Captain Swing- part 2

In my last post I'd brought the story to the point where we'd given ourselves a name- "Captain Swing" and we'd started playing a little further afield.

I first saw Jasper Carrot at the Cambridge Folk Festival in 1972. I enjoyed his songs, especially "Bastity Chelt" and this song "The Twelve Days of Christmas"



The band that played the sessions numbered anything between six and sixteen musicians, but we settled on a core of five players for the folk club slots. These were George (a Scotsman)on vocals, Rod Sherman (an Englishman- more on him in a moment) played flute and sang, Another Scotsman called Willie played concertina, yet another Scot by the name of Fin on guitar, and myself on mandolin. Yes- three Scotsmen and two Englishmen.
So it was quite a surprise when we were asked to take over an Irish group's two pub residencies while they took a holiday.
They were called the James Connolly Folk Group- after a leading member of the 1916 Easter uprising. That's right a staunch Republican, pro-IRA band....
and we were either Scots or English.....

We had four dates a week to fulfil. Friday nights and Sunday lunchtimes were at the Hop Poles in King Street, while Saturday and Sunday nights were spent at the Willesden Junction Hotel in Harlesden. Both pubs were 100% Irish, and the troubles were just starting...
I had a PA and Willie had a Mini Clubman. Somehow I managed to fit the PA in his car, but we had to tie the rear doors shut as the speakers were too long, and we drove to the Hop Poles. I can still remember the atmosphere as we walked in and started to set up. All that was missing was the chicken wire in front of the stage. The barmen all had baseball bats under the counter and seemed all too ready to use them. Gulp.
I resolved to keep my mouth shut, keep my head down and just play. They let us live and we were back again on Sunday lunchtime. The Willesden Junction Hotel had a much larger music room with a stage in the corner, and it was packed every night.

We settled down and for the next four weeks we were an Irish band playing Irish traditional music- even though we were three Scots and two English. It was quite an education.
Part of that education included learning that many "traditional" Irish tunes and songs carried political overtones. Some tunes were Republican, while others were Loyalist, and you took your life in your hands if you played the "wrong" tune in the venue.

We played a lot of Irish tunes and songs, but also a lot of Scottish tunes and songs as well. We also included a few shanties courtesy of our flute player Rod Shearman. He was the oldest member of our group and had spent a lifetime at sea.
He was a songwriter and we sang a few of his songs and shanties in our set.
He died in 1984 but here's a picture I stumbled upon

Here's link to a site about his songs
http://www.chanteycabin.co.uk/Rod%20Shearman/Rod%20Shearman.htm

I stopped playing with Captain Swing early in 1974 when we moved from London to Northampton. I enjoyed playing traditional music and I included a set of jigs and reels in the repertoire of the next two bands I played in.

I thought I'd said goodbye to folk music...but then-

We holidayed in the far North West of Scotland in 1977. We stayed not far from Gairloch in Sutherland and one evening we visited a pub in a tiny hamlet called Badachro. There were three musicians playing in the corner of the bar and we sat listening to them and enjoying the beer. Eventually I went up to them and asked if I might play a tune for them. I managed to remember enough of a tune and drunkenly stumbled through it and was rewarded with another pint. We got chatting and they seemed familiar, I asked if they'd ever played in London and yes they had.
It's a small world. We'd played together in a session in Kings Cross a few years earlier.

Fast forward to 1989 or thereabouts. My all-time favourite band Fairport Convention were on tour and they were playing a date in Northampton, just down the road from where we were living in Kettering.
Imagine my joy and pleasure when my all time favourite band played one of Rod Shearman's songs "London River". It just brought all the memories back.

I started this series of reminiscences with the words of a Richard Thompson song that has become their signature tune.
"If you really mean it, it all comes round again".
This year, almost forty years after I first stumbled upon the session at the Duke of Clarence in West London, I started attending the local open mike evenings in the area. To cut a long story short, I met up with a couple of local musicians I'd known for a few years and started to play at the local session at the Dukes Arms in a small village near Kettering. The tunes I learned back then are coming back out and bringing pleasure to a whole new audience.