34 minute read
Mandy Morton & Spriguns Interview by Dave Hammond.
Mandy Morton and Spriguns
After the Storm
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Interview by Dave Hammond.
When Mandy Morton started singing with her sister in an attempt to raise some funds for a local Amateur Dramatic Society, little did she realise it would lead to the recording of seven albums of critically acclaimed music, signing to a major record label and touring around various parts of Europe. The legacy of music she left with firstly the Spriguns of Tolgus, then Spriguns and latterly with her very own Mandy Morton Band has, like so many other Psych Folk bands of the ‘60s and ‘70s, grown in stature, with copies of some of the early vinyl albums exchanging hands for in excess of £1,500. The good news is that all seven albums and a bonus DVD of a live recording of the band from the late-’70s have been gathered together in one package, along with comprehensive liner notes, by Cherry Red Records and is now available to purchase. I caught up with Morton for an interview about the releases and the history of the bands.
Thanks very much for taking the time to speak to me Mandy, it is very much appreciated. My first question is why and how did the compilation come about, nearly forty years after the last release from the band?
Thanks very much for the invite, it’s great to be talking with you too. The way it happened was that Cherry Red Records, who have promoted this, got in touch with me to add the liner notes to the two Decca albums they were going to release [‘Revel, Weird & Wild’, 1976 and ‘Time Will Pass’, 1977]. Obviously, I didn’t own those tapes, Decca had the tapes so they could licence them whenever they felt like it. So, when Cherry Red got in
contact with me, I then said to them, you know, what would be really nice is if my album ‘Sea of Storms’ [1979] was re-released, because it’s never seen the light of day as a CD, other than a bootleg copy swimming around out there, which is awful. Anyway, they went away to think about it and then they contacted me, I suppose at the end of 2020. And they said, ‘You know, we’ve been thinking about ‘Sea of Storms’, but another thought we had is why don’t you release everything?’ It was a bit of a shock to me, because I thought ‘well, how’s that going to work?’ You know, it’s sort of ten years worth of material forty odd years ago, is this is going to be tricky, even though I owned a lot of the tapes myself. I said, well, how’s it going to work? And they said, ‘You’re the governor, you’re still alive and kicking’, which is great, because a lot of the re-releases that they do, people are no longer here. And they said it was a wonderful opportunity to tell a story of Spriguns first hand from somebody that had been in the band right from its inception. So, I sat down and wrote a potted biography on the band, as much as I could possibly remember. The salient points of how the band progressed and moved on was simple enough, just through the music, that was a simple thing to do. Then I had to raid my tape boxes to find out if I really, truly did have any of the master tapes that were in good nick, because that’s another thing - forty years of tape deterioration is not great! And luckily, because of the way I’d stored them over the years, they were able to do this process you’ll know about, this baking of the reel-to-reel tapes, and creating new digital masters, which they did beautifully. I have to say the sound that’s created in the box set is just fantastic. I’m so thrilled with it. And so that’s exactly what it was, it was dragging that 1970s sound into the 21st century, and giving me an opportunity to tell the story of the band, the way I saw it. I mean, you know, I’m sure there’ll be lots of different versions, but I was also getting pretty fed up with there being all sorts of weird internet sites that were telling me what my songs were about, that were talking about members who had never
been in the band. I thought if I then put down in my own words, the way I saw the band and its progress, that at least would be nice for the fans. And then the added bonus, of course was the live DVD.
Yeah, absolutely. If you don’t mind, can we run through the albums in chronological order and comment a little bit about what it was like at the time, going right back to the early days. Before you released anything, I think it was just yourself and your sister and possibly Mike Morton as well, who were just playing around locally, raising money for the amateur dramatics society you were part of …
Yeah. Mike didn’t come into it straight away. My sister, brother-in-law and myself and a friend, we formed this band called Simple Folk. And it was literally for an amateur dramatics society to actually raise funds for their next production because, you know, if you’ve ever been in amateur dramatics society, you’ll know that penny pinching is the thing. So, we just sort of wandered around local venues, just singing the traditional songs of the day, straight out of the Joan Baez songbook, little bit of Pentangle, little bit of Fairport, all that sort of stuff. But then I’d started dating Mike, and one of the first presents that he gave me was tickets to see Steeleye Span at the Lady Mitchell Hall in Cambridge. We went along to see Steeleye and on that night, my whole life change, because at that point in time, I’d always viewed folk music as being you know, ladies sitting on stools, singing traditional songs, or in the folk club with everyone beering it up and some poor person in the corner desperately trying to be heard. That really was my experience of folk clubs. But then, when Steeleye Span came to the stage, I realised that there was so much more drama in these traditional songs if performed properly. And on that day, as we left the Lady Mitchell, I said to my sister, right, I’m out of here. I’ve seen something I want to do. And Mike and I are going to pursue that and we formed a duo at that point. Neither of us could play much of
anything, really. I mean, I could play a reasonable guitar. In Simple Folk. I’d been their multi-instrumentalist, for some reason, playing bongos, glockenspiel, dulcimer, and guitar as well as a bit of singing, although my sister did most of the singing. And so, we transformed ourselves into this duo, performing some of the material, but more updated, of the Steeleye [Span], Fairport [Convention] and Pentangle catalogue. And it was at that point that the landlord of the Anchor Folk club in Cambridge said to Mike and I, ‘Why don’t you start a music club? There are not enough students coming into this pub at the moment and I want to fill the pub with students on a Friday night’. And the rest, as they say, is history.
Yeah, I know while you were at the Anchor, because the sound equipment there wasn’t necessarily the best, you decided to try and raise some funds by recording a cassette, which became, effectively your first album, your first recording ...
Yes, I could never believe that was ever going to be our first album. I mean, at the Anchor, more people joined us on stage, which was lovely, and it became very organic. And in the end, Chris Russell and Rick Thomas joined us sort of permanently at that stage. In our kitchen in Cross Street in Cambridge, we just literally had a four-track mixing desk, and reel-to-reel tape recorder, and a friend pressing the buttons for us who later became our sound engineer. We literally just performed the sort of stuff that we did at the folk club every Friday night on ‘Rowdy Dowdy Day’ [1974], which on reflection now turns out to be a set of bawdy ballads. When I actually look at the material now, its very eye-raising. I don’t know whether we’d get away with it now, to be perfectly honest. I spent an awful lot of my days making cassettes out of the reel-to-reel, we made our own photographic covers and then at the Anchor we would sell them on the door in hopes of raising a bit of money to buy a decent PA system. So that was the very beginning of our recording career, though it was never meant to see the light of day other than to the
people that went in the Anchor.
Do you know if there’s still any copies of that cassette floating around then? Do you know of anyone who’s got copies?
They do turn up from time to time. We have a Spriguns Facebook page and, from time to time, some of the fans will post their treasures on that site. So there are obviously some about. I have one copy and luckily, I was able to forward the cover of that to Cherry Red records so they’ve been able to use that for the release. Our next foray into recording was ‘Jack With a Feather’ [1975].
Yeah, just reading through my notes, I believe it was recorded for a small label who took you away for the recording in a little country cottage out in the wild somewhere?
Yes, yes, basically, what happened in short was that a couple of guys wearing suits turned up at the Anchor folk club one Friday night and I happened to be on the door at half-time as people came in, and they bought a cassette, and then they went to the bar and sat there drinking all night. I didn’t give them a second thought other than the fact that they really stuck out like sore thumbs. We thought they were from the brewery because it didn’t look at all like our sort of fans. And a few days later, the phone rang and the one of these guys said, ‘We’re from a Alida Star, a small recording label. We’ve picked up your cassette at the weekend, and we would very much like to record an album with you’. And we were gobsmacked. I mean, we thought if they’ve listened to the cassette, surely they thought this is not our thing. This is just fun. This is what we do on Fridays. Anyway, they were absolutely genuine about it, they gave us a date, we told the band and they thought it was an absolute hoot. We took off to Leicester ended up in this little cottage, which had been flooded recently because the whole of the carpet was soaking wet. And with what I now know about electricity, we were probably taking our life in our hands by using electric equipment on that day! Anyway, we cut ‘Jack With a
Feather’, a lot of material very similar to ‘Rowdy…’ and some new things. We cut that whole album in a space of about eight hours. And then went off and didn’t really think much more about it. Next thing we had through the post was the master tapes. And Mike said, ‘Well, why don’t we press them?’ So that was ‘Jack With a Feather’ which now, extraordinarily, is one of the rarest Folk Albums of all time, which to me is just absolutely astonishing. But, you know, it’s just in its time. 500 copies were pressed, which obviously makes it extremely rare. But the big thing about that was that it did lead to the major Decca contract.
And with ‘Jack with a Feather’, it was a real DIY affair, because you printed it all yourself as well. Everything was done by yourselves, preceding what happened post Punk when independent, DIY labels became the norm. You were pre-dating that really?
Yeah. And I think it was important for us for it to be organic, because we never dreamed at that point that anybody in the music industry professionally would be interested in the sort of outfit like us, because there were a lot of people like us in folk clubs.
You mentioned Decca Records. So, the people that came along to see you from Decca had previously rejected the Beatles?
Yes. I mean, I’m very proud to hear that. Hugh Mendel was one of the people in the A&R department, along with someone whose name I can’t remember. After we’d had an interview with the managing director at Decca, we were sent down to the A&R department to be signed. And it was those two people that had the first conversation and originally listened to the early Beatle tapes, which I imagined must have been appalling quality! And they turned them down, but they did sign the Stones!
At this point you signed a three
record deal. And the Spriguns of Tolgus became Spriguns. Could you tell us where the Spriguns of Tolgus name originated?
Mike and I used to holiday in Cornwall a lot. At the time we were a duo, and we wanted to be called something just a little bit different, maybe a bit magical and mysterious. So, Spriguns is a mythical Cornish pixie that was reputed to sit on clifftops and spit at people. Tolgus was a place renowned for its tin mill, where they took the raw tin and turned it into all sorts of stuff. It was just a lovely sounding name, so we became Spriguns of Tolgus. As soon as we got to Decca, they said, no, no, no, people aren’t going to go with that length of title, so let’s just stick with Spriguns. We went to Decca via Tim Hart of Steeleye Span, who had heard ‘Jack with a Feather’ and a recording of one of his songs, ‘Seamus the Showman’ and he became something of a mentor and produced our next album, which was wonderful.
That first album with Decca was 1976’s ‘Revel, Weird and Wild’. A couple of things struck me about that release, one is that there’s a lot more vocals from yourself and there’s a lot more songs that are written by yourself, some along with Richard Powell, which was a big step forward from the previous two albums.
Yes, it had to be, because we couldn’t just carry on making albums like ‘Jack With a Feather’. The material was lovely and because I’d already become very, very interested in Folk and magical ballads, through spending a lot of time at Cecil Sharp House where there’s a fabulous library, poring through these tomes to find any ballads that had not been made popular by Steeleye, Fairport and Pentangle. I needed to have something different so I spent a long time gathering together some ballads that perhaps other bands hadn’t covered though subsequently, of course, in later years, they did end up covering them. But we found them and then started putting music to them, which is where Dick came in. And Thom Ling, of course, another
Cambridge member of the band, fabulous violin player. And that really was the way that we put together all the material on ‘Revel, Weird and Wild’. And, because I was the female vocalist, and that’s what Decca wanted, that’s what they got.
Also, there was more additional instrumentation on these songs, a bit more electric guitar, a few more keyboards. And I think you also have the great BJ Cole (legendary pedal steel guitarist) playing on it as well?
Yes, BJ was a great friend of Tim’s. Wonderful player, and he did the most beautiful things on ‘When Spring Comes In’. It was lovely. It was all a bit of a shock, really, because we’d come from a Folky band meeting up on a Friday night, you know, beer and fags and a bit of music, to suddenly this prestigious outfit that were living in this extraordinary Hotel in London. It was a very strange life and then at weekends, when we went home to Cambridge, we were eating beans on toast because we had no money. So, Decca picked up the tab while we were physically working for them, but then we were cast aside instantly as soon as the studio time was over.
Yes, I think you did comment in the liner notes that it you had mixed feelings, mixed emotions, seeing the album coming out. Obviously, there was great joy about that, but then realising, well, actually, this is this is gonna be our lives going forward now …
Yes, I mean, we were called to do all sorts of Rock star type things for Decca; photoshoots, and things like that. And it was on completely another planet, compared with the reality of our life back at home where we were sort of penny pinching and living from hand to mouth.
The next album, which was 1977’s ‘Time Will Pass’, was again a big step forward in terms of song writing, and probably the quality of the songs as well. Some brilliant writing on there, and some lovely
arrangements as well, especially the ones with Robert Kirby’s (another legendary Cambridge figure, famed for his work with Nick Drake, Vashti Bunyan, Sandy Denny, Elton John, etc) orchestral instrumentation.
It was lovely because for the second album, Sandy Robertson, who had produced Steeleye work and many other notable bands, including the legendary Albion band, was brought in by Decca for the second album, and Sandy, of course, was known for these quite lavish productions. He contacted Robert Kirby, and then contacted me and said, I’ve isolated three tracks, which I would like to send to Robert. So, I want you to record them acoustically just you and the guitar, and send them to Robert because I want him to do orchestral arrangements on them. And of course, some of those acoustic tracks are actually bonus tracks on the box set. And equally, we had another personnel change at that point, and brought in Dennis Dunstan, and Wayne Morrison from Australia, to sort of really beef up the centre and backline of the band. And that worked beautifully because Wayne was a no nonsense sort, a really quite heavy rock drummer. I think he brought an awful lot of life to it. Wayne is a superb lead guitarist, and also a great vocalist, he worked very well with me too.
Just going back to what you were saying about bringing in additional musicians that beefed up the sound, I keep going back to the version of ‘Blackwaterside’ on ‘Time Will Pass’, which is really quite heavy.
Yes, I insisted that that went on the album because that was one of our live show pieces. Spriguns were very much a live band and we didn’t take any prisoners. We really were very, very energetic and very Rock heavy on stage. A lot of that, I think, was probably smoothed out a bit on the recording of ‘Time Will Pass’. And in some respects, I think it would have been nice if it had been slightly rough around the edges. But of course, once we actually started to get out there and promote the album, we put the sort of
dynamics back into it again. But it is it is a lovely album to listen to it. I was very pleased with the writing on it.
Absolutely. And lyrically as well - there’s an anti-war song on there, ‘Letter to a Lady’ …
But there’s always an anti-war song! Unfortunately, there’s always a war to be anti about!
Around this time, you were touring bigger venues and finding that maybe a little bit unusual compared to what you’d been doing before.
Yeah. I mean, Decca in those days, and they probably still do now, stuck an upcoming band on tour with a much more famous band to sort of put them in the spotlight. So, we ended up playing the support to Roy Harper, which was going to be a wonderful opportunity. But the strange thing was that we were also on an electricity blackout situation in the country at the time of the tour. So that was pretty weird. We were playing all manner of times during the evenings to try and counter when they were going to pull the electricity supplies at the venues! And Roy had just recovered from a terrible illness and he still wasn’t that well. There were nights when he would only do half his own gig, and the band would actually carry the rest of it. And there was other stuff going on. I wouldn’t want to say too much about it other than the fact that we felt very unwelcome. We were given all sorts of lovely display material by Decca and on the first gig at West Runton Pavilion, Roy’s roadies just dumped it off the cliff into the sea. As far as they were concerned, Roy didn’t have any lovely, nice, posh publicity boards, so why the heck should we! But it culminated in a gig at the Rainbow, which I will always remember just from looking up at the roof and seeing the stars and also seeing the row of notables on the front row, including all our Decca A&R department and a lot of very famous faces from Roy Harper’s friends. And hey, old Spriguns just got up there and let them have it. That was special. And you know, that poster to this day,
whenever I see it in my archive makes me smile. It was just a wonderful moment. And I still have a T-shirt, but it doesn’t fit anymore. So, yeah, I think there was a period after that, of us possibly losing a little bit of control, and wanting to gain back that control.
So, you set up your own record company, which was quite a brave thing to do at the time.
Yeah, we were quite brave. And when I looked back on it now, what happened really, with Decca was I owed them another album. But the personnel at Decca changed and all the people that had been looking after us and actually genuinely loved the band left. And they were replaced by some, I don’t know, almost business executives who hadn’t necessarily any great depth of interest in music, just an interest in making money. Punk and new wave was flying high at the time, their attitude was, well, this is what we’re going to promote from now on. And then they looked at Spriguns and thought, ‘well, they’re lovely, we’ll just make them middle of the road’. And I think they felt that songs like ‘White Witch’, which of course had the lavish production and the orchestration from Robert Kirby, would be the way to go. And that was something that absolutely didn’t interest me at all. I wanted to stay in the, you know, the acid folk scene, I did not want to move into a lovely, smooth sort of KTel type album situation. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but it wasn’t for me, and Mike and I agonised over it. Then I decided that I would go to Decca and explain how I felt. And they very graciously allowed me out of the contract. And then I started to write ‘Magic Lady’ [1978]. Mike formed our own new record label, Banshee records, and we did feel a freedom to be able to write the songs I wanted to write as well. It was massively freeing. And again, I always think of it as being my black magic album because, well, these subject matters interested me. I think looking back on it now, it was very much to do with my own life and my own feelings. I’d come out of a horrible childhood; an awful lot of things had
not surfaced. I believe that they surfaced in those albums, which was great, because the point is that it was wonderful therapy for me to actually get some of the anxieties of my younger self out into the music and make it productive.
It was quite cathartic writing some of the songs at the time, then?
Yes, it was. I couldn’t honestly tell you where it was all coming from, I mean, literally, the songs would fall out of me. They were always preceded by a bit of a grumpy mood. And I always knew that there was something on the way that was going to be delivered quite magically, in the middle of a night. And that’s literally how songs came to me. And they are very anxious, they are quite sad, I think, in their thoughts and also the way lyrically that the thing is put together. People always talk about their mental health these days, as if it’s, you know, second to their existence. I had no idea at that time, that my younger days had formed so much anxiety within me, and I was able to get rid of it. They always say that, if you’re cross with somebody sit down and write a letter to them and then burn it. And in a sort of way, that’s what I did. Except I didn’t burn it. I made it into plastic or metal or whatever goes into making records and CDs these days. On reflection, the one track that probably counterbalances all that on the album is the title track, ‘Magic Lady’, which I think was a late addition to the album. Yes, it was. In April 1978. I had almost completed writing ‘Magic Lady’ [it was released in November of that year] and a friend of mine, Caroline Pegg phoned up one Sunday morning and said, ‘Did you know Sandy Denny had died?’ Sandy had been absolutely massive in my appreciation of music once I discovered her. It was the way that she wrote, the way she spoke, the way she sang. Very much like the sort of stuff I was doing, although I never in my career ever emulated her and never even attempted to sing any of her songs, because for me, they were more sacred than that. And even to this day, I have to say, I can’t stand anybody else singing a Sandy Denny song, because
it’s not the same. Sandy was a spiritual person. And she was going through some really tough stuff. And that came out in her music, and you can feel it in everything that she’s saying. So, when I found out that she died, I like many other 1,000s of her fans, I felt that so badly. I couldn’t play her music for a year after that. I decided that the only thing that I was able to do was to retitle the album, call it ‘Magic Lady’ and write a beginning and an end to the album as a tribute to her and not for any other reason than the fact that I wouldn’t have continued with music unless I’d been able to do that. That album itself, did get some really good reviews. I think it ended up in the Melody Maker end of year chart in the top 10 Folk Music albums as well. We were absolutely delighted. And literally, it was so homegrown that Mike was touring up and down the country to record shops, just selling two or three copies into each shop. That’s how organic we were at the time, while I was busily thinking in terms of getting a tour and stuff together. But yeah, ‘Magic Lady’ was a very surprising success for us.
And the other thing that was a little bit surprising, was how well it went down in Norway, which led to you leave the country for a time …
Yes, indeed. I mean, thank God, good old Norway and Denmark. It actually came to our rescue during punk and new wave because I mean Steeleye and Fairport, they sort of packed up for a bit because gigs were getting few and far between in this country. And I think we were very lucky we were invited to do a month residency in Oslo. And it was a sort of a Bernie Inn with lots of beer and music and sailors, mostly drunk. We took Thom Ling [fiddle player] out there and as a three piece we did, like four forty minutes sets a night, but had days off to just wander around that beautiful city and sit on the docks and have a look out at the ocean and stuff. And there I started to write ‘Sea of Storms’ [1979]. But while we were playing in the evenings, several record companies came along to see us. We were offered two deals, one with
EMI and the other with Polydor of Norway, who wanted to release ‘Magic Lady’ in Scandinavia. They did love Folk Rock, and they liked the stories. I mean, obviously, even from the Viking days, stories were everything in Scandinavia, and they just loved English Folk music, particularly performed in a Rock way. When we came back to England, I recorded the ‘Sea of Storms’ and subsequent album, finished them at Spaceward Studios in Cambridge and then licensed to Polydor Norway. We then started to widen the net, and to play more and more in Scandinavia to promote that album. We took in Denmark, as well as Norway, and we travelled literally from one big venue to one tiny venue, perhaps in a little village in the mountains across the Arctic Circle. It was a real adventure. I couldn’t do it again. No way!
Did that adventure in Scandinavia feed into 1979’s ‘Sea of Storms’ in any way? Did it cause you to think and do things differently to if you’d spent all that time in England?
Yeah, I think it would have been more wistful that album, I mean, tracks like ‘Land of the Dead’ were totally about Scandinavia. And of course, people misconstrued the fact that the ‘Land of the Dead’ was talking about England, not Scandinavia. And once you actually turn that round, you realise what’s going on. It was just the freedom of that country and the way that people were, they had a completely different outlook to the people in the UK. We were going to through some really heavy politics in the UK. The Scandinavians, what was foremost in their mind was a good and healthy life, you know that the kids came out of school at two o’clock in the day so they could spend time with their families for the rest of the day. People got up at five o’clock and went to work so that the rest of the time they could be skiing, swimming and just enjoying their life, staying fit, and free. That really caught fire with me. I thought, this is just an amazing lifestyle, and the laid back Danish people were fantastic, welcomed us into their homes after the gigs and you know, we never slept. I
don’t think we ever slept on those tours. We spent all night sitting up talking and moving on to the next gig.
And with ‘Sea of Storms’, I think you were stretching yourself, there’s a bit more experimentation. There’s a lot more synthesisers. There’s a sitar on one track. There’s another track which is quite reggae tinged really. And there’s even a track, ‘Compline Anthem’, which features some nuns on it!
Yeah, so that’s really interesting. We’d reached a stage where I could actually start to afford to bring in session musicians who I picked because of the way they play their instruments. So, we had John Lingwood from Manfred Mann’s Earth Band, who was fantastic from a reggae point of view and then Terry Cotton with the Sitar. I felt that something very, very simple and hippie-like would be a lovely thing to have as a contrast on the album. So, there we sat cross-legged in the studio I couldn’t do that again today! And then of course, the synthesisers, which were becoming more and more popular in the UK at the time. I wanted to move on with the times. I wanted there to be a really harshness to some of the music. Because I was actually in control, it was like a chocolate box. It was like picking what should I have next and it was really lovely to feel it all come together. For me, I think it was the pinnacle of a career which had been building all the way through. I felt that was the album I wanted to make and I’m very proud of it still today. I can still listen to that one, quite happily, and transport myself back to the studio, which is lovely.
There could have been a hit single off the album in ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’. If you had slipped it in to a different sleeve with a twenty-yearold Synth-Pop duo on the cover, it might have been a smash. But I suppose because it was associated with Spriguns and Mandy Morton, it perhaps wasn’t viewed as such?
Yes, I think so. And I mean, we’d made that decision years ago. If we’d stayed
with Decca, with the middle of the road aspect of it, then yes, we would have had probably a mega hit with the ‘Ghost of Christmas Past’. But for me, it was something that was just nice to revisit, briefly, to make it a little bit more Christmassy. I also removed one of the more depressing verses for the Christmas single. Not many people picked up on that. The verse goes, ‘What have I to show for all these wasted years’. That song was a very personal song to me, because it took me back to being four years old, in Suffolk, with my mother coming home from hospital, and me hiding behind a curtain at Christmas. And that was the imagery that was there. In a very troubled childhood. That was something that still stands out to this day as a magical moment.
And that takes us to the final album in the set, which is 1983’s ‘Valley of Life’, which is effectively, is a solo music, because at that point, Mike had got himself another job, and was less involved in the music itself.
Yeah, we decided to part company. It had been a stormy sort of few years. Lots of money troubles, obviously, because we were perpetually trying to keep the band on the road and keep ourselves sane and in one place. But looking back on it now, Mike and I grew up together in those ten years, we had an absolute blast. There was no doubt about it. It was all about the band. But Mike had a very brilliant mind. He was a wonderful teacher and inevitably he was offered a wonderful opportunity to head the St. Andrews Tutorial Centre in Cambridge, which was a very high-profile job. At that point, we had decided to remain friends but to go our separate ways. I thought for a long time about whether I would continue the band then decided that maybe there was one more album because like I’ve always said, you know, music to me was a terminal disease. So essentially, if I wasn’t doing it, there was going to be a problem. I pulled around me a lot of local people, good musicians from Cambridge, to form a band to go into the studio at Spaceward again, and to make ‘Valley of Light’, which was really an out and out Pop album, because everybody at that time had sort of labelled me ‘the dark lady of Folk’. I wanted to sort of, you know, come out into the sunshine for a bit. Listening back to it now, the time worn subject matter is still there underlying everything. There’s an awful lot of sarcasm, there’s an awful lot of trying to be bright and making the best of things when things weren’t that great. I love ‘Valley of Light’ because it is quite an optimistic album in some respects and it did give me another two years work on the scene. But when the BBC came calling and suggested that I might like to start a new career, I was ready to do it. I toured extensively for ten years, I wondered where my twenties disappeared, too. And I was also now a single woman with big responsibilities,
and I had to have an income. And, you know, when BBC Radio Cambridge just started offering me a decent salary, which would probably have taken me a whole month to earn if I’d been with a band, and the fact that I could see my dog more often, and I could appreciate my lovely Cambridge house, that was a no brainer. So, I spent the next 26 years on the radio.
And another string to your bow is your writing, with your Cat Detective agency books. How many now?
Well, the tenth one will be published in May. And I’m writing the eleventh at the moment. So, I started the first one to raise money for the Blue Cross animal charity because Nicola, my partner, and I actually made a point of adopting elderly tabby cats, long-haired tabby cats, of which we’ve had a few. Essentially, I made them into detectives, self-publishing a book to raise money for an animal charity. A London publisher picked the book up in Heffers book shop in Cambridge and said, who’s written this? This is lovely. And before I knew it, well, I’m writing the eleventh. It’s my annual knitting as a lot of people in the writing trade say, it’s something I do in the winter because I love my gardens in the summer. In the winter, when it’s all grim and nasty, both Nicola [Upson, also an author] and I will be found at our desks, beavering away on murdering people, and encouraging our detectives to solve the crimes in a really good way. Of course, she’s much more famous than me, but if she discards a plot that is rather bizarre, then you can guarantee that it probably will end up turning up in one of my books and vice versa. It’s a good combination.
And are you still doing the Eclectic Light show as well?
Yes, indeed. I mean, COVID, like with a lot of radio shows, did for us for a little while. I’d concentrated on faceto-face interviews with people from theatre and music and writing, all that sort of thing. And of course, you know, with lockdown, it started becoming impossible. And then of course, we started relying on the internet. We try and put out a show sort of every month or so, which are very, very well received. But we sort of wait quietly for a candidate to come along that we want to feature on the show. They can still be heard on Mixcloud.
Yes, I know, having listened to your wonderful Syd Barrett special and your reports from the Cambridge Folk Festival. It’s been wonderful talking to you Mandy, I wish you all the best for the future.
Thanks very much Dave, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed it, take care.
