f38 Reckoning Up


Steve Tilston recently celebrated the 40th anniversary of his debut album: still firing on all cylinders, but with less answers. Colin Irwin probes cautiously…


S


teve Tilston cuts a mellow fig- ure, contemplating the vagaries of four decades as one of Britain’s most accomplished gui- tarists and singer-songwriters at his house overlooking the gorgeous town of Hebden Bridge in the Calder Valley in West Yorkshire.


“I haven’t got any answers about this game… I just keep doing it. It’s not a bleed- ing meritocracy, you just do the best you can. I adore the fact that I’ve been able to be a professional musician for 41 years. People say ‘doesn’t it piss you off that you’re underrated and have never been really successful?’ but I’ve been around 40 years and I think that’s pretty successful. I still feel on top of my game. There are still things I want to write about…”


The town has become something of a melting pot for local musicians of various vintages and styles. Music – not to mention comedy and Nepalese curries and Tibetan dumplings – can be found most nights of the week in the Trades Club (Dick Gaughan recorded a live album there a few years ago) and where Steve Tilston is on the com- mittee of the November Folk Roots festival plotting to play a set with one of the town’s newer residents, Becky Unthank.


Cambridge Folk Festival 1972


“This part of Britain has more foot- paths than anywhere else, they criss-cross the whole place,” he tells you, giving a sharp insight into the powerful natural forces that play a keen role in his newest album, The Reckoning. He often goes walking across the ‘tops’ at the back of the houses, drawing on the fabulous sur- roundings to inspire pensive tracks like Pennine Spring and This Is The Dawn. The mood of The Reckoning is also clearly set by an evocative sleeve photo showing Steve in Heathcliffe pose wearing his favourite “Australian sheep-shagger’s coat” amid a dramatic Pennines landscape under a Biblical sky.


The album has already brought him the sort of acclaim and attention he hasn’t enjoyed for years, even earning a nomina- tion for the title track as best original song in this year’s BBC Folk Awards and an appearance on Later With Jools Holland playing Oil & Water. The poor old singer- songwriter is a much maligned beast, but Tilston feels the tide has turned and the noble art is now regarded in much more sympathetic terms.


“The fact that I’m writing songs that are more informed by traditional music anyway is more acceptable to the folk scene. That’s something that’s happened naturally because I’ve become engaged with it. Traditional music is my favourite genre of music because it is all-encompass- ing. And I’m not talking just about these islands. I love Spanish music – flamenco…”


“The folk scene in the late ‘70s and ‘80s was a wasteland for a singer-songwriter. Nobody wanted to know unless you were a staunch traditionalist or a comedian. I can understand why now but at the time I was trying to earn a living and I didn’t feel particularly welcome. But of course some- one wrote those traditional songs in the first place. No matter how many hands have changed and burnished them, they weren’t written by committee.”


“Things have eased quite a lot now. It was all quite polarised at one time but I think songwriters are gradually being held in higher regard now with a younger gen- eration taking an interest. I get a lot of young people at my gigs… though it’s mostly fans of [daughter] Martha who come along to check the old feller out! The new generation seems to hold song- writers in higher regard.”


One of the album’s key songs informed by the tradition is Nottamun Town Return, which takes the old tradi- tional classic and – inspired by his step- daughter’s experience of being ‘kettled’


during the London protests about student fees – reinvents it as a searing modern protest parable.


“Nottamun Town was always one of my favourite song by Davey Graham and Shirley Collins, and Bob Dylan obviously used it for Masters Of War and it recently struck me that Woody Guthrie used it for Pastures Of Plenty. It’s quite an unusual song. It stands on its own because it has that seemingly nonsense side but it’s also quite seditious. I was just messing around with it, basically just banjo picking on a guitar, and I was learning the original ver- sion when my stepdaughter went down to London for the protest and it just seemed a natural thing to do.”


Mostly, though, The Reckoning is a beautifully mellow album of thoughtful reflection with tracks like Doubting Thomas debating the great imponderables of life. “I make no bones about it, I have less answers than I did in my 20s. And as far as religion is concerned the jury’s still out. Sometimes I feel very spiritual and sometimes very athe- istic. File me under agnostic.”


Songwriters probably got a bad name in Britain due to the improbable angst- ridden overload of young artists deter- mined to shower the finer details of their emotional adequacy over the rest of us, but it doesn’t have to be that way, as The Reckoning comprehensively shows.


Another of his big songs on the album,


Memory Lane, says plenty about his chang- ing attitudes. “I always thought that Je Ne Regrette Rien was a fantastic idea but a bit spurious because life is more complicated than that. There are things I’d do different- ly. They don’t keep me awake at night but if you’re writing a song about reminiscing, certain ways get thrown up. Certain ways I treated people when I younger and was more cavalier. With age we mellow.”


“I was playing in Cornwall and a friend burst into the room and told me an old girlfriend had days to live and in the telling he mentioned that he himself had liver cancer and only had six months to live. This haunted me a bit. It’s an age thing. I’m in my early 60s now and you do take stock. The songwriting process has slowed down. When I was younger it was like a nervous complaint, it was like break- ing out in acne. Now I write from a differ- ent vantage point. When you’re younger you’re desperately trying to find your own voice and write everything in the first per- son about your girl buggering off, which is a universal thing. It’s inevitable. But as you get older you realise there are other things to write about.”


Photo: Joe Gedrych


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