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Sam airborn in Bellowhead. “It was such fun to do something so ludicrous and ridiculous.”
vision of music changed. He subsequently attended the summer school Wood was running and it was revelatory.
“I remember so vividly being outside by the Pizza Oven at Ruskin Mill in Nailsworth, Gloucestershire, playing with Rob Harbron, Chris Wood, Andy Letcher and Verity Sharp playing Mount Hills, the Playford tune, and I looked up at the stars and thought ‘This is for me!’ I’d never felt like that before.”
“God knows what he’d think about me saying this but there’s no doubt that if it wasn’t for Chris Wood I wouldn’t be doing what I’m doing now. He did so much work with Andy Cutting and redefined English fiddle as far as I’m aware and then went to Canada and did all that research with Lisa Ornstein and to France and Swe- den and did all the stuff that people now consider standard English fiddle playing.”
“So Chris was basically the reason. He asked questions. He made you try and think about your music, which people don’t often do. The whole point of his course was for you to try and get your own music out. And that’s when I maybe start- ed to develop my own style.”
It was, clearly, a very different experi- ence to the one he went on to have at the Folk and Traditional Degree course at New- castle University, where he lasted barely three weeks. He sighs when you bring it up… and is characteristically entertaining in describing why he left so abruptly.
“It was so prescriptive there. It was like, ‘This term you will study the fiddle playing of Willie Taylor. I hate the fiddle playing of Willie Taylor, so why would I
want to do that? I like some of his tunes but most of the time I can’t stand the way he plays them. And it was, ‘Now you’ve got to study Shetland fiddle’… I’d been playing fiddle for twelve years and decid- ed I wanted to work out how to play English music so why would I spend nine thousand pounds a year to learn how to play Shetland fiddle?”
So he walked out… and more or less went straight into an invitation from Jon Boden to join Bellowhead, which involved – among other things – a six-week dead- line to learn to play three tunes on bag- pipes (“I’ve not played bagpipes since – I don’t even know where they are”).
Plenty enough has already been writ- ten about Bellowhead – and Sweeney’s key role in it – to dwell too long on it now, but we do anyway…
S
am gets quite misty-eyed reflect- ing on the band’s last shows after calling time on their twelve-year reign in which they galvanised the folk world and dramatically broadened its reach.
“It was horrendous,” he says of their 2016 farewell. “Still is. I miss it every day. I’ve never experienced anything remotely similar in terms of the incredible energy and buzz it gave us. I think we only realised how amazing it was when it was coming to an end. I was crying through- out the entire final gig. I went home and was a total recluse for four days – I didn’t talk to anyone.”
“When it went big there was one year when we spent one in every three days with each other. It was genuinely like hav-
ing a new family – cheesy but true. You’re with them all the time and for that to be taken away was mad. Some of them I haven’t seen since. The grieving process for Bellowhead was horrible.”
You miss jumping off speaker stacks then, Sam? “When we finally got radio packs and could go anywhere without a cable it was amazing. The set designs were extraordinary. We ended up with these three-level risers on either side of the stage and trees everywhere. There was this mad moment when we played Rosemary Lane and I’d play this little riff and climb on top of the speaker stack and the light would come on me and Jon would run round the back of the stage to come on the other side and climb up the speaker stack in the dark and the light would shine on him and it would then get really heavy and we’d leap off. It was such fun to do something so ludicrous and ridiculous.”
And hugely successful, of course. Their biggest-selling album Broadside sold a 120,000 copies, they were A-listed on Radio 2 for several weeks and 46,000 peo- ple attended their farewell tour.
“Most people who came to our gigs
weren’t folkies at all. I don’t think there are 46,000 folkies around. I don’t claim at all that Bellowhead was genius or made exceptional music but the live show was amazing. I don’t think anyone will get close to it. They think they can but I think it was lucky coincidence that those people were in that band at that time and made it happen. I don’t think anyone else could ever achieve that. It’s horrible that it does- n’t happen any more.”
Photo: Elly Lucas
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