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several different incarnations of changing moods and arrangements depending on where and when he played it.
“Chris Foster came to stay once and was practising all the time,” says Julia. “He asked if Nic ever practised and I said ‘yes…when he’s on a booking’. Bone idle! Burland was the same. The pair of them just used to wing it.”
“No, were just relaxed,” insists Nic, bursting into laughter.
Another case in point was Ivor Cutler’s I’m Going In A Field, which he heard on John Peel’s show and decided to sing it, despite only half remembering the words. He simply filled in the gaps with what he thought should be the words. Unfortu- nately he got completely the wrong end of the stick in terms of the song’s subject mat- ter. “He thought it was about sitting in a field when it was really about having rumpy pumpy with your girlfriend,” says Julia triumphantly.
Despite the Sidmouth reunion Nic
doesn’t have particularly fond memories of Bandoggs, a noble experiment that essentially faltered after just one not very successful album and tour, suggesting there was dissension in the ranks from an early point. “The problem is I don’t really like being in groups,” he says. “You have to have so much trust in other people and you have to allow for other things.”
He’s more enthusiastic, though, about backing June Tabor and Maddy Prior on both guitar and fiddle in Silly Sisters and remains fond of Prior in particular. His greatest admiration, though, is reserved for melodeon player Tony Hall, who subse- quently played a key role in his favourite bits on the Penguin Eggs album and turned up accompanying Damien Barber at the QE Hall tribute.
D
“He was fantastic. Never stopped mak- ing me laugh. His main living was drawing cartoons. Great character. I learned a lot on that tour, too, from Danny Thompson. Great bass player. He could play in whatev- er key he wants, it’s very free.”
espite his debilitated right side, he continues to persevere on the guitar. He won’t be playing it in public this summer but is happy enough to be able now at least to maintain a consistent rhythm. He also pens the odd ode and sings one of them for me, a song called Now, which reflects one of his favourite philosophies about the irrelevance of the past and pointlessness of fretting about the future. He then sings a more whimsical Supermar- ket Song about a disaster at a checkout desk, which shows he’s lost nothing of his way with words, or his sense of humour.
“It’s all a bit of fun isn’t it?” he says. “Personally I like listening to singers, female voices especially. I like what’s her name?”
“Kate Rusby?” suggests Julia. “Yes,
Kate Rusby, she’s a nice singer. One of my all-time favourite singers was Shirley Collins because she always sounded so nat- ural. I like the way Anaïs Mitchell sang Humpback Whale, too. Lovely singer, very expressive.”
So will the Cecil Sharp House gig on September 22 definitely be the last time we ever see Nic perform in public? “I very much doubt if there will be anything else after this…” says Joe Jones. “Definitely… he’s an old man now!” says Julia Jones. “I don’t know,” says Nic Jones. But it’s abso- lutely not a comeback. No sirree.
F
The Nic Of Time T
Nic Jones was the cover interview for our second issue, published in autumn 1979, the year before he made the iconic Penguin Eggs album. Here’s an extract…
he morning after one of Nic Jones’s club appearances in North Hampshire in summer 1979 he was placed in front of a tape recorder and interogat-
ed by our probing investigative team of lan Anderson and Maggie Holland. Despite Nic’s much publicised new year resolution of 1979 to give up being cyni- cal, The Wild Man Of Folk (as he had been aptly dubbed by Melody Maker’s impish Colin Irwin) was well on form. His diffidence to the awe in which his music is held by mere mortals is also notorious – “All I’ve got is four O-levels, what else can I do?”, he had remarked the previous night.
I remember reading somewhere that you started out by becoming interested in guitar playing through the pop groups of the day.
“Yeah, I used to have all the Shadows’ singles; I’d stick them on the record player, tune up to it and play Apache, Frightened City, Perfidia…”
Did you ever play in a schoolboy pop
group? “Yeah, there was a group called The
Talons. Jesus Christ, that was years ago! We played in one church youth club and we had a drummer who had a tom tom drum and one cymbal, about the size of a hubcap, a meccano stand, and then we had about one amplifier between three guitars and one pickup between three gui- tars, one solid guitar which was basically an acoustic guitar filled with concrete.”
Reading Folk Club, 1980
“I had a Selmer. I think it was one of those f-hole things, jazz-style guitar, real- ly. When we first got together the only chords I knew were the chords to Per- fidia, which were A-minor, G, F and E. I had been playing a guitar for two years before I even knew about chords. Listen- ing to the Shadows and things I’d learned solo notes, the tunes as notes, it had never occurred to me that there were actually chords. The existence of chords completely eluded me until I’d been playing for two years.”
This is a shot in the dark, but does that have any effect on the way you played guitar subsequently?
”Yeah, because I’ve always learned things by tuning up to the record player! I still do it; I put on the Martin Carthy records and then play to them. [laughs] I’ve played with the Eagles, I’ve played with Charlie Byrd!”
How did you get from there to play- ing in folk clubs?
”What happened was that I was working in an office and there was a bloke there who was interested in folk music and he heard Bert Jansch’s record and knew I was interested in playing the guitar. I had given up the idea of playing electric guitar, because I hadn’t got enough money to buy one. There was a crucial stage, really, when I nearly bought a good quality amplifier and a good quali- ty electric guitar but it meant tying myself up with a load of HP, and at the time I chickened out and didn’t buy them. But had I actually had the guts to stick my neck out on that HP deal I would have probably gone into electric things. The fact that I didn’t buy that meant that I car- ried on with the acoustic guitar.”
“Round about the same time I heard something like Don’t Think Twice It’s Alright by Peter, Paul & Mary; I thought what a great guitar sound they got, this clawhammer thing. A bloke at school was doing elementary clawhammer and he showed me how to do it, and I spent eight bloody weeks trying to get that stupid thumb thing going, driving myself potty trying to get that. Then I heard the first Bert Jansch record when I took a job in London, after leaving school, and I thought it was really good, so I bought that and tried to learn all of those. And for about a year and a half was just trying to be Bert Jansch, sitting on a chair with my legs crossed, looking down and trying to look moody and playing all the chords.”
You’ve obviously evolved a style which is instantly recognisable and very much your own. Have you consciously aimed for that or is it another thing you’ve drifted into?
Photo: Ian Anderson
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