43 f The Robin’s Return

One of the key figures of the 1970s folk scene has been ‘a hermit’ for 25 years. But he just may be ready for action again. Steve Hunt gently probes.

Dransfield, making the pre-interview coffee in his Cornish kitchen. “In that time, a lot of myths have grown up around me…”

“Y

What isn’t just a myth is that way back in the early 1970s, Robin Dransfield and his brother Barry were among the most excit- ing and influential of all English folk revival performers. Their first two albums would today surely occupy a similar status to any of those acknowledged ‘cult classics’ from Witchseason Productions et al, were it not for the fact that they (along with the rest of the Trailer catalogue) disappeared into a commercial black hole from whence, scan- dalously, they’ve never been reissued.

ou know I’ve been away from the folk scene for about 25 years, and basi- cally just been a hermit here, right?” asks Robin

He’s generous with both his time and his cheese and pickle sandwiches, and laughs often as he tells me about his musical life.

“I went to see the Chris Barber band at the Royal Hall in Harrogate in the mid- 1950s, when I was only about eleven or twelve years old. Lonnie Donegan was Bar- ber’s banjo player and he was just starting to do the skiffle set in the middle of the show. I decided that I wanted to be a banjo player so I went down the local junk shop and bought a banjo. Then I got hold of the Pete Seeger banjo book and that’s how I started.”

“I met Roger Knowles at a party, where he was sitting with an f-hole guitar, and we started as a duo, then formed a bluegrass band called the Crimple Moun- tain Boys. My brother Barry, who’s three years younger than me, was fifteen when

he joined the group and he’d already made his own guitar! We started out play- ing material by Flatt & Scruggs and the Stanley Brothers, and then one day I was looking through a copy of Sing Out! and I saw a group in there called The New Lost City Ramblers and thought with a name like that they’ve got to be good! I sent off to London for an LP and that was like… Nirvana!”

“After three years I’d had enough of just playing bluegrass. I’d go to the folk club in Harrogate and see Louis Killen, Martin Carthy, Anne Briggs. The Watersons came across from Hull and oh my god they were terrifying in the early days! So good! That raw edge that they had used to really run through me – a fabulous sound. That was when I started to swing towards English stuff and wanting to do that.”

Inset – Robin in 1973

Robin at Cecil Sharp House in 2015

Photo: Toni Arthur

Photo: © Judith Burrows