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The celebratory tale of the
slightly legendary independent folk label that released its first albums 50
years ago in September 1970.
Scroll down for the Playlist.
It was late 1969 and, licking
my wounds after losing two rounds with major record labels, I’d made a tactical
retreat back to Bristol from whence I’d exported myself in 1968. I was
inhabiting the notorious flat above the Bristol Troubadour with the club’s then manager, bassist John Turner, and – briefly – fellow
songwriter/guitarist Al Jones. The 5 nights a week coffeehouse in what we’d
christened Clifton Village was in its heyday as one of the country’s leading ‘contemporary folk’ venues,
sharing an axis with London’s Les Cousins.
Artists from all over Britain were being attracted to live in the city by the
local scene’s reputation. Over small-hours brainstorms and late breakfasts in
early 1970, we came up with the idea to launch a record label and agency,
taking control of our own destinies from the music business. The Village Thing
was born.
I eventually moved to a nearby
basement flat in then run-down Royal York Crescent which I shared with Maggie Holland, and we initially ran the new
organisation from there, including recording some of the albums in the living
room or bedroom. Later, as it grew, we moved into offices in Park Street that
we shared with local graphics company and rock promoters Plastic Dog. As well
as the artists on our label, Village Thing also acted as agents for other
locally-based musician friends like Keith Christmas and Shelagh McDonald.
Subtitled ‘the alternative folk
label’ (decades ahead of the coining of ‘alt.folk’, let alone ‘psych folk’,
‘acid folk’ and all the other bewildering terms that get showered on it these
days), Village Thing released two dozen albums and a few singles between 1970
and 1974. With immediate strong national press and radio support, we initially
prospered with our unique and hard-to-pin-down mix of established names and newcomers,
original singer/ songwriter/ guitarists, a few visiting Americans, and folk
entertainers. It was essentially the contemporary folk scene’s complement to
the more traditionally-based recordings being simultaneously released by Bill
Leader’s wonderful Trailer label, and soon both were manufactured and
distributed by the folk ‘major’ of the day, Transatlantic.
Over the years, many of Village
Thing’s releases have gained cult status amongst collectors of ’70s
contemporary folk, blues and songwriter/ guitarists, often changing hands for
high prices. Alongside them – and indeed providing some of the label's best
sellers in the first two cases – were popular folk club entertainers like the
late Fred Wedlock, the anarchic Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra, much-loved Irish
singer Noel Murphy and jug band superstars Tight Like That.
Village Thing was literally a
cottage industry: its official headquarters were at Inglestone Common, a tiny
hamlet in the wilds of South Gloucestershire where business partner Gef Lucena
of Saydisc lived and some of the initial recordings were indeed done in Gef’s
cottage. Later, we were able to set up in a Quaker meeting house at Frenchay on
the outskirts of Bristol. Equipment was good but basic – at least one album was
recorded with a pair of mics plugged straight into a Revox tape recorder, and
the maximum was a pair of tape machines, multi-mics through a small mixer and a
simple reverb unit. Anything more complicated than that, on the few occasions
when it was needed, we took over to record at Rockfield near Monmouth. It was
also very much a family of artists and musicians, as will be apparent from the
way that names crop up on each other’s recordings.
The first releases were 50
years ago on September 18th 1970: the launch gig was the night before the very first
Glastonbury Festival, to which many of us trooped off the next day. We kicked
off with the aforementioned Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra who’d been a smash hit
at that summer’s Cambridge Folk Festival and were embarking on a frantic schedule
of folk club gigs, with a chest full of improvised instruments (most famously
Andy Leggett’s ‘ballcockophone’, heard here on Sweet Miss Emmaline) and a zany repertoire of 1920s jazz classics. Their
debut PHLOP (“Pigsty Hill Light
Orchestra Presents…”) was studio recorded and in retrospect maybe didn’t
capture the full essence of the band, so we followed it up the next year with
the live Piggery Jokery.
Immediately highlighting the intended
diversity of Village Thing, the other in the label’s first pair of LPs was the
sole album made by a couple from Cardiff, Graham & Anne Hemingway, who went
under the name The Sun Also Rises. They clearly inhabited the same musical zone
as the Incredible String Band and Dr Strangely Strange and had impressed us
with gigs in South Wales and at the Bristol Troubadour. They briefly blazed,
with Sounds calling their self-titled
album “the most original record of the year” and claiming they’d “opened up a
new dimension into which British music can blossom,” before they slid into
obscurity. They eventually separated but are still good friends and as far as I know still in
Cardiff. Their LP can be found on CD from Saydisc.
My own Village Thing debut Royal York Crescent came shortly after,
in our second pair released on 13th November 1970. In order to differentiate myself from an irritatingly
well known namesake, I'd added in my middle initial (in authentic sci-fi author
style) to become Ian A. Anderson. I’d eventually make three albums for the
label – following it up with the unwieldly-titled A Vulture Is Not A Bird You Can Trust (1971) and Singer Sleeps On As Blaze Rages (1972) while I went through my obligatory singer/
songwriter/ guitarist years, an era sandwiched between my becoming a 65 year
old Mississippi blueser by age 19 and emerging from the Tardis as a more
conventional (and much younger) English folk/ blues/ roots person from the
post-Village Thing mid ’70s on. They were interesting times… Tracks from my
three VT albums can be found on the recent CD compilations Onwards!, Onwards Vol.2
and The Time Is Ripe, available from
Ghosts From The Basement.
Coinciding with my first
release on the label was the arrival of folk blues guitar legend Wizz Jones.
Wizz, a contemporary of Davey Graham, was a major influence on ’60s artists
from Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Ralph McTell to Eric Clapton, Keith
Richards and Rod Stewart. Wizz, like me, had previously been on United Artists
and we were very happy to put out his self-mockingly titled The Legendary Me. He then nipped off to
do an album for CBS before returning for his second VT album When I Leave Berlin featuring his group
Lazy Farmer. The title track was covered live, years later, by Bruce
Springsteen of all people. Many consider those two to be among Wizz’s finest
works – they were re-issued on CD by Sunbeam.
It was either Wizz or Ralph
McTell who recommended Steve Tilston – originally from Liverpool and by then in
London after some years around Loughborough – to point himself in our
direction. A very talented 21year old guitarist and songwriter, he impressed us
mightily, moved to Bristol and produced the simple but striking debut An Acoustic Confusion that the Daily Mail, of all things, promptly made
one of its records of the year (and Rod Stewart bought a box of them to give to
all his mates for Christmas that year!) The album is available on CD with extra
tracks from Saydisc.
Tilston’s debut served another
purpose: it introduced us to the amazing Dave Evans who – again via time in
Loughborough – came to Bristol to play on Steve’s sessions and stayed. Dave,
with his totally unique and often mind-boggling guitar playing, self-made
instrument, utterly delightful songs and madcap tunings, became a great friend.
With his own debut The Words In Between
(recently re-issued by Earth) he produced one of Village Thing’s towering
treasures, a criminally under-acknowledged classic of the day. He followed it
up a year later with the excellent Elephantasia.
It took a fair bit of
persuasion to convince local folk club hero Fred Wedlock to make an LP. We
recorded his debut The Folker in my
living room: it went on to reputedly sell 20,000 copies, easily the label’s biggest! That
debut featured a few of the traditional songs that had been a regular part of
his club repertoire – on this podcast I’ve included his version of the Copper
Family’s Spencer The Rover, with
Stackridge’s Mike Evans on fiddle. By his second LP Frollicks (like the PHLO’s second, also recorded live to more
capture the essence) he’d completely concentrated on his inimitable comedy,
which stood him in great stead from then on, culminating in his top 10 single a
decade later, long after Village Thing had expired. His two VT LPs are
available on one CD from Saydisc.
Apart from the albums, Village
thing released a handful of singles: the only one which wasn’t from an existing
album was by an energetic bluesy duo – Pete Keeley and Keith Warmington, known
as Strange Fruit – who’d suddenly materialised in Bristol in 1971. Pete’s long
gone, but Keith remains a popular musician around Bristol and regularly works
to this day with Steve Tilston.
VTS 10 was the lost Village
Thing album. We had begun to record singer/ songwriter Dave Mudge, originally
from Devon and until then playing in the popular folk duo Mudge &
Clutterbuck. In spite of strong support from Al Stewart, they had somehow not
quite managed to complete recording deals with several majors and finally
chucked in their towel. Our initial sessions in my Royal York Crescent flat had
featured guests like Keith Christmas, but petered out. The album never got
finished and the tapes vanished down the years, but we never re-allocated the
catalogue number. So to give you a taster of the one that got away, I’ve
included a Dave Mudge demo recorded by local musician Tim Webb in Trowbridge in
1973 or ’74 – of one of Dave’s most popular songs Memory Book. Dave Mudge died in 1998.
The always well-dressed Ian
Hunt – ‘the handsome Mr Hunt’ as he was affectionately known on the scene –was
the nimble guitarist of choice for many around Bristol at that time. He’d been
strongly featured on my first two VT albums and we’d appeared as a duo on the
very first Glastonbury Festival. When Village Thing’s house double bass player
John Turner decided to leave the Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra for more serious
musical pursuits, the two teamed up as Hunt & Turner and produced their one
album Magic Landscape which was well
received. Over recent years it has attracted re-issue on labels from South
Korea to the USA, including on Saydisc CD.
Jug bands had been a popular
staple of folk clubs in the 1960s, and towards the end of that era one of the
best emerged, Tight Like That. Led by bouncing blueser Dave Peabody, they were
a skilled packet of good-time energy, and we took them into Rockfield to record
their one LP – maybe the only jug band to ever record in that iconic rock
studio. Sadly, they disbanded not long after, so right at the end of the
Village Thing years the label released the first of Dave Peabody’s many solo
LPs down the decades, Peabody Hotel.
It was a clever title, that establishment in Memphis being the field recording
location of many classic early blues and country 78s.
By 1971 I was regularly touring
in Belgium and Germany and on those travels I met a couple of Belgian-based
American exiles. One of those was Tucker Zimmerman who had come to Rome on a
scholarship, and ended up in England in the late ’60s where his first album was
produced for Regal Zonophone by Tony Visconti. After moving to Belgium, he’d
built a strong following in Germany, where they called him a ‘song poet’. His
second, home-recorded album had been released on a small German label and we
were happy to pick it up for UK release, the only Village Thing album we didn’t
originate.
As was the fashion of the day,
we put out a couple of budget-priced compilation LPs. Us was the obligatory label sampler, everything on it from existing
LPs except for a Sun Also Rises track recorded for an intended 2nd LP that never
happened. The cover art was the illustration that had been created for the
unfinished Dave Mudge LP – waste not, want not! The other sampler, Matchbox Days, was an anthology of
tracks by artists from the mid-late 1960s UK country blues boom – Dave Kelly,
Jo Ann Kelly, Mike Cooper, the Panama Limited, Wizz Jones, myself and more.
That collection still lives on in an expanded CD version on Ace Records – notes here.
The other Belgian-based American
was already a legend. Zen banjoist Derroll Adams had come over with Ramblin’
Jack Elliott in the ’50s and never gone back. Resident in the UK, he’d become a
major guru for the young Donovan and people like Ronnie Lane of the Small
Faces. Eventually alcohol had got the worse of him – as witnessed in the Dylan Don’t Look Back film’s hotel room fracas
– and he’d had to get out of England, to France and then Belgium where he was
miraculously taken care of and nursed back to drink-free health by a dedicated
young woman, Danny. They soon married and we brought them over to Village
Thing. Along with Wizz Jones, Belgian hero Roland Van Campenhout and others, he
recorded his wonderful Feelin’ Fine
which saw his triumphant return to stages including the 1972 Cambridge Folk
Festival. Sadly, Derroll died in 2000 at the age of 74. Feelin’ Fine has been recently re-issued on CD with extra tracks
from 1975.
By 1973 my great friend, early
musical partner and eccentric songwriter/ guitarist genius Al Jones had endured
a thoroughly disillusioning experience recording an album released on EMI
Parlophone that barely registered, and then another uncompleted one for Bill
Leader’s Trailer label. He’d retired semi-hurt to Cornwall but I prised him
back out to record Jonesville.
Sessions in the Quaker hall involved a drummer encased in a box made of
mattresses! Al really was an original, both in his oddball lyrics and crafty
chord structures. As with Derroll Adams, the full Jonesville album augmented with five 1974 demo tracks has been CD
re-issued by Ghosts From The Basement. Tragically, Al Jones passed away in the
summer of 2008.
Probably the most sought-after
Village Thing album of all by collectors came from superb New Zealand singer/
guitarist Chris Thompson. He’d spent time in Ireland where he’d recorded some
initial tracks; rumour and radio tapes from Belgium (again) had reached us and
I eventually bumped into him in a London club where he was visiting with Wizz
Jones. We got him to Frenchay with tabla player Keshav Sathe and among the
tracks we recorded to complete his album was the extraordinary flight of Her Hair Was Long. Frustratingly,
distributors Transatlantic ‘lost’ most of his album pressing in an insurance
scam and only 101 copies were sold. It was the writing on the wall for Village Thing.
Chris returned to NZ in 1974 and is still performing. The album was re-issued
on CD with lots of extra tracks by Sunbeam.
Towards the tail end of the
Village Thing era we ran into another couple of rambling Americans – in fact,
unless memory is playing tricks on me it was at a Derroll Adams comeback gig at
the Shakespeare’s Head in London’s Carnaby Street. Lackey & Sweeney were
from Tucson, Arizona and doing that classic ’70s thing of seeing Europe while
living in a Volkswagen Microbus full of instruments. Their Junk Store Songs For Sale was one of the last in the Village Thing
catalogue before the label closed in 1974 and, as with Chris Thompson’s and for
the same reasons, it never got the circulation it deserved. Both are seperately
back in Tucson now after long times away on the West Coast.
The very last Village Thing LP
finished it where it started, with a popular folk club entertainer. Irishman
Noel Murphy had been one of the scene’s biggest audience draws, starting out as
the regular allnighter MC at London’s famous Les Cousins and soon making his
name nationally for his uproarious gigs. Not long before making Murf he’d had a regular duo with
banjoist ‘Shaggis’, subsequently better known as Elton John’s guitarist Davey
Johstone. The Old Man’s Tale, written
by Ian Campbell, proved he could do serious songs too.
More reading about the era here.
Happy 50th birthday, Village
Thing!
Ian
A Anderson, September 2020
Note
– a few little crackles will be heard here and there as some tracks had to be
dubbed from original old vinyl LPs where no CD re-issues from original master
tapes have been made. Thanks to Phil Beer for help with making the copies.
1. (Intro) Dave Evans : a snippet of Insanity
Rag from the LP The Words In Between
(VTS6) 1971
2. Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra : T'Ain't
No Sin from the LP PHLOP! (VTS1)
1970
3. The Sun Also Rises : Flowers
from the LP The Sun Also Rises (VTS2)
1970
4. Ian A Anderson : Hero
from the LP Royal York Crescent
(VTS3) 1970
5. Wizz Jones : If Only I'd
Known from the LP The Legendary Me
(VTS4) 1970
6. Steve Tilston : Simplicity
from the LP An Acoustic Confusion
(VTS5) 1971
7. Dave Evans : City Road
from the LP The Words In Between
(VTS6) 1971
8. Fred Wedlock : Spencer The
Rover from the LP The Folker
(VTS7) 1971
9. Pigsty Hill Light Orchestra : Sweet
Miss Emmaline (live) from the LP Piggery
Jokery (VTS8) 1971
10. Strange Fruit : Shake That
Thing from the 45 single, VTSX1001-A 1971
11. Ian A Anderson : Time Is Ripe
from the LP A Vulture Is Not A Bird You
Can Trust (VTS9) 1971
12. Dave Mudge : Memory Book (demo
– VTS10 never released)
13. Hunt & Turner : We Say
We're Sorry from the LP Magic
Landscape (VTS11) 1972
14. Tight Like That : West End
Rag from the LP Hokum (VTS12)
1972
15. Tucker Zimmerman : Left Hand
Of Moses from the LP Tucker Zimmerman
(VTS13) 1972
16. Dave Evans : Only Blue
from the LP Elephantasia (VTS14) 1972
17. The Sun Also Rises : Fafnir
And The Knights from the Various Artists LP Us (VTSAM15) 1972
18. Dave Kelly : A Few Short
Lines from the Various Artists LP Matchbox
Days (VTSAM16) 1972
19. Derroll Adams : The Valley
from the LP Feelin' Fine (VTS17) 1972
20. Ian A Anderson : Marie
Celeste On Down from the LP Singer
Sleeps On As Blaze Rages (VTS18) 1972
21. Al Jones : High And Dry
from the LP Jonesville (VTS19) 1972
22. Fred Wedlock : Talking Folk
Club Blues (live) from the LP Frollicks
(VTS20) 1972
23. Chris Thompson : Her Hair Was
Long from the LP Chris Thompson
(VTS21) 1973
24. Dave Peabody : Long Time
Loser Blues from the LP Peabody Hotel
(VTS22) 1973
25. Lackey & Sweeney : Sparrow
from the LP Junk Store Songs For Sale
(VTS23) 1973
26. Wizz Jones : The First Girl I
Loved from the LP When I Leave Berlin
(VTS24) 1974
27. Noel Murphy : The Old Man's
Tale from the LP Murf (VTS25)
1974
CD
REISSUES: Ghosts
From The Basement have recently released the limited edition 6-track EP The Great Granddaughter Of The Great White
Dap, with tracks from Wizz Jones, Ian A. Anderson, Derroll Adams, Steve Tilston
& Dave Evans (previously unreleased), Al Jones and The Sun Also Rises.
They
also have complete CDs by Derroll Adams, Al Jones and Ian A Anderson at Ghosts From The Basement. You can find Village
Thing re-issues from Dave Evans on Earth Records; Wizz
Jones, Chris Thompson on Sunbeam Records; Fred Wedlock, Sun Also
Rises, Steve Tilston, Hunt & Turner on Saydisc and the expanded Matchbox Days compilation on Ace.
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To submit CDs for consideration for Podwireless, send to:
Ian Anderson
Podwireless
PO Box 3072
Bristol BS8 9GF
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