f96
even released an album, Cara was intent on becoming a speech therapist, with no plans or expectations of a career in music. Until Team Lakeman came calling and said ‘Oi Dillon, fancy coming to England and joining our band? We’re gonna scare the shit out of Fred Bloggs from East Anglia, us… ’ Or words to that effect.
The Dillon family also had quite a chinwag about the pros and cos of Cara leaving home, leaving Oige, leaving her plans for Belfast University and a career in speech therapy before deciding… what the hell, it sounds like a bit of a hoot, give it a year and see what happens.
And so it came to pass that Cara Dillon came to Devon, The Equation were a two- singer five-piece once more and Geoff Travis was back in the folk game.
“I thought we could make a good record, that was it.”
Some people thought you tried to turn them into The Corrs…
Cara Dillon in Oige, 1995 B
y his own admission, Geoff’s knowledge of folk music at the time was relatively scant, although he’d spent more schooldays than he cares to
remember at the all-night sessions at Les Cousins in Soho, catching the first tube home in the morning.
“I loved Bert Jansch and Anne Briggs and Island Records was a big thing for us when we were kids. Island and Joe Boyd taught us about the String Band and John Martyn and we followed it back to John Renbourn and Dick Gaughan’s Handful Of Earth and those things. And great Irish music. We were very much children of that era. You could buy a Roxy Music or a Free album but you could also buy a Nick Drake or Sandy Denny album. So that was a good broadening of the musical palate, so we were quite receptive to folk music… ”
So receptive that when Geoff and Jeannette heard the Kate Rusby & Kathryn Roberts duo album, they – like most of the rest of us at the time – were bowled over, completely fell in love with it and were determined to discover more. It led them down to a village hall in Devon, where Rusby and Roberts were with their new mates, the Lakeman boys. Even more enthused, they decided they wanted to record them for an album.
“We just liked them. There was no rhyme or reason to it. We’re pretty imma- ture – we just fall in love with things. We trust our own tastes and hope people will come along and follow us. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.”
“We had a really nice talk and all seemed to be getting on fine when Kate Rusby suddenly got up from the table and said ‘I’ve got to go and talk to my dad.’
And she rushed out of the room, went down the road to the phone box and phoned her dad, who I think must have told her that under no circumstances should she have anything to do with the wicked corporate record companies.”
“Okay, I can understand the aversion to major record corporations but Jean- nette and I had our own label and I don’t think anybody there had a horrible time because of our attitude. So she came back and said ‘I can’t do this.’ So that was a bit of a dramatic moment – a first for us. I had this image in my head of her dad being a bit like Geoffrey Boycott, this dyed-in-the- wool Yorkshireman with principles down to his socks. ‘I’ll have nowt to do with those southern bastards!’ I don’t really know whether that was the substance of the conversation but I imagined it was.”
“So we went away feeling a bit of a failure. The group without Kate didn’t seem like the same group. That was the magical thing – it’s very unusual to have two brilliant singers in the same group. It doesn’t happen very often.”
So, tails between legs, they returned to London to chalk it up to experience and abandon the great folk experiment.
The remaining Equation members,
however, had other ideas, recruiting a young singer from Dungiven, Northern Ireland, who was steeped in traditional song. An all-Ireland singing champion, no less, who was a regular at the fleadhs, played fiddle and bodhran and had even sung with the great traditional singer Paddy Tunney. Enter Cara Dillon.
At the age of fifteen she formed the group Oige with a couple of mates from Dungiven and while they’d toured Ger- many, played Cambridge Folk Festival and
“No. I never have aspirations to dumb anyone down or make them blander than they are, I just want them to do the best they can do. I thought they were doing something really interesting and I liked the fact that there was this renaissance of really young people who knew about folk music. One of the nicest things Sean Lake- man ever did for me was to tell me about Nic Jones.”
“I noticed that so many young people were embracing folk music for lots of rea- sons… because of its great stories, it’s root- ed in culture, it has some history, it has meaning and it can be quite radical. We wanted to do it for all those reasons. And we didn’t know anything about the politics of folk music. We were ignorant of all the strains and stresses and all the things you shouldn’t do and who you should and shouldn’t talk to. We didn’t know anything about any of that, which was good really.”
So Equation decamped to Real World studios to record their debut album and… well, disappeared. That was the perception anyway. Nothing emanated. There were gigs certainly and there were rumours and stories and lots of delays and assumptions that the Warners machine had swallowed them all up in the search for the magic for- mula that would provide a hit single and trigger something or other wonderful.
The way Cara Dillon entertainingly related it when she later came to my local pub for an uproarious fRoots cover feature interview shortly into the new century (ah, those halcyon days when they’d speak to us), Warners’ head honcho Rob Dickens apparently decided Equation were des- tined for greatness and decreed them as a top priority act; they were plunged into a dizzying new universe of designers, stylists, photo shoots, producers, chauf- feurs, PR gurus, videos, record company execs, demos and TV studios, rubbing shoulders with the Spice Girls and all sorts.
“I remember singing in the studio and I stopped and said ‘What’s that noise behind me? Please make it stop,’” Cara told us. “And someone said ‘That’s drums, Cara…’ We were just this little acoustic group who’d never even played with drums and bass before!”
Photo: Brendan Kelly
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