PROMOTIONS / MUSIC ARCHIVE 1966 to 2009
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RAINYDAY GIG LIST A list of concerts, festivals, dances, readings, talks etc booked by Martin Val Baker in various westcountry venues from 1966 - under the title Rainyday Promotions since the early eighties
PLUS an interview with Martin - bottom of page
1966/67
Thursdays WINTER GARDENS PENZANCE Residents: PETE CHATTERTON. VERNON ROSE, IRIS GITTENS.
1.
2.
3.
4. SHIRLEY COLLINS plus Jonathan Coudrille.
5.
6.
7.
8. CYRIL TAWNEY
9.
10.
11. HEDY WEST.
12.
13. JOHN SLEEP
14.
15.
1970
ST IVES GUILDHALL
16.August 21st: THE TEMPLE CREATURES, Kris Gayle & The Jazz Roots, Mike Silver, Chrissy Quayle, Bob Devereux, High Speed Gas
17. September10th: THE TEMPLE CREATURES, Kris Gayle & The Jazz Roots, Mike Silver, Chrissy Quayle, Bob Devereux, High Speed Gas.
1971
ST IVES GUILDHALL
18. June 4th: CLIVES ORIGINAL BAND, Ron Smith Quartet, Bocvum, Iris Gittens.
19. June 11th: GORDON GILTRAP, High Speed Gas, Jonathan Baker, Roger Brooks.
20. June18th: MIKE SILVER, and Friends
21. August 13th. STEVE TILSTON, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux, Jim Hughes.
22. August 20th: MIKE SILVER, Mike Beeson, Don Fowler, Phil Donne.
1972
Mr PEGGOTYS ST IVES
23.June 28th: Roger Brooks, Alan Greenhall, Denys Stephens.
24.July 5th: Iris Gittens, Phil Donne, Denys Stephens.
25.July 12th: Nicki Tester, Alan Greenhall, Phil Donne, Denys, Stephens, Karen Evans.
26. July 19th: ROGER BROOKS, Alan Greenhall, Phil Donne, Denys Stephens.
27. July 26th: SWEET WILLIAM, Phil Donne, Alan Greenhall.
28. August 2nd: MASK, Phil Donne, Alan Greenhall, Denys Stephens.
29. August 9th: MIKE SILVER, Phil Donne, Alan Greenhall, Bob Devereux,.
30. August 16th: HALCYON, Denys Stephens, Vicky.
31. August23rd: ROGER BROOKS, Chrissy Quayle, Phil Donne.
32. August 30th: DAVE EVANS, Denys Stephens, Alan Greenhall.
33. September 6th: Alan Greenhall, Phil Donne, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux, Roger Brooks.
34. September 13th: MIKE SILVER, Denys Stephens, Alan Greenhall. M. C. at all Barry.
__________________
PENWITH GALLERY
35. December19th: MASK, Mick McCreadie, Phil Donne, Alan Greenhall.
_______________________________
1973
MR PEGGOTTYS ST IVES
36. April 24th: STEVE TILSTON, + support.
37. May 27th: ALCHEMY, Roger Brooks, Chrissy Quayle, Phil Donne, Don & Alan.
38. June 3rd: MICK McCREADIE, Chrissy Quayle, Phil Donne.
39. June 10th: 3.C.K. Alchemy, Don, Stephen, Geoff.
40. June 17th: CHRISSY QUAYLE, Phil Donne, Don & Alan.
______________________________
TYACKS CAMBORNE
41. June 11th: ALCHEMY, Chrissy Quayle, Don Fowler.
42. June 18th: MICK McCREADIE, Alchemy, Alan Greenhall, Barry.
______________________________
43. June24th: AL JONES, Alchemy, Phil Donne.
44. July 1st: KEITH HILLS, Alchemy, Don & Alan, Chrissy Quayle.
45. July 8th: STEVE TILSTON, Alchemy, Phil Donne.
46. July 15th. FRIEDMANNN, Chrissy Quayle, Don Fowler.
47. July 22nd: WIZZ JONES, Alchemy, Phil Donne, Bob Devereux.
48. July 29th: Don Fowler, Chrissy Quayle, Phil Donne, Alchemy.
49. August 5th: MASK, Phil Donne, Alchemy.
______________________________
ST IVES GUILDHALL
50. August 10th: LAZY FARMER, Mask, Mike Silver, Chrissy Quayle.
_______________________________
51. August 12th: MIKE SILVER, Don Fowler, Chrissy Quayle, Bob Devereux.
52. August 19th : THE CELEBRATED RATLIFFE STOUT BAND, Phil Donne, Denys Stephens.
53. August 26th: JOHN BIDWELL, Chrissy Quayle, Don Fowler.
54. September 2nd: STEVE TILSTON, Alchemy, Phil Donne.
55. September 9th: CHRISSY QUAYLE, Phil, Denys, Sue, Bob, Demelza, Graham. M.C. Bob Devereux _______________________________
PENWITH GALLERY
56. November 30th: MASK.
_______________________________
1974
ST IVES GUILDHALL
57. May 25th: SCARLET RUNNER, Mastermind, Keith Hills, Ice Breaker.
58. July 18th: SCARLET RUNNER, Mastermind, Nigel Mazlyn Jones, Chrissy Quayle, Jacob Bush.
______________________________
59. December 19th: PENWITH GALLERY: SCARLET RUNNER, Mastermind, Bob Devereux.
_____________________________
1975
ST IVES GUILDHALL:
60. May 20th: CROOKS & NANNIES, Mastermind.
_______________________________
MR PEGGOTTYS ST IVES:
61. June 1st: Don & Alan, Chrissie, Ufi, Jake Bush.
62.June 8th: THE FAREWELL BAND, Denys Stephens, Chrissy Quayle.
63. June 15th: KEITH HILLS, Adrian O Reilly, Chrissy Quayle, Denys Stephens.
64. June 22nd: CREEPIN JANE, Mike Collins, Denys Stephens.
65. June 29th: JONATHAN COUDRILLE, Clive Palmer, Keith Hills, Frank, Chrissy Quayle.
66.July 6th: ROGER BROOKS, Mike Collins, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux.
67. July 13th: THE CELEBRATED RATLIFFE STOUT BAND, Chrissy Quayle, Frank, Jake Bush.
_______________________________
68. July17th: ST IVES GUILDHALL STEVE TILSTON, DAVE EVANS, The Farewell Band, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux. _______________________________
69. July 20th: CLIVE PALMER, Keith Hills, Denys Stephens.
70. July 27th:THE FAREWELL BAND, Chrissy Quayle, Frank, Jacob Bush.
_______________________________
ST IVES GUILDHALL
71. July 31st: WIZZ JONES,JOHN JAMES, Nigel Mazlyn Jones, Chrissy Quayle, Jacob Bush, Bob Devereux. _______________________________
72. August 3rd: JOHN JAMES, Mike Collins, Denys Stephens.
73.August 10th: CROOKS & NANNIES, Chrissie&Kevin,Frank.
_______________________________
ST IVES GUILDHALL
74. August 14th: CLIVE PALMER, Crooks&Nannies, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux.
_______________________________
75.August 17th: ROGER BROOKS, Mike Colins,Denys Stephens, Jacob Bush.
76. August 24th: WIZZ JONES, Clive Palmer, Chrissy & Kevin.
_______________________________
ST IVES GUILDHALL
77. August 28th: DECAMERON, Kris Gayle Band,Nigel Mazlyn Jones, Bob Devereux.
_______________________________
78.August 31st: STEVE TILSTON, Denys Stephens, Frank, Jacob Bush.
79. September 7th: KEITH HILLS, Chrissy Quayle, Jacob Bush.
80. September 14th: CLIVE PALMER, Frank, Jacob Bush.
_______________________________
PARISH ROOMS
81. December 29th: CROOKS & NANNIES, Pete Berryman, John Bidwell, Mick Bennet, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux.
WINTER GARDENS
82. December 30: CROOKS & NANNIES,Clive Palmer, Pete Berryman, John Bidwell, Mick Bennet, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux.
1976
83. April 20th: WIZZ JONES, Clive Palmer, Crooks &Nannies, Bob Devereux, John Bidwell.
WINTER GARDENS
84. June 1st: THE DYNAMIC ACES, Clive Palmer, Adrian O Reilly, Bob Devereux.
85. June 8th: KEITH HILLS, Clive Palmer, Colin Smith, Stephen, Bob Devereux.
86. June 15th: JOHN JAMES, Creepin Jane, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux.
87. June 22nd: JOHN COX BAND, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux, Stephen, Colin Smith.
88. June 29th; STAVERTON BRIDGE, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux, Denys Stephens.
89. July 6th: CROOKS & NANNIES, Roger Brooks, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux, Colin Smith.
90. July 8th: ST IVES GUILDHALL CROOKS & NANNIES, Roger Brooks, Clive Palmer Bob Devereux Colin Smith
91. July 13th: WINTER GARDENS MIKE SILVER, Crooks & Nannies, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux.
92. July 15th: ST IVES GUILDHALL MIKE SILVER, Crooks & Nannies, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux.
93. July 20th: WINTER GARDENS CROOKS & NANNIES, Clive Palmer, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux.
94. July 22nd: ST IVES GUILDHALL CROOKS & NANNIES, Clive Palmer, Roger Brooks, Bob Devereux.
95. July 27th: WINTER GARDENS MICHAEL CHAPMAN, Crooks & Nannies, Clive Palmer Bob Devereux.
96. July 29th: ST IVES GUILDHALL MICHAEL CHAPMAN, Crooks &Nannies, Clive Palmer Bob Devereux.
97. August 3rd: WINTER GARDENS JOHN RENBOURN & JACQUIMcSHEE, Steve Tilston, Crooks & Nannies, Clive Palmer, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux.
98. August 5th: ST IVES GUILDHALL JOHN RENBOURN & JACQUIMcSHEE, Steve Tilston, Crooks & Nannies, Clive Palmer, Denys Stephens, Bob Devereux.
99. August 10th: WINTER GARDENS CROOKS & NANNIES, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux.
100. August 12th: ST IVES GUILDHALL CROOKS & NANNIES, Clive Palmer, Bob Devereux, Keith Hills
101. August 17th: WINTER GARDENS JOHN WILLIAMS BIG BAND Crooks & Nannies
102. August19th: ST IVES GUILDHALL JOHN WILLIAMS BIG BAND Kris Gayle Band
103. August 26th; ST IVES GUILDHALL JOHN JAMES.
_______________________________
1977 No Promotions?
_______________________________ .
1978
ST IVES GUILDHALL
104. July 25th: CLIVE PALMER, Keith Hills, Colin Smith, Adrian O Reilly, Mick Mc Creadie, Larry Law, Dick Reynolds, Peter Vastl, Nial Timmins.
1978 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
105. September 14th: BERT JANSCH GROUP,Wizz Jones, Roger Brooks.
106. September 15th: STEFAN GROSSMAN, JOHN RENBOURN, DAVEY GRAHAM .
107. September 16th: TANNAHILL WEAVERS, Stockroom Five, Celebrated Ratliffe Stout Band.
108. September 18th: DON RENDELL, the Jazz Roots .
Mr PEGGOTTYS:
109. September 14th: Niall Timmins, Dick Reynolds and Friends.
110. September 15th: KNACKERS YARD.
111. September 16th. STEVE TILSTON.
PARISH ROOMS
112. September 14th. Bob Devereux & Clive Palmer.
113. September 15th: Celebrated Ratliffe Stout Band.
114. Septembern 16th: John the Fish, Mick Mc Creadie, John Bidwell.
1979
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
115. May 29th: BOB DEVEREUX & CLIVE PALMER, Tim Wellard, Dick Reynolds.
ST IVES GUILDHALL
116. July 12th: TANNAHILL WEAVERS, Rhombus.
117. July 26th ROBIN WILLIAMSON AND HIS MERRY BAND, Rhombus.
ST AUSTELL ARTS CENTRE
118 . July 20th: RHOMBUS.
1979 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
119. September 13th: MICHAEL CHAPMAN, Mike Silver, Earl Okin.
120. September 14th: JUNE TABOR & MARTIN SIMPSON, Ratliffe Stout Band, Jake Walton.
121. September 15th: MADDY PRIOR BAND, Wizz Jones, Adrian O Reilly.
122. September17th: MIKE WESTBROOK BRASS BAND.
123. September 21st: BRENDA WOOTTON, Matchbox Purveyors etc.
124. September 22nd: GEORGE MELLY & JOHN CHILTONS FEETWARMERS.
1980
125. March 3rd: WINTER GARDENS ROBIN WILLIAMSON, Orion.
126. May 21st: PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE BOB DEVEREUX and support.
127. July 22nd: ST IVES GUILDHALL THE TANNAHILL WEAVERS
_______________________________
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
128. July 24th: NIGEL MAZLYN JONES
129. August 2nd: ROGER McGOUGH, Bob Devereux .
130. August 14th: MICHAEL CHAPMAN & MICK MCc CREADIE.
131. August 17th: THE BARNEYS.
_______________________________
1980 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
132. September 2nd: MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA
133. September 6th: JOHN MARTYN, and support.
134. September 7th: BRENDA WOOTTON & Four Lanes Choir.
135. September 11th: THE BATTLEFIELD BAND & SHEGUI.
136. September 12th: CHRIS BARBER BAND with OTTILIE PATTERSON.
137. September 13th: GEORGIE FAME & THE BLUE FLAMES.
138. September 20th: BOB KERRS WHOOPPEE BAND.
PARISH ROOMS
139. September 13th: CLIVE PALMER & FREINDS
PENWITH GALLERY
140. September 16th: DYLANS DAUGHTER
141.September 18th: THE CITY WAITES.
_______________________________
ST IVES RUGBY CLUB
142. November 22nd: GEORGE MELLY & JOHN CHILTONS FEETWARMERS.
_______________________________
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
143. October ?: BRIAN PATTEN.
144. December 4th: BERT JANSCH CONUNDRUM & JOHN RENBOURN.
145. December 14th: CHRISTOPHER LOGUE.
1981
146. January 30th: DAVE EVANS, plus support.
147. March 13th: ARIZONA SMOKE REVIEW.
148. March 20th; ROSIE HARDMAN & JON GILLESPIE
. _______________________________
ST IVES GUILDHALL
149. June 23rd: THE BLACK THEATRE OF PRAGUE
_______________________________
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
150. June 16th: OPENING CLUB NIGHT.
151. June 23rd: ADRIAN O REILLY, Keith Hills.
152. June 30th: COLIN SMITH & ANNIE FOYLE.
153. July 1st: OSSIAN ELLIS.
154. July 5th: FRANK PERRY.
155. July 7th: CHRIS SMITHERS.
156. July 14th: PETE BERRYMAN.
157. July 17th: ROY RAY 100 years of Art in St Ives.
158. July 21st: CLIVE PALMER.
159. July 25th: SHEGUI.
160: July 28th: SPIDER JOHN KOERNER.
161. August 4th: JOHNN JAMES.
162. August 11th: NOEL & PAM BETOWSKI.
163. August 18th. MICHAEL CHAPMAN.
164. August 22nd: BUCCA.
165. August 25th: Residents.
166. September 1st : NIGEL MAZLYN JONES.
167. September8th: MICK McCREADIE.
168. September 15th: Club Season FINALE Residents.
1981 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
169. September 4th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON, Brian Patten, Clive Palmer, Douglas Cook.
170. September 5th: THE TROPIC ISLES STEEL BAND.
171. September 11th: DAVE SWARBRICK & FREINDS, Earl Okin.
172. September 12th: HUMPHREY LYTTLETON BAND.
173. September 19th: THE TEMPERANCE SEVEN , Mounts Bay Syncapators.
PENWITH GALLERY
174. September 9th: PEASANTS ALL.
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
175. September26th: JOHN RENBOURN, Adrian O Reilly.
176. September 28th: BARBARA THOMPSONS PARAPHENALIA.
177. October 9th: MARTIN CARTHY.
178. October 13th. ALAN SCHILLER.
179. October 24th: CHARLES CAUSLEY.
180. November 11th: THE LIGHT BLUES.
181. November 14th: EARL OKIN.
182. November 21st: MIKE SILVER.
183. December 5th: DECAMERON.
184. December 12th: ROGER BROOKS.
ST JOHNS HALL
185. December 17th: CHRIS BARBERS JAZZ & BLUES BAND.
1982
ST IVES GUILDHALL
186. April 30th: MAINSQUEEZE.
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
187. May 11th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON.
188. June 3rd: WIZZ JONES.
189. June 29th: EARL OKIN.
190. July 1st: MARGARET DRABBLE.
191. July 6TH: THE RECESSIONS.
192. July 13TH: BUCCA.
193. July 17th: ROGER McGOUGH.
194. July 20TH: MICHAEL CHAPMAN.
195. July 27TH: ROBIN WILLIAMSON.
196. August 3rd: DAVEY GRAHAM.
197. August 10th: JOHN RENBOURN.
198. August 17th: ROGER BROOKS.
199. August 6th: LOL COXHILL with Mike Cooper and Dave Holland.
200. August 24th: MARTIN SIMPSON.
201. August 31st: Folk Blues & Rags.
202.September 4th: ARTHUR CADDICK.
203. October9th: DAVE EVANS.
204. October 16th: BERT JANSCH & Nigel Smith.
205. October 20th: DANNIE ABSE.
206. October 21st: BARBARA THOMPSONS PARAPHENALIA.
207. November 24th: MIKE SILVER.
208. December 9th: A LITTLE WESTBROOK MUSIC.
ST JOHNS HALL
209. October29th: THE BLACK THEATRE OF PRAGUE.
1982 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
210. September 3rd: KEITH TIPPETS OVARY LODGE.
211. September 11th: THE CHIEFTAINS.
212. September 18th: BLACK ROOTS & ZAMBULA.
1983
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
213. February 3rd: LONDON GABRIELLI BRASS ENSEMBLE.
214. April 16th: BUCCA.
215 July 12th: SHEGUI.plus Adrian O Reilly.
216. August 1st: EARL OKIN.
217. August 2nd: EARL OKIN.
218. August 4th: EARL OKIN.
219. August 5th: EARL OKIN.
220. August 6th: EARL OKIN.
221. September28th: at Demelzas. BARBARA THOMPSONS PARAPHENALIA
222. October ? : at Demelzas. GEORGIE FAME & THE BLUE FLAMES.
ST MARYS CHURCH
223. May 29th: THE ALLEGRI STRING QUARTET.
1984
UNION HOTEL PENZANCE
224. February 4th: ZAMBULA.
225. June 16th: ZAMBULA.
226. August 4th: ZAMBULA.
SEYMOUR HOTEL TOTNES
227. October 21st: ZAMBULA.
ST GERMANS
228. Whitsun: (26th & 27th May) ELEPHANT FOLK FESTIVAL
Alan Stivell & his Breton Musicians, Stocktons Wing, Maddy Prior Band,Dave Swarbricks Whippersnapper, Bert Jansch Band, Gordon Giltrap, Jake Walton, Michael Chapman, Dave Cousins, Martin Simpson, Jon Benns & Bill Zorn, Leon Rosselson, Wizz Jones, English Tapestry, Clive Palmer, Adrian O Reilly, Wendy Herman, Chucklefoot, etc, etc.
1985
229. February 15th: ZAMBULA. plus Bridesmother- Demelzas
230. April 9th: ZAMBULA.- Demelzas 231.
May 10th ZAMBULA. plus The Jack Rabbits and Theatre Rotto- Demelzas.
232. June 8th: ZAMBULA & MONSOON Totnes Civic Hall.
233. June 15th: ZAMBULA-St Ives Rugby Club. 234.
June 21st: ZAMBULA- Demelzas. 235.
July 18th: ZAMBULA- St Ives Guildhall. 236.
July 19th: ZAMBULA. - Demelzas
237. August 23rd: ZAMBULA. - Demelzas
238. August 26th:
LAMORNA FAYRE.
ZAMBULA,The Strangers, Clive Palmer, Bluestrain, Brides Mother, Sunshine Blues Band, Adrian O Reilly, Shiva Theatre, etc etc.
239. December 28th: ZAMBULA+ Paint the Man Pink + Theatre Rotto+ Sunshine Blues Band. - Demelzas
1986
240. June 10th: KAREN EVANS. - Union Hotel, Penzance.
241. June 13th: KAREN EVANS.- Penwith Gallery.
1987
ST JOHNS HALL
242: July 16th: THE REAL SOUNDS OF AFRICA, plus Style & Fashion.
DEMELZAS
243. March 19th: WILKO JOHNSON, & The Greasey Hat Band.
244. August21st: DESMOND DEKKER & THE ACES & The Dance Band.
245. September25th: TAXI PATA PATA, & The Nancledra Hillbillies.
246. October 16th: LE RUE, + The Bad Boys.
247. November 13th: FLACO JIMINEZ & His SAN ANTONIO BAND +The Thundering Typhoons.
248. December 4th: LOVEMORE MAJAIVANA AND THE ZULU BAND plus The Bad Boys.
PENZANCE ARTS CENTRE
249. October 24th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON, and Clive Palmers Charlie Cool Quartet.
1988
WESTERN HOTEL ST IVES
250.May 14th: EARL OKIN, The Bad Boys, Adrian O Reilly.
WINTER GARDENS
251. August 25th: REMY ONGALA AND THE ORCHESTRE SUPER MATIMILLA.
252. September 29th: HARARE DREAD, plus Jaroma.
253. November 24th: ZAMBULA, plus Jaroma.
254. December 29th: ZAMBULA, plus Colin Smith & Annie Foyle.
TOTNES CIVIC HALL
255. November 26th: ZAMBULA, plus Jaroma.
1989
256. March 23rd: -TRURO CITY HALL ZAMBULA, plus Jaroma.
257. March 25th. -DARTMOUTH GUILDHALL ZAMBULA, plus Cauldron.
258. March 31st:-LAUNCESTON TOWN HALL ZAMBULA, plus Backdoor Men.
259. April 1st: St Georges Hall, EXETER. ZAMBULA, plus Urban Verbs.
260. April 7th: WADEBRIDGE TOWN HALL ZAMBULA, plus Jaroma.
ACORN PENZANCE
261. August 16th: BERT JANSCH & PETER KIRTLEY, and Roger Brooks.
262. August 17th: BERT JANSCH & PETER KIRTLEY, and Roger Brooks.
263. August 30th: MICHAEL CHAPMAN, and Nigel Mazlyn Jones.
264. August 31st: MICHAEL CHAPMAN, and Nigel Mazlyn Jones.
265. October 25th. ZAMBULA.- Western Hotel St Ives.
266. October 28th: ZAMBULA.- White Hart, Hayle.
ACORN
267.November 15th: JUNE TABOR, and Mick Mc Creadie.
268.November 16th: JUNE TABOR, and Mick Mc Creadie.
269. December 6th: JOHN RENBOURN & JACQUI McSHEE, plus Noel & Pam Betowski.
270. December 7th: JOHN RENBOURN & JACQUI McSHEE, plus Noel & Pam Betowski.
1990
ACORN
271. July 18th: S.E. ROGIE, plus Hank & the Wolf.
272. July 19th: S.E. ROGIE, plus Hank & the Wolf.
273. July 25th: The MRS ACKROYD BAND.
274. July 26th: The MRS ACKROYD BAND.
275. July 31st: ROBIN WILLIAMSON & BOB DEVEREUX at Truro Museum.
276. August 1st: ROBIN WILLIAMSON &WIZZ JONES.
277. August 2nd: ROBIN WILLIAMSON &WIZZ JONES.
278. AUGUST 8th: MADDY PRIOR & RICK KEMP, plus Wendy Herman.
279. AUGUST 9th: MADDY PRIOR & RICK KEMP, plus Wendy Herman.
280. August 15th: QUIMANTU. 281. August 16th: QUIMANTU.
282. AUGUST 22nd: RORY McLEOD, plus Adrian O Reilly.
283. AUGUST 23rd: RORY McLEOD, plus Adrian O Reilly.
284. August 29th: CILL CHAIS, and FRANKIE ARMSTRONG.
285. August 29th: CILL CHAIS, and FRANKIE ARMSTRONG.
286. September 5th: BERT JANSCH & PETER KIRTLEY plus STEVE TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE.
287. September 6th: BERT JANSCH & PETER KIRTLEY plus STEVE TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE.
288. September12th: THE KATHRYN TICKELL BAND.
289. September13th: THE KATHRYN TICKELL BAND.
290. October 19th: TOM HALL & THE STRUNG OUT SISTERS plus Adrian O Reilly.
291. November8th: ROY RAY- 100 years of Art in St Ives.
292. November15th: ROGER SLACK- Alfred Wallis Lecture.
1991
THE ACORN
293. April 25th: LA MUSGANA.
294. June 4th: MICHAEL CHAPMAN plus Patrick Walker.
295. July 17th : THE HANK WANGFORD BAND plus The Half Human Video Show.
296. July 18th : THE HANK WANGFORD BAND plus The Half Human Video Show.
297. July 24th: RAMBLING JACK ELLIOT plus Clive Palmer.
298. July 25th: RAMBLING JACK ELLIOT plus Clive Palmer.
299. July 31st: SYNCOPACE 300. August 1st: SYNCOPACE.
301. August 7th: MAKVIRAG & MELANIE HARROLD.
302. August 8th: MAKVIRAG & MELANIE HARROLD.
_______________________________
DESMOND DEKKER AND THE ACES TOUR with JAROMA
303. Augut 12th: The Barn Club Penzance
304. August 13th: The Shire Horse St Ives
305. August 14th: Truro City Hall.
_______________________________
ACORN
306 August 14th: THE BUTTERMOUNTAIN BOYS plus WIZZ JONES.
307. August 15th: THE BUTTERMOUNTAIN BOYS plus WIZZ JONES.
308. August 21st: JUNE TABOR plus TOM HALL & THE STRUNG OUT SISTERS.
309. August 22nd: JUNE TABOR plus TOM HALL & THE STRUNG OUT SISTERS.
310. August 28th: VERMONTEN PLAGE plus Dr Syntax.
311. August 29th: VERMONTEN PLAGE plus Dr Syntax.
312. September 4th: THE BARELY WORKS.
313. September 5th: THE BARELY WORKS.
314. September18th: JOHN RENBOURN & ISAAC GUILLORY.
315. September19th: JOHN RENBOURN & ISAAC GUILLORY.
316. September 25th: SILEAS.
317. September 26th: SILEAS.
318. November 2nd: ANNE BRIGGS.
1992
THE ACORN
319. June 22nd: JOHN SURMAN.
320. June 23rd: LA MUSGANA.
_______________________________
ST JOHNS HALL
321. June 24th: THE BARELY WORKS.
_______________________________
322. July 8th: VASMALOM.
323. July 9th: VASMALOM.
324. July 15th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON plus STEVE TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE.
325. July 16th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON plus STEVE TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE.
TOTNES CIVIC HALL
326. July 17th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON plus STEVE TILSTON & MAGGIE BOYLE.
_______________________________
THE ACORN
327. July 22nd: THE HANK WANGFORD BAND plus Bates Motel 328.
July 23rd: THE HANK WANGFORD BAND plus Bates Motel
_______________________________ .
TOTNES CIVIC HALL
329. July 24th: THE HANK WANGFORD BAND.
_______________________________
THE ACORN
330. July 29th: THE KATHRYN TICKELL BAND.
331. July 30th: THE KATHRYN TICKELL BAND.
332. August 5th: THE POOZIES plus Wendy Herman.
333. August 6th: THE POOZIES plus Wendy Herman.
334. August12th: FOUR MEN & A DOG plus WIZZ JONES.
335. August13th: FOUR MEN & A DOG plus WIZZ JONES.
336. August 19th. WOOD & CUTTING plus TOM HALL.
337. August 20th: WOOD & CUTTING plus TOM HALL.
338. August 26th: MUSIKAS.
339. August 27th: MUSIKAS.
340. September 2nd: BERT JANSCH & JACQUI McSHEE.
341. September 3rd: BERT JANSCH & JACQUI McSHEE.
342. September 9th. ALIAS RON KAVANA.
343. September 10th. ALIAS RON KAVANA.
1993
THE ACORN
344. July 14th: GREGOR SCHECTORS KLEZMER BAND.
345. July 15th: GREGOR SCHECTERS KLEZMER BAND.
346. July 21st: FOUR MEN & A DOG. 347.
July 22nd: FOUR MEN & A DOG. 348.
July 28th: TARIKA SAMMY.
349. July 29th: TARIKA SAMMY.
350. August4th: THE BARELY WORKS.
351. August5th: THE BARELY WORKS.
352. August 11th: JUNE TABOR.
353. August 12th: JUNE TABOR.
354. August18th: DEMBO KONTE & KASAU KANYA.
355. August19th: DEMBO KONTE & KASAU KANYA.
356. August 25th: AFTERHOURS.
357. August 26th: AFTERHOURS.
358. September 1st: VERMENTON PLAGE.
359. September 2nd: VERMENTON PLAGE.
360. September 8th: HELL BENT HEAVEN BOUND.
361. September 9th: HELL BENT HEAVEN BOUND.
1994
TRURO CITY HALL
362.March 23rd: DESMOND DEKKER & THE ACES plus SKAAD FOR LIFE.
1994 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
363. September 8th: THE PEKING BROTHERS.
364. September10th: JOHN MARTYN plus Mike Silver.
365.September 15th: THE KATHRYN TICKELL BAND plus BIG JIG.
366. September 16th: THE CHRIS BARBER JAZZ & BLUES BAND.
367. September 17th: CARAVANSERAI & DOCTORS OF DUB.
WESTERN HOTEL
368. September 7th: RORY Mc LEOD. 369. September 10th: THE COAL PORTERS.
370. September 13th: TO HELL WITH BURGHUNDY.
371. September 15th: JOHN OTWAY.
372. September 16th: STEVE FROST & THE GITS. SCHOOL OF PAINTING
373. September 9th: DAVID KEMP.
1995
THE ACORN
374. August 25th: CHRIS JAGGER ATCHA BAND.
375. November 24th: M TOTO.
1995 ST IVES FESTIVAL
THE GUILDHALL
376. September 14th: THE JUNE TABOR BAND.
377. September 15th: FOUR MEN & A DOG.
378. September16th: ROBIN JONES & KING SALSA.
379. September 18th: THANK YOU MR GERSHWIN-Elaine Delmar & the Keith Smith Band.
380. September 21st: THE JACQUI McSHEE BAND plus VASMALOM.
381. September 22nd: ORCHARD THEATRE- A Dolls House.
382. September 23rd: TAXI PATA PATA plus BAKA BEYOND.
THE WESTERN HOTEL
383. September 12th: PIERRE BENSUSAN.
384. September 13th: JOHN KIRKPATRICK.
385. September 19th: PETE BERRYMAN & ADRIAN O REILLY.
386. September 20th: M TOTO.
387. September 21st: HALF HUMAN VIDEO & THEATRE OF FRUIT.
388. September 22nd: TI FER CAJUN. 389.
September 13th: Penwith Gallery GEORGE MELLY LECTURE.
1996
EXODUS CLUB PENZANCE
390. April 26th: TITO & ZAMBULA BENEFIT.
_______________________________
HARBOUR CAR PARK PENZANCE
1996 West Cornwall Maritime Festival.
391. Thursday July 4th: THE BLUES BAND- GENO WASHING TON- KING MASCO etc etc.
392. Friday July 5th: THE BOOTLEG BEATLES-HANK WANGFORD BAND- WILKO JOHNSON BAND-BOBBY VALENTINO etc etc
393. Saturday July 6th: TAXI PATA PATA-ZILA- THE h-KIPPERS-CHRIS JAGGERS ATCHA BAND-LA CUCINA etc etc
394. Sunday July 7th: JAMES HUNTER BAND-BOHINTA- EARL OKIN etc etc.
_______________________________
1996 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
395. September9th: BERT JANSCH plus Steve Tilston & Maggie Boyle, Wizz Jones.
396. September 11th: JACQUI DANKWORTH & NEW PER SPECTIVES.
397. September 12th: DADE KRAMA African Ancestral Dance.
398. September 13th: STOCKTONS WING.
399. September 14th: DESMOND DEKKER & THE ACES plus Skaad For Life.
400. September 16th: ELAINE DELMAR & THE KEITH SMITH BAND.
401. September 18th: JO BRAND plus STEVE FROST & BOOTHBY GRAFTOE.
402. September 19th: GEORGE MELLY & JOHN CHILTONS FEETWARMERS.
403. September 20th: KINGS OF CALLICUT & BOHINTA.
404. September 21st: EDWARD 11 plus EUNICE & THE RED HOT BAYOU BAND.
WESTERN HOTEL
405. September 10th: CATRIONA MACDONALD.
406. September 11th: MICHAEL CHAPMAN.
407. September 17th: BIG JIG (sub).
408. September 18th: SALLY BARKER BAND.
409. September 19th: DARK LANtERN.
1997
THE ACORN
410. March 14th: JUNE TABOR TRIO.
PENZANCE ARTS CLUB
411. April 18th: WIZZ JONES.
1997 LITTLE FESTIVAL
THE ACORN
412. May 15th: WOOD & CUTTING
413. May 16th: CATRIONA MACDONALD.
414. May 17th: KATHRYN TICKELL.
1997 ST IVES FESTIVAL GUILDHALL
415. September 8th: THE POOZIES plus FERNHILL.
416. September 10th; THE SNEAKERS (subs) & THE SINGING NUNS.
417. Septewmber 11th: WATERSON CARTHY.
418. September 12th: STEELEYE SPAN.
419. September 13th: SHOOGLENIFTY & DR DIDG.
420. September15th: LADIES OF JAZZ, May, Jay, Gibson.
421. September 17th: MARK LAMARR, STEVE FROST, STEVE BOWDITCH.
422. September 18th: GENO WASHINGTONS BLUES QUESTION & THE BOOGIE BAND.
423. September 19th: OYSTERBAND & THE SLAVES.
424. September 20th: OSIBISA & ZAMBULA.
WESTERN HOTEL
425. September 9th: ALAISTER HULLET & DAVE SWARBRICK.
426. September10th: MARTIN SIMPSON.
427. September 13th: JOHN JAMES & The Ragtime Millionaires.
428. September15th: RORY McLEOD.
429. September16th: CHRISTINE COLLISTER.
430. September 18th: KAREN TWEED & IAN CARR.
1998
ST IVES GUILDHALL
431. May 9th: ZAMBULA & THE PHOENICIANS.
_______________________________
1998 WEST CORNWALL MARITIME FESTIVAL
432. Friday July 10th: MARY BLACK, SHARON SHARRON BAND, ELIZA CARTHY BAND, ANAO ATAO.
433. Saturday July 11th: BAABA MAAL, OSIBISA ,LA CUCINA, TI JAZ, ZAMBULA, THE SLAVES.
434. Sunday July 12th. AUSTRALIAN PINK FLOYD SHOW ,BAKA BEYOND, WAULK ELECTRIK, SILEAS, SHAVALI.
435. Monday July 13th: COUNTERFEIT STONES, BALHAM ALLIGATORS, JAMES HUNTER BAND, THE BOOGIE BAND, THE SUPERIOR BAND.
436. Tuesday July 14th: EDWARD 11.
1998 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
437. September 7th: JUNE TABOR BAND.
438. September 9th: THE IMPRO SHOW -Steve Frost & Freinds.
439. September 10th: MARY COUGLAN.
440. September 11th: NICK LOWE.
441. September 12th: KULJIT BAHMRA BAND.
442. September 13th: HARLEM JAZZ.
443. September 14th: SHOW OF HANDS & SAVOURNA STEVENSON.
444. September 16th: ROBIN WILLIAMSON & JOHN RENBOURN.
445. September 17th: THE RUSSIAN FOLK ENSEMBLE.
446. September 18th: RALPH McTELL.
447. September 19th: IFANG BONDI & SANYOMA.
WESTERN HOTEL
448. September8th : THE WRIGLEY SISTERS.
449. September 9th: DICK GAUGHAN.
450. September 10th: GORDAN GILTRAP.
451. September 11th: BEN WATERS BOOGIE BAND.
452. September 12th: STEVE TILSTONS STRING THING.
453. September 14th: QUIETLY TORN.
454. September 15th. FINALITY JACK.
455. September: 17th: CARLENE ANGLIM & ALI.
THE ACORN
456. November 28th: DEMBO KONTE & KAUSU KUYATEH plus BUBA JAMMEH.
457. December 29th: GENO WASHINGTON & THE PURPLE ACES plus BEN WATERS.
1999
THE ACORN
458. February 19th: KAVANA/ McNEILL/ LYNCH /LUPARI.
459. March 5th: BERT JANSCH plus PETE BERYMAN & ADRIAN O REILLY.
460. April 6th: GEORGE MELLY -Talk.
461. April 7th: GEORGE MELLY-Talk.
ST IVES GUILDHALL
462. May 1st: ASERE & TOTO LA MOMPASINA plus RAMSHAKA.
THE ACORN - THE 1999 LITTLE FESTIVAL
463. May 20th: SAVOURNA STEVENSON & CATRIONA MACDONALD.
464. May 21st: WATERSON CARTHY.
465. May 22nd: JACKIE McCAULEY.
________________________________________________________________
THE ACORN
466. July 14th: FERNHILL.
467. July 15th: FERNHILL.
1999 ST IVES FESTIVAL
GUILDHALL
468. September 13th: FRANCES BLACK & DECLAN SINNOT.
469. September 15th. MADDY PRIOR & THE CARNIVAL BAND.
470.September 16th: THE BLUES BAND.
471. September 17th: THE SHARON SHANNON BAND.
472. September 18th: THE WHISKEY PRIESTS.
473. September 19th: BOB HUNTS ELLINGTON BAND.
474. September 20th: ALY BAIN & TOM GILFOLLEN.
475. September 22nd: EDDI READER & ELEPHANT TALK.
466: September 23rd: PAUL LAMB & THE KINGSNAKES.
467. September 24th: THE POPES.
478. September 25th: THE DUPPY CONQUERORS & SPECIES.
WESTERN HOTEL
479. September 14th NETTI VAN & BART RAMSEY
480. September 15th CHRIS WOOD TRIO
481. September16th TANTEEKA
482. September 18th RICHARD SMITH TRIO
483. September 21st TIM VAN EYKEN
484. September 23rd COLIN REID
485. September 25th DAILY PLANET
2000
ST JOHNS HALL
486. April 1st TAXI PATA PATA & Ramshaka
2000 LITTLE FESTIVAL
THE ACORN
487. May 12th EDDI READER & ROB PETERS
488. May 13th BAKA BEYOND
489. May 14th CHRISTINE COLLISTER
_________________________________________________________
ISLAND CENTRE ST IVES
490. May 17th ALISON OLDHAM TALK
THE ACORN
491. May 22nd ALISON OLDHAM TALK
_________________________________________________________
2000 CELTIC VOYAGE MUSIC PENZANCE
492. July 7th GUMBO FLYERS /BLUES DELUXE/ KESCANA
493. July 8th SKAD FOR LIFE /TREANA MORRIS /SEX SLAVES
494. July 9th MÕTOTO /BLUES INC/ PATRICK & STEVE
495. July 10th F.O.S. BROTHERS /SALLY CRABTREE BAND /ALEXANDERS RAGTIME BAND
_____________________________________________________________________________________
THE ACORN
496. August 6th JUNE TABOR BAND
497. October 14th WOOD & CUTTING
ST IVES GUILDHALL
498. December 29th BAKA BEYOND / FOS BROTHERS
ST JOHNS HALL PENZANCE
499. December 30th BAKA BEYOND / FOS BROTHERS
2001
2001 THE LITTLE FESTIVAL
THE ACORN
500. May 14th FUNNY FEATHERS & IAN WHEELER
501. May 15th PETER KING & JOHN COX QUARTET
502. May 16th BRIAN PATTEN & BOB DEVEREUX
503. May 17th PURBAYAN CHATTERJEE
504. May 18th WHISKY PRIESTS
505. May 19th IMBONGI AND ALBERT NYATHI
-----------------------------------------------
506. October 5th JANE KITTO
2002
St JOHNS HALL
507. February 9th KANDA BONGO MAN & RAMSHAKA
2002 LITTLE FESTIVAL
THE ACORN
508. May 6th JOHN COOPER CLARKE
509. May 7th DAVID KEMP
510. May 8th ROBIN WILLIAMSON & MARTIN CARTHY
511. May 9th ALAN SKIDMORE & PETER KING
512. May 10th SECKOU KEITA & JAMORAL
513. May 11th LA BOUM
_______________________________________________________
THE ACORN
514. June 6th MOSES FAN FAN
515. November 27th DAVID ALVAREZ and JUEGO DE MANOS
2003
2003 LITTLE FESTIVAL
THE ACORN
516. May 5th BEN WATERS BOOGIE BAND with CHRIS JAGGER
517 May 6th GEORGE MELLY talk "My Life and Times"
518 May 7th CARA DILLON TRIO
519. May 8th ANDY SHEPPARD TRIO
520. May 9th WATERSON CARTHY
521. May 10th JALIKUNDA
522. August 10th ROBIN WILLIAMSON
523. October 24th BOHINTA and SALLY BARKER
2004
THE 7th LITTLE FESTIVAL at The Acorn
524. May 3rd BERT JANSCH
525. May 4th GERMAINE GREER
526. May 5th STAN TRACEY
527. May 6th SEAN KEANE TRIO
528 May 6th at THE UNION
......................ANTHONY FROST
529. May 7th JUNE TABOR
530. May 7th at THE UNION
......................PHIL BOWEN on WS GRAHAM
531. May 8th ANGEL BROTHERS
532. May 8th at THE UNION
......................BOB DEVEREUX & ADRIAN O'REILLY
----------------------------------------------------
533. June 5th IMBONGI at The Acorn
534. July 30th WIZZ JONES at The Acorn
535. August 20st CHRISTINE COLLISTER KIRSTY McGHEE at The Acorn
536. August 20st CHRISTINE COLLISTER KIRSTY McGHEE at The Acorn
537. September 3rd ROBIN WILLIAMSON at The Acorn
538. September 4th ROBIN WILLIAMSON at The Acorn
2005
St Ives September Festival 2005539. September 13th PATRICK STREET at St Ives Guildhall
540. September 14th KROKE at St Ives Guildhall
541. September 22nd IMBONGI & ALBERT NYATHI at St Ives Guildhall
2006
St Ives September Festival 2006
542. September 9th OSIBISA and ZAMBULA at St Ives Guildhall
543. September 13th CHRIS WOOD and KARINE POLWART at St Ives Guildhall
544. September 14th KATHAKALI at St Ives Guildhall
545. September 16th THE BIG CHRIS BARBER BAND at St Ives Guildhall
546. September 17th JUAN MARTIN & QUINTTETO FABULOSA at St Ives Guildhall
547. September 20th LOU RHODES and Oddur at St Ives Guildhall
548. September 22nd ELKIE BROOKS at St Ives Guildhall
549. September 23rd MERINGADA and Tempo da Festa at St Ives Guildhall
2007
550 July 20th ZAMBULA Acorn
551 July 21st ZAMBULA Acorn
St Ives September Festival 2007
552. Sept 8th BAKA BEYOND St Ives Guildhall
553. Sept 8th Bennett Bros New Orleans Band Western Hotel
554. Sept 9th ATHENA St Ives Guildhall
555. Sept 10th MIGHTY ZULU NATION St Ives Guildhall
556. Sept 12th BILLY BRAGG St Ives Guildhall
557. Sept 13th EDDI READER St Ives Guildhall
558. Sept 17th SECKOU KEITA QUARTET St Ives Guildhall
559. Sept 19th THE POOZIES + Buffalo Gals St Ives Guildhall
560. Sept 20th SKYE + Tom Dale St Ives Guildhall
561. Sept 20th KIRSTY McGEE Western Hotel
562. Sept 21st BLACK ROCK JAZZ BAND Western Hotel
563. Sept 22nd CHIMANIMANI & PONDLIFE St Ives Guildhall2008
564. Feb 9th BARRY MARTYN & THE YOUNG BLOODS Union Penzance
St Ives September Festival 2008565. Sept 6th The BOOTLEG BEATLES + A.T. HARVEY. St Ives Guildhall
566. Sept 8th CHERISH THE LADIES. St Ives Guildhall567. Sept 9th Orquesta Tipica Imperial. St Ives Guildhall
568. Sept 15th SETH LAKEMAN +Gallys Folly St Ives Guildhall
569. Sept 16th CARTHY/SWARBRICK+ The Clive Palmer Band St Ives Guildhall
570. Sept 20th THE BLUES BAND St Ives Guildhall2009
571. Jan 23rd BEN WATERS Acorn
572. Feb 14th Barry Martyn & THE NEW BLOODS Acorn
573. May 15th Po’Girl & The Cavarrick sisters Acorn
574 June 22nd STEVE TILSTON Acorn
575. June 25th ROBIN WILLIAMSON Acorn
St Ives September Festival 2009
576 Sept 12th BELLOWHEAD + Bagas Porthia St Ives Guildhall
577 Sept 17th CHRIS WOOD St Ives Guildhall
578 Sept 19th EDWARD II + Kabasa ! St Ives Guildhall
579 Sept 20th ELIZA CARTHY + Simon Swarbrick & Kenny Watkins St Ives Guildhall
580 Sept 21st JACKIE OATES + Tom Kitching & Gren Bartley St Ives Guildhall
581 Sept 22nd THE UKULELE ORCHESTRA St Ives Guildhall
582 Sept 24th THE JIVE ACES St Ives Guildhall
583. Sept 25th ELKIE BROOKS St Ives Guildhall2010
584. Jan 22nd BEN WATERS Acorn
585. Feb 26th CLIVE PALMER BAND Acorn
586 April 3rd BRIGET ST JOHN & MICHAEL CHAPMAN Acorn
587 April 16th BAKA BEYOND Acorn
St Ives September Festival 2010
588. Sept 11th COURTNEY PINE Guildhall
589. Sept 12th THE UNTHANKS Guildhall+ Johnny Kearny & Lucy Kerr
590 Sept 14th EDDI READER + Boo Hewardine Guildhall
591.Sept 15th ALTAN St Ives Guildhall
592. Sept 16th DONOVAN + Kirsty McGee St Ives Guildhall
593. Sept 17th THE IMAGINED VILLAGE St Ives Guildhall
594. Sept 19th KILA St Ives Guildhall
St Ives September Festival 2011595. Sept 10th THE BIG CHRIS BARBER BAND St Ives Guildhall
596. Sept 11th BARBARA DICKSON + Sean Taylor St Ives Guildhall
597. Sept 13th THE MARTIN SIMPSON BAND St Ives Guildhall
598. Sept 14th LAU+Adrian O’Reilly St Ives Guildhall
599. Sept 15th MARTIN CARTHY & DAVE SWARBRICK + Fernhill St Ives Guildhall
600. Sept 18th JOHNNY FLYNN + The Sam Brookes Quartet St Ives Guildhall
Nearly all the gigs I ever put on: DANNIE ABSE - AFTERHOURS - ALCHEMY - ALEXANDERS RAGTIME BAND - ALIAS RON KAVANA - ALLEGRI STRING QUARTET - ALTAN - DAVID ALVAREZ & JUEGO DE MANOS - ANAO ATAO - ANGEL BROTHERS - CARLENE ANGLIM & ALI - ANY EXCUSE - ARIZONA SMOKE REVIEW - FRANKIE ARMSTRONG - ASERE & TOTO LA MOMPASINA - AUSTRALIAN PINK FLOYD SHOW - Backdoor Men - Bad Boys - KULJIT BAHMRA BAND - ALY BAIN & TOM GILFOLLEN - BAKA BEYOND - Jonathan Baker - BALHAM ALLIGATORS - CHRIS BARBER BAND with OTTILIE PATTERSON - BARELY WORKS - SALLY BARKER BAND - BARNEYS - Bates MoteL - BATTLEFIELD BAND - JO BRAND - The Sam Brookes Quartet - Mike Beeson - Mick Bennet - Jon Benns & Bill Zorn - PIERRE BENSUSAN - Pete Berryman - NOEL & PAM BETOWSKI - JOHN BIDWELL - BIG JIG - FRANCES BLACK & DECLAN SINNOT - MARY BLACK - BLACK ROOTS - BLACK THEATRE OF PRAGUE - BLUES INCORPORATED - THE BLUES BAND - BLUES DELUXE - Bluestrain - Bocvum - BOHINTA - BOOGIE BAND - BOOTLEG BEATLES - STEVE BOWDITCH - PHIL BOWEN - MAGGIE BOYLE - Bridesmother - ANNE BRIGGS - Roger Brooks - BUCCA - Jacob Bush - BUTTERMOUNTAIN BOYS - 3.C.K. - ARTHUR CADDICK - CARAVANSERAI -CARNIVAL BAND - ELIZA CARTHY BAND - MARTIN CARTHY - MARTIN CARTHY & DAVE SWARBRICK - CELEBRATED RATLIFFE STOUT BAND - MICHAEL CHAPMAN - PURBAYAN CHATTERJEE - PETE CHATTERTON - CHIEFTAINS - CILL CHAIS - Chucklefoot - CITY WAITES - CLIVES ORIGINAL BAND - COAL PORTERS - Mike Collins - SHIRLEY COLLINS - CHRISTINE COLLISTER - Douglas Cook - Charlie Cool Quartet - CONUNDRUM - Mike Cooper - JOHN COOPER CLARKE - Jonathan Coudrille - MARY COUGLAN - Dave Cousins - COUNTERFEIT STONES - JOHN COX BAND - LOL COXHILL - SALLY CRABTREE BAND - CREEPIN JANE - CROOKS & NANNIES - DADE KRAMA - DAILY PLANET - Dance Band -JACQUI DANKWORTH & NEW PERSPECTIVES - DARK LANtERN - DECAMERON - DESMOND DEKKER & THE ACES - Elaine Delmar & the Keith Smith Band - Bob Devereux - BARBARA DICKSON - CARA DILLON - DOCTORS OF DUB - DONOVAN - Phil Donne - MARGARET DRABBLE - DR DIDG - Dr Syntax - DUPPY CONQUERORS - DYNAMIC ACES - EDWARD 11 - RAMBLING JACK ELLIOT - OSSIAN ELLIS - ELEPHANT TALK - English Tapestry - EUNICE AND THE RED HOT BAYOU BAND - DAVE EVANS - Karen Evans - THE IMAGINED VILLAGE - GEORGIE FAME & THE BLUE FLAMES - MOSES FAN FAN - FAREWELL BAND - FERNHILL - FINALITY JACK - John the Fish - JOHNNY FLYNN - F.O.S. BROTHERS - Four Lanes Choir - FOUR MEN & A DOG - Don Fowler - FRIEDMANN - ANTHONY FROST - STEVE FROST & THE GITS - Kris Gayle & The Jazz Roots - GORDON GILTRAP - Iris Gittens - BOOTHBY GRAFTOE - DAVEY GRAHAM - Greasey Hat Band - GRERMAINE GREER - STEFAN GROSSMAN - DICK GAUGHAN - HALCYON - Half Human Video ShoW - TOM HALL & THE STRUNG OUT SISTERS - Hank & the Wolf - HARARE DREAD - HARLEM JAZZ - MELANIE HARROLD - HELL BENT HEAVEN BOUND - Boo Hewardine - High Speed Gas - KEITH HILLS - Alan Greenhall - ROSIE HARDMAN & JON GILLESPIE - ISAAC GUILLORY - GUMBO FLYERS - DICK HANHAM BAND - Wendy Herman - Jim Hughes - ALAISTER HULLET - Dave Holland - BOB HUNTS ELLINGTON BAND - JAMES HUNTER BAND - Ice Breaker - IFANG BONDI - IMBONGI AND ALBERT NYATHI - THE IMPRO SHOW - Jack Rabbits - CHRIS JAGGER ATCHA BAND - JALIKUNDA - BUBA JAMMEH - BERT JANSCH GROUP - JOHN JAMES - Jaroma - BARB JUNGR & RUSSELL CHURNEY - FLACO JIMINEZ & His SAN ANTONIO BAND - THE JIVE ACES - WILKO JOHNSON BAND - AL JONES -ROBIN JONES & KING SALSA - WIZZ JONES - K- PASSA - KANDA BONGO MAN - KAVANA/ McNEILL/ LYNCH /LUPARI - SEAN KEANE TRIO - Johnny Kearny & Lucy Kerr - SECKOU KEITA & JAMORAL - DAVID KEMP - RICK KEMP - BOB KERRS WHOOPPEE BAND - KESCANA - KILA - PETER KING & JOHN COX QUARTET - KING MASCO - KINGS OF CALLICUT - h-KIPPERS - JOHN KIRKPATRICK - JANE KITTO - KNACKERS YARD - SPIDER JOHN KOERNER - DEMBO KONTE & KASAU KANYA - LADIES OF JAZZ, May, Jay, Gibson - MARK LAMARR - PAUL LAMB & THE KINGSNAKES - LA BOUM - LA MUSGANA - LAU - Larry Law - LA CUCINA - LAZY FARMER - LE RUE - LIGHT BLUES - CHRISTOPHER LOGUE - LONDON GABRIELLI BRASS ENSEMBLE - NICK LOWE - HUMPHREY LYTTLETON BAND - BAABA MAAL - CATRIONA MACDONALD - JACKIE McAULEY - MAINSQUEEZE - LOVEMORE MAJAIVANA & THE ZULU BAND - MAKVIRAG - JOHN MARTYN - MASK - MASTER MUSICIANS OF JAJOUKA - Nigel Mazlyn Jones - Mastermind - MICK McCREADIE - KIRSTY McGEE - ROGER McGOUGH - RORY McLEOD - JACQUI McSHEE BAND - RALPH McTELL - GEORGE MELLY & JOHN CHILTONS FEETWARMERS - GEORGE MELLY LECTURE - MONSOON - TREANA MORRIS - Mounts Bay Syncapators - M TOTO - MUSIKAS - Nancledra Hillbillies - Earl Okin - ALISON OLDHAM - REMY ONGALA AND THE ORCHESTRE SUPER MATIMILLA - Adrian O Reilly - ORCHARD THEATRE - Orion - OSIBISA - JOHN OTWAY - OYSTERBAND - Paint the Man Pink - Clive Palmer - BRIAN PATTEN - PEASANTS ALL - PEKING BROTHERS - FRANK PERRY - ROB PETERS - PHOENICIANS - POOZIES - POPES - MADDY PRIOR BAND - CHRISSY QUAYLE - QUIETLY TORN - QUIMANTU - Ragtime Millionaires - RAMSHAKA - ROY RAY - EDDI READER - REAL SOUNDS OF AFRICA, - RECESSIONS - COLIN REID - JOHN RENBOURN - DON RENDELL - Dick Reynolds - RHOMBUS - S.E. ROGIE - Leon Rosselson - RUM N SHRUB - RUSSIAN FOLK ENSEMBLE - BRIDGET ST JOHN - SANYOMA - SCARLET RUNNER - ALAN SCHILLER - GREGOR SCHECTERS KLEZMER BAND - SHARON SHANNON BAND - SHAVALI - SHEGUI - ANDY SHEPPARD TRIO - Shiva Theatre - SHOOGLENIFTY - SHOW OF HANDS - SILEAS - MARTIN SIMPSON - Mike Silver - SINGING NUNS - SKAAD FOR LIFE - ALAN SKIDMORE & PETER KING - ROGER SLACK - SLAVES - JOHN SLEEP - COLIN SMITH & ANNIE FOYLE - RICHARD SMITH TRIO - Ron Smith Quartet - CHRIS SMITHERS - SNEAKERS - SPECIES - STAVERTON BRIDGE - Denys Stephens - SAVOURNA STEVENSON - Alan Stivell & Breton Musicians - Stockroom Five - Stocktons Wing - Strangers - Style & Fashion - Sunshine Blues Band - SUPERIOR BAND - JOHN SURMAN - DAVE SWARBRICK & FREINDS - SWEET WILLIAM - SYNCOPACE - JUNE TABOR - TANNAHILL WEAVERS - TANTEEKA - TARIKA SAMMY - CYRIL TAWNEY - SEAN TAYLOR - TAXI PATA PATA - TEMPERANCE SEVEN - TEMPLE CREATURES - Nicki Tester - THEATRE OF FRUIT - Theatre Rotto - AERONWY THOMAS & MERVYN LEVY - BARBARA THOMPSONS PARAPHENALIA - Thundering Typhoons - KATHRYN TICKELL BAND - TI FER CAJUN - STEELEYE SPAN - STEVE TILSTON - TILSTONS STRING THING - Nial Timmins - KEITH TIPPETS OVARY LODGE - TO HELL WITH BURGHUNDY - STAN TRACEY QUARTET - TROPIC ISLES STEEL BAND - KAREN TWEED & IAN CARR - THE UNTHANKS - Urban Verbs - BOBBY VALENTINO - NETTI VAN & BART RAMSEY - TIM VAN EYKEN - VASMALOM - Peter Vastl - VERMONTEN PLAGE - Patrick Walker - Jake Walton - WAMMA JAMMA - HANK WANGFORD BAND - GENO WASHINGTONS BLUES QUESTION - BEN WATERS BOOGIE BAND - WATERSON CARTHY - WAULK ELECTRIK - TIM WELLARD - HEDY WEST - MIKE WESTBROOK BRASS BAND - IAN WHEELER + FUNNY FEATHERS - Whippersnapper - WHISKEY PRIESTS - JOHN WILLIAMS BIG BAND - ROBIN WILLIAMSONS MERRY BAND - CHRIS WOOD TRIO - WOOD & CUTTING - BRENDA WOOTTON - WRIGLEY SISTERS - X TRADITION - ZAMBULA - ZILA
artcornwall November 2006
INTERVIEW by Rupert White
Martin Val Baker: promoter, publisher, gallery-owner
For many in Cornwall, Martin will need no introduction. Currently the owner of the Rainyday Gallery, Martin's CV is a testament to his energy and commitment to local art. It includes being a founder of the St Ives festival, and the man behind publications such as 'Eighty from the Eighties' and the Cornwall Gallery Guide. He also happens to be the son of Denys Val Baker: one of Cornwall's foremost writers.
Rupert: Martin, you've been an important figure on the art scene in Cornwall pretty much all your life - always acting as a facilitator for others - making things happen around you - not I would guess in it for the money - but because you attach an importance to culture and the cultural life of Cornwall. Is this a fair description?
Martin: Yes I suppose so. I tried Art but was not good enough! I tried music, bought a banjo and then a trombone but never had the patience to practice...consequently I have great admiration for those who did. I get great satisfaction from promoting events, putting on exhibitions and publishing, a pastime for which I realised I do have a particular talent. There is nothing more satisfying than inflicting your own taste in music and art on the public...
The business of Arts promotion in Cornwall needs what I call ‘mechanics’, people who have the confidence and ambition to make things happen and are prepared to take a risk...Bob Butler, Rob Lewis, Mike Reynolds, Robert Etherington, Mark Shaw come to mind but there are plenty more all over the county. Making money is a pleasant bonus - but not losing it is the main aim...
There is a lot of talent around - both in Cornwall, and the UK and of course in the rest of the world - we should grab the chance to see it in a local context. Also as a tourist area we should try to utilise all the facilities that lie dormant for half of the year- why not make the county a centre for Festivals of all kinds which can be of benefit to the locals as well as the visitors who can help subsidise the exercise.
Rupert: On a biographical note: you were born at the end of the war and moved to Cornwall as an infant. You went to art school at Falmouth and got involved with organising music gigs in the 60s - what was the music scene like then, how did you get into it, and how did this affect your own work as an artist?
Martin: I remember I was a great Adam Faith fan as a kid - and later I listened to my father’s collection of records, Chris Barber, Louis Armstrong, Sydney Bechet...things like that. By the time I got to Falmouth I was a confirmed jazz fan - though not the modern sort! We formed a jazz record appreciation society at Art School and I learned about Bix, Ellington George Lewis and Ken Colyer - we used to sneak our own favourites on to the record player at Parties and hide the Beatles and Stones records favoured by another gang. These were the days of the Beatnik and we would hitch hike all over the country going to jazz/blues Festivals and if in London to the All Nighters at the Ken Colyer Club in Great Newport Street.
Parallel to all this came the advent of the singer songwriters (at the first party I ever went to we sat around and listened to Joan Baez records) and a little later Bob Dylan broke through. He had a tremendous effect on our generation - all those words...we became politically active, marched from Aldermaston to London with with CND, sat down in Trafalgar Square with the Committee of 100 and got arrested. From Dylan we moved on to Woody Guthrie, Ramblin Jack Elliott, Cisco Houston, Derroll Adams, Judy Collins and later their British equivalents. In 1966 I started a folk club at the Winter Gardens in Penzance in aid of CND, the first major guests were Shirley Collins, Cyril Tawney and the American banjo player Hedy West. Later that year a group of us were hired to play beatniks in an ITV documentary on Donovan at St Ives (picture right)- all this gave me a good background in the music business.
The Folk Club scene in Cornwall was very lively in the late sixties with a lot of the people who later became big names performing in crowded venues. In 1970 I put several of them on together at St Ives Guildhall and we pulled a crowd of 450 - that really gave me a taste for promoting bigger gigs. Through the seventies the folk boom continued and I ran clubs and concerts culminating in 1978 when we started the St Ives September Festival, which is still going strong.
I really was not much of an artist though I have always had a good eye for type which has been very useful for poster layout and advertising over the years - I also was a great gothic letterer!
Rupert: Talking of Donovan, I understand he was down here at the time his career took off, C.O.B. who we both admire were down here when they recorded both of their immensely influential acid-folk albums, and Ralph McTell also has close links with Cornwall. Can you expand on some of this?
Martin: Yes Donovan was down in St Ives in 1962 or 63 – he was a friend of my sister Jane. I remember lending him a tent as he was living rough – a lot of his songs were inspired by St Ives. In autumn 1966 he returned with an ITV film crew to make a film. The hour long documentary was to be set half in London and half in St Ives, and Donovan sent the crew round to hire us all as extras. Eventually a dozen or so of us gathered on Porthminster beach with Don, his friend Gypsy Dave and also the American Folk Legend Derrol Adams who was travelling with the party. For three pounds a day, good money then, we were to play beatniks, sitting around a camp fire cooking mackerel and potatoes whilst Donovan mimed to a tape of his current hit record ‘Catch The Wind’. The props department rushed around town buying kettle, mugs, cutlery and rolls of tin foil, all of which were in mint condition and so we had to age it all with the aid of candle smoke. As for the mackerel, well there just weren’t any in St Ives on that day so the company had six driven over from Newlyn by taxi. Filming continued for a week, on the beach, in an old Second World War bunker above it and in the woods above the town where Don and his friends had camped first time round. The continuity girl would demand ‘who was smoking in the last shot’ all our hands would shoot up and we were tossed Senior Service cigarettes, a posh smoke that no self respecting beat would have been seen with in those days. In the end the film was actually quite good and clips from it turn up every now and again in ‘The Sounds of The Sixties’ series on T.V. - it really is quite strange seeing younger versions of us all after all these years.
Clive Palmer turned up at The Old Sawmills near Fowey (now a recording studio) where the Val Baker family (picture left) was living at the time (1969). His band at that time ’The Stockroom Five’ metamorphed into ‘The Temple Creatures’ a three piece with John Bidwell on dulcitar and Indian hand organ, and my sister Demelza (later of Zambula) on bongos. They played the Cornish Folk Club circuit as did Ralph McTell, Pete Berryman, Mick Bennet, Steve Tilston, Tim Wellard, Wizz Jones, Michael Chapman, Mike Silver, Roger Brooks... Cornwall was a hive of talent in those days. Probably the most influential club was the Folk Cottage at Rose which spawned ‘The Famous Jug Band’, the Railway Cub at Penzance was pretty good and of course Botallack Count House. Clive was a bit of a catalyst then and with John Bidwell and Mick Bennett he formed ‘Clives Original Band’ (C.O.B.) in 1971. I put them on a few times at St Ives – I remember once the three of them turned up, with all their instruments, on two mopeds having driven all the way from Fowey. A year later I saw them at The Royal Festival Hall with Pentangle! Of course the two albums ‘Spirit of Love’ and ‘Moyshe McStiff’ (picture right) became collectors items and rightly so. Clive at his best was terrific – someone should have given him a wad of money and recorded a lot more of his music, particularly the Temple Creatures and his work with Bob Devereux and Rhombus in the late seventies.
Rupert:How did the Val Bakers get to know Clive Palmer originally? Presumably he moved to Cornwall soon after leaving the Incredible String Band (ISB) and before they made their appearance at the era defining Woodstock festival. Also did the Temple Creatures ever make any recordings that are available to the public?
Martin: Clive turned up at The Sawmills as a friend of Demelza’s , she probably met him at the Folk Cottage, he stayed there for a few months. Since the ISB he had been part of The Famous Jug Band with Pete Berryman, Jill Johnson and Henry Bartlett but left after the first LP ‘Sunshine Possibilities’ again a great record: still highly sought after. By 1969 Clive, John Bidwell and Demelza formed a new band and soon Temple Creatures were gigging regularly around Cornwall, sometimes with Chrissy Quale on vocals – I have a few badly recorded demo tapes. Grahame Hood is writing a biography on Clive which should be out soon.
Rupert: Was the Folk Cottage in Rose near Perranporth or was it a different Rose? Am I right that it was also referred to as the Folk Cottage at Mitchell? Where exactly was it? Do you know what this building is now?
Martin: I think it moved: it was at Rose first and then Mitchell – oddly I never went there in the glory days. Later, Ella Knight ran The Folk Cottage at a pub in Truro for some years (The Swan I think).Rupert: Given that artcornwall is a new publishing venture it would be nice to move on to discussing the 'Cornish Review' - which your father edited and promoted - and also your own experience of publishing the 'Peninsular Voice'. (For those that don't know the 'Cornish Review' was a quarterly periodical - and the ‘Peninsular Voice’ a monthly publication that ran from 1982 to 1995 or so). Would you mind describing these publications a bit more? In what way were they alike and in what ways different?
Martin: My father was always a great inspiration to me. Besides being a prolific creative writer (over 100 books published) he too was a ‘mechanic’. The Review really was a labour of love for him, it ran from 1949 to ‘52 and then again from 1966 to ‘74. The purpose of the Review was to give a platform for creative writers in prose and verse and also to carry reviews, articles and letters covering the local art scene. It was destroyed by the withdrawal of an Arts Council grant. The Lesson of this is ‘Don’t put yourself in the hands of ‘funders’’ - at any time they can change personnel and dump you!
The Voice started as a co-operative of about 15 people all of whom had a vote at ‘copy date’ this provided terrific energy and we had many, many stimulating arguments. To begin we used to put on benefits to keep the paper going but then we realised that if we each went out and got a £20 advert we would not have to expend so much energy. Having so many people involved was a definite plus - the editorial collective was much better than having an individual as a dictatorial editor - and we could do the stuff we ourselves were interested in. We rarely turned articles down and were mightily relieved to have enough copy to fill the thing. We were eventually destroyed by a rather silly libel action and although the paper carried on for a few more years under a capable editor, the original energy had been dissipated.
Rupert:re your fathers journal: having read some copies recently it is interesting just how little visual art actually featured. It was very much a literary journal wasn’t it? Was there a reason for this? Did it simply reflect you father’s own interests?
Martin: Yes my father was very much interested in literary journals. In the forties he put together many annual anthologies of the genre and was recognised as an expert on the subject long before he came to Cornwall – see my website rainydaygallery.co.uk. In Cornwall it was pretty obvious that there was a large visual arts community and he did take that on board, but as economics prevented the publication of paintings in colour he was only able to reproduce work in black and white and that was never satisfying. I think you will find that a lot of the articles do refer to the painters and their struggles. Two books ‘Britain’s Art Colony By The Sea, and ‘The Timeless Land’ as well as numerous articles in national newspapers and magazines helped bolster Cornwall’s fledgling art industry in those days. But he did feel that the county’s writers had suffered some neglect by comparison and brought out a book on them ‘A View From Lands End’ in 1982. I’m sure he would have been delighted to see the Tate St Ives mounting a show in the late nineties on five writers connected with the ‘St Ives School’, himself, Sven Berlin, W.S. Graham, Arthur Caddick and Norman Levine.Rupert:What do you see as the role of periodicals like this, and what are the problems and/or pitfalls to look out for? How does this relate to your experience of publishing local art-related material and indeed to that of your father and his journal?
Martin: There is an enormous arts community in Cornwall - possibly, after tourism, it is the next biggest money earner in the county - and it needs to be serviced by a competent and well-informed media. There needs to be somewhere for practicing artists, writers and musicians to argue their causes through articles, letters etc and of course for publication of original work - but although such a publication is likely to be non profit-making beware of taking the ‘Queen’s Shilling’ and being in the hands of someone else's purse strings. Even advertisers can be upset and withdraw their support - possibly the answer is a large number of annual subscriptions.Rupert:Can you see the internet as a way of avoiding some of the overheads and difficulties that may have affected the other two periodicals you had links with? How do you think it might change things? I guess it becomes easier and cheaper to publish things, but there is a danger that the quality suffers as a result because the stakes are not so high...
Martin: Well computers and the internet certainly would have made things a lot easier but having a physical magazine that can be passed around is a more punter friendly publication – I have just passed a lot of old ‘Peninsula Voices’ on to The Penlee House Museum. Yes I agree that financial pressures are a great incentive not to do anything silly – and also to go out and SELL the thing !
Rupert: re Your own gallery: the Rainyday Gallery. How long has that been going and what have been the highlights for you? I think you've moved location 3 times am I right?
Martin: I worked as a litho printer for many years and by 1992 was based in an old chapel in a Penzance back street. The late Hazel Burston who ran the gallery at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro suggested that the building could make a good gallery so I put on my first show in May of that year. I have since staged about 170 ! . For some years I ran the printing and shows in tandem but when I moved to my present premises we could not get the machinery up the stairs so I had to abandon printing at very short notice.Rupert:As many of the readers of artcornwall are into conceptual art they will be interested that you showed David Tremlett, who was one of the original British conceptual artists, and who was nominated in 1992 for the Turner Prize for his wall-drawings (picture below right). How did this come about?
Martin: David Tremlett is an old pal of mine- we first met when we were teenagers in Mevagissey. We went to Falmouth Art School together and shared digs there. Later he lent me some of his drawings to get into Hornsey Art School – I think I lent him some of my pen lettering to get into Birmingham! Dave was one of the gang at Falmouth in 1962 who would take off our jazz records at parties and put on stuff by that new fangled band the Beatles. He was very ambitious and certainly caused a stir early on, he had a show at the Museum of Modern Art in America and was described as a ‘...disgrace to British Culture’ in The Times – what more could a young artist wish for... We his contemporaries were rather baffled by the early minimalist stuff but I think he has now developed into a really major artist – I still get invites to his openings all over the world. I went to his Turner Prize Opening but discovered he had gone to another one of his in Mexico or somewhere! His show with me in 1993 was one of the best and busiest shows I have put on – we did’nt sell much though...
Rupert:I notice you also put on a show of the Brotherhood of Ruralists. Peter Blake, the pop artist, was one of their number, together with Graham Ovenden and David Inshaw, if I remember rightly - they had an interesting take on landscape painting and are represented in the Tate collection. Am I right that they have links with Cornwall? I seem to remember that one of them had an amazing house near Liskeard that looked like something out of Lord of the Rings. Do you know any more about this?
Martin: Yes, I did put on a Print show. I sold a few Inshaws. Graham and Annie Ovenden live on the edge of Bodmin Moor (I think the others are outside Cornwall). I saw their house which is amazing.
P.S. Mick Bennett of C.O.B. Is now in Falmouth, Clive Palmer in Pendeen (a biography by Graham Hood out soon). John Bidwell I think in Thailand - a brilliant band.
P.P.S. Tremlett was in the last four of the Turner Prize in 1992 the others were Rachel Whiteread, Damien Hirst and Grenville Davey – It was won by Davey who was from Launceston
Rupert White November 2006
The Rainyday Gallery is at 116 Market Jew Street, Penzance
http://www.rainydaygallery.co.uk/
Does anyone know a rich publisher who might publish the memoirs below ?
We'll Dream
Adventures In Cornwall
by Martin Val Baker
Introduction
1.Heligan and Beatniks page 2
2. Banning the Bomb page 9
3. Art School in the Sixties page 14
4. Back to St Ives page 18
5. Summers and Winters page 21
6. Sawmills and St Ives Again page 25
7.Interlude and Rainydays page 32
8. Putting on the Music page 37
9. St Ives September Festival page 41
10. A Very Cornish Coup page 47
11 Running a Newspaper- The Voice Years page56
12. On The Road with Zambula page 62
13. Two Nights at the Acorn page 67
14. Festival Fever page73
15. How to start and run an Art Gallery page 82
Introduction
As the son of a father who published twenty six autobiographical books on our family adventures it seems unnecessary to cover all the times that he wrote about so well and I will try to concentrate mainly on things that happened away from the family. However I should give a brief breakdown of my early life.
My father, the Welsh author Denys Val Baker married his first wife, my mother Patricia Johnson, a librarian from Yorkshire, in 1942 . They met when they both worked at a pacifist community centre in Camden Town during the war. I was born in 1944 in Wookeyhole Somerset where my mother was evacuated when the Blackheath hospital in which I was due to be born in was hit by a bomb.I have vague memories of a rather idyllic infancy and then my parents split up when I was three and a half - both re-marrying in 1949, my mother to Dick Kitto and my father to Jess Bryan. There was quite a reasonable solution to the problem of my custody whereby I spent school holidays with my mother and Dick and term time with my father and Jess. This had the advantage of me acquiring four grandmothers - each of whom would give me ten shillings at Christmas. Also it brought the benefits of being an only child at my mothers for a time, until the birth of my half sister Lucy, and of being one of an ever growing family of step, Gill and Jane, and half siblings, Stephen, Demelza and Genevieve, at my fathers. Despite my mothers worries I actually very much enjoyed this situation as I really did have the best of both worlds.
Jane, Jess, Denys, Martin (back) Genevieve, Demelza, Stephen, Gill 1960
In 1948 my father and I travelled down to Cornwall from London in an old Austin Seven with a bookcase strapped to the side - I remember this because at some stage of the journey it fell off. He had decided to make his life in Cornwall where he had worked for a time as a publicity agent for a couple of Reperatory Theatre companies at Camborne and Falmouth. We settled down in a little cottage on the slopes of Trencrom Hill about four miles from St Ives, later to be joined by Jess and her elder daughter Gill. At around the same time my mother and Dick rented the poet W.S. (Sydney) Graham’s cottage in Church Street Mevagissey on the south coast of Cornwall, about forty five miles away . Sydney Graham had gone off on a reading tour of America but returned earlier than expected and my mother and Dick were forced to find somewhere else to live, luckily getting one of the remote workers cottages in nearby Heligan Woods for ten shillings a week.
In the early fifties my father lived at Penzance, Sennen Cove and eventually at the Old Vicarage St Hilary, previously the home of Father Bernard Walke (writer of the classic book on 1920’s and 30’s Cornwall ‘Twenty Years at St Hilary’) Thus I spent my schooldays in West Cornwall and my holidays in the romantic and exciting Heligan Woods. I would be put on the train, with a label round my neck in case I got lost - and a packet of cheese sandwiches, under the guard’s care from Penzance to St Austell and back again. Sometimes I would be driven half way and met by a parent at Truro. In 1954 my father and Jess with their growing family moved briefly to Kent and then London, returning to Cornwall in 1957 to live for ten years in St Ives, later for five years at Golant near Fowey - finally settling at St Buryan in 1972. My mother and Dick lived at Heligan until 1955 when Dick was appointed secretary of Dartington Hall School in Devon and my mother became a housemother for the boarders there. They lived first at Rattery just outside Totnes and then lived at Dartington until moving to Totnes in 1974, they did however keep the Heligan cottage on until the sixties.So I spent my childhood travelling between two homes and two quite different life styles, I cannot remember being at all disturbed by this arrangement in fact I did rather enjoy it and eventually friends from both worlds mingled quite happily.
.... Lucy, Pat and Dick Kitto 1960 Heligan
CHAPTER ONE - Heligan and The Beatniks
Heligan Woods in the nineteen fifties was a wonderful place to grow up in. This was long before the recent redevelopment of ‘The Lost Gardens of Heligan’. Heligan House had been a fine manor house, a mile outside Mevagissey owned by one of the Cornish ‘County’ families , the Tremaynes. It seems that during and after the First World War its exotic gardens and woods had gone to seed as most of the large staff who worked there had gone off to fight in the trenches. There were five former workers cottages in the woods and an old millhouse all built out some sort of a cob mixture They had no water (that came by bucket from a well) no electricity (we used oil lamps and wood fires) or telephones. For entertainment we listened to old crystal radios and wind up gramophones or gathered around my mother who read us stories from such writers as Mark Twain and Arthur Ransome whist gently swaying in an old rocking chair. During the fifties, besides my mother and Dick who rented Sylvan Cottage for ten shillings a week, a succession of other bohemian families passed through this little community. Television writer Geoffery Gilbert, his wife Mollie daughters Janet and Bridget and son Hilary for a long time lived in Butlers Cottage, whilst writer Derek Savage and his six children lived in Couple Cottage for a time as did potter Bernard Moss and his family. In 1958 Ivor and Brenda De Courcy moved into Heligan Millhouse and later Dick’s older brother Francis Kitto and his own large brood stayed at Couple Cottage. So hoards of spirited and adventurous children roamed the woods exploring, building camps, building tree houses and generally running free. Regular visitors to the Gilberts were the author Frank Baker, his wife Kate and children Jonathan ,Lewellyn and Josie who lived on the other side of Mevagissey for a time at Portmellon.
From the age of five or so Janet Gilbert and I used to have combined birthday parties every August as we were only a week apart in age. Someone built us a little wooden table and chairs, all of them brightly coloured, at which our little gang would sit. At that age there were strict rules of hierarchy governed by sometimes only a few months in age, and it was age that governed the size of the seat we got. In 1953 or 54 , brilliantly made up as pirates by Frank Baker - who had worked in the professional theatre years before, Jonathan, Lewellyn, me and another friend, Francis Hunot, won the Mevagissey Carnival fancy dress competition. I remember being very miffed at getting, with Lew, only half a crown prize whilst Jon and Francis got five shillings because they were bigger - yet I was the second oldest ! When we were about eight or nine the Gilbert girls, Jonathan and Lewellyn, myself and a couple of other kids furtively formed a secret society. This was The Supersonic Seven, and we went
Francis, Martin, Llewellyn, Jonathan win the 1953(or4) Mevagissey Carnival as Pirates. ........Janet Gilbert 1944-2008
The same gang 31/7/2008 with Bridget Gilbert at a memorial for Janet Gilbert near Gorran Haven
Martin, Bridget, Katy Cornell, Janet, Steve Cornell 1962 Heligan
Jonathan, David Tremlett, Bridget and Janet Gilbert, Llewellyn, Martin, Aldermaston March 1963
On The Beach at St Ives 1962: Lew, Stephen VB, Genevieve VB, Dave Tremlett, Bridget, Jonathan, Danny Hutton, Vicky Stirling
Jon, Lew, Bridget, Dave Tremlett, Janet, Hilary Gilbert, Katy Cornell, Belinda Kitto, Steve Cornell
at Portmellon 1963
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on expeditions to the Jungle a particularly wild and mysterious part of Heligan Woods adjoining Heligan House - a dense overgrown tropical garden, full of exotic trees and plants. We imagined that the Jungle was rigorously patrolled by a gamekeeper, (with a shotgun of course) and we would go to great trouble to hide from him. In the midst of the Jungle we buried a time capsule of bits and pieces in an old milk bottle. A quarter of a century later I returned to the Jungle with the musician Clive Palmer in search of a particular hardwood we knew was there. We plunged into the undergrowth and Clive emerged with some off cuts with which he began making Cornish bagpipes, in effect reviving interest in this strange instrument. Back in the fifties The Supersonic Seven used to scrump apples and have mammoth midnight feasts where we would eat mountains of secretly acquired swiss rolls, biscuits and apples and pass around woodbine cigarettes, much as years later we did joints. I had an old wind up gramophone and a stack of old ‘78’s which we constantly listened to. I have very little recollection of any pop tunes of the time but I do remember we had Noel Coward’s ‘Mad Dogs and Englishmen’, a song that still takes me back to those rosy tinted days, and a rather gloomy dirge possibly by Stanley Holloway ‘Ain’t it grand to be blooming well dead’. Later on of course like most of our generation we listened to Radio Luxembourg on the newly developed ‘transistor radios’ which we carried around rather as today’s teenagers carry ‘walkemans’.
Each Christmas, Easter and Summer throughout the fifties I spent my school holidays at Heli
gan, becoming part of an extended family of friends, building links that lasted for many years and returned to my father’s place in St Hilary, London and eventually St Ives during school terms. Even when in 1955, Dick and my mother moved to Devon after they got jobs as Secretary and Housemother at Dartington Hall progressive school they managed to keep Sylvan Cottage on for the summer at least into the early sixties. I was quite fascinated by Heligan and really looked forward to my holidays there. On one occasion , still only thirteen or so, I rode my bicycle from St Ives to Mevagissey and back in a day (over eighty miles) to pick up a fishing rod I had left behind - in retrospect rather adventurous but quite crazy- something you could not imagine someone of that age doing today!
Ivor De Courcy, who lived at Heligan Millhouse had a small fishing boat that he worked from Mevagissey harbour and I spent many happy hours on his and other ‘tossers’ in St Austell Bay fishing with feathers and plummeting or whiffing for mackerel. Then there were the great outings to the nearby beaches, Vault, Hemmick and Gorran Haven with several of the Heligan families and their masses of kids with picnics for all. In a little house high above Mevagissey harbour a little old lady (who was a friend of Mollie Gilbert) Annie Walke, the former Newlyn School painter and widow of Father Bernard Walke of St Hilary fame, would feed us with biscuits and teacakes.
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In 1962 Jonathan and Lewellyn Baker (whose family by now were living near St Hilary in West Cornwall), myself and a crew of other fledgling beatniks from St Ives came over to Heligan for the summer. On the first night we crept into Butlers Cottage which the Gilberts had vacated for a while but were completely spooked by the sound of mysterious voices and fled the cottage to sleep under the stars. We later realised that the voices we heard had freakishly been carried by the wind in the trees from Mevagissey over two miles away. By now my mother and Dick had relinquished the lease on their Sylvan Cottage and so we set out to find our own accommodation. We discovered a clearing deep in the middle of Heligan woods and built the sort of wood cabin you used to see in western movies, we chopped down a few small trees for the walls and roof, and used packed ferns for thatching and bedding. Gradually a community of a dozen or so grew up around our encampment, old army tents were pitched and other beats would turn up from all over the country after we met up with them at festivals and demos. These newcomers had long flowing hair and exotic names - several of them really were ’on the road’ and we held them in great awe. We ourselves, still in our late teens, were considered a rather inferior breed, ‘ravers’ which in those days meant week-end beatniks who could always run home to mum and dad if things really did get tough.I remember that we seemed to live almost exclusively on mackerel and porridge which we cooked over the camp fire whilst we listened to Jonathan and others with guitars play the songs of the Kingston Trio, Leadbelly and Woody Guthrie. We must have looked a strange bunch as we trapesed into Mevagissey to get provisions, with long jerseys, high khaki boots and camouflage hats - all bought from the Army & Navy stores prevalent in those days. I am sure that we were all a little embarrassed ourselves as we tended to wear sun glasses to top off the outfit and hide our eyes.
At the camp site Heligan 1963
For the next couple of years we spent our summers in the woods, usually working for my step cousin Alex Kitto who ran a landscape gardening business with his father Francis from his house Crosswyn in nearby St Ewe. We laid many of the gardens and lawns around Mevagissey and Gorran Haven as well as maintaining and trimming existing gardens. It was very hard work shoveling and raking behind Alex as he thundered along with his ancient rotovator churning up the rough ground but at least it was summer and we tended to suffer from too much sun rather than too little.
Throughout the year there was much coming and going between West Cornwall and Heligan and in those days of course we hitch-hiked everywhere. The Gilbert girls and Bridget’s boyfriend David Tremlett as well as Alex and his sister Belinda (cousin Maud) would come down to St Ives for all night parties whilst Jon, Lew , myself, my sister Gill and co would travel up to the Kittos at St Ewe for the return match. It was all perfectly innocent in those days, and although we did drink cider and smoke dope quite a lot, my abiding memory of those times is of playing billiards through
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the night on Alex Kittos rather dilapidated pool table. At my father’s St Ives house St Christophers, a long rambling building backing on to Porthmeor beach, my sister Gill and I would arrange for Jess and him to go out for the evening and then take over the whole house. Still only teenagers, a group of us would club together and buy a barrel of beer for a few pounds and throw an all night party, in the morning there would be a dozen or so of the Mevagissey crowd lying around in sleeping bags on the sitting room floor nursing terrible hangovers.
I don’t remember any massive drug taking amongst our particular group at that time. Although we all smoked ‘grass’ and hash moderately and there were a few pills around there did not seem to be many serious casualties until the fashion for L.S.D. towards the end of the decade. Certainly when later I was in London in the mid sixties I was sending little wraps of grass down to friends in Cornwall - but following a terrifying experience of paranoia and claustrophobia with some friends in Fulham in 1966- (when I was actually threatening to kill people ) I swore never to get involved with anything so unpredictable as drugs again. Alcohol is much more stable .I think that in the end people should be allowed to do what they want to with their bodies but they must be prepared to take full responsibility for their actions if things go wrong.
By travelling to the many sit downs and jazz festivals throughout the country in the early sixties we got to know many like minded people from all over the country. We would encourage many of these new friends to come down to Cornwall and join us at our Heligan base. In those days we would travel vast distances by thumb, hitch hiking with just a small rucksack, a blanket and a tin mug - sleeping rough in the open air or at the homes of friends we met on the road. We got to know a group of people based in Exeter and often would break our journey there on the way to some festival or special gig in London. On a good day, and this was before the days of motorways, you could leave St Ives at 8 am and expect to be in central London twelve hours later. New Orleans revivalist jazz was all the rage in the circles I mixed in, there was a great jazz club just outside St Ives at the Carbis Bay Memorial Hall which would be jam packed every week with a regular local band playing. The hall was unlicensed for booze and we would all have to rush down to Scotties bar half a mile down the road in the interval for a drink. There were people from all over the country at the jazz club, you could tell where they came from by their dance styles, not only the town or city of origin but their actual individual jazz clubs.
In fact hundreds of young people came to work the season in St Ives each year, usually from Easter to October, they tended to come for one year, three years - or for ever. In those days there were many elderly Scots women who had married local fishermen and settled in the town after coming to St Ives in the twenties and thirties as itinerant fish workers. Forty years on I am sure that now there are now a few dozen elderly cafe workers drawing their pensions in the town, having
5originally arrived just to work the season as waitresses. Just as I am sure the seventeen year old seasonal worker who arrived in St Ives for the first time in the sixties found it a magical place so do their do their grandchildren in the new century - and so it goes on. Throughout the sixties the cafe workers seemed to come in waves from specific parts of the country. Probably what happened was that one character came and enjoyed himself told his mates what a wonderful place St Ives was and encouraged them to come down as well. At first they came from London, mostly the south west part, and later there was a big contingement from Manchester and Lancashire generally. There were a lot of people from Yorkshire - I remember a flurry of people at one time from Doncaster in the late sixties, and then there was a gang from Reading - who got up to all sorts of naughty things. Eventually the Scots came and finally the ‘colonials’, Australians, Canadians, Americans and so on. In the seventies people drifted in from other parts of Europe and the rest of the world, all helping to give West Cornwall the intriguing cosmopolitan mix that it thrives on. At the same time of course there was a sort of cultural exchange as the young people who had grown up in Cornwall disappeared off ‘Up Country’ in search of education and careers - and hopefully a decent income. This invasion of Cornwall was of course on many different levels - from the millionaire pop star who buys a mansion, to ‘retiring folk’ who move to a bungalow on the cliffs to the ordinary holidaymaker, the cafe worker and the beatnik all of whom were quite likely to have originated from the same suburb of the same city. They come they see and are conquered, they up sticks and move to Cornwall for good replacing the cream of the local kids who, bored with country life, rush up to
the cities to sample life in the fast lane, and wages that they can only dream about at home.
The early sixties were indeed the heady days of the beatnik- and St Ives was a magnet for them. Long haired, bearded, clad in high desert boots and khaki clothes from the Army & Navy stores they poured into the town from all over the place. They lived in encampments on the hills outside St Ives and spent the daytime lounging around the town strumming guitars and smoking dope. Rod Stewart, Donovan, Julie Driscoll and even John Lennon were rumoured to have been amongst them. There were minor criminal acts, some were said to have been escorted to the borders of Cornwall for stealing bottles of milk from doorsteps. St Ives was horrified, angry signs went up, ‘No beatniks served here’. National newspapers and television did stories on the problem. To us teenagers however, they were romantic figures - we had all read our Kerouac. They came from London and the northern industrial cities, a much more classless society than the hippies of the later sixties who were much more likely to be the children of the middle classes. Some of them played instruments and sang songs, usually Woody Guthrie, the Kingston Trio and Leadbelly. Blues guitar player Wizz Jones, who I later got to know (In 1972 I met him in the dressing room of
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the Royal Festival Hall!) was a frequent visitor to the mid-Cornwall area and was interviewed for T.V. as a typical beatnik by Alan Whicker on Newquay beach. Wizz and his friends Malcolm and Carol Price would busk the streets and beaches of Cornwall, setting a fashion that continued through the next four decades. I can remember Carol doubling up as a busker on autoharp whilst selling slices of melon to the holidaymakers on the beach at Pentewan as a sideline. Back in St Ives, the beats used to gather on the sea wall opposite the Sloop Inn, strumming their guitars, singing and generally looking rather untidy, so in an effort to discourage them the local Town Council had the wall demolished and put up railings instead. The beats then moved on to the music bandstand on the promenade, the Council demolished that too. No one with long hair could get a drink in the pubs and many of the shops were no-go areas for them either. In the end however, there was a quiet revolution, the local kids began to grow their hair long and dress in the way of the beats and gradually assimilated them. The problem disappeared as the publicans and shopkeepers were unable to distinguish between who of these long haired young people was a beat and who was a local - and they could not afford to jeopardise their winter trade. One local pub landlord, who had banned the beats as a policy move, quickly came to the conclusion that it was not after all sound economics, reversed his decision and very soon became the busiest pub in town throughout the year.
In the early sixties we thumbed to jazz festivals in Manchester, Taunton, Bath, Bristol and in particular the annual bash at Richmond run by the National Jazz and Blues Federation - this one must have been in the summer as I remember sleeping out in an enormous heap of cut grass. Their booking policy was fairly liberal and acts would range from the commercial trad stuff of Acker Bilk, Kenny Ball and co, the wonderful Chris Barber Band and that great blues singer Ottilie Patterson, to the deadly serious Ken Colyer Band through to modernists such as Tubby Hayes and Joe Harriot. In the early days Blues was represented by the likes of Alexis Korner, Cyril Davis, Long John Baldry and a young Rod Stewart, many of whom would also play Ken Colyers 51 Club in Great Newport Street, off Charing Cross Road in Central London. At the 1963 Festival a noisy young blues band called the Rolling Stones packed a marquee with very loud music and I fled in horror back to the solace of the Chris Barber Band on the main stage. In fact it took a very long time for our generation of jazz lovers to accept that the Stones - or even the Beatles, who gradually replaced our heroes on the country’s festival lists and record players, had anything going for them at all.
Later that year four of us from the Heligan encampment managed to get a lift from Mevagissey to the Edinburgh Festival. Jonathan Baker, myself, Oxo from Exeter and Graham the Wig from Bristol (who was bald but sported three wigs of different lengths to give the impression of growing
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hair) were dropped in the middle of the city by a friend who was on his way to the highlands. Unfortunately, despite it being August it was pouring with rain. We went into a cafe and sat down to examine our options - Graham had a pound, I had ten shillings and the others had only a few coppers between them. One by one we went out trying to find somewhere to stay the night - it was
not a night for sleeping out as we had planned, the summer rain was coming down in torrents. Eventually Oxo returned; ‘I’ve found a room all four of us can stay in for three shillings a week’ - whoopee! We went off to a pub to celebrate with several halves of bitter. However, on going back to the room we found that our prospective landlady had actually just been removed to a local mental hospital and we were homeless once again. By now it was after 10pm and things did not look too good. Luckily Jonathan knew the banjo player Clive Palmer who shared an Edingburgh flat with Robin Williamson and other musicians and we were able to snatch floor space for the night. The next day Graham and I left Edinburgh, having seen nothing of the Festival and realising that we were unlikely to in the future it seemed sensible to head back south.
Eventually we split up and I found myself at 6pm on a Saturday night at the side of the road on the outskirts of Carlisle. When you’re thumbing a lift you are always convinced that the next car will stop and whisk you a hundred miles down the road, so I stayed put, It isn’t necessary to walk on - if a car’s going to stop it will stop. After two hours and no lift for me people started to arrive for a party at the house across the road from where I was standing. Another two hours and the party was packed ,everyone seemed to be having a wonderful time, I was invited in and even offered a bed for the night- but still I stayed on my side of the road, waving my weary thumb at the passing traffic waiting for a lift. At midnight the noise died down and gradually the partygoers began to drift away by 1am all was quiet again but it was not until 2am that I finally got my lift -a long one to Bristol. I often wonder what would have happened if I had gone over to the other side, a cross roads in more ways than one.8
CHAPTER TWO - Banning The Bomb
Having grown up as the child of two pacifists (both of them had faced a tribunal during the war), I suppose it was inevitable that like them I should get involved in the 1960’s Peace Movement. There were frequent meetings of the local Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament at my father’s rambling St Ives home, St Christophers and in fact there was a regional South West Committee of 100 meeting in full flow on the week-end of the Cuban Crisis in 1962 which heightened the tension immensely. All the older members of the family were involved in C.N.D. or Youth C.N.D. meetings and demonstrations in Cornwall and when I later moved to London in 1963 I immediately became involved in political activities from our students flat in the Fulham Road. My father and Jess had been arrested at a sit down in Trafalgar Square early in 1961 and later that year my sister Gill and I joined them on what turned out to be quite a memorable return trip to the big city
Aldermaston March 1963
Forty one of us had boarded the coach at Camborne late that autumn evening, when it returned from London the following day there were only eleven people on it - the rest of us had been gaoled. This was the occasion of the massive Committee of 100 demonstration on September 17the 1961, when over 1,200 were arrested as thousands of anti nuclear protesters blocked Trafalgar Square in a peaceful sit-down. It was the largest mass arrest in British political history, the courts and cells throughout London were crammed full and barely able to cope with this sudden increase in population.
When the police moved towards us I remembered the instruction to “go limp and weigh heavy”, as we were picked off one by one and carried to the Black Maria’s which were to ferry us to a local lock-up. On the way to gaol , locked in one of the van’s sixteen cells each fitted with barred windows , I caught sight of well heeled patrons emerging from Covent Garden Opera House quite a surreal contrast from my rather unusual viewpoint. Oddly, that remains my only ever glimpse of the national Opera House.
At the police station as we shuffled in line to be charged I got talking to a rather plump communist who gave his name to the police as Alan Sillittoe, it was indeed the celebrated writer of ‘Saturday Night & Sunday Morning’ . Coincidentally my father shared a cell that night with John Osborne and George Melly whilst Jess was in gaol with Vanessa Redgrave and Shelagh Delaney - quite a literary week end ! The fourth member of the Val Baker family on the coach up , Gill , had also been arrested, along with our friends Llewellyn Baker and David Tremlett, but all three were released as they were under seventeen.
To be deprived of one’s liberty is an enormous shock to the system when first it happens.Suddenly there are doors you cannot go through and strange faces in uniforms telling you what you
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can and cannot do. Thirteen of us were put into one cell, doing our best to while away an uncomfortable night, lying on the floor with the lights on all the time. In the morning we were each fined the princely sum of twenty shillings and turned out into the street again . Just as losing liberty was a enormous shock, regaining freedom that day was one of the most tremendous experiences of my life, opening doors...fresh air.. ,obviously a fairly trivial matter compared with the experience of many others in other countries, but pretty significant on a personal level .
After our release I met up with Janet Gilbert, who had been released from the nearby women’s section and , after staying the night at a sympathisers house we set off on the long trek back home by thumb. On the way a lorry driver who gave us a lift pressed two pounds on us to pay our fines- a moving gesture to two rather young seventeen year -olds like ourselves. Back in West Cornwall Jonathan Baker, Hugh Fido and I (all Penzance Grammar School boys who had been arrested) were interviewed by the local paper- which led to calls for our expulsion, a call that the headmaster kindly ignored . At my suggestion my father wrote a letter in to the school explaining my days’ absence saying that I had been ‘unavoidably detained.’
There were many other similar demonstrationsat that time. The four day C.N.D. Easter march from the Aldermaston Atomic research station to Trafalgar Square, which had been staged annually since 1958, was probably at its peak when I joined it during the years from 1961 to 1964, with
up to 200,000 people marching in to London at the end. The Cornwall and Devon contingement., including a group from Heligan with a banner proclaiming it ‘100% unilateral’ ,was notable for taking its own catering section - rather like an army on the march. There was an incredible cross-section of the sixties left ; pacifists, socialists, anarchists, communists, youth groups, pensioners, mums with babies, deadly serious people, light hearted people, jazz bands, folk singers, the famous and the infamous..... Because of the vast numbers involved we moved forward in a sort of slow shuffle which was immensely tiring. At the end of the day we collapsed exhausted to see to our blisters, sleeping in our hundreds on floors of the school buildings which had been secured by C.N.D. to accommodate us.
In those days the main argument within the Peace movement was between the Committee of 100, led by Bertrand Russell, which believed in Ghandian non-violent civil disobedience, and the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (Chairman Canon Collins) which believed in a more moderate approach to the cause, with marches and vigils. In Easter 1963 members of the Committee somehow managed to find out the location of the Government’s secret ‘Regional Seats of Government ‘. These were isolated bunkers where Harold Macmillan’s men would have fled to in the event of a nuclear war to run what was left of the country. This was all part of the Civil Defence system which was thought to encourage acceptance of nuclear war as a survivable option so we were of
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course against it. Fortuitously one of these R.S.G.’s was just off the route of the1963 Aldermaston march so around 3000 supporters of the Committee suddenly peeled off the road and after a couple of miles down country lanes and through some woods, hotly pursued by the press -who had been primed, we came across a rather sinister looking underground shelter surrounded by a massive gathering of police - who presumably had also been primed. It was a brilliant publicity coup for the Committee, we blockaded the place for an hour or so and then rushed off to try and catch up with the main body of the march, photographs, stories and film were all over the press that evening and the following day. The activists who had published the original R.S.G. locations were prosecuted under the Official Secrets Act, bringing further publicity to the cause. For a time there was a distinct feeling of paranoia around in the peace movement. In the flat in Fulham Road London I was living at that time, often visited by Committee activists, we were convinced that our phone was tapped and our mail opened. Once we were tipped off that we were about to be raided by Special Branch, (we weren’t) and someone was sent scuttling off to North London with a bundle of papers. On another occasion a group of us arranged by phone to fly post the bridges and banks of the Thames on the night before Boat Race day in an ill-fated attempt to gain television publicity for the peace movement. At midnight we had split up into couples and were just about to go about our business with posters, paste and paint when suddenly three police boats in the middle of the river opened up their searchlights onto us, and from nowhere dozens of other policemen appeared, arrested us and confiscated our materials. I am sure they had been tapping our phones and presumably they had infiltrated the Committee and C.N.D. too for that matter - that was their job after all.
There was another sit-down followed by arrests, this time at Parliament Square and then I was involved in a demonstration in 1964 at the U.S. Airforce base at Greenham Common when we blockaded the base for twenty four hours. This was of course years before the famous women’s peace camps and both sexes sat down and were carried away to be processed together at a nearby makeshift magistrates court. As soon as we were released we returned to the demonstration and sat down again. Throughout the night we were being heckled by a group of Empire Loyalists ( the name by which the right wingers went by in those days) when a friend from Cornwall the Cana
dian sculptor Bill Featherstone had the bright idea of provoking them into physically attacking him, upon which the rightists were immediately arrested and at last we had a peaceful night.
Later that year there was what seemed to be the last major sit-down organised by the Committee of 100. The authorities had come up with quite a clever way of clearing the streets of these irritating people and activated an obscure fourteenth century law which enabled them to “bind over” demonstrators with a hefty fine or prison sentence in the case of any further transgression. Con
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sequently many senior members of the Committee were shackled by an expensive binding over
order and unable to sit down with us when we marched on another U.S. base at Ruislip in North West London. Once again we blockaded the base and were arrested. We were taken to Uxbridge Court and bound over with a financial penalty or sentence for non compliance. However this time with the extra rider that we had to find someone else to stand ‘surety’ for each of us - again with a hefty financial penalty on them if we sat down again. This meant that further civil disobedience meant a steep penalty for a second person as well as oneself, a move that fairly successfully intimidated the movement - somewhere in Whitehall there was a Civil Servant who fully earned his O.B.E. for thinking that one up!
The later demonstrations against the Colonels who had taken control in Greece and the anti- Vietnam war demos in the mid and late sixties saw the emergence of a more violent kind of protester. Often these involved the London Federation of Anarchists (who seemed to have gained control of C.N.D.) they carried little red and black flags, threw smoke bombs and sometimes used iron bars - people who believed that the ends justified the means. A lot of us did not agree and stepped aside from politics, I watched the famous 1968 Vietnam demo in Grovesnor Square from the pavement. Although I agreed that the Americans should have left Vietnam to the Vietnamese I could not see how bashing a London copper on the head with an iron bar would help achieve that. Although C.N.D. revived successfully in the 1980’s -by then I was involved in other things.
Throughout the sixties I was involved as a foot soldier in most of the great campaigns of the time including the anti Apartheid movement as well as the Peace movement - I even worked to get Michael Stewart elected as M.P. for Fulham. However I was very pleased , just once, to have attended that very rare thing - a successful demonstration. We were at an anti capital punishment demo at Trafalgar Square, two men were due to be hanged very soon, Michael Foot, Sydney Silverman et al were the speakers when halfway through the speeches someone passed a note up to the platform telling us that the men had been reprieved. A tremendous cheer went up and we all went off to the pub to celebrate.
A rather less successful demo occurred back in Cornwall around 1967 when a group of us decided to draw attention to the rather sinister base at Nancecuke near Portreath which was rumoured to be involved in the production of nerve gas and possibly germ warfare. I was the getaway driver and the idea was that the others would put up posters and paint slogans on the road and then run back to my car and that I would then whisk them of into the night. We thought it best to wait until midnight before we started so we decided to have a drink in the local pub, splitting into three couples so as not to be conspicuous. However it seems that the pub was not used to such an influx of strangers and the landlady asked us if we all came from the circus that had just opened
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up at nearby Camborne. Mortified our bunch of political desperados made our excuses and fled up the road towards the Nancecuke base. For half an hour or so I sat in my car feeling for all the world like a getaway driver on a bank robbery as the others got on with their job. At last they came running down the road, ‘right let’s go, I think we were spotted’ said someone as the car filled with bodies. I pressed the starter, nothing happened, I pressed again - still nothing. By now there was a feeling of real terror as we imagined gangs of armed troops chasing after us. There was nothing for it, everyone piled out and pushed the car as though their lives depended on it, at last the engine burst into life and we chugged off towards St Ives and safety. It all must have looked quite odd to any passing stranger who might have seen us and I don’t remember that our escapade pulled any press coverage at all, which after all was the purpose of the exercise. Interestingly since the base closed in 1980 there have been a series of enquiries into the long term safety of the Nancecuke base and the local people who worked there. Perhaps in the near future the truth about what really went on will at last emerge.
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CHAPTER THREE - Art School in The Sixties
I was not a great success at school, although an inspiring teacher did give me a great and lifelong love of history and I was fairly competent at art. In 1961 I had started the A-level course at Penzance Grammar School but dropped out when someone suggested that I should try Art School. At that time a new course the Diploma in Art and Design had just been introduced throughout the nations Art Schools, and it was I suppose an attempt to intellectualise the students. What it meant was that as there was a five O-level qualification to get in to Art Colleges many gifted students were unable to get on the main course whilst those like myself with a smattering of ability at art and the required O-levels were welcomed with open arms. I went to Falmouth Art School for an interview at the same time as my old friend from Heligan days, David Tremlett, (later a Turner Prize nominee and probably the college’s most successful student). We were both given a reference by Mevagissey artist Lionel Miskin (who lectured at the College) and accepted to start in the Autumn of 1962.
To fill in the time before we started college I worked for a couple of months running the family beach cafe which opened out on to Porthmeor Beach from our home at St Christophers, St Ives. This was a fairly idyllic existence, naturally I inflicted all my trad jazz records on the unsuspecting holiday makers and in fact began to draw a large group of beats who would congregate on the beach outside the cafe and frighten away many of our potential customers. We used to sell a lot of ice cream when it was hot and also hired out surf boards and windbreaks - one of the best bits of the day was sitting on the steps in the late afternoon sun waiting for these to be returned. However I was apparently rather too generous with the ice cream scoop and as the profits on the cafe were not very wonderful I was soon encouraged to travel over to Heligan before the summer was over.
In September there we were at Falmouth Art School, just eighteen and living away from home for the first time, Tremlett and me, another lad and six girls got lodgings with a Mrs Cornish in a large house with a magnificent view across Falmouth harbour. We stayed there for four nights a week and then returned to our respective homes for the weekends, the accommodation and breakfast and evening meals cost us £1.15s a week, unbelievable now, out of our grant money of £52 a term. Despite this seemingly tight budget, I remember we seemed to have a very busy social life - mostly in the students pub The Kings Head where beer was 1s.3d a pint, as well as regular parties at the Art School and also at Pendennis Head where we would club together and buy a barrel of home-made farmhouse cider. The College in those days consisted of less than fifty students and so became like yet another extended family - and many of us remained close for years to come.
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The tutors, mostly practicing artists were very inspirational, with amongst others Francis Hewlett and Bob Organ teaching painting and Ray Exworth sculpture and after our one year pre diploma course almost all of us got places in major colleges throughout the country.
These were the days of the trad jazz boom, we had an Art School Jazz Appreciation Society where we would earnestly sit around listening to classic records of the twenties and thirties and there was a School band featuring trumpet, clarinet, cello, guitar and washboard. In an effort to expand the band I bought a trombone which I totally failed to master, my one and only attempt to actually play music. Ever since I have had tremendous respect for those who had the patience to persevere and learn to play an instrument. At Art School parties the students fell into two camps, we traddies would put our Ken Colyer, Bix Beiderbeike and George Lewis 45’s on the record player and the other gang, led by Tremlett would take them off and put on music by the newly emerging Beatles, or Screaming Lord Sutch, creating in me an antipathy towards the Beatles that took a decade to recover from. One thing that most of us agreed on however was that Joan Baez and particularly Bob Dylan were Gods. the latter's ‘Masters of War’ confirmed me as a pacifist , and ‘God on Our Side’ as an atheist, several of us travelled up to London to see Dylan at the Festival Hall in London in 1963.
Falmouth Art School 1963
For the last term at Falmouth David Tremlett and I and another student, Mike Coates, took a flat above Greenbank where we were looked after by the delightful Mrs Myles who regaled us with stories of her life as the local midwife. All in all life as an Art Student was great fun and though I was really not much good at painting and drawing I did acquire the odd ability to produce quite reasonable gothic pen lettering which proved useful in later years.
Although Falmouth was able to teach the Pre diploma year of D.I.P.A.D. the College did not at that time have the authority to teach the further three year course so our ‘class of 62’ had to look elsewhere to complete our Art School education. With the aid of some of Tremlett's drawings ( I lent him some of my graphic work for his interview at Birmingham) to bolster my own folder I set off for London for interviews at Hornsey and Kingston Art Schools. On the way to the Hornsey interview my pocket was picked on the tube and my wallet taken so I was unable to get to Kingston, luckily I was accepted by Hornsey, presumably because of my borrowed drawings, and was asked to start there in the September of 1963.
My first night in London was spent sleeping under a deckchair in Hyde Park. I had hitch hiked up and was to stay initially with my sister Gill and her husband Alan in Surbiton but naturally went immediately to Ken Colyers Jazz Cub in Great Newport Street for the late night session, stumbling out early in the morning to sleep beneath the stars. Eventually I ended up in a bed sit near Hornsey College at Finsbury Park and from there attended the main school and its two outposts , the graph
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ics department at Wood Green and the wonderful ‘Ally Pally’ ( Alexandra Palace) where we studied photography and I spent most of my time blowing up and distorting a cross section of a cabbage and a second world war gas mask.
My memories of Hornsey are a little hazy now, it was completely different from the small community of art students from which I had come and was incredibly overcrowded - a factor that I am sure had some bearing on the ‘revolution’ at the College some five years later.The principal was rumoured to be on some sort of commission depending on how many students he signed up ! I really should not have been there myself, however when we were told we had to write a 10,000 word thesis on a subject of our choice I chose “The Labour Party and Pacifism” and spent many happy hours researching something I was actually very interested in - though it had very little to do with art.
During that first term in London a bizarre little incident occurred when I went to get a carton of milk from a machine opposite my digs. A classic instance of man’s battle with machine. I put sixpence in and nothing came out, I examined the slot, realising that my coin was jammed I tried to flick it out with the only suitable implement to hand, my front door key. A passing woman seeing my predicament offered me a hairgrip which proved far more efficient and soon I had managed to extract not only my own sixpence but three others as well , obviously other people besides myself had been robbed by this voracious agent of United Dairies. Suddenly I was grabbed from behind and my arm forced up against my back - I was arrested ! The policeman marched me a mile to the nearest station and I was charged with stealing ‘1s.6d the property of United Dairies Ltd’ . When I pleaded ‘not guilty’ and suggested that the machine had in fact robbed me I was told by the bobby ‘We don’t want any of that Perry Mason stuff here’. Eventually I appeared in court and was given a ‘conditional discharge’ whatever that is. Two weeks later I met the same policeman who again marched me to the station where I had to sign a receipt for my own sixpence and a ladies hairgrip which had been used in evidence against me.
I think that this incident put me off North London a little and I soon teamed up with a group of friends who I had met through C.N.D. and Colyers Jazz Club to rent a large unfurnished flat in Fulham Road. A mixed bunch we were, Julian and Anne were anarchists as was Roy who was also a Charlie Mingus fanatic (he later wrote a discography), Wyn Gardener was, like Julian, a member of the Committee of 100 who had been arrested thirteen times and like me a socialist, whilst Lesley who later married Roy was an architectural student from Twickenham. 744 Fulham Road was a hot bed of politics and many activists such as Peter Moule, Terry Chandler and George Clarke were frequent visitors. Almost certainly our phone was tapped and probably the mail was opened. At one time there were documents relating to the Governments secret Regional Seats of Government in
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the flat. Someone said we were about to be raided and they were swiftly whisked off to North London.
I was becoming more and more disillusioned with Art School and aware very much of my lack of ability in this field, Hornsey was not at all the inspirational place that Falmouth had been. Just after Easter in 1965 I was driving my old Austin Cambridge through Piccadilly on the long haul to Hornsey when I suddenly realised I had had enough and made my way back to Fulham. It took some time to sort it all out as my father had signed a guarantee in order for me to get my student
grant (by this time around £130 a term) and he was presented with a bill for £634.13s.8d, the total money I had received during my three year Art School career. Somehow he managed to persuade the County Council that I had some sort of breakdown (which perhaps had some foundation) and fortunately they reduced the payment to a token £50.
What now ? well I had learned to drive and jobs were quite easy to get in those days so I signed up as a wine delivery driver for Ellis and Co of Richmond working from their Kensington branch delivering all over South West London. It was very interesting to learn the routes through London, every day was different and one never knew who one would meet, where one would go and most of all what tips would come in.
That summer I left London to go off on a trip to Scotland on my father’s M.F.V. with all the family spending my 21st birthday marooned on the boat, it was too rough to get ashore, off Stranraer.
After various adventures described in my father’s book I left the boat at Inverness and travelled back to London where somehow I managed to blow £200 I had just inherited from a great uncle - in those days you could buy a Cornish cottage for that much. At least I did end up with a bright blue Bedford van (and lots of L.P.s) and decided to set off back to Cornwall to earn my living doing small removals and deliveries with a sideline as a decorator17
CHAPTER FOUR - Back to St Ives
In fact I had a go at anything to earn a living and after a spell on ‘National Assistance’, for a time worked delivering newspapers for the local branch of W.H. Smiths. This was one of the most physically exhausting jobs I have ever had to do as St Ives is built on a hill (with Smiths at the bottom of it) and I had three separate uphill rounds with a heavy bag of papers to be collected for each one. We would go in at around six in the morning to sort the papers and eventually finish the rounds in all sorts of weather after 12.30, all for the grand sum of £4.1s.6d a week.
I met quite a lot of interesting people and quite a cross section at that. There were batches of Telegraph readers, devotees of the Guardian, one or two brave Daily Worker readers and then masses of Mirror readers on the council estates. The one thing they all had in common was that every Thursday they would all have the local paper the Cornishman which, much to our discomfort, would double the weight of our already heavy delivery bags. Dogs of course were a constant danger, they saw all sorts of delivery men as a threat to their territory and were determined to protect it. One particularly vicious brute took a special dislike to the paper deliverer and though I managed to fend him off each day I forgot to warn my replacement when I left and he was badly savaged on his first day - resulting in a six week lay off. Often through that winter the rain would be beating down and we would get soaked to the skin but just occasionally the sun would shine and the walk back down the hill with an empty bag would be enriched by the glorious views over St Ives Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse.
Most of the native St Ives families had long ago sold their cottages in Downalong to incomers and moved up the hill to be sprinkled among the sprawling outskirts of the town. One of these was Loveday Stone a woman in her seventies from an old local family, a real eccentric living on her own in a wooden bungalow the top half of which was painted bright yellow and the bottom bright purple. She told me that the local Council had once insisted that she painted her home in more traditional colours but when she threatened to paint every plank a different colour they decided it was safer to leave her alone. Loveday liked a little flutter and often asked me to put bets on for her at the local bookies. However after a while I realised that she was not too good at forecasting winners and decided to hold the bets for her myself. Every now and then I paid her winnings when her horse did come up but mostly she was not a successful gambler and so I supplemented my earnings as a sort of unofficial bookmaker. As she was housebound I would also do bits of shopping for her and inevitably she would complain that the shops were trying to cheat her, I once had to take a half eaten tin of beans back to Woolworths and demand a refund on her behalf. Every now and again
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I would take her for a drive in the country along the coastal road just to get her out of the house. I remember cringing with embarrassment when Loveday, a very large lady dressed from head to foot in colours that matched her home and not familiar at all with current fashions, spotted a group of pretty girls in mini skirts at Lands End and laid into them with her handbag howling ‘Disgusting, Disgusting, Disgusting’ in her very powerful voice.
It must have been at this time that my father won his libel case against the People newspaper, £4500 damages and £12000 costs after a two week case at the Old Bailey. I have the transcript of the case still and absolutely rivetting reading it makes. In the freezing winter of 1963 my father and a group of friends had planned to start a community on an island off Australia, The People heard about the idea and offered to fly someone out to see the island they had in mind in return for an interview with the group. The paper then published an article entitled ‘Quitter, ex C.N.D. man and cronies run to funk hole in Pacific’. The original interview was done by a free-lance and then it had been ‘hotted up’ by a staff reporter and published under an assumed name. My father’s barrister was so convinced that he could win the case that when funds ran out (there is no Legal Aid in libel cases - whoever has the most money to start with inevitably wins) he carried on free of charge. The transcript really does show up the dubious morality of the newspaper business, you get the feeling
that they would definitely shop their own grandmothers to get a few extra sales.
I had tried and failed to play a musical instrument but I did have organisational skills and a love for live music gained by frequent visits to festivals in the early sixties. Now in the Autumn of 1965 the Folk Boom was getting into its stride and I arranged a series of folk club gigs at the Winter Gardens dance hall in nearby Penzance, originally I think in aid of C.N.D. Locally there were several clubs in existence already - Ian Todd had started the Counthouse at Bottallack which featured a galaxy of singers who later made names for themselves, the Penmare at Hayle put on the likes of T.V. stars Robin Hall & Jimmy McGregor and Nadia Coutouse. In Penzance Tell Mann had his Tel Tale Club which amongst others featured ’Wee Scotch laddie Des Hannigan’ who, like Mike Sagar from the Counthouse club, was later to be involved with me on the alternative paper Peninsula Voice. At the Winter Gardens I signed up traditional singer Peter Chatterton from Sheffield, singer/guitarist from Falmouth Vernon Rose, and a friend of Donovan, Iris Gittens, who sang and played very much in the Joan Baez mould, as residents. Each of the resident singers earned £3, Pete acted as M.C. as well and then we padded out the night by giving the first hour over to the youngsters and encouraging visiting musicians to sit in or do a floor spot. The club was quite a success from the start and I recall regular crowds of over two hundred for our Thursday night sessions. For a time I even ran a coach full of people over from St Ives every week.The next step was to book guest acts and through contacts with a London agency I arranged
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a series of concerts. Our first name act was the top English singer and banjo player Shirley Collins who cost all of £10 - but that included her return train fare from London, and accommodation at £1. I went to meet Shirley from the London train to give her a lift to the venue in my old van only to find that local musician Jonathan Coudrille who was due to do the support had turned up in his sparkling white vintage Rolls Royce, sheepishly I had to ask our star how she would like to travel and got the expected reply! Others who appeared included shanty singer and songwriter Cyril Tawney from Plymouth and the Appalachian singer and banjoist Hedy West, who because she was an American act, I had to give half the fee, (£12.10s) in advance. The club ran through the Winter of 1965/66 and then came to an end when the logistics became a bit too much for me, but it was good fun and gave me a taste for music promotion that has stayed with me for many years.
Out of the blue came a new sort of job opportunity, brief though it was. In October 1966 the Folk singer Donovan arrived in St Ives with an I.T.V. film crew to make a documentary on his life before he found fame and fortune. In the early sixties Donovan and a group of friends from North London had come to St Ives as beatniks and camped on the outskirts of town ( in fact I remember lending him a tent at the time). Many of his early songs were obviously inspired by his time in Cornwall and now he was a household name through many appearances on national television. He was seen for a time as Britain’s answer to Bob Dylan with songs such as; Sunshine Superman, Saffron, Sunny Goodge Street, Universal Soldier and so on.
The hour long documentary was to be set half in London and half in St Ives, and Donovan , who remembered my sister Jane from earlier days, sent the crew round to hire us all as extras. Eventually a dozen or so of us gathered on Porthminster beach with Don, his friend Gypsy Dave and also the American Folk Legend Derrol Adams who was travelling with the party. For three pounds a day , good money then, we were to play beatniks, sitting around a camp fire cooking mackerel and potatoes whilst Donovan mimed to a tape of his current hit record ‘Catch The Wind’.The props department rushed around town buying kettle, mugs , cutlery and rolls of tin foil, all of which was in mint condition and so we had to age it all with the aid of candle smoke. As for the mackerel , well there just weren’t any in St Ives on that day so the company had six driven over from Newlyn by taxi. Filming continued for a week, on the beach, in an old Second World War bunker above it and in the woods above the town where Don and his friends had camped first time round. The continuity girl would demand ‘who was smoking in the last shot’ all our hands would shoot up and we were tossed Senior Service cigarettes, a posh smoke that no self respecting beat would have been seen with in those days. In the end the film was actually quite good and clips from it turn up every now and again in ‘The Sounds of The Sixties’ series on T.V. - it really is quite strange seeing younger versions of us all after all these years.
20CHAPTER FIVE - Summers & Winters
That winter I began a strange sequence where for three years I shuttled between St Ives and London working in the Harbour Restaurant, St Ives for the holiday season and then as a wine delivery driver in London for the winter. I think I must have been at a bit of a loose end unsure of where to eventually to settle down - both jobs had their plusses and minuses though neither was exactly stimulating. In the city the whole ‘Swinging London’ scene seemed to pass me by I positively ignored the hippie fashions and had even stopped smoking dope, after a particularly nasty experience by 1967. I lived in a series of dingy bed sits and went to jazz and folk clubs with friends from my bases in Fulham and Putney , for a time I drove trumpeter Bob Kerr to ‘sitting in’ gigs in south London and was a regular visitor of course to Ken Colyers club where I once saw two New Orleans legends Kid Thomas Valentine and John Handy play a wonderful ‘all nighter’. I was working from an Off license in the West End covering most of South West London, dealing with everyone from the myriad range of international restaurants to the nobility, famous film stars, little old ladies (often Ladies down on their luck) who just wanted six bottles of guinness, to famous artists whose gallery sent them a case of Moet each for Christmas. Occasionally I would have to go in with the bailiffs to recover some of the shops stock when some unfortunate restauranteer went bust. I saw kitchens where cockroaches were literally crawling over cooked chicken, delivered incredibly expensive 1945 red wine to the top peoples places and was treated weekly to a free Indian meal in a restaurant kitchen where nobody spoke English and the staff would gleefully try out their hottest menu on us. One customer, an art dealer in Kensington, when she heard that I came from St Ives asked me if I knew of the whereabouts of any Alfred Wallis paintings as she was trying to get one for King Hussein of Jordan. The Off license for whom I worked, now long defunct, used to import and bottle wine and sherry from the continent and North Africa and there was a sink permanently full of water where we were instructed to soak off labels and put on new ones depending on the customers order - though we were strictly not to try this dodge on bottles which cost more than ten shillings as the conneiseur would probably realise what was happening. Ever since then I have had very little confidence in wine labels and believe there are good bottles and bad bottles depending on your luck. In the spring of 1969 when I eventually decided to leave wine delivering and London for good I had the rather embarrassing experience of having my van, fully laden with wines and spirits , pinched from outside the firm’s wine cellars beneath the London Palladium - on my very last day. Luckily it was found, though empty, and I was cleared of any suspicion soon after I arrived back in Cornwall.
During this time I lived in a succession of bed-sits around Fulham and Putney and would
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socialise in pubs on the Putney side of the river like the Bricklayers and the Half Moon,- well known for an adventurous music policy. In one bed-sit off the Fulham Road I had gone to bed early one night when I was woken up around two in the morning to hear someone calling “Martin, Martin -are you there?’. I crawled out of bed and opened my door to find Ivan, a chef I knew from St Ives, standing in the hallway waving a bottle of whisky . The whole house was in an uproar, Ivan was in need of somewhere to stay, he had been on the razzle in a Putney pub and someone had given him my address so he had called round to see me - with the whisky as a peace offering. Unfortunately when Ivan had rung the doorbell and had no reply he had smashed the glass front door panel with the bottle and let himself in, blundering around the house trying to find my room and actually going into my landlady’s room which of course terrified her. Still feeling rather groggy I stumbled out and eventually managed to pacify everyone and Ivan was allowed to sleep on my floor. The following morning Ivan who can be a bit of a charmer when he tries, spent a couple of hours carefully repairing the damage to the door and as far as I know left on the best of terms with my landlady. However when I went to pay my rent the next weekend the landlady told me I was to leave her house, immediately! “I’ve found out who you are’ she said ‘You’re working for the police - I want you out of my house-now’. Astonished, I showed her my driving license, my passport, my
insurance card - but to no avail. ‘Ah, they teach you to act as well ‘ she said triumphantly. In the end I managed to get her to agree to let me stay on just another week and then moved out. I often wonder what nefarious crime she was guilty of , or just possibly had Ivan spun her some tale to get into her good books.
New Years Eve, Xmas and birthdays I always find very difficult, I much prefer accidental celebrations and it was on New Years Eve 1968 that I came across something rather extraordinary. I had been out to a party near East Putney tube station and, feeling rather sorry for myself, was making my way through the back streets down the hill to Fulham at two in the morning when I was approached by a man waving a bottle of whisky in one hand and a bottle of brandy in the other. “ Come in and have a drink’ he shouted. Naturally I was a little wary, but soon he was joined by his wife also waving a couple of bottles and I followed them into their sitting room. Obviously they had had a rather muted evening and decided to do something about it . At regular intervals one or the other of them disappeared into the street, returning a few minutes later with someone who just happened to be walking down their road. In the end there were about twenty of us, all complete strangers to each other - and I must say that when I staggered out at seven we had all had a rather stimulating time.
For three summers I had been working as a dishwasher at the Harbour Restaurant at St Ives, a complete contrast to my work in London, we did a seven day week with an eight hour shift for
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£ 10 a week and a brief midday meal. Somehow we managed to spend every night in the pub, often playing dominoes in the Sloop with locals , from Spring to September. The Harbour was the largest Restaurant on St Ives harbour and its kitchen in fact also served food to the Seafarer Restaurant in the parallel Fore Street. Often people would compare the food in one or other of these two cafes but we knew that both sets of customers were eating from the same menu. Including the day and night shifts there were well over fifty people working at the Harbour, a wide mixture stretching from old Gordy a true St Ives man who peeled the potatoes, a chef from Birmingham, waitresses from all over the country down to work the season ,and the painter Dick Gilbert who made a rather flamboyant head waiter. The food came from all over the place, I can remember potatoes from Egypt, fish from Denmark, beans from the Peoples Republic of China....... the only thing that I am sure that was local were the Lobsters brought in live by a local fisherman. It was hard work but there was always a good sense of camaraderie in the kitchens, our shift hardly saw the sun and when we nipped out for a smoke on the prom we stood out like sore thumbs with our pasty white faces and weary expressions a complete contrast to the jolly hoards of sun-tanned holidaymakers from upcountry pouring around the town.
Although the management of the Harbour Restaurant itself were fairly benevolent, generally wages and conditions in the town’s catering trade were not very good at all and in the late spring of 1968 there were moves in St Ives to do something about it - perhaps we were in tune with the general revolutionary feel of that year. At the time the minimum wage in catering for men was 2s.10d per hour and for women 2s.6d, the average wage in the country as a whole was around £20 though of course in Cornwall it would have been much lower. A friend of mine worked an 84 hour week as an assistant chef in another establishment for £12, at one hotel the whole staff of fifteen went on strike and were fired and replaced the next day. Rather shocked by this a group of us began to hold clandestine meetings to get the catering workers more organised. The obvious thing to do was to team up with one of the major unions, so we arranged to meet representatives of two of the most likely organisations to help us with our struggle. However in both cases we were dismayed to discover that they were not really interested in us at all as we were only seasonal workers and thus would not be able to pay the dues all the year round. This really was a great disillusionment for those of us with socialist sympathies, we had always believed that the unions were there to help people like ourselves. However we decided to go ahead with our unofficial ‘St Ives Catering Workers Union’ and arranged a meeting of all the catering workers to discuss future tactics.
Because of the nature of our work the only time that the day shifts and the night shifts could get together was midnight and because we expected a fairly large crowd the meeting had to be out
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side. So, in the moonlight, about two hundred of us gathered around the chapel on top of the Island, the headland that juts out between Porthmeor and Porthgwidden beaches . It must have been quite a surreal sight for anyone who happened to be passing by. The night shifts were exhausted, many of the day shifts were just a little bit tipsy, those capable of public speaking spoke, every viewpoint was put forward, at one point we were harranged by a sympathetic Polish baroness who was big in foreign sales for nearby Holman’s engineering works. In the end it seemed that there were two camps those who thought we should go for four shillings an hour and those like myself who thought that three shillings and sixpence might be more attainable, most of us there were terrified of actually losing our jobs so secrecy was essential. We had amongst us a chap called Jake, a seasonal worker from London, who proved to have a brilliant flare for publicity and he managed to get the story not only in the local press and T.V. but also in the national tabloids, suddenly we were big news. Inspired by this Jake and the more militant of the protesters arranged for a march through St Ives in the full glare of the national media, I thought this was too soon and so it proved. Although the marchers were cunningly disguised with large paper bags over their heads to hide identities most of the catering workers were too worried about losing their jobs to take part in the march at this stage. In the end about eighteen protesters marched in single file round and round the T.V. cameras in an attempt to give the impression of an endless procession, but it became clear that the support was not really there and soon afterwards the fledgling movement came to an end. With hindsight we should probably have taken up one of the suggestions floated at the big meeting and picketed the cafes and hotels paying the lowest wages and shamed their managements to up the rates. Perhaps visiting trade unionists as individuals, unlike their organisations, would have supported us and boycotted these places.
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CHAPTER SIX - The Sawmills and St Ives Again
By the spring of 1969, with my twenty fifth birthday fast approaching, I realised that I could not continue the rather nomadic existence of summers in Cornwall and winters in London and had to decide what to do with the rest of my life. In the end it had to be Cornwall and after finishing my stint with the Wine Merchants I set off for Golant near Fowey where my father, Jess and the rest of the family had been living for two years since leaving St Ives.
The Old Sawmills was a wonderfully romantic building up a creek a couple of miles up river from Fowey. There were a series of dilapidated chalets dotted around the main house and it was in one of these that I made my new home. I had of course visited the Sawmills on several occasions previously and I remember once early on walking through Fowey with my father and hearing someone, obviously under the misapprehension that authors earn big money, say ‘that's the bloke who’s bought the Sawmills - supposed to be rolling, doesn’t look it though’. Once again this period has been well covered in my fathers books, he continued to write and to edit his revived literary magazine The Cornish Review whilst Jess opened up a Pottery in the centre of Fowey. To start with I was employed to build a dam across the creek with the idea of having a small permanent lake in front of the house instead of the rather ugly tidal mud flats that were a daily feature of the place. For a couple of months I toiled away at this impossible task, carrying huge boulders in a little rowing boat and heaving them overboard at the place where the dam wall should be. Eventually I gave up and my brother Stephen who had just left university took over, in the end he too was defeated and we realised there were better things to do.
There was no road access to the Sawmills so all shopping involved either walking a mile along the riverside railway line to Golant and a car or travelling down river to Fowey in our zodiac inflatable boat which had a powerful outboard - and a lot of leaks. We used the boat for pleasure as well often visiting the pubs of Fowey and Polruan and sometimes having a rather scary return journey a little the worse for wear. Once Stephen and his girlfriend Wanda and I gave a lift to some Spanish sailors back to their China Clay ship after a good night out and they invited us aboard for a final drink. Unfortunately the Spaniard's did not speak English and of course we had no Spanish though we seemed to get along quite well with gestures. At the end of the evening they showered us with bottles of wine and packets of cigarettes, which seemed very generous - it then became apparent that they believed we had sold poor Wanda to them for the night, a situation we only extricated ourselves from with great difficulty.
One Summer evening I decided to row across the river and explore the other side a place far more remote than our own with no roads for miles. Walking up the hill I came across a cottage
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which appeared to be deserted and tentatively pushed the door open to have a look inside. Astonishingly it had all the appearance of a landlocked ‘Marie Celeste’, there were plates on the table books were scattered all over the place it was well furnished but had obviously not been used for years, fascinated, I began to sift through the evidence to try and work out what had happened there. Most of the books had been published in the forties, many of them had the word ‘Balls’ stamped in bold red ink in the frontispiece, though whether this was a name or a piece of literary criticism I could not work out. The mysterious householder appeared to have been at one of the major universities and then to have served with the R.A.F. but apart from two items nothing in the place had been published after 1951, and it was now 1969 ! The two more contemporary items were a ‘Sunday Times’ and an ‘Observer’ both dated on the same day in 1962, left presumably by someone who had stumbled across this strange place and perhaps stayed overnight seven years previously. After a couple of hours investigation all I could surmise was that the householder had (a) gone mad (b) perhaps had been lost in the Korean War or (c) might have just wandered off and had been missed by no one at all, a spooky thought. By now it was getting quite dark and feeling rather uneasy about the whole situation I scuttled off down the hill to return to the Sawmills never to visit this remote place again.
After my sojourn as a failed dam constructor came to an end I looked around for some other way of earning a living and ended up driving a three ton furniture lorry for a firm in nearby St Austell.In fact the job involved sharing the driving and delivering with another chap, Roger, who’s greatest delights were to speed through St Austell at 60mph or to take the lorry unnecessarily through the middle of Mevagissey in mid-summer- a feat which was just about possible but tended to result in queues of furious holidaymakers being held up. Every day was quite terrifying, I was never quite sure if I would return home alive. Travelling around this part of Cornwall was however quite interesting, each day we would cover a particular direction, stretching from Truro in the west and Liskeard in the east , from Mevagissey in the south to Newquay in the north. The China Clay hills at the back of St Austell were particularly impressive, not only were the then conical hills majestic but the clay pits themselves were staggering in scale, from the top a massive vehicle moving the clay around the bottom looked nothing more than a Dinky toy. In the tiny Cornish Cottages the first thing we looked for was a coffin hole, this is a series of loose floorboards resting on slats between the beams which enabled coffins to be lowered from an upstairs bedroom and doubled as a means of getting beds and wardrobes upstairs, the stairs themselves being far too narrow and twisty to be of any use.The firm kept an employee permanently on call to repair the flimsy new plastic covered furniture then in vogue and in fact the old furniture we collected in ‘part exchange’ was far more substantial. When old sofas and armchairs came in we would slit the back cover and a
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veritable fortune of lost change would pour out. This we regarded as our perks as it was very hard work and not a very well paid job.To get to work I would have to walk along the railway line at seven in the morning, often in the moonlight, then drive my old car in to St Austell and as winter drew in the car became more and more difficult to start. The river provided a notoriously damp atmosphere with dense sea mists quite common and sometimes an exceptional high tide which would maroon my car on the wrong side of the road to town. Often I would be there early in the morning pushing my car up and down the road trying to start it. After a hard day at work I would collapse in a heap and the thought of going out again was not very appealing . In the end I was late for work once too often and for the only time in my life I was sacked, just before Christmas. A week later my erstwhile colleague Roger crashed the lorry and also joined the ranks of the unemployed - I had got out just in time. With no work I had a rather depressing Christmas, for a while I signed on and then came to the decision to move back to the far west and to return to St Ives.
At first I looked for a job as a driver with no luck and then someone at the Labour Exchange asked me if I would be interested in working as a printer with a firm on the outskirts of town. As it happened I had dabbled with various forms of printing when I was a student at Hornsey so I thought it would be worth a go. James Pike ran a small publishing firm printing paperback books and had bought a series of titles from the U.S with titles such as ‘How to Start and Run a Business’, ‘The 1936 Joke Book’ etc which we proceeded to recycle. There were about six of us working for him and I must say we always seemed very busy, we took the books all the way from typesetting to printing, collating and finishing and then dispatch to mail order customers. It was here that I learn the basics of a trade that kept me going, just, through most of my working life. Besides the American titles there were more adventurous sallies, I remember a paperback colouring book on the treasures of Tuttenkamun (then on display in London) and a book by a local vicar entitled ‘THE EXORCIST -and the possessed’ which came out at the same time as its near namesake and somehow managed to get in to the lower regions of the Best Seller list. Often we would be working late into the night with twelve hours overtime most weeks, but with a basic of ten pounds there was not much chance to live the highlife.
I had a room at nearby Hellesvean in a cottage owned by Caroline, a colourful character who had run the Revolution Boutique in downalong St Ives in the sixties. Caroline was at the time rehearsing for a part in a play which was to be performed in the forthcoming St Ives ‘New Activities Festival’ due to be staged that Easter. The Festival, funded by South West Arts and run by the poet Nicki Tester would feature new theatre and music as well as a lot of street performances, some of which were to prove a little too bawdy for some of the locals. As a recent newcomer I volunteered
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to help and was given the job of guarding the Festival’s marquee overnight on the Island with another poet, Bob Devereux. Unfortunately the Festivals press officer, in order to stoke up some publicity for the event, had spun a story to the national press that thousands of people were coming to St Ives for the weekend - and somehow this had been twisted to say that ’10,000 skinheads to descend on St Ives’ - and we read it in the papers so it must be true. Throughout the night somehow Bob and I, worrying all the time that we were going to be overwhelmed by thousands of skinheads paced up and down the big marquee furnished with just a few deckchairs and an upright piano, no heating and typical freezing Easter temperatures - and no one came.
While I had been at Fowey my younger sister Demelza had begun to play bongos with a little band called The Temple Creatures run by a fine musician and singer called Clive Palmer. Clive had been a founder member of The Incredible String Band (originally Clive’s I.S.B.) but had taken his royalties from the first L.P. and travelled overland to Asia so missing the great success the band achieved when in the late sixties their album sales were only outdone by the Beatles, The Rolling Stones and The Who. On his return he had moved to Cornwall playing with The Famous Jug Band and various other musicians in the Cornish Folk Clubs which were booming in those days ending up for a time in one of the chalets at the Sawmills. Clive had a really adventurous approach to music and would take his material from all sorts of directions, a multi instrumentalist, he now played guitar, banjo, balalaika, violin and clarinet. Accompanied by ‘Little’ John Bidwell who as well as singing and playing guitar also played the Indian Hand Organ and the ‘Dulcitar’, a hybrid instrument built by Clive, and with Demelza on percussion the Temple Creatures had a unique sound very popular around the Cornish clubs.
Encouraged by the Easter Festival I decided to return to the music promoting business by putting on a concert at St Ives Guildhall featuring the Temple Creatures and some of the best acts from the local music scene.By tying up with the Mask Club in St Ives, (run by Julie Hewitt in our family’s old house St Christophers) Chrissy Quayle’s Mermaid Club at Zennor and the Railway club at Penzance we pooled resources to put on an all star gig. Besides the Creatures we had Kris Gayle and the Jazz Roots, Mike Silver, Chrissy, a guitar duo High Speed Gas and Bob Devereux reading poems and compering. I inserted an enigmatic advert in the local paper for a few weeks, ‘The Temple Creatures are Coming’ and postered the whole of West Cornwall. We hoped for at least a hundred people and were astonished to find that when we opened the doors there was a queue of nearly three hundred and ended up with a full house of five hundred people. This struck me as a fairly interesting way of making a living so a month later we repeated the exercise with similar results.
In the Spring of 1971 I arranged a series of concerts at the Guildhall starting with Clive
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Palmer’s new band C.O.B. which featured him, John Bidwell and ‘Whispering Mick’ Bennett on vocals and percussion - possibly the only time ever that a complete band and their instruments arrived at a gig on two mopeds ! This was a terrifically creative time in the music business locally. Although we used the loose term ‘folk’ to cover it the great majority of musicians and performers were writing their own material, criss crossing the worlds of poetry, jazz, classical to the edges of rock . Song writers like C.O.B., Steve Tilston, Mike Silver, Roger Brooks, Tom Hall and Jim Hughes were continually producing new work for us in St Ives as were Ralph McTell, Michael Chapman and other regular visitors to Brenda Wooton’s Pipers Folk club in Penzance. The Folk tradition had not been entirely forgotten though and acts from that area mingled amongst the earnest young men and women of the more contemporary mould. Acoustic guitar playing was another theme at the concerts and clubs - inspired by the work of Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and their contemporaries, that year we had Gordon Giltrap at the Guildhall as well as the fine local duo High Speed Gas. Another major creative force in those days was my old friend Bob Devereux. Bob, originally from Dorking , had arrived in St Ives in the mid sixties and found work as a waiter, deck chair attendant, painter and eventually as a poet and compere. He had an immense amount of original poetry which he was able to reel off without the aid of any book or prompt, in a way he made original poetry ‘accessible’ to an audience unfamiliar with the genre. Several of his pieces were over twenty minutes long, one ‘St Ives Feast’ was a spectacular reworking of the Dylan Thomas ‘Under Milk
Wood’ theme with St Ives as its subject, another, his masterpiece ‘Arnold’, expresses the frustration of dreamer forced to earn his living on a street market stall, often Bob worked with musicians and there were some wonderful ‘jams’ featuring West Cornwall’s finest that really should have been recorded for posterity. During that season and the following one when I teamed up with Julie Hewitt to run the Mask Folk Club at Mr Peggottys Disco a stream of talents passed through the doors; Mike Beeson who put his short story ‘The Applicant’ to music with Mike Silver, lutanist Denys Stephens, Glaswegian songwriter and singer of Bob Dylan songs Phil Donne, Dave Evans from Bristol..... And then there were the ‘Floor Singers’- every night there would be at least half a dozen aspiring musicians queuing up to play at the Mask club and some of these were very good indeed. Each night we would book a guest act, usually from outside Cornwall, who would do two half hour spots and then there were two resident acts,leaving half an hour in each half to try out the floor singers. In fact this was a very useful way for new performers to learn their trade, a sort of academy of stagecraft.
By the autumn of 1972 I was becoming more and more exhausted working long hours as a printer and began to think of doing something else. Bob Devereux was now working in a group with singer/songwriter Jim Hughes and violinist Bridget Tickner under the name Mask, they had put
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a lot of Bob’s pieces to music and also featured Jim’s own songs and some jigs and reels. They needed a driver for a forthcoming two month tour of England through the Chrysalis agency and asked if I could do it. I was of course delighted and soon gave in my notice to set off on a new adventure. My car at that time was a battered but reliable old Austin Cambridge big enough to hold the four of us, our baggage, instruments and also for part of the tour, singer/guitarist Roger Brooks who was looking for gigs in other parts of the country. It really was an extraordinary experience, we travelled from town to city playing small Folk Clubs and massive concerts, to audiences of 100 one night and then the next to 2000. At some places Mask would be top of the bill and others at the bottom, in some places their act would go down a storm in others it would not work at all. It all really depended on what sort of audience they were faced with. At Harringey Tech someone had made a mistake and booked Mask for the end of term ball thinking they were a rock band as support to a heavy metal band called, I think, Wild Turkey. When we arrived I must say we were a little apprehensive to see a rather hairy looking outfit guzzling bottles of whisky in the main dressing room, they didn’t look like folkies....... Mask’s carefully crafted mix of poetry and music must have taken the audience by surprise, it wasn’t exactly danceable. Although there were a small group of people up front who did seem to like the set , eventually there were growls of ‘gerroff we want the Turkey’s’
and I noticed Bob beginning to speed up the performance - this audience had come to bop. The one hour set shot by in forty minutes, we grabbed the £40 fee, jumped into the car and shot off up the motorway to the next gig, in Leicester, as quickly as we could.
The following night was much more to our tastes, Roger started the night off followed by Mask and then guitarist/singer John Martyn, with The Albion Country Band finishing the night. The biggest gig was I think at Leeds University where the main act was Elkie Brooks’s band Vinegar Joe, she, then in her prime as a sort of female Mick Jagger, was a truly remarkable performer and the organisers had the sense to use two stages so that this time Mask were not faced by an audience waiting for a rock band to go on. Most of the tour however involved small college gigs and folk clubs with fees ranging from £10 to £40 and the accommodation from floor space to hotel rooms. Bob had one superb piece “Yellow Dwarf’, based on the Fairy Story, which he managed to split into three episodes each about twenty minutes long and the group would finish the night with this on an Archers-like cliffhanger ‘What will happen next, to find out the further adventures of Yellow Dwarf - Book Us Again !’ Occasionally we would have some time off, we visited my mother and Dick who were at that time running an annex of Dartington Hall School at Conisborough near Doncaster and Dick took us for a midnight drive through the industrial heart of Yorkshire. I had never seen such places, and having rather resented the influx of holidaymakers to Cornwall every year I became an immediate
30convert to the idea that people who live and work in such conditions to produce the things we need at least deserve a decent holiday - and in fact how lucky we were to live in such a beautiful part of
the country. Another time someone lent us a converted barn in Dorset for a weekend and towards the end of the tour we were invited by some friends of Jim and Bridget to stay with a Community on a farm in Hampshire for a weekend. They seemed quite nice people but I had forgotten that Jim and Bridget were keen Christians and at the first meal we were asked to stand and sing grace. I was horrified, and though to humour our hosts I did stand and mumble a few words, I explained that as a devout atheist I was unable to stay, jumped in the car and fled to London to stay with more rational friends, Bob, an agnostic, to his credit stayed on to argue the case until I picked them up on the Monday.
Whilst we had been driving round England in a circle Clive Palmer’s group C.O.B. were on another tour as support to the Folk supergroup Pentangle and Wizz Jones. My youngest sister Genevieve, still only eighteen, was playing congas with C.O.B. as a substitute for Demelza with whom Clive had fallen out. They were promoting their second album ‘Moishe McStiff’ which although not a great seller then has since become a real collectors item and now changes hands for £250. Somewhere in the middle of England we actually picked up a hitchhiker who’s last lift had been with Danny Thompson, Pentangle's bass player. Through Genny and Clive we managed to get tickets to see the final Pentangle gig at The Royal Festival Hall, bizarrely I sat next to Ralph McTell and a musician friend from Cornwall who had escaped from prison and was on the run - I half expected him to turn up in arrows ! The concert was packed out and Clive gave up some of his set to the elderly Scottish traditional singer Willie Scott. C. O. B. , Wizz and Pentangle were all superb and we were invited backstage afterwards for drinks with the performers. This was all a bit overwhelming for me, there were all my musical heroes Bert Jansch, John Renbourn, Jaquie McShee, Wizz Jones.. even Mary Hopkin I really felt like a starstruck groupie - Bert Jansch sat on my jacket !
After such brushes with the great and the good it might seem a bit of a comedown to return to Cornwall but there was one last flourish for Mask. The group, which was coming to the end of its time, (Jim and Bridget wanted to get on with other things ‘upcountry’) had recorded a half hour session for Radio One’s “In Concert”series and it was going out on a Sunday at 7pm on the night we had a gig at Padstow. We once again packed into my old Austin and set off for Padstow carrying two radios to catch the programme. In the end six of us ended up sitting in a field listening to the broadcast, this was it, Mask were Bigtime at last, in high spirits we set off for the gig - only to find an audience of twelve. That’s showbiz !
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CHAPTER SEVEN - Interlude and Rainydays
In the spring of 1972 I was having a drink in the St Ives artists pub The Sloop with some friends when I met up with Karen Evans who I knew slightly from the days of the Winter Gardens Folk Club. Karen was down in St Ives to stay with her grandmother Dorothy Whittaker a painter, after dropping out of College. We did seem to get on rather well, having similar interests in music and walking and I was soon rather smitten. A few days later I saw Karen home after a drink and we were horrified to find that Dorothy had collapsed during the evening and though we immediately called the ambulance the doctor told us that she had died. Karen was devastated, convinced that she should have been at home that night, though it was something that could have happened at any time. I think this incident brought us closer together and we began a series of regular long walks around the peninsula getting to know each other.
Karen had trained as a classical pianist but was also a very good cook and when she decided to stay on in St Ives she got a job in a local restaurant. Throughout that summer we were together constantly and when I returned from the Mask tour it seemed natural for me to move in with her in to Dorothy's cottage with the romantic address of 3 Wheal Dream. I remember those as very happy days, it was the first time that I had actually shared someone's life and we embarked on a comfortable domestic time with lots of dinner parties and I was able to free myself from the constant social life of pubs. I had managed to find a job back in the printing trade with Headland Printers in Penzance travelling each day across to the south coast. We took a couple of lodgers to help make ends meet but both times had to ask them to leave, one was a fanatical cleaner and tidy-upper whist the other was the complete opposite , the cottage was too small for that sort of conflict.
I still kept my hand in with music promotion, and put on Mask for one final time at The Penwith Gallery though by now the group were presenting Bob’s poems and Jim and Bridget's music as two separate sets. The following summer I once again ran a weekly club at Peggotty’s and by way of experiment opened up a Folk club at Camborne as well with the idea of utilising the guests we booked at both venues. This latter move collapsed in tatters as I went down with a particularly nasty flu and the good people of Camborne refused to respond to our attempt to bring culture to their town. Karen, who also played and sang now and again in the club, entered a county wide piano competition and came a very respectable second. She would also play concerts locally but I think was quite frustrated by the lack of a musical tradition in the area. My own interests were in the area of jazz and folk, I had no knowledge of the classical strain and only slowly began to pick up a love for it. Karen also taught me to play chess, another thing I had not come across before, at one time I became quite addicted and we played regularly at Wheal Dream.
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One evening whilst sitting outside the Tinners Arms at Zennor we decided on the spur of the moment to drive to Heligan and stay the weekend in the woods. Confidently I led Karen through the dark woods to the campsite where ten years before we had played at being beatniks and we bedded down under the stars - only to here a loud snore from under a nearby tree. I don’t know if he was spooked but we certainly were and we fled of to a quieter location. We had a weekend in London visiting my sisters Demelza and Genevieve who were briefly on remand on a drugs charge at Holloway Prison (where the warders treated visitors like convicted prisoners let alone those on remand) and saw two wonderful films “Lady Sings the Blues” and the Russian ‘War and Peace’ a seven hour epic that ran through the night. In St Ives I got to know Margery Horne, Karen’s music teacher a nice old lady whose parents had lent the potter Bernard Leach the money to buy his workshop in 1920. As Marjory’s arthritis grew worse and she was unable to teach she used to send off Leach and Hamada pots and others from her remarkable collection to the London auctions.
That autumn we decided to go for a camping holiday in Wales. Perhaps October is not an ideal time to go camping but that somehow did not occur to us.My father’s family came from North Wales and I was quite looking forward to visiting the country for the first time. We packed the car with everything we could possibly need and set off. I don’t know if it was a normal weather pattern but it rained and rained and rained for the whole two weeks, even the campsites were flooded and we often ended up sleeping in the car. Despite the downpours we enjoyed the experience and did a
lot of walking on the mountains and drove around much of the north and central part of Wales. On one occasion we were high up in the hills when an impenetrable mist came down and we became completely disorientated and lost. Luckily we eventually came across a group of Welsh speaking students who kindly led us down to the foothills.They obviously saw us as a couple of English tourists, although as Karen, who was born at Bangor, and claimed descent from Owen Glendower himself, and my own ancestors were buried just a few miles away, we almost certainly had as much Welsh blood in us as them.However when they learn that we were from Cornwall they decided we were O.K. and were Celtic cousins after all, a bit strange really because although we had both lived in Cornwall from an early age nobody at home would have thought of us as Cornish at all.
It was this experience of Wet Wales that gave me an idea that was to give me a good little business side line and a trading name that I have used to this day - Rainyday. As we trapesed from sodden hill to rainswept resort I noticed that without exception all the postcards on offer featured blue skies and blazing beaches (often photographed from behind a lone palm tree to give that extra feeling of the exotic) - and a lot of the time it was not quite like that at all ! If that applied to Wales then it must also apply to Cornwall and also any other holiday area - and so the concept of Rainyday Postcards was born. The idea was to create a range of alternative cards featuring holiday
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makers, rather like ourselves, who were determined to enjoy themselves whatever the climatic conditions. When we returned to St Ives I set to work to put the scheme into operation. Originally I had planned to use photographs taken in the pouring rain but a photographer friend convinced me that the technology of the day was not quite up to this. Fortunately I soon afterwards met the cartoonist Michael Green in our local the Sloop and explained my plans to him and we were soon hard at it planning an operation that we hoped would spread throughout the country. To cover myself I also contacted another good cartoonist Maggie Tremlett the wife of my old art school friend David and asked her to produce a couple of drawings on the theme. Unsure at first of how these things are done I offered the two of them the choice of an outright fee of £10 per drawing or 25% of the sales, Maggie took the tenners whilst Michael opted for the percentage deal.
Michael, known familiarly as Mitty, had worked regularly as a cartoonist for kids comics for many years and had the grim sense of humour that was well suited to the idea, Maggie produced some excellent drawings but after a trial run in St Ives it soon became clear that it was Mitty’s that caught the public’s eye and so began a professional relationship that was to last for twenty years. We used to combine on producing the ideas for the postcards, often I would sketch out a rough and then we would shuffle around a selection of familiar captions to suit Mitty’s finished drawings. Titles like ‘Wish you were here’, ‘Oh I do like to be beside the seaside’, ‘Just our luck’, ‘At least we’re not getting sunstroke’, ‘And from here we should have really spectacular views’ etc adorned pictures of the determined holidaymakers smiling madly in adversity. At first we sold the cards to shops in St Ives and then spread to the Penwith area, then the rest of Cornwall and eventually ventured into Devon as well.
Rainyday Postcards never made either of us a fortune but they did enable me to have a sort of working holiday for two weeks of the year. At the beginning of May I would print off 30,000 cards, bundle them into packs of fifty and set off up the north coast and down the south coast on a sales trip and then in July I would print another 20,000 and go on a re-stocking run. Usually the shops would buy 400 or 800 of the eight designs I carried, although I did once pursuade one shopkeeper to take a massive order of 16,000. At first I had a horror of Bed & Breakfast establishments as a place to stay and used to sleep in the back of my car but eventually I realised that if I was going to be a salesman I needed somewhere comfortable to rest my head. Often I would spend my last few pennies on half a gallon of petrol and set off on my selling trip convinced that somehow I would raise the next gallon in the first fifteen miles. The first stretch was usually the most profitable, from Gwithian to Bude, then I would carry on up to Coombe Martin in North Devon across to Dawlish on the South Devon coast and work my way back along the coast of South Cornwall, a round trip of about 450 miles. I would drive from 9am when most shops opened to 6pm when most of them
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closed,selling all the time except when I would have to wait for a buyer to return from a lunch break. Looking back, there must have been some sort of boom in the tourist industry in the seventies
and I did not have too much trouble selling the cards. Despite or possibly because of the Rainyday theme they seemed to go better on a really sunny day when the shopkeepers were in a good mood and could see the humour of Mitty’s drawings. The cards were aimed at a sort of mid-market target, they were too upmarket to sell well in towns like Newquay, Paignton and Ilfracombe but rather too downmarket to succeed in the likes of Salcombe, St Mawes and Dartmouth, the ideal places were seaside shops in small villages along the coast. It was through these trips, and later when I extended the run to Aberystwyth on the north coast and Margate on the south, that I came to appreciate the incredible variety of styles encompassed in the British seaside resort. The class system endures fiercely even on holiday, the subject could make a wonderful photographic or film documentary. The only thing that remained constant everywhere was the same tat on sale in the shops supplied by travelling salesmen like myself who cruise up and down the coastal roads all summer purveying their bits and pieces. In Paignton once I asked a shopkeeper (a retired Black and White Minstrel who had come to Devon to perform and stayed) what was his best selling line was - ‘plastic Hawaiian skirts’ he replied, ‘the old ladies love them’, and indeed I spotted them again and again throughout my trip.
When I first started publishing the postcards I tried other lines as well, Terry Pascoe produced a series of ‘Country Characters’, strange gnome like figures in colour, Sally Cole drew animals and birds, Maggie Tremlett did a series of funnies on skateboarders but none of them in the end had the selling power of Mitty’s black and white rainday cards. At one time I was carrying 28 different designs but all that happened was that buyers bought in dozens rather than fifties. In the end I decided to stick to eight designs by Mitty, each season we would drop two and put two new cards in. We were never sure which ones would sell, often a design we thought was hilarious would flop and one we had little confidence in would prove to be a best seller, one early good seller featured Prince Charles and Diana on honeymoon in the background but we had to tippex them out when the marriage floundered. Buoyed by the success of the cards I encouraged Mitty to produce a little book of cartoons on a similar theme entitled ‘A Day at the Seaside’ and to keep the unit price down I printed 2000 copies. However we soon discovered that people who buy postcards don’t necessarily buy books. Although we got three hundred or so into the shops, most of them were still there five years later and I was forced to set fire to the rest of them. At least the surviving copies must be some sort of collectors item. I had plans to do an epic sales trip right round the coast of Britain and in fact did make it as far as mid-Wales where I collapsed mentally and physically exhausted after shouting at
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a shopkeeper who refused to even look at my samples. Another year I drove to Margate and worked my way down the south coast including a foray on to the Isle of Wight. Co-incidentally Arthur Dixon, a postcard firm on the Isle of Wight brought out their own version of rainyday cards a couple of years later, seemingly inspired by some of Mitty’s drawings. When I complained I received a letter from their managing director saying that he ‘failed to see any similarities’. The one thing I discovered by visiting some of the country’s biggest resorts was that the major card companies had these places tied up and that I could not compete with their discounted prices. Licking my wounds I returned to my regular round of village seaside shops where there were small but dependable outlets. Still I must say these trips were incredibly stimulating and I did have the privilege of visiting the whole of the coastal regions of the southern U.K. through the seventies and eighties.
Back in St Ives Karen was becoming more and more frustrated by the lack of opportunity to play music and mix with classical musicians and after a failed attempt to get in to one of the major music colleges we decided to move to London to give her more of a chance. Some friends owned a flat in Blackheath which they agreed to let out to us and we started making arrangements to move and I managed to get work lined up as a ‘temp’ with a printers agency. First of all some friends manoeuvred her heavy grand piano into a van that went on ahead of us and then packed my trusty old Austin with all we could fit in it. Karen had gone on a music course at Dartington Summer School so I picked her up from Devon at the end of it and we set off for the city and a new life.
I suppose I should have realised something was wrong, but somehow there were no warning
lights at all. We drove up outside our new home and out of the blue Karen said “I don’t think we should live together any more’. I was shattered, I really thought I was in a secure and happy relationship with someone I cared for very much . I had burnt my boats, and whilst I had been quite happy moving to London as part of a couple the thought of living in the big city on my own again did not appeal at all. Over the next month I did my best to retrieve the situation and persuade her to change her mind but to no avail, she needed her freedom and I had to go. In the midst of all this I went down with a severe summer flu , suffered an excruciating toothache and rather mournfully celebrated my thirtieth birthday. Eventually seeing that there was no hope of a change of heart I moved out to stay with my sister Jane in her Putney flat for a couple of weeks. In a very depressed state I carried on working as a temp printer near Tower Bridge and then decided the time had come to return to Cornwall once again. The car was now in a bit of a state with electrical problems but I jumped in and drove non stop until the lights gave up and it ground to a halt just over the Tamar Bridge in Saltash. I spent the night in the back of the car on the Cornish side of the river, glad to be home again and to have escaped from what had turned out to be a real nightmare.
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CHAPTER EIGHT - Putting On The Music
Trying to pull myself together again I threw myself wholeheartedly into music promotion, (and I am still promoting three decades later). Although I now based myself in Penzance, and had managed to get my job back at Headland Printers, I continued to put on shows in St Ives, mainly at the Guildhall. A favourite attraction then was a wonderful new band called Scarlet Runner which featured the excellent American cellist and singer Sandy Spencer plus locally based musos Tim Wellard, Mick Bennett and Thom Podgoresky, another American. Both Sandy and Mick were also in entirely different ways very good songwriters whilst Tim was capable of turning out a few as well.Scarlet Runner were probably the best of the creative musicians around in West Cornwall in the mid seventies and carried on in another equally good incarnation as a duo, Crooks and Nannies, after Thom and Mick moved away. Other performers around at that time included the American poet Jacob Bush, who also acted as M.C. for a time, Bob Devereux -now performing solo, and singer/songwriters Clive Palmer, who had moved to West Cornwall, Mike Silver, Steve Tilston, Dave Evans and Roger Brooks. With guitarists Wizz Jones, John James, Adrian O’Reilly and Keith Hills also making regular appearances we were fortunate to have a very lively and innovative music scene - and luckily a sizeable and enthusiastic audience. I ran one more season of Mask Folk Club gigs at Peggotty’s in St Ives with concerts at the Guildhall once a fortnight featuring bigger acts from outside the county. Often we would feature a supergroup using many of the afore mentioned performers jamming variations on their own music with Bob weaving improvised poetry over the top, wonderful performances that should have been recorded for posterity (or at least for me !).
The following year (1976) I came to terms more with living in Penzance and started a regular club night at the old Winter Gardens ballroom in the early part of the season with major acts in concert at the St Ives Guildhall and the ‘Wints’ during the summer. At that time Michael Chapman was pulling very large audiences and I also booked former Pentangle stars John Renbourn and Jacqui McShee for the first time as well as a seventeen piece jazz band led by saxophonist John Williams. To keep the costs down I would put each act on at both the Penzance and St Ives venues on a Tuesday and Thursday respectively, advertising and promoting two gigs being the same cost as putting on just the one.
During that season Bob Devereux and Clive Palmer had been improvising poetry and music with great success and when they decided to work together as a duo I offered to work as an agent for them.Bob had a wealth of poems he had written over the years, it was all in his head - he very rarely read from any sort of script, whilst Clive at that time playing mainly banjo and northumbrian pipes would weave tunes behind the words, often using traditional music from his own substantial
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reservoir of material.
On the face of it this was a pretty unlikely combination, but both were very talented and creative artistes in their own fields and working together inspired a flurry of new material. Bob and Clive’s set would include about 75% working together and then solo pieces by each of them, practically all of the words would be original material al First we arranged a recording session at the flat I then lived at in Marazion to make a demo tape of their best numbers and soon afterwards I printed and published a small book of Bob’s poems ‘Seeds Sparks and Searches’ which we sold at the gigs. For a couple of years I got them bookings throughout the Westcountry - I think the furthest we went was Bristol, although I did get them a gig in Guernsey which unfortunately fell through. Probably the most interesting booking was at the massive Sidmouth Festival where Bob and Clive and their wives were given rooms in a posh hotel whilst their Manager, me, had to make do with a free camping space a couple of miles up the road - so much for the trappings of success ! Later we went to a proper recording studio and recorded ‘Suns and Moons’ a cassette that is now something of a collectors item and was much later released as a C.D. Years afterwards a track from this C.D. “Morris Room’ was chosen by Billy Connolly (an old friend of Clive’s from Edinburgh in the sixties) as one of his ‘Desert Island Discs’. In fact much enthused by the ‘Suns and Moons’ cassette I went to London in search of a prop
er record deal for Bob and Clive and eventually ended up in the offices of Mooncrest Records in North London. Much to my delight the company offered to make a single of the best number ‘She Changes’ and work on the rest of the recordings to have an L.P. ready for release later that year. In buoyant mood I went back to Cornwall and waited for the call, but nothing happened. I eventually contacted the company and discovered that the man who was so keen on our tape had ‘left the label’ and pretty obviously the others were not really interested. Despite this dissapointment we carried on for time later augmenting the act by the addition of Tim Wellard on guitar and Dick Reynolds on keyboards to form the band ‘Rhombus’. This really was a line up to set the spine tingling. In their whole existence Rhombus only played in public about five times but each performance, all of completely original material, went down to enormous applause. After the first performance in Penzance at The Art Centre, Dick much to his surprise was stopped in the main street and asked for his autograph.
On an earlier visit to London with Bob and Clive we had met up with Clive’s old colleague from the days of the Incredible String Band, Robin Williamson, who was now based in Americ a and was touring Britain with his four piece U.S. group ‘The Merry Band’. Strangely I had never heard the I.S.B. in their heyday but I was very impressed by this new line up and booked them to play at the St Ives Guildhall with Rhombus as support. Robin, like Clive himself, did seem to be something of
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a genius, able to play a vast array of instruments in many different styles. As well as having a good grounding in traditional music, especially that of the harp, he was a prolific writer of new lyrics and music as well as a poet and an accomplished storyteller. Fortunately such was the appeal of this gig to I.S.B. fans throughout the south west that we had a near full house and the concert was recorded by Radio Berlin for a later broadcast. Joachim the German broadcaster was kind enough to send me a tape of the programme which I still play from time to time, it does seem odd to think that one of our St Ives gigs was broadcast to Eastern Europe possibly even reaching Russia. Rhombus produced an hour of their self penned material whilst Robin and the Merry Band cruised through the Williamson song bag finishing up with a totally unexpected, and brilliant, rendition of the old Music Hall number ‘Where Did You Get That Hat’.
After four more years working for Headland Printers in Penzance I decided to try and have a go myself as a printer. In 1978 I borrowed £1000 and set out to get equipment, mostly through the Exchange and Mart, always a good source for the printing trade. Eventually I got hold of an old Multilith 1250, lithographic printing machine and an even older Guillotine, one of those Victorian things with an enormous fly wheel which you had to operate by hand, plus all the various inks and accessories. For premises I rented a ramshackle upstairs workshop in a yard behind the Shell garage in Penzance, opposite the railway station. It was here that I was based throughout the eighties printing leaflets, letterheads, business cards, books and of course the Rainyday Postcards. I decided to use the ‘Rainyday’ label to cover the Printers and also my music promotions as well as occasional other publications. It was at the time when the postcards were still booming and I also supplemented things for a little while by taking a part time job as a taxi driver.
This latter occupation was an eye opener, I worked from 6pm to 2am three nights a week delivering drunks and old ladies all over West Cornwall. The pay was paltry, drivers were on 1/3rd of the take, usually a minimum 90p fare, and most of the intense work was concentrated between the hours of 10pm and 1am, the rest of the shift we waited around in a dilapidated office waiting for ‘the call’. Big boozey drunks and their molls would order a taxi to take them from the pub to the local night club just outside town and of course when the taxi arrived would keep you waiting whilst finishing their drinks, thus making the job even more uneconomic. The only way to make it worthwhile was to squeeze in as many fares as possible at the busy time. The most depressing part was picking up the fares again when the night club closed at 1.30am, by then they were truly paralytic and were likely to be sick all over the car - not a pleasant experience at all, and almost enough to put you off alcohol for life. I tried this for three months but found it so exhausting on top of my day’s work as a printer that I had to give it up and did work for a while for a local firm delivering flowers around West Cornwall - which I found much less stressful. Slowly I built up my little business until
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I was able to exist without the need to do other work, occasionally I was so busy that I was even
able to employ friends to collate, fold or staple when major jobs came in. In the spring the postcards would subsidise a poor winter and of course there was a lot of work for the Tourist industry and in April there were local election leaflets to be printed. I can’t say that I really enjoyed life as a a printer but one did meet a host of interesting entrepernerial types who seemed to inhabit the area in droves. There were always optimistic poets who wanted their masterpiece printed and some extraordinary money making schemes that did seem rather doomed from the start, they all required printers and I suppose I did my little bit to keep the economy of West Cornwall going. When the eighties recession began to bite I was actually forced to live in the workshop for a year to save money, sleeping in my darkroom and living on takeaways.
CHAPTER NINE - St Ives September Festival
During this time I had continued to promote live music, and in the autumn of 1977 with a group friends decided to try and organise a week long Folk Festival in St Ives. The St Ives Guildhall was an ideal venue for the bigger events and we planned to put smaller ‘club sessions ‘ in various smaller places around the town. We started to have meetings and decided to approach South West Arts for funding. Rather naively I applied to S.W.A. for the whole cost of the Festival, around £2500, and was soon put in my place with an offer of £100. Fortunately we discovered that Hilary Behrens and Robert Etherington who organised the International Musician’s Seminar (I.M.S.) at nearby Prussia Cove were also keen to expand their series of Chamber music concerts in September and so we came up with the idea of combining to produce a St Ives Arts Festival every autumn.
We encouraged people from other branches of the arts to get involved and soon encompassed the fine arts, poetry, theatre a cartoon festival, lectures, street entertainment and all the rest - as well as the basic core of Chamber and Folk Music. Throughout that winter we planned and schemed and the first two week St Ives September Festival was launched in 1978 with Robert Etherington as the, eventually, paid co-ordinator, myself as the booker of a three day folk section, the painter Patrick Hughes (and later Bob Devereux) booking the poets and a host of enthusiastic others looking after other sections of the arts. One early decision was to revive the custom of ‘Open Studios’ where the local artists would open their studios to the public on the two Wednesdays during our fortnight. Chamber Music concerts featuring maestros and students (including the young Nigel Kennedy) from I.M.S. were put on in St Ia Church, the great Footsbarn Theatre Company, The Barneys (featuring Daniel Rovai) and The Natural Theatre Co amongst others were booked to perform in the town’s streets whilst poetry readings and lectures were staged at the Penwith Gallery.
For my own part, I booked three major concerts at the St Ives Guildhall featuring acts such as The Tannahill Weavers,The Bert Jansch Band and three other top folk guitarists; Stefan Grossman, John Renbourn and the legendary Davey Graham, as well as afternoon and evening sessions featuring local musicians at Mr Peggottys Disco and the Parish Rooms. Because of the intimate nature of St Ives performers, organisers and audiences mingled freely and this helped to build up a feel good factor that lasted through the years. The Cornish opera singer Benjamin Luxon gave a concert at the Guildhall as did modern jazz star Don Rendell and we also featured Theatre (Including Shiva Theatre’s debut performance) and Dance groups. That first year the weather was spectacular and St Ives really looked at it’s best, although this did hit our afternoon indoor cartoon festival rather badly. All sorts of things were going on around the town, I remember standing outside the
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Sloop Inn with Robert, pints in our hands, when a group of soaring hangliders swooped gracefully towards the harbour from the Carbis Bay direction, I rather fear that Robert had forgotten that he had booked them! Everywhere you looked there was something going on and the festival soon acquired its own impromptu ‘fringe’,.On the Island there were performance artists and there was even a Morris dance group on the Slipway. The fortnight of events finished up with a festival Ball featuring top local band Kris Gayle and Gayleforce.
This first Festival broke the ice and taught us a lot about what worked and what did not. Of course we made a loss, but it was bearable and we set about fund raising to cover it. There was a good amount of local support and a lot of offers of help, the committee expanded to around thirty including a councillor or two as we began to plan for the1979 event. We had no pretence of being a ‘Community’ Festival, although we did use quite a few good local acts, our intention was to bring down national and international performers and give them a platform in St Ives to entertain both the local and the visitor and also extend the holiday season bringing much needed trade to the town. As a feedback operation we sent out Red Simpson and Chris Cocklin with tape recorders throughout the town to find out the reaction of the public, performers and punters to our event. These tapes are now safely ensconsed in the St Ives Archive Centre an interesting addition to the oral history of the town - and they really do contain some little gems.
There were, in those days, two other major Festivals in Cornwall; The Festival of Fools at Penzance, based around the Footsbarn Company and featuring many of the great alternative theatre companies around at that time and Polgooth Fayre near Mevagissey which had a particularly strong music policy booked by a friend of mine Bob Butler who later went on to run the enormously successful Elephant Fayre at St Germans. Both these two were on open air sites and at the mercy of the weather, most of the St Ives events were inside as there was no obvious outdoor venue in the town and I must say it made things rather easier though we were I think regarded by the others as a rather more mainstream event. In fact I rather liked the fact that we covered such a broad range of the arts and that often one could end up for a late night drink with a gaggle of chamber musicians, an outrageous theatre type, a coke snorting rock musician, a tipsy northcountry folk band and a bunch of celebrated painters and poets. As I was living at Penzance at the time, during the Festival I and many others made use of one of the enormous Porthmeor Studios overlooking the beach which was empty at the time and was let to us for poster making . One morning I counted eighteen people in sleeping bags and blankets who had ‘crashed out’ there after some big gig, it was a wonderful place to wake up in and breakfast with that magnificent view over Porthmeor beach. The story was, incidentally, that the studio, one of a dozen or so owned by the Borlase Smart Trust, was kept empty in the expectation that the Pop Artist Peter Blake was about
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to move to St Ives. Fortunately for us he must have changed his mind and for two years the Festival was able to use this very handy asset.
The following year the Festival expanded with more of the same, I booked Michael Chapman, June Tabor and The Maddy Prior Band amongst others, Liverpool poets Roger McGough and Brian Patten gave a reading as did Ivor Cutler, on the jazz side we had Mike Westbrooks Band, with George Melly and John Chilton’s Feetwarmers playing the Festival Ball - a truly memorable occasion. As George also had his foot in the Art camp we arranged a debate at The Penwith Gallery on the motion ‘Has Modern Art Finished?’ and got him to chair it. I was on the door and there was an enormous response from the local artists, we crammed over 250 in and had to turn many away. Speakers included David Brown from the Tate Gallery, S.W.A.’s Tony Foster, painter Patrick Hughes, and writers Colin Wilson and W.S.Graham with critic Giles Auty speaking for the motion. Nothing inflames an artist more than talking about art, in fact several were moved to shout about art. One artist cried out ‘there’s only one decent painting in this gallery - and its over there! ‘ jabbing his finger wildly in the direction of his latest masterpiece. Several artists walked out in a rage, all in all it was a very passionate affair that stretched on for over two hours, the whole event was in fact recorded and will no doubt surface again some time. A little uproar occurred sometime later when an excerpt from George’s regular ‘Punch’ article was reprinted in the St Ives Times & Echo mentioning that he had met people from all over the country at our festival but none at all from Cornwall and that he had been told that the Cornish all lived ‘up the hill on the reservation’ .In a way there was some truth in this as many of the locals had sold off their cottages in downalong years ago and a lot of them did live on the new estates at the top of the Stennack. However if he had been quoting one of us non Cornish Festival organisers it would have seemed terribly patronising to St Ives people so I was very relieved to hear later from my friend the very Cornish sculptor Maxie Barrett that the quote had come from him when he chatted to George in the gents at the Sloop.
The wide diversity of acts and cultures made for some strange bedfellows and for one night we decided to try and mix them together on one stage, something which seemed a very good idea at the time. Topping the bill we had the Cornish folk diva Brenda Wootton with a couple of I.M.S. chamber musicians, some other folkies, Bob Devereux and two poets from the north. The northern poets had only just arrived in town not expecting to have to perform that night and consequently had had a few drinks on the way down. The large audience consisted mostly of elderly St Ives folk, had come to see Brenda who was very popular at that time and I rather suspect that their familiarity with the work of alternative poets from the north was fairly minimal. Anyway the poets started the evening off and after about fifteen minutes the St Ives lady who was selling raffle tickets for us came out to me on the door and said ‘Martin there doesn’t seem to be much applause in there -
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hang on they’re beginning to clap’. And so they were, slowly -very slowly, they clapped . The poets had misjudged the situation, or rather we had given them the wrong audience. As I poked my head into the hall they were going on about dog mess in St Ives - not quite right for the local audience at all. It was the first and only time I have heard a slow handclap, but the northern poets rather bewildered, still did not take the hint that their time had come and Bob who was also acting as compere had to move on to the stage and carefully manoeuvre them off it. The rest of the evening went down relatively well and at last the audience were able to see their favourite in full song. Another lesson learned, don’t mix chalk and cheese. Later that evening around midnight I came across a rather surreal scene at one of the town’s telephone boxes. Inside, our old friend Joachim from Radio Berlin was phoning in a live review of the Festival to his station in Germany whilst the northern poets, who, understandably had been drowning their sorrows, hammered on the outside of the box as they searched for a taxi to take them back to their accommodation. To be fair the next day our friends from the north did a perfectly reasonable reading to their own audience in the Penwith Gallery and hopefully left the town with fond memories of their adventures at St Ives Festival.
During my five years involvement with the Festival the event expanded in many different directions, I stayed generally within my remit of booking the folk and jazz acts and organising advertising and poster distribution. By now we had managed to secure some sort of meagre wage for Robert Etherington who was thus able to work for six months of the year administrating the Festival and applying for grants as well as sorting out the classical side of the event. Robert at first seemed to us as a bit of a fish out of water, a great chamber music afiscianado he was a typical ex public school and university man from a world we were very unfamiliar with. However he had a boundless energy a great gift for administration and the sort of artspeak that the funding organisations delight in. Also because the rest of us were tied up in our differing day to day ways of making a living he had the freedom to concentrate on the work in hand. An added bonus was that each year he was able to persuade half a dozen of his friends from upcountry to come down to St Ives and do the festival’s donkey work in return for a fortnight’s accommodation. Their job was to distribute publicity and to draw up daily posters to place around the town and I will never forget the embarrassment of discovering a board covered in posters advertising Cambourne Town Band - our friends were not all that familiar with Cornish place names.
With the expanded committee we began to explore new avenues and introduced more street activities including a carnival and a ’Harbour Day’ which included raft races, a fancy dress swim and a waiters race. Indoors the ‘Mayors Choice’ concert featured acts chosen by that years incumbent and we built up a regular fixture of a band and choir night on the middle Sunday. National
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names continued to appear such as Chris Barber, John Martyn, Georgie Fame, Humphry Lyttleton, Adrian Henri, The Battlefield Band plus a host of I.M.S. musicians and sundry folkies. On two occasions we commissioned work. The Cornish sculptor Maxie Barrett produced a massive slate piece called ‘Gentle Wave’ (which now languishes at Lands End) and Bob Devereux wrote the libretto to Christopher Brown’s music for ‘Seascape’ based on the life of the revered St Ives painter Borlase Smart. This last had two acclaimed performances at the Guildhall featuring soloists, choir and a band and led to Bob being commissioned to write the libbreti for several more operatic pieces. There were two particular acts I was very pleased to get to St Ives, one was The Master Musicians of Jajouka a thirty piece group of musicians from Morocco who did a spectacular performance at the Guildhall (and were later photographed on The Island in their flowing Arabian robes - another very surreal sight). The second was the internationally famous Irish folk band The Chieftains. One of our committee, Chris Cocklin, had bumped into their piper at a Breton Festival in Lorient and secured a phone number. I called Paddy Moloney in Ireland and asked if the band could play St Ives in 1982. ‘Sure’ he said and that was it ,no contract or letter of confirmation. We went ahead and quickly sold out the venue and as the big day got nearer and nearer I began to panic. The Chieftains were on a world tour somewhere,I phoned Ireland, I phoned America, I phoned again and again, finally I tracked down one of the band two days before the concert - ‘don’t worry we’ll be there’ he said. And so they were, jet lagged and just back from the States they rose
to the fantastic audience response and played a blinder, certainly one of the best gigs the St Ives September Festival ever put on.
So the Festival progressed - attracting national , ‘a mini Edingburgh’ and international ‘the Best Little Festival in Europe’ reviews, the popular Festival Ball on the last night became a guaranteed sell-out. However the amount of work required to keep the event on the road was enormous, especially for those of us who already had a full time job to run in tandem. Robert I knew was finding it difficult to give up six months of his life each year to the Festival and becoming frustrated by lack of support from the local authorities. Without doubt the Festival was extending the season by attracting several thousand extra visitors to the town, what it needed was an input of enthusiasm, and money, from the local councils to establish it as a long time commitment. All over the country there are similar events, often run by the local authorities themselves which have proved of great economic benefit to the towns that stage them. St Ives, with its unique mixture of scenery, history and involvement with the fine arts was the ideal place to have an Arts Festival.
I came to the conclusion that after five years that I had done my bit and decided to resign from the Festival Committee at the first meeting after the 1982 event, only to be beaten to the line by Robert Etherington who announced his own resignation. Realising that it might look like too many
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of us going at once I bit my tongue and stayed on a little longer before dropping out quietly. The Festival continued on with a different group at the helm until 1986 when it became a victim of the eighties recession - although Bob Devereux did keep the Poetry section going at his own Salthouse Gallery until we ressurected the Festival itself in 1994.46
CHAPTER TEN - A Very Cornish Coup
I suppose another reason for my need to leave the Festival was because of my increasing other commitments. In 1980 the committee of the West Cornwall Art Centre in Penzance was in crisis and announced that they felt that the venue could not continue as an Art Centre. They proposed selling off their grand piano and letting off the upstairs theatre as a furniture store. This would really have been a tragedy, the Arts Centre was based in an old methodist chapel with really beautiful acoustics, one of the few decent live venues in West Cornwall. Together with a few disaffected members of the old regime we gathered a group of enthusiasts to try and save the Art Centre. We had several furtive meetings around the town and then began to hatch a plan to take it over - much in the way of a revolutionary cell staging a coup. There was an A.G.M. due so we rushed around the town eventually getting sixty or so new members to sign up, each of who’s six pounds subscription entitled them to vote for a new committee. We then drew up a list of our own candidates for all the positions up for offer and urged our supporters to vote us in en bloc. The resulting meeting was as an exciting and passionate affair as any of the dramas staged there. A packed crowd voted us all in and the following week we took office. My first job as House Manager of the West Cornwall Art Centre was to sort out a dispute between the Women’s Institute and the Women’s Gas Federation who had been double booked for an afternoon meeting by the previous management! However we soon got into the swing of things, most of us were in our thirties brimming with energy and ideas, determined to make the hall work as a venue again.
The first thing we did was to book an ambitious programme of events to raise the profile of the venue. I put in many of the folk acts I had become familiar with through the St Ives Festival, Michael Chapman in particular was a regular visitor and was always an assured house filler, and I also took on the literature side, booking amongst others; McGough, Patten, Charles Causley, Dannie Abse, Margaret Drabble and Christopher Logue. Mr Logue’s visit could have come right out of his own quirky series ‘True Stories’ in Private Eye magazine. To encourage him to come to Penzance on a Sunday in November I had promised to take him up to see his contemporary W.S. Graham who was living now at nearby Madron. However I discovered two days before the reading, when I met Sydney’s wife Nessie in the street, that W. S. had a reading of his own to attend to in Hampstead that very same weekend. In fear of losing my poet I could not bring myself to pass this information on to Christopher and so was left with the job of entertaining Mr Logue from the time when his train arrived in town at 8am until the reading at 7.30pm. My own car was off the road and I had arranged to borrow my fathers but it turned out that his had broken down too, so we started off sitting in a transport caff whilst I tried to find a car
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to take us to visit Sydney and Nessie Graham and then on to the Tinners Arms at Zennor for a walk on the cliffs. Eventually I persuaded an old friend librarian Liz Mumford to do the honours and we set off for Madron where I actually went up to Sydney’s cottage and hammered on the door to of course no response. By now it was not only very cold but as we reached the Tinners it also began to rain rather heavily it was obviously not the time for a romantic walk on the cliffs either. After having tea at Liz’s cottage I could see that Christopher was becoming more and more exhausted by these exertions and booked him into a B&B for the afternoon so he could rest. Finally we got to the Art Centre for the Reading to find an audience of only a couple of dozen or so. The poet rattled through his programme at great speed and only lost his composure, understandably, when someone asked a silly question at the end. With great relief all round we bundled him on to the overnight train to London and back to civilisation.
Partly through this experience I came to realise that poets, or at least most of them, don’t drive cars, and in fact those that do, drive rather badly. Perhaps they all need to have admirers drive them around whilst they consult their muse. Certainly in Cornwall I have driven Bob Devereux, Sydney (W.S.)Graham and Arthur Caddick around at different times, and I began to hear of others; Roger McGough, Brian Patten, Charles Causley, Ted Hughes, Stevie Smith............. I once drove Caddick to a reading of his poem commemorating the fifthteenth century Cornish Rebellion at an
anniversary do at St Keverne on the Lizard where he suddenly started slurring his words in the middle of the piece. Now Arthur had built up a fine reputation in his youth as a bon viveur so the packed audience naturally assumed that he had been drinking again, but he was as innocent as a lamb, I had been with him all afternoon and in fact he had the great misfortune to be wearing a set of dentures that were slipping. Arthur incidentally was I think a greatly underrated poet, he was known mainly for his hugely funny satirical poems but was capable of some very moving serious work often published in very limited editions and it is for this that he would like to be remembered.
I had known Sydney Graham since I was a kid at Mevagissey and in adulthood got to know him again in West Cornwall in the sixties and seventies often at gallery openings or wild nights at the Gurnards Head Hotel where if you were lucky the landlord Jimmy Goodman would shout ‘Stay on you buggers’ at closing time. During one of the early St Ives Festivals a national newspaper reporter arrived in town and expressed a wish to interview one of our performers so Robert Etherington deputed me to drive him out to Madron to meet Sydney and Nessie.
‘It would be very nice’ said Sydney on our arrival, “if we had a bottle of whisky’ . The reporter took the hint and dashed over the road to the William 1V pub and came back with a bottle which we began to consume. As the afternoon went on, I began to feel that the reporter had not quite done his homework. Sydney began to switch the interview around, suddenly he was delving into
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the man’s childhood and his relations with his parents which were apparently not too good. Sydney was known for a rather cruel streak when he had been drinking and slowly but surely he began to twist the knife. In the end the reporter was in tears - in deep distress. I had to rescue him and take him back to St Ives. I don’t know if an article was ever published, it would make interesting reading.
Many years later, long after Sydney had died, I met up with Nessie at a gallery opening and reminding her of that day, asked why Sydney had been so cruel. ‘Martin ‘ she said ‘ he soon realised that the man had never read any of his poems and probably had never even known his name so he felt moved to put him in his place’. Sydney’s own place in West Cornwall and national history is assured with a fine body of published work and in particular his elligies to his painter friends Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton and Bryan Wynter which were so movingly hung beside the artists’ works in a recent show at the St Ives Tate Gallery.
The Art Centre began to get rather lively again, there were regular exhibitions in the downstairs hall and local jeweller Robin Kewell initiated a very successful Film Society where the selection of films was so consistently good you could turn up without having to refer to the programme. Using a pool of locally based musicians as residents the Irish guitar player Adrian O’Reilly and I organised a regular Folk Night with visiting guest acts - even attracting the American Spider John Koerner, a contemporary of Bob Dylan with whom we went for a drink at the Blue Anchor at Helston to sample their celebrated home brew - quite a memorable experience. As part of the Art Centre programme we had regular classical concerts and several big jazz names which we would book at the annual South West Arts tours conference - known by regional promoters as the ‘Bookers Ball’. We were receiving funding from S.W.A. of around £2000 a year and part of the deal was that we booked acts through them at their co-ordinated tours conference, the idea being that if an act had several gigs in the region their fee would be reduced. The trouble was of course that as soon as the acts knew they were playing on the subsidised art centre circuit they charged their maximum possible fee (with all the trimmings) in the first place. Thus it was far more sensible to contact the act direct and find a mutually convenient date and arrange a sensible fee. However this sort of thing would rather make S.W.A. rather irrelevant so each year we had to book acts at the Bookers Ball which we knew would lose us the money we had received in funding - we called it ‘humouring South West Arts’. One particularly good band around at that time was the Cornish group Bucca who were based around the Davey brothers from Redruth. With an amazing assortment of traditional and modern instruments they were as good as if not better than many of the visiting bands from the other Celtic regions. In an explosive but brief career they played for us several times promoting the traditional49
tunes and songs in the old Cornish language in a thoroughly modern way. I was in fact so impressed that I managed to get them a record deal, (if you look carefully at their album, now a collectors item, you will see the words thanks to Martin and Val Baker ! ) but soon after recording their first L.P. the group fragmented. Naturally the Art Centre covered a wide spectrum of artistic forms and I was lucky enough to come across many performers who I would not have dreamt about going to see before. During the time that the ‘Festival of Fools’ was on at nearby Ponsandane Field just outside Penzance, I drew the short straw and was put in charge of a Friday night concert at the Arts Centre by the Camborne Town Band. I was astonished to see them play a quite spectacular programme of music including jazz and in particular the music of Duke Ellington, and the musicianship was top class, so different from the public perception of band music seen on T.V.
Throughout the Spring and Summer of 1982 we put on a series of nineteen Sunday Cornish Choir concerts arranged by Gerald Babcock, a member of the Newlyn Choir, who was keen to bring the music of the choirs to a new audience, and I volunteered to do the lighting each week. The performances were excellent but we had audiences of only 40 to 60, mostly really keen choir enthusiasts, the art centre buffs were wary of a culture that they were unfamiliar with and the great mass of choir followers were wary of going into a venue that they suspected might be full of ‘arty folk’. They preferred their choir concerts in the traditional venues, Churches and Chapels.
This was of course in the midst of the Falklands war when there was a surge of old fashioned patriotism throughout the country and as most of the choirs and their audience were sympathetic to that feeling they began to introduce the national anthem into their programme. As an atheistic republican pacifist I found this very difficult to deal with, there I was in charge of the lighting and the temptation to bring the lights down in the middle of the anthem and go home was great indeed. However in the end I decided that it would have been wrong to interfere in other peoples rights to say (or sing) what they wanted to and sat tight. There was also the possibility that in those rather tense and emotional times I might have got lynched as well !
Eventually I did miss some of this series when I had a rather nasty accident at work. I had been printing in my Mabbott’s Yard workshop when I felt a bit dizzy, I walked out on to the first floor balcony and passed out. Apparently I twitched a couple of times and then rolled over to fall head first about 20ft into the cobbled yard below. I was taken unconscious to hospital and was fairly lucky to survive, a friend kindly looked after me for a couple of weeks whilst I recovered and I was inundated with get well cards and an anonymous gift of £100 to see me through. When I did get on my feet again, with stitches in my face and bandages on my head, I looked for all the world like a Falklands veteran myself.
50Only a year or so afterwards I was back in the same hospital with an extraordinary sporting injury which required five stitches in my forehead. I had been teaching a friend to play chess, he was a good learner with a very competitive edge and it had got to the point when he was beginning to beat me. In his enthusiasm for the game my friend had built a fine solid wooden chess board which we were using almost daily. Anyway, after a string of losses I finally forked his king and queen and in exultation yelled something like ’gotcha’ . My rather intense friend cracked and suddenly grabbed the solid board and all the pieces and threw it straight at my face - the corner of the board hitting me right between the eyes. Again I was extremely lucky not to suffer more serious damage, but blood was spurting all over the place. My friend was as shocked as I was by his behaviour and hastily drove me up to the hospital where we explained that I had ‘walked into a cupboard’. As far as I know my friend did not play chess again and both of us learned why most chess and draughts boards tend to have hinges in them.
At the Arts Centre we began to branch out, the building had originally been acquired with a covenant which forbad the selling of alcohol on the premises which of course was a severe restriction in our attempts to draw larger audiences to the venue. Because of this we began a series of outside promotions including Chris Barber’s Jazz and Blues band and the fabulous Black Theatre of Prague at the local Town Halls. We put a series of reggae bands on at The Winter Gardens and also modern jazz with Barbara Thompson’s Paraphenalia, one year we staged local playwright David Dearlove’s farce ‘Horseplay with Helen’ featuring many art centre members at the famous
open air Minack Theatre near Land’s End. We were fortunate at that time to have a powerful team covering all aspects of the arts and were able to put out a strong programme of events films and exhibitions. Once again though I had got involved in too many things and after four years left the Art Centre to follow new directions.
Other adventures ensued, and for a while I went back on the road driving a local theatre company, Shiva on a tour of the west country with their production ‘Stevie’ based on the life of the poet Stevie Smith. Shiva Theatre had been started by the Cornish actor David Shaw and the writer Pauline Sheppard in 1978 and flourished for a decade or so taking a succession of diverse plays around the circuit of art centres and festivals using many of the talented actors scattered through the county. David had worked professionally in London for some time but had become disillusioned after spending three years in the West End with a five minute role in ‘No Sex Please We’re British’ and returned to Cornwall determined to start a company of his own. In fact Shiva made its debut at the very first St Ives Festival and at its peak fielded a cast of eight in an Alan Ayckburn play. ‘Stevie’ was a three hander featuring David, Pauline Sheppard and an actress from St Austell with David’s son doing sound and lighting and myself as driver and general humper. It was a new experience for me to see at first hand
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how a theatre company works. Unlike the music acts I had dealt with, who tend to leave everything to the last possible moment, the theatre people would do their ‘get in’ in the late morning and afternoon and then have a leisurely meal before starting the show at 8pm. Audiences would range from 11 (David would quite rightly not play to less) up to about 250, usually depending on the competence of the local promoter. The number of the audience would rarely affect how the play went down, it could go down a storm to a small crowd and flop to a large one , or vice versa; a similar thing happens with most versions of the performing arts - it’s something to do with the sort of day the performers have had the way they are looked after by the organisers and the way the audience, whatever the size, responds to the first half of the show.
We drove up and down the roads of the westcountry from Penzance to Andover in Shiva’s old van (top speed 45mph), at one time I drove through a snow blizzard in the hills above Exeter and we were very lucky to get through - but as the rest of the gang were asleep in the back they didn’t even see it. Accommodation was as varied as the venues and audiences, sometimes a posh hotel and sometimes someone’s couch. It is sobering to think that every day of the year theatre companies, bands, orchestras, dance companies, clowns and guitar players are criss crossing the country in their thousands in their search for a glimmer of fame and to bring stimulation and entertainment to the rest of us. Incidentally, I know as a promoter myself what a relief it was to find that the invention of the mobile phone meant that we could now actually find out how close to the venue the performers were as the minutes ticked away.
David Shaw also doubled up as an organiser of extras for the many film productions that came to Cornwall in those days, he had himself appeared often in series like ‘Poldark’ and ‘The Onedin Line’ where of course as an Equity member he was able to do speaking parts. One day I got ‘the call’ and got a couple of day’s work as a tin miner in the T.V. series ‘Penmarric’ which was being filmed on the cliffs at Pendeen. Being an extra may seem to the uninitiated to be an easy job, the pay was quite good, I think £28 for a day, double anything we could normally earn locally. However the ‘day’ was really sunrise to sunset - most of which was spent hanging around waiting for the light to be right or, as in our case, loading and unloading a lorry - ten times, until the film crew got a successful shot. There were about sixty or seventy of us hired to play miners and the first thing we had to have was a very short 1916 hair cut. This was at a time when long hair was quite in fashion and I remember that several potential film stars, including my brother Stephen, fled at the first sight of the shears. Maxie Barrett of course looked every inch the Cornish tin miner and was heavily featured as was his cousin David Shaw as a mine captain. There was one hilarious moment when we, as miners, were being filmed en masse walking up the long path on the side of the cliffs, a spectacular shot indeed, when the director suddenly shouted “Cut”, Cut’, Cut’ - David take off
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your sunglasses ! It was a hot day but 1916 tin miners would have been unlikely to have been able to afford to have a pair of flashy sunglasses. Having been unable to resist telling this little story I think it only fair for me to put on record what a very good actor David is having seen him in such a variety of guises over the years including of course his role as the dastardly Golowan ‘Mock Mayor’ of Penzance David White. Shiva Theatre continued on for a decade or so touring the West Country with a range of serious and humourous theatrical productions until South West Arts withdrew their grant, apparently because they were pulling too many people.
My father, who had been living at the Millhouse Tressider near St Buryan since 1972 had been suffering for some years with a particularly painful form of Irritable Bowell Syndrome. As it became worse he found it impossible to produce new works of fiction although he was still able to continue his series of autobiographical books. Jess, who had for years helped support the family as a potter, completed an Open University course in Psychology in the seventies and then gained a place in a London college - qualifying as a psychologist in 1980. The disruption to his life of moving to London with Jess put him under more stress and I think aggravated his problem. In fact my father’s whole life had been been stressful, although he had over one hundred books published and was a popular writer with fans all over the world, only in two years in the forties and in the year of his death did he achieve a half decent income. Somehow he, with the help of Jess managed to support a family of six growing children by writing, writing, writing....books, short stories, articles journalism anything that could maybe bring in a penny or two. In a review of one of his autobiographies Kenneth Alsop described his life as a free lance writer as ‘the freedom of a stoker in hell’ and in a way it was. Determined to live the life he wanted to he lived continually on the edge ploughing from one financial crisis to another in the early days and I think that this lifestyle undermined his long term health. In his younger years he was able to cope with the stress but now in his sixties the strain was beginning to show.
Convinced that there must be something physical causing him such pain he consulted any number of experts but nobody could diagnose what the problem was. I have discovered that I appear to be allergic to dairy products and as he, a life long vegetarian, ate vast quantities of cheese over the years, perhaps that was his problem as well. For the last few years of his life he was in and out of hospital all the time, a gall bladder operation, a thrombosis and still the aching pain in his stomach. None of us coped well with his final illness, we just did not know how to help him. When he was at home he would pace up and down for hours in his office trying to relieve the pain, looking more and more drawn and twenty years older than his sixty six years. The end came on July 6th 1984 at West Cornwall Hospital at Penzance early in the morning and our close knit family was shattered.
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I was very close to my father, we shared similar interests in the arts and literature and of course gossip. As well as a relative he was also a friend and for years I used to meet up with him and his contemporaries Bill Picard and Frank Baker in the St John’s House pub in Penzance for lively lunchtime conversations knowing that we were probably feeding him ideas for some new story or novel. Although he in the end never had the time to produce that great book he was capable of because of the commitment of supporting such a large family he left enough good published work and of course his celebrated quarterly magazine The Cornish Review to secure a significant place in the history of Cornish culture.Naturally as his autobiographies were published we kids would devour them to see if we had been grossly libelled (we never were) but I never read any of his fiction whilst he was alive - I think I was frightened to have to make a judgement on his creative writing abilities. After his death as part of my mourning process I elected to sort out his papers ( I now act as a sort of unofficial literary executor) and came to know him even better. I began to catalogue his four hundred or so short stories and taking the plunge decided to read them through, much to my relief and making a fairly objective criticism there was some pretty good stuff there. There were of course some racy tales aimed at the Woman’s magazine market but at least a third of them were of a fairly high standard and would perhaps bear re-publishing one day. He was also rightly highly regarded as an editor and years before the advent of the Cornish Review, whilst still in his twenties, was publishing the magazines Opus and Voices which promoted the work of many of his contemporary writers as well as many other literary publications in forties London.
We arranged a humanist funeral at Truro where friends read tributes, Charles Causley read a poem and Stephen and Demelza played a some music - and then returned to the Millhouse at St Buryan for a wake. A few weeks later I arranged with a friend to take the family and my father’s old friend Bill Picard on a fishing boat out into Mounts Bay off Penzance to spread the ashes. The weather was rather choppy and after about three miles we thought it safer to return to harbour (we had intended to head for Porthcurno), we had lost one Val Baker and did’nt want to lose any more, so we scattered the my father’s ashes whilst gently surfing back into Penzance.
It seemed a good idea to try and erect some sort of memorial so we opened a ‘Denys Val Baker Memorial Fund’ with appeals in the press and a mail shot to people who knew him. Prompted by one of my father’s short stories ‘A Seat on the Cliffs’ we began to look for a good site to place a bench. At first we tried the south coast around Porthcurno, but most of the suitable places were owned by the National Trust who had a policy against such intrusions. Fortunately a friend of my father’s, the writer Eric Quayle, offered us a site he owned on a romantic stretch of cliffs at Zennor and we commissioned woodworker Peter Marshall of St Ives to build a sturdy seat with the inscrip
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tion ‘In Memory of Denys Val Baker 1917-1984 Author, Editor and Seafarer’. On a sunny day in the spring of 1985 a group of fifty or so family and friends carried the seat along the cliffs and had a little picnic and a few glasses of wine to celebrate its installation.
The Memorial Fund had in fact drawn several hundred more pounds than we needed for the seat so we decided to use the surplus to pay for an annual Westcountry Short Story Competition in my fathers memory with the aim to encourage young writers in the region. As a printer and promoter I knew what needed to be done and did a massive mail out of posters to all the libraries in Cornwall, Devon, Somerset and Dorset. We offered a prize of £250 and publication in the Western Morning News, stories were to be up to 1800 words and there was an entry fee of £2 to cover overheads. We were amazed by the response, over 120 stories and very few of them were of a poor quality. I persuaded local writers Des Hannigan and Frank Ruhrmund (and later Pauline Sheppard) to be the competition judges of the final selection whilst Jess and I whittled down the original entries to sixty. Each story was given a number so that they could be judged annonomously and then they were passed on to the judges to cut down to six for a final selection at my flat in Marazion where we had a convivial evening with a bottle of wine. The first winner was a retired army major from Bude called Saa Arnold ( my father would have loved the irony) with a very good story, in 1987 the competition was won by a teacher from Newton Abbott Phil Chandler and in 1988 we had our first woman winner Patricia Tyrell from Newquay. The final two winners John Arnold in 1989 and Tom Scraton in 1990 were both under twenty and exactly the sort of writers we hoped to encourage. For each of the five years we ran the competition we very much enjoyed reading through the work and selecting the winners sadly it came to an end in a most unexpected way.
I had been away from Cornwall on tour with Shiva Theatre for a couple of weeks and was shocked to find on my return that somebody had stolen the Memorial Seat. Now this was no lightweight, it had taken four of us to carry it to the site in the first place and the nearest road was over a mile and a half away along the cliffs or across several fields. The four legs had been sawn off at the base leaving just the concrete slab it had perched on. The obvious place to look was the cliffs below, perhaps someone who did’nt like seats on cliffs had just chucked it over - but I scoured them without success.We tried to figure out who would do such a thing - all sorts of wild allegations went around about people who might have a motive.I was driving along one day and thought I had spotted the seat in somebody’s garden, furtively I returned at midnight to examine the seat only to find a perfectly ordinary garden bench. The most likely culprits I think would have been someone who wanted the cliffs clear of any man made features or just possibly someone who collected literary souvenirs. Anyway the end result of it was that to replace the seat we had to use up all the already depleted Memorial Fund and knock the Short Story Competition on the head - still it was fun while it lasted.55
CHAPTER ELEVEN - Running a Paper - The Voice Years
During these times I continued on running my printing business in Mabbots Yard. Things got really tough during the eighties recession and I had to live in my workshop for a year, sleeping in the dark room full of chemicals where I made printing plates. However I continued to promote music at the Art Centre and for St Ives Festival and in 1981 then became involved in a new project when a group of us began to plan to produce a new monthly newspaper for West Cornwall . It all started as pub talk in the beginning, a few friends in the St John’s House Penzance, speculating that it would be a good idea to produce an alternative West Cornwall publication covering politics, arts and the environment. The local weekly newspaper ‘The Cornishman’ was part of the Daily Mail organisation and a little staid, it was crying out for a competitor.
We drew up a list of a dozen or so possible contributors and called a meeting in a back room at the Art Centre. From the start there was terrific enthusiasm for the project and we decided to go ahead as soon as possible. Few of the others had any experience of putting together a magazine so I did insist that it should be properly typeset to mask our stumbling attempts at journalism, rather than typewritten like most similar publications of that time. We decided to work as a collective editorial board with whoever was sitting round the table on copy night having an equal vote on what went in to the publication. Our first major decision was to find a name for the thing. For a whole evening the arguments carried on, everybody’s perception of the publication was a little different and consequently the suggested titles were as varied as the people at the meeting. I remember I sided with Des Hannigan’s suggestion “Hard Times’, Mike Sagar came up with ‘The Huer’ - in the end we had to vote in reverse to find a compromise title we could all live with, ‘The Peninsula Voice’.
Throughout the spring of 1982 we planned for publication and finally the first issue of the Voice hit the streets in May. Looking at it now it does seem a bit dated, with just twelve pages - in fact three sheets of folded A3. To begin with none of the articles were signed - we had at first a policy against personality cults rather than a fear of recrimination and also definitely there were to be no poems! The main features were an article on glue sniffing by Mike Sagar, Mike Rossendale on a suspicious looking bunker at Land’s End and the first of Des Hannigan’s fine ‘Hard Times’ columns, Jean Hellyer did the first cover and Liz Leechey produced the first of a regular cartoon strip ‘Tradgwith Tales’. The rest of us filled in with snippets of news, reviews, previews, a ‘Whats On’ spread and we gathered in a few advertisements from sympathisers. In the days before cheap computers, pasting up the Voice each month was a long and laborious task. In fact it took a whole weekend of toil in my cramped Mabbots Yard workshop and like the editorial meetings this was a communal job often with a dozen or so people involved . I would
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half-tone the photographs and then we would match them to the typesetting which was the only process done out of house, often original illustrators would be on hand to add that little bit extra bite. We prided ourselves that the paper looked interesting by trying to break up long columns of type and by using cartoonists Clive Wakfer, Mick Tracey and Mike Green and photographs by Ashley Peters,Mick West, Rich Henty and Annette Robinson. I found an old encyclopedia from the 1920’s with some extraordinary photos of people from all over the world and each month would re-caption them for the Voice. Sue Monro and later Mike Venning and myself began a series of interviews with local artists, writers and performers. Ashley Peters produced a string of striking portraits to illustrate the articles. However the Voice was best known for its effect on local politics; this was in the midst of the Thatcher years and our local district council was in the hands of a bunch of Tories whose features seemed ready made for the wonderful caricaturing skills of Clive Wakfer. Our main writers on politics were Des Hannigan, Mike Rossendale and later Peter Wright Davies whilst Robin Kewell, Mike Sagar and Andrew Mc Douall covered environmental matters and we even had a gardening page by ‘Old Hodge’ -gardener Roger Lowry. Other contributors covered a wide range of subjects particularly music, entertainment and the arts, the idea was to provide a platform for views and opinions that did not appeal to the local papers.
The Voice did not make a profit, far from it, so we staged a series of benefit gigs, paying parties and jumble sales to keep it going. Mike Rossendale and I who both had experience in the music promotion field put on a series of Reggae and Blues gigs in Penzance and St Ives in aid of the Voice. I remember once putting on Mainsqueeze, an all star Blues band featuring Dick Heckstall Smith, Victor Bronx and five others at St Ives Guildhall, this band was the loudest I have ever put on and although they pulled a good crowd and were going down a storm, as the notional promoter I had to run and hide from the environmental health officer who was determined to close the gig down.Of course he failed to realise that if we did stop it we would have both probably been lynched!
All these enterprises took an enormous amount of effort until at last we realised that if we just went out and got proper advertisers we would have a much easier time. We printed 1000 copies a month and hoped to sell about 800 through subscriptions and shop sales so our actual readership was reckoned to be around 4000. Issue number 2 ( a collectors item as it features a Mick West photo of Labour leader Michael Foot reading our first issue on the train back to London) is very hard to come by as we distributed several hundred free copies on the council estates of West Cornwall in an attempt to popularise our new organ amongst ‘the people’. Issue number 13 is of course impossible to find as I thought it safer to paste ‘no12a’ on the masthead and for some reason there are two ‘no 21’s- probably we just forgot to change the number on the masthead. Very few articles got turned down by the editorial collective. Usually as the paper expanded to
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twenty four pages ,we were mighty relieved to have enough articles to fill the paper on copy night - if something was too boring or difficult we just put it to the vote. One early example of the latter was an investigative article into the local activities of the ‘Divine Light’ religious cult movement written by a St Ives woman who had infiltrated it which was illustrated by a devastating cartoon by Mick Tracey. I was all for it going in, whilst giving the subjects space to respond, as were Ashley and Jean Hellyer and some others but we were out voted on the grounds that several of our advertisers would have been upset. An absolute parallel of the problems the national media have.
A couple of campaigns hit the nationals, the first was Des Hannigan’s story about military manoeuvres where servicemen were painting numbers on ancient stones so that they could find their way around on the moors and later Peter Wright Davies discovered the incredible story of the Tippexed proxy votes at local election time. In those days there was pretty well continual conflict between local authorities and various bands of travellers so we covered two major incidents at Rosugeon and St Just. Local and national elections brought great opportunities for our writers and cartoonists and familiar targets Tory councillors such as Geoff Venn, William Rogers, John Daniel and Harry Storer became frequent visitors to our pages - some of them we were reliably informed started collecting caricatures of themselves. I think in the long run we were actually able to help change the political atmosphere for the better. Locally, the Tory M.P. has gone to be replaced by a Liberal and the Labour party is much stronger on the district council. Probably though, the magazine actually needed the advent of Thatcherism to flourish and to provide it with easy targets.
One night I was walking down Penzance’s Chapel Street with a friend when we encountered Arthur Caddick the poet, emerging furiously from the Union Hotel complaining about the depravity of modern youth. Apparently in the back bar there was a young man with a message stencilled on his jacket inciting people to ‘gang bang children’. Arthur was going to report him to the police and the newspapers. We went into the bar and discovered that the message was in fact ‘Sex Gang Children’ which was the name of a popular punk band of the time, the poor lad was merely advertising his support for his musical heroes. I wrote a little piece about a “culture clash at the Union’ for the Voice, and very nearly got a libel writ from Arthur (who had trained as a lawyer ), and who as I said in the piece had himself been a bit of a hell raiser in his own youth. Luckily we were able to get a photo of the jacket and printed it with a long letter from Arthur so honour was satisfied all round.
There were many furious arguments on our Wednesday night editorial meetings, often over quite insignificant things but they were always pretty stimulating. One major row followed the publication of Betty Thatcher’s article ‘We’re all only human after all’ which put the point of view of a moderate feminist, but this was the mid eighties at the heights of feminist discussion and we were
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inundated by letters putting an alternative view. This was really what the paper was for, to put two sides of an argument - but we did become aware of people joining the collective in order to stifle Betty’s writing. However by far the worst thing to happen at the Voice occurred in 1986/7 when we were sued for libel, in a way I suppose we had been lucky to get away with some things but there were other matters that would have been worth fighting all the way.
In 1983 a local man had promoted a Rock Festival in West Cornwall. I don’t think he had done this sort of thing before and he made a lot of elementary mistakes and although by all accounts it was a great gig it lost around a quarter of a million pounds. In a Voice article about something else entirely, mention was made about failure to pay in full a couple of the acts. The promoter spotted the reference and decided to sue the Voice. He was asked by his solicitor to come up with some names and having taken advice from a former member of our collective decided on Mike Rossendale, Mike Sagar, myself, Simon Parker as the likely writers and I think he threw Ashley Peters in for good measure because of some unflattering photos Ashley had taken of him at the Festival. In fact none of the five of us mentioned in the writ had written the article in question but the collective decided to defend publication. Now having read through the typescript of my father’s 1966 case against the “People’ and followed other libel cases in the press I am quite cynical about the ‘Law ‘of libel; - whoever has the most money hires the most expensive barristers and wins - its as simple as that, and of course there is no legal aid in a libel case. Consequently I was all for apologising and getting it all over and done with as soon as possible, it was not anyway something worth fighting for, there are a million of layers of grey in the rock business and the dealings between artists, management, agents and promoters. However the solicitor we used encouraged us to fight it as did the printer of the Voice - who was insured. For six long months the five of us, and I am sure the promoter too, suffered a slow form of torture as the costs of the action escalated week by week. None of our group had any money, although I suppose I had a business, and one of us owned a house -it seemed quite mad to carry on. At each of our meetings I would advocate some sort of settlement before the action got totally out of hand. The stress became more and more severe for all of us, if we wanted a barrister we were told we would have to put £2000 on the table just for a modicum of advice. It felt to me as though we were on an out of control lorry hurtling towards the cliffs with no way of stopping - even sleep became difficult. Eventually I took the initiative, much against the wishes of one of the five defendants and probably our solicitor as well, and approached our opponent, (who had come to a Wilko Johnson gig I was promoting at the Winter Gardens). This was apparently something ‘not done’ in the legal world. I pointed out that the way things were going the lawyers were going to make a lot of money and that the rest of us were going to have to pay, more and more. I suggest
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ed we sort out our legal expenses,our printers and those of our opponent - plus a small sum for his out of pocket expenses. The solution was eventually agreed by both sides and the juggernaught finally brought to a halt in July 1987, with us having to find around £6,000 in expenses, rather than the tens of thousands that the case was lurching towards. I must say that if the case had been worth fighting - a nice juicy political scandal for instance, I would have advocated fighting all the way, with public appeals to fund us - as Private Eye had done in the past. We now had to set about raising money and mainly through the massive efforts of Ashley Peters we staged an Art Auction at the Art Centre with a “Save the Voice” theme. The local artists appreciated the good work done on their behalf by our five year old magazine and were very generous with their offerings, the event itself proved to be an exciting piece of theatre and raised nearly £5000. We had suspended publication of the Voice for a couple of months but were now able to stagger back into action. The trauma of the libel case however led to a breakdown of the editorial collective and eventually Peter Wright Davies took over as editor and kept the paper going well into the mid-nineties.
In the early days of the Voice Sue Monro had started a series of interviews with local artists and as the years went by Mike Venning and I as well as several others also began to contribute profiles. As we were unpaid we would go out and interview people who interested or impressed ourselves, there was no one who could say ‘go and talk to so and so’. This led to a remarkably wide spectrum of interviewees in the arts, we all covered different fields. My own field was of course music and I began a run of profiles of many of the top names in British folk music at the time, having put them on the night before I would interview them the morning after. At first I would try to jot down responses but without the benefit of shorthand I soon learned the advantages of a little cassette recorder. Though trimming down an interview that was often an hour long certainly took some doing. In the end I would type up, with one finger, my scribbled copy on the old mechanical typewriter I inherited from my father. Almost all of these interviews were illustrated by a fine portrait photograph by Ashley Peters.
In 1990 whilst idling through back copies of the Voice I realised that we had accumulated almost a hundred separate interviews with artists, writers, musicians and the like. This, I thought would make a very good book, and so I began to compile the publication that would eventually become Eighty from the Eighties. This became quite a massive project, first I had to find the money to do it and managed to persuade a group of friends and relations to lend me half the printing costs, in the expectation of course that the the book would be an immediate sell-out and I would be able to pay them some sort of dividend. One of the advantages of a reprint was that we had all the articles in type already, though to tidy up our primitive paste ups I managed to get the type transferred
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into a slightly different typeface through some new computer magic. To give the book a theme we decided that all the illustrations should be by Ashley Peters so we sent him out to re photograph the half dozen or so subjects he had not done in the first place. One woman refused to be photographed by Ashley but said she would agree to be snapped by a woman photographer (this was in the days of ultra feminism) so we had to leave her out, another had died so we were unable to take a new photo. In the end we settled on eighty interviews and portraits and the art work went to the printers in the autumn of 1993. We printed 2000 copies to keep the price down and I then organised a massive team of friends to collate the book in my print workshop, which by now doubled as an art gallery.
To publicise the book I arranged an exhibition tour of all eighty of Ashley’s portraits, now nicely framed in black wood. Starting off in my own premises ( where it was filmed by local T.V. ) we then took the show on the road to; Torrington, Taunton, Exeter Art Centres and then finally The Royal Cornwall Museum at Truro. Luckily the whole exhibition fitted nicely into the boot of my comfortable old Volvo so the transportation was no problem. Strangely the whole operation had the familiar feel of the world of Show Business with the day long hanging echoing a band’s ‘get in’ and the Private View the ‘performance’. At the end of the month I would drive up to dismantle the show (a much easier task) and bring it back to Penzance. Both the exhibition and the book got very good reviews and for a couple of years the book sold fairly steadily but gradually sales began to dwindle and eventually we decided to just concentrate on West Cornwall. I still have quite a few boxes of Eighty from the Eighties, perhaps it was not a great book but it was certainly as Des Hannigan says in the foreword a ‘good book’ and in years to come will be viewed as a curious snap-shot of the West Cornwall art scene in the 1980’s.
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CHAPTER TWELVE - On The Road with Zambula
Whilst the Voice flourished to some extent, I continued in my business as a printer in Mabbots Yard, and carried on promoting at the Penzance Art Centre. In the Spring of 1982 my conga playing sister Demelza became involved in a new West Cornwall project, the now ‘legendary’ Afro Cornish band Zambula. Apparently it all started with a jam at a party at Ding Dong high up on the Penwith moors, when the newly arrived Titus Mwanga Sebate, ‘Tito’, from Uganda started drumming with Demelza and they were joined by Israeli singer Wendy Herman and local acoustic guitar player Alan Horsley - known familiarly as ‘Ufi’. Others joined in and they were quickly snapped up to play at a birthday party at Sancreed Village Hall. A regular engagement then followed at the Coastguards Hotel in Mousehole where the band began to attract quite sizeable crowds. At that time Zambula were a ten piece featuring Tito, Wendy and Martin Otto on vocals, Demelza on percussion, jazzman John Cox on sax, Ufi and Paul Richards on guitars Bob Morley on bass, John Bickersteth on keyboards and Matt Pullum on drums. Way ahead of their time and the explosion of ‘World Music’ Zambula played a exciting mixture of African and European music with original words and music written by Tito and Wendy.
From the start Wendy and Tito jelled as performers and on their day bore comparison with many more illustrious names, off stage they had completely different lifestyles but on it they complemented each other brilliantly. Tito had an extraordinary history, a former public schoolboy from Uganda, and the son of a bishop, he had come to the U.K. as a student and been marooned when Idi Amin’s coup, and his father’s death made it too dangerous to return. For a time after completing his training he worked as a food technologist for Pepsi Cola and then after meeting up with a Cornish girl moved down to Cornwall to live in a caravan in Ding Dong. If he had a fault it was alcohol, I think he drank to give himself confidence because he was naturally a very shy and reserved man, ( I know that I myself would have to be absolutely paralytic to sing in public! ) and after a few drinks was able to create this wild African warrior figure who fronted the band and indulged in wonderful conga drum duets with Demelza. Wendy on the other hand was unsure of herself in other ways, on stage she too was able to escape into another confident character, but without the need for substantial quantities of alcohol. Off stage she continually needed reassurance that she was any good - and she was.
As the band’s reputation grew they moved to another residency, at the newly opened Kennegie Manor just outside Penzance which for a time flourished as West Cornwall’s cultural centre with other exotic local acts such as The Can Can Girls, rock n’ rollers Johnny and the Moonlighters and blues band The Recessions. Zambula’s personell changed regularly as people fell out or found
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other things to do, with well over 35 musicians going through the band over its twenty year existence, though the band still was based around Tito, Wendy and Demelza.
In 1984 Zambula after several false dawns, seemed in need of a manager and I decided to have a go at it. Generally this meant arranging bookings and publicity and in the end spending 10% of my income on them - this was not a well paid job. In fact a lot of the Zambula gigs in those days involved me doing the actual promotion of the gig as well which was something of an extra stress.The Kennegie gigs peaked with a crowd of 1000 one summer night and the band also appeared on a BBC 40 minutes Documentary ‘Demelza’s Baby’ which was about my sister and her gay partner bringing up a baby. Some of the band’s music was used as soundtrack for the film and there was quite a good response to it, though not the offer of a recording contract we were hoping for. Zambula were regulars at all the Westcountry festivals; St Ives, Elephant Fayre, Hood Fayre and Glastonbury and began to get bookings further away. I saw a series of national gigs as the key to success, however popular they were in the westcountry it was the people in London who had to be impressed, in this vein and using my music contacts in the big city I managed to arrange the 1985 ‘Zambula tour of London’.
Musically London is a very hard place to break into for a regional band, however strong your support is on your home turf the big city has a surplus of performers and quite big names are quite happy to play for peanuts in their local pub. At one venue we were told that we would have to pay to play there and then we would be supplied with tickets which we could then sell on to fans that we could ‘bus in’ to recoup our outlay. In the end we got a respectable little circuit of The George Robey Finsbury Park, The Cricketers at the Oval, the Half Moon, Putney and the famous 100 Club in Oxford Street. However just as we were leaving Cornwall I was mortified to see in the London listing magazine Time Out that someone had double booked and instead of Zambula the 100 Club was advertising ‘Roy Harper and friends’. With a couple of phone calls I at least managed to get the band booked as the ‘friends’ but when we arrived at the venue an enormous queue was in the process of being turned away because Roy, a well known singer songwriter had gone down with flu or something. In vain we pleaded with the management to run the gig with just Zambula, some of the crowd had certainly come to see the band, but to them we were just another unknown act and they cancelled the gig. The other three gigs went pretty well, particularly the Half Moon where the big crowd was bolstered by a large group of paraplegics on their weekly night out who had a wonderful time ( and wrote to tell us). However our attempt to find fame and fortune had failed as none of the show biz spotters we had encouraged to come and see Zambula had turned up and we returned to Cornwall a little chastened.
Other great nights followed back in the Westcountry, and although Wendy left to form another
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band, The Strangers, Zambula continued on playing to large audiences , particularly at the Winter Gardens in Penzance and the Civic Hall in Totnes. In the Summer of 1985 Rick Blake, who had been the band’s drummer for a time, suggested putting on a one day festival in a field he owned beside his house at Lamorna, just outside Penzance in aid of Greenpeace. Rick and his friends spent a week building a sturdy stage and I was deputed to put together a programme featuring all the best local bands, acoustic acts and a bit of theatre. Despite that year being one of the wettest on record miraculously the sky cleared and we had a beautiful day, the bands played brilliantly, everyone had a really good time and around £2000 was raised for Greenpeace. We had not been entirely sure about the legal position about putting on an event of this sort and so we did not put out publicity until ten days before, hoping that if what we were doing was illegal nobody in authority would notice us. As soon as the Lamorna Fayre was over however, Rick received a writ from the local council accusing him of putting the event on without consent. To the astonishment of us all, including Penwith Council I think, a local solicitor was able to prove that the original law under which Rick was being prosecuted had never been ratified. The charge was dismissed and to his delight Rick was given £200 compensation for his troubles.
The previous year I had also been involved in booking acts for a festival, this time at the other end of Cornwall. An old friend of mine Bob Butler who had run The Polgooth Fayre near St Austell in the late seventies was now responsible for the massive annual Elephant Fayre at the Port Eliott Estate, St Germans which was very much like a much bigger version of the Festival of Fools. By 1984 the Elephant people were ready to expand and they decided to add on a Victorian themed weekend and a Folk Festival to compliment their main event. Bob rang me and offered me £200 to organise acts for the Folk Festival and oversee the smooth running of the performances. It was the first time anyone had ever offered me any money to put on music; ‘Bob’ I responded ‘I would walk on my hands and knees to St Germans to do something like that !’. That was overdoing it a bit I suppose but it was something I really enjoyed doing... and to get paid as well. Putting together a programme is a bit like cooking a meal, with a little bit of this and a little bit of that, you know what the final objective is and try to find a way to achieve it. The first thing to do of course is to find some major acts who will draw in the audience; in this case we booked the Maddy Prior Band (who in the end turned out to be Steeleye Span themselves), top Breton act The Alan Stivell Band and the rising Irish act Stocton’s Wing. Then you need some substantial acts in the middle range, here we had amongst others ; Bert Jansch, Gordon Giltrap, Michael Chapman, Dave Cousins, Dave Swarbrick and Martin Simpson whilst the whole event was rounded off by all the good Cornish based acts that we could rustle up. On paper it certainly looked one of the most formidable line-ups that had ever appeared
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in the county and we looked forward to quite a busy time over the weekend . Unfortunately the Elephant organisation had decided on the Whitsun holiday for the Folk Festival, they were not to know that this would be the coldest and wettest Whitsun for forty years! Although the stages were covered to some extent, the audience was not, and it rained solidly throughout the whole weekend . The potential audience was decimated, in the end we had just over 1000 people when we needed three times that amount. Despite the weather we battled on and a lot of the people who were there still remember the event with some affection because of the high quality of the acts.
After the ill fated Zambula tour of London the band split up for a couple of years, Wendy and Demelza formed an all woman band with two Danish musicians called The Bad Boys who played locally with some success. There was a sensational and newsworthy happening as The Bad Boys were about to go on stage at a local venue one night with a couple of hundred fans waiting. The police turned up and arrested Vibe the Danish bass player for non appearance in court on a motoring charge, despite the entreaties of the rest of the band she was carried off to Camborne police station for the night and the gig had to be cancelled. ‘Quick, quick ‘ I told them ‘phone the tabloids’
this would have made a classic national story along the lines of Bad Girls, Bad Boys and could have made the band a national name. But the band were too busy weeping over the lost gig and their missing bass player to do anything about it.
So for two years I carried on without Zambula to worry about.In 1986 I arranged a tour of piano recitals by my former partner Karen who was now living in York and playing early music on a reproduction 1800 piano - something of an Indian Summer. I then began a series of fairly major promotions of dances at the Winter Gardens and St John’s Hall in Penzance. One of them was a spectacular thirteen piece band from Zimbabwe called The Real Sounds of Africa, who were in the midst of a major tour of Europe. Although their act required them to dress up in native costume and dance in grass skirts I had the impression that these guys knew exactly what they were doing, their coach pulled up disgorging the band in suits listening to walkeman’s. It was total entertainment with every move choreographed even the amazing game of football they played on stage - the joint, as they say was jumping. This was when ‘World Music’ was booming and I booked a whole string of acts mostly on tour from overseas; cajun band Le Rue from the U.S., Desmond Dekker and the Aces (Jamaica), Taxi Pata Pata (Zaire), Harare Dread and Lovemore Majuvana and the Zulu Band (Zimbabwe) Flaco Jiminez (Bob Dylan’s Accordian player) and his San Antonio Band (Tex Mex) and probably the best band of all, the Tanzanian Remy Ongala and his Orchestre Super Matimilla.
The renaissance in African Dance music, helped by the commercial success of Paul Simon, and the WOMAD promotions led to frequent tours of Europe by the Continent’s best acts stretching from the Indian Ocean to the Atlantic Shore. Each country’s acts had their own particular
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flavour, my own particular favourites being the Congo/Zaire sound and the rippling rhythms of Zimbabwe. Although a very cautious traveller myself I have been fortunate to meet people from all over the world through music promotion and have heard some really splendid sounds along the way. I think that also it has been very useful for the audiences in West Cornwall to have frequent contact with cultures from other continents something that might not have happened in this relatively isolated neck of the woods.
Seeing this explosion of world music reminded me that Zambula had indeed been before their time and I decided to try to get them on the road again with the line up from m two years previously. The Bad Boys had come to an end and Tito was a bit at a loss so we had our front line, Dick Hanham an inspirational blues/rock guitarist provided the melody with Tim Chapple on bass and Londoner Steve Laffey on drum kit. This time I thought, we should gradually work our way up country playing town and village halls along the way using local bands as support to create interest. Naturally we started off at The Winter Gardens with a well timed Christmas gig and the venue was packed, we did so well that at the end of the night the band was actually drinking champagne. Other gigs followed, with me going on ahead to do advertising and poster distribution, usually I would arrive in a strange town a fortnight before the gig with hundreds of posters, leaflets and the press releases to distribute. Totnes was always a happy hunting ground for the band so we played the Civic Hall there, then Launceston, Truro City Hall, Wadebridge, Dartmouth and Exeter. At each place we had a localsupport band many of whom we had not seen before but had taken on somebody else’s recommendation. On one occasion the support band was so unbelievably bad that whilst I watched open mouthed frozen with horror, my p.a. man had the good sense to bring the levels down, the lights up and announce an interval after only twenty minutes. Other promoters took the band on in venues throughout the South West reviving Zambula’s status as the top dance band in the area. However the long distance promoting was exhausting and the economics were rather on the negative side added to which Tito’s constant bingeing in those days drained the last of my energy. I decided to slow down a bit and find something easier to do. I was glad to have given Zambula a kick start and in fact they kept playing for well over another ten years, becoming regulars at the Glastonbury and Womad festivals but somebody else would now have to do the management.
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CHAPTER THIRTEEN - Two Nights at the Acorn
I was still keen on an involvement in the music business although economically it barely paid its way and I really had to think of my Rainyday promotions as something of an expensive hobby. It did seem rather more sensible to do promotions on my home territory rather than to travel further afield so I began to look around for a suitable venue and found the perfect place. The old Penzance Art Centre with which I had been involved in the early eighties had undergone yet another revamp and now after a refurbishment had emerged, complete with bar, as The Acorn Theatre. The Acorn was being run by two old friends of mine David Shaw of Shiva Theatre and former Zambula guitar player Ufi and I told them of my plans to bring nationally known Folk and World music acts to Penzance and have them play two nights, on a Wednesday and Thursday, so saving quite a bit on both fee and advertising. To start off with as a taster, in the autumn of 1989 I booked four of the best folk acts of the day; Bert Jansch, Michael Chapman, June Tabor and John Renbourn with Jacqui Mc Shee - all with a good support act. There was a good turnout for each of them so I set out to arrange a series of concerts for the summer of 1990. Over the years I had built up a good relationship with many of the top music agencies in the country, a strange one because in the majority of cases we never actually met - communicating only by phone or mail. Very occasionally an agent would turn up with his clients and I would be able to put a face to a familiar voice. There were of course horses for courses and particular agencies who dealt with particular styles of music such as ‘world’, traditional, blues, jazz, contemporary, tribute, instrumental and so on. There was a very hierachial system in the business depending on the amount of fee one could afford to pay, thus there were agents who I needed to deal with more than they needed to deal with me - and equally, acts who needed to play at the Acorn more than we needed them. Normally the main act would expect to get around 60 to 70% of the take so a venue like the Acorn, with a capacity of 200 and a ticket price of say £5 could afford to pay a fee of around £500. The secret was to try and book an act who would normally play venues of 300 capacity and who’s fee was around £750, and pursuade them to take a reduction in fee to play the Acorn as part of a nationwide tour. Assuming the artist was not overpriced in the first place and the fee reflected their ‘pulling power’ this would guarantee a full or near full house with a small but fairly certain profit. At least that was the theory! I would study the ‘trade’ magazines such as “Folk Roots”, “Rock ‘n Reel”, ‘Time Out’ and Festival guides to see who was playing where at a particular time and if a decent act was within striking distance (Devon, Somerset, Dorset) I would approach their agent and try and do a deal. Of course if the act was already playing in Cornwall I would have to resist temptation because with Penzance’s location at the western tip of the British Isles we can only pull audi
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ences from the east - and the populations of the nearby towns of Falmouth, Helston and Truro are too vital to expose them to the rival draw of another similar promotion in Cornwall.
Besides the fee the promoter is expected to provide a number of hidden extras which normally come in a ‘rider’ which is attached to the contract; obviously the p.a. and lighting, then accommodation, drinks, food and often some idiosyncratic demand that reflects some personal foible of the performer. Sometimes an act will put in a rider as a joke just to irritate the promoter, one famous band toured Europe with over twenty gigs at each of which the organisers had to provide a pomegranate. Another demands a couple of dozen picture postcards of the locality with first class stamps already appended. I once had to provide a touring group of eight with six bananas, leaving me wondering how they were shared out, did four of them get a whole banana and the others half each, were the banana eating days of two of them well past - or did in fact the most important one in the group scoff the lot. One famous hippie performer demanded accommodation in a ‘drug free environment’ much to the surprise of his fans who no doubt expected him to stay up all night singing and smoking dope. Often one would have to rush around trying in vain to find some exotic kind of food easily obtainable in a city but never heard of in Penzance. The worse thing was to actually find the thing and then discover that the band member who required it had left the band some time ago and the agent had forgotten to update the rider. One performer would ask for two bottles of expensive red wine and take them home to augment his no doubt bulging wine cellar. Sometimes the act would insist on us finding some unusual instrument or amp which they could easily have brought with them, for a festival once I had to get a set of keyboards sent down from London which the act used on one number only. I rather liked the story of the musician touring abroad who demanded a ‘Yamaha’, meaning an electric piano - and arrived to find a motorbike on stage.
Overnight accommodation is never easy in an area like West Cornwall where everything is geared to the holiday trade and rooms (except the very expensive ones) are arranged for multiple occupation and usually on a weekly basis. The odd single act or duo is manageable but when a ten piece band demands ‘singles’ costs can rocket. Usually the older musicians who have been on the road for years are quite adaptable but the younger ones who are new to the game like to throw their weight around and make unnecessary demands. On a couple of occasions bands have trashed a hotel - but then a couple of times bands have been trashed by hoteliers unfamiliar with the lifestyles of these sorts of night workers. It is not a good idea to put major acts in ‘private accommodation’ as very often they are in the middle of an arduous tour and rather than stay up late they are usually keen to get their heads down early in readiness for a long drive the next day rather than stay up for another late night.
For the first of four seasons of ‘Two Nights at the Acorn’ I booked a mixed bag of acts starting
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with the veteran palm wine guitarist and singer rom Sierra Leone S.E. Rogie and then continued with many top British folkies such as Maddy Prior, Rory McLeod, Robin Williamson, Mrs Ackroyd Band, Bert Jansch, Steve Tilston, Kathryn Tickell and the Scottish harp duo Sileas. World music was further represented by the Chilean Quimantu and the Irish band Cill Chais. In 1991 amongst a very strong line up I was delighted to be able to bring the legendary American, Ramblin Jack Elliott, to Penzance. Jack had been the direct link between Woody Guthrie and Bob Dylan in the 1960’s and we were lucky enough to have him for two nights out of a three day tour of the U.K. - the Acorn was packed for both nights. At that time Uffi, who was looking after the Acorn, had somehow managed to tame and rear a starling in the building, a bird that had some delusions about appearing in public so of course we were treated to the spectacle of him flying around the arena whilst Jack played, eventually landing on his guitar. As far as I can remember there were no clauses in Ramblin Jack’s long rider about starlings, but there was a mysterious one stating that if the performance was interrupted by drunks he was entitled to pack up shop and go - after being paid in full. I had never seen anything like this before but did not feel I needed to worry about it. However, Jack had lived a long and romantic life in the music business and certainly did seem to draw enibriated admirers. We managed to evict a couple but I was astonished to see another, an old friend of mine, in hot pursuit of the singer during the interval, as Jack, a man by now well into his sixties, sprinted to the safety of the dressing room. There was one further trauma when Jack was doing his final encore, a fourth drunk managed to get into the dressing room determined to go from there the short distance to get on stage with his hero. Luckily one of the support band, a doorman and I spotted him just in time and we sat on him for five minutes until the show was over.
Other acts we had that year included the singing gynaecologist Hank Wangford and his band with their spoof country & western, the Hungarian band Makvirag, the French cajun act Vermenton Plage and the brilliant English bands Bareley Works, Syncopace and Buttermountain Boys whist there were return visits by June Tabor and also John Renbourn this time with Isaac Guillory. Many of these concerts were sell outs and by now we had created a formidable reputation for the Acorn as a venue.
I suppose I got carried away by all this and decided to branch out into a larger promotion. I decided that nothing could go wrong in Cornwall in August and all I needed was to find an act that would have no trouble in pulling an audience and put them on three nights in a row, so cutting the costs on fees promotion and so on. A couple of years previously I had put the Jamaican reggae star Desmond Dekker and the Aces on at the Winter Gardens with great success and Desmond did seem to be the answer. By now the Winter Gardens was not operating so I booked The Barn Club, a disco just outside Penzance, The Shire Horse at St Ives and a final gig at the much larger
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Truro City Hall. Convinced that it did not matter what day it was, as long as it was August, I took a run of Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday - a fatal decision. On the morning of the first gig the p.a. man I had booked rang up to ask if Desmond Dekker needed more than one mike! I had assumed that everyone knew what Desmond did - this chap obviously did not. Somehow we cobbled together a p.a. that really was not up to it and just about got through the Barn Club gig - though the audience was fairly small because the place did not have a history of live music. Understandably the band demanded the big p.a. I had hired for Truro for the St Ives gig as well, which meant that my costing was really up the creek. The Shire Horse also had no real history as a live gig, there was not even a dressing room and we had to put Desmond in a broom cupboard to rescue him from his fans at the end of a great performance (through the big p.a.) Finally we got to Truro and this one did at least break even with a crowd of around 300 dancing the night away. The whole experience had cost me well over £1000 and I was shattered, having learned some very useful lessons along the way.
As I left the Truro City Hall I stumbled over a roll of notes, £50 in fact, and saw this as a gift from the gods towards my loss. Desmond and his girlfriend had decided that they would like to stay on for a few days and I knew that my sister Demelza would happily put them up in Penzance so I gave them a lift back to town. We arrived well after 2am to find the house all locked up, (Demelza herself had gone off to play with Zambula somewhere upcountry) in despair I tried unsuccessfully to climb over the back wall to get in. There I was with one of the U.K.s top stars and no idea what to do with him ( I was at the time sleeping in my print workshop) , then to my enormous relief I spotted two figures lurching up the road, they were two of the Buttermountain Boys a cajun band from Yorkshire who had been playing for me at the Acorn that same night.They were staying with a neighbour of my sisters who was feeding her cats and did in fact have a key to Demelza’s house.I installed Desmond in the house and retired gratefully to sleep.From then on a two night run was going to be enough for me.
The 1992 season started off with one of the most sensational performances that I have ever seen in more than thirty years of promoting, and it was to a tiny audience of 35 or so. Vasmalom were a seven piece Hungarian outfit featuring an enormous sort of xylophone - a cymboline, some brilliant musicians and a wonderful singer whose vocals were complimented extraordinarily by the Acorn’s fine acoustics.They played a mixture of East European traditional music and modern western music even venturing into the realms of blues and jazz, a combination that held the audience spellbound. This was their first gig in England after a tiring journey from Budapest and I felt rather ashamed at the small audience I had produced. The next morning I rushed into my workshop and ran off 1000 leaflets extolling their talent - quickly distributing them around town and achieving a
70much more respectable 120 for the Thursday night performance.
Other great acts that year were the all woman supergroup The Poozies, Fiddle and Accordian duo Chris Wood and Andy Cutting, another leading Hungarian band Musikas (whose music featured in the film The English Patient), and the top Irish band Four Men and a Dog - with return visits by Kathryn Tickell, Hank Wangford and Robin Williamson. The season was rounded off much in the way it began with another sensation this time the Irish band Alias Ron Kavana. Ron, a fine London based singer/songwriter who wrote a lot for Christy Moore, turned up with a six piece who played acoustic in the first half and then took the roof off when they reappeared, electrified with stratocasters, to produce a spine tingling folk rock set. Being, I suppose, something of an incorrigible gambler I had decided to combine visits to my mother in Totnes with giving an extra gig each to Robin Williamson and Hank Wangford at Totnes Civic Hall. Once again I was convinced that these were promotions that could not possibly go wrong and I made extra trips up to Devon to distribute posters around the Totnes area. Robin’s Concert did at least draw over 100, but the night before Hank's Totnes gig I rang from the Acorn, (where Wangford’s band had just completed two total sell out performances) to find out how tickets were going, to be told “they’re going quite well - we’ve sold eleven”. I’m told that my jaw dropped and I went white - in the end we got 58, but I’m still at a loss to realise how we sold 400 tickets on a Wednesday and Thursday in Penzance and only 58 on a Friday in Totnes. That’s the trouble I suppose , there are so many variables in music promotion, and nothing is ever certain.
Licking my wounds I returned to Penzance once again, resolving not to get involved in long distant promoting any more and to concentrate on local gigs. For the summer of 1993 we started off with Gregor Schectors Klezmer band, a new kind of music for me, featuring as it did the yiddish music of Eastern Europe. I was astonished to realise the way Klezmer music had influenced the white jazz of 1920’s and 30’s America, particularly the music of Benny Goodman and his circle. Another eye opener was the Madagascan band Tarika Sammy, who’s music was so different from the rhythms of the African mainland. In deep contrast we had the Kora masters Dembo Konte and Kasau Kuyateh from West Africa and the Irish band Afterhours. Old favourites returned in the form of Four Men and a Dog, Vermenton Plage and June Tabor, with an impressive cabaret act Hell Bent,Heaven Bound finishing off the season. And so the ‘Two Nights at The Acorn’ series came to an end, terrifically stimulating and often a joy to behold but requiring an immense amount of effort on the promotional side over a long period of time. I needed to find something that I could do in shorter bursts.
In the Spring of 1994 I was once again offered Desmond Dekker and the Aces and found the challenge hard to resist. This time I took no risks and tied up with another local promoter Rob Lewis
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who had been working in a similar field - and our combined talents and energy made the whole thing work. We booked the massive Truro City Hall on a Saturday and put Desmond on with a good local support, Ska’d for Life and attracted a massive audience, each of us going away with £476 - the most I have ever made from a music promotion. If there are any profits in this game they tend to be in the region of £100 to £200 range - but when you lose it can be well over £1000. The act’s fee and other expenses is always the priority the promoters role is to take the risk and hopefully come out of it without losing too much.72
CHAPTER FOURTEEN - Festival Fever
In the late seventies and throughout the eighties Cornwall had boasted several major music and theatre festivals. Besides the St Ives September Festival that I had been involved in, there had been The Festival of Fools at Penzance, Polgooth Fayre near Mevagissey, The Elephant Fayre near St Germans, and the Womad Festival at Carlyon Bay . Now in the nineties things had quietened down on that front, although there had been one or two attempts to get something going but with no success. However in 1991 in Penzance local activist Stephen Hall and a group of friends decided to revive the Feast of St John, a traditional festival that had flourished around the town’s harbour area in days gone by. The week long event under the title ‘Golowan’ would feature music, theatre, talks and workshops showcasing the best of local talent, history and culture culminating in a massive parade on ‘Mazey Day’ - traditional dances with bands playing and in particular most of the local schoolchildren participating. The idea was to build a community based event which, as the puppetry , banners, street decorations and stalls on Mazey Day became more and more exotic, metamorphisized into a truly spectacular sort of Cornish ‘Mardi Gras’. Now ten years on Mazey Day has become a much anticipated treat, drawing thousands of people in from the outlying areas and as much a part of Cornwall’s calender as Helston’s Furry Dance, May Day at Padstow or Trevithick Day at Camborne. However on that first year the rain poured down in torrents on Mazey Day, enough to make anyone give up the ghost, but the organisers bravely ploughed on, probably realising that they had already used up their quota of rain for the nineties, and began to plan for 1992.
At this time I was in the midst of my five years of organising the “Two Nights at The Acorn’ series of concerts in Penzance so it seemed sensible to join the Golowan committee and put in some extra promotions as part of the festival. I managed to get three pretty diverse sorts of acts; top jazz saxophonist John Surman performed his brilliant ‘St Ives Suite’ at the Acorn followed the next day by the Spanish traditional band La Musgana and then I put English folk band The Bareley Works on at The Penzance town Hall, St Johns. All three went down very well and only lost a little money and I thought, helped to pad out the Golowan week which preceded Mazey Day and gave that part of the festival a higher profile. During the following winters meetings though, it became clear to me that the other members of the committee were quite keen for the Golowan Festival to keep its ‘community’ feel and feature Cornish based talent and not to diversify into the field of imported acts. I had nothing against this at all, in fact there always has been a great deal of talent in the county and I had always taken the trouble to encourage them. However I did think that it was also important for us to see performers from outside the area as well, those who were not normally accessible, and my thoughts began to turn to the idea of a platform to feature such things.
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Over in St Ives my old friend Bob Devereux, who was now running his adventurous Salthouse Gallery, had managed to keep the Poetry end of the now defunct St Ives Festival going in the form of a series of readings in his gallery every September. In 1993 I approached him with the idea of reviving the St Ives event as a full blown festival again. He would extend the literature side and I would bring in some high profile music acts to attract an audience from outside the county.To begin with we would have to take the whole risk ourselves but then we would hope to draw in funding and set the event on a sound financial footing over the next few years.I encouraged one or two other local promoters to get involved to spread the load and drew up a budget. There were still quite fond memories of the original festival in the town and I decided to build on this by booking two successes from the old days, John Martyn and Chris Barber’s Jazz and Blues Band to headline the event. Other acts included new folkies such as the Kathryn Tickell Band and Rory McLeod, old rocker John Otway, comedian Stephen Frost (son of local painter Terry) traditional Chinese music from the Peking Brothers, jazz sax ace Alan Skidmore and a festival ball featuring Caravanserai and The Doctors of Dub featuring local girl Chrissy Quale from Zennor. Bob as usual produced a good line-up of poets and somehow we got the show on the road again. Both Bob Devereux and myself had been promoting the arts in West Cornwall for years
on a knife edge, as independents with little or no financial backing, our financial management might shock the professionals but our combined experiences of existing on a shoestring got the festival going, much to our own economic disadvantage.We sold tickets from Bob’s gallery ( for an office we used the benches in Norway Square - just outside) and from my own gallery in Penzance. I printed off thousands of posters and went on the road all over Cornwall distributing them, I had learned the importance of a really thorough publicity campaign and put adverts in all the important local weeklies. With posters I keep to A4’s and A3’s both of which are large enough to have an impact and small enough to get put up on notice boards without encroaching on the businesses own promotions. I have a system whereby I arrive in a town after the shops have closed, or before they open, and put a poster or leaflet through the letterbox of every business in the main and secondary streets. This seems to work on the basis that a third of the places will immediately throw the poster away, a third will read it and then throw it away and the final third will keep it or actually put it up - or so I imagine!
To begin with we concentrated on drawing an audience from the rest of Cornwall and then began to attract people from all over the country to the point where the Festival now has a data base of thousands of people who regularly bolster the holiday season in St Ives. However the first few years of the revived event really were a bit of a struggle. Gradually we built up a team of specialists. Quality of presentation is always important and I always used a p.a. firm from Devon run
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by Steve Norris a dapper little chap who has no pony tail (always a worrying sign in a p.a.man) and in fact looks more like an accountant than a muso, and if he is off on some exotic tour his sidekick Clive Rooke is equally reliable. For lighting I used Mike Richards a local electrician who had also done the job for the many Zambula gigs I had promoted over the years, whilst Geoff Nicholas had the arduous task of looking after the artiste’s ‘riders’. Bob Devereux had ‘m.c’ d’ for me regularly but now he was tied up with the poetry side of the festival so I managed to persuade the Irish guitar player Adrian O’Reilly to come over from Penzance with me to do the ‘intros’ . I have always had an enormous terror of going on stage and having done it once in an emergency swore never to repeat the experience. As stage manager I managed to get an old friend of mine, Johnny Jones, known as ‘Jonah’ in the business, to leave his London haunts and spend a couple of weeks in Cornwall each year in return for accommodation, the record stall concession, and a little money. Jonah was a real old pro and had a host of stories about his experiences in the music business with which he would regale us with at the ‘apres gig’ parties we staged. Just as Robert Etherington had been a bit of a fish out of water in the festival’s earlier incarnation in another way Jonah was this time round. The St Ives art world baffled him and he was more likely to be found in a betting shop rather than in one of the local galleries. But his love for the world of music and musicians was profound, and inevitably well known performers would turn up in St Ives to be greeted by the same Jonah who had welcomed them in a similar capacity at some other event in Denmark, Germany, Cropready (home of the annual Fairport Convention reunion) - or even from the days when he promoted gigs at the Half Moon Putney in the sixties.
For the first year Bob and I encouraged other people to share our gamble by putting events on at St Ives and then chipping in a percentage to a central advertising and promotion fund. John Cox, himself a noted local jazz sax player, brought down Alan Skidmore who performed a tribute to John Coltrane at The Guildhall and started a tradition of modern jazz promotions at the festival. In later years we put on Elaine Delmar, Tim Whitehead, Peter King and the Jaqui Dankworth/John Williams band New Perspectives amongst others. My own particular favourites were still the contemporary folk acts so there was always a good representation of them in our line ups with The June Tabor Band, Four Men & a Dog, Bert Jansch, John Kirkpatrick, Bohinta, Eliza Carthy’s Band, Stockton’s Wing, Pierre Bensusan, Vasmalom and the Jaqui McShee Band standing out. The McShee band gig proved to be one of the most traumatic nights in my long career as a promoter. The band started their soundcheck at 3.15 in the afternoon and were still at it by 8.45 - three quarters of an hour after we should have opened the doors. The tension became unbearable and for the first and only time I just walked away from it and went for a walk on the beach leaving
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Jonah to try and get it sorted out. Many of our queue were not prepared to wait so on top of everything we made quite a substantial loss on the evening - it was one of those occasions when the band had brought along a ‘technician’ whose presence proved far more a hindrance than a help. Jonah swears that he later saw the band hanging the unfortunate fellow out of their hotel window by his feet. The travelling technician or roadie is usually competent enough, after all he is familiar with the acts material whereas the p.a. man knows his equipment and the promoter knows the hall - it is rare for one person to be knowledgeable in all three areas. I myself am not technically minded, I know how to book acts, promote, organise and advertise and am quite happy to delegate such matters to someone who does know what to do.
Other parts of the festival began to grow. We reintroduced the ‘Open Studios’ days for the artists and through Stephen Frost (who had grown up in St Ives and was now a successful T.V. comedian) we began to book performers from the Comedy Circuit. The best known of these was Jo Brand who in 1996 took her capacity audience further and further to the edge with material that some St Ives folk were not quite ready for - only to be out done by Mark Lamarr the following year. George Melly was a frequent visitor then, both in his capacity as a jazz singer with John Chilton’s Feetwarmers and also as a lecturer with illustrative slides. There was a wide range of subjects, over a dozen in fact, that George could talk about - from Bessie Smith , Piccasso, Magritte to his own hilarious ‘Life and Times’ . In both capacities he was well worth the fee and attracted good audiences and on one occasion he interviewed Bob Devereux and I for his late night Radio 2 programme to help publicise the Festival. One of my own particular favourites has always been the singer June Tabor who manages to put such passion into her arrangements of other peoples songs, sometimes performing with a duo or trio but on one occasion I managed to get her with her complete recording band, including Andy Cutting. This sort of music is really a sort of ‘Chamber’ Folk, an intense listening experience and is also rather like the blues in the way it uplifts the spirit through an emotional performance, and I was drawn to book more and more acts in this field. We also brought down one or two ‘Stage Shows’ including the wonderful African Dance team Dade Krama and the spectacular ‘Russian Folk Ensemble’. Every year the Festival would finish up with the Festival Ball, always a sell out, with memorable sessions by Taxi Pata Pata, Edward II and Osibisa (with Zambula in support) amongst others - when the hall was so full that the walls themselves would be sweating. As the driver back to Penzance for myself Adrian and Geoff, I often would find myself sipping lager shandies late into the night whilst all the others let go at the apres gig sessions and when one night I left early, Adrian was unable to find a taxi home having to wave down a milk float in the early hours to take him
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back to the south coast for £20. We had a wide range of acts over the six years I was involved second time around and began to gain a reputation as one of the major south west arts Festivals. Because of the rules involving funding Bob Devereux and I rounded up a committee to run the event, both of us becoming directors and thus rendering ourselves ineligible for any payment for all the work we put into the festival. People were definitely coming to the town in September for the Festival and once again the town profited from an extended season. Each year we spotted the regular visitors, one of whom Peter a gardener for a Convent in Essex would ring me well in advance to find the line up and then put in an order for thirteen tickets, one for each night of the event. Tragically in the seventh year we had a phone call from one of the sisters at the Convent to tell us that Peter would not be down that year as he had just been killed in a road accident . We tried desperately to produce a line up to satisfy everyone and not to have any obvious clashes so I was very surprised to be told by Mike Tooby, the then director of Tate St Ives, that he was unable to choose between an I.M.S. chamber concert and a performance by Desmond Dekker and The Aces which happened to clash! Probably the most successful year was 1997 when we filled the Guidhall on five occasions and also, several times, the smaller venue, The Western Hotel, where we tended to put a strong line up of folk and jazz acts.
Memorable concerts at The Guildhall included Bohinta, Waterson /Carthy, Mary Coughlan and
most of all Eddi Reader, previously unknown to me, who brought a sell out crowd to their feet in 1999. By now however I was beginning to tire of the immense amount of work involved with the festival and thirteen days on the trot over in St Ives and began to make plans to drop out again. We now had a strong committee headed by Tina Wilkinson who were well capable of running the event and a mailing list of well over 2000 addresses to fall back on. I had kept my hand in with a few gigs back in Penzance and had in fact put on the first of a series of bi-annual ‘Little Festivals’ (later to become annual) at the Acorn in May 1997 as well as a few independent dances at St John’s Hall and The Guidhall, featuring the Cuban band Asere and Columbian singer Toto La Mompasina as well as the inevitable Zambula and also Baka Beyond. So 1999 was my last year with the St Ives September Festival going out with a bang with amongst others The Blues Band, The Sharon Shannon Band, Eddi Reader and Aly Bain. Unfortunately I caught a particularly nasty strain of flu from one of the early bands, who had just returned from Canada, and spent the whole two weeks sniffling with an awful headache.
My retirement from St Ives did not of course mean a quiet life beckoned, I was still to be involved in Music promotion but this time on the Penzance side, within walking distance of a comfy bed. In 1996 I had been approached by Mike Foxley the energetic tourism officer for Penwith Dis
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trict Council with a view to booking acts for the upcoming four day West Cornwall Maritime Festival. Mike had been to Brittany and, impressed by the tourism potential of Maritime Festivals over the Channel decided to try and get one going in Penzance. Maritime Festivals are dependant on a flotilla of sailing ships both large and small which travel between suitable sea ports around the Channel and Irish Sea and Mike had managed to pursuade around one hundred of these boats to visit Mounts Bay in early July of 1996. The original idea I think was for me to hire performers with a nautical theme to entertain the yachtsmen and women but there is only a limited amount of shanty singing (however good) that a refugee from the sea can take - so I decided to go out and hire a line-up to really entertain them. I realised that this was not to be an Arts Festival like St Ives and needed a more mainstream programme. The largest venue was to be a marquee with a capacity of 1000 sited on the main Penzance harbour car park whilst a smaller tent was erected on the St Anthony’s car park near the promenade to house the smaller acts. For the first night I managed to get the former Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones and his Blues Band with soul star Geno Washington and a guitarist doing a blues set in support. Geno actually turned up with a four piece and did such a sensational set that the Blues Band found it very hard to follow, (support acts are not supposed to do that ! ) and I remember Paul Jones good naturedly pleading to his full house audience ‘Come on, haven’t you got something for me and my friends - have you given it all to Geno ?.’
For the second night, through my old friend Jonah -who was stage managing for me again, I booked the Bootleg Beatles who had the reputation as the best of the tribute bands around at that time. It was the first time I had booked a tribute band and as they started off with the Beatles career as a small time Liverpool act I was horrified by what appeared to be a degree of musical ineptitude some way away from their rather large fee. However as the evening progressed the band got better and better, as the Beatles themselves did, along with a series of costume and wig changes, and by the end the capacity crowd was ecstatically singing along with the old hits of the sixties. During the daytime sessions we had also a good cross section of music in the marquee, including The Hank Wangford Band, Wilko Johnson, The h-Kippers, Chris Jagger's Atcha Band, King Masco and many others, whilst in the smaller tent acts like Bobby Valentino, La Cucina, Bohinta and the James Hunter Band kept another audience entertained. On the Saturday night we had a double bill of African music with Taxi Pata Pata and Zila and on the final sunday night in complete contrast, the local Duchy opera put on a sell out performance of the ‘Last Night of the Proms’.
All in all the West Cornwall Maritime Festival was a great success, the weather was reasonable and the unusual combination of interesting sailing ships from all over the world crowding the harbour and bay with a good cross section of stage acts seemed to create a very happy atmos
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phere. However because the festival was staged just a few weeks after the equally successful Golowan Festival, now in its eighth year, there was some friction between the respective organi
sations. Golowan was always seen as a community event with Penzance Town Council an enthusiastic supporter - whereas the Maritime Festival, promoted by the Penwith District Council, appealed more to the wider audience with the aim of attracting tourists to the town. It is practically impossible to run such events without the help of funding from cultural organisations or local councils and I think that some representatives from both groups were worried that there was not enough funding to support both events. Consequently although the Maritime Festival was intended to be a bi-annual event, when the 1998 festival was being planned we discovered that Penwith Council had been persuaded not to promote the music side of it but to stick only to the maritime aspect. I must say I found the sniping exasperating, obviously the Golowan Festival with its glorious Mazey Day celebration was a great addition to the culture and economics of the area but so was the Maritime Festival - surely the two organisations could work together. In fact our end of Cornwall is an ideal place to put on these sort of events, with facilities such as hotels, guest houses, restaurants and camp sites under-used for most of the year - away from the high season. If the local authorities could encourage the creation of suitable venues for such things we could build up a regular clientele throughout the year. The potential themes are endless; for a start lets say jazz, classical, folk, rock, opera, musicals, country and western, theatre, film and poetry. If top names are featured people would come from all over the country - if not the world, to enjoy the natural delights of the area as well as great entertainment.
Luckily, due to the perceived success of the first Maritime Festival’s music a group of local businessmen got together with the intention of putting on a music festival to compliment the Penwith Council run 1998 visit of over 100 sailing ships. This time we hired a much bigger marquee, a picturesque affair with colourful stripes, which came direct from Glastonbury Festival (complete with mud ! ) and could accommodate a crowd of 3000. Mike Foxley, who was still running the maritime end of the event, asked us to provide entertainment for a five day period - which in retrospect was probably a day or two too long, with the intention of keeping the mariners in Penzance until the start of a similar event up the coast at Falmouth the following week-end. Once again I set out to book a fairly wide spectrum of acts, although I did aim to cater for a slightly older age range. We were putting on what was in fact a major music festival in the middle of a residential town and however worthy catering for a younger audience was it always carried the risk of unpredictable behaviour by the fans and we could not risk jeapordising the Festival’s future. As it happened when I asked the local Police Inspector at the festival post mortem whether there had been many complaints about the event he replied ‘none at all ‘ much to my relief. Once again we hired in top class p.a. systems
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which has the effect of sorting out the horrible throbbing base line that cheaper systems produce - and of course we pointed the speakers out to sea.
I had never heard the singer Mary Black before, but I knew she would draw a massive crowd. So to make our first gig really a night to remember I booked another top Irish act The Sharon Shannon Band to do the support and we were rewarded with great performances by both acts and a crowd of over 2000. During the day we had sets from The Eliza Carthy Band who had just won a Mercury prize nomination, and Cornish music from Aao Atao. The Saturday night proved to be what was probably the best gig I have booked in over thirty years of music promotion, an eighteen piece band led by the African superstar Baaba Maal supported by Osibisa. During the day a gale raged and the rain came pouring down, our marquee proved not up to the job and leaked like a sieve. We had to cancel a couple of afternoon acts as water was getting into the p. a. and even the tent poles were looking shakey. At one time it seemed that we would have to call off Baaba Maal which would have been catastrophic - but fortunately the rain came to a halt just in time and we saw a sensational set by both bands. Later on that night, well after midnight, as Baaba Maal and his band waited in their bus to drive up to London, I was paying their manager the rest of the fee ( we had paid 50% up front ) when I discovered to my horror that I was £700 short. In fact I later discovered that our treasurer had made a mistake in counting out earlier on, but for a time I thought I must have overpaid Osibisa and was trying to pluck up courage to go to their hotel to retrieve the money when one of the festival directors told me not to worry and managed to find the deficit from his nearby business.
The Sunday was the day of the World Cup Final and we were worried ( unnecessarily - they drew 2,200 ) that this would affect our audience for the Australian Pink Floyd Show a marvellous rendition of the Floyd catalogue by the Aussie tribute band. At first I was hostile to the idea of the present day vogue for tribute bands, thinking of them as taking work away from the new acts, but I must say I am now a convert as it enables a new generation to see the good music of the sixties and seventies played by musicians in their prime rather than by the survivors of that era who are often well past it. Of course it is essential that the original creators of the music get their fair share of any takings but otherwise you should think of the new generation of musicians as actors in a play by Coward or indeed Shakespeare playing well known roles. Another good parallel could be the work of the New Orleans revivalists who recreated the sounds of the early jazz musicians. The following night we had another example of the genre with The Counterfeit Stones who performed a wonderful tongue in cheek tribute to Mick Jagger and his friends to a large and enthusiastic crowd who sang along with the band when the p.a. and lights failed for over three minutes. As usual there were a fine selection of daytime acts including Baka Beyond, Waul Electrick, Sileas, The Balham
80Alligators and The James Hunter Band with Edward II to finish off with.
I think that over the two festivals we established a strong following for a music festival in the middle of Penzance, with high class acts and very few complaints and it was something that could have been built on for the future. However in the end Penwith Council lost their nerve and Mike Foxley who had been the powerhouse behind the West Cornwall Maritime Festival was shifted sideways and the idea came to an end in 2000 with a greatly scaled down version of the event. This time in a much smaller tent with a capacity of 300 featuring the best of the local based acts who though good performers could not quite recreate the heady days of ‘96 and ‘98. Still now when I look out over the Penzance Harbour Car Park I marvel that the local council had the bravery to put on such a glorious event even for just a couple of times, something we could not have imagined in the eighties. Perhaps in times to come their successors will have the temerity to have another go.81
CHAPTER FIFTEEN - How To Start And Run an Art Gallery
In 1990 I moved premises with my printing business from my ramshackle old studio in Mabbotts Yard to an old chapel in the nearby Cross Street. I was still in a back street but at least there was the chance of attracting the odd bit of passing trade. As ever I was printing the usual w workfor a jobbing printer; letterheads, business cards, leaflets, invoices, small books and so on. It was fairly interesting work though with a very high stress factor because of my ancient equipment and lack of capital. Most of the great entrepreneurs of West Cornwall moved through my portals at some time or another with their often over ambitious dreams clutched in hand, and of course I continued with my own Rainyday postcards and promotions which although hardly profitable kept boredom at bay.
What attracted me at first about the old chapel, besides its enormous size, was that it contained shelves and shelves of old second-hand books, some 8000 in all which I was convinced would provide me with another source of income. Laboriously I sorted and priced the books and reopened as Rainyday Printers and Books feeling very pleased with my latest business initiative. However nobody seemed interested at all and it gradually dawned on me that apart from a couple of dozen books that interested me personally, I had inherited the dregs of the other booksellers rejects. I reduced my prices to no avail and eventually even tried giving them away, in the end I realised my career as a bookseller was fated never to materialise and took the whole stock to a local rubbish dump, something which probably should have been done many years earlier . I’m sure that there was somewhere a prospective owner for each of these books but I had not the time or money to find them.
So for a couple of years I carried on purely as a jobbing printer still very much aware that I could be doing something interesting with all the extra space I had acquired. One day, whilst chatting in my workshop to some friends of mine, Hazel and Trevor Burston, the idea occurred to us that the building could in fact be made into an art gallery. Trevor was involved in a local photographer’s group called the Cornwall Independent Photographers Association, C.I.P.A. for short, which contained most of the good local young snappers including Ashley Peters and Annette Robinson who had worked with me on Peninsula Voice, as well as Bob Berry, Steve Tanner and Francesca Ausenda. We decided to kick off with an exhibition of work by C.I.P.A. and with a little help from South West Arts we began to line the buildings walls with chipboard . Hazel, who at that time was in charge of the gallery at the Royal Cornwall Museum in Truro and later went on to a similar position at Penlee House in Penzance was a great help to me in setting up what was to become The Rainyday Gallery. It was a great loss to the artistic community of Cornwall when she died sudden
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ly and tragically of meningitis in 1997 at the early age of 53.
In retrospect I wish I had opened the gallery much earlier. Printing had always just about earned me a living but I had a long background in the arts, right from the late forties when as a toddler I had travelled around Cornwall with my father delivering his Quarterly Arts magazine The Cornish Review. In the fifties and sixties I had grown up in St Ives where artists and writers who later became national names were frequent visitors . I was part of a gang of kids that included Adrian and Anthony Frost, sons of the recently ennobled Terry as well as the children of other local painters and then I had met a new generation of artists whilst at Art School.
At last the boards were up and then painted with several coats of emulsion and our first exhibition ‘C.I.P.A. Exposed’ opened up as part of the 1992 Golowan Festival on June 20th - and as I remember we did actually sell three or four images and attracted favourable reviews in the local press. This show certainly gave me a taste for the Art business and I then began to make plans for a mixed painting show under the title ‘A Baker’s Dozen’ which was to feature work by several; friends of mine, many of whom are still showing with me ten years later.
I have always had a fairly wide taste in artistic styles, as with music it just has to move you on a personal level. I am quite happy to hang bright abstracts with subtle landscapes, humourous work
with the deadly serious - often the contrasts actually help set a picture off. Whilst finding the politics of the game immensely entertaining I can appreciate the bravery of the artist in putting something of themselves on a wall to face criticism from journalists and contemporaries. As with my long term stage fright in the music business you won’t catch me putting a picture of mine on the wall - I would be terrified and much prefer to watch from the sidelines. Although most artists feel passionately about their own and other people’s work, very few sublties here, someone actually running a gallery soon learns to be far more tolerant in judgement. Practically every painting on view has it’s admirers and detractors. Who is to say what is actually good or bad - all we can do is offer our own personal opinion of any particular work. In this the Gallery director is in a fortunate position, the paintings on the wall can only reflect his or her taste, and tastes vary immensely.
At first I was very unsure of my selective powers and used to cringe with embarrassment whenever anybody brought work in for me to look at. Now with many years and over one hundred exhibitions behind me I can look dispassionately at work and answer the questions (a) Do I like it and (b) is there a chance that I might actually sell the thing. Despite my experiences in other art forms I ventured rather gingerly into the precarious world of fine art promotion. Luckily a year after I opened up as a gallery something happened that was to completely re invigorate the West Cornwall art scene. After a long campaign of fund raising from the late eighties onwards the St Ives Tate Gallery
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dedicated to showing the work of the St Ives abstract painters of 1935 to 1975, opened to much acclaim in 1993. In the beginning there was much hostility to the project from some locals who could not accept that anyone could possibly be interested in the daubings of Peter Lanyon, Roger Hilton, Wilhelmina Barns Graham, Terry Frost, Patrick Heron and co. They were convinced that ‘rate payers money’ would be wasted on the project and assailed the local media with letters of protest. In the event St Ives Council contributed £5000 and Penwith District Council £15,000 to the £3.5 million that it cost to build the Tate and in returns for money invested that contribution must rank as one of the wisest investments by local councils in history. In its first year the Gallery was expected to draw 60,000 people but in fact it had more than 210,000 visitors. Since then Tate St Ives has drawn millions of pounds into the town’s economy with visitors from all over the world cramming its hotels, guest houses and restaurants. A spin off from this has been the opening of many new businesses and indeed art galleries to cater for the influx of more up market trade. The resulting publicity in the national and international media has led to swarms of artists of all styles and capabilities moving to West Cornwall, probably trebling the already large arts community and making it the second largest industry after tourism in the area.
The building itself has the flavour of an extra large wedding cake. I was lucky enough to be taken on a guided tour of the empty Tate Gallery with a gaggle of gallery directors and found it quite delightful, it could have stood on its own feet as a tourist attraction - even without the addition of the paintings. In fact the impact of the building itself somewhat overwhelmed the art that was eventually hung in it, rather like an over elaborate picture frame on a painting. Pictures really need to be hung against a simple background to show them off at their best, a plain rectangular cement block would have done the required job to better effect. Having said that, the Tate St Ives certainly does have some glorious aspects and is a worthy addition to the architecture of St Ives.
Before the advent of the St Ives gallery, or perhaps even the 1986 London Tate ‘St Ives’ exhibition the London art clique had been very ‘sniffy’ about the work of the St Ives abstract painters of the forties, fifties and sixties but after 1993 for a time it became rather trendy. Academics, researchers, and journalists descended on West Cornwall by the dozen, biographies abounded, learned articles appeared by the dozen, Terry Frost was knighted - and even got to do ‘Desert Island Discs’. It was a sort of Bloomsburyization of the place, if only the painters had been writers there would have no doubt been even more books, diaries and ‘letters of’. Eventually the Tate did commission research into the work of the few writers active during the ‘St Ives School’ years and there was a small exhibition featuring the writings of my father, Sven Berlin, Norman Levine and the poets W.S.Graham and Arthur Caddick. However the management of the St Ives Tate has always been in the hands of arts administrators ‘parachuted in’ from other parts of the country who
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while no doubt perfectly capable of doing their jobs seemed to have no real feel for West Cornwall and the art it has produced. One wonders how they would have coped with a roistering Roger Hilton and Sydney Graham and their pals in full flow at a 1960’s gallery Opening with a barrel of beer in one corner and a fierce argument in another. More and more one feels that Tate St Ives is not at all keen on the gallery’s original remit and is actually keener to use the space to feature the new conceptualist movement from the big cities, something I am not particularly against - but why not create a new building to house it.
So it was probably quite a good time for me to open up as a gallery in Penzance, the massive publicity throughout the national and international media had the effect of drawing thousands of extra people interested in the visual arts to West Cornwall. I still kept my printing going in harness with the gallery and I think my art patrons must have been pretty amused to see, instead of a posh curator, me battling away on my old rotaprint to get some commercial leaflet out in time to pay the rent.The gallery lived up to its name and leaked like a sieve, I half solved the problem by rigging up plastic guttering under the roof and leading the water off through a hole in the floor. It was not a good venue to hang ‘works on paper’ as dampness got everywhere. However I began to stage monthly exhibitions and for some time the Rainyday ‘openings’ were something of a social occasion - although often the patrons would have to dodge puddles on the floor. One of the early shows, going by the name of ‘Young Stuff’, featured the work of eight young artist in their twenties (several of whom are now quite well known ). We only sold one picture, by Michael Rees, to a holidaymaker, and as I was going up to London I offered to deliver it - discovering to my surprise that the buyer was the chairman of the London Tate Gallery, and I had the rather odd experience of going up the steps of the Tate with a painting under my arm. In fact the reason I had gone to London was to attend the Opening of the 1992 Turner Prize Show as my old friend from Mevagissey and Art School days David Tremlett was, with Damien Hirst, Rachael Whitread and Grenville Davey (another Cornishman - who won the prize), one of the four finalists. David was by now something of a star in the world of international art; originally a sculptor then a minimalist then a conceptualist he was now producing huge geometric wall drawings in venues all over the world. He kept in touch by putting me on his mailing list and I would regularly get invites to exotic places I could not even dream of going to. To begin with we, his early contemporaries, could not take his work seriously but gradually he developed into an artist of a definite talent and his wall drawings did have a certain beauty about them. As it happened David himself was involved in another opening, in Mexico, on the same night as the Tate do so I wandered around the Gallery on my own amidst massive crowds and very aware of the class and money difference from my own patch. The event reinforced the realisation that the art world consists of two
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camps the monied intellectual one and the poor bohemian one, with both sides now and then making forays into each others territory. As ever, many artists have inherited wealth to see them through the rocky bits of their career whilst others are picked out by the wealthy patron or funding organisation who can make rich men or women of them. All that we can hope is that the patrons and funders have been given good taste!.
Back in Cornwall I hopefully approached David with the idea of having a show in my fledgling gallery and much to my surprise he was able to do it. So in the spring of 1993 David and another Art School friend Terry Pascoe set to work covering the walls of the gallery with dramatic wall drawings in oil pastel. I must say it was an interesting experience plugging away with my printing whilst watching my old friends working for a week on the drawings. The arrangement was that David put the drawings on the wall and if anyone wanted one he would go to their home and repeat the drawing on their own walls. At the end of the show I would paint over the drawings with white emulsion - something I did with all the enthusiasm of Sir Bedivere throwing excalibur into the lake.
I ran a series of solo shows that year including another old Falmouth Art School friend John Henderson - a photorealist,abstract painters Carole McDowall and Anthony Frost, caricaturist Mick Tracey the drawings of Julian Dyson and the seascapes of Robert Jones, yet another art school friend. I interspersed these major shows with mixed exhibitions where I was able to try out new artists - including another show by the under thirties. By my first year I had covered a pretty wide range of artistic styles and decided to carry on in that fashion. At this time my main income still came from printing so I could take far more chances on the exhibiting front. When I sold my first big picture, for £1800, I was too embarrassed to take my allotted cut of one third and insisted on only 25% - now I know better. The year finished off with an exhibition of Ashley Peters Peninsula Voice portraits that had featured in our ‘80 from the 80’s’ book which was filmed for local T.V.
To keeping the gallery going a fine balance has to be achieved between putting on shows that will be safe enough to bring in sales and taking risks with adventurous artists who will give the gallery a good reputation. The risky shows will always attract the big crowds but rarely if at all will produce many sales, and this is why they will be usually found in subsidised venues. There is terrific pressure to take these risks and indeed it is pretty satisfying to stage a show that is so very obviously stimulating to the gallery visitor. One such show was by a talented young local sculptor Amanda Lorens who produced an amazing array of pieces based on oversize fruit and later I put her on again with her equally gifted contemporary Tessa Garland. Other exhibitions featured the eccentric St Just sculptor David Kemp probably best known locally for his imaginative props for Kneehigh Theatre, and I did manage to sell a couple of his pieces to Glasgow Museum of Modern Art. However as funding organisations will not deal with independent galleries, (you have to form a
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committee or become a charity), one has to be extremely careful about taking on big risk shows.
With the mini boom created by the St Ives Tate and the renewed interest in the artists of West Cornwall a new generation of sellable artists, usually figurative rather than abstract, emerged and of course all the local galleries vied for their services. As a gallery putting on regular monthly shows I was pushed more than most to find suitable exhibitors and for a time my shows were based around a stable consisting of such artists as; Kurt Jackson, Naomi Frears, Nicola Bealing, Louise Mc Clary, Jessica Cooper, Simon Pooley and their contemporaries - most of whom have gone on to bigger things. Of course there was always the ‘old guard’ of whom Rose Hilton, who for a long time was my top seller, Jack Pender, Bob Bourne, Moreen Moss and Jeremy Le Grice were also favourites. One of the peculiarities of the Gallery business is that the artists who pull the biggest crowds at openings or generate the most coverage in the local media are not necessarily those who sell the best. One, with a manic gift for self promotion got half page articles in at least four papers, drank the bar dry with the help of his buddies and yet failed to sell a single painting because he had priced them too high in order to boost his flagging reputation. Another, a minimalist abstract painter, was featured in the papers to such effect that someone turned up at the gallery and walked out with two of her, good but difficult to sell, paintings in the belief that she must be collectable. Usually it is naturally the more middle of the road painters who are easier to sell. Often these people have been featured many times in the press before and if they are not particularly gregarious do not draw large crowds to the opening. Sometimes I am asked by younger artists for advice on how to succeed in their chosen career and always offer the opinion that assuming they have a modicum of talent they should marry into a rich family and acquire famous friends, generally its the rich and the artists friends and relatives who will buy pictures. By the mid nineties I had stumbled across quite a successful formula that I ran for a few years, The Rainyday Little Picture Show, whereby I invited fifty or more artists to submit three paintings each all priced at less than £300. This gave me an opportunity to try out some new faces and several artists progressed to major shows through this route. Generally I try to use locally based artists but occasionally have tried people from outside the area, notably the narrative painter David Shanahan from Devon and the seascapes of Bristol’s Chris Hankey. The ‘Second Generation’ of the St Ives School painters were regular exhibitors, like Roger Hilton’s sons Fergus who painted wild abstracts like his father and Bo who’s restrained realist pictures were more reminiscent of his mother Rose’s work. Peter Lanyon’s sons Martin and Matthew (who was a late but impressive starter) put in their abstract paintings as did Billy Wynter the son of Bryan whilst Anthony Frost , son of Terry who was probably the most successful of that generation was later joined by his own son Luke Frost as a painter. Like Christine and Helen Feiler the ceramicist and jeweller daughters
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of painter Paul Feiler and Patrick Heron’s daughters Katherine and Suzanna the second generation of the St Ives School have to live with the disadvantages and advantages of being born into artistic families. There is a certain amount of unjustified envy and suspicion from some of their contemporaries, who don’t seem to realise that it is quite a natural course for someone to take up a similar trade to their parents - after all it happens with plumbers and carpenters. In the end some are good at it and some are not. Regular monthly exhibitions over the years brought me into contact with most of the prominent working artists of West Cornwall through the nineties. The gallery built up quite a reputation but it was always on a knife edge economically and I learned to appreciate the patience of the painters most of whom understood the risky nature of the business. I persevered with artists who’s talent I was sure would come through, sometimes it did though often a great show would produce hardly any sales. Gradually I built up a mailing list of over 500 addresses from all over the country and many of these people became regular visitors to the gallery. I still find it very difficult to identify a possible buyer out of the blue and am often taken by surprise when someone approaches me and says nervously ‘excuse me I’d like to buy that blue picture in the corner - how do I pay for it’. From time to time I have people working for me, my sister Jane was a particularly skilled saleswoman in the gallery but terribly over qualified for such a job. I have always been a bit wary of approaching a customer until they show a positive interest after which they get my full attention. In the spring of 1997 we were all horrified to hear that Bob Devereux had suffered a stroke. Bob had been under extreme stress running his Salthouse Gallery in St Ives, he had always taken great risks in exhibiting work he thought was good rather than work he knew would sell. He had promoted many young artists and often given them their first show - I had myself taken on several painters from his gallery. Bob’s economic sense was notoriously hit and miss but his taste in art has always been very good, hence he had one of the best galleries in St Ives but is often on the breadline. The stroke was obviously pretty serious and he was likely to be out of action for two or three months so Anthony Frost and I got together to try and come up with an idea to raise some money to keep his landlord and the rates people at bay. Anthony knew of a scheme used in London where artists contributed paintings signed on the back which were then numbered and sold at a fixed price on a first come basis and we decided to adapt this to our ‘Benefit for Bob’.
We approached well over a hundred artists and asked them if they would contribute a little picture on an A5 sheet signed on the back which we would hang in my gallery and sell for £30 each. The buyers would give us the money and the picture’s number and find out at the end of the afternoon whether they had hit the jackpot. With hindsight we should have put the price a little higher as we were given work by Terry Frost, Patrick Heron, Wilhelmina Barns Graham and a lot of other
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major artists amongst over 130 paintings. An hour before the event opened, on a bright sunny Easter Monday, there was a queue of over 200 stretching around the back streets from my Cross Street gallery. It must have looked very strange to the casual observer or passer by. Inside, as Anthony myself, Bob and his wife Pauline, my sister Jane and Annette Robinson who were helping run the event, surveyed the show we realised we had a very good exhibition on our hands. At 2.30pm on the dot we opened the door and let the crowd in having decided to restrict the crowd to one picture each and sold the lot within the hour. In the end we raised well over £3000 after expenses and were able to put Bob back on his feet again. It showed the wonderful community spirit that exists within the West Cornwall artistic fold and the tremendous respect that they had for Bob’s efforts over the years.
I carried on with the regular monthly shows and later that year was persuaded to put on three exhibitions tied in with ‘The Quality of Light’ a project run by St Ives International a collaboration put together by the St Ives Tate, Newlyn Gallery and Falmouth College of Arts. There were several fairly avante garde displays by internationally known artists throughout West Cornwall heavily funded by St Ives International who had grants of over £300,000 to play with, and although none of that came to the fringe exhibitions like mine we were encouraged to put on risky adventurous shows. Now this was all very well but without the benefit of funding several of us put our businesses in jeapordy only to find that the kudos went to St Ives International! I very much enjoyed putting on Amanda Lorens ‘and Tessa Garland’s thought provoking modern sculpture and indeed the show was an enormous crowd puller but in the end sales were practically non existent. David Kemp also had a show with me to complement his ‘Quality of Light” exhibition at Botallack Counthouse again drawing big crowds though in this case I did actually sell a couple of pieces. The Counthouse show by David, who lived about a mile away, proved to be by far the busiest show of the project although with the amount of effort he put into it he reckonened he was working at around 50 pence an hour. My third show for the project was a much more populist affair, ‘Pictures of St Ives’ and this one did cover itself.
In February 1997 and 98 I put on shows featuring the Mousehole artist Jack Pender and Jeremy Le Grice, both of whom specialised in semi abstract boats and harbours with great success and also in 1997/8 featured three artists who have since made names for themselves; Kurt Jackson, Naomi Frears and Nicola Bealing. A constant problem in arts promotion is that successful artists like the last three inevitably move on to greener pastures and one has to somehow find replacements who have not only the talent but also have the ability to sell paintings and keep the wolf from the door. Usually new faces have to be plucked from the walls of other galleries, it is very rare to find any exciting new work arriving in the post in the form of photos or slides or indeed in the hands
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of the many artists who call in with their work. Every now and again I will put on a ‘Little Picture Show’ to try out one or two new artists but I always take the precaution of putting some of the better known names in to ensure a sale or two.
In the summer of 1998 I was asked to put together a Cornish ‘Little Picture Show’ by Lyn Strover who runs a successful gallery just outside Cambridge and we repeated the concept the following year with me driving up in a car full of over a hundred paintings by thirty odd different artists. These shows seemed to work very well but now it appears that many other ‘up country’ galleries are coming to Cornwall to collect work by the more successful Cornish based painters and although I arranged a show for a Brighton Gallery in 1999 this little idea seems to have come to a halt.
In the spring of 1998 I spotted that a likely looking premises in the main street of Penzance had become vacant and seized the opportunity to move to a better trading position. The rent and rates were much higher but the place had enormous windows which I could use to display many more paintings. I gave in my notice after eight years at Cross Street and after a rather spectacular last show there featuring Willie Barns Graham, Terry Frost, Alex Mackenzie, Breon O’Casey and Karl Weschke opened up at 36 Market Jew Street in June .
At this time I was still operating as a litho printer from an upstairs room though I gradually began to reduce the workload as I sold more paintings. In the end I just did jobs for long standing customers rather than going out and looking for business - making £100 from selling a painting is a lot easier than doing it from a printing job with all the dozens of things that can go wrong. After a lot of hard work building false walls to hang the pictures on we opened up with a show featuring Rose Hilton, her sons Bo and Fergus, Zoe Cameron and Victoria Burlton. The opening night was packed and for a couple of years the Rainyday Gallery monthly shows seemed to be the trendy thing of the moment. In those days I would regularly feature promising young artists mixed and distinguished painters from an older generation with the occasional sculptor thrown in - often in totally unlikely combinations. In January 1999 I managed , with the help of his son Anthony, to get an exhibition of Terry Frost’s exhuberant screen prints and did very well on sales. Other artists who did well that year were Nick Williams with his mysterious interiors, Matthew Lanyon’s abstracts, Kurt Jackson’s landscapes and David Shanahan's imaginative narratives. From Sax Impey’s minimalist abstracts through Chris Hankey’s seascapes, to Bob Bourne’s naive interiors to Mick Tracey’s delightful caricatures I tried to make a visit to the gallery a truly unpredictable experience. As well as the monthly show I always make sure that there is a good cross section of other styles so that everyone who comes in can at least find one painting they can praise and another to disparage, which after all may be the whole point of promoting art in the first place.
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