I slept well, waking just before dawn, around 4:30am. The English country air feels good in my lungs as I walk to the Portaloo’s which, at Cropredy, are always well maintained. No one else has stirred yet and it’s warm enough for shorts and a T-shirt. I lay in bed for another hour as the sun comes up and then it’s breakfast, a cheese and onion roll and a coffee. My first interview is at midday and I read through my notes again. Come 10am, it’s noticeably cooler and overcast. It’s not looking good and I decide to opt for boots and a pair of casualwear trousers for at least the first half of the day. Within minutes of changing, the rains came. Not heavy but enough to put a damper on the morning however, from where I sit, snuggled inside my campervan, I discover that if I open a window on the right side, the sound from the stage bouncers off the campervan next to me with remarkable clarity and for an hour, I have the bonus of listening to Rick Wakeman’s soundcheck.

 

The rain has eased by 12:30am and I make my way to the Press office. I’m early and they let me know that my first interview will be half an hour later than scheduled so I loiter a bit, wondering what to do. I ask who the special surprise guest is on Saturday but nobody’s telling. A car pulls up, a lady steps out from the passenger seat…she looks vaguely familiar. She goes to the driver’s seat and helps him out. My word! Joe Brown! One of England’s original Rock ‘n’ Rollers from the late 50’s, I’d love to have a chat with him and his wife, Manon Pearcey, but they are needed elsewhere so with nothing better to do, I head back through the drizzle, grateful that I was able to park where I did. A Spitfire flies overhead; two national treasures in one day and the festival hasn’t even started yet.

 

Hugh Crabtree
Founder of Feast of Fiddles, Hugh’s other life is as a Pig Farmer and last year was given The David Black Award for his outstanding impact on the British pig sector. For this interview, knowing nothing about pigs, I stick to music.

 

Q: 30 years, congratulations. I’ll bet you never figured on that on Valentine’s Day in 1994.

 

HC: Absolutely not. We didn’t think we would make the second year because it was a one-off gig and then the organiser of the club where we did it said it went so well we ought to do it again. Three gigs in three years turned into a short tour and then that grew into an annual three-week tour. In amongst that we did a few festivals including Cropredy of course and this is our fourth time here.

 

Q: Pulling a dozen musicians together who all have other bands and commitments for a tour and organising it must be a logistical nightmare.

 

HC: Well, the thing is, it grew organically. We never attempted to be a touring band. It started as the one-off gig, everybody loved it and as it grew, the amount of availability that was required grew but the individuals that are in the band, just made a bigger gap in their diaries to fit whatever it was that we were going to do. For me, it’s absolutely fantastic that I ended up playing with some of my heroes from when I was having a drink and lying on the floor as a student, listening to Fairport and Steeleye and all that stuff. I often say it is harder to run Feast of Fiddles on the road than it is to take a party of school children out in a school trip. (laughs)

 

Q: Herding cats?

 

HC: Yes, exactly (laughs)

 

Q: Does it ever go wrong?

 

HC: It has been known to. We haven’t had any major disasters though. A few cock-ups along the way, sometimes involving vehicles, sometimes involving availability of venues when we thought we were there and accommodation mistakes but nothing out of the ordinary.

Q: Well, you are all old enough and wise enough to know that these things will happen occasionally anyway.

 

HC: We are certainly old enough, I’m not sure if we are wise enough. (laughs)

 

Q: I doubt there is a better ensemble on the planet that is better at putting together traditional music with film themes and Rock classics; how much work does it take to put one of your medleys together?

 

HC: What typically happens is that ideas are lobbed into the pot and there is a group of us – the backline basically along with Tom Leary who very reliably turns up for our dining room rehearsals – and we try stuff out. We will record a very rough rehearsal, pop that into Dropbox and then people can start doing their homework on it. Then it gets honed-up as we go through that rehearsal process in the first three months of the year. We have one dress-rehearsal before the tour starts, most people have done their homework by then and we iron out a few snafus that creep in. The whole idea of mashing music from films and TV is to try and make the music a bit more accessible to people who wouldn’t normally go out to listen to a fiddle band. We always say, bring your friends along because they will enjoy it because it isn’t just a lot of diddly-diddly, there is an awful lot going on.

Q: Only one dress rehearsal before the tour?

HC: Yeah.

Q: Do you have an assigned MD? (Musical Director)

 

HC: It’s a combination of me, our late lamented keyboard player and Martin, the guitarist. The gang are remarkably collaborative in that if it seems like a good idea and it works, it’s ok. They don’t all work of course, some ideas simply don’t work and you never quite get there but the ones that do work, survive in the set.

 

Q: That’s marvellous because you have a lot of potential cooks in there.

HC: Absolutely! A lot of creative people. This band became a band quite a long way down the road in about 2008 It used to be was six well known fiddle players and a backline. I was doing most of the frontman stuff but from backstage and it was Guy, the guy who did our first live recording, said too me “This is nuts Hugh. You need to be in the frontline because you are the guy doing all the talking.” So, I moved forward, nobody complained which was remarkable having an accordionist in amongst all the fiddle players but it gelled as a band and now it’s a couple of weeks on the road having fun. We are not on the road long enough to fall out with each other. (smiles) That is picked up by the audience. They like seeing their heroes doing something a little bit out of the ordinary. Pete and I playing the trumpet solo from String Of Pearls on a fiddle and things like that. Alan, who is no longer with us unfortunately, arranged the fiddle part so it actually sounded like a horn section. The first gig of that tour we were playing at The Stables - the Dankworth’s place as you know - and there were quite a lot of jazzers in and that’s what we opened the show with and then crashed on into Kashmir. They were just gobsmacked at the contrast. (laughs)

 

Q: Now that you’ve done it, Kashmir is so obviously a violin part but where did that idea come from?

 

HC: That was very weird because when we did our first Cropredy gig in 2006, one of the fiddle players just started playing the riff so we just did it and of course the audience here lit up. It’s a much fuller arrangement now with twin vocalists and I can’t remember if Robert Plant was here that year but I remember coming off stage and thinking that one year, maybe we might just invite him to come and sing the part. (laughs) 

 

Q: Oh you’ve got to!

 

HC: It’d be fun.

 

Q: Do Feast of Fiddles jam?

 

HC: They do. The thing with fiddle players is that they are always wanting to play stuff to check tuning or to remind themselves of particular fingerings or licks so what tends to happen is that when we have the serious bit of soundcheck over, someone will start playing something and then people will join in and sometimes an idea will emerge from that. You see, the first time we met, we literally met in the car park of a club. We went on stage, we set up, we had made up a set list, we played everything through once during the soundcheck and then the next time we played all of the tunes was in the performance. The repertoire back then was quite commonly known so it was relatively easy to string together enough material but these days it’s a bit more formal with a bit more preparation because we’ve given ourselves more difficult and more interesting things to do.

 

Q: I have one last question that I am asking all my interviewees this year: What’s your favourite audio format?

 

HC: Ah! Well, how interesting is that! We’ve just released a vinyl album (Tunes So Good) and I was absolutely gobsmacked at how well the band sounded on vinyl with the warmth. Personally, I’m still a bit of a CD man. I use technology to share rehearsals with Dropbox – in the old days I would be copying cassettes and mailing them to everyone – but sitting at home, I’m listening to CDs.

 

As we leave, Hugh mentions that he’s never had a serious Hi-fi set up and that maybe he should get his Wharfdale speakers out of the loft. He says it with a little smile on his face and I’m not sure if he’s joking or not but no matter, I say it’s been a pleasure talking to him and he repays the compliment. Outside the Press Office is Adam Wakeman and I re-introduce myself, reminding him of last year when I interviewed him and Damien Wilson together. ‘I remember’ he says with a broad grin (it was chaotic to say the least) as we shake hands.

 

Adam Wakeman

Seated comfortably, I tell Adam that there’s a lot of stuff I want to cover from over the last year. “No problem” he says and we begin.
 

Q: Jazz Sabbath, how did the Australia shows go?

 

AW: Australia was brilliant. I honestly didn’t know what to expect. I knew that the tickets were going well because we added a couple of extra shows, smallish venues, theatres and Jazz clubs and it went down great! We’ve done Slovakia, Romania, did some shows in L.A., the UK and around Europe and it seems to go down everywhere that is familiar with Black Sabbath – you know, that other band that stole all my songs (big grin). We have a big tour next year, thirty dates around the UK and Europe and there is talk of a Canadian tour in the summer.

 

Q: They get the joke then.

AW: I don’t know…I’m not really sure. I think you get a lot of people coming along who don’t really know if they like Jazz or not and they haven’t seen the documentary and the comedy side of it so they are wondering why I’m dressed up like an old man. I think the music carries it enough though, with the association and the songs is musically interesting enough to keep people’s attention. Then they work backwards, learning the story behind it.

Q: I’d love to see you in Japan but Jazz Sabbath isn’t available there.

AW: The funniest thing with this project, is that I never expected anything from it. It was something I really wanted to do and I was pleasantly surprised when we were selling records and the shows were going really well but agents and promoters just don’t get it. I’d spoken to ten, twenty different people, booking agents, promoters, etc but they are all ‘Mmmm…I’m not really sure’ so in the end, I did it myself with Mark at the record company. More fool the promoters really as we are not having to give away 20% to them and we are selling out all the venues. Australia was a small promoter there; we had spoken to the bigger ones but again they were not interested and it’s the same in Japan.

 

Q: Wilson and Wakeman’s new album, Can We Leave The Light On Longer?, is your best yet…

 

AW: Oh that’s very kind of you.

 

Q: What struck me was that when I interviewed you both here last year, you have that impossible to keep up with banter between the two of you but the music on the album is incredibly warm, sincere, poignant…

AW: We have a laugh when we are doing it but when we are together in the studio, we write in quite intense bursts of a couple of days and then we tend to have a week apart or whatever where I would tend to work on the tracks while he is working on the lyrics. The recording process is so different to when we are away doing shows when we can just chat, catch up and have a laugh.

 

Q: November is a heartbreaker; you seem to have tapped into a very strong, personal, emotion on that. Care to expand?

 

AW: The connection was my step-grandmother had dementia and I saw a little bit of that as it went through the end stages. She thought that her son was her husband and thought my mum was somebody having an affair with her husband. There was all this confusion and it just got me thinking about what it would be like if I ended up with dementia. The three-year-old girl is my daughter, now, but that being my granddaughter in the next generation. It’s sort of autobiographical. I don’t have dementia but it’s how I feel I will be if I do.

 

Q: I thought the way you wrote it using September, October, November and December as reference points was lyrically superb.

 

AW: Thank you. Yeah, I’m very proud of that song. It took quite a while to write. I don’t write loads and loads of songs, I’m not very prolific. I find that it’s difficult sit down and try and write something which I tried to do with The Man From The Island which is also on that album. He was a friend of mine on the Isle Of Man who passed away in 2020. I played in a band with him for years and he was like a surrogate Dad to me but that song, I started writing when I found out that he had died and it was eighteen months later before I could finish it which was just before a show in the Isle Of Man because I knew his wife was going to be there. I was writing the last lyrics an hour before the show thinking ‘It’s got to be tonight!’ but yeah, I find they finish themselves when they are ready.

 

Q: How do you split the parts with Rick in the ERE? Obviously, he does the leads but I was wondering how you split the orchestral parts.

 

AW: Well, we’ve worked together a long time. I started off working with him when I was seventeen or eighteen and we’ve played in different formats of this band and therefore the music, which we have played a lot of times, has had different arrangements. It kind of evolves into what it is as I know what to play because I know what he is playing and he knows what to leave out because he knows what I’m playing. His arthritis is setting in so he’s become a bit more dependent on me now, which is great, providing I am around so we have to book stuff way in advance but it’s always been comfortable working with him. If there is something particular he wants me to cover, then he’ll ask me to. There’s a lot of keyboards up there tonight. (laughs)

Q: Who is the MD?

 

AW: Ultimately, Dad is but he is one of those people who doesn’t tell people what to do, he lets them do what they want to do which I think the best way to be. If he said to, Dave Colquhoun for example, I want you to play like Steve Howe, it just becomes a covers band so Dad is very much about letting people put their stamp on whatever it is. He’s pretty lenient but he will reign you in if he thinks you’ve gone too far.

 

Q: Given that you seem to have inherited your Dad’s sense of humour, I should imagine there’s lots of banter when you get together in rehearsals.

AW: You’ve just got to keep him focused really because once the stories start going…It’s the same with all these older, legendary musicians who have such a catalogue of stories that if you let them go, you would end up getting nothing done. What tends to happen is that if Dad is telling a story and going off on one, somebody will start a piece. Adam Falkner will start counting a song in and then everybody goes ‘Oh yes!…right…supposed to be rehearsing…’. It’s like an alarm call. When you hear four clicks on a drum stick then you know you’ve got to start.

 

Q: You know when you give two guitarists two guitars and they can’t resist jamming on a Blues, do keyboard players do anything like that?

 

AW: In my experience of the different bands I’ve worked with, the bass player and drummer tend to start something off, then the guitar player will use that as the bed to solo over everything and then the keyboard player will just throw in some chords or whatever. It will ultimately end up in Africa by Toto. (laughs)

 

Q: What’s your favourite audio format?

 

AW: This is going to sound a real cop-out. I am going to say vinyl but I don’t have a record player. I love the fact that vinyl has had a resurgence over the last twenty years and two years ago I tried to start a vinyl pressing plant and then when the electricity prices went up, it wasn’t profitable to start it. It’s still something I want to do because for me, vinyl is where it should be. The problem with streaming music and mp3s is that people only listen to one track; no one has the time to actually sit down and listen too music. In the car, I may listen to a whole album but even then, it’s unlikely I’ll get through the whole album but with a vinyl record, you are kind of forced into listening to it. ‘You will sit down! You will listen!’ kind of thing. Music has become such a throwaway commodity – people expect it to be free but that just means that no one values it. If you have a physical product, if you are putting on a record, looking at the sleeve, there is a feeling of ownership and you feel connected to something.

 

Q: You know Dave Bainbridge from Lifesigns and Strawbs of course

AW: Yes!

Q: Dave made a very good point to me some time back when he said ‘How could anybody put on side two of Beethoven’s 5th, drop the stylus in the middle of it for three minutes and say they liked it or not?’

AW: Absolutely.

 

We chat for a couple more minutes a bit about this year’s and next year’s Cruise to the Edge (Rick and the ERE are on it) until our time is up. He thanks me and he says he’ll see me in Japan next year. I check my watch. The music is a little over an hour away from starting so it’s time to set my pitch in the field.