RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY
Ralph
Hits the Road 2007
An Interview with Ralph McTell - September 2007
... for the Ralph, Albert &
Sydney Web Site
by Michael Cohen
Interview with Ralph McTell September 2007
The mighty McTell machine is about to hit the road again. After a quiet summer in Cornwall Ralph is embarking upon two forthcoming tours. Firstly the Dylan, Guthrie and Country Blues -Up Close Up North Tour followed by a smaller Up Close tour in the South. He then seamlessly moves on to the As Far As I Can Tell tour when he will be promoting his forthcoming double CD and book. I caught up with Ralph recently.
How is life with you down in Cornwall?
"Busy busy. I haven't done many of the things I'm supposed to have done but I have done things that I wasn't expecting to do. I've had a summer on the shovel really doing a bit of manual work and I've enjoyed it. But I now realize that my tour is imminent and I must get on with my finer preparations if you like."
Been out in the garden have you?
"Yes. I have been helping to build a conservatory. My digger driver reckons we've moved 200 tons of earth from one part of the garden to another to accommodate this thing which is going into the hillside so it is going to be a rather nice day room for the winter time-I'm spending more and more time in Cornwall and loving it madly. That has been my diversion really-that and the talking book"
This is the new album is it?
"Well-yes. It's the new album but it's reading this time-I think some of you may have been aware there was a demo of the book just by Steve Brown when I was still with him. It was made up of a few readings which proved to be quite popular actually and we thought well perhaps we should do one properly. On my book reading tours around the book shops I was reading and playing songs that were appropriate to the passage that I was reading and we decided we were going to record it so it is going to be some kind of monster!
Book one is ready to go-it is not the entire book-it is selected passages interspersed with re-recordings of some old songs and one or two new ones.
The two CD's will be over 70 minutes long"
Where did you record it?
"We recorded it entirely in Cornwall over the last five or six years. I am not quite sure about this but I started recording it as an idea with my son Sam down here at the cottage and that proved to be a little fraught and it was dropped for a while. Then we went and recorded over at a place called Golant which is a small studio near where the famous Sawmills studio is near Fowey. We recorded there in the open air with windows open and absolute Cornish silence apart from the birdsong. Finally, I have recorded in Truro with Martin Bell who is a sometime neighbour here near me and was in a band called the Wonderstuff. Miles Hunt was the lead singer and Martin was on keyboard, fiddle and guitar. He made a lovely DVD which is called the Working Party with some of my favourite traditional musicians. It is a downloadable teaching programme and it is very well worth a look. Its got Chris Parkinson, Chris Leslie, Maartin Alcock and Simon Mayor. These musicians all got together and Maartin formed a band and recorded some amazing stuff by taking musicians in and out so that if you were the mandolin player you could be in that band and play that part and so forth. It is really rather nice." http://www.mandolin.co.uk/wp.html
Ralph is this a solo project?
"Yes. I thought it would sound incongruous to switch from a solo reading voice to a full orchestra so I have had the chance to record songs like Daddy's Here again and songs like Dancing Doreen, Big Tree (which I recorded on the banjo). A new song about the Brighton Belle which I'm very pleased with. My grandfather drove the steam train the Brighton Belle for awhile and as a little boy I was smuggled on to the footplate-unfortunately I don't remember that but I do know I was put there and travelled to Brighton. I wrote this little song which turned out to be quite profound in what it suggests but you'll have to wait to hear that. I also included a guitar version of Pick Up A Gun which is bloody near impossible to play but I managed it. It is all one voice-one guitar"
That's in F isn't it?
"I had to capo it in the end. I think I played it in F on the piano but as I don't know what I'm doing it was quite an ordeal but I have got a version down and I am quite pleased with it"
A double CD available for the tour?
"Yes it will be a double CD and we hope it will be available for the tour. The official launch will probably be at Banbury and we hope it might be available before then."
So you have been working quite hard getting that sorted over the summer or has it been work over a longer period?
"It has been for the last five years. Every time I had some spare time we do it. But I have never realised how complex it is to read aloud. The word on the printed page is vastly different to the word recited and my admiration for actors who can read aloud has gone up considerably. When Dylan Thomas wrote his poetry he wrote it to be read aloud and he practised reading it aloud that's why it flows so well. I wrote what I thought without much heed to punctuation and breathing and so on. I found out the hard way that it's not easy to do but thankfully thanks to modern technology if I make a stumble I go back and read the sentence with the same cadence and my editor has knitted it together seamlessly. I am very impressed with what he has done and I'm reasonably impressed with what I have done."
I am sure it will be wonderful….
"The whole point is Michael I hope it will bear more than one listen and that people will go back and explore it again. Because most of my things do contain a little bit more intentionally anyway than might be apparent on first listening but I am optimistic it will stand a few plays."
I bet it will. I was thinking recently how you get feedback on your work?
"I used to love meeting everybody. Even a dog needs a pat on the head even though he might be getting big juicy bones in his bowl and all the rest of it!
I actually think if somebody says "well done" it is a lovely feeling. Thankfully for me I still do get letters of appreciation so much so that I find it impossible to write back every time. It is important not to seek that but my intention these days is to write well and finish a song then that's it. It is its own reward".
So is it all at the printers?
"It is not at the printers yet because we are still racing against the clock as usual on album two. My editor Martin is confident that at the end of next week it might be ready. The art work has been done and it's a compilation of the two books I've done- the little boy aged 3 years 4 months on book one and the teenage boy on book two. Behind each other, set against 1950's wall paper, are pictures of a bomb site with a roll of 40's and 50's icons underneath like the Freddie Mills Boxing Annual, The Lone Ranger, and Lonnie Donegan and a ration book, and the headline about Bentley and Craig and so on. These peripheral things go around the edge of the CD and a picture of me. And I thought I won't write all the lyrics of the songs or even the passages recorded-I will write or get someone else to write about the 50's or maybe take the intro's to the book and put them in there and let the thing stand for itself. Then of course that CD picture will be the poster for the tour and will also be the cover for the forthcoming amalgamation of both books."
How much input do you have on these designs?
"Oh yes- having my old art college buddy Peter Thaine back in the fold is just wonderful. He is a bit of a soul brother- we both like the same sort of music and he is so empathetic to my intentions. We hardly have to talk- he says this is how I see it what do you think? And I say sounds great go do it and let's have a look at it. He did the Spiral Staircase sleeve and here we are nearly 40 years on working on the latest McTell thing which is absolutely marvellous. And his concept was that all these thoughts and memories were in this little lad's head and we ought to make him the feature. I think the cover will be very strong."
Can I ask you a bit about Times Poems? It is fascinating reading so much material that previously had not seen the light of day. Is any of that material going to come out in new songs? I heard you sing Reverend Thunder on the Alan O'Leary show on the sadly passed Spyda Radio
"Well I am still working on that can you believe after all these years?!
I want the guitar part to be a proper tribute to Reverend Davis who remains one of my all time great heroes and I'm nearly there. I want to avoid Reverend Davis's clichés but use some of his chord shapes and I've written a verse melody-I am happy with that-it's the chorus melody which is taking longer because it is going to be quite a complex piece to play. I want to write a proper tribute to him and the irony of religious belief if you like and a little sting in the tail-well you'll know the lyric from the book. But I am nearly there with that and I think that will make an appearance on a forthcoming album. But quite a lot of the songs-writing late at night when you allow your thoughts to free range having had a glass of wine or two then you get into the darker areas of your mind-they are not intended to be songs more the seeds of ideas. Often they can be quite dark and you think you can see no place for this in a performance because essentially I still see myself as a performer. Perhaps when I come off the road I may make an album of darker songs. I still think most of my stuff is optimistic I think one of the darkest songs in the book is probably a song called Convoy where I think people have never really confronted the terrible horror of ships being sunk in the North Atlantic and men below never knowing that the ship is even sinking. Meanwhile someone somewhere else is hanging out the washing or doing something quite mundane. How a scene of absolute horror can be transformed in seconds- a flock of birds fly across the water where a ship once was-that sort of thing.
I did allow myself an indulgence but I have no intention of writing a tune. It became a way of getting rid of a nightmarish thought. I don't really think many of things that have not been recorded will ever see the light of day but I just wanted to be honest and being my publisher I could put in everything I wanted to put in."
You must have an incredible archive of writing which you have kept over the years?
"Well I think most of the stuff which is finished is there now. I have got scraps and beginnings of ideas but some of it doesn't pass muster to me and I think well I looked at that and I tried to explore it didn't go anywhere I'll leave that. I'm getting more and more difficult to please as a composer and writer these days. I'm pretty hard on myself."
What about songs like Somewhere Down The Road and Walk Into The Morning-are they going to be recorded?
"I think so. Walk Into The Morning especially. I absolutely love that song in its youthfulness. It took me about six months to write and I was writing it all the time dear old Nick was putting the book together. I conferred and talked to him about almost every line in it because I wanted to try to show the enormity and freedom I felt as a kid, and how much the music was inspirational to me, and how much it affected me, and how much I believed in it. Although it is probably not my best tune, and it will not be one of my best loved songs, it was a song I could not have written as a young man and I needed to write it on reflection. I think it is a better song because of that."
I think it is a song which really hits the spot when you open up with it these days…..
"I have been looking to have a good opening song. I still think sometimes no one knows who I am and I have got to kind of win them from the first song. But I ought to start to relax and walk out and play that song. I think it is a good opening song and I wouldn't mind opening with that song for the rest of my career. It really says follow your dreams, be inspired, and just do it and live with what comes after."
Ralph what are your thoughts about the recent releases of the first three Transatlantic albums which I believe you don't have any ownership of?
"Yes. I don't have any ownership of these albums and I would love to because I would stop them being exploited the way they are. Having said that I do get a trickle of royalties through from the publishing and the new company has promised to pay royalties which were missing for a few years so that's nice. I still think the songs are fine but I still think the recordings and performances are weak. However, Nanna who is very honest with me says they have a boyish charm but I didn't want boyish charm I wanted to be manly and so on! But I don't have strong feelings about them I think they were worth more than £2.50 at a petrol station so I am pleased they have done me the honour of putting them together. However, there are certain tracks that I think would have been better consigned to the vaults particularly Suzanne by your famous namesake…"
Uncle Len?
"Yes Uncle Len. I'll tell you honestly I knew nothing about him but my record boss Nathan Joseph was absolutely enamoured with a book called Beautiful Losers which Leonard wrote. He thought he was the best thing since Jack Kerouac at the time. I have to admit that over the years my attitude to Leonard Cohen has changed totally because I thought he was someone spinning along on the coat tails of my hero Bob you know. And when this song was presented to me as a potential "You will have the world exclusive on a Leonard Cohen song" I said "I don't even know who Leonard Cohen is!"
Nat said believe me he is a wonderful writer and he will be incredibly famous. So they put me in the studio and dear old Tony did an arrangement which is a bit high in pitch for me and I read the lyric and I can remember Gus and I laughing and thinking what the f does this mean -what is this? It is not such a mystery now is it with the passing of time. It was in front of us all a little bit and I was rather dismissive and bewildered. We cut out verses and we didn't do the whole thing - I can't remember now and I was quite convinced it had been lost and my horror when they found it and put it on the record but there we are."
There are some real gems on the first album especially I Love My Baby.
"Well I wished I'd written it. It was actually put together by a guy called Guy Kerouan.
I didn't know it was on there but anyway he actually did me the great honour of recording Streets of London some years later completely unbeknownst to him that I'd recorded I Love My Baby. If you remember in book 2 I interspersed the lines of that song through the reading after I'd got off the train. It comes like an echo every now and then you'll see a line "…she used to throw her arms around me
Like a circle around the sun…."
It was one of the tracks I recorded for Gill when she was in America along with Drybone Shuffle, Girl from the North Country and Bells of Rhymney."
They are on The Journey aren't they? I think the two versions of Drybone Shuffle are fascinating. As a want to be guitar player just hearing the difference between the song as you played it then and now is so illuminating. Your playing has become so much more sophisticated Do you notice that?
"Of course. You know the beautiful thing about music is I can still remember how impressed my friends were that I could play so fast and so on. I thought I was playing like Arthur Blake until I listened to him and thought blimey it's nothing like him-it's not nearly as good. And it was the same with Hesitation Blues I was quite convinced I was playing it like Reverend Gary Davis until I heard him play it. But I think although it's not authentic I actually think it is better than all those smart New York boys who can play those tunes note for note but somehow don't swing as they might do. I'd rather hear the originals and bring a little bit of yourself and throw it in and I think my fondness for Dixie Land jazz is apparent in some of my approaches to playing the guitar. But it's kind of you to say and I'm glad to think that I have improved!"
It is an extensive tour coming up Ralph isn't it?
"Well I think I'm over doing it again I don't know how I got talked into it. I don't think the people up North have got their tongues hanging out waiting for my Dylan interpretations necessarily, but I have always tried to be fair. We decided to put six in and I thought I don't want to do that for the whole thing so we'll switch somewhere around Sleaford to doing songs from the book and maybe some experimental readings prior to Banbury which will be the official launch. The book will be called As Far As I Can Tell. There is a song with that name and the album will also be called the same. I am very pleased with the title because I think it suggests distance and travel and it suggests it is as honest a memoir as you can make it. And no one else has used it as a book title which is quite extraordinary. At Banbury the first half will be readings and songs and the second half will be general McTell stuff. The National Tour starts then at the bigger venues and maybe I'll do a bit of all of it.
I really want people to enjoy the evening. I am not sure I want to break new ground but at the same time it has got to be kept fresh. My criteria for performance is do the ones which you think are the best but sometimes performances might need a bit more light and shade than I am prepared to give them."
What have you been listening to?
"Well it has been the season of boxed sets. I have been listening to Steve Tilston and Peggy's remarkable career documented in a boxed set. I have been listening to Mike Silver and Johnny Coppin and was asked to make a comment on their album. For my sins I have been appointed one of the judges at a busker's competition in the South West and there is a final at Totnes in a couple of weeks."
Any versions of Streets of London?
"Thankfully they have refrained! Some of them have got a very long way to go indeed. The extraordinary thing is I was always a bit embarrassed about my busking technique as a kid but having heard some of things on offer I have decided we were bloody good!"
Do you ever feel tempted to give it a go?
"Absolutely never!"
Your early experience in Cornwall was a sort of Eden for you. How do you relate this to your album the Gates of Eden which you recorded recently in Cornwall?
"The Gates of Eden to me really represent the opening of a beginning. In a way my Cornish experience was a belief in the power of music and a recognition that I was going to be a small part of it and that was very exciting. Dylan's revelations on his revelatory songs were an inspiration to all of us and although we did not have his vision or poetic expertise we did feel we were a part of something. So it was part of dawning and I love the way Peter portrayed it with those great wooden gates and walking through into whatever it is. I must say when I got on the train at Par to meet Wiz in Newquay I actually I felt I was in a different country and the journey through the clay country was one of the most magical train journeys I have ever taken and I was inspired from then on. And Cornwall still weaves its magic on me on a daily basis."
I imagine it does. It must be a wonderful place to live in terms of being allowed to experience life and nature and allow you to be creative?
"It is all of those things. It still hangs onto little old world charms as well and people are kind and polite in the main, although things are changing here as they are everywhere. But the inspiration of the landscape and the sea and this little leg sticking out into the Atlantic and the Channel and its history and so on…….. the Celtic culture has been stifled a bit over the years but they don't have to resurrect it and start dancing and playing the tunes because it is in the air somehow. It is all around you. You just have to plug into it when you need to."
So in the summer months from the writing or creative point of view do you turn yourself to new ideas mainly in the evenings?
"I think it is constant. You are among it as they say in Ireland. The hard thing is I went to see my beloved Fulham play Arsenal at the Emirates stadium on the first day of the season. I was in London with my son who was over from Thailand and we came out again and walking down the Holloway Road I felt appalled and sad and didn't feel like a Londoner at all and couldn't wait to get back here again. All the time you are working, especially when you are doing manual jobs as I choose to do here in the garden-digging and moving earth, my mind is raging over hundreds of things-it's quite a beehive up there. It is good to have all these things fighting for attention in your brain. I am seldom still but I sometimes go out and look at the bats flying over head or go out and look at the hills or the sea. Not for long-I am not one of those people who go in for wistful reverie. But I do experience moments of peace here unlike almost anywhere apart from maybe Richmond Park."
Ralph have you anything you would like to tell you friends and fans at this time?
"It is a long road and I don't know how long and how much longer I am going to continue and get round all these places and do all this work. I am thinking maybe I have a future as a writer and recording artist and maybe travel less. I am already pulling my horns in as I announced my Australian Tour was my farewell tour. I have pulled away from touring in Europe- I doubt if I will ever play in America now. Having done these dates I am not sure what the future holds in terms of live performance. I want to keep my standards up. I don't want to hear people say Ralph looked a bit tired or he is probably getting ready to come off the road. I am not that mad to perform in public. I love it but it is not my life blood. So I will not be wasting anyone's time when I go out and perform and will as always be giving it my best shot. I hope I'll stand up for some of the gigs as it puts a better edge on the presentation.
I shall have several guitars-my J45's -2 of them on stage, a 12 string and maybe a banjo. I am really looking forward to doing a concert when we have a grand piano again but I think that is going to be a little way off. One of the things I didn't notice at the time was that David didn't choose one keyboard song for the boxed set. I have an idea in my head that it is time to re release the Affairs of the Heart compilation with all the new songs. I am also writing some extra paragraphs for the autobiographies where I have touched on a particularly difficult passage. I am also looking to write a couple more paragraphs and little short episodes for book two so we shall end up with a 630 page tome with maybe some extra photographs in it and we hope it will be ready for Christmas."
Thanks Ralph for all of that. As ever it has been a great privilege to talk to you. Good Luck with the tours and every success with the new album and book and we'll see you out there.
Mike Cohen
Westbury on Trym
Bristol
September 2007