root salad Jon Wilks
The skilful guitarist and singer who is digging into his Midlands roots talks to Ian Anderson.
tion. My mum remarried when I was in my teenage years and she married a proper folkie, a Cornishman who spent his youth listening to the likes of Bert Jansch and Brenda Wootton. By the ’80s he’d moved on to world music, so apart from my mum’s lingering love of Simon & Garfunkel and his vague interest in Joni Mitchell, ‘folk’ in any form had changed into the likes of Kanda Bongo Man. That’s pretty much all we lis- tened to –which I blame on you!”
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So speaks Jon Wilks, publisher until recently (when it also ran the danger of blighting his life) of the superb Grizzly Folk interweb blog, and as a musician one of a small posse we’ve flippantly branded ‘The New Wave Of Folkblokes’ (others including Thom Ashworth, Nick Hart and Jack Rutter).
“When I went to university,” he contin- ues, “I had a collection of CDs. Everybody else had Oasis, which I wasn’t averse to, and all the girls in the halls of residence had Boy- zone and things like that, but I was the one who had Martin Carthy and was told to shut up! So I was a closet folkie for a long time.”
“It was only when I had kids and start- ed becoming interested in my background, where I come from and that kind of thing, I found out from my grandmother that my grandparents had met and courted at Cecil Sharp House. So about two-and-a-half years ago I thought I’d go on a little family pil- grimage to Cecil Sharp House to see what it was all about, and got the bug.”
But somebody who plays and sings as well as he does can’t have only begun a few years ago, surely…?
“No, like a lot of people who I’ve now met on the scene, they either seem to come from folk backgrounds or to have started out playing guitar in indie bands and worked their way back. Which was always my tendency: even back in the ’90s when I was listening to people like Blur, I’d start with them and then go back and find peo- ple like Ray Davies and then people like Muddy Waters. So my natural progression now is to go back to people like George Gardiner and I’m not sure how much fur- ther back I can go without joining Emily Askew in a mediæval band!”
“Doing Grizzly Folk was just a sidetrack from that Cecil Sharp House pilgrimage. I started getting interested in it all because my background has to do with journalism so it was a natural move for me go and investi-
his magazine blighted his child- hood! “I suppose like everybody of my age group I was brought up lis- tening to my parents’ record collec-
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gate it to an almost obsessive length, and then want to share it with people.”
Why does this sound familiar?!
“And the other natural outlet for it is that I love playing guitar and always chal- lenging myself. Even back in the days of playing Britpop stuff I was challenging myself by playing like Graham Coxon rather than just strumming. It’s interesting that people who I worshipped back then like Gra- ham Coxon, Johnny Marr and Bernard Butler are all closet folk fans. It was always about that intricate thing and I found it much more interesting to look at people like Mar- tin Carthy. My influences have gone from that flash Martin Simpson style through to what Nick Hart did last year which seemed to be taken from that older Carthy style.”
“S
o my first album was me trying to find my way into folk music, and then inevitably I think most folk musicians seem to go to see where they come from. This new record coming out in the autumn is songs from the Midlands. There was an album which came out in 1972 on Topic called The Wider Midlands. The lovely thing about being involved in this community is that as soon as I started playing some of the songs off that, some of the singers who are still living started turning up in my in-box saying, ‘We see you’ve recorded this, and that’s amazing because we used
to sing it!’ and I’d say, ‘I know, because I learned it from you!’”
“There was one song referenced in the sleeve notes called Colin’s Ghost that nobody else seems to have recorded. It had been collected by Gardiner and Hammond. When Martin Carthy came to stay after doing our folk club…” (Jon now co-runs the Whitchurch Folk Club with Paul Sartin) “… he was amazed, saying he knew it existed but had never ever heard it. Yes! Result! But what had interested me was that it comes from a stone’s throw from my house when I was growing up, between Birmingham and Stratford, where my mum used to go to pick up food from a drive-through McDonald’s if we’d been good!”
“There are some interesting bits and pieces. Another one that fascinated me was a fragment from the singer Cecilia Costello that exists in the archive, of a song called My Bloke’s A Peaky – as in Peaky Blinders. They actually existed, a thuggery street gang, dangerous and wild enough that Cecilia Costello’s song talks about how if you were dating one, people would cross the street and avoid you as a couple. So I’ve stuck a tune on that and I’m quite pleased with it.”
He concludes: “If you’ve found these things and can play them, it’s good to be able to share them.” It would be churlish not to take him up the opportunity.
jonwilks.bandcamp.com F
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