f48 H
e was working totally on his own (no-one else seemed to know about this stuff) and freely admits to making lots of mistakes along the way. Trying to sound authentic, but ending up sounding authenti- cally himself. “You play something in a way that isn’t
true to the genre, because you don’t know any better (and there’s no-one to tell you otherwise). And somehow that ends up being a part of the way in which you play. Accidently developing your own style. Sometimes nowadays, Louisiana musicians will say ‘How do you do that bit Chris?’ And I say ‘What, that bit where I’m not get- ting it quite right?’ And I realise that even when you get it wrong, you’re sometimes getting it right in a different way.” To this day, he’s still striving to make his sound as authentically Louisianan as possible, even as he acknowledges that his inauthentic moments are a part of his individual musical identity.
Realising that the proper-job Cajun music experience needed more than just one man and his accordeon, Chris decided to get a band together and through chance encounters and rooting around the local blues scene, R Cajun was born, initially as an accordeon/fid- dle/guitar trio. They’d bomb down the motorway after work to play in whichever folk clubs would have them. Through the folk scene connection they got to play on a Mike Harding album and as a result were invited to make a record of their own for his Moonraker label. Harding suggested they got themselves a rhythm section for the recording and in honour of this larger line-up, they elongated their name to R Cajun & The Zydeco Brothers. The band in this form still do the odd gig now, although their heyday was in the 1980s and early ’90s, when they seemed to be playing all over the place, all of the time (as often as not at festivals) and introduced many, this writ- er included, to the delights of live Cajun music.
In the early ’90s Chris got another band off the ground, The Bearcats, a more straight-down-the-line Cajun four-piece (accordeon, fiddle, guitar and drums). They were particularly popu- lar over in Ireland, perhaps because their fiddle and accordeon based sound was close enough to the local music to be relatable to, but stylistically different enough to be of interest. “We played in North- ern Ireland, right in the middle of all the Troubles,” he remembers. “The people who kept booking us said that our gigs were one of the few times when people from the different cultures came together without any boundaries or questions.”
Around about this time, a UK Cajun/ zydeco scene was starting to emerge, with twenty or so bands all playing in that style and Chris, fuelled by pure fan-boy enthusiasm, bringing real deal artists such as Steve Riley and John Delafose over from the States. At the same time he was drafted in by the reliably wonderful Ace Records to help compile and write sleevenotes for the series of Cajun compi- lations they were putting out. “It got to a point where all of this started getting in the way of what I really wanted to do, which was just play music!”
Then there was The Swamp Club, which he set up in a Victorian ballroom in Derby. “It was sold out every time, so it became a real phenomenon. It was the place to be every last Friday of the month.” At one stage they’d book world and blues acts as well as the Cajun and zydeco bands and were attracting a highly varied clientele: rock- abillies, punks, crusties, folkies, country music fans… “Everybody felt a belonging to it and everybody got on!”
At first, they all just jumped around to the Cajun music, but then dance orthodoxies set in. “People started going out to Louisiana and realised that there were certain ways of dancing to Cajun and zyde- co, which is fine, but then they brought that back to the UK and started to see that as the appropriate response. They set up dance workshops. Which is great, but an unfortunate side effect is that a lot of the people who came along and just enjoyed freely respond- ing to the music decided that this wasn’t for them.”
This resulted in the scene changing very rapidly over a couple of years, from one that was inclusive to something more specialised. Where, if you didn’t know the steps, you wouldn’t feel at home. “What that meant is that the numbers went down. They became a much more consistent crowd. You could rely on these people coming to every event that you put on. But you were talking about 100 peo- ple rather than 500.”
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
