f90
he Lakeman Brothers are also spawned of a highly musical family, but swear that their interest in taking up musical instruments was entirely self- motivated. Sean, the eldest, took up the guitar when he was six because it was “every boy’s dream.”
T
“I didn’t seriously start playing until I was about eleven, when I changed teach- ers. I turned to a jazz guitarist called Steve Redman, a very fine guitarist in the South West. He was a huge influence. And then I started listening to and became friends with people like Chris Newman and other quite famed guitar players, which was another huge influence. I really started doing it seriously then.”
Seth, the youngest, started playing vio- lin classically by choice at the age of five. “I did all the grades and so on. The folk ele- ment came from my mum and dad. And that influence grew and grew as did jazz. I was also influenced a lot by Tom McConville. He would come and stay because he knew mum and dad from the old days and he knew me as a young boy. When he found out that I had started playing the fiddle, at about ten, he started giving me advice which was very, very helpful.”
Kathryn & Kate 1995 “I
started singing when first could talk really as my family were all involved in the singing of traditional songs and they all play in a ceilidh
band. By the time I was five I’d learned to play fiddle, then I joined the family ceilidh band when I was about nine or ten. By that point, I’d started playing in front of people.”
On realising she was having a whale of a time doing this, Kate swiftly learned to play guitar and piano and started singing. Her voice has evolved into one of those honey-toned yet potent styles, taking influ- ences not only from her mum singing in the bath but also from the likes of Dolores Keane and a host of contemporary Ameri- can singers like Nanci Griffiths and Mary Chapin Carpenter whose material she often uses. Her singing has been featured on the Battlefield Band’s Quiet Days album, and she has also taken to the stage with them at a couple of British Festivals. With Kathryn, she mainly uses the piano and guitar for accompaniment, working out sparse but richly harmonic arrangements.
Whereas Kate had a pretty much exclusively traditional background in the home, Kathryn’s musical upbringing cov- ered not only folk music but also classical training.
“I started singing when I learnt to talk
too. I don’t think my mum used to talk to anyone. She’d just sing songs. Me, Mum and a family friend, Betty Martin, used to sing together, the three of us. I learnt a lot of songs from her, she’s a magic singer.”
“My dad is a peripatetic music teacher and I got lumbered with learning the clar- inet when I was five, then I learned the flute and saxophone. Both my parents are
very much classically trained so I got all that as well as the traditional thing. I’ve got quite a mixed-up head! It comes through in a lot of the music. I think the reason it does work with me and Kate is that we have these different upbringings.”
After years of solo singing, Kate and Kathryn started working together as a duo just after they recorded the Intuition album with Pat Shaw, Julie Matthews and two of the young Deighton Family women. The tracks that the duo recorded far outstrip any of the other contributions. Finally submitting to years of their parents nagging them to work together, and real- ising the fuller potential for them musical- ly, the duo have been gaining a lot of ground over the last couple of years. Kathryn has just had to give up a job as a peripatetic clarinet, flute and sax (all of which she plays on stage) teacher in Barns- ley secondary schools due to her perfor- mance commitments. Their debut album. Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts, is due to be out in April and they have work taking them to Belgium, Poland, Holland and Fin- land in the forthcoming months.
Somewhere along the way in their rapidly accelerating musical career, Kathryn was pressganged by family and friends to enter the BBC Radio 2 Young Tradition Award in 1994. She won.
“It’s been really useful. We’ve got a lot of radio appearances and things seemed to have led from one to the other very quickly. It’s quite amazing. We’ve done quite a lot on Radio 2 obviously, and we did Pebble Mill, Woman’s Hour and an interview in the Independent. It sort of snowballs – someone read that and we got on Radio 5. It’s been really helpful. I’m quite glad that they entered me now.”
This help continues to this day, though these days Seth and Tom “swap tips.” Other players like Chris Leslie from Whip- persnapper have also played an active part in his development as a fiddle player. And Seth’s brother, Sam, cites Mark O’Connor as another big influence: “He’s god!”
Sam himself, a bit jealous of his broth- ers’ budding musical prowess, and spurred on by a desire to be like Howard Jones(!), didn’t take to the keyboards until the ripe old age of seven. He too took the classical route, passing all the grades, but notes that as soon as the three had a grip on classical stuff they started working things out for themselves, including playing folk music which was a constant presence in the household. A family band was born. Their first-ever professional gig was for BBC TV’s Saturday Superstore, for which they were paid in cash and Spacehoppers! In addition to regular work in the South West, the family often took working holi- days in Brittany. All three boys saw the merit in playing music for fun and money rather than doing paper rounds.
The youthful trio (the even more youthful trio than now, that is!) developed very fast as players and gained experience in a broad range of styles.
Sam: “There was just all this stuff we were hearing around the home. As well as straight folk music, we played ’20s numbers. That was where the jazz came from, from dad. He used to play a lot of jazz on his concertina. ‘Twenties and thir- ties good-time numbers and Gershwin, things like that.”
Jazz has continued to be a very strong factor in the Lakemans’ lives, particularly for Sean, who is currently in his final year at Leeds College of Music. It has been an invaluable experience for him, offering practical guitar studies on anything from bluegrass pieces to Bach sonatas in addi- tion to the more obvious choices of the
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