47 f


The truth is, of course, that the majori- ty of artists of the time didn’t do any of those things. Making records was far less common than today when everybody in the world – or at least the USA – gets to put out at least one CD of their own songs, and most had to get it together in an unremarkable urban bedsit or basement.


Of course it’s reasonable that tales are constantly retold and uncovered about the high profile, well-selling and influen- tial bands of the day like Fairport Conven- tion, the Incredible String Band and Steel- eye Span. But strange cult status has grown up around certain artists like Vashti Bunyan and Nick Drake who, partly through their back stories, later achieved much greater fame than they did at the time they made their albums. Albums which, I could argue, only sound good out of context, compared with later things against which they sound ‘other’. At the time, stacked up against more interesting music of the day, they stiffed.


The truth, as Joe Boyd is the first to admit, is that their sales, along with other cult figures from the era like Dr Strangely Strange, were “Very small. Very very small. Vashti’s was barely three figures. Which is part of the story, of course. When the cult interest began, there were no copies in cir- culation! So few had been sold that copies of the original vinyl barely existed. So when one came up for auction sometime in the mid-late ‘90s, it sold for £750. Record Collector noticed, asked ‘Who the fuck is Vashti Bunyan?’ and wrote a piece which led to the deal for the album’s reissue and subsequent success. Nick wasn’t a lot bet- ter, but probably the low four figures. Dr Strangely Strange much the same, I think. The latter, of course, were the only one of the three artists who did any performing at all, but that was mostly in Ireland.”


And here you have the beginning of how the mythology overtakes the music and artists’ actual achievements. I vaguely remember seeing Nick Drake in London’s Les Cousins, the haven for aspiring young singer/ songwriter/ guitarists of the day. The reason my memory is vague is that he simply wasn’t that noticeable, his music was definitely not outstanding among that of many other similar people around, and his performance skills were frightful. Quite why he attracted a record deal is a mystery. On a recent TV feature about Drake, Joe – a man who I greatly respect and with whom I’d rarely argue – came out with some statement about how Drake was so original and unlike anybody else at the time. “No he fucking wasn’t, Joe” – I bawled at the screen – “if you thought that, you didn’t get out enough!”


Chris Thompson J


oe Boyd was of course a visionary record producer, one of the greats, but at that time some of his ideas were possibly out of step with what the audience – and critics – expect- ed. By the mid-’70s, in the wake of the suc- cess of American names like James Taylor and English acoustic songwriters like Al Stewart and Cat Stevens crossing over to the mainstream, there was a new audience for acoustic songwriters with denser pro- duction, rock rhythm sections, orchestras, keyboards, kitchen sinks and the like. At the time of Drake’s first release though, the main UK audiences were from folk clubs and colleges and still finding such things intrusive. Al Stewart had been inspired by the orchestrations on Judy Collins’ In My Life album to go that route on his debut Bedsitter Images, for exam- ple, and it really wasn’t well received.


But whereas Nick Drake sank without much trace at the time, in spite of the ben- efits of mainstream distribution and pro- motion, our little Village Thing label work- ing out of Bristol with much smaller resources could regularly sell several thou- sand copies of our releases by – I’ll argue better – singer/ songwriter/ guitarists like Steve Tilston, Dave Evans or Wizz Jones. Reviewers at the time praised the fact that their records weren’t overburdened with session musicians extraneous to how the artists generally performed live, because there was clearly a growing trend to do otherwise. And today, of course, with the huge decline in instrumental standards amongst landfill singer/ songwriters, those records sound astonishing by comparison.


Evans, Tilston and our other Jones boy, Al, may have been more popular perform- ers and record-makers at the time, but they weren’t living in London or a country commune, recording for a major, pro- duced by a ‘name’ or hanging out with members of one of the golden circles. Worse for legend, they didn’t disappear over the horizon in a gypsy caravan, come equipped with an iconic set of Keith Mor- ris photos or terminate their own lives (though Al Jones did his best for commer- cial suicide by moving to Padstow and becoming a coastguard). On a sliding scale of mythology-creation points, they barely register. So far they’ve not turned into the Garfield Akers of their generation by being included in a taste-making compila- tion. Nor have they been fêted in any new- genre defining features like Richard Mor- ton Jack’s ground-breaking April 2005 Strange Folk piece in Record Collector which established the likes of Forest, Trad- er Horne, Trees, Spirogyra, Vashti Bunyan, Comus, the Sallyangie and Synanthesia as


Michael-Claire


Strange Folk royalty and sellers of old vinyl at unfeasible prices. At the time of original release, though, few people were that bothered about most of those bands. Often they only had a reputation at all because they’d been picked up by a major label A&R man and got their LPs adver- tised in Melody Maker and Sounds. That’s history for you.


One of the Village Thing stable whose original vinyl has at least got into the silly money stakes is New Zealand songwriter/ guitarist Chris Thompson, but that’s because his eponymous album, like Vashti Bunyan’s, only sold just over a hundred copies. This wasn’t through any musical faults of his own, though (as imminent CD re-release by Sunbeam will prove), but because faltering distributors Transatlantic had to eventually find a creative way of disposing of massive over-pressings of Pen- tangle’s post-Basket Of Light albums. Thus their vans curiously acquired a habit of being stolen and the contents – which nat- urally were bound to include a certain amount of other Transatlantic-distributed stock as well, to be convincing to the insur- ance company – were lost or destroyed (by fire, or dumping into a canal…). Many low-selling albums end up among the stock of cheap deletions out there depress- ing the market, but not Chris Thompson’s or his label-mates Lackey & Sweeney.


History has been even less kind to the artists who didn’t manage to make it past the front door of a record label. You could possibly explain away the failure of the West Country’s popular Mudge & Clutter- buck by their hippy shambolicism (or a crap name). But why, for example, people like Anglo-American duo Michael-Claire (Mike Milner & Claire Hart) didn’t make the breakthrough is much harder to imag- ine. With great voices, songs, guitar play- ing and fabulous good looks, they played all the right venues of the day like Les Cousins and the London and Bristol Troubadours, appeared on the BBC’s radio folk show, even hung out with the gang in London’s popular post-gig café La Fiesta that included the likes of Sandy Denny and Trevor Lucas, but they never got a record out. Finally, in 2008, Italy’s Night Wings released their extraordinarily good 1971 demos – but only on vinyl, not CD, so they’re still nearly lost to posterity.


If received history has got the relative popularity and importance of certain songwriters and folk rock explorers out of kilter, it has nothing on the cruel hand dealt to most of the great younger expo- nents of traditional song and music of the day. For a while, most of the popular artists around the folk club circuit of the


Pete & Chris Coe


Photo: Dave Mason


Photo: Dave Peabody


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