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ut, as Telfer rightly advises me, to just say that Oysterband grew out of a PTA ceilidh circuit in Kent would be “a travesty” and would belie some pretty heavyweight context from which they sprang. When they met, they were not happening upon folk music as innocents. “We had plenty of theory and opinion, as young men do,” recalls Ian. “What was great was ‘living’ the music, knowing it had a real social function.”


John adds: “They were tough times – the ’80s. Maybe people are beginning to feel it again now. It was great to play ceilidhs and all that but three or four miles down the road, Kent miners were out on strike, never to go back. Billy [Bragg] and Red Wedge were down there every weekend. We went over. The trad songs that had some radical element to them still seemed pertinent but you had to start writing about what you could see around you.”


Their convergence in Kent was a result – directly or indirectly – of social change, social change that has shaped them as indi- viduals and stoked the fire in their bellies. Our three main protagonists went to uni- versity in the late ’60s, “that era of would- be cultural radicalism and rising social mobility.” All were the first in their families that “could even have dreamed of going to college, let alone done it, and it was a life- changing experience,” rails Telfer, “We mustn’t ever let the right-wing bullshit us that ‘we don’t need shop assistants with BAs in media studies.’ Access to further education is still a crucial battle-line.”


This was a formative period in terms of their musical outlook. Telfer’s involve- ment with traditional music was at a grass roots level. Living in Aberdeen until he was 24, he was involved in “what you might call cultural politics.” He vaguely knew activist, singer, collector and broad- caster Arthur Argo and went along to con- certs he had arranged with the likes of Jeannie Robertson. “A gang of us organ- ised a conference at the Uni along the lines of ‘Whither Scottish culture?’ and invited every poet, film-maker, gallery owner etc we could think of. It actually had an impact, because lots of people got to talk to each other who didn’t usually have the chance to. One of the stars was Hamish Henderson, who became a big influence on us.”


He recalls hanging out at the Catholic Chaplaincy in George Square in Edinburgh, “then a hotbed of radical thinking,” just a couple of doors along from Hamish’s office at the School of Scottish Studies.


“He was an enthusiast and his mission was to enthuse other people. He got into the habit of ringing up and saying ‘You’ve got to hear this!’ and then holding the phone for 20 minutes up to a loudspeaker while he played some gem from his archives of source singers, or some record he’d just been sent. I’m proud to say I sat with others at his feet (manning the whisky bottle) while he interviewed the great Gaelic poet Sorley MacLean in a hotel bed- room, at the time when MacLean was just re-emerging after many years of silence.”


He describes such encounters as a “fringe benefit of living in a small country: it’s not hard to meet people if you really want to. Difficult to imagine an equivalent occasion in England – casually sitting in while Melvyn Bragg interviews Seamus Heaney? I don’t think so.”


Moving to Canterbury for further post-


grad study, he joined Alan – who had dropped out of Kent University to “become a medieval minstrel and pizza chef” – in Fiddler’s Dram. Alan had also been absorbed in all things musical, from a gram- mar school age, with guitar-based obses- sions ignited by jazzers and folkies alike: from Barney Kessel, Diz Disley and Django Reinhardt to Davey Graham, Bert Jansch and Martin Carthy. He dabbled in a number of school and university bands, going on later to play and record with Tundra with Doug and Sue Hudson and, even later, doing a brief stint with the Albion Band.


During this era in the late ’70s, Telfer recalls working with other “good ol’ left- ies like Leon Rosselson and (especially) Sandra Kerr,” who further inspired them. And it was around this time that Alan, Chris Taylor and Ian were taken under the wing of post-Critics’ Group era Ewan Mac- Coll and Peggy Seeger.


“They gave us the run of their copious library and involved us in the making of a couple of albums in their home studio – some of our very earliest recording experi- ences, which encouraged us to start our own small set-up and make our pre-Cook- ing Vinyl albums.”


He recalls with some twinkly-eyed enthusiasm, the day that he and Alan sat somewhat awestruck in Ewan and Peggy’s sitting room while Alan Lomax talked “vir- tually without pausing for breath” for about five hours between flights home to the USA from Sudan, where he’d been advising the government. “He talked mainly about cantometrics, a pretty heavy- duty topic, but thrilling when described with passion.”


S


“I still think Ewan was a great singer – virile, no messing. Sitting six feet away while he recorded Tam Lin in a single epic take was a sort of masterclass in economy and purpose. The day he died Oysters were flying home from New York, and I thought, ‘Oh, that’ll be all over the papers when we get back.’ But almost eerily it wasn’t. It was as if that era had passed away already while no-one was looking; or at least its politics had.”


omeone who shared those radical political roots was John Jones, whom the pair met at Whitstable Folk Club. JJ, born in Aberystwyth and raised in Yorkshire, came from a politically conscious working class family. His grandfather, Edward Longley (‘Red Ted’), was the greatest influence on his life as a youngster, engendering in him, according to the Oyster web-biog, a taste for “radical politics, a sense of injustice, a love of nature, a love of lurchers, hatred of the Tory way of mind, the sense of history, and a short temper.” He then found himself at the University of Exeter, “a revelation, it was so middle-class”, where he studied poli- tics, anthropology and sociology “at a time when these subjects were in a ferment.” As many did, he fell in love with traditional music, and was lured into the world of the melodeon and the hanky. He fell in with the Exeter Folk Song Club crowd, “the likes of Barry Lister, Tony Rose, Phil Beer,” and also Great Western Morris before later moving to Canterbury as a teacher, and meeting his future bandmates.


And thus we come back to the band’s


beginning. It’s not long after that I would have first caught up with The Oyster Ceilidh Band myself. With the help of JJ’s calcula- tions, I realise that I probably first danced to


them at the age of 7, maybe 8, in Sidford Village Hall. Through the rosy-tinted haze of childhood, I remember their yen for English song; lapping up The Lakes Of Cool Flynn from 1980 album Jack’s Alive, one of several home-grown early releases putting down tune-sets and songs for posterity. I also recall delighting in Kearey’s singing of Mike Waterson’s Mole In A Hole at one of the Cowfolk ceilidhs my dad organised in a village hall somewhere in Sussex. That was the sort of gig they did back then.


And then, in the mid-’80s, to some far distant backroom folk club cries of “Judas”, they started wearing leather jack- ets, sounding a bit angry and frightening the horses. In 1986, the band joined new roots label Cooking Vinyl (a relationship that would last for their next nine albums until the establishment of their own Run- ning Man label). Step Outside was the first release on the emerging label and marked a significant shift of direction for the band with Russell Lax joining them on drums. These were exciting times for roots music, as musical worlds converged. It was a scene that even mainstream music journal- ists acknowledged, with Step Outside walking the line between traditional roots and visceral rock sensibilities, selected as one of Q’s albums of the year.


“This was a time when Bragg and oth- ers were heading folk-wards from a punk background,” recalls Telfer, “and we were from a folk background but being noisy and dynamic and so forth. We found our- selves touring with Billy in America and The Pogues in Germany and these all extend your experience of playing to other societies, other communities, other venues, bigger venues.”


And so off the band went, for a decade or more, venturing into the sticky- floored underground world of black- walled rock venues around the UK and Europe and beyond. Not to mention the big-boy festivals in North America, holding their own on the stages around the world with sheer grit, velocity and energy.


John recalls the gear shift: “We were hitting the stage with world music acts like Thomas Mapfumo and Mory Kante, and Billy Bragg and Michelle Shocked from the post-punk scene. You had to make an impact! Somewhere along the line, we said to each other we must make our ver- sion of English music, folk music, whatever it is, as exciting as possible. And it has to stand up alongside what we’re listening to, what’s just been on before us or after us. That has been one of the biggest moti- vations in all of this, finding an exciting way of playing this music. That’s the key. Making it raw, making it move.”


Alan fizzes with the early excitement of their playing style at the time: “When we first went to Canada – to Edmonton - we played everything at four or five times the speed of anything that anyone was playing that weekend. There was this mas- sive reaction to that. I’ve got a recording of the announcers saying “Jeez, these guys are really punky!” It was normal, where we were coming from, to take it some- where else. To see the effect of it, that’s the payback.”


They would concede that there some points at which, during this “polkas and leather jackets era,” they seemed some- what out of their comfort zone. As a rule, this is a place they relish, living on the edge musically and they certainly attract- ed a new, cult following.


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