f26 Hanging Out With Old Nic
Nic Jones may be playing four festivals this summer but it’s definitely not a comeback. Oh no. Colin Irwin goes to visit Nic, his son Joe who’ll be accompanying him on the gigs, and Julia Jones who kept it all together down the years. Photos by Judith Burrows.
“I
’m not making a comeback,” says Nic Jones. “He’s not making a comeback,” says Joe Jones. “I want to make one thing perfectly clear, Nic
is definitely not making a comeback!” says Julia Jones. So what I’m getting here is this isn’t a comeback…
The Nic Jones story is a fabled one in folk circles but as his stock continues to rise among the flood of emergent young artists continually discovering his music despite or – as Nic himself self-deprecatingly sug- gests – because of his long absence from active combat, it’s worth repeating.
He wanted to be Hank Marvin. He wanted to be in The Shadows but knew he never would because he couldn’t master the Shadows dance… an affliction that apparently continues to haunt him to such a degree that it leads, deep into the night, to an hilarious, politically incorrect dia- tribe against morris dancers.
Events took a hand as events do and an old schoolfriend, Nigel Paterson, invit- ed him to join the folk group he was in – The Halliard. And when they split, Nic took his first tentative steps into what swiftly blossomed into a soundly celebrated solo career, during which he ripped apart all the manuals. While he threw himself into traditional song and, like every other folk singer of the day worth their salt, plun- dered the Cecil Sharp House library mak- ing illegal tape recordings of some of the riches secreted there, the frustrated rock star never quite deserted him.
He developed an hypnotically percus- sive style of guitar accompaniment that sat beautifully with his engagingly relaxed vocal approach, an ear for a killer tune and a colourful tale (which he felt no com- punction about re-writing however he saw fit) and, seldom practising, he made it up as he went along. Lyrical changes and instrumental diversions were a rudimental part of the approach, even if more often than not they occurred simply because he couldn’t quite remember the way he’d learned a song in the first place or how he’d played it the night before, and his whole approach to performance was whimsically on the hoof. Inspired by Ian Dury’s Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick, he even took to slapping the back of his gui- tar as an additional rhythm device.
Always wonderfully irreverent and entertainingly caustic, he maintained a healthy cynicism towards any intellectuali- sation of folk song and mischievously con-
fronted its core values, once playing the big band standard Chattanooga Choo Choo at one of the folk revival’s hardcore epicentres, Nottingham Traditional Music Club, which purportedly even winced at the sight of an acoustic guitar. Sometimes wilfully perverse, he once ‘invented’ an ancient traditional singer called Arthur Parrott he claimed to have collected vari- ous songs from, inspiring a wild goose chase of enthusiasts intent on seeking out the mysterious Mr Parrott.
This was the 1970s, an era when the folk song movement still held reasonable sway before its fall from grace and fashion in the wider music spectrum. With his very English style, Nic was one of the jewels in its crown. There was even a brief and not wildly successful experiment at forming a folk ‘supergroup’ – Bandoggs – with Pete and Chris Coe and Tony Rose, and a Silly Sisters album and tour with June Tabor and Maddy Prior; but his artistic approach was too free-spirited to ever be contained within the disciplines of a group. Four increasingly impressive and influential LPs – Ballads and Songs (1970), Nic Jones (1971), The Noah’s Ark Trap (1977) and From The Devil To A Stranger (1978) – are testament to that.
His fifth, though, Penguin Eggs (1980) is the one that has elevated him to such iconic status. Partly this is due to the fact that – for messy business reasons still a source of immense frustration and pain to the family – the others are no longer freely available; partly (mostly, if you listen to Nic whose highest praise for it is “not too bad”) is because it was the last one he made; and partly (mostly, if you’re every- one else), it’s because it’s so sodding bril- liant. Its enduring freshness and timeless beauty is comprehensively and repeatedly proven by the way it constantly connects, not just with new tribes of folk fans, but way, way beyond the folk world into other unlikely strata of the music industry.
Habitually name-checked in those periodic ‘best album of all time’ polls, it has inspired cover versions by everyone from Bob Dylan (Canadee-i-o) to Mari- anne Faithfull (Flandyke Shore) and when you hear a guitarist of the calibre of Mar- tin Simpson eulogising about his “diesel driven” accompaniment to Humpback Whale, you know you get a measure of his importance. “What he did was completely mad,” says Simpson. “On the one hand his guitar playing in the service of the song was fantastic and on top of that he was a beautiful singer.”
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