33 f
”I’m not that aware of having evolved a style. By and large, I’ve gone through phases that other people have gone through, copying other people, swiping other people’s ideas and trying to be like them, whether it be Bert Jansch, initially, and then Paul Simon, Tom Paxton, Peter, Paul & Mary, Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Martin Carthy; all these people I’ve attempted at some stage to be like, to copy and make the sound that they make.”
Between the second album and the third, you seem to be playing a very much more rhythmic and percussive way, whereas on the earlier ones it was a more intricately fingerpicked thing. Has that come about because you’ve become more interested in the singing of the songs than the playing of the accompaniment?
”No. If anything it’s probably the other way round. With the guitar, if you’re work- ing on intricate accompaniments, some- how it makes the song a rigid thing. Once you start thinking about the accompani- ments, the simpler they are, the easier they are to play, the more fluid they are, the more separate they are from what you are singing, the easier it is to sing the song and the more spontaneity you can get into a song. So I started to think about doing accompaniments that stopped me from getting bored singing the same thing every time. Boredom with singing something that was dead rigid every night, so I’ve been trying to do accompaniments that have the element of flexibility in them.”
“But I think I’m a fairly inept guitar player in actual fact. What amazes me is that other people are infinitely more inept than me. What always staggers me is that people regard me as a reasonable guitarist on the folk scene and I think I’m fairly trashy as a guitarist and have a fairly low standard. What amazes me is the standard is as low as it is, that someone like myself can be regarded as a decent guitarist.”
Yes, but is it possibly because there is
a different set of values that apply on the folk scene? For instance, classical players would be very hung up on the technique of playing and the correct fingerings and that sort of thing, whereas the values that apply on the folk scene would be things like the end result. It’s not the way you produce that result, but the actual result in itself. Part of being a good guitarist would be to leave out the right things.
”I leave bits out? They’re the bits I can’t play! I don’t really know.”
Because it’s an accompaniment for a song, rather than as an instrumental thing in its own right, then the better you get at it, the more it allows the song room to breathe. I think maybe people have got bored with flashy guitar playing that doesn’t actually do anything.
”Well, I think that’s interesting. It’s like doing a jigsaw puzzle. It’s interesting to do, in the same way as passing exams is worth doing, but I personally don’t want to sit there, ten hours a day, practicing a ridiculous riff just so somebody’s going to gasp in a folk club. To me it’s as ridiculous as an Olympic swimmer bashing up and down 50 lengths of pool everyday just to knock 0.2 of a second off, to say he ‘s faster than some other bugger. I don’t see the point of it.”
“There are a lot of musicians who spend hours practising, but for what? They’d do better going out and getting drunk and getting a bit of experience and letting that show in their music. Someone
With daughter Helen and son Joe, backstage at Bracknell Folk Festival 1981
like, for instance, Derroll Adams or Alex Campbell, their music lives far more than any technician’s does because they’re experienced in living. They’ve had more emotion in their lives. Their voices are like sacks of nails, or a bag full of sandpaper or something, but they live. It’s a sound that’s got emotion, feel, it’s got sensitivity, it’s got humanity in it, whereas technical singers are flat, boring, uninteresting peo- ple who have been sitting in some cob- webby attic somewhere, just twiddling their fingers all their lives. They’ve not done anything really.”
You’ve said in the past that you don’t, on the whole, listen to traditional singers a lot, other than maybe as a source for songs. But surely with a lot of those old guys there would be that experience of life showing through?
”Well, sometimes. A lot of the ones that people revere are just old farmers, they’ve spent a lot of their lives in a field or on a tractor or something. They haven’t necessarily got any more experi- ence. For example, George Belton wor- ships Alex Campbell. He thinks he’s a fan- tastic bloke. Alex has done things that George Belton’s never done. This business about traditional singers – people like traditional singers often for the wrong reasons. In folk clubs there is this desire, because a guy is old and grows potatoes in his garden and smokes some old pipe or something, they’ll do the same thing, they’ll wear a pair of old gaiters, they’ll wear some piece of leather leggings or something, or they’ll wear a pair of old boots with studs on because, in a sense, this old person, he becomes their hero because he’s so absolutely normal. They’re so incapable of being normal that when they see somebody normal they actually worship him. Really what people are doing is that they’re attempting something that they lack, and they’re try- ing to compensate somehow for an inad- equacy that’s in their own life.”
You were saying in the club last night about songwriters writing songs from the point of view of almost being on another planet.
”Well, they set themselves apart, they
are apart. We all do. We sit there and it’s very easy to look at the world from the
outside. You can look at the folk scene and say ‘This is weird, this is cut off from reali- ty’, but you can also look at office people and say they’re cut off as well, they’re in an unreal world. You can look at any sec- tor of society and say the same thing.”
“Songwriters tend to somehow pro- ject themselves above, in the sky some- where, and look down on this, and all human activity. If you stood on Mars and looked at all the human beings grovelling about on the earth trying to grab them- selves a living and fighting their silly wars and playing their silly football matches and listening to silly records and playing their silly guitars, it’s so stupid because you are outside it and not involved in it. It’s easy to look down on it all and say how utterly silly and irrelevant it all is. Anything you do can appear irrelevant, and it probably is, that’s the horrible thing. So you might as well just get on and do it if you enjoy doing it. If you’re involved in it the main thing is that you’ve got to try and enjoy it.”
You can find the whole 1979 Nic Jones interview on line at
www.frootsmag.com/ content/features/nic-jones
F From the Penguin Eggs photo shoot, 1980
Photo: Ian Anderson
Photo: Dave Peabody
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