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PhD in the same subject. He disliked the place, which reminded him of Marlborough, and finding the studying dry, he was drawn to the road protest happening at the time. “I just wanted to do some real ecology, I was very idealistic and wanted to change the world. It was ‘95, I was in my late 20s. I ended up going to Newbury for an evening and decided to move down, living in a tent, before going up into the trees.”


His environmental activism and exten- sive research into nature’s psychotropic larder was fuelled by his time in Sheffield and the university’s Pagan Society which was one of the first of its kind. Its take on paganism that was “very much that of the free festival, drug taking, travelling and psychedelia. It was the late ’80s and the height of Thatcher’s reign of terror. The miners’ strike was very recent and everyone was living in trucks – the Battle Of The Beanfield had just happened.”


If this in anyway suggests that Letcher is a boring traveller drug casualty it would be entirely wrong. He’s actually an informed and erudite scholar on the subject – at least in the case of mushrooms – having written the extremely well-received and thoroughly aca- demically researched Shroom: A Cultural His- tory Of The Magic Mushroom (Faber 2006). And it was in a hugely entertaining conversa- tion that fRoots learnt about the fun-guy (sorry!) at the heart of the band’s sound.


to two kinds of music: classical and jazz. Their youngest was discouraged from attempting either after scraping through his grade 3 piano by a despairing music teacher who insisted he had no musical ability.


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But Letcher had a good ear and, when staying with a tin-whistle-playing friend in the New Forest at the age of eighteen, was inspired to give it a try. This led to his partic- ipation in Irish sessions, the discovery of The Penny Whistle Book by Robin Williamson and the American system of music with its whole notes, half-notes and quarter-notes that suddenly made sense to him in a way semibreves, minims and crotchets had not. A friend of his used to accompany him on the mandolin and, liking the sound, Letcher went to Totnes market one Friday morning and purchased one for a tenner. Totally self- taught, he says “The way I play is not how most people play the mandolin, which has emerged from my relationship with that instrument, from hours of noodling and strumming.”


By the time Letcher got to Sheffield he says “Part of me was desperate to break out of a very stifled middle-class upbringing in Torbay and protesting and music was part of that. I just wanted to write songs as a means of self-expression and the folk form that I’d been listening to just seemed to make sense.”


He discovered folk music at the time acid house started and says: “To me there’s a relationship between the two. I’m really interested in transcendence and transcen- dence through music. Of course we would have had it here on this soil at some point, but what was it? Was it our bagpipe music? Was it our drone-based music? So I went through the whole rave thing and that still


othing in Letcher’s childhood suggested his musical career. Growing up in Stoke Gabriel, Devon (famous, he says, for its yew tree), his parents listened


informs the way I write songs, which is acoustic, with a strong foot tapping beat.” And Webber when the rest of the band soon joins us, recalls being inspired by Letcher’s ability to stomp out the beat whilst playing extraordinary “mesmerising” cross-rhythms on the mandolin.


He felt too that “mushrooms were a ticket to some other world-view, a different way of being in the world. Again it’s about transcendence and ecology and connection to nature and finding interesting unusual connections to nature, and for me they have helped find a connection to the natu- ral world. They open up the channel and you’re reminded about what’s important.”


I’m suddenly reminded of the brilliant Bill Hicks: “I’m glad mushrooms are against the law, because I took them one time, and you know what happened to me? I laid in a field of green grass for four hours going, ‘My God! I love everything.’ Yeah, now if that isn’t a hazard to our country… how are we gonna justify arms dealing when we realise that we’re all one?”


Though for Letcher, “they haven’t real- ly answered the big questions in life…”


Like what? “Oh you know, come on, why are we here, why is there any meaning, we’re all going to die, why should we strive for anything and what should we strive for? What’s a good life? Is there meaning beyond human construction? We live in an atheist time, a secular time, the only meaning is that which you create and although it sounds cheesy it’s been a spiritual quest for mean- ing that lies outside human construction.”


It’s something he’s closely considered, since during his road protesting days, he met the man who was to become his second PhD supervisor who – ringing him up out of the blue – “invited me to do a second PhD in the Study Of Religion. I knew nothing about the humanities, having been trained as a scientist, but he had three years funding, so, mad as it was, I said yes.” This led to a long- term part-time lectureship at Oxford Brookes in the study of religion, “specialising in shamanism, paganism, magic, theories of religion: the weird and wonderful stuff.”


Along with the politics it’s the “weird and wonderful stuff” that informs his song- writing, in which themes of timelessness and the gypsy, or outsider, is often explored – as so beautifully in the opening track on Steer By The Stars, A Puppeteer Came Into Town. His songs are rooted in his personal experiences, including his experience with mushrooms, though this is not necessarily overt, but hinted at in Through The Looking Glass surrealism and poetic imagery that suggests the interconnectedness of every- thing, of man and nature and his place in it.


There is a darkness, though, a pervading sense of menace and loss even in the carni- val magical atmosphere, one that’s directly alluded to in One More Mazurka. Nor does Letcher shy away from harrowing reality. His first child, a girl to be named Lyra May was born dead in January 2103. It’s a grief that never goes away, he says, though he and his wife Nomi “are at least through to the other side” as parents now to nineteen- month-old Minka. In St Kevin And The Blackbird, Letcher subtly expresses this grief for his first child and how Minka helped him through, using poetic natural imagery that’s supported by the band’s arrangement of spiky crescendo-ing dissonances.


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etcher’s songwriting method, he says, comes from his relationship with the mandolin. He jams by himself until a narrative comes out of a chord sequence and sug- gests an image and then sets about “the hard process of finding words. Though recently,” he says, “the words have come first, such as the John Clare poem I Fear Those Tory Radicals” which he re-set for the band. St Kevin And The Blackbird, he says, wrote itself in a matter of hours.


Bringing his songs to the group for them all to arrange is a process he describes as nerve wracking – much to the surprise of the others. And together they bring their originality and musical talent to create the band’s distinctive sound. I find it’s not just Letcher who’s honed an idiosyncratic approach to playing.


Jim Penny got seriously into Charlie Parker and John Coltrane and was taught jazz saxophone from the age of fourteen. He listened to Simon & Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, practically on a loop, and his mum’s copy of Sergeant Pepper, when she said the Beatles “went a bit weird.” The LP had a scratch in it, so he always heard it with a bump. It was because of his mum he took up the Anglo concertina as she used to have one hanging on the wall. Discouraged by his dad from making squawking noises on it as a child, when he was twenty Penny took it down off the wall and along to a bloke he met on a street in his hometown of Liver- pool who showed him how to play it. Together they busked a “smorgasbord of European folk. We didn’t know where any- thing came from. He would say ‘this is a Greek song I heard’ and years later I’d dis- cover it was French. I didn’t differentiate between styles or how anything should or shouldn’t be played.” It was altogether, he says, a very liberating musical introduction.


Colin Fletcher’s musical career began in his rambling four-storey Oxford house with instruments lying around and music teacher parents who “were up for any noise we wanted to make.” Fletcher claims to have “bashed the piano a bit” but a defining moment occurred when he took down Ter- ence Dwyer’s musique concrète primer off his dad’s bookshelf and discovered you didn’t have to play an instrument to make music.


“I must have been about nine or ten. In my house everyone dispersed to their rooms and wouldn’t be seen for hours and I’d be in mine giving myself electric shocks working on old tape recorders and making bizarre noises by splicing tape together with razor blades.”


He says the social services were not involved.


“Eventually my parents asked if I’d like to learn an instrument and I said I’d like to learn the French horn.” And whilst this has assisted with his playing of an old USSR euphonium that he now has on permanent loan, it was finding a guitar in a cupboard when he was fifteen and locking himself away in his room that summer learning chords that led to him buying a bass guitar from his friend a year later for the sum of £19. The bass has been his main instrument since. So his playing is focused on what sort of noises he can make out of his instruments (an interest he further explores in the Sonic Catering Band) as opposed to a more tradi- tional approach. This is supplied by the band’s female members.


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