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Keston Cobblers Club
From small pub gigs to supporting Bellowhead, Colin Irwin hears about the rise and rise.
K
eston Cobblers Club are a cleans- ing gust of reinvigorating air. A young five-piece band palpably in love with their music and the
whole rigmarole that goes with it, a joy they impart effortlessly to an excitable audience on their feet dancing almost from the kick-off. Tubas and trumpets, ukulele and mandolins, melodica and guitars, drums and handclaps, banjo and accordeons, keyboards and close har- monies, fiddle and buoyant choruses, mad songs and irrepress ible ebullience, jokes and stagecraft… a feel-good band with no chips on their shoulders, no axes to grind and no agenda beyond getting up there and having the time of their lives.
With acoustic guile, thunderous cho- ruses, a penchant for memorable melody and idiosyncratic structures, pundits have been falling over themselves to pre-empt what appears to be a straightforward charge into crossover territory by compar- ing them to someone else. Inevitably, Mum- ford & Sons is the first name out of that particular hat, although Of Monsters & Men and Storno way also get frequent men- tions in dispatches. They laugh wryly when it’s mentioned. They’re still trying to get their heads round touring with Bellowhead (and sharing their tour bus!) without con- templating ascension to the ranks of flag- bearers on the Good Ship BritFolk.
“We’re not hung up about the idea of being big or anything like that,” says Matt Lowe, over a gentle afternoon sup in a Lon- don hostelry. “We’re just enjoying ourselves so much. If we can make an honest living, putting in the work, touring, I’d take that. We wouldn’t say no if a big breakthrough came along, but I want to be doing this for the next 40 years.”
From the suburb of Keston on the out- skirts of Bromley, southeast London, they named themselves in honour of an 18th Century local cobbler and fiddle player who’d get everyone up dancing in a cunning plan to wear out their shoes to create more cobbling work. Raised on folk camps and school orchestras, Matt and his sister Jules launched the first incarnation of the band six years ago with a schoolmate, Tom Sweet.
Sweet: “We recorded a song called You
Go, our first single, before we’d done any gigs. It got played on Xfm and things like that so we thought we should do a show. So we did a gig in a clothes store.”
Recruiting all-action drummer/ percussionist Harry Stasinopoulos from the local youth orchestra, it was another couple of years before they played their first proper
19 f
gig, preluding a long succession of small pubs and clubs, the type of gruesome establish- ments that require you to blackmail friends, relatives and passing acquaintances to come along before they’d allow you to play.
But they insist they loved it all. “Oh they set you up well,” says Matt cheerfully. “It means any problems you get now don’t faze you. But after a couple of years of that you do appreciate playing nicer venues and having a booking agent and not having to manage yourselves.”
Their intoxicating mix of folk, classical music and indie rock is made even more intriguing by their unconventional instru- mentation, including tuba.
Tom: “It was never a conscious thing, it was purely accidental. It was what instru- ments happened to be around that we could physically play. When the band started, Jules learned the bass but her hands were too small to play it. We didn’t know anyone who played bass but we knew someone who played tuba so we got them in.”
Devastated when their tuba player Dan Slade announced he was emigrating to China, they advertised on Facebook and recruited the one non-Kentish band mem- ber, Bethan Ecclestone, to take his place and thus the current line-up was completed.
Matt and Jules tend to write the mate- rial, which has now resulted in two albums, A Pocket Guide To Escaping (2014) and Wildfire (2015), a clutch of festival appear- ances, various radio sessions and immense goodwill. They don’t play traditional mate- rial (they’re more likely to play a cover of Toto’s Africa) and their original material doesn’t sound rooted in the tradition in any way but, having spent so much time at folk camps in their youth, they still feel a strong kinship with the folk world.
with these great musicians like Seth and Bellowhead and Lau. We can’t quite believe it. We did Folk By The Oak on the Acorn stage and then we went back the next year and did the main stage. And at Cambridge we played in The Den and then one of the main stages. It’s amazing. You’re used to 500 people watching you and suddenly you have 7,000. We used to think we shouldn’t be here. It was like being at a party you’re not sure you’re entitled to be at and then you think mmmm… we’ve got away with it!”
“W
http://kestoncobblers.club F
hen we started we looked up to people like Seth Lakeman and now we’ve met and played
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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