Music in the Eightees.

Music in my Life: Part Four

The 80s.

I left Salisbury Plain and moved to Arundel in Sussex to become the education officer at the Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust there. The Famous Willows Folk Club was on my doorstep and I got to play pubs and folk clubs pretty much weekly. 

One night, I was lolling in my arm chair while roasting my feet on the fire. Centuries before, the house I rented had been a sort of pub and a hang out for smugglers. The fireplace was as big as the kitchen.and I often fell asleep in front of it, still wearing my woolies and Barbour coat. I eventually heard a knock on the door and there, in the pouring rain, stood a young American girl who was to be our intern and my assistant, on loan from Slimbridge. We married a year later. 

There was a serious amateur dramatics scene in town and we did a few musical shows,. I enjoyed the social side of all that, but the folk music was the real deal. The Copper Family became close friends and even sang for us at our pre-wedding booze-up. 

There were some good bands around in the 80s but this was the decade of the synthesiser and it pervaded everything. Joan Armatrading, Steve Winwood, even Joni Mitchell fell under it’s spell. However, my favourite Joni album is from 1980 and it goes in the opposite direction. This double live album, called Shadows and Light is a jazzy masterpiece with Pat Metheny on guitar. Lyle Mays on keys, Don Allias on percussion, Michael Brecker on sax and, ……wait for it………Jaco Pastorius on bass. It’s probably my favourite album of all time.

Eberhard Weber and Jan Garbarek

We moved to Scotland where I was the new warden at the RSPB’s Vane Farm Reserve, less than an hour from Edinburgh. My new hi-fi took pride of place on the roof of my car all the way up from England. 

I remember driving up to Mull for a spring camping trip (it was freezing cold with snow on the hills) and listening to Mark Knopfler’s music for the film “Local Hero”. The real local hero was a musician called Dougie Maclean who I had met in Sussex years before. He provided the music for the film “Last of the Mohicans” and ran a thriving studio and record label up the road from us in Dunkeld. His most famous song “Caledonia” is an unofficial National Anthem up there.  

The Scottish folk scene is quite different from the English one, but we loved going to the clubs and the ceilidhs. Archie Fisher hosted the weekly folk show on the radio and he spent a lot of time in Canada with a singer called Stan Rogers who, like Ewan McColl  before him, wrote songs that everyone thought were traditional. His Northwest Passage sing, about driving a truck across the tundra, is a Canadian classic.

Then there was Edinburgh with its Festival. We went to a huge number of gigs in our first year up there. Edinburgh was on the tour list for many of the great bands, and there was a good jazz scene too. One of the best concerts was a solo gig by John Martin when he was in his prime.

Jan Garbarek in Edinburgh

The ECM record label launched an era of “chamber jazz” based around an international set of musicians that some called the Third Viennese School, though many of them also went to the Berklee Music School. Jan Garbarek is a Norwegian sax player with a very characteristic pure tone, Eberhard Weber played an electric double bass that sounded more like a cello. The pianists Keith Jarrett and Chic Corea signed up and Gary Burton played vibes while Ralph Towner brought his 12 string along. Everyone had their own band, made up of other soloists who had their own bands too. You could call it a collective. Every time I  saw them there was a different line up. I missed seeing Bill Frisell play guitar with them but I caught David Torn doing his weird computerised, pedal powered and over-driven guitar to create a ghostly, impressionistic backing to  Garbareks sparse, ringing, plainsong sax-ballads.

After our son Nicholas was born, we didn’t go out quite so much. The first concert we went to was a band called the Rolling Stones (‘remember them?). They were playing a football stadium in Glasgow on a summer’s Sunday afternoon. They were not allowed to play after ten pm, so the show was in such bright sunlight that the lighting and the big projected images struggled to have any effect. The band was a long way away and I’m afraid we got a bit bored, and so we left early to get a bite to eat on the way home. Scottish Sunday nights were a wee bit dull in those days and we didn’t find anywhere open. Our babysitter was astonished when we fell in the door, stone sober and famished.