85 f “J
esse was selling copies of his 45 San Francisco Bay Blues – I bought a copy and I still own and love it! I went home and tried to learn
how to play this. I had the audacity to go and see Jesse again at a folk club a week or so later and I asked him to show me the chords to San Francisco Bay Blues and he did! I went over and over it for a cou- ple of weeks then went back to Don’s club and got up and performed it – my first ever public performance! The audience seemed to like it. I got offstage and some- one said, ‘would you like a pint?’ I was shaking so much I spilled most of it! But I quickly got over my stage fright and have enjoyed performing ever since then.”
In 1964 Peabody accompanied his
school’s brass band on a North American tour. Not that he played a horn. “Us geog- raphy students were roped in as roadies and I was happy to go along. We had to wear school uniforms and American kids equated us with The Beatles! I was already a Stones fan so was pushing them. We went to Toronto one night and saw Ron- nie Hawkins and The Hawks – they were impressive but by then I’d already seen T- Bone Walker and John Hammond so was familiar with American music. I bought two of my all-time favourite blues LPs in New York City – Sonny Boy Williamson’s Down And Out Blues and John Lee Hook- er’s House Of The Blues. That shows you what I was into.”
“I formed my first jug band immedi- ately after I got back to London. I’d not done any paid gigs before, just floor spots. Hugh McNulty on string bass and a guy called John Wallace – we did one gig in a youth club in Greenford then got a resi- dency in Osterley Jazz Club in Norwood Green! Osterley was popular as all the main jazz musicians played there and they had a second room that a folk band would play. We remained in residency for 18 months and this pushed us to learn materi- al – we rehearsed two or three nights a week, fresh material for Friday night. That gave me the experience and repertoire necessary. It came to an end because I fin- ished school and got a place in Plymouth College Of Art. That’s where I got my grounding in photography.”
“In Plymouth I became a regular at
Peter Russell’s Hot Jazz Store. So much so that Pete asked me to start writing for his newsletter – that was my first foray into music writing. There was a folk club run by Cyril Tawney, the famous sea shanty singer, and I put a jug band together, got a floor spot, audience went wild, but Cyril would- n’t give us a gig, said, ‘We don’t like that kind of music here’. So we started our own club in a pub and made our own posters at art school and the first week we got about 60 people, next week 100, following week 120, fourth week the local authority came down and said we were exceeding the numbers licensed to hold!”
“My band were called The Pongo
Flossy Good Time Merger – a wonderful name; people still come up to me in folk clubs and say, ‘I saw you in Plymouth with the Pongos!’ We found a Masonic hall, Sin- cerity Hall, and they agreed to let us have
Peabody live nowadays
it for a weekly club and we ran it for the next two and half years. We booked all the folk and blues artists of the day – we brought all the music we liked to Ply- mouth! Jo Ann Kelly, Dave Kelly, Ralph McTell, The Strawbs – and Arthur Crudup and Juke Boy Bonner! Back then we’d pay on average £15 – 20 – we could cover that. We paid Crudup £60! Juke Boy the same. Both were wonderful. I got on really well with Juke Boy! Everybody loved Jo Ann Kelly, not only for her phenomenal singing but because she really was a genuinely nice person. And she was always very nice to me, always encouraging me when I turned up to play a floor spot at her regu- lar gig at Bunjies Coffee House. Back in London I formed Tight Like That.”
ight Like That found regular work on the London folk club scene and, when playing the Troubadour, were approached by Ian Fisher, offering to man- age them. Good as his word, Fisher got the band a recording deal but insisted they change their name to Polly Flosskin. He also produced their album, adding a session bassist and aiming to get a sound akin to “Mungo Jerry, who had had a huge hit as a jug band.”
T Their 1971 debut album Sailing On
The Ocean came out to little notice but “then this young Bristol acoustic blues musician called Ian Anderson told me he had heard it and knew the album sounded nothing like what we sounded like and that he’d like to produce an album for us for his Village Thing label. Obviously, the
commercial failure of Polly Flosskin meant we fired our manager and lost our record deal so we reverted to being Tight Like That and took up Ian’s offer, We recorded at Rockfield Studios – Dave Edmunds’ stu- dio – and released Hokum in 1972. Hokum’s a great record – Ian really cap- tured our sound.”
Anderson and Peabody clicked so well that Ian produced Dave’s solo debut, 1973’s Peabody Hotel, and its 1974 follow- up Keep It Clean.
“By now I’m more and more getting into the proper solo acoustic stuff and doing fewer band gigs. This prepared me for meeting the Americans – 1976’s Come & Get It, a co-production between Ian and myself, is dedicated to Jesse Fuller. I got a great compliment around that time when Little Brother Montgomery came up to me after one of my concerts and said, ‘I don’t like many guitar players but I like you’. He then added, ‘I only ever played with a cou- ple of guitar players – Lonnie Johnson and Blind Blake’. Wow! To be ranked alongside those two is really something!”
If Peabody missed out on the millions showered on the likes of Clapton and Rory Gallagher (“Rory regularly came to my gigs”) he was happy earning a living play- ing acoustic blues.
“Back then there was still a folk club scene which accepted blues musicians – but this was about to change as they became more insular. By then I was playing regularly abroad – often as a duo with Hugh McNulty, who was a great raconteur.
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