69 f
I’ve always listened to a little voice inside my head and it said, ‘Have nothing to do with it.’ Dave Burland was staying with me at the time and he’s a big bluff Yorkshireman so I asked him if he’d sign it. ‘Bloody hell,’ he says, ‘no I wouldn’t.’ So Dingle’s, who were selling my album, said, ‘If you’re not gonna sign the contract we’re not gonna give you any more albums to sell.’ So there I was, 27 years old, new on the scene, getting work but with no albums to sell.”
“So I realised I was going to have to do it the hard way; I’d bet- ter go to the bank of mum and dad. They lent me £600 to make an album on a shoestring, with a black & white cover. 500 copies, just me and guitar, a record called A Branch Of May. Looking back on it you could write a book on what was wrong, but it went out like mad. People are still buying it, I don’t know where they’re finding it. But I made enough money off that to pay my parents back and to make another one, which was much more considered (it still wasn’t a particularly good cover!). And that was the A Poor Man’s Gift album. After that came A Mark Upon The Earth. It was very political; it was released at the height of Thatcherism. We were very involved in the miners’ strike, me and my wife (by then I was married to Mally). We were even arrested for not paying our Poll Tax! So it was a bit of an in-your-face album, but it had a lot of good traditional music on it. I still do one or two songs off there today.”
“Then Alan Bell put me on in concert at the Marine Hall, Fleet- wood. I played to about 1,000 people and I’d never been better that night. When I came off stage I had a feeling of anti-climax. It was a case of, ‘What the bloody hell am I gonna do now?’ I was at a loss because whatever I’d been trying to do, I’d just done it. So I needed to reassess the situation. I’d never looked further than being a singer and doing gigs. What am I doing it for? I looked through my repertoire and thought, ‘What the hell do you know about ram- bling through the new-mown hay when you were born in Peck- ham? What do you know about skinning rabbits as a poacher?’”
“M
ally was a Romany Gypsy, and she’d been put into a convent when she was very young and told that a Gypsy was a bad thing to be. And she’d always kept it cov- ered up until I got talking to her. After a
while I said to her, ‘The only thing I know how to do other than play guitar is paint. I think I might go back to college.’ So aged 39, I went along with all the 16-year-olds and started honing my skills as a signwriter.”
“At that particular time I fell in with the Gypsies and I took Mally back to meet her people, really. And they started teaching me how to paint Gypsy caravans. I began to learn and felt I could do it, so took a few jobs on doing flat carts. By this time we were living in a static caravan on a gorger site, and I started painting liv- ing wagons. I suddenly realised one morning that I now knew how to skin a rabbit. I now did know what it was like to go travelling on the road, because we had a little caravan and we went out and camped with the Travellers. I’d learnt their songs. I knew what I was singing about. I’d also spent a lot of time down in Dorset col- lecting folk songs. I even wrote an article about it for Folk Roots, about Bill House.”
“It’d been a few years since I’d gone from the folk scene com- pletely and I felt like I wanted to go back. I didn’t think they would remember me but they did. It was lovely. And Jackie Oates and Jim Moray were doing songs from my LPs! I’ve found that the younger generation are more interested in what I did than my own genera- tion were when I did it. You’ve got to encourage them... well, they don’t need any encouragement; they could teach me a few things. I saw Jack Rutter last night. He reminds me of me, thirty years ago. I think that’s wonderful. And I’ve been doing a bit of singing with Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne. We’ve got one number so far!”
“I’m retired now, I’ve got my pension. I always had another job of some description, until I became a full-time carer for my wife. But I do a few gigs and festivals now and then. I never did it for money. I never earned any money. I don’t care about money. It’s about songs, it’s about passing it on. So I just do music for the love of it.”
One hell of a life.
To buy one of Nick Dow’s many fine CDs, email:
sales@gypsy-wagons.com
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