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traditional singers were just there and that was the be all and end all. ‘That’s an old man singing,’ but I hadn’t got any further than that. The person who showed me how, although he didn’t know, was Ewan MacColl.”
“A lad from Catford Folk Song Club said, ‘I’ve got some tapes at home, recorded off the radio, called The Song Carriers. You real- ly ought to listen to them.’ And that was of course MacColl’s famous Song Carriers programme. That was another Son House- type revelation. ‘That’s what the old man’s doing! That’s why you should listen to him! That’s what it is.’”
“As I started getting gigs I remember Mike Waterson coming up to me and he said, ‘The more you listen to the traditional singers the more their style will rub off on you.’ And then Peter Bellamy had a go at me: ‘The thing with you Nick, you’re very competent but you’ll never be a great singer until you master listening to tra- ditional singers. Don’t think you can ever do a better job, boy!’”
“But I remember Peter phoning me up after I’d just done five days on the road and he said, ‘Nick, dear boy. How the fuck do you get so much work?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’m just a persistent bugger. I keep asking.’ I was determined. Apart from anything else it got me out of London.”
“I
n the 1970s the place to go in London was Dingle’s Folk Club, which was run in those days by Roger and Helen Holt. I was going to this folk club and seeing better and better guests. I even MC’d the night for Walter Pardon. And at Dingle’s was Sam Stephens & Anne Lennox-Martin, Jim Mageean, Packie Byrne & Bonnie Shal- jean... Chris Foster and John Kirkpatrick started the club. There were a couple of people before me, Tim Laycock was involved, but basically I replaced Chris Foster as the resident at Dingle’s.”
“I knew I was good enough to get gigs so I wondered if some- body would offer me a recording contract. And lo and behold a small company called Cottage Records asked if I’d like to do an LP for them. So I went to Roger Holt and told him I’d got a recording contract with Cottage Records and he said, “No you haven’t, you’ve got one with Dingle’s!’ So I made this album called Burd Margaret. It had a cover on it that would actually keep the kids away from the fire, it was pretty awful. I was noted for my awful covers in those days.”
“Well the album after it on the label was To See The Play by
Fiddler’s Dram. I had an agent sort of person called Debbie Cook, and she wrote a little ditty called Day Trip To Bangor. While I was in the studio, the engineer Allan Morrow played it to me and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ It had a brass band on it and it was bloody horrible. So I said, ‘Get rid of the brass band for god’s sake.’ But they released it and it got to number two in the charts and all hell broke loose.”
“Roger and Helen were swamped by big boys from the music industry; I ended up with this contract from somebody called Spar- tan Records who were distributing punk. And throughout my life
Photo: Mally Dow
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