became the landlord of the Queen Victoria in Rottingdean. There is a connection between the singing and the beer – the one lubricates the other.

Bob writes: ‘One of Dad’s long-term aims in life was to keep alive the love of the old songs he had inherited and been brought up with and whenever the four of us...found ourselves together in suitable circumstances we would give voice.’

In August 1950 Bob and his Dad contacted the BBC Home Service radio programme Country Magazine which at that time had an audience of 10-12 million. The programme, which was devised and produced by Francis ‘Jack’ Dillon, was an outside broadcast transmitted from locations across Britain. It consisted mainly of

interviews with workers – miners, shepherds, foundry workers and so on – talking about their jobs with a musical interlude halfway through with a relevant folk song.

Generally the songs were sung by professional singers accompanied by a string trio or quartet. The Coppers broke that mould. They sung for Country Magazine in their own voices and unaccompanied.

Jim and Bob were introduced to Brian George, an Irishman, then head of the BBC’s Central Programme Operations, who was so impressed that he hired two full-time collectors to go out with new-fangled portable tape recorders and find other singers of old songs.

In March 1951, the BBC brought a team down to the Central Club along with an acetate cutter to make a disc on the spot, to record the Coppers.

Later that year, there was a radio feature – The Life of James Copper which was broadcast on 11 September 1951 and featured on the cover of the Radio Times.

These early appearances led to an unusual and important discovery.

Bob writes that it was through the BBC connections that they first learnt that in 1897 his grandfather and brother Tom had sung about ‘half a hundred’ songs for a Miss Kate Lee, who was visiting Rottingdean from London. Together with friends, she founded the Folk Song Society in 1898 and made the “two Mr Coppers” honorary founder members for their contribution of songs.

Bob and Jim remade the family connection with the organisation – since 1911 known as The English Folk Song and Dance Society – and together with Ron and John were made honorary members at a ceremony on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in 1952.

From that time on, the Copper family singers gained a national reputation and were seminal figures in the great revival of interest in traditional music in the 50s and 60s

The Life of James Copper broadcast on 11 September 1951 featured on the cover of the Radio Times

James, Bob, Ron and John were made honorary members of The English Folk Song and Dance Society at a ceremony on stage at the Royal Albert Hall in 1952.

that led to the establishment of a network of folk clubs in Britain, many of which survive to this day.

Sadly, John died later in 1952 and Jim two years after that, but Bob and Ron kept the tradition going until Ron’s death in 1979. In fact this next period saw a new generation of Copper’s take the stage in the shape of Bob’s son and daughter, John and Jill.

Both sung in choirs as kids and absorbed the Copper’s songs by osmosis. John remembers singing Brisk and Bonny lad when he was 7 years old, standing on a beer crate in his dad’s pub, the H.H. Inn in the village of Cheriton in Hampshire where they lived for a couple of years. But it was in the 1960s when John was a teenager that he got to sing with Bob in a live show for the first time.

It was 1965 and Bob and Ron had been booked into a folk event in Plymouth but Ron was not well enough to fulfil the gig. John recalls: “Bob versed me in a few songs and said: ‘Come on, you do Ron’s bass part and come down with me. I’ll do mainly solo stuff but when I want you to come up and join me it’ll be for the harmony songs and nearly always the audience joins in so you won’t be under much pressure.’ I was 15 and we got through it but it was quite daunting.”

This was nothing compared with John’s second appearance standing in for Ron, which was in a different league as he explains: “The next time I was asked to sing was at a one-day folk festival at the Royal Festival Hall on the fourth of June 1965 and the

‘The Life of James Copper’ broadcast on 11 September 1951 featured on the cover of the Radio Times.

occasion was also, by coincidence, my 16th birthday.

“It was in the main auditorium in front of an audience of 3,500 people.

In the programme we were billed as the Copper Brothers (Ron and Bob were in fact cousins) and when they were introduced by Dominic Behan (Brendan’s brother) who was hosting the event he said: ‘Now when they come on to the stage, if your thinking that one of the brothers is a lot older than the other brother it’s because the

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Bob and his Dad Jim outside The Eight Bells at Jevington doing their first radio broadcast (1950)

first brother is the second brother’s father.’ That was my introduction at the RFH. It made me much more nervous than I would have been already. I was quaking like a leaf which I’m told gave my voice a tremelo effect. We sang two songs and I got through it. Having done that, I felt that I’d graduated. After facing an audience of such magnitude with such a strange introduction everything else was peanuts.”

Strangely enough, Jill’s debut was also at the Royal Festival Hall in 1971

THE COPPERS: FIRST FAMILY OF FOLK when she was 27 – the first female in the Copper’s history to perform in public.

The trigger for this came two years earlier in 1969 at concert in London at Cecil Sharp House, the headquarters of the English Folk Song and Dance Society when Ron and Bob were invited to sing at what turned out to be the last concert by The Young Tradition, a popular folk group of the time.

“Mum and I went to sit in the audience”, recalls Jill, “and afterwards my mother said to dad: ‘She knows all the words of those songs you know, she was singing along all the time’.

After that he was quite keen to get me involved.

“So there I was a couple of years later at the Festival Hall, singing with Bob and John in another big one-day festival called The Sound of Folk. It was a great occasion. We sang three songs and I remember Martin Carthy coming up to me afterwards and saying ‘Where have they kept you hidden?’.

That was nice.”

Jill says 1971 “was the huge folk revival time when folk was the in-thing and every university had a folk club and every pub had a folk club upstairs.

The Copper family had a sort of renaissance of fame in a minor way when Bob’s first book A Song For Every Season was published and the family recorded a four-album vinyl boxed set with the same title which I sang on.”

It contained 46 unaccompanied songs, each recorded in just one take by Bill Leader, over three afternoons at the Central Club. (This rare set has never been made available in digital form.)

John continued to do some gigs with Bob but increasingly he was forced to learn the lead parts and stop singing bass as Ron became too ill to travel and Bob was tied to home looking after his wife. John recalls that in the years from winter 1971 through 1972 he drove some 48,000 miles up and down the country in his 1960 Morris Oxford estate car and became, more or less, a full-time folk singer sometimes doing five gigs a week.

In 1973 Bob had his second book published Songs and Southern Breezes about his song-hunting travels and he and John settled into a more occasional gigging schedule keeping things ticking over.

Enter Jon Dudley, who moved down south with his parents from Hertfordshire when he was 17 in 1967 and joined the 6th form at Lewes Grammar School (now Priory).

He recalls: “My contemporaries there were mostly from university families.

Sussex University had recently been established and Lewes had become peopled by educational types and it was relatively cheap and preferable to Brighton for them. So a lot of their spawn were at Lewes Grammar School.

And they seemed to pick up from their parents, who had probably been Woody Guthrie fans and other left-wing stuff,

a love of folk music. So there was a very busy folk club at the Lewes Arms and we used to go regularly on a Saturday night and it was there I saw John, Bob and Ron for the first time and I ended up being a Copper family roadie using my big old Volvo estate.”

John and Jill had by now started taking on a few gigs. Then in 1974 John married his wife Lin and Jill got together with Jon - both partners could sing - and a new musical Copper family took shape doing festivals and in 1988 recording an album with Bob entitled ‘Copper Songs 1’, produced by Ian A. Anderson, now editor of fRoots magazine and partially funded by the Arts Council and the Folk Song & Dance Society.

Remarkably, a completely new phase in the family’s musical adventures began in 1994 when the five of them set off for the first time to America. From then until 2003 they went over every year, sometimes three times a year and visited 25 states.

One trip a year always centred on the annual conference of the Folk Alliance, held in a different city every year – Cleveland, Chicago, Memphis, and Albuquerque to name a few – and Bob and the family were guests of honour.

On their first trip they opened at the Library of Congress on Capitol Hill and sung in New York and Boston. On their

Above: The original songbook; Top Right: Bob outside The Jugg’s Arms, Kingston; Below: Jon, Jill and John in front of the Young Coppers; Bottom: The full family gathering at Hastings 2013; Bottom Right: Bob’s utilitarian memorial stone.

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return Lin ‘jumped ship’ but the family group continued, doing gigs all over California, in Seattle, San Diego and even Nova Scotia in Canada.

The full story of their American adventures has yet to be written.

Jill and John each had three kids and they began singing together in the 1990s – their first performance being at a family concert in 1996 for Bob which, Jill recalls, “he said was the best Christmas present he ever had.”

Bob died in March 2004, just four days after he had been awarded the MBE. This ‘man of no consequence’ remained modest and true to his lights to the end, as exemplified by the fact that he chose a Brighton Council boundary marker as his headstone.

The Young Coppers, as they became known, brought out their own album of the family’s songs in 2008 and toured it throughout the UK. Since then nine grandchildren have been born and, at what has become a regular annual May Bank Holiday gig in Hastings, the entire surviving Copper Family take the stage at the same time.

The story of the Coppers still has a long way to run. CF

Photo: Katie Van Dyke

EwordsLEshirley collins

BOB COPPER (1915-2004)

A MAN OF NO CONSEQUENCE ob Copper, whose memoir A Man of No Consequence has recently been published, was the outstanding figure in the history of Southern English folk song. Although born into a family who for at least four centuries had been farm-workers and shepherds around the Rottingdean area, Bob became a writer, a poet, an artist, a raconteur and broadcaster, a parish historian of genius, a great walker, a singer and a field collector of traditional English songs. In the 1950s, BBC Home Service radio programmes Country Magazine and As I Roved Out which featured traditional English songs, were so popular, and created such an interest in this material, that the BBC set up a project to record folk songs from ordinary people throughout the country, gathering and saving whatever might be left of a long tradition. Bob was given the task of collecting in Sussex and Hampshire.

For a man who accomplished so much in his lifetime, why would Bob’s memoir be called A Man of No Consequence?

While recording for the BBC Bob travelled throughout the countryside in his modest Morris Major, which he’d bought for £25 from a friend, describing it as ‘a grand old character’, and naming it The Major. The BBC had provided him with a reel-to-reel tape recorder, called a Midget, although Bob said you needed arms like a blacksmith to carry it! He was the ideal person for this work. He wrote: ‘When attempting to record songs or stories from a countryman of the older generation, the success of the operation depends almost entirely upon winning his confidence and getting him thoroughly relaxed before producing the recording equipment and microphone. A glass or two of beer and a pipe of tobacco can work wonders in this direction, but I also found the more relaxed and casual one’s own appearance, the fewer barriers there were to break down before real contact with the singer was established.

‘The news released in a remote country pub that ‘a chap from the BBC’ was going to pay a visit to record one of the locals singing was likely to cause a bit of a stir in those days. But if anyone had been expecting a city-type gent in natty suiting to appear in a sleek limousine, then my arrival in The Major came as a big surprise. The fact that we shared a common bond of country origins and upbringing was more readily recognised, and we got along splendidly from the start.

‘Oh, I’m glad it turned out to be someone of no consequence like you,’ said Enos White that evening at The Crown at Axford in Hampshire. ‘To ‘ear ‘em talking ‘ere last night you would’ve thought we was going to meet the Queen or somewhat.’

I count myself blessed to have known Bob Copper for some 60 years, first meeting him back in the early 1950s when I was in my teens. I’d had the temerity to write to the BBC to let them know I wanted to be a folk-singer. The letter had been passed to Bob, who followed it up while he was in Hastings recording songs from local fishermen. My sister Dolly and I sang for him, but instead of singing songs we’d learnt at home from Grand-dad or Aunt Grace, we tried to impress him with a couple of Scots ballads that we’d learned from the radio. Foolish girls! Many years later, at a Copper Family evening of song at The Royal Oak in Lewes, Bob presented me with a copy of his work-sheet for that day. It said: ‘Shirley Collins. Occupation: Schoolgirl’.

I stayed in touch with Bob over the years, meeting him again when I was working with Alan Lomax, the American folk-song collector. He and Bob became great friends, sharing a passion for the blues. And then, naturally, in my career as a singer of English folk songs, Bob was always there as a source of inspiration and as a friend.

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He encouraged young singers, delighted that they were interested in the old songs. Bob never had a bad word to say to – or about – anyone. He was tolerant, warm and kind. I fondly remember a walk we took together some 15 years ago, over the Downs from Peacehaven inland towards Rodmell, where we’d been invited to lunch by the blacksmith. Bob was a wonderful companion, full of anecdotes and local knowledge, aware of so much that was around him, even stopping at one point to allow a beetle that was crawling across the chalk path to finish its journey before we continued ours.

Bob wrote about his own family history of work and songs in his book A Song for Every Season (Heinemann 1971) a beautiful evocation of Sussex country life the year round, and including 47 of his family’s songs. It won The Robert Pitman Literary Prize. Two years later came Songs and Southern Breezes a heart-warming account of his years as a folk song collector, and which included 50 of the many songs he came across. In 1976 came Early to Rise - A Sussex Boyhood, adding a further 25 of his family’s songs. Then, after a gap of almost 20 years, he published Across Sussex with Belloc. Bob had first read Hilaire Belloc’s The Four Men in 1939, some 27 years after its publication, the account of a walk Belloc as ‘Myself’ took across Sussex with his three imaginary companions, ‘Grizzlebeard’, ‘the Sailor’ and ‘the Poet’. It started at Robertsbridge in East Sussex and ended at South Harting in West Sussex. He wanted to experience the Sussex that he knew but that he feared might change.

Bob shared these misgivings, and the book so fascinated him that in 1950 he ‘set out with a stout stick and a haversack to walk the route the original Four Men had taken’, 91 miles in all. His book is a delight of anecdotes about the people he met and the places he stayed, with a good measure of Belloc’s poems and some of Bob’s, as well as his own illustrations, and all showing that ingrained love of Sussex and its inhabitants.

Next came Bob Copper’s Sussex in 1997, further recollections of life in and around Rottingdean, featuring a collection of his own poems and illustrations.

And now, his memoir A Man of No Consequence completed a few years before his death in 2004. It gives a broader picture of the less-well known aspects of Bob’s life; of how he enlisted in the army, without letting his parents know, joining the Household Cavalry, (he’d worked with horses on the farm so was considered a suitable applicant) becoming a lifeguard.

He writes of this first part of his career with such ease, and is able with a few words to capture the atmosphere of a scene, to absolutely fix it in time, such as of this pre-war evening in a London club.

‘I was in The Nautical one night, when the place was packed almost to suffocation, the hour advancing and the atmosphere near curdled with Abdullah No. 7s and Chanel No. 5.’ Read that, and you’re there.

After the lifeguards, and following a spell as a barber’s assistant in High Holborn, Bob knew that a London life wouldn’t suit him, and he returned to Rottingdean. He applied to join the police force, and during that summer of 1936, while waiting for his police training to start, worked as a Corporation boatman – and Bob in that guise is pictured on the front cover of his

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memoir. It’s one of 48 wonderful photographs that enhance this book.

Of his years in the Worthing police force, as a bobby on the beat, in wartime England, eventually becoming a Coroner’s Officer, Bob deals sensitively with the tragedies he encountered. And a rare thing for Bob, there are the occasional flashes of anger. Of the people he met, and the friends he made, he writes with affection and gratitude; there is a genuine grace in his work.

Bob Copper’s contribution to the folk music of England is a unique one, and recognised with various awards; by the University of Sussex who, in 2000 gave him an honorary MA, presented by Lord Attenborough. He was awarded an MBE in 2004 which he received from Prince Charles. He died just four days later. He was given The Good Tradition Award by BBC’s Folk on Two in 2001, and he had held The English Folk Dance & Song Society’s Gold Badge since 1978.

He has been the chief source of inspiration for the many lovers of Southern English folk song.

It would be easy to revere this man, but that wouldn’t be what Bob would have wanted. His pleasure was in sharing with warmth and good humour all that he knew and loved, while raising a pint of Harvey’s.

How people feel about this remarkable, still dearly-loved and sorely missed man can best be expressed in this verse from an old Sussex carol: Had we as many years to live as there are blades of grass We could never do for him all he has done for us CF www.shirleycollins.co.uk

Purchase the book from www.thecopperfamily.com £15 plus £2.80 postage

EwordsLEjohn may

Sir John Tomlinson An Exclusive Interview Lewes’ operatic knight speaks out t’s an early afternoon in September with the smell of autumn in the air, and I’m sitting at a long wooden kitchen table in the Lewes house of one of the most famous operatic bass singers in the world.

He’s a man whose voice, for more than 40 years, has filled the most prestigious opera houses, playing seminal roles which required him often to be on stage for four hours at a stretch — most famously perhaps Wotan in Wagner’s Ring cycle.

Born 66 years ago ”up north” in Accrington, in the same nursing home as the composer Harrison Birtwistle — who created two operas especially for his remarkable voice (Gawain and The Green Knight and The Minotaur) — he is now happily beginning to ease off on his hectic globetrotting schedule and to do things he likes which are less physically demanding.

In the days after we speak he is doing two intimate performances — a warm-up in Ripon and a bigger concert in Germany — of poems by Michelangelo that have been set for voice and piano by Benjamin Britten, Hugo Wolf and Shostakovich which he has also recorded.

But examining his 2013 schedule he is still much in demand and is a long way from retirement. Having completed Birtwistle’s The Minotaur at the Royal Opera House in London, he did Brecht’s The Threepenny Opera in Paris and

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London, Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle in Milwaukee, Wagner’s Parsifal in Munich, Operfergang by Hans Werner Henze in Frankfurt and Hamburg, Gawain in Salzburg and Wozzek by Berg at Covent Garden, before rounding off this year with a carol concert at the Royal Albert Hall.

When he was Sue Lawley’s guest on Desert Island Discs many years ago, he sketched out his life-story: his boyhood and adolescence growing up in a fairly strait-laced Methodist household which was always full of music; acquiring a huge bass voice when he was 16 or 17 which was both an embarrassment and a source of pride; going to college to study engineering before making the crucial decision to follow his voice; the years of hard graft and training during which he discovered a love of acting that opened up his character, before gaining prominence and setting out on a remarkable career that made him famous worldwide.

A Lewes resident since the 1970s, when he first joined the chorus at Glyndebourne, he has none of the airs and graces that often come with being an opera star who has been knighted by the Queen.

He is passionate and emotional about his work and is deeply concerned about the future of opera.

Articulate and sincere, he talks openly and at length about his chosen profession and his innermost feelings.

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Opera comes in all shapes and sizes. For people who are not habitual opera goers, the image that they have of it is the one promoted by the media — a grand opera with big fat singers with glorious voices, splendid Italianate emotive music, very mannered, very grandiose, but completely illogical, irrational and a waste of time. Like Dr. Samuel Johnson said: ”Opera is an exotic and irrational entertainment”.

Some opera is like that, about a tenth I would say, but the other ninetenths are very different. It’s a huge spectrum. The first operas were composed in a Venetian style by Claudio Monteverdi around 1608; and it goes from there to the excesses of Handel, then Mozart, Beethoven, then the great Romantic thing of Wagner followed by the modern music of the 20th century (Schoenberg and Bartok) and later Benjamin Britten who was more theatrical.

If you haven’t listened to much opera, what would you recommend to start with?

Benjamin Britten’s Peter Grimes and Billy Budd . La Bohème and Tosca

by Puccini which are great theatrical pieces. Then Rossini comedies, or Donizetti. And Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Don Giovanni.

Opera is changing, isn’t it? There’s opera in cinemas, the rise of aria radio, and a broader audience has been primed — but still relatively few people go to live shows, partly for economic reasons.

It’s really complicated and it’s very much to do with the way opera is perceived and marketed. I believe opera is for everybody.

I loved the 70s and the 80s in particular because there was an emphasis on real singing and acting in real theatres. Although the opera-going public was in a minority then, opera houses were full every week. In Germany, where I work a lot, opera was a very live theatrical art and was at the cutting edge of theatre at that time. It had imagination and creativity and was more adventurous than anything else— the staging, the set design, the concepts behind the productions.

The change came with digital recordings and the huge success of The Three Tenors in 1990. After this the record companies latched onto the idea of popular classics like Puccini’s Nessun Dorma and artists like Russell Watson and Katherine Jenkins. The radio station Classic FM was founded in 1992 and now you have the popular classics vying with serious classics and an audience that says, ”We don’t go to Covent Garden; that’s just for the snobs. We go to Russell Watson’s Earls Court concert. He sings all the juicy bits”.

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More recently still you’re getting a lot of live simultaneous broadcasts at the cinema and, like everything, they’re a mixed blessing. Opera is essentially a live art form and as soon as you get a camera up a singer’s nose singing a top C it’s too much. It’s overdone. In the theatre it’s got to be big gestures or a bigger stillness. On the stage, you need that intensity. Cinema performances don’t come over that well. The scale is wrong. It’s meant to be seen from a hundred yards away in the space of the theatre. The scale is not right as it’s coming in too close.

What I’m saying now is completely unpopular. Nobody else in my profession would say that. It’s not as good as the real thing. I have question marks about it.

The barriers between different kinds of music have broken down a lot.

I think there’s a new audience for new music. They love good jazz, rock, opera and theatre and they love anything adventurous.

Has opera penetrated more countries worldwide?

Opera has always been totally international. As an opera singer I am well-known in almost every country in the world by a small minority of people.

If I go into Waitrose one in every 50 people know who I am. If I go to Venezuela there will be people who will have heard my recordings or possibly have come to Europe to see opera.

Opera is completely global. I’ve been to Japan and I’m going again. China is now going crazy about opera. India — I don’t think there’s much interest in India but everywhere in the world there’s an operatic minority.

How did you come to Lewes?

I first sang in the Glyndebourne chorus in 1970 — 43 years ago. I came straight from the Royal Manchester College of Music in that summer to sing in the chorus and understudy in The Magic Flute and then went back to college that winter (1970/71) and then came back to the chorus again. I first stayed in Lewes in a little flat in Albion Street, then a little house in Lansdown Place and then our family (wife Moya and their son and two daughters) moved to Southover where I’ve been ever since.

What do you think of the musical scene in Lewes?

I’m not in Lewes all the time as I’m a bit of a globetrotter but I’d say it’s wonderful. There’s a lot of music about.

All the music-making around Lewes in the pubs, the street players, the folk music, the jazz, lots of good stuff — I think it's fantastic. Then there’s Glyndebourne and the New Sussex Opera which I also support.

I’m President of the Nicholas Yonge Society1 and also President of John

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Hancorn’s East Sussex Bach Choir, who I sing with every three or four years. Last time was the St Matthew Passion in Brighton eighteen months ago and we are planning to do something next May. I’ve done two recitals for the Nicholas Yonge Society which every year stages a series of concerts – mainly chamber music, string quartets and quintets. There is some singing but the vast majority is instrumental.

I’d like to take you back to your roots in Accrington which was also the home of Harrison Birtwistle.

Harry and I were born in the same building, a nursing home in Accrington.

He’s quite a bit older than me. Next year is his 80th birthday. I’m 14 years behind him. He was already very well known in the 70s. He’s a great, great composer.

Harrison Birtwistle’s music will last for ever.

When did you first make contact?

I first met Harry at the rehearsals for the recording of his Punch and Judy in the 70s with David Atherton conducting. I’d worked with David quite a bit and I was someone he knew he could rely on.

It’s quite good being a bass because there’s not many basses about. You have to have a solid bass voice going down to a D or lower if possible but the top of your voice has also got to be very good — ideally F sharp at the top — a full two octaves. If you have a very solid bass voice you can earn a good living because in every opera there’s a chap with a big bass voice who comes on. In Don Giovanni he’s the stone statue who challenges Don Giovanni, or the monster, or the Green Knight in Birtwistle’s Gawain and the Green Knight. The opera composer writes certain roles for the powerful bass voice.

You made your name by singing a number of signature roles.

Yes. I sort of broke out during a 20-year phase in 1987-2007, the years I was singing roles such as Hans Sachs in Meistersinger, The Dutchman in Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Golaud in Debussy’s Pelleas et Melisande and, most importantly, Wotan in Wagner’s Ring.

These are an extension of the traditional bass roles, they’re more bass baritone and I was able to sustain the higher notes and use my bass voice to sing these slightly higher parts. That’s the reason I was so successful with those parts: because those parts are quite often sung by those lighter voices not as effectively. But if you can get a heavier voice singing a slightly higher repertoire it’s very, very impressive.

Wotan’s a raging god. You need a lot of colour in your voice, a lot of power if you can sustain the top. If you get a lighter quality voice it’s never going to be so impressive. But a bass lives more dangerously, bringing a heavier instrument.

With a lot of instruments the top register is the most impressive.

Nobody’s interested in the tenor singing in the middle of their range but, when it goes up, it becomes heroic and a very exciting sound. It’s the same with many orchestral instruments, like a violin.

When you get way up on the top of the

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E string when you’re playing those sailing melodies that you get in the Mendelssohn concerto, they’re stunning.

When your voice broke when you were 15 or 16, you had this huge deep bass voice which you say was half embarrassing and half a source of pride.

It was part of my identity. You know what it’s like being a sixteen-year old at school. Every time I opened my mouth, everybody would comment on it.

You became obsessed with singing at that time but you were studying to be an engineer. Then you decided to go for singing because, as you told Sue Lawley on Desert island Discs, you were ”afraid of anonymity”.

Is that what I said? Well that’s a rather revealing thing to say. It’s something that you shouldn’t really say.

(Pause) I think there’s truth in that.

Why do you think you wanted to stand out? Did you think this voice that you had should be heard?

It’s interesting. Now that I’m a lot older, you might say, ”why do I keep doing it?” I could retire. But I keep doing it because I enjoy it, my voice is still good, and it keeps me alive, I’m learning stuff all the time. Singing is a very healthy thing for the body, and it’s stimulating for the mind. I’m doing a series of new things all the time so I keep doing it now because of that, because it’s very invigorating. I suppose it’s similar to the way I felt when I was younger in that it its part of my identity so I think there is still a fear.

The fear now is if I stop then I might lose my identity to some extent. I’m a singer. If I stopped singing, I’m nothing. ”Sir John Tomlinson has been given a knighthood. He was once a singer at La Scala, the Metropolitan and Covent Garden. What does he do now? He just potters around the garden.” I’m being really honest now.

There is often a gap between art and science in our educational system and we are told that we have two sides to our brains — a calculating side and a creative side. You appear to have bridged those gaps.

I don’t go along with that. In school I was good at mathematics and physics and so on and I automatically went to engineering because I wanted to do something practical and useful in the world. I was very happy with that but, at the same time, I had this voice.

At that stage I didn’t know I could

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act; it was purely singing at concerts.

It was when I was at college, when I was 21 to 25, that I started doing workshops and operas and I suddenly realised I could act, something I hadn’t thought I could do because I expected that I would be inhibited.

Did your voice give you confidence perhaps?

I went to college purely for the singing because my voice was quite extraordinary and still is in terms of its power and its size. Voices like that are quite rare.

How do you view your voice — as part of you, something special that you’re carrying around?

You ask some very incisive questions.

You asked me originally if I was frightened of being normal. When I was 21 I was faced with this very real dilemma. I loved maths and science and engineering. I was good at it and I enjoyed it but my heart was probably in making music and singing.

I remember I agonised over this decision for months and then suddenly woke up one morning and thought, well I’ve got to try singing haven’t I? I’ve just got to give it a go.

I didn’t think I was going to be a famous opera singer I just thought I’ve got to give it a go because that’s what I really wanted to do. But I think linked in with that, was a slight fear of anonymity because, after an engineering degree, in those days you’d be in the back row of an office for Ove Arup or somebody, probably doing drawings. There’d be a bridge being built and your task would be to design a nut and bolt.

So at that stage I think there was some fear of that, but I think also the whole creative side of the brain felt like a pregnant feeling. There was something that could happen which had not been used at all. I was aware that there was a lot of potential there which I had only scraped the surface of.

I felt that I could go a lot deeper and it could be a wonderful thing. And so it proved to be. Those four years at college in Manchester were the most wonderfully creative time. A whole new side of my personality opened up.

Did it change you socially?

Yes, completely. When you’re working with figures, science and maths, it’s fantastic and there’s also creativity there of the highest level.

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‘WOTAN’S A RAGING GOD.YOU NEED A LOT OF COLOUR IN YOUR VOICE, A LOT OF POWER’

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But then there’s the thing of workshops, being involved with other people in an acting environment and expressing yourself. This was something I’d never – even remotely – done before.

My Methodist, non-conformist background taught me that everything had to be acceptable. The way I was brought up, showing off on the stage is the diametric opposite of Methodism.

You don’t show off — you don’t go too far — everything’s very rational and controlled — your behaviour is a controlled face to the world and you don’t make a fool of yourself, show off or anything like that. You shouldn’t be egotistical.

I remember there were some tennis courts up the road from where we lived, and people would walk up our road with tennis racquets to play tennis, and if somebody went up with shorts there was this awful Alan Bennett thing: “Who do they think they are – Rod Laver or something?”. I had a really great upbringing but there was that sort of awful denigrating thing: “Who does he think he is?”

Taking up singing and acting was a decisive shift away from your father’s aspiration for you of getting a safe job.

My father, in the end, was my biggest fan. There was this fertile musical environment at home with everybody playing the piano and singing, but purely amateur. Nobody supported me with a view to becoming a professional musician. They thought I was getting above myself and I should calm down a bit.

But once I went to college and made the change and once they came to see a performance they were almost immediately won over. I remember my mother — my mother died very young in 1969 when I was just 22. She came to one or two things I did in her last year or two and she absolutely loved it. ”You’re wonderful, this is fantastic,” she’d say. So they swung round completely. My brother and sister also love coming to see my performances.

I wouldn’t say we were a working class family but the previous generation were very working class; we were all miners and textile workers. My mother was in the mill at 12 years old, but I’d been brought up in a terraced house with a garden, respectable and always enough money for the basics.

What would you say to young singers now?

I don’t teach regularly because I don’t have time to work with regular pupils but I do work with younger singers doing masterclasses at the Royal College of Music or the Royal Northern College of Music on about four occasions every year. Just last week I was working with a young singer in the chorus at Glyndebourne, a very talented young bass, and it’s quite helpful to him to have someone like me come in from the outside. I can say: ”This is good, you’re good on this, you’re good on that, this is excellent but for goodness sake you’ve got to work on this, you’re deficient in this” — giving a completely clear view from outside. This guy’s in the chorus. He will have a career.

I do help people before that stage, too. I just work with their abilities.

Whether they’re great or whether

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Sir John Tomlinson they’re less than great, I will just try and help them to get better. I don’t usually get into talking to them about whether they’re going to make it in the business or not. Occasionally I have been known to say I don’t think someone’s voice is good enough to make it in the business, but I would always say you could prove me wrong. You never know for sure.

There are famous examples of singers who’ve been told that, and who’ve gone on to have very good careers like Andrew Shore who sings at the English National Opera and has been successful for 30 years. He was told at the beginning of his career that he didn’t have the voice.

I do think that austerity and the economic situation are having a big impact on our business.

There are 60 opera houses in Germany. Opera is wonderful in Germany. It’s different than here, as everybody goes to the opera. The fall of the Berlin Wall, going back 24 years, has had a big impact. There used to be a lot of Americans singing in Germany before 1989 but now there are a lot of East European singers who’ve taken over. Usually half the cast list are Bulgarian, Romanian and so on with excellent voices, often a little bit primitive in their performance but with strong voices. I’m guessing that probably they are being paid a tenth of the money an American singer would have got.

So, fees have gone down, partly because of that and partly because of austerity. People talk about the opera scene in Germany as if its streets were paved with gold but they’ve been making cuts for at least the last ten years. Things have been pegged back.

Nobody’s got an increase in fees, everyone’s got a reduction. Rehearsal money’s been cut, travel money’s been cut, fees have been cut in Germany as well as everywhere else.

Next year, two productions I was due to be in have been cancelled, one in the Metropolitan in New York and the other in Copenhagen. I’m lucky I haven’t really been affected too much, but for young singers I think it’s harder.

Because of the Tony Blair years, a lot of money was put into universities and colleges so there’s a lot of singers being trained. In Korea they tell me there’s something like 3,000 students qualifying a year and a lot of them are singers. But the actual profession is getting tougher. Nobody’s overpaid, put it that way; twenty years ago we were well paid.

You had the golden years...

My agent tells me the young singers on his books are getting pretty low fees. He says in some of these touring opera groups which appear at places like the Theatre Royal in Brighton and stately homes, you’ll get a young singer in Carmen doing seven performances a week and getting barely enough to survive on. It’s pretty tough. I think it’s harder than it was.

Thinking of my career as a whole, those 20 years I told you about where I

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was singing this handful of massive roles and where I’d be on stage for three or four hours each night, now I’m not being offered those parts so often. I’m 67 and there is an age factor. I’m not complaining at all. If someone’s planning a new Ring Cycle, I’m going to be 70 before they get to Götterdämmerung. I’m just too old.

To be Wotan on stage, you need tremendous amounts of energy. It’s not just the voice, it’s the physical energy. I can do a great performance but I’m knackered the next day. I used to just jump out of bed the next morning; now I sort of fall out of bed and collapse on the floor.

So I’m now exploring a more diverse repertoire. I’m doing more modern music. This year I’ve done a number of pieces that have been written for me in the last five years — Harrison Birtwistle’s The Minotaur, a piece for the Berlin Philarmonic by Brett Dean, and a Hans Werner Henze piece Opfergang which we did with Ian Bostridge the tenor in Frankfurt and Hamburg. These things are really exciting.

Twenty-one of Michelangelo’s poems have been set to music by Britten, Bartok and Shostakovich and so I thought I could do a programme of them. It means transposing down the Britten because they were written for Peter Pears whose tenor voice was considerably higher than mine. We had to get permission for that. There will be a lot of people who will be interested that a bass is singing Peter Pears’ songs.

I dress like an Edwardian painter with a smocky gown thing and a cravat and I sit at my table, looking over the poems and singing them accompanied

by David Owen Norris on piano. Some of the songs are in Russian, some in German, some in Italian.

German is the language I speak best as a foreign language; also Italian.

When it comes to Hungarian, the only vocabulary I know is the words of the opera Bluebeard’s Castle. I have worked like mad on my pronunciation with a coach. It’s actually nothing like Russian; if anything it sounds more like Italian.

The poems are quite enigmatic, quite difficult to disentangle, in the translation and in the original too. He (Michelangelo) was bisexual and was in love with two or three women sometimes and he was also in love with a man at a particular phase. How active he was as a bisexual we’ll never know.

So there are these passionate love songs but also work songs about painting and carving out sculpture, others which show quite a bit of resentment about not being offered any work, and then finally poems about death.

I wouldn’t say it’s great poetry but it’s fascinating poetry and it’s great set to music.

I think that the great poems are never set to music. In Winterreise my favourite Schubert song cycle, the poetry is not quite doggerel but it’s very simple: ”I looked into the stream and I

“IT’S AN AMAZING WORLD, BEING ON STAGE IN THE MIDDLE OF ONE OF THOSE GREAT OPERAS... AND IT’S TAKING OFF.YOU NEVER GET SELF-INDULGENT. IT’S NEVER A WALLOW AT ALL.YOU JUST LIVE MOMENT FOR MOMENT.”

saw ice on the surface and running water underneath. And it was like my heart – ice on the surface, and underneath its turbulent emotion.”

Dead simple and fantastic as a vehicle for music.

Tomorrow I’m going to do a performance in Ripon as a warm-up for another performance in Frankfurt on the opera stage a week after for an audience of 1,500 people. Each time we do a week of these performances you’ve got to get back into it.

Would it be true to say that having achieved the highest level in the opera Parnassus, playing those massive roles, that you feel a certain relief and another kind of enjoyment now that you can just pick and choose what you like and explore a lot of lighter things?

You’ve put it very well. It’s exactly like that. Of course there’s some little bit of regret when you’re ageing a little bit.

You feel that you’re not the man you used to be but there’s a lot of pleasure in these other things.

I can’t really sustain an eight-week rehearsal with Meistersinger and a run of performances of four hours on stage each night. But I can still hack it. A couple of weeks ago at the Proms I did Parsifal at the Albert Hall in front of 5,600 people. I was on stage for three hours sweating like a pig.

It must be overwhelming to put out so much of yourself and to experience the incredible level of applause for your efforts.

Julia Somerville the news reporter was there sitting quite close and she talked to me afterwards. She asked me, ”Where does the power come from, how do you do it?”

I’ve been singing and performing for 40 years. It’s what I’m good at. I know how to be on a stage, how to communicate with an audience, how to sing over an orchestra and I’m very, very proud of that. But I must say I’ve never had any difficulty, when I come off stage, at feeling completely normal.

Is there a point when you’re doing something like that and you’re on top of it technically but then the emotions take you to another level?

Yes. It can be a spiritual or religious experience.

It’s an amazing world, being on the stage in the middle of one of these great operas. Whatever you say about Wagner, everyone agrees that he produced works of incredible genius.

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So if you’re in the middle of one of those performances and it’s taking off, you never get self-indulgent, it’s never a wallow at all. You just live moment for moment. You hear the music you sing.

You hear your colleagues. You’re part of that event as long as it lasts. It’s an amazing thing and an amazing privilege to be involved in that sort of event. Then it’s finished.

Music by its essence is a transitory thing. It’s the artform that lives when it’s being performed and then it’s gone.

It’s just dots on a page and somebody else has to come to those dots and bring them to life.

Those dots are nothing unless somebody of a different generation actually spends 20 years learning how to sing and work on those dots again.

Then it becomes a living thing.

Are you a spiritual person? Has the singing you’ve done encouraged a spiritual side of your nature?

I suppose it depends on your definition of spiritual. I don’t go to church, for instance. I don’t think I can call myself a Christian because there are certain things I just don’t believe in.

Some people say that’s irrelevant.

I heard a sermon by one of the bishops who said you shouldn’t have to make up your mind whether you believe things before you go to church. Just go to church and then see what happens.

But, when I go to church, I don’t like the dishonesty of saying things that I don’t believe.

You must also have to keep your voice down.

Yes I just start singing and people look and say, ”Who is that guy?”

The whole thing of music is that it’s an art which operates in a spiritual realm so I think I’m quite spiritual actually. It’s very Buddhist in the sense that it’s in the moment.

I think God is God but it’s completely incomprehensible. So, in a way, why waste time thinking too much about God? I wouldn’t go so far as to say God exists.

Could we agree that there’s another dimension to things apart from the material world?

Who knows! There are vast amounts of mystery. Its arrogance to think we can pin it down. CF

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Eimages L Richard Wagner – Die Walküre Bayreuth 1992 (Barenboim, Tomlinson, Elming, Secunde) www.youtube.com/watch?v=1nuu9Rr1o9w

Here are the classical music events taking place in Lewes in the near future.

NYS: Nicholas Younge Society TWS: A concert in The Workshop Series

Classical round-up

New Sussex Opera & St Paul's Sinfonia, cond. Nicholas Jenkins, dir. Susannah Waters Wednesday 20th November @ 7.30pm £12–£30 Chabrier: Lucky Star (English version by Jeremy Sams of L'Etoile) Lewes Town Hall newsussexopera.com NYS Maggini Quartet Friday 22nd November @ 7.45pm £14, £6, children free SC Mozart K387, Britten Quartet No. 1, Purcell Chacony, Bridge Quartet No. 2 Sussex Downs College, Mountfield Road BRITTEN FESTIVAL All in St John sub Castro Church, Abinger Place: Lewes School Choirs, cond.

John Hancorn, with Nancy Cooley piano Friday 22nd November @ 5pm free East Sussex Bach Choir, cond.

John Hancorn with Nick Pritchard tenor Saturday 23rd November @ 7.30pm £18, £15, £10 Britten: Rejoice in the Lamb and Choral Dances from Gloriana. Purcell: Anthems

Paul Austin Kelly tenor, Pippa Longworth mezzo, Nancy Cooley/Carol Kelley piano Sunday 24th November @ 4pm £10 Works by Schubert, Bridge and Britten.

Free pre-concert talk: 3pm TWS London Baroque Saturday 30th November 2013 @ 7.30pm £12 The Lettres Persanes — early 18th century Parisian music and satirical readings The Workshop, English Passage, Cliffe Kantanti Ensemble (chamber orchestra), cond.

Lee Reynolds Sunday 1st December 2013 @ 4pm £14, £12 Family Concert: Amazing Animals — Jurassic Park, Carnival of the Animals, Jaws and more St John sub Castro church, Abinger Place kantanti.com East Sussex Community Choir, dir. Nicholas Houghton Saturday 14th December @ 7.30pm A Christmas Cracker including Vivaldi: Gloria RV589 Lewes Town Hall eastsussexcommunitychoir.org Lewes Concert Orchestra, cond. Ian McCrae Friday 20th December Christmas Concert Programme to be announced Lewes Town Hall lewesconcertorchestra.org

Various artists including Nicholas Houghton organ Sunday 22nd December @ 6pm Prices tba A major charity concert in aid of Amnesty International St John sub Castro church Musicians of All Saints (chamber orchestra), cond. Andrew Sherwood Saturday 18th January 2014 @ 7.45pm £10, £7 children free Bach: Brandenburg 6, Barry Mills: Clarinet Concerto, Vivaldi: Concerto. Grosso Op.10 No.3, Stravinsky: Concerto in D All Saints Centre, Friars' Walk www.mas-lewes.co.uk TWS Charme du Hautbois Sunday 19th January 2014 @ 4pm £12 19th century music for oboe, bassoon and harp, on original instruments The Workshop, English Passage, Cliffe NYS Louise Alder soprano, John Paul Ekins piano Friday 24th January 2014 @ 7.45pm £14 / £6 Debussy, Strauss, Poulenc, Boulanger, Liszt, Ireland Sussex Downs College, Mountfield Road The Paddock Singers Christmas Concert Sunday 15th December @ 7.00pm £8, £5, under-14s free incl Mozart's Ave verum St Michael's Church, Lewes High Street

EimageLEdavid illman

EwordsLEsarah bayliss This month, in Encore Week, Glyndebourne will open the opera house to new, younger audiences. LME meets a Lewes-born conductor who is helping to launch the programme

Glyndebourne

Encore L ee Reynolds was 17 when he made his debut as a conductor. It was with Pirates of Penzance for the Lewes Operatic Society in the town hall and, though nervous, he was totally at home.

After all, he’d been attending rehearsals since he was three months old – “parked in a pram” by his parents Colin and Kath who’d met and married in between productions for this century-old Lewes society.

Lee, a bass baritone, was already used to being in the limelight, singing The Artful Dodger in Oliver! and later Billy Bigelow in Carousel. For the LOS’ centenary year in 2011, his skills as a conductor, composer and singer all came together when he arranged Iolanthe for a full swing band.

“It was a lot of fun and I didn’t realise the significance when I was growing up; I just assumed that everybody had an operatic society in their family!” he tells the LME on the eve of another debut – conducting Captain Blood’s Revenge, a new chamber opera for children, on the Glyndebourne Tour.

The opera has been specially commissioned for a new young audience of seven to nine-year-olds on a piratical theme and Lee, dressed as a scruffy mariner, is part of the action while conducting four musicians and four singers. “It’s atmospheric and tricky but contemporary and completely accessible to kids. They just love it,” he says.

With funding from Glyndebourne’s New Generation Programme (NGP) Captain Blood ‘s Revenge is part of a wide-ranging effort by the Sussex-

Captain Blood’s Revenge, left to right: Roger McCann, Berrak Dyer, Lee Reynolds, Helena Nicholls, Karen Street

based international opera house to reach new, younger audiences as well as to develop exceptional young talent.

As David Pickard, Glyndebourne’s general manager and resident of Lewes explains: “I would hope that in ten to 20 years time we can look back and see that the audience for Glyndebourne has changed, that a new generation has come in and that we have discovered the stars of the future.”

This November, when Glyndebourne’s Tour would normally be on the road, it returns for Encore Week (November 24-30), supported by the Arts Council and with extra investment from the NGP. There will be performances of each of the three critically- acclaimed touring operas plus Captain Blood’s Revenge, with special ticket prices for children, families, schools and young people aged under-30.

“If you've never been before, or are a regular Tour audience member but have never brought your children or grandchildren, younger neighbours or friends to Glyndebourne, here is your invitation,” says the programme.

Lee Reynolds, now aged 28, neatly personifies Glyndebourne’s ‘new generation’ aims. They first spotted his talents in 2011, appointing him director of Glyndebourne Youth Opera; in 2012 he was made chorus master for Imago, the highly acclaimed community opera with a cast of 80, aged 15-85.

“I’ve not trained as a professional singer but my voice is part of my tool box,” he explains. “I can sing all the parts and for Imago recorded everything onto training cds for the cast. Glyndebourne is incredibly generous with rehearsal time and the commitment is total to make something work”.

Lee began learning the cello at Wallands primary school and is still grateful to mum Kath for making him

EimagesLEjohn warburton

practice. (Recently he has returned to run voice workshops at Wallands and has encouraged ex-pupil Louise Moseley who sang solo as a cub in Cunning Little Vixen at Glyndebourne last year.)

As a teenager Lee played with Sussex Downs Orchestra, got ‘immersed’ in classical music, took music GCSE at Priory School and achieved Grade 8 cello. “I’m still friends with my teacher Terry Steele and his son Ali“, he says.

Crucially, while at school, Lee began to take notice of conductors.

“Looking back I think I knew I wouldn’t make a career as a cellist and I was interested in law for a while. But I would sit looking at conductors thinking, I’m sure I could do that, it can’t be that difficult flapping your hands about!”

He’s especially grateful that he played with East Sussex Youth Orchestra conducted by Colin Metters – whose day job for 30 years was director of conducting at the Royal Academy of Music. “It was amazing to watch and learn from him; he is a first rate teacher.”

After sixth form in Brighton, Lee took a music degree at Surrey University and then got the first of several ‘lucky breaks’ working with the London Symphony Orchestra. In 2010, when the Russian conductor Valery Gergiev missed a flight, Lee deputised for him at an LSO rehearsal of Mahler’s Symphony No 1. That year he succeeded Gareth Malone (of BBC’s The Choir and Glyndebourne’s Knight Crew) as director of the LSO’s youth choirs.

Lee is also the founder and director of the acclaimed Kantanti Ensemble, a

Coming Up

group of young professional musicians who perform in London and at St John’s sub Castro in Lewes.

Paul Austin Kelly, the American tenor, who hosts the website www.lewesclassical.com, is a fan: “Classical music on your doorstep doesn’t get much better than this,” he wrote in The Argus.

The most recent Kantanti concert featured Lee’s favourite, Mahler’s Symphony No 1, which Kelly described as ‘glorious’ in his blog. ‘The conducting and playing was concentrated, inspired and inspiring and the audience rightly went wild at the end. It’s why music-lovers respond so well to this ensemble. Perhaps it’s a combination of their youth and exuberance – how often do you see players smiling as they play? – as well as their expertise.”

The Kantanti Ensemble will be back at St John’s on December 1 for a playful family concert called Amazing Animals, including Mancini’s theme from The Pink Panther. Tickets for children always cost just one penny.

Like Kelly, whose roots are in rock music, Lee is very comfortable with different genres but says the key to success is quality and enjoyment.

“That’s how it all started for me and how I’ve developed. Some conductors see it as their job to create tension but that’s not my style; sometimes you have to crack the whip, but for me people perform better when they relax and are engaged. Obviously you have to put in a lot of hard work but it’s the living and breathing of music that has taught me the most valuable things.”

November 22: For Benjamin Britten’s 100th birthday anniversary, Glyndebourne Youth Opera performs Into the Harbour, Carry Me Home, a special exploration of the composer’s music and songs conducted by Lee Reynolds. For tickets and for Encore week (Nov 24-30) go to: www.glyndebourne.com For tickets to Amazing Animals (Dec 1) at St John’s sub Castro call the Ticket Line on 01273 474979 or email tickets@kantanti.com

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MUSIC STORE “Sometimes I am two people.

Johnny is the nice one.

Cash causes all the trouble. ”

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Last Words Ewords /EillustrationLEpeter messer

from page 3 )

Musical Spaces

here’s an opaque but well-known saying which states that ‘Time is just a device to prevent everything happening at once’. It has been attributed to many people, although I personally favour Henri Bergson, if only to give my recyclings a spurious intellectual heft. I must have only an intermittent sense of time, or perhaps Lewes imposes it on me, because I often find myself seemingly able to perceive exactly ‘everything happening at once’.

So look, there’s the young Joe Brown, vaulting from the cream leather driver’s seat of his lipstick-pink Buick convertible, ignoring the doors, as he visits a shop on School Hill. Simultaneously, although years later, you can see, through the window of an antique shop, Lewes resident Charlie Watts thoughtfully picking up an elaborate candlestick and peering at the base. Further down the town in the Cliffe, at another point in time, a group of skinny adolescents in navy Boys’ Grammar School blazers are nursing coffees in the Polar Bear Milk bar. One, Pete Thomas, is unaware that he will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with Elvis Costello and The Attractions, or that Tom Waits will later cite him as his favourite rock drummer.

Another, future punk icon Wreckless Eric, then Eric Goulden, is worrying about the least obtrusive way of bunking off double physics in the afternoon. The genre in which he makes his name doesn’t yet exist.

It’s all happening at once. Jez Bird is busking in the precinct which also doesn’t yet exist, as I notice my lanky eighteen-year-old self emerge from the Record Bar near the railway bridge. I’m the one wearing South Sea Bubble jeans and Levi jacket, carrying a copy of ‘American Pie’. I don’t doubt that I can also see an absorbed Syd Barrett, smoking a fag and leaning on a Thames van at the back of the Town Hall before the Pink Floyd gig in 1967. Oddly, only the sight

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I notice my lanky eighteen-year-old self emerge from the Record Bar near the railway bridge. I’m the one wearing South Sea Bubble jeans and Levi jacket, carrying a copy of ‘American Pie’. of Arthur Brown across the street returns me to the here and now. He’s lived here longer than Tom Paine did and is held in considerably warmer affection by his contemporary residents. I’m not the only Lewes person to have stood behind The God of Hell Fire in the ’10 items or fewer’ queue in Waitrose.

‘The Hills Are Alive’, as Julie Andrews and Viva Lewes used to say, and not entirely because of Tommy Paine & The Revolution and the Travelling Bloomsburies. For a relatively small town, Lewes has missed out on surprisingly little in its musical history and degrees of separation tend to be few.

Woody Guthrie may not have played here but his good

friend and fellow traveller, Rambling Jack Elliot has. Shirley Collins, for decades at the centre of the folk movement, lives here and Martin Carthy, likewise, is a frequent visitor.

It may not be Greenwich Village, but ‘Spider’ John Koerner, one of Dylan’s and Dave Van Ronk’s early Village contemporaries (see Dylan’s book, Chronicles), played at the Royal Oak not so long ago. Bluesman Kent Duchaine, a frequent attraction at the Lansdowne, was a friend of the late Johnny Shines, who travelled and played with the legendary Robert Johnson. I shook hands with a man who shook hands with a man who shook hands with Robert Johnson in a pub in my own home town! Kent even plays Johnny’s old National guitar.

Well, it’s not over yet. There has never been so much music in the town as there is

Available from

Skylark Bookshop & Octave Records 22

now, across such a range of genres. More to the point, it has character. There were times when pub music meant well-meaning outfits with names like ‘Double Trouble’ or ‘Twice as Nice’. They, and an 80s drum machine, ground out the chart hits of the day, interspersed with the odd album track and some desperate banter. Now, you’re very likely to hear a salsa band, a gypsy punk band, a voodoo swamp band, a Berlin-flavoured chanteuse, a bluegrass orchestra, swing, ska or good old rhythm and blues. Go out on a Friday or Saturday night and see what you find. But pay attention to the young man smoking outside the pub, or the young woman who pulls your pint, or the tentative, inexperienced band in the corner.

They might be from the future. CF

which has discussed the implications of the Audit.

Clive Wilding, Property Director of The Santon Group, is the face and presence of the company in Lewes. In a phone interview he told the LME: “We’re still having loads of ongoing discussions and we haven’t reached any conclusions.

We’ve got a shopping list of things we’ve got to provide within the development – affordable housing is a big priority. There will be some creative industry space on-site but whatever we provide, we’ve got to ensure that we can sustain it and that it can be economically let so we don’t have empty buildings. One of the features of our scheme is to create a public square which would incorporate a performance-related space.

We are not sure what form that should take but the key is to create a flexible space that can be used for a variety of things.”

Santon will be submitting their initial planning application early next year to the LDC. We will be following developments with interest.

jm

LEWES musical express

Editorial

Second Issue Winter 2013 www.lewesmusicalexpress.com info@lewesmusicalexpress.com Editorial/Advertising: 01273 471505

Ephoto LEmick hawksworth

Editor/Producer/Writer: John May Designer: Raphael Whittle Treasurer: Lindsey Shakoori

‘...what I refer to confidently as memory – meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion – is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.‘ William Maxwell So Long, See You Tomorrow [Harvill Press. 1980] This has been the difficult second album, a long and quite dark journey. We have plunged very deep into the roots of folk music, the world of opera, the spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, through in-depth long-form interviews of a kind that are increasingly rare in mainstream media. As its turned out, through the process of making this issue, a theme of ‘musical memories’ has emerged and formed a linking thread that guided us through the labyrinth.

So here’s my memory story about how Ramblin’ Jack Elliott came to Lewes. That’s me up there with the Kerouac beat cap, back of Jack, upstairs at The Lansdown Arms on 22 February 2005.

Who the heck is Ramblin’ Jack. Briefly, Jack really knew Woody Guthrie, lived with him, learnt his songs directly off him, visited him in hospital. The younger Dylan arrived later by which time Guthrie was too ill to sing or play.

Dylan learnt Guthrie off Jack.

Jack was in Britain to receive a Radio 2 Folk award and do some gigs.

I interviewed him in London (with his daughter who’d made a documentary about him) and the piece was published in The Telegraph. They needed a picture of Jack and that’s how I came to discover a rare set of pics of Dylan, taken in 1964, that were only just coming to light. The set included shots of Dylan and Jack in New York’s Greenwich Village. [Incidentally, the new Coen brothers film is set in that time and place]

I never expected to see or hear from Jack again but then the phone rang two or three days after the interview.

It was Arthur Brown just letting me know about someone who he thought I might like, who was coming to play a hastily-arranged gig at The Lansdown Arms. Who is it then Arthur? Ramblin’ Jack Elliot have you heard if him…

Shock! You kidding me! So it was I found myself in the back of a dormobile in a snowstorm, heading up School Hill for Hugh Rae’s. Jack had arrived, taken a shine to my cap and wanted to buy one. He tried some on but in the end he left it.

That night, The Lansdown was packed with young people sitting at the foot of the stage and elders clustered round the edges. Jack came out to the small, low bareboard stage and the landlord’s dog followed him and sat at his feet throughout the whole performance. For that one night, it was Greenwich Village in Lewes.

That was destined to be the full gist of my editorial but fate took a hand. Back in the day (1975-1982) I worked freelance under the nom-de-plume Dick Tracy for the NME. The paper contacted me a couple weeks ago via Tom Mugridge who lives in Lewes. He asks: Who was Dick Tracy? I respond: That Was Me. [There was then and is now a general impression that Dick Tracy was a name used by a number of writers on the NME. This is officially untrue.]

Turns out they’re reprinting one of my favourite pieces from 1978 concerning Keith Richards’ heroin trial in Toronto and I’m getting paid. The issue duly came out as you can see which I felt real good about.

It brought back a lot of memories.

Your overwhelming support and enthusiasm for our first issue was greatly appreciated.

Hope this one also hits the spot. See you next time in the spring.

John May, Editor

This complete story of Jack and the lost Dylan photos + the full Keith Richards’ article can be found in four posts on my blog THE GENERALIST: http://hqinfo.blogspot.com The Ballad of Ramblin’ Jack Elliott (17 June 2005), The Lost Dylan Photos (11 September 2005), Ramblin’ Jack Revisited (18 June 2007), NME: The Stone with The Golden Arm (1 December 2005)

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Contributors John Agard Steve Arch Sarah Bayliss Shirley Collins Malcolm Davis Manek Dubash Kim Fuller Carlotta Luke Peter Messer Neeta Pederson Bob Russell John Warburton Print: The Newspaper Club

The 100 Club Martin Leeburn Andy Thomas Mich & Dawn Magnified Learning Stephen George Arch Alexander & Bernadette Jane Whitaker

Issue One: 100 Club Andy Banks, Nick Davies, Ed Mawby, Simon Smewing, Tony Norman, Manek Dubash, Pelham House/David Anderson, Colin Lloyd, Charlie Dobres, Nigel Atkinson, Phil Pickett, Pete Mobbs, Caroline Dorling

Our Banner: Paul Harrison

Big thank you Margaret Messer, Sluff, Steve Franklin, Alec Swinburn, Charlie Dobres, Andrew Mellor, Miles Jenner, Tom Mugridge, Abi Mawer, Will Rogers, Stevie and Jamie Freeman, Polly Marshall, Nick Benjamin, Maria Bowers, Lin Heyworth, Jacqueline Allard, Jack Carey, Eve Deacon, David Anderson, Chris Horton. Tom Mugridge, Tanya Laporte, Paul Morgan, Arthur Brown, Paul Andrew

Candlelit TO SHARE

DINNER

18oz english 21 day aged rump of beef served with skin-on fat chips seasoned with rosemary sea salt 50cl carafe of red wine eton mess

ÂŁ17.50 (per person) www.bills-website.co.uk @BillsRestaurant

56 Cliffe High Street Lewes, BN7 2AN 01273 476 918