A Life in Music: Loz Kingsley and Vo Fletcher. Guitar and Mandolin. And how.

Definitely a string thing

In this edition of Lives in Music, I'm talking with Loz Kingsley and Vo Fletcher, Mandolin and Guitar players of great skill and experience. I met this pair, I think, back in 1974, when they were doing a session at the old BRMB Radio. They were no slouches then, and they've only got better since. To listen to the podcast episode, go here, or simply scroll down to the bottom of this post

Vo plays with a bewildering number of talented people all over the midlands and beyond, and he gets together with Loz, who only returned to live work with the much-missed Rhino and The Ranters, for regular and highly enjoyable sessions in some of the nicest boozers in the region. And of course, having spent nearly a year in lockdown, that's something I have missed enormously. There is some compensation with Vo running (as do many others) a live session on Facebook every Tuesday at 6pm.


They have, as you might expect, mighty track records, which you'll hear about. There's also some super live guitar and mandolin work to be enjoyed in this episode, along with a taster from Loz's new album, Vintage Mandolin.

Links

The Tuxedo Bay Facebook page
All you ever need to know about Jellikins
Rick Sanders and Vo Fletcher page on Costa Del Folk
Vo's weekly Wine O'Clock live sessions: Tuesdays 6pm on Facebook 

Albums
Loz's album Vintage Mandolin can be had by emailing loz1954@me.com 
Vo's new album is at vofletcher.com 

Vo and Loz's episode of Lives in Music

 

The Lives in Music Podcast series   

I've been doing this for about two years now. These are interviews with local 
musicians, looking at how music has shaped them throughout their lives. Series 3 
also looks hard at how lockdown has had an impact. There are some lovely stories. 

To see who's in the list of artists, here's a link to see every episode.

One further footnote: the intro and outro flourishes I'm using in this series of Lives in Music podcast come from Vo himself. I asked him for a bit of live impro, and this was the result.  

The Radio To Go blog
This blog has been going since 2007. I started it to focus mainly on radio stories, as the industry went through a series of convulsive changes. Those changes aren't over yet, not by a long chalk. Over the years I expanded the range of topics to cover local music, another subject close to my heart. I think it was a Destroyers gig that pulled me in that direction. I've banged out several hundred posts in that time, and of course deleted quite a few. But if you're interested in thoughts on the local scene and/or radio futures, by all means visit the full topic index on the Radio To Go blog

Photo credit for Vo Fletcher: Colston Halls

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A Life In Music: Gordon Giltrap

One of our finest craftsman. A fine guitarist and a really nice guy.

Imagine sitting right down in front of a terrific guitarist while he plays for you. It's an amazing privilege.

One of the things I try to do in the Lives In Music podcast series is to persuade my guests to include a little bit of live music as part of the conversation. That's tricky with, say, drummers, of course, so it doesn't always happen. 
But it happened here. Gordon was generous to a fault with his time.

Gordon Giltrap may be best known for his 'Heart Song' classic, but there is so much more to the man that that. Here, Gordon deconstructs some classic songs, plays some of his own material, and tells tales of his days as a wide-eyed teenager watching Paul Simon demo 'Bookends' to a folk club audience. 

This is a companion post to Lives in Music Podcast 9, featuring Gordon.
You can download it here, or scroll down to stream it from the bottom of this  page.

Gordon was playing as a scrap of a teenager in a scene that defined the best of UK 60s and 70s folk. He's still playing today, with boundless enthusiasm.

Links

Gordon Giltrap's website and facebook page carry details of his custom guitars, gigs, a freshly published biography and lots more.

There's a ton of iffy facebook clips, shot mostly on wobbly hand-held phones, of Gordon playing live. Some are good; most are bad and don't do you or Gordon any favours. For some 70s vintage, here's Gordon on Top of the Pops in 1977

And if you love the sound of Gordon's guitars, here's the Fylde Guitars website.

Lives in Music

The Lives in Music series celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. They all have stories.

The theme music for this series is by Big Q Fish. 'Boksburg Jive Toon' was written by Brian Neil, and recorded at the Jam House, Birmingham, in 2017.

Don't forget to subscribe!

Also published in Lives In Music  

all with show notes and music links 

1 - Ruby Turner 
2 -  Steve Ajao
3 - The Men Who Make Mellotrons
4 - Mike Hatton
5 - Horace Panter
6 - Jasper Carott   
7 - Sam Slater
8 - John Patrick
10 - Jim Simpson


The Podcast

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A Life In Music: Sam Slater

Old head, young shoulders...

I set myself a rule when working up ideas for the Lives in Music podcast series. Nobody under 50, please, otherwise the experiences and perspectives I hoped to glean might not be juicy enough.

Then, I promptly broke my rule for Sam Slater.

Sam is the youngest person featured in this series of Lives in Music, but he's packed an awful lot into his (relatively) tender years. I've known him for ages, since he first emerged in a lovely guitar trio, Trio Gitano, one of whose members, Sophia Johnson, is now earning rave reviews playing country and bluegrass in Austin Texas.

Sam moved on into Jazz and World music to great effect. A dab hand on guitar and other stringed instruments like the Oud, Sam has a bewildering range of activities, not counting his Jazz Label Stoney Lane, which documents some of the finest players in the West Midlands region of the UK. 

John broke out both guitar and oud to illustrate a couple of points. It was a sheer delight to listen. The podcast is here, to download or stream, or you can simply head to the player at the bottom of this page. 

Links

Stoney Lane Records
TG Collective
Paco De Lucia
The Oud

Lives in Music

The Lives in Music series celebrates people who have spent a lifetime in music. They may be famous; they may be people who have spent their lives working in the background for the love of it. They all have stories.

The theme music for this series is by Big Q Fish. 'Boksburg Jive Toon' was written by Brian Neil, and recorded at the Jam House, Birmingham, in 2017.


Don't forget to subscribe!

The Podcast

Also published in Lives In Music  

all with show notes and music links 

1 - Ruby Turner 
2 -  Steve Ajao
3 - The Men Who Make Mellotrons
4 - Mike Hatton
5 - Horace Panter
6 - Jasper Carott 
8 - John Patrick
9 - Gordon Giltrap
10 - Jim Simpson

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A conversation With Music: Gordon Giltrap.

This week, I'm thinking guitars and guitarists. Especially those with a few miles on the clock.

I was at a gig last week, packed with music veterans. Among them, the great guitar player Tony Kelsey, who, along with fellow muso Matt Worley, has criss-crossed the country collecting superstar guitarist signatures on a Fender, soon to be auctioned, to benefit Jerry Donahue: that particular story is here. There's hardly any room left on the guitar for more famous names. I came away thinking... guitar.
 

Guitarists. Skills. Seems to be a good combination.

Guitarists just seem to carry on longer than many in rock. The Guardian just ran a review listing the many incarnations of 70s prog-rockers Yes, all of whom tour; it's not just UB40 who have a bad case of multiple fractious identities. The last sentence was key:

“Arguments still rage about which band is really Yes, but with 70-year-old guitarist (Steve) Howe’s virtuosity undimmed... these time-served warriors are surely entitled to a few more moments in the sun.”

So, the incredibly ancient Steve Howe still struts his stuff. Good luck to him. 

The joy of watching skills honed over a lifetime

I take huge pleasure in watching veteran musos still at the top of their game. It's long been said that the very act of playing music is good for you, and I believe that. Of course, you need to avoid rock and roll excess, and factor in the sheer physical strain of, say, strapping a plank of wood across your shoulders for half a century.

But it's heartening to see so many of the musos I know from back in the day, still spry, still up for it, still savvy, and still, above all, thoroughly enjoying their craft.

A reunion forty years on

And that brings me to the newest radio show I've been working on. In 1976, as a young rock DJ at the old BRMB, I was very taken with an album from Gordon Giltrap. Again, I invite you to look him up if you're under 40. We met when he did the radio circuit to plug his album; it was a nice interview. 

A few years later, Gordon hit pay-dirt with 'Heartsong', which he still plays. That paydirt got richer still when the song was chosen to be the theme tune for BBC TV's Holiday programme.

And late last year, we met up again. Gordon's still here, and happy to be here too. He's still spry, as nimble-fingered as always, and as positive as ever. I went to his house to for what turned out to be a long and very convivial chat. Gordon is a man with stories: he has extraordinary tales of the UK 60s folk scene, when, starting as a fresh-faced 18 year old, he met, befriended, played and collaborated with some of the giants of the UK folk revival.

Conversations with music. Live music.

Now, every so often, I've been lucky to conduct an interview with a musician, who in between the chat, will sing and play right there in the studio. I did one a few years back with Brum favourites Steve Gibbons and John Caswell; another with Steve Ajao and Dave Wakelin. They were lovely shows to do, recorded under studio conditions, and if you are interested, Brum Radio has both on its listen-again page, here and here.

I love this kind of show. I've long wanted to do more. But of course, you need the right elements. Those are: favourable recording conditions, a musician of stature and experience, who can, and will, switch seamlessly between story telling and playing, ideally as naturally as if you were simply having a conversation. I'm thinking fondly of some rather fine pub nights in Killaloe in the West of Ireland, some 16 years back. Music conversations flowed and sang across the room. 

Pick up your guitar and play....

But you know what? Those elements all came together when I sat down with Gordon Giltrap. Gordon rolled out some great stories, and the cherry on the cake was that he was happy to break out his guitars, talk about them, discuss structure and technique, and above all play some stunning stuff. It was thrilling to sit three feet away from a great virtuoso, watching him play, really close up. I was very lucky.

So now, after some careful assembly work, you can hear the results. It is, indeed, a conversation with music. I haven't made this as a DJ show, with in-show intros for every piece of music; Gordon's live work is front and centre in the show, but on top of this absolute luxury, there are snatches of music from influential stars of the day as they came up in the conversation.

If you know all of these pieces, you're probably over 40 years old. If you don't, I list them at the end of the show. And when the show goes on to listen-again, as it will after its two Brum Radio airings, every detail will come up on your player as it happens.

That's why it's a conversation with music. Listen online right here...




I'm planning on doing more.  

Links: Gordon Giltrap's website
Photos from Mick Dodsworth
 

See more music posts on Radio To Go

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A Fairport alumnus in trouble; time to rally round...

A life of great guitar: Jerry Donahue

The peerless Tony Kelsey messaged me the other day. Tony's been in more bands that you can shake a stick at in his forty or so years on stage. He messaged to tell me of a sweet local initiative to benefit fellow guitar player Jerry Donahue. 

You may know the story; you may not. The bad news came in 2016. Jerry suffered a catastrophic stroke. He will almost certainly never play again. Strokes can do that: bang! and there's a whole new and horrible raw deal.

Jerry is from the States, based on the West Coast. He worked over here with great distinction in the 80s and 90s. He hasn't had much of a UK profile for, ooh, maybe twenty years. So, unsurprisingly and sadly, his news didn't make too much of a ripple: I missed it last year. And I was thunder struck when Tony got in touch with the news. 

In The Studio: Catherine Howe and Vo Fletcher

Music and conversation in the shadow of the Malvern Hills – a taste of a forthcoming audio project

Last week, on a bright late summer morning, the Malvern Hills shone invitingly in the sun. I'd headed out to meet up and record with Catherine Howe and Vo Fletcher. 

Vo is a stupendously fabulous guitarist; I've known him for at least forty years. Catherine Howe is someone I've known of for the same period of time, but we'd never met until now. Older hands may remember Catherine for a one-off hit in the 70s, 'Harry'. The two are now a performing duo, and have been for some ten years or so. Occasionally they are joined by Fairport stalwart Rick Sanders on fiddle, and Michael Gregory on drums. Sometimes Vo heads out with just Rick and Greg; it's that sort of flexible thing.

The plan was to do some recording: live, straight to stereo. With that we had a conversation for the blog. In due course, a lot more more material will emerge as a full-on radio show, part of a new series I'm working on. But readers of this blog are getting an early taste.