root salad Sam Sweeney
Never knowingly underemployed, the Bellowhead fiddler tells Colin Irwin about his latest project.
I
s there anyone busier in the fabtastic world of folk music than Sam Sweeney? If there is, then they won’t have time to talk to the likes of us…
Sam Sweeney of Nottingham (that’s Nottingham, not Sheffield) – the one who jumps higher than anyone else in Bellowhead – is a sort of King Midas of English folk, sprinkling magic dust since he first started playing with Hannah James at the age of twelve. He’s strutted his stuff in a variety of different line-ups since… Ker fuffle, Remnant Kings, Sam Carter, Fay Hield & The Hurricane Party, Leveret, The Full English and, of course, Bellowhead, playing an intriguing array of instruments along the way, from drums to English bagpipes.
His first instrument – and the one still closest to his heart, though, is the fiddle. The fiddle, he tells you, has a character, even a mystique,that guitars and the like just don’t have. Fiddles have their own sto- ries to tell… well, one of them has… and it’s a story he’s turned into a whole album and full-blooded show that hits the road through September.
The fiddle in question is almost a hun- dred years old but began for Sam when he first laid eyes on it at Roger Claridge’s vio- lin shop in 2007 when he was eighteen. Sam, started playing when he was six and, hooked on his parents’ record collection, set his heart on being a folk musician when he was ten. With money burning a hole in his pocket after being awarded a Performing Arts Fund bursary, he decided to spend it on a really nice fiddle.
He tried around 50 fiddles that day but was drawn to what looked like a brand new light orange one which he assumed had been built from scratch by Roger Claridge. Studying for his ‘A’-levels at the time, he didn’t inspect it too intent- ly but noted the words on it suggesting it was made in Leeds in 1915 and was signed by Richard S. Howard.
“It was freshly varnished, it looked brand new and it smelled brand new, but my dad – who is a keen genealogist – did some research and found the signature inside matched Richard Spencer Howard from Leeds, who was a music hall per- former.”
And, bit by bit, Sam pieced together the story of stonemason, music hall per- former and violin maker Richard Howard, who went off to fight for king and country at the Battle of Messines in Belgium, leav- ing behind his hand-carved fiddle.
“We don’t know what happened in between, but 90-odd years later it found its way into Roger Claridge’s shop in Oxford.
Roger had bought the parts at an auction house, gave them a bridge and some strings and a chin rest, tail piece and tuning pegs and strung it up and I became the first person to play it. It’s mental that I chose it without knowing any of that history.”
He engaged writer / storyteller Hugh Lupton (“a lot of storytellers over-act but Hugh is magic”) to help out and, with Rob Harbron (“my favourite musician in the world” and Paul Sartin (“he’s got the big voice to carry it off”) also on board, they have devised Made In The Great War, a show telling the fiddle’s story.
With Sartin currently engaged in com- piling a book of music hall songs from the era, there’s no shortage of ebullient wartime singalongs like Keep The Home Fires Burning and Scarlet & The Blue, plus the recurring theme of the Duke of Wellington’s West Riding Regimental March (the regiment with whom Richard Howard served). Glued together by Lup- ton’s narrative, it also includes an emo- tional film of Sam Sweeney playing the fiddle at Richard Howard’s graveside.
It’s all new territory for Sam. “It’s simultaneously incredibly exciting and incredibly terrifying,” he says. “I have such respect for the fiddle now. I used to tour it all the time but now I keep it safe in a case – I don’t want any harm to come to it.”
Such a turn of events wasn’t conceiv- able when Sam walked out of the folk degree course in Newcastle after just three weeks. “When I left school I didn’t want to go to uni, I just wanted to play music, so I went on the folk degree course and hated it. It was one of the worst things I’ve ever done. I hated every minute of it. I was still in Kerfuffle and we’d been offered a sup-
H
port tour with Fairport Convention and they wouldn’t let me go. In my year there were eighteen students and two of them had never touched an instrument in their lives. I thought the standard was low and in any case the best musicians aren’t the ones who’ve been trained. I didn’t get on with it at all.”
e was eighteen then and, with incredibly fortuitous timing, walked straight into Bellowhead as a replacement for Giles Lewin. It did mean he had to learn to play bagpipes in a hurry, though. “Jon Boden left a message on my phone saying ‘I’m just going to leave the bagpipes in your parents’ greenhouse – you have six weeks to learn them. To be honest, it’s not an instrument I have a passion for. If you asked me to play a tune I couldn’t do it; I just learn what I have to do for Bellowhead and that’s it.”
Fiddle, though, is a different matter. Ask him about his fiddle heroes and he waxes lyrical about Dave Swarbrick, Chris Wood and Eliza Carthy.
“The fiddle I play now was made for Dave Swarbrick. I saw him as a six year old and it’s incredible I now have his fiddle. He’s the thing that started me off. Then Chris Wood changed my fiddling world completely and so did Eliza. Seeing her playing with Jon Boden in the Ratcatchers was mental – I’d never heard English music played like that before.”
Made In The Great War is launched at
Cheltenham Town Hall on September 3 and runs through to finish at Bradford-on-Avon Wiltshire Music Centre on September 28.
www.samsweeneymusic.com F 17 f
Photo: Elly Lucas
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