root salad Toothless Mary
A decade on from Whapweaselmania, it time for a hot new dance band. Ian Anderson thinks he’s spotted one.
I
t’s odd how things pan out. Last summer we’d agreed to fRoots-brand a stage at a festival featuring a couple of great bands from our pages, and I was due to MC. I was then a bit alarmed to discover that an outfit I’d never heard of had been added and I’d have to introduce them too. Oh blimey! So I put out some feelers among People Who Know Stuff and got reassuring reports, then turned up at Sidmouth Folk Week to find that this very band were doing the Late Night Extra the same evening. And on legging it up there, I discovered that this young English ceilidh band, mostly aged 25–30, were very good indeed. The name: Toothless Mary.
English ceilidh has gone in pulses: there was the 1970s ‘new wave of English country music’ with Old Swan, Flowers and New Victory. The ’80s went electric with Oyster Ceilidh Band, us lot in Tiger Moth and the early Edward II. The ’90s saw a bit of a lull, remedied by a 21st Century upris- ing a decade back centred on Whapweasel who had everybody so festival ceilidh crazy that they even had their own Folk Awards category for one year only. The festival youth wave catalysed by Shooting Roots undoubtedly helped all that too.
And then it has gone a bit quiet again, in the absence of a new standard bearer. Toothless Mary might just be that animal.
Led from the rear by really impressive drummer Joe Sidell (not the instrument which would ever spring to mind for the main tune composer), they’re a tight, funky and adept bunch, with melodeon (Alex Nikel), bass (Mike Smith), sax (Dave Larkin), guitar (Jack Everitt) and on bigger gigs like Sidmouth a trumpet/ sax brass section. And their callers of choice – apart from the master, Gordon Potts – all come from the same new generation too: Pete Rees, Phil Bassindale and Hannah Bright.
A few weeks later we’re huddled in typical English festival weather – rain and wind – at the event where I will later have to put them on stage, and I’m finding out all about them. If I’ve deciphered every- thing off an interview recording battered by the elements, passing vehicles and a sound check next door, it seems they coa- lesced at a really young age via Folk Camps and NYFTE (the National Youth Folklore Troupe of England).
They may be young, but they’re already a decade-plus seasoned team. “Myself and Joe pretty much grew up together, we’ve known each other for a long time. Joe introduced me to pretty much everyone else,” starts Mike.
Joe takes up the story: “Myself and Dave went to Folk Camps when we were
very young, our parents took us along. We bumped into Alex there – very young, seven years old – this was about 1994 or 1995. And I met Jack later at the Brit School. We just got really enthusiastic about all the aspects of English folk. Our parents had got the roots as well. Alex’s parents both dance for a morris team. We got into the whole scene. Through Folk Camps we got involved with NYFTE and eventually we became the house band.”
They don’t deny that there’s some Whapweasel influence on their approach. “I was quite inspired by Whapweasel when I first saw them and we were quite young,” admits Joe. Dave agrees: “We were coming up slowly, in our early years, when we were going to their ceilidhs.”
But that’s only an element in a band notable for almost entirely original mate- rial, and definitely on the ‘one tune per dance’ wing of English ceilidhdom
Mike: “Most of ours are based on one tune that morphs into other things, returns to the original, then goes into something else. Not a set of tunes.”
Joe: “Even some of the stuff I’ve writ- ten which I try to combine in a traditional style, jigs and reels for example, you give the melody to Dave or you give the melody to Jack for certain sections and they’ll turn the melody into something completely different.”
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Dave: “What I find great, and it’s taken ten or twelve years of doing ceilidhs to get to this, is we’ll start a tune and we’ll have our arrangement of it, but we’ve played with each other for such a long time that every performance will be differ- ent as we experiment during it. Alex and I can read each other really well.”
hey must be pretty much the only band playing festivals who don’t have a CD to flog to the crowd. “We’ve been bugged and bugged to make an album,” admits Joe, “and because our set has grown we’ve actually got enough for two.” But they have a plan…
“I’ve combined some of the tunes with songs I’ve written, so my intention for the album is have a few guest singers.”
I remark that I don’t think anybody has ever pulled that off…
”But that’s the challenge,” Joe contin-
ues. “That’s why I really want to do it. We do love playing festivals, but it’s hard to get gigs for the rest of the year. So having some other avenue… as well as being Toothless Mary the ceilidh band, there can be Toothless Mary with somebody else who can do a concert.” “But we prefer it when people are up and dancing, not sit- ting down,” interjects Mike.
Not, I suspect, a problem they’re likely to face very often!
facebook.com/ToothlessMaryBand F 21 f
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