For Folk's Sake

With a back catalogue longer than the A30, Devonshire English Roots duo Show of Hands have one of the largest fan bases in the South-West. Intrepid reporter and fan Vanessa Hiller, accompanied by Neil Heatley, went to meet them. Here's what occured:

3 December 2004 – The Greenbank Hotel – Falmouth, Cornwall

Vanessa: Is this the last date of your tour?
Phil: Nope.
Steve: Three to go.
Phil: Two more to go.
Steve: Yeah, including tonight three and two after tonight.

Vanessa: You’ve just released the Western Approaches album, is that right?
Steve: I did that in September with the other two, with Seth and Jenna
Vanessa: Right, so that wasn’t a Show of Hands album?
Steve: No, it’s under our general umbrella and label and all that sort of thing.

Vanessa: So, are you playing any songs from that on this tour or is this just Show of Hands numbers?
Steve: Yeah actually, well Crooked Man is on that, but Crooked Man will obviously be on the new album, which we’ll do next year as well, so there is a version, and we are also putting a version of Crooked Man on the website at the end of the tour as a help yourself single.

Vanessa: So that will be a live recording then
Steve: There’s both.
Phil: In fact, we’ve just got the mastered version yesterday so we were all ok-ing it last night.
Steve: They’ll be the Western Approaches version on it and a live version of it.
Phil: From this tour.
Steve: And basically if people like it they send of a couple of quid, if they don’t they don’t bother.

Vanessa: Oh that’s good, because one of the things I was going to ask you about was you saying you want people to bootleg. Is that right?
Steve: As much as I can.
Phil: Not bootlegging, lets be absolutely clear, not for sales, not commercially, but the whole business and stupidity of making it illegal for people to copy albums to give to other people - you know, here you are, see what you think of this, I like this - is patently absurd. Everyone has always done it, back in the days of cassettes, we always made cassettes. There’s a very simple basic point about it, isn’t there. If someone burns a CD for you, you take it, speaking for myself, if it’s anything I like, I only go and buy it anyway, because I want the complete package.
Steve: You go and see the band
Phil: You go and see the band, if I’m interested I want the sleeve, I want everything, if I don’t like it, and play it a couple of times and it goes into the ‘out-tray’ as it were, that’s where it goes, there’s no harm done is there.
Steve: No.
Neil: I found it interesting last week it was reported in the news that even though you’ve got the iTunes Website and you’ve got all this downloading, that last year saw the most album sales on CD than ever before and everyone is kinda saying, oh no, the internet is destroying the music industry, but then how can you have the biggest selling year of CDs ever?
Steve: It’s possibly bad for fizzy pop stuff, because kids maybe just download it and don’t like it, but who cares, you know. Because we make music, we’re as different to a major record company in the way they go about it as a local pasty shop is to Tescos, but it’s Tescos that claim to represent us. It’s the major retailers, if that’s the analogy, that claim that they have our interests at heart, but they don’t, they would destroy us, like they would destroy that corner shop, they’d rather have family firms not there. But it’s all called music, so that’s the problem, that it’s different.
Neil: The joy of Simon Fuller, who’s now destroying the music industry.

Vanessa: There was one statistic last year that there are more ringtones sold for pop songs than actual pop songs.
Steve: I’m not surprised it’s become so.
Neil: Top of the Pops has been ditched from BBC1.
Steve: It’s all over isn’t it.
Neil: Yeah, it’s been moved to BBC2 on Sunday nights
Steve: I mean, there are concrete examples by the thousand, but the one we always use is Kelly Joe Phelps. I was given what is technically a copy right infringing minidisk in a pub in Topsham of ‘Sky Like a Broken Clock’, so I play it in the car, Phil hears it, likes the song, he goes and buys the album, my Mrs goes and buys the album, we record the song. I suspect at least fifty people a night from our audience were going to check him out, either his website or his gigs or his records, all through that one illegal act. So you can’t apply the same principles of someone producing by the million in Malaysia and importing. But it’s all called the same thing, its all called Copy Right infringement. It just broke my heart to see on the Peter Gabriel album, actually on the thing, a whole thing about, please do not copy this, you are damaging the musicians rights and you are actively involved in destroying music and I thought, for fuck’s sake, if someone like that isn’t even big enough to say, you know, its horses for courses, its not a simple argument…I was quite disappointed.
Phil: But then again, the converse of that is that you have manifestly impish pop stars like Robbie thingy.
Vanessa: Williams?
Phil: Robbie Williams who - I know he doesn’t care what he says anyway - he’s quite happy to stand up at a major music business event and say yeah, copying’s great.
Steve: Chuckle Chuckle
<mutley style giggling from both>
Phil: It’s swings and roundabouts. That’s disappointing; you’d think that someone of his supposed intellect would see the slightly bigger picture.
Steve: humm.
Neil: Now they’ve banned the iPod speaker that Apple are producing on the grounds - sorry, it’s the ones that linked in to your car radio so you could listen to your ipod through your radio - and now its like, oh no, you need a radio licence and everything and I was like, what’s the difference between having it there, plugged in through your cassette, as opposed to just having it… it’s not for mass consumption, I think people get a bit silly sometimes.
Phil: It’s crazy, crazy, especially when they went to the trouble to do something as clever as that, which you know, is an obvious thing, it’s just really neat and it works beautifully.
Neil: its stooped.
Steve: I’ve heard about the beach parties, where everyone opens their car doors, tunes into the same frequency that someone on an ipods got, and blasts it out at 1000 watts.
Phil: ha ha ha ha.
Neil: That’s just great, that’s a good plan, I’d never though of that.
Phil: a ha ha ha he he.
Steve: Yeah you just have an instant disco, an instant, mobile little rave, everyone’s got the big speakers in the door, you just find your frequency, say ok, lets check this out and its like, Dumph, dumph, dumph [I think this was Steve’s version of a human beat box]
Phil: a ha ha ha.
Neil: That’s hilarious, just hilarious.
Steve: In fact there’s no reason why that technology wouldn’t work to do a gig, if we could find a frequency and reduce the PA down to a band and just broadcast it into a lot of car stereos
Phil: A, yeesss, yep.
Steve: That would be a good……<chuckle, chuckle>, that would be a first wouldn’t it, get everyone to sit there, no PA and just a load of open car doors, like a drive in movie.
Phil: All you need is an FM transmitter,
Steve: Yeah.
Phil: That’s all you need.
Neil: That could be a very interesting concert actually, just literally a drive in Concert.
Phil: At Exmouth Sea Front, or something like that.
Steve: Alright, we must think about that.
Neil: I think that would be really good.
Steve: You could have a car full of a thousand a field, either the doors are open, or if its raining, everyone is inside, just find a frequency, tune it in.
Phil: Brilliant.
Steve: Alright, who would be the man for that, we must know someone….
Phil: Yep, you’d just need an FM transmitter.
Steve: A pet boffin.
Phil: <American advertising exec type voice> Remember, you heard it hear first!
[Much laughter from all]
Neil: Oh, I just love that idea, cool.

Vanessa: I’ve been looking at your webpage and I notice on it, that you are described as an acoustic roots duo?
Steve: We always are looking for terms to describe it, English Roots is probably the best in a way, I mean, people call it acoustic, but we’ve got more technology than most bands you know, because it’s an acoustic guitar with a pick up in it, so its technically an electric guitar, well it looks like an acoustic and the sound is as close to it as we get, and people think acoustic, but it’s just a way of trying to get round the folk word isn’t it.

Vanessa: We were actually going to ask you about folk, I mean why do you not want to be associated with the word folk?
Steve: All you have to do is walk into the nearest pub and say, fancy going to a folk concert, it’s free.
Vanessa: he he
Steve: Or fancy going to see a blues band, or reggae night, or Cajun night, its like going to for a Chinese meal, Indian meal, Italian meal, you know the flavour don’t you, before you know which version you’re going to go to, you know what you’re gonna get more or less. If you say English acoustic music, its got no genre identity and the nearest thing you can call it is folk and that has an identity and people don’t like it.
Neil: You’ve been nominated now for a Radio 2 Folk Award, seeing as it’s an actual Folk Award and obviously any kind of awards are good. I don’t actually know, is there a ceremony for that and is it in March next year?
Phil: We got the best Live Act Award this year. I certainly think that now there are more people than I hitherto thought who seem to be tuned in to the thing and, obviously, the BBC put up the budget for it. Certainly the Awards thing that we went to this year was a serious concern, it was well presented, it was filmed and edited and then shown on BBC 4 so, at the end of the day, you know, all publicity is good publicity. They seem to have raised the standard and there is a degree of awareness going on because of that, you know. They also had some fairly good live stuff on as well and so, overall I think there may be a general rising of perception about the quality of what folk music is supposed to be.
Steve: It’s definitely not as uncool as it was.
Phil: Yeah, for sure.
Steve: I mean it may well be that our obsession about trying to get rid of the ‘f’ word is slightly out of date now, because I think more and more people are aware, you know. It’s a bit cooler for a lot of people.
Neil: I just love that tag line, that you don’t like using the ‘f’ word.
Phil: Ha ha, we have a very odd thing happens with us, we tend to attract people who are usually the singer songwriter leaders of quite young, quite hip, bubbling under indie bands and it’s interesting to note now that there’s absolutely no stigma attached to any of these guys or girls, getting up and doing their solo thing with acoustic guitars. If you went back fifteen years, there was a whole generation of young people in bands, who wouldn’t dream of standing up and singing their songs with an acoustic guitar, whereas now it is absolutely part of the package. We seem to have attracted quite a few lads and lasses like that, which is very flattering and very very nice,
Vanessa: You were saying earlier about the technology, the pickups. Is it Jim Moray who’s got the World of Wires? He’s quite a young ‘folk’ artist isn’t he?
Phil: Yes, but he’s, he’s quite young, and he’s been through all indie band thing, and he outraged some of the ‘finger in the ear’ people by immediately turning up and playing quite radical technology to his performances, which of course is absolutely fantastic. The first gig I saw him do, on a couple of songs he was doing literally on the spot voice sampling. He’ll sing a line through the microphones and everyone thinks he’s started the song, then he stops, then he processes it almost instantly and then he sings against what he has recorded and looped on the spot. That’s something quite radical, quite left field and very innovative.
Vanessa: Have you ever considered going in that sort of direction with your music?
Phil: I’m doing more and more of it in the studio, but not in context of what we’re doing, um, however, having said that, Steve especially has been working with a youngish producer again, Sean Lakeman, who although not a techno in that sense, certainly has leanings in that direction.
Steve: I did a tour with back projection and rhythm tracks about three or four years ago, and it wasn’t entirely successful. I did a lot of my own filming and then we made a file of the backing tracks for a solo album on a visual file, without the vocals. So I would play acoustic guitar and vocals over a back projection, but some nights, it was like, suddenly you had Windows 98 about nine foot high and this mouse looking for…the technology was a bit ancient, not ancient, but it wasn’t really up to speed. I’m thinking of doing it again, maybe in a couple of years, of recording all the West Country songs, such as the Preacher or whatever, doing my own filming around the West Country and making a DVD of ambient tracks, you know, very stripped down, so that I play the songs acoustically but use the back projections as context.
Phil: If you did that now, there wouldn’t be any technological issue.

Vanessa: You’ve told us about the traditional, acoustic, side of your music, would you say you are known for traditional songs?
Phil: Traditional, no. Traditional music is usually for the hard core of the folk scene as an end in itself whereas, I think as far as we’re concerned, I think its the springboard, I think its from whence everything comes. If you look at any contemporary music in any genre, there are bands still playing all the standard traditional music. I mean, an absolute classic example, The Pogues, everyone thinks of the Pogues, they write their own songs, ya know, but, its completely grounded in and absolutely held on the ground by Irish traditional music, even if they don’t do a single traditional song on the night. There is also this kind of holy cow in the folk music genre that, because its traditional it must be good and in fact, if you actually start examining traditional music, in fact, the best songs that exist within the tradition, are the best songs you’ll ever hear, but there’s an awful lot of ab-so- lute rubbish mixed up with it all, terrible stuff you know. Having looked in to it and been exposed to it, as English people we’ve got to go and search it out, because our tradition died out so much. If the Victorians hadn’t collected it all and written it all down, we wouldn’t have it. When you look at it, you find perfect songs, you actually find perfect songs, and you can’t often say that. I suppose everyone has their own perfect songs but in our gig, you’ll only hear us do one traditional song at the moment which is 'The Blue Cockade', - actually that’s a lie because there’s the ‘Blind Fiddler’, but that’s American - but you listen the to 'The Blue Cockade', that’s a classic example, it’s a perfect English folk song, it’s the most lyrical song, story, exquisite tune and you take these things as bedrocks upon which to build. Steve writes most of the songs that we do, but if you care to listen carefully you will hear where it’s coming from and where it’s actually rooted.

Vanessa: So the traditional songs that you have played and recorded, they’re the cream of the crop as far as you guys are concerned.
Phil: Yeah, as far as we are concerned
Steve: Also they’re just ones that you’ve picked up really, you know a lot of them tend to be from the Martin Carthy or Joan Baez repertoire,

Vanessa: Silver Dagger?
Steve: Yeah, causes that’s what I heard a lot when I was a kid, at the same time as early Bob Dylan.

Vanessa: To a certain extent, do you feel - I mean, from what I know of folk, a lot of songs have been passed on personally, and its only recently you’ve got recordings - do you feel some sort of responsibility in a way to keep that going, to keep these songs alive?
Phil: Yeah, I think so, in terms of the folk scene as such, its all so well documented now, that really I think mostly all people can do, to attempt to reinvent the way the songs are sung.
Steve: Martin Carthy says the worst thing you can do to a folk song is not sing it. I think they are there to be cut and pasted, chopped about. I mean 'The Blue Cockade' is a construct out of about four different versions, with the melody altered and the rhythm changed - if it works, you know. We now go to places and people sing it as the version, like the template, and that’s what happens, if it works, it’s just absorbed. The problem with original songs is you wouldn’t really want people taking your lyrics and changing them around too much, they tend not to but, in some ways, you want the process to stop with original songs and that’s quite a difficult thing sometimes

Vanessa: So with your original songs, what sort of writing partnership do you have?
Steve: I tend to do all the writing.

Vanessa: And the lyrics, I mean, personally I think you can read the lyrics as a poem, do you put a lot of effort into making them stand up on their own, so you could read them without the song?
Steve: Tend to, unless it’s something that’s very poppy and throw away like ‘Are We Alright’. You don’t want close examination on something like that, it’s just like a pop song really, but yeah, lyrics I tend to want to make a poetic sense of them, to try and draw a big pattern from small incidents in the way that a good poem would.

Vanessa: Are you influenced by any writers?
Steve: Ted Hughes. Yeah, Ted Hughes, Peter Ackroyd in particular, but Ted Hughes I met when I was a kid and it was quite an important moment really.

Vanessa: I can’t say I’ve actually read any Ted Hughes, except the Crow.
Steve: You would have done it at school, like ‘The Horses’, and ‘The Thought Fox.’ Yeah the Crow he did and it’s just amazing and country based, but very savage in a way.

Vanessa: Are you into Seamus Heaney at all, have you read any of his stuff?
Steve: Yeah, they were great mates, the best of friends, and it’s not dissimilar, but Ted Hughes is just extraordinary. I’ll tell you who else is, Sting as well, you’ll find images in Sting that he’s nicked from him, like that “black back gull bent like an iron bar slowly” which is in some of the early stuff, the Police stuff. I can recognise an English teacher at work there.

Vanessa: Haven’t you said that you want to sit down with Sting and, is it correct his grammar or something or get his tenses right?
Steve: Oh god, it drives me mad, when I hear ‘we didn’t start the fire, it was always burning since the world was turning’ … it would have been so easy to get that right, and Sting does it all the time, ‘If I ever lose my faith, there’d be nothing left’ - it doesn’t qualify you know and it is so easy to make stuff qualify like that. That’s always a bit of a bug bear of mine that, you know. I’ve got a friend who’s an historian and who I always just run stuff by, and I say, look, I’m thinking of writing a song about Armadas, who are we talking about and he’ll check the facts. When I did the ‘Galway Farmer’, I’ve got a friend who’s a hardcore gambler and he just gave me the low-down on dates and times and places and that. It’s good to do that.

Vanessa: I was going to ask you about your historical songs, you do seem to have quite a sense of history in a lot of your songs, like Drake, The Man in Green, Tall Ships…
Phil: But that’s harking to the tradition again, traditional songs are old songs
Steve: But also, I studied history and that was always my passion so…

Neil: We have the Tall Ships here in Falmouth next year, looking forward to that?
Phil: Well I shall be down, I shall be here.
Steve: They’ll probably be a gig going I should have thought.
Phil: Yeah, we should seek it out.
Neil: Coincide it with the event? So have you actually been down to the Events Square, outside the Maritime Museum? [in Falmouth]. They’ve got that paved area that they use as an events square, to put concerts on and things.
Steve: No
Neil: It’s not bad, people in Flushing complain though, they had to turn the tent around this year so that the doors were faced towards Falmouth instead of Flushing!
Phil: <adopts extreme Cornish accent> Ever since I been born, those Flushing people have been bloody miserable!
Steve: Phaw ha ha!
Neil: After this then, after tonight, where’s next?
Phil: We’ve hooked up a lot with the Oyster Band in the last year which has been great because we share some similar backgrounds and we played on their Big Session Live Album. We’re doing three Oyster Band Big Session Gigs, including the finishing one for them in London. I think Eliza Carthy is doing that as well, so that’s going to be really good fun, I’m looking forward to that.
Neil: I was chatting with a friend of mine about you today. Is it right you go down to Limpston, to the Red Wing Pub every Christmas?
Steve: Yeah.
Neil: I heard from past reviews of the whole village trying to get into the pub to see you!
Steve: Yeah, everybody will be there.
Phil: Yep, we will be there, we will be singing carols. I don’t know how they do it, every year they seem to raise just a little bit more money for the Life Boat. Its riotously good fun, that’s our good friend Paul Downes…
Steve: Yearly claim to fame
Phil: His yearly claim to fame, as he organises it and of course, he lives a hundred yards from the pub, which is quite handy.
Neil: That’s very handy. That’s a bit dangerous! Have you played in Ireland?
Phil: I’ve toured Ireland twice. For a while an Irish American friend of mine was running a Hotel out in the Ring Killorglin, so I went there two or three years running and that was a laugh. The Hotel was a hunting, shooting, fishing hotel, so it was closed, obviously, out of season and this woman used to invite her friends there from all around the world. We just used to bowl over, and you do your own cooking, serve yourself behind the bar then chuck the money in the till. It was riotously good fun, fantastic. I played there a couple of times and we even talked about trying to organise a summer gig there because obviously they’ve got extensive grounds, but it never came to anything.
Steve: There’s not an Arts Centre circuit that we can get on as far as we can see. We’ve been trying to get the Belfast Festival for years, but it just; again, it’s just the English genre.
Neil: Yeah, I’m not a huge fan of the Belfast Festival.
Steve: I’ve got a friend who plays there, Martyn Joseph. It’s the same as Scotland; it’s hard for us to get a look in. I mean Celtic Connections might make a difference, we’re doing that in January, but there is a type of, I wouldn’t go so far as to call it racism, but there’s a negative English image in Scotland about a couple of English blokes. It doesn’t ring true and it doesn’t quite fit, but maybe that will change because whenever we’ve played to a Scots audience they go crazy. They don’t quite know what it is that we’re gonna do and they’re always a bit surprised.
Phil: And you’ve got this curious anomaly of a small enclave of Scots fans who drive all the way down to our North of England gigs you see, and it was very noticeable on the run on the week before last, Keswick, Newcastle and so on, we got a sprinkling of Scots people. They’ve driven all the way down because that’s the nearest gig we’re doing and there was especially a couple of guys who have driven down to Kesick and were driving back that night - they were going to work the following day - it’s a bit of a trip!
Neil; I see that your fans have Forums on the internet, do you ever drop into those at all, to see what people are up to?
Steve: Yeah, within reason, it’s quite good to get feedback about songs and shows and stuff like that. To be honest, our message boards are generally a lot healthier in discussion than the BBC Folk Forum which is dominated by about eight people who make up ninety per cent of the postings. Our Longdogs site is completely free ranging now. They’re getting about ten new people a week, there are over twelve hundred now and there’s chapters about everything, its moved way beyond us. Everybody that we associate with becomes part of the family tree - Martyn Joseph and Sean and Seth Lakeman - so that anything that we’ve touched is now part of that world and it’s a really growing thing, it’s quite healthy really.

Vanessa: I did want to speak to you about the Country Life album, released in 2003.
Steve: Yeah, yeah.
Vanessa: The song Country Life, it caused quite a stir didn’t it. It got banned from some radio stations…..
Steve: It didn’t get banned, it didn’t get playlisted.
Phil: It sounds a bit dramatic to say it was banned. We were told, unofficially, by senior BBC Producers that it was a bit too issues based.
Steve: It would have cost us about three grand to hire pluggers, you know, to go to the radio stations and do all the stuff they do, so we got an unofficial ‘don’t waste your money on it’ because we can’t play list it - like the song, but its too issues based.
Vanessa: How did you feel about that?
Steve: I’d rather they said they didn’t like the production or didn’t like the song; it’s a bit odd to say that they liked the song, it’s got all the right ingredients, but it is considered not right for day time radio.
Phil: But I think its quite ironic that Steve’s new song, Crooked Man, which is infinitely more subtle, but actually more political than Country Life - but is a very well crafted, very well written song - at the moment that’s the one that’s being gently pushed around and we’ve had several quite good prominent plays of it and they’re not quite getting it, in which case we’ve managed to put one over on them.
Vanessa: I know you’ve been asked before about what it [Crooked Man] is about and you’ve been reluctant to say specifically, but is it based around the Iraq situation?
Steve: It’s about Blair, Bush isn’t it really, its about people who spin so fast they become hollow and it’s about just having your intelligence insulted more than anything. People just knew, they just knew that there was going to be a war, the decision had been made and then it was just a question of selling it to us with focus groups and with so called weapons. If you think of the Crimean War, or any other war in history, nations tend to go to war and then historians pick over the bones afterwards don’t they, they figure out what happened there, but the idea of, we are going to go to…..
Phil: It’s a PR job
Steve: The eve of Waterloo and you know, how can we sell this to the British population, that we’re gonna go, well ok, lets pretend that Napoleon… Its just all bollocks really.
Neil: Have you ever come across a film called Wag the Dog?
Steve: Yeah yeah.
Neil: It’s a fantastic film.
Steve: An American film.
Neil: Yeah, it’s an American film where………
Phil: Oh, is this the film about the fake war?
Neil: Yes, it’s an absolutely fantastic film and its one of those ones that all Journalists watch just going, haaww, this is so true! Have you watched Fahrenheit 9/11?
Steve: No I haven’t.
Phil: I haven’t seen that either, no.
Neil: I watched it for the first time a few days ago and the first half an hour was very clever and does what Michael Moore does very well, and links it all together and then I found the last hour was blatant Bush bashing and not with any real direction. Bowling for Columbine was excellent, very well put together, all the facts were there.
Phil: There’s a black comedy concept here. We’re talking about hiring people as you have to do, to try and present your records to the media and ten stages further on, you hire someone in Saatchi and Saatchi to present your war to the world and you pay vast sums of money for that to happen!

Vanessa: So, Country Life, you can listen to the song and you know what you’re saying, you don’t mince your words, but do you feel the rest of the album has received the same sort of attention?
Steve: Not really, no, but that was obviously a flagship song.
Vanessa: How do you feel about that, do you think it’s overtaken the rest of the album?
Steve: I don’t mind really. I just think it’s a song that was obviously at the right time and Crooked Man’s the same really, you go with the flow, if people pick up on a song, that’s what you end up talking about, but we did invest the most in it, in terms of the video and the whole look of the album and artwork, which was all based around that song.

Neil: You were quite hands on with the actual production of the artwork and the CD cover weren’t you?
Steve: One of our oldest friends is the head of one of the top three design studios in London, called Stylorouge. They did things like the Blur cover, you know the dog, the greyhound, and he did the Trainspotting poster. Rob just said I’ll do the lot, the whole concept of the album, the poster, the photos and video, to make one big package. So it’s a major record company standard production. What you’ve got there in that package is like what other bands couldn’t get their record companies to do in a million years, but we got it. It cost us a lot, but it seems to be worth it. It’s certainly paid for itself.

Vanessa: Is it right the photographer went into a village in, is it Teignmouth?
Steve: He went around the Tavistock area, he was given leads to people. There was a woman who used to work in casting that lives in that part of Devon and she just tipped him off as to some good faces, some good places. Some of the stuff that didn’t get used was equally as strong and as a whole it was a fantastic montage.
Phil: You’re often faced with a dilemma of what to leave out, because they were very, very thorough and in a sense, that’s what your paying for. The photographer was actually a fashion photographer, but a friend of Rob’s and he had a small window of opportunity so Rob grabbed him and brought him down. He was just an astounding photographer
Steve: What we said was, we just want to be put in that context, find country faces, you know the guy with the chainsaw, the guy in the café, and just include us in it, so that what we do musically and the way that we look, is in that context, to try and make an English West Country….almost like a Springsteen landscape.

Vanessa: I have to ask you about, the song Tommy, because my friend and I just love that song, but its just so unusual, how did you come up with that song?
Phil: Steve was given the minidisk of ‘Sky like a Broken Clock’ by Kelly Joe Phelps, I particularly homed on that song. I was born in Exminster, outside Exeter. Exminster’s primary industry, apart from agriculture was a huge Victorian Psychiatric Institution which my father was the last Director of. Throughout my childhood, the entire community revolved around this gigantic place, it was the first ever architect designed lunatic asylum in this country, in 1873, and it was very, very ahead of its time, with ramps for wheeling trolleys along, all that kind of thing. It was a beautiful building and of course, as the concept of Care in the Community was developed, a lot of the great monolithic institutions closed down and my father took early retirement. He was the last man out of the place, he locked the front door. Of course, what it had been was a safe haven for certain types of people, especially schizophrenics and far from being the prison that a lot of these places were presented as being, it was a actually a very safe place for certain types of people to be. My father was the chief administrator and our lives almost revolved around this place. There were psychiatric patients who were free to roam, walking up and down the village all day, strange behaviour on the streets nobody would even bat an eyelid at, because every other person walking past worked at the hospital. In a sense we were a Bedlam community as it were - there was no such thing as strange behaviour in our village in those days! So the song [Tommy] immediately struck a few chords, and I figured because the words were so good, that he [Kelly Joe Phelps] must have known this person, perhaps from a community he has lived in or perhaps it was a memory from childhood or whatever, and it was very easy to get inside the song. It was about things that I knew a little bit about, so that’s why it stood out. All the songs on the album are great, the albums fantastic, but that one does seem to strike a chord with a lot of people, interestingly enough. It’s very well written and it paints an amazing picture.

Neil: In terms of your direction in the future, you’ve got your own DVD now. Is that only available through the website or can you buy that from anywhere else?
Steve: No, it’s in the shops - I don’t know actually!
Phil: It’s not distributed yet but it will be.
Steve: We’ve just noticed this year, there’s a critical breakthrough in DVD ownership, now people are doing what they did with CD’s earlier, they’re getting stuff that they’ve had for a while transferred. The Albert Hall stuff is three years old now, but they want that on DVD and the first documentary we did.
Neil: Yeah, you said you wanted to do the big three, the Albert Hall, Madison Square and…
Phil: Sydney Opera House
Neil: That’s the one. Any plans for the other two yet?
Steve: Noo, not yet, but one day!
Phil: Actually no, it’s not Madison Square its Carnegie Hall, slightly more realistic than Madison, but not much!

Vanessa: I did want to ask you about hunting, I don’t know how you feel about talking about that.
Phil: No problem
Vanessa: I know you write a lot of your songs about rural ‘issues’ for want of a better word, and you do seem to care about writing about people, realistically. How do you feel about hunting, in your experience? You come from rural areas, how do you think a ban is going to affect the people in rural areas?
Steve: To be honest, there’s no doubt it will destroy some peoples livelihood, there’s no doubt that its going to do that, but there’s a bigger question in a way. I quite like boxing, but I’m not particularly proud of the excitement. If I’m honest, I can get into it, but I think that generally speaking, I think we measure our progress as a species by the distance we put between us and our primal instincts. I think that the idea of getting pleasure from killing something is fundamentally not the best for humans, but at the same time, if I rode and had horses, I suspect that the spice of knowing you were actually going to catch something would make it intoxicating.
Vanessa: I used to work in a riding stable and the woman I worked for, I mean, she must be in her nineties now, she said there’s nothing like going out and galloping around, when you don’t know where you’re going.
Steve: I mean, it must be fantastic to be in a pack, tearing over the country side and I think that the idea that there’s a kill at the end of it is an essential part of the ingredient and I don’t think people are honest when they say its all about pest control and I don’t think the anti hunters are honest when they say its about love of the fox. I think there’s a lot of class envy and I think ingrained in all of us, particularly if we’re from peasant stock, is a hatred of people on horses. If you imagine what it must have been like on the Russian steps when the Mongols arrived on horseback - I think it’s a primal thing - and I think everybody is less than honest about the love of the dear old fox. I think it’s all spiced up with a bit of class envy. I just hate the dishonesty and the other thing that I think is wrong is that real issues of the Countryside, which I think are about housing and employment, are buried by hunting.

Vanessa: You’ve spoken about the Countryside Alliance; you’ve said it doesn’t speak for the whole countryside.
Steve: No it doesn’t, but they’re so well organised and my other prediction, just to nail it on the head is, that I think that there will be what the government would consider a terrorist incident, I think something will happen, life will be lost and then everyone will fall down, because you’re looking at people, well some of them, they’ve got nothing to lose and they’re a bit cranky at the best of times. I think that they would do an awful lot of damage before the whole thing falls down, so that’s basically it, in a nutshell. I wouldn’t want to alienate a lot of our country based audience by saying that it’s right that it should be banned, but I think, why not fishing next? You know, morally, why not, why is a fish any less worthy, you know and then of course the governments not going to do that, with a big Labour majority of fisherman. Phil might want to say something.
Phil: Well, I broadly agree with Steve, I live on a farm, and I’ve lived on farms for virtually nearly twenty years and I lived on a hunting lodge for four years. I rode out and exercised horses, I did the whole bit. I actually would disagree with Steve that the excitement of the end object is the primary thing - you’ve ridden horses, you know perfectly well how difficult it is, even on a Bridal Path system, to get a good gallop - two thirds of the kids going out hunting are doing so because you have unbridled, if you’ll pardon the expression, access to land that they can tear over at high speed.
Steve: Yeah, but they keep saying that even if they were to drag hunt over free land, it wouldn’t have the same spice.
Phil: Ok, um, I think you’ll find that lots of the kids have been told to tow the party line, because most of the kids are in it for the ride, they’re not in it for chasing the fox and there’s absolutely no reason why drag hunting shouldn’t be done, but there’s a much more fundamental point - Steve is absolutely right. There’s absolutely no point in chasing and killing something you can’t eat, it is absurd. I live on a ‘frontline’ Farm, it’s a Dartmoor Hill Farm, and when I am at home, I’m in the middle of incredibly hard working, working class, farming people. Now, I’m aware of one fox incident in the last three years when a lamb was taken and of course, what happens is, that the farmers aren’t stupid, they know where to go, where to find the fox and how to deal with it. So the idea that you need a pack of people with hounds chasing over the land to possibly locate the fox that’s causing the trouble is just, its lying.
Steve: And also you tend to get the old and the weak, and you’re strengthening the stock.
Vanessa: Yeah, I mean, it’s the young ones you want to get rid of on that argument.
Steve: Ironically, where I lived in Dorset, the Hunt was the biggest force for conservation in the area; they bought a whole lot of woodland that they wanted kept unploughed and unused. There are a lot of ironies and a lot of contradictions in that sometimes feudal institutions work for the good of the Countryside and so it’s not a simple answer. I just hate the lack of honesty around.
Phil: I’ll give you a good instance; it’s sort of grizzly, but also funny. Dartmoor National Parks, in a section of the administered woodland below our Farm, have planted loads and loads and loads of new trees and despite the old plastic tubes, there was a bad outbreak of squirrels eating them. Of course, the Parks are supposed to present this politically correct face of being conservationist and being nice to wild life, but at the end of the day, very, very quietly they had to take an exterminator down there to poison the squirrels,
Neil: He, he, squirrels.
Phil: Its trees or squirrels! That’s another of those anomalies that is slightly grizzly but it does make me laugh, that the public face of the Parks is, you know, wildlife etc, etc, but they had to do this radical form of control in order to allow the trees to start growing.
Neil: I read a fantastic story about squirrels last week in Bournemouth, about squirrels attacking people, you know, I can’t imagine being attacked by a squirrel! You know, damn squirrels, stealing everything, aa, he’s got my wallet, ahh man, its in FHM, its terrible!

Vanessa Hiller

© Substance Magazine 2005