Folk In Cornwall

There was far more to the Cornish folk scene of the 60s & 70s than the few records that seeped through onto the Sentinel label. It was a remarkably fertile training ground for many artists; this movement has been newly documented in a book by Rupert White, entitled “Folk In Cornwall”. The book tells the story from the early years of the beatnik scene in St Ives & Newquay in the early 60s, right up to the final days of the Pipers Folk Club & the Folk Cottage, and encompasses world-renowned artists including Donovan, Ralph McTell, Clive Palmer, Michael Chapman and Wizz Jones (the cover star), all of whom either served musical apprenticeships in the county, or were attracted by the ambience of the area & chose to stay. And, of course, all the key natives (Brenda Wootton, Richard Gendall et al) are heavily featured too.  The narrative is told almost entirely through the voices of the interviewees (all the above -and many more- are heavily quoted throughout), and there’s little expansion from the author on their quotes. White has simply carried out the research & joined the dots. I say “simply”; the research is meticulous to say the least, and is impressive enough to carry the book on its own.

Even so, this makes “Folk In Cornwall” quite a dry read, and one which could definitely have used a(nother) proof-read. But it’s a fascinating story, and one which casts a wider net than you might imagine. This is the only place you can hear the story told. My favourite quote is this striking piece of scene-setting from Michael Chapman, in which he explains the genesis of “Fishbeard Sunset” from his second LP “Fully Qualified Survivor”....

“When John The Fish was playing at The Count House, he always had one eye out of the window, as we had a tradition that the gig would stop and the entire audience would walk out onto the cliff to watch the sunset, then come back in again and we’d restart. So one night I was sitting to one side of the stage watching the sunset through Fish’s beard. And that’s where the title comes from....”

I was delighted to read in a recent issue of The Cornishman that this tradition still stands. Can we have more gigs where people leave the venue to watch the sunset, please?

Buy “Folk In Cornwall” here: http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161057817420

Hear “Fishbeard Sunset” (but not Chapman’s version, sadly) here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7x2aspndm-w

Pasties & Cream in The Cornishman

On a recent trip down to Newlyn, I spent much of my time rifling through my parents’ book & magazine collection (which they are currently whittling down). I was pretty delighted to come across a copy of local newspaper The Cornishman from July 1971 in their shed, and was even more pleased to find an article about Brenda Wootton’s “Pasties And Cream” LP (SENS 1006). The Cornishman, of course, is depicted on the cover of the album, together with the Cornish delicacies after which the album is named.

One day I’ll get round to writing about this most renowned of Sentinel LPs myself, but for now I’ve reproduced the article here, together with some other relevant bits & pieces from the same edition, including an advert for a quite amazing week of shows at Penzance’s The Garden. See Queen (lest we forget, "Roger Taylor's group, formerly Smile") for 25p! Beggars belief, really...

 

Gill Watkiss

Here’s another Sentinel album where the significance of the cover outweighs that of the music within. It’s a Christmas album from the Holman Climax Male Voice Choir (and associates) and features the usual mix of traditional carols & festive cheer.  What makes this album more appealing is the cover painting, an early work by Penwith artist Gill Watkiss. A fairly realist depiction of a Christmas scene, it’s fairly atypical of her approach; her painting is usually far more stylised, and all the better for it. For me, her work is the precise visual equivalent of the spookier end of early 70s psych-folk, creating exactly the same quietly unsettled, sinister aura that –say- Linda Perhacs’ “Parallelograms” or the theme from "Picture Box" conjures up. It’s all in the movement of the air and the characters’ faces; I can still remember encountering her work for the first time in Newlyn Art Gallery in the late-70s and feeling oddly uneasy. But in a good way.  

This is what she does: 

 

Amazing stuff.

Most of Gill’s paintings depict St Just & its environs, and the cover of “We Wish You A Merry Christmas” (SENS 1044, 1979) is no exception, the clock in the village square being instantly recognisable in both paintings here. Recently her work seems to have shot up in value, and rightly so. She is genuinely a one-off. Her website can be found at  www.gillwatkiss.com

Lanyon Quoit

As I may have mentioned in the past, there’s only so much enthusiasm I can muster for male voice choirs and silver bands. On “The Reason Why”, by the Climax Male Voice Choir with Camborne Town Band (SENS 1020, 1974) we have a double whammy. It’s fine for what it is, but it’s not much to my taste. The cover, on the other hand, is magnificent.

Lanyon Quoit was one of the first ancient sites I ever visited, one foggy day in autumn 1976. Somewhere, I still have the photographs. But they're not as good as this one. Here is the dolmen in all its splendour, with Ding Dong mine to the right, and Carn Galver to the left. This area of west Cornwall is riddled with fantastic ancient monuments: Men An Tol, The Nine Maidens of Boskednan, Tregeseal Stone Circle, and the quoits of Mulfra, Chun & Zennor. Lanyon Quoit always looked a bit pre-fabricated for my liking; just *too* perfect to be authentic. I later found it had collapsed early in the 19^th century & was subsequently reconstructed, so maybe that's why it looks so perfectly honed. In 1769, William Borlase wrote in his Antiquities Of Cornwall that the monument was so tall that it was possible to ride a horse under the capstone. Wow.

Even so, it’s still a beautiful monument despite the reconstructive work, and the photograph - taken by Ander Gunn - that graces the cover of “The Reason Why” is a brilliantly composed image, taking in both the natural geology of the area and also its industrial heritage, as well as its ancient history.

Digging this album out reminded me of another favourite cover of mine, that of Kariba by Irish post-punkers Kissed Air. This featured Paul Caponigro’s incredible photographs of Pentre Ifan chambered tomb on the rear, and Kilclooney dolmen (I think??) on the front. There should be more ancient monuments on record sleeves, I think. Any other nominations out there (Julian Cope notwithstanding)?

More about Lanyon Quoit here: http://themodernantiquarian.com/site/235/lanyon_quoit.html

You're either on the train or you're off the train.

In a typical 1970s independent record shop (I'm thinking of "White's of Alverton" here, Penzance residents), it wasn’t uncommon to find a section marked “sound effects”, generally in between the “humour/spoken word” & “miscellaneous” sections. This would generally be filled with hi-fi test records and those BBC sound effects LPs of which Paul Weller was so fond. But it would often include a subdivision of albums consisting of recordings of steam engines. This flummoxed me as a child, but as I grow older it makes more sense. These albums weren't intended to be used to help create your film soundtrack or to check your tracking alignment. They were an entertainment in themselves, a nostalgic look back at a bygone era.

Which brings me to “An Enthusiast Remembers” (Sentinel JW 1). It’s an album of recordings made at Shrewsbury, Talerddig, Lancashire & Yorkshire during the last years of steam traction on British Railways, collected & annotated by Jonathan Wood. Not being an expert on steam locos, there’s very little I can say about the recordings, so I’ll simply quote the nostalgic, evocative sleeve notes...

“It is still dark, and there is only a murmur of traffic from the distant main road as the 4.10am Shrewsbury to Aberystwyth Mail coasts in towards the signal box, slowing to pick up the single line token from the apparatus opposite. As the train passes, the driver opens up purposefully, and the train heads towards Westbury. The countryside is quiet again, and then just before dawn the signalman can be heard replacing the token for a goods train following at 5am. This time with a heavier train the engine is working harder, and the sounds bursts out from under the road bridge just before the box, and the driver picks up the token without slackening pace. After the train has passed the sound is carried back on the light air, gradually picking up speed into the distance.”

It's all there, isn't it? I don't even need to include a sound file. Indeed, there's not much more to add, except to say that it’s difficult to see how these recordings wound up being released by Sentinel. There’s no local content (the recordings weren’t made on any South-western lines), and the copyright date is 1988, long after Sentinel shut up shop (or so I believed), so I’ve no idea quite who or what made the connection. And Sentinel didn’t exactly have a history of marketing this type of album, though a fair few of them wound up in that “miscellaneous” section I referred to earlier. But there in the credits, it states “Thanks...for endless patience in remastering the tapes to Job Morris of Sentinel Records”.

Children. Singing.

Wow. Has it really been four months since I last updated this blog? And there’s been so much Sentinel-related news! Actually, there hasn’t, of course, but that’s no excuse to not write entries more frequently. Having said that, I’ve not really found much in the way of interesting Sentinel LPs of late, so here’s a bit about the first album I owned on the label. And one on which I actually appear...

I guess it must have been July 1976, which means I was 10 years old. Just before we broke up for the long summer holiday, our primary school teacher Mrs Ellery told us an exciting piece of news: Brenda Wootton was going to be recording an LP with various children’s choirs in west Cornwall, and our school choir had been chosen as one of the participants. Teach then played a tape of a couple of the songs Brenda had demoed, and may have handed out Banda-duplicated lyric sheets too, but I don’t really remember. It didn’t really matter: we were going to be on a record! How thrilling!

So when we all returned after the summer holiday, suitably scorched from too many long days on Perran beach, the record was quite a hot topic, and we spent many Friday afternoons with Mrs Ellery, honing our craft. Or did we? It doesn’t really sound like it, judging from the rather under-arranged performances I’m listening to now. But that’s beside the point: it’s not supposed to be Bohemian Rhapsody. The five songs on which we appear were recorded in Sentinel’s Newlyn studio one Sunday morning: we were all done by lunchtime. I think we recorded no more than three takes of anything. One of us sneezed during “Thunder & Lightning”, a song celebrating clotted cream & pasties, wouldn’t you know? The sneeze is there on the LP, unedited. Some of the other recordings on the LP were made in the music room of Ludgvan School, rather than the studio, lending an even more rustic air to the album’s ambience.

Anyway, it was an unforgettable experience. I remember peeking into the studio control room and thinking, “well, this would be a fine way to earn a living”.... though actually it was probably more “wow look at all the buttons & knobs”.  Both Brenda & Richard Gendall (who wrote most of the numbers too) were welcoming, helpful & funny, and the guitarist on the album – Al Fenn – was a member of west country folk-rockers Decameron, my mum’s favourite band at the time. She was dead impressed. I don’t remember seeing much of Job. I really should have been paying more attention.

As for the record itself (Children Singing; SENS 1036), it plays the charm card quite heavily as you’d expect, but is all wonderfully evocative (that word again!), at least for me. And – I’d imagine – it would probably conjure up a few memories from some of my fellow “choristers” too. So: is anyone out there? Luke Shirley? Zora Trapp? Would love to hear from you.      

Here's "Opie, Davy, Foote, Trevithick & Bone", the opening number on the album, and a paean to five Cornish heroes.

Twin Reverb

Now, here’s a curiosity. The Twintones were a duo from Nanpean consisting of organist Kay Tucker & her twin brother, drummer Gary. They were each only eleven years old when they recorded this album, Eleven Plus Two (SENS 1025), which consists of –how I hate to use this word- cheesy instrumental versions of many top hits of the day (Solitaire, Remember You’re A Womble, Y Viva Espana, Popcorn), 60s revivals (These Boots Are Made For Walking, Peyton Place) and more trad fare (Ode To Joy, Amazing Grace, Theme from the Dambusters). There’s also a single self-composed number on the album, a quaint ditty entitled Melody Waltz. They even take to trombone & euphonium on Remember You’re A Womble, and vocalise on their interpretation of Banana Rock (what, two Wombles covers on the same LP?!).
It’s all pretty competent –remarkably so for a couple of eleven year olds- so rather lacks the charm you might expect from a record played by pre-teenagers. What it does have in its favour is a sleeve note from Dick Emery, for whom they opened during a season at Talk Of The West, St Agnes in 1974. “It was a very great pleasure for me to meet Kay & Gary in Cornwall”, he claims, “and I wish them every success with their new record.” They must have been thrilled.
We also get a colour cover photo of what I believe is the interior of the Riverbank Studio in Newlyn, but you don’t really see much beyond a few mics and a 13 amp socket. Lovely photo of the combo though.