|
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
HARKER!
THE VILLAGE WAITS FOR WEYGANG!
Tim Moon speaks to fab new young bucks
BEN HARKER AND EMILY WEYGANG
Way, way back it was all dying. Old men and women sat around the back
rooms of pubs having cast out floor singers like Elvis Costello and Tim
Robinson. Young people cut their hair, learned three chords and (briefly)
changed the face of popular music. And they meant it maaaaan!!! Then things
began to take on a new complexion. Sons and daughters decided that drum
machines and aaaaceeeed! were not to their tastes and looked elsewhere.
Kate and Catherine popped up, so did Eliza and Nancy and lots of people
added their ‘beats’ to the tradition, and the tradition eager
as ever to move on, embraced it. Young faces told of how fab Bert and
John are, members of Suede played with Bert and…
Well. This ain’t no history lesson, it just leads into the fact that
Ben and Emily grew up with Paul Weller not Paul McCartney. And I’d
heard good things about them so, as is my wont of a Friday, I meandered
down to the BACCAPipes to catch them live. They didn’t disappoint.
Freshness, taking the songs as songs and not museum pieces and fine instrumental
ability won me over. Time for an interview I thought.so…
T.M We’ll get onto the duo in due
course, but what’s your background Ben?
B.H well, I started quite late in life,
didn’t play the guitar till my early twenties. I was in a political
band and Emily was in that band as well. And then we decided to work on
our own.
T.M So what were your early influences.
There’s a Paul Weller song on the album, is that the sort of area
you were interested in?
B.H Yeah, and the Clash as well. I was into
guitar bands when I was a student, not at all folky. I never heard folk
music before, well, perhaps The Spinners on the radio, but it wasn’t
a type of music I was aware of.
T.M So was your band electric?
B.H. No an acoustic sound, and I was playing
mandolin and banjo as well as guitar and Emily was just singing.
T.M So how did you find folk music then?
B.H I just staggered into a club in Reading
when I was on a pub crawl, and from there started to go to clubs on my
own, a kind of a double life really, I just went to watch and slowly got
into that. I’m a big Dylan fan, like a lot of people, so that was
a way into that music, and I’d read Shelton’s biography of Dylan
and he talked about Dylan coming to England in the 60’s and meeting
people like Ewan MacColl and Martin Carthy, people who I’d never
heard of really.
T.M I can hear echoes of many great guitar
players in your playing so who did you find at that stage?
B.H Well Carthy was an influence. I mean
I can’t play in some of those open tunings, but that finger style.
The obvious people, Bert Jansch, Nic Jones…all those people.
T.M The Carthy style is so important.
B.H Yes, he can play a rhythm but it supports
the words rather than imposing itself on them. When I did get into those
open tunings I felt they worked better with our style of music.
T.M Talking of guitars, there’s a nice
sound on yours. What is it?
B.H Ah, well, it’s quite new, I’ve
only had it about two months, it’s made by Dave Gregory in York.
He’s mainly known as a mandolin maker. He’s very under-rated
as a builder…he does make fantastic instruments.
T.M So where does your material come from?
B.H From the traditional singers. It’s
not a research thing, we genuinely do love singers like Harry Cox and
Walter Pardon, people like that. So we would take a song from one of those
singers and build an arrangement round it.
T.M so after hearing from Ben, what’s
your side of musical history?
E.W Like Ben, I was very late. I played
clarinet when I was younger. I gave up when I was about 14. Classical
clarinet. I was never good enough. In singing it was jazz, Ella Fitzgerald
and so on. Folk was much later. As I said at the gig the biggest influence
was Chris Coe.
T.M You also sing in your own accent which
is something I always admire in a singer.
E.W Yeah, that’s what Chris Coe does.
That’s what folk singers do.
T.M Yeah. I suppose that happens because
your singing lyrics are in the speech patterns of your own daily language.
It’s difficult not to sing ‘dollars’ and ‘cents’
and ‘sidewalks’ without using an American accent, isn’t
it? You’re playing the low whistle now, which I suppose is a carry
on from the clarinet?
E.W Yes. I’ve played the low whistle
for four or five years but I don’t practice it enough.
T.M What about your fiddle playing. It brought
to mind the playing of Carole Pegg of Mr Fox.
E.W I’ve only been playing for two
and a half years and I think the BACCApipes was the first time I’d
played and not apologised. I wanted an instrument that would go with the
guitar that I would find very challenging, something more challenging
than the whistle which I didn’t have to blow down. I just wanted
to sing and play. I’ve a long way to go, I don’t play that much
live at the moment. I go to sessions a lot. I listen to people like Jay
Unger, people like that for fiddle, I really like that. And Woody Guthrie.
I like his fiddle playing. That track ‘900 miles’, he plays
that really great. Slightly out of tune and raw.
T.M Yes, my argument with a lot of musicians
is that they are so technically good that they lack feeling. Don’t
slide into notes and so on.
E.W I think I have to slide into notes to
find them. I think it’s when you are accompanying a song it’s
what the guitar, fiddle and voice are doing for that song rather than
making a beautiful sound independently of what the song is about.
T.M So how long has the duo being going?
E.W About six years.
T.M Was it a struggle at first? It can be
hard to break into the clubs.
E.W We never approached music with any idea
but pure enjoyment in the front room really. And then we started to go
to singarounds together. It was really a lot of Woody Guthrie, Dylan,
American stuff…Pete Seeger and political songs from that era. I don’t
know how we ended up doing so much English stuff…I think we just
discovered it at festivals like the National. I’d no idea…we
just started taking it more seriously.
Try and catch them live, then you can buy the album.
Neither will disappoint.
Tim Moon, Tyke’s News, Autumn 2003