root salad f20 The Young ’Uns
The Teesside threesome who are beginning to attract a national reputation. Vic Smith catches ’em down south.
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here’s been an interview like this before, but with a family, with the six grandchildren of Bob Copper; siblings and cousins. Their words come tumbling out, one person takes over from another as soon as there is a gap. It is like a river flowing over rapids splitting into different routes around rocks then re-joining but ultimately all going in the same direction. Let me give you an example of how the three of them got together. Here’s a transcription with the voices jumping in over one another. David Eagle probably has the most to say of the three but all contribute to the conjoined answers:-
“A natural development really… it was never our intention… really proud of the way its developed… In clubs like that, you had to have a good loud voice… a bit of a personality… give a bit of patter… We really cut our teeth doing that sort of thing… People think that because we are from the north-east that we might have come off that great traditional music degree course, but we’re not.”
No, it’s not like the groups that come out of the Newcastle course at all; students with an eye on a performing career trying out a solo or a group path. David explains,
“Michael [Hughes] and Sean [Cooney] knew one another from primary school onwards. I met them through a mutual friend when I was about seventeen and then sort of went to the pub and stumbled across Stockton Folk Club and we heard some fantastic singers in there. It was absolutely wonderful. The likes of Ron Angel, the Endeavour Shanty Men, the Wilsons, It was all new and wonderful to us.” Before long they were singing at that club, no intention of taking it any further. Even their name came about by chance when the audience called out “Are the young ’uns going to sing?”
With that inspiration, powerful har- mony was inevitable. Then they needed to dispel stereotypes of a grimy industrial north-east with songs that told this. Many fine songs that Sean has written take this theme.
How about their harmonies, were they a combined effort or the work of one person? After acknowledging their debt to Coope, Boyes and Simpson, they gave an answer that I might have predicted. “In a sense, we don’t actually arrange to rehearse. We might just go through things wherever we are on tour. We are often singing in the car, arranging as we go.
Then Dave and Michael might try out stuff on the songs. We listen very carefully to the reactions to new arrangements and it’s actually great when it goes wrong. It tells that we need to work it a different way. Other times you sing a song a few times and you think, that’s it we’ve got it.” The hilarious banter between them is impor- tant. “All the gigs are fresh to us because we do it that way. We don’t have a set list when we go on; we decide as we go along. No idea what we are going to talk about. It’s a lot more organic doing it that way.”
They also used the word ‘organic’ to describe the way their career has devel- oped; bookings at north-east folk clubs started to come along, producing their own label CDs to sell at gigs. Two changes gave them an enormous boost. They were asked to record an album for Navigator. This gave them an elevated profile, radio plays, media interest, a level of support behind them. 2014 will also see the release of a new album which they are all very enthusiastic about; Never Forget has been produced by Andy Bell, the man behind so many great folk albums in recent years,
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The other change was acquiring an agent who had their interests at heart. Phil Simpson at Regent Music saw that they had the sort of appeal that could take them beyond the confines of folk clubs and festivals and booked them into places that they might not have sought them- selves. They arrived for interview after their first house concert.
ntil things became hectic with touring, they saw the need to put things back into the scene. For seven of their ten years they were running their own folk club. They are the main movers behind the Headland Folk Festival set for April 2014, following on from the event they hosted when the Tall Ships came to Hartlepool in August 2010. Running harmony singing weekends has also been part of their recent schedule.
I might have expected the response when I asked about the future; more inter- changing voices; a pause and then:-
“We will just want to continue what we do and continue to enjoy it… I don’t want to think that far ahead… not changed very much in ten years… still have that love of the songs… love being involved with the folk scene and commu- nal singing… If we ever changed that, we might be in some kind of trouble… on our days off we still go to pubs where there are singarounds… Even if we stop doing it as our main thing, I can’t imagine us saying ‘That’s it! The Young ’Uns is over.’ ”
www.theyounguns.co.uk F
Photo: Elly Lucas
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