Kate Fletcher & Corwen Broch

An edited version of this interview first appeared in fRoots magazine No. 406, April 2017.

“Raised on porridge and song in a family of eccentric musicians in Reading,”  Kate Fletcher first came to our attention as the singer and main songwriter of Epona - a short-lived but influential  English folk-rock group whose alumni include her brothers Colin and Jon - latterly of Telling The Bees and Magpie Lane, respectively, and Nancy Kerr. They released a fine album entitled Shine Again in 1997, after which Kate retreated from recording for ten years, returning with her solo CD Fruit (recorded in a caravan by Leveret’s Rob Harbron) in 2007. Ten years later (she’s nothing if not consistent) Kate’s back with Fishe or Fowle - her first album as as a duo with her husband Corwen Broch, and (astonishingly) his debut recording.

“I always wanted to be a musician” Corwen tells me over the phone from Orkney (where Kate works as a music teacher) “but I didn’t really have any musical background or way into it. When I was 21, I bought a truck and started living on the road. I met a bunch of people at Wayland’s Smithy and from them I picked up some drumming and didgeridoo - all the terrible hippie instruments! Then a couple of years later I learned tin whistle and bodhran and joined a band called Senzar Tribal Collective, which was really a rounding-up operation of everyone in Boscombe who was stoned enough to agree to come and play - but not so stoned that they couldn’t come and play! Then I joined a little Irish trad pub band called Celtic Dream - which sounds like a liqueur, and that was a hilarious bunch of people. I was still living on the road and on protest sites in my late twenties when a wealthy Druidess kindly bought me a set of Welsh bagpipes made by John Tose, and that was a turning point.” I first met Kate after being drafted in to deputise for her regular musical partner at a medieval music and storytelling show.”

“We became a couple because we had compatible reed instruments,” Corwen deadpans, but, as they soon discovered, their musical compatibility runs deep.

“We’re both real believers in maintaining traditional customs and the purpose of music as something more than just commercial, consumer entertainment,” says Kate.  “It has social and ritual functions for dancing, for remembering, for bringing communities together.  We’ve amassed a huge collection of CD and DVD resources to explore traditions. When we found out that Folktrax was folding (in September 2007)  we bought everything we thought we’d ever need.  That’s where the two samples of the old ladies on Fishe & Fowle come from - they’re Peter Kennedy recordings that now belong to Topic. We made a conscious effort to really honour and credit those source singers, because Kennedy didn’t always do that.”


Fish or Fowle is a double CD release, with eleven traditional songs and four originals on disc one, while the second disc is the first recording for 30 years of The Play o' de Lathie Odivere, an Orcadian ballad, sung in five parts. All of the songs are concerned with themes of transformation, as Corwen elaborates.

“There’s a marvellous book called Folklore In The English and Scottish Ballads (Lowry Charles Wimberly) which is full of fantastic stuff about ghosts, the afterlife, fairies, and all the cosmology that you can work out from the ballad tradition. One of the ideas is of a very permeable barrier between human persons and other-than-human persons. In the ballad tradition, people turn into animals, animals turn into people, animals speak…  The album explores liminality between human and other-than-human and the desire for transformation and the fear of transformation. People resist hugely the idea that we might be animals , even though we demonstrably are! We can only be animals, plants, fungi or bacteria… Our animal nature and our kinship with the wild is really something to be embraced, and by distancing ourselves from the natural world we really impoverish ourselves.”

That Fish or Fowle is a unique-sounding record is due in no small part to the instruments used in its creation. “Corwen made the first Shetland gue in over a century!” Kate enthuses. “One of his instruments is in the Shetland museum, and he’s lectured in Scandinavia on the British bowed lyre traditions including the Shetland gue and the Welsh crwth. A lot of the instruments on the album we made ourselves, and we were very selective with the sounds that we used. We limited ourselves to producing a sound that’s very ancient, but not necessarily played in an ancient way. We’re not trying to recreate something - the minute you do that, you’ve made a museum piece and killed it. Almost every song that we sing has had changes made by us. They’re not fossilised pieces - even the oldest, most traditional songs are very personal to us in some way.”

katecorwen.bandcamp.com

Stepling CD review

First published in fRoots magazine No. 425, Summer 2019

Stepling. Leap 

It’s not uncommon for groups to claim that they’re “inspired by English traditions,” but rare to find one that so wholeheartedly explores music, song and dance in one tidy package (and with no: “actually MOR acoustic pish,” subtext!) making them all the more vital and interesting.

Stepling are fiddle player and singer Deb Chalmers, guitarist Adrian Lever (Alma, Horses Brawl)  world percussionist extraordinaire Jo May and step and clog dancer Toby Bennett.  Anyone concerned that the involvement of the latter might be something akin to ventriloquism on the radio… fear not. Toby Bennett is to clogging as Kathryn Tickell is to Northumbrian piping and Andy Cutting is to diatonic button accordeoning, and the interplay between his feet and May’s hands (as on their showcase piece Sophie’s Accumulation) is breathtaking.

The tunes are a well-chosen selection, with Chalmers’ own Bewl Water Waltz and Meg’s Welcome To Kingston sitting easily alongside a lovely slow Agricultural Jig, a mutated version of Our Cat Has Kitted (retitled Wonky Cat) and James Fagan’s Hannah May’s. Chalmers proves an affecting singer on Here’s The Tender Coming and Died Of Love - the latter in an enchanting arrangement made of  pizzicato fiddle and tinkly things. Jo’s Jig - comprised of two of Lever’s guitar compositions, provides another demonstration of both his and May’s considerable talents.

The music here is both undeniably English yet inventively cosmopolitan, and Stepling make it with palpable joy. They’re sensational live, so go and see ‘em and pick up a copy of this CD.

stepling.org.uk

Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s

First published in fRoots magazine No. 381, March 2015

Roots of the Revival: American and British Folk Music in the 1950s 
Ronald D. Cohen and Rachel Clare Donaldson. University Of Illinois Press
(ISBN 978-0-252-08012-8)

Never as widely celebrated in folk circles as the decade that followed it, the 1950s nonetheless saw a fascinating period of transformation in the burgeoning revival on both sides of the Atlantic, with an unprecedented level of exchange between the US and the UK.

The primary motivation for many American performers to decamp to Europe was the great “red scare,” which led to the House Committee on Un-American Activities “witch hunt,” of progressive sympathisers and fellow-travellers. For some, like the blacklisted Pete Seeger, it was a case of continuing to work and perform, while for others, it was merely expedient to escape the heat for a while.

Pete Seeger

Those who did come, for whatever reason, were welcomed with open, comradely arms by the Workers Music Association in England. Ramblin’ Jack Elliott had the good fortune to ramble into London at the height of the skiffle craze and was recorded by Topic Records, before sending for his friend Derroll Adams to join him. Both would inspire countless British musicians.

Alan Lomax emerges as the central figure of the intertwined revivals in this decade. Ewan MacColl’s enthusiasm for folk music was inspired by Lomax’s 1950 field recording trip to Britain and Ireland and six years later MacColl would meet, and later marry, Peggy Seeger (who graces this book’s cover) when she came to transcribe Lomax’s work. Lomax would himself become involved in a transatlantic relationship by the decade’s end, with his assistant, Shirley Collins.

The impact of the Weavers is explored in some depth, as is the (now) oft-overlooked calypso phenomenon, which inspired teen magazine headlines like: “Elvis vs. Belafonte: The Big Battle of 1957 - Rock ’n’ Roll vs. Calypso! and a slew of movies like (the dreadful, but irresistibly titled) Bop Girl Goes Calypso!

The authors successfully maintain the reader’s interest through the inclusion of first-hand anecdotes and correspondence among the chronology, including this (sadly unrealised) proposal in a letter from Alan Lomax to Johnny Cash - “I have an enormous backlog of American folksongs which I think would be of great use to you in your further work as an American folk bard… It would be a great pleasure for me to work with you on developing this material for the commercial market.”

Roots Of The Revival  does run out of steam a bit towards the end, but so did the 1950s. The decade’s closing year saw the surprise introduction of a young singer called Joan Baez at the inaugural Newport Folk Festival, providing America (and soon, Britain) with it’s first whiff of whatever it was that was blowin’ in the wind.

http://www.press.uillinois.edu

Slim Chance

First published in fRoots magazine No. 372, June 2014 

It’s easy, in an already post-Mumford & Sons British musical landscape, to forget that once-upon-a-time, back in the 1970s, the sight of young men with accordions and mandolins entertaining the nation’s pop kids with roots-informed toe-tappers on Saturday morning TV shows really wasn’t all that unusual. Although never the most commercially successful, Ronnie Lane’s Slim Chance remain, for me, the pick of the bunch. Presaging Mike Scott’s similarly romantically and spiritually-inspired Fisherman’s Blues adventures in Ireland by more than a decade, the much-missed Lane (who died from multiple sclerosis  in 1997, aged 51) eschewed the era’s trappings of rock star excess in favour of touring his now- legendary Passing Show rock ’n’ roll circus, and joyous, naturalistic communal music-making at Fishpool - the farm he shared with his wife Kate, their kids and various musicians near the village of Hyssington on the Welsh-English border.

Ronnie and Kate at Fishpool

Multi-instrumentalist Charlie Hart (whose musical history includes studying classical violin from the age of 6, playing double bass in jazz clubs, organ in the psychedelic band 117 at Middle Earth & UFO, decamping to Ghana for a year to play highlife and study marimba, and a stint with Ian Dury in Kilburn & The High Roads) spoke to me about life down on the farm.

“I went there for a weekend to do a bit of recording and stayed for two or three years! Ronnie was a very sociable man, really. Not only with his musical mates but all the local people. That’s what amazed me when I went there the first time. A lot of people from London move to the country and never really get accepted by the local people but Ronnie and Kate were just part of the local community, it was fantastic. We did the Slim Chance album up there and toured it quite a bit. When that line-up disintegrated I stayed on. I played on the Rough Mix record with Pete Townshend, See Me  in 1979 and then did the 1980 Rockpalast TV show in Cologne, which is now on DVD".

"Ronnie attracted a particular type of musician, because you weren’t going to get rich on his music, but it was very interesting and fulfilling in many ways. The musicians involved at different times included Bruce Rowland, Ian Stuart, Benny Gallagher & Graham Lyle, Henry McCulloch and George and Ray Carless. Then we had Eric Clapton knocking about from time to time - it was all interesting! The band moved through the 70s from Anymore For Anymore which was acoustic, country music to playing much more R&B by the end of the decade.”

After Slim Chance, Charlie started playing bass with Geraint Watkins, Ed Deane, Diz Watson and Ron Kavana in Juice On The Loose on London’s blossoming pub rock circuit, working with the likes of  Alexis Korner and Mose Allison. “When I left Fishpool in the 70s, that’s where it seemed to be happening. There were some great bands at that time, just out there, playing. It was a fantastic scene - great musicianship, great vibes and, like Ronnie, very under-appreciated. Pub rock is a bit of a crap term, really!”

Following more African travel and working extensively with Chris Jagger, Charlie was engaged as musical director for a Ronnie Lane memorial concert at the Royal Albert Hall in 2004, an event that eventually led to him and guitarist Steve Simpson reforming Slim Chance in 2010.

“We’ve been back for a few years now. We’ve got a good hardcore following and yes, probably about 70% are “old geezers,” but they’re increasingly bringing their children and even their grandchildren along and they enjoy it. It’s been brilliant to do in terms of revisiting the music a bit differently, but in the same spirit as Ronnie. The vibe’s not that different, I’d say, and Ronnie’s songs are fantastic. they’re deceptively simple and very well constructed. He didn’t just write about anything - each one’s very centred and really well composed. Some of the songs came to him in dreams, they’re deeply rooted. The spiritual element comes through because he was in touch with 'something,' and that shows in his music".

"Ronnie’s complaint about the rock ‘n’ roll industry in general was that the genuineness had disappeared. At the time he didn’t get much recognition for it, but now people are realising that what he did has stood the test of time. He broadened the idea of what rock ‘n’ roll was about at the time, and that’s what we’re still trying to do now, using acoustic instruments but playing them with the rock attitude. You don’t have to be a reconstituted folkie to play a mandolin or a fiddle"!

Slim Chance

"Slim Chance is a cottage industry really, we manage ourselves. It’s a really great line-up which includes violinist Steve Simpson, who was the other half of “the Fishpools Philharmonic” with me, and Steve Bingham on bass, who was with Ronnie in The Passing Show. We’re actually hoping to re-stage The Passing Show at some point. The idea remains absolutely captivating and people still love it. If we can find a circus operator to work with for a night or two then we’ll get in a bunch of guests and do it!”

Charlie Hart

http://www.slim-chance.co.uk

Gwenifer Raymond

First published in fRoots magazine No. 422, Autumn 2018

When Bristol’s Cube Microplex announced that guitar and banjo doyenne Gwenifer Raymond would be opening for Michael Hurley in June, there was never any question about whether I’d be attending. The venue’s 135 miles away, you say? When the Lord get ready, you gotta move…

I’d already heard Gwenifer’s Deep Sea Diver 7” and an advance download of her terrific debut album You Never Were Much Of A Dancer, but the precision and ferocity of the music that she unassumingly wrought from her instruments left everyone in that room (the aforementioned Mr Hurley included) wide-eyed and open-mouthed in delighted astonishment.

“That guitar’s dead now, unfortunately,” she informs me, deadpan, a couple of weeks later. “The neck’s totally gone on it, which is a real shame…”

A Welshwoman now resident in Brighton, Gwenifer Raymond is currently the most talked-about musician in American Primitive circles. She somehow channels the spirits of Skip James, John Fahey and Dock Boggs whilst remaining entirely true to herself. Her all-instrumental, hook-laden compositions are both coherent and concise - proper, exciting tunes that never outstay their welcome nor lose their way in pointless noodling.

“Ah, it’s probably because I’m an old punk musician!” she laughs. “I started off playing in punk bands around the Welsh valleys , so I’ve always liked riffs. When I’m writing, a lot of it is assembling what I think are cool riffs together. I like noise, as well. Even though I’ve played in very different styles, I always joke that I have exactly one trick, which is to pick a note that’s not in the scale and just stick it in there! When I say I’m an old punk, I was more on the left-field, avant-garde end of punk. I’ve always been a big fan of The Fall and things like that. Basically, I like a bit of a dirge, but I like there to be a riff in it. Those two things can complement each other quite well, I think…”

Like many a musician featured in these pages, Gwenifer’s acoustic epiphany arrived in the form of Nirvana’s 1994 Unplugged in New York (Live).

“I was a huge Nirvana fan, which meant that I was also really interested in all their influences. They played that Lead Belly song (Where Did You Sleep Last Night?) - a great version of a great song, so I wanted to know who Lead Belly was and started looking into it. Neither of my parents play music but there were a lot of records around - Bob Dylan, The Velvet Underground, and 1960s and 70s Greenwich Village kind of stuff. I bought a bunch of those The Blues Roots Of… CDs because I liked the artists they were referencing in the titles. I think the first Mississippi John Hurt songs I ever heard were on The Early Blues Roots Of Bob Dylan - it’s a really great CD!”

It was, however, the haunted, minor-key blues of Hurt’s contemporary Skip James that exerted the greatest influence on Gwenifer’s style.

“Oh, Skip James blew my mind the first time I heard him! Because he really doesn’t sound like anyone else. His style is completely singular and it sounds really contemporary to me - a  maudlin, moody, angular sound. When I got really seriously interested in actually wanting to play the kind of stuff I do now - which is after I’d already been playing guitar for a long time, I tracked down a guitar teacher to specifically suck the knowledge from his brain so I could play like Skip James. He also played clawhammer banjo, so I got him to teach me that too. I owned a banjo for a long time before I really started playing it properly. I have this problem that when I learn a new instrument I get really obsessed - I can’t stop playing it. I played so much banjo in two weeks that I actually damaged my shoulder and then couldn’t play anything for ages…”

Mississippi John Hurt and Skip James

“At the moment I’m still playing fairly random shows and make video games for a living. I’d like to try and do a tour - I’d like to tour Europe before Brexit! I’d like to do an American tour as well at some point, but obviously that’s more complicated because of visas and stuff. One of the things I’m pushing for at the moment is trying to get a booking agent as it’s a lot of work doing it all yourself. The night I got the e-mail from Josh (Rosenthal, Tompkins Square Records) offering me a record deal, I was playing a gig and saying to myself this is the last one I’m doing. I’d just grown sick of no-one ever answering my e-mails or paying any attention...”

Everyone’s paying attention now.

https://gweniferraymond.bandcamp.com

Donovan

Originally published in fRoots magazine Nos.385/386,  August/September 2015

Catching The Wind

This year marks Donovan’s fiftieth anniversary as a recording artist; a half-century in which he’s released hit records and been inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall Of Fame. In recent years, his associations with famous friends like Bob Dylan, Graham Nash, Jimmy Page, The Rolling Stones and The Beatles have frequently seen his achievements positioned as a sidebar to the stories of others, and the oft-repeated anecdotes dismissed as mere hubris by those too young to remember his heyday.

Back in 1965 however, Donovan was what used to be called a folksinger, albeit one with a singularly unusual career path. Still a teenager when catapulted to stardom, he was awarded an Ivor Novello Award for his debut single (the timelessly lovely Catch The Wind.)  While his contemporaries honed their craft in the safe havens of folk clubs, Donovan - subjected to the full glare of the public spotlight, was urging the readers of teen magazines to listen to Bob Davenport & The Rakes. Time to ask some different questions…

Catch The Wind

“Hell-oo!” says the unmistakable voice on the telephone, from his home in Ireland. “So… you want me to talk about folk music?”  Oh ‘deed I do…

“For the first ten years of my life I lived in Glasgow, where I listened to folk songs at family parties. Each relative would sing a song - aunts, uncles, family friends. A chair would be put in the middle of an empty room at these parties and a slightly tipsy relative or friend would be pushed onto it and asked to sing their song. Many of the songs, though I didn’t know it at the time, were folk songs from Ireland and Scotland - we’re talking about The Wild Colonial Boy, Over The Sea To Skye, Mairi’s Wedding, and they were always sung unaccompanied.” 

Glasgow in the 1950s

“Also, my father, Donald, used to read me poetry by rambling poets like Robert Service and WH Davies - who was an English guy who travelled into America and rode the trains during the depression. When I got my first taste of recorded American folk music - Pete Seeger, Woody Guthrie, Jack Elliott and all that good stuff, I found I was listening to things that I’d already heard my father read as poems.” 

After the family moved to Hertfordshire, young Don quickly became enamoured with the new rock ’n’ roll sounds.

“The Everly Brothers and Buddy Holly appealed to me tremendously. Of course, I didn’t know then that the Everly Brothers had an Irish granny too! At fifteen or sixteen I left school and managed to get in to a further education college, and that was the start of becoming completely plugged-in to what one would call the ‘bohemian scene,’ of St Albans. Hatfield and Welwyn Garden City. That’s when I became aware of the folk scene that was going on at the time. It was jazz first - the New Orleans revival played by Acker Bilk, Ken Colyer and Chris Barber.”

“Somehow, the folk music was starting to influence me and I used to go to the folk club in St Albans, where the visiting singers like Alex Campbell and Jack Elliott played. The guitar was my second instrument, as I played drums first - the jazz groove was what blew me away. My pal Mick Sharman played guitar and he showed me some chords and taught me to play a couple of Hank Williams songs, and I was hooked! Eventually I was able to borrow a Zenith f-hole guitar from Mick’s girlfriend which was much better than the guitar I was learning on - a Spanish guitar, but with steel strings. That was a bugger to tune - impossible!”

“I’d started learning a few songs from Joan Baez and Woody Guthrie records, but it wasn’t until I got hold of that Zenith that I started seriously wanting to learn. I first heard Woody Guthrie’s songs from Jack Elliott, and he fascinated me. I saw that he was playing with Derroll Adams and one thing led to another as time went on, and Derroll Adams became a mentor for me. I followed Derroll around - and this is after I’d already made my earliest records. Colours is really influenced by Derroll. Even the way he touched the strings of his banjo fascinated me. He was a student of Zen Buddhism, and he played that banjo like a Japanese koto, or something. So I’d sit with him for hours, listening and looking at what he was doing - he taught me a lot.”

Donovan and Derroll Adams

“From hearing songs in the folk club, I used to go to the record shop in St Albans and listen to loads of albums, even though I couldn’t afford to buy them - traditional British folk music on the Topic label and stuff like that. Then, when I saw Martin Carthy on stage, that was a great breakthrough, I mean Martin had it down!  He was already playing the guitar in a very different way, and performing all those British ballads collected by Francis Child. I knew that Joan Baez had recorded some of these Child ballads, but seeing Martin really made me aware of them.” 

For all Donovan’s admiration for Martin Carthy, it was another British singer and guitar player who would make the greatest impression on him.  

“Bert Jansch became my teacher in 1965. Bert played British folk tunes too, but slapped and attacked the strings like a blues player - just amazing playing. He’d do these incredible descending runs behind the tune - something he probably learned from Davy Graham, but Bert was my man, I loved what he was doing. Bert was really very good to me - the magnanimity of the artist came out of him. He slowed it all down for me, and that was important. One night in Bert’s kitchen, he showed me the D9 chord, from which I started writing Season Of The Witch, with the descending chord progression from Angi. John Renbourn says I played Season of The Witch in Bert’s kitchen for seven hours straight, so that’s the kind of kitchen Bert had!”

Bert Jansch and John Renbourn

1965 also saw Donovan heading to America, where he performed at the Newport Folk Festival and appeared on Pete Seeger’s Rainbow Quest.

“It all happened really fast! Derroll introduced me to Buffy Sainte Marie, as I’d already learned two or three of her songs, and listened to all of her songs. Then Buffy introduced me to Joan Baez, who called up Pete Seeger and said: ‘Donovan’s got to be part of the Newport Folk Festival’ - and that’s what she’d done for Bob Dylan two years earlier, of course. Joan was tremendously helpful to me. So there I was, on the plane to go to to the Newport Folk Festival and also straight to Rainbow Quest with Rev. Gary Davis! 

If you were a guitar picker then, there were two essential songs that you had to learn. One of them was Angi by Davy Graham and the other one was Cocaine Blues by Rev. Gary Davis. My early repertoire is drawn very much from folk tradition - Ballad Of Geraldine is based on an old folk song melody, London Town is a Tim Hardin version of Green, Rocky Road. All that hammering-on and pulling-off on Summer Day Reflection Song comes from listening to the Arabic music that Davy Graham and John Renbourn  loved, the oud music. There was a lot of that in London - this is before even the sitar became fashionable.”

Newport Folk Festival, 1965. Bob Dylan, Donovan, Mary Travers

Donovan spends about six months of the year in Ireland, and loves to hear the traditional music.

“When I first came here in 1970 I was plugged-in immediately to what was going on. What was different to the British folk scene was that the traditional music in Ireland wasn’t really recorded until Claddagh Records was created by Garech Browne. He was an aristocrat with a castle and a coach and four horses that he would ride around in with all the Dublin poets in the late 1950s!

Garech Browne with Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains and Rita O'Reilly

“Anyway, a photographer called Tom Collins told me there were some guys playing in Newbridge he wanted me to hear, and it was Planxty - Liam O’Flynn, Andy Irvine, Donal Lunny and Christy Moore. They were playing in the church hall there, and we invited them back and had a party that lasted a week! I told them they were the Beatles of Irish music and took them on the road with me. Through them I met the guys from Sweeney’s Men, who Andy had been with, and started learning from them the facts of how this music was passed on, and that there were pockets across the west coast where these real, traditional fiddlers still played. Then, many years later, I met Seamus Begley and Steve Cooney and the new tradition. First I met Planxty and Maire Brennan of Clannad, then when we came back here in 1989 we ran into the Waterboys and Sharon Shannon and all those guys. That was an amazing scene too. We’d go to pubs with these people and the owner would lock the door and we’d never go home ’til four in the morning! The fiddles and flutes and the bodhrán and the banjo and guitar, and the girls singing… It’s amazing how Ireland preserved it’s traditional music. And we all know that the Irish and the Scots went over to America and invented pop music!”

Planxty

If the folk boomers of the early 1960s soundtracked the civil rights movement and the opposition to the Vietnam war, what does Donovan see as the role of today’s troubadours?

“The questions still remain about how do you speak out against inequality, against the Earth’s destruction and against the greedy sods who just want to buy up and waste and eat and pollute? How do you do it? The singer-songwriters of the new generation have to use their understanding of these things and sing about them. Billy Bragg is the only one that really stands out, for me. Maybe we can say that the social commentators in music now are the street-level hip-hop artists rapping about the continuing racial inequality and the power of the bosses to keep the poor down.” 

Joan Baez and Donovan on CND march, 1965

“The roots of all popular music is folk music and these things never change. So, when you say an artist has gone back to the roots, it means they’ve gone down to get at the sustenance. People think that the roots music is just something from the past, but in actual fact it’s what supports all the music being made today. The smart younger ones like Moby and Jack White go back to the roots to be nurtured, to be fed and to be encouraged into creating new music. That’s what I think about roots, anyway.”