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hings like emigration, topic of his most famous and most suc- cessful song Slip Jigs & Reels, inspired by a photo he saw of an emigrant leaving Ireland for


the New World. The song has since taken on a life of its own. “The song is better known than I am,” he laughs. “I had no idea it would take off, but people picked up on it straight away. They knew it in Australia before I went there. There was this bloke in Australia who said ‘You did- n’t write that, I was playing it in the ‘60s, it’s a traditional song.’ I just said ‘You don’t know it, but you’ve just paid me the biggest compliment I’ve ever had. But I actually wrote it in the ‘80s.’”


“I originally tried to write it about


Maggie Boyle’s dad coming over to England to work on the buildings, but I was trying to find a way of doing it without stating the obvious or making it cod Irish. I wrote the first verse and played it to John Renbourn when we were working together on Ship Of Fools. About six months later he said ‘Did you ever finish that cowboy song?’ I’ve always liked westerns and his little quip set the ball rolling again and I finished it.”


There have subsequently been around a hundred cover versions (“not a week goes by without someone sending me a CD with a new version of it”) and there was excited talk at one point of Kenny Rogers covering it, until he apparently decided it was too long but didn’t want to risk spoiling the integrity of the song by cutting it (“that would have been nice – he was selling albums by the boatload then. Why didn’t he get in touch? I’d have found a way of cutting it down!”)


The first recorded cover of Slip Jigs &


Reels was by Steve’s old friend Peter Bel- lamy. “I remember him saying to me ‘I’ve done your little song and what’s more I’ve improved on it.’ He put himself into it, which is the whole point of writing these kinds of songs. It’s not a Chopin Prelude or anything where you have to play every- thing note for note.”


Bellamy was actually the catalyst for


Steve’s move from Bristol. “He came to stay and said ‘You must come to Yorkshire’ so I came up and drove down to Hebden Bridge and thought ‘This is fantastic – I want to live here.’” And he did!


Shortly before Bellamy’s suicide, the two of them were in advanced discussions about writing a ballad opera together – a sort of follow-up to The Transports – about a redcoat soldier who left the British to fight for the Americans during the War of Independence. “I had the beginnings of a song called The Turncoat and I played this idea to him and he listened to it and said ‘let’s do a ballad opera!’ He was really buzzing about it. He rang me and said ‘I warn you, I write very fast, you will have to keep up with me.’ We were both up for it. Then his life started unravelling and it never happened.”


Steve subsequently finished the song,


The Turncoat, a 12-minute epic, included on the album Solorubato, but only ever performed it live twice. “I gave it up after the second time because there was a woman in the front row who fell asleep while I was playing it. I got the message…”


Another of Tilston’s songs – Pretty


Penny, a diatribe about bankers which pre- dated the economic collapse and was included on the Ziggurat album – has also became a bit of an anthem, sung on the steps of St Pauls Cathedral at the recent


anti-capitalism protests. This, after a colour- ful character called Alderney Fred and friends had sung it non-stop outside Bar- clays Bank in Crouch End. The manageress eventually came out to plead with them to stop and when they refused, she said “Well, can you at least sing a different song?”


We talk of Steve’s old friend, the late Bert Jansch. “When he did the album Jack Orion, with that version of Blackwaterside, it was groundbreaking. Davey Graham had done some wonderful stuff with Shirley Collins, but Bert took it in a different direc- tion. Him and Davey were big influences… and Robin Williamson as well.”


You know you must now be a godfa- ther of nu-folk or something, Steve?


“I don’t really know what nu-folk is. I think Karl Dallas coined one of the best phrases – folk baroque. A lot of people pooh-poohed it, but it’s a very astute observation. That’s really where I see myself. Looking back at that period in the late ‘60s and ‘70s, the guitar playing and picking was a high standard; I think it was a musical golden age.”


“There are wonderful guitar players around now but mostly there are a lot who just strum, buskers really, and I don’t see that kind of compulsion to move things on. It was so exciting when I first went to London, we were all trying to do something new. I was living in Lough - borough when John Martyn was booked at a local club. He was incredibly friendly and what impressed me most was that he was wearing a pair of elephant cords. We ended up going for a Chinese together and he pulled out a £20 note and said ‘Oh,


L


didn’t know I had that.’ At the time I was training as a graphic artist getting £15 a week and there was this bloke wearing elephant cords with a £20 note he’d for- gotten he had. That’s when I decided to turn professional…”


ife has (mostly) been pretty good ever since and he’s learned plenty along the way, including the fact that he’s hopeless at try- ing to write commercial music (during a period contracted to a song- writing publisher). That he wasn’t cut out to play electric guitar during a brief spell fronting the Little Feat-flavoured Loose Shoes. And that you can overcome writ- ers block by not worrying about it (“I just thought what’s the point? Does the world really need another Steve Tilston song?”) before unblocking it with his last album Ziggurat.


In those five years of non-songwriting he recorded a traditional album, Of Many Hands; he received a letter penned 25 years earlier by John Lennon, who’d been inspired to write a letter of support after reading a Tilston interview in ZigZag mag- azine; and he finished his very unusual his- torical novel, All For Poor Jack, which has sold well enough to get a reprint.


“I don’t feel jaded at all and I still love music. The other day I was listening to Radio 3 in the car and Rachmaninov’s Sec- ond Piano Concerto came on and it was so beautiful I had to stop the car and listen to it. That’s why I’m still so enthusiastic about music, moments like that. There’s no other feeling like it…”


www.stevetilston.com F


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