31 f
on my own. People will say my guitar style is like him and yes that’s because I like it, not because I want to be him. It’s easier for me being on stage with him because then it is quite clear we are two separate people and I’m playing guitar as a vehicle for him, not because I want to be him. Yes, I would like to be a musician – who wouldn’t? – but I don’t think I could ever get over that mental block in myself. I’m OK playing on stage with my mates, dressing up, doing it for a laugh and hiding behind a persona but on my own it’s much more personal and I’d be very self-conscious.”
M
“With these gigs it’s not me people are coming to see. I’m just a vehicle for people to see dad so I’m doing it for both dad and mum. She’s the unsung hero behind the whole family. She’s had to do so much. None of the CDs released after- wards would have happened if she hadn’t put the effort in. She does all the donkey work. She’s amazing.”
eanwhile, back at their house in Devon, Nic and Julia Jones are like a double act, amiably contradicting one another as they attempt to
reconstruct the chain of events that fuelled Nic’s accidental career in the first place.
Nic: “I thought people writing songs like Al Stewart and Roy Harper were much better than people on the traditional side.” Julia: “No you didn’t, you thought they were boring.” Nic: “Yes but I thought writing your own songs was a good thing.” Julia: “You said they were navel-gazers.”
“The thing was I didn’t like working in
offices,” says Nic. “I had a few office jobs and didn’t like it so the idea of making a bit of money from singing appealed. I did- n’t want to join a folk group, I wanted to be a rock star. Geoff Harris, the guitarist, left The Halliard because they wanted to turn professional and he didn’t because he had a good job and so they asked me to join because I could play guitar. So I was dragged into folk music.”
Nic and Julia ultimately took over run- ning Chelmsford Folk Club, which was quite a hotbed of music at the time. Paul Simon once asked The Halliard’s Dave Moran to be his manager, but Moran declined on the grounds that it would be too time-consuming, even damning the nascent singer-songwriter with faint praise when he phoned him from a push-button call box one time to play him a new song he’d written – Homeward Bound.
Most of the top acts of the day gravitat- ed to the club at some point and Nic particu- larly remembers a gig there by The Strawbs, who were breaking big at the time. “Their fee was £40 but they brought in such a big crowd I decided to give them £140 and put the money in my pocket to give them and one of the chaps – not Dave Cousins, one of the others – came over and said I should increase their money. So I gave them £80 instead and said ‘if you’d kept your mouth shut you could have had £140!”
Then The Halliard split. “I felt like Yoko Ono,” laughs Julia. “They broke up just after Nic and I were married. Nigel went off to teacher training college and Dave went off to do social work and nobody spoke to each other and we didn’t hear anything from either of them until after the accident. Dave called to say he was going to be in York one day so we hooked up again. I asked him then why The Hal- liard split up and he said it was because his wife wanted him to give it up.”
M
oran was undisputed singer and band leader in those days but as Nic grew in con- fidence and aptitude, he developed his own ideas
about the way things should be done and there were, ahem, a few musical differ- ences. When the split came, however, he was scarcely ready for a solo career.
“I went off to London to work each day and Nic stayed at home reading Don Quixote,” says Julia. “I’d come home and say ‘Shouldn’t you be getting a job, Nic?’ and he’d make one or two half-hearted attempts and then he got offered a couple of solo gigs.”
Nic grimaces at the memory. “I think Dave Burland recommended me but after the first couple I wasn’t going to do any more. I was useless. I couldn’t do it. Moran used to do all the talking in The Halliard and he was funny. In those days everyone was funny. Mike Harding, Alex Campbell, Hamish Imlach, Johnny Silvo, Derek Brim- stone, all jokers, but I couldn’t do it. I was going to give up then but Burland said ‘no keep at it’ and a few more bookings start- ed to come in.”
Outside of a few specialist venues, folk clubs rarely differentiated between genres and comedy acts co-existed happily on the folk scene with introverted singer songwriters, serious instrumentalists, hearty singalong chorus groups (like The Halliard) and traditional revivalists.
Gradually the
axis changed as tra- ditional song and music took hold and the comedy brigade were
marginalised. Short of natural stage craft at the time, Nic rode the wave at the serious end of the folk move- ment… and regrets the shift. “Folk clubs were great social places but then it all got very precious and we bored everyone to death,” he says cheerfully. “It came from people like Ewan MacColl that ‘we must take this very seriously…’ and it was boring.”
Indeed, when
Nic later got togeth- er with Pete and Chris Coe and Tony Rose to form a new group and asked for suggestions of names, the journal- ist Karl Dallas sug- gested that “any group with Nic Jones in it should be called Total Fucking Bore- dom!” Nic respond- ed with unflattering references to “Karl Phallus.”
Nic acknowl-
edges there was lit- tle originality about his early work. “When I started I just tried to sound
like Martin Carthy until I realised I was just being fake. I thought ‘I’m an Essex man and I should sing in my own voice’. I used to try to copy people on guitar too. Hank Marvin. Bert Jansch, Wes Montgomery, Charlie Byrd, Chet Atkins. But in the end I knew I had to develop my own style.
“I always liked jazz guitarists because they knew how to improvise. Django Rein- hardt, he could speak with his guitar. He’d create shapes. It wasn’t just millions of notes strung together, it was like walking with his fingers and he knew that fret- board amazingly well. It was only after the accident I realised what an inept guitarist I was. I’d never play straight tunings, it was always open tunings, which was a bit of a fake way of playing. First time I played in a straight tuning was when Willie Russell asked me to play Teddy Bear’s Picnic for a documentary. I like improvisation, to be able to play freely whatever you like at any given time. If you’re depressed you play depressing music, if you’re happy play happy music. I like that idea, although I’m not good at it.”
He had no compunction about dab- bling with the tradition. He quotes Annan Water, which was virtually an original song by the time he’d finished playing around with it. That’s the folk process, he says. No, says Julia, it’s down to making up words on the spot because he’d forgotten them. Even his most classic track Canadee- i-o fluctuated quite a lot, going through
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