23 f A Fine Undertaking


From ceilidh bandits to multi-awarded elder statesmen, it’s been a long road for Oysterband. The first of our trio of fRoots 33rd anniversary reappraisals of English folk icons is by Sarah Coxson. Photos by Judith Burrows.


T


here are some bands with whom you feel so familiar, that are so intertwined with your own life history and musical furniture, that you risk over- looking some of the significant defining wood for the trees.


There will be newcomers to Oyster- band, probably as a result of the recent floor-sweeping award success and critical acclaim of their revisited June Tabor col- laboration on Ragged Kingdom, a mere 21 years after the ground-breaking Free- dom & Rain. And as the aftershock rever- berates, it requires a step outside (ahem!) to clear away my own thicket of presumptions.


Founder members John Jones, Ian


Telfer and Alan Prosser converged on fRoots Dungeons recently to remind me of this. Over coffee and cake, we collectively mused, reflected and hypothesised about the course of events over the past 36 years. Has there really never been a gameplan? Hah, no, they splutter, “Life confounds your expectations all the time!”


The group dynamic is reassuringly as it ever was. Singer/frontman Jones is garru- lous and free-ranging in his opining; gui- tarist Prosser wonderfully and tangentially Zen in his analogies, occasionally twid- dling happily on the editor’s old Thornbo- ry guitar; and wry Aberdonian fiddler Telfer, coherent, erudite and pithy. They fill me in on the ‘unfilled in’ bits and try to make sense of a career as the angry men of British folk.


For the novice, the bare-bones story is that they’ve all been at it in some form since 1976. There’s an early parallel con- nection, best not dwelled upon, with a novelty no 3 chart hit with ‘artfolk’ band Fiddlers Dram. Amongst early incarnations of the band – all with connections to Uni- versity of Kent or to local folk clubs – members included singer Cathy LeSurf, a certain Chris Wood, early music man Will Ward, multi-instrumentalist Chris Taylor and bassist Ian Kearey.


In the intervening years, they have clung onto the manes of twisting fortune, still standing as a consistent (tour de) force in British roots music. The current line-up, extant since 2008, is well bedded-in, with Chopper on bass and cello and Dil Davies on drums. As Telfer reflects, “Sometimes the world changes around you, the market changes, the fashion changes… and doors open. You just carry on doing what you think you know how to do!”


They’ve happily weathered these fick- le shifts of focus; from mainstream obscu- rity to a North American chart hit cover of their When I’m Up, I Can’t Get Down by Canadian folk rockers Great Big Sea in 1997. Their coiled-spring energy and rest- less pursuit for the next thing remain healthily intact to this day. As the cropped- haired Prosser puts it: “It kind of feels like there’s always a new direction to head in!”


Of course, in the 36-odd years since their inception, they haven’t stood still. The history books and the haircuts will attest to this. Remember Alan’s splendid Afro? It drew you, like a moth to a flame, with its hypnotic, metronomic headsway and entire days were lost. It had its own momentum, that hairstyle. It could have had its own spin-off series.


The band interviews in these pages down the years go some small way to doc- umenting their history. When Southern Rag interviewed them way back in 1983, they had relatively recently emerged from the PTA ceilidh circuit chrysalis in Kent into a fully-fledged English dance and song butterfly (see page 28).


“Our world has expanded rather a lot since and we might be a bit less certain of our certainties!” suspects Ian Telfer, on re- reading that feature.


Back then, as Canterbury-based collec- tive The Oyster Ceilidh Band, they had played exclusively for dancing. In fact, the first ever Whitstable Royal Native Oyster Company Ceilidh Band were formed for a ceilidh fund-raiser to bring the Watersons to play at the Sidney Cooper Centre in Can- terbury. These were times when they wore corduroy with function-follows-form ratio- nality… except for Kearey, who always looked too cool for (art)school. And they were masters, as fiddler Ian Telfer confirms (and my dad recently reminisced wistfully), of the bouncing ‘hop-step’ tune.


“We were bloody good at hop-step


tunes. We should have it as a coat of arms: ‘Hop-steps a speciality’. You know though, if Oysterband has always had an extra gear in reserve in its performances, it probably comes from that training of playing for dancing; playing the same music over and over again with invention and with some spirit. Always finding another gear to keep the dancers going. I don’t think that train- ing has ever abandoned us. It’s stood us in good stead ever since.”


John takes up the theme: “I think that that idea of getting people going and dancing has never left this band.”


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