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It's January
1973. Jim Marshall and I have invited Chris Foster to Radio Sussex
to record for "Minstrels Gallery". Chris goes into the studio, we
get a balance and he reels off eight stunning one-take performances
- "When A Man's In Love", "The Golden Glove", "The Banks of Newfoundland",
"The Flower of Servingmen" - Jim and I catch one another's eye;
we are aware that something very special is going on. Chris comes
back through to the control room. Can he listen to the playbacks?
Well, we had expected to spend the evening getting three or four
songs on tape and inside forty minutes we have eight remarkable
performances. We listen in silence to all of them. Chris relaxes.
"That's a relief!" he says, "It sounds OK. I've never heard myself
singing before."
What? The man
had been singing in public for nine years by then and was already
a professional singer. How things have changed! This simply would
not happen today. Anyone contemplating professionalism now would
be circulating demos to seek work; in many cases they would have
a CD released before they even though about gigs. Not our Chris.
"I actively resisted putting out an album in fact. People were asking
me why I hadn't recorded. I just felt that I hadn't learned my craft
enough, so I didn't do it. My first album came out in 1977 and I
had been touring constantly for five years before then.
" Now, this
does not imply reticence on his part. In fact, the first time he
went to a folk club, he sang. Most of Chris's early repertoire came
from records and the Penguin book. The singing came first, and then
he took up the guitar as an accompanying instrument. This was the
Yetties' folk club at Yeovil where visitors like Cyril Tawney, Tony
Rose and Louis Killen were to make a strong impression on him as
did Packie Byrne. "That was interesting because a lot of the performers
who came were just a few years older than me as a sixth-former.
But then Packie came. To me as a teenager, he seemed like an old
man. He arrived in a suit and we were thinking, 'Blimey, what's
this?' but then, of course, he was an astonishing performer."
After a 'false
start' on a science degree, Chris studied at Norwich School of Art.
He met Nic Jones during his time there and they became firm friends.
"I started linking up with him and doing things that were like early
forerunners of Magic Lantern." Post-graduate study was to be in
London. Chris had met up with John Kirkpatrick at Sidmouth Festivals,
so visits to John's London folk club, Dingles, were natural and
he was quickly asked to become a resident. It was one night there
that his singing career got the sort of boost that could not be
replicated today. "At that time Jane Winder and Jean Oglesby had
built up their agency and that was a sort of who's who of the scene
at that time - Boys of the Lough, Richard & Linda Thompson, Dave
Burland, lots of people. One night at our club, Sean Cannon turned
up and he had Sara Grey as his driver. Jean came down to see him,
and then also saw Sara and I sing. She asked me if I would like
to join her agency as the cheap end of the list. So when I left
college, I became overnight, a professional folk singer. Initially,
I was not known, but because the agency had such a formidable list,
and they were good agents and because the folk scene was really
flourishing at the time, I started picking up late cancellations,
clubs that had been too late to book the people they wanted and
things like that. I picked up a lot of bookings by default as it
were." I don't know how many of those rough Gestetner-copied agency
price lists are still in existence, but this collector of folk ephemera
has it squirreled away amongst his vast collection and here it is…
Boys of the Lough £80, Watersons £80 all the way down to Chris Foster
£10. From then Chris had eight years touring as a full-time pro.
Two fine vinyl
albums on Topic date from these successful years, but the life was
never going to be enough to satisfy a person of Chris's intelligence,
range of talents, and radicalism. "It was becoming a treadmill.
I couldn't see how it was going to pan out. The fees were at a level
where you had to be constantly working to make ends meet. You never
had a chance to go away and have fresh thoughts. This was around
1979. The music was too important to me for me just to churn it
out. If it was going to be that, then I would prefer to go and do
some other kind of job."
Chris had moved
to Leiston in Suffolk in 1977 and had spent much time in the company
of the area's traditional singers, particularly Jumbo Brightwell
and Percy Ling. He feels that he learned a great deal about performing
the songs from great characters like these, but also he became aware
of the role and status that men like these had in their own communities
and saw how different it was from the way he was working on a national
scene. "I wanted to have an ongoing social context for my work and
going around as a solo artist is a pretty isolated kind of life
and it didn't seem to hold that possibility… Also it became clear
that the folk clubs were going down the tubes, relatively speaking."
His university training in visual arts was not getting full use.
Politically, Britain was entering the Thatcher era and we were all
being asked, by Gaughan and others, 'Which side are you on?' Chris
knew and a progression into Community Arts became almost inevitable.
This meant another
move, this time to Salisbury and the all-embracing work with Mobile
Arts working on multi-disciplined community arts projects around
South Wiltshire and parts of Hampshire. He was working with photographers,
writers, artists, musicians, dancers, designers and makers of all
sorts. Lots of socio-political issues were being addressed; Greenham
Common was in the locality and the anti-Cruise missile campaign
was one of the focuses. There was still the possibility of using
traditional music and song. "Unlike a lot of community art groups
at the time, we drew on our own vernacular folk traditions. A lot
of community arts groups tended to look overseas. We did that as
well but we looked at home as well. We used traditional music in
a street band, for instance." One effect of this was that quite
quickly he had a much lower profile around the clubs. "I would say
I was disconnected from the folk scene throughout the '80s. I did
a handful of bookings in a few folk clubs that basically sought
me out - Garland Ox, Bodmin, The Black Diamond club in Birmingham,
Lewes and so on. I was just so involved with Mobile Arts in an all-consuming
way." I suppose he might not have come back at all, but love of
the tradition and of performing never went away.
Then his circumstances
changed. A funding war between the various support bodies led to
the Mobile Arts grant being cut; Chris was jobless and on the move
again, this time to Burton-on-Trent and to work on the opening of
the Brewhouse Arts Centre there. They were heady, exciting days
and Chris looked forward to more community outreach work, but he
had a building that represented a huge investment on his hands.
"Inevitably, the building sucked me in and I was programming the
art gallery and the music. That was a good experience and it made
me think. I started to be inundated with demos and promo packages
from all sorts of people and music. Quite a lot of Rhythm and Blues
bands. I had played bass in a R'n'B band in Salisbury. I was putting
on quite an interesting variety of music, all kinds of stuff. I
made a pledge that I would listen to everything that came in. There
was some good stuff, but a high percentage of garbage. A lot of
it was competent, but not more than competent." It was these thoughts
that turned his mind back to thoughts of his own performing career.
Back to the folk clubs? Well, this was not as easy as it seems.
The scene had shrunk considerably in the decade he had been away
and his name did not register strongly with a new generation of
organisers.
Bookings at
prominent festivals like Sidmouth and Towersey were a great help,
but the scene was very different. Chris had to think of another
way of reaching an audience. Here the experience and knowledge of
Arts funding and organisation proved very useful. Along with Chris
Cheek, a colleague from Mobile Arts days, he developed a show called
"A Sting In The Tale". This was a full performance with a set and
props all about animals, songs, stories and poems and the performances
were part of several rural touring schemes. A couple of songs had
been commissioned from Leon Rosselson but the majority of songs
were traditional including songs that he has sung for decades like
"The Coasts of Peru" and "The Fowler".
It was missionary
work. "I did about 30 performances of it in 18 months. It went down
great - very mixed age audiences, families coming out together and
lots of people that you would never see in a folk club - wouldn't
have a clue what a folk song sounded like; completely fresh audiences.
Then we did another show in which Chris Cheek and I performed together.
That didn't get so many bookings. That was "Travellers' Tales" songs,
story telling, spoken links, slide projections, and everything from
"The Flying Cloud" to Edward Lear's "The Jumblies". We did each
of the shows at a couple of festivals but otherwise it was outside
the folk scene."
Then out of
the blue came a Canadian tour that included a couple of festivals
and a visit to Cape Breton. This came indirectly from a "Whatever
happened to Chris Foster?" enquiry on the Mudcat Internet chat group.
The prospect of this tour became the incentive and the deadline
for the CD that Chris had been working on. This was the superb 1999
album "Traces" with Chris singing in that totally distinctive manner
that combines power and passion, with clarity and warmth and those
highly individual, inventive accompaniments that really add to and
grace the singing.
The album is
self-produced on his own Green Man label and stands as an example
of what a many-talented artist can do when he has control of all
aspects of production. I note that four of the songs on this album
were also on his first Topic album - on his radio session for us
as well. Yes, the arrangements had changed and developed with the
years but he is very loyal to the songs he has learned. Chris picks
up my copy of "Layers" and scans the titles. "Let's see... Yes,
I still sing more than half of these. I sang four last night at
your club. I still sing "The Banks of Newfoundland" now and I had
been singing it for ten years before I recorded it on this first
album. I have always been fairly picky about songs; I have never
learned a huge number of songs to performance level. To do that,
I have to like it a lot for the song to stay."
So what are
the Foster criteria for choosing a song? What's more important,
melody or words? "It's got to have all of it in buckets for me to
bother to learn it. Sometimes I love the tune but think some of
the words inappropriate and so on. I might sometimes set words that
I really like to a different tune to make a song better for me.
It also has to be something that I think that I can do something
with. There are great songs that I wouldn't sing, simply because
I think that I couldn't do them justice."
All the albums,
all the performances as far as I can remember, contain at least
one song by Leon Rosselson and that starts the pair of us off on
long paeans of praise to that songwriter. Perhaps not the place
for it here, but suffice to say, we both hold him in the very highest
esteem. During the 90s Chris gradually reduced his commitment to
Burton Brewhouse, considering that the future was in freelancing,
including short-term community arts project work, art consultancy
work and a renewed commitment to performing.
Since September
1999 Chris has been the Co-ordinator of the Baring-Gould Heritage
Project working in Devon with Marilyn Tucker and Paul Wilson of
The Wren Trust. The project is using live performance, community
projects, recordings and publications with an aim of bringing the
wealth of material in the Baring-Gould archives into the public
domain locally, nationally and internationally. Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould
was squire and parson of the village of Lewtrenchard in West Devon
from 1881 until his death in 1924. As well as his duties as a parish
priest he was also an antiquarian, hymn writer and author of both
fiction and non-fiction, publishing over 400 books and articles
in his life time. Unusually among the song collectors of his day,
Baring-Gould sought to place the songs in their social and cultural
context and took a great interest in the people who sang for him.
His note books contain many word pictures of the people from whom
he collected and these accounts give a unique insight into the lives
of working men and women of Devon and Cornwall in the late 19th
century.
The main event
in the Baring-Gould Heritage Project calendar is a week long study
break and festival each autumn. Baring-Gould had links with Iceland
which Chris pursued, resulting in some Icelandic musicians appearing
at the festival This led to a musical partnership between Chris
and Icelandic singer and composer Bára Grímsdóttir. Bára is one
of the finest interpreters of the traditional folk songs of Iceland,
perhaps one of the least known song traditions in Europe. It was
while she was singing with 'Embla' at the Baring-Gould Festival
in October 2000 that Chris met Bára and they started to explore
the possibilities of combining Chris's 'open tuned English style'
of guitar playing with the modal melodies of her traditional Icelandic
songs. Chris and Bára have since put together a programme of songs
which has already been performed in 2002 at Towersey Village Festival,
at Chard International Women's Music Festival in the UK and at the
Siglufjord Folk Festival in Iceland.
In a further
collaboration with Sheffield based songwriter Sally Goldsmith. Chris
provided guitar accompaniments for a set of eleven songs based on
Sally's experiences and the stories from groups of older people
who go rambling in the Peak District National Park. This was part
of Year of the Artist project by Sally called 'As we walked out'.
Following the success of that project Sally was invited to write
a song to mark the 70th anniversary of the Kinder Scout Mass Trespass
which took place on 24 April 1932. It was this event which prompted
Ewan Macoll to write one of his best known songs 'The Manchester
Rambler'. Sally and Chris performed the new song, 'Trespassers will
be Celebrated' along with some of the songs from 'As we walked out',
at an event held at Bowden Bridge where the mass trespass started
from on Saturday 27th April 2002.
It was a very
moving occasion, compered by Mike Harding and attended by over 1000
people including Michael Meecher the Minister of the Environment
who steered the new Countryside Rights of Way act through parliament
and The Duke of Devonshire who publicly apologised for his grandfather's
conduct in 1932. Following the performance and speeches they all
went on a five mile hike along the route taken by the trespassers
in 1932.
The experiences
that his long and varied career have given him put Chris in a unique
position to comment on the folk scene, both as an insider and a
passionate enthusiast for traditional song and music and for the
folk club system at its best and as an outsider as a man with vast
knowledge of the broader world of performing and expressive arts.
Coming back to the scene with a fresh eye, he saw that the folk
scene had shrunk considerably, but that it was also less open and
less visible. "I believe that the music is incredible and accessible
but where is it on the mainstream media? The vast majority of people
do not hear it. It is invisible. English people do not know what
English traditional music sounds like. They may have an idea of
what it is like, but it is likely to be way off the mark. They have
no concept of how deep or how broad it is."
The latest "twist
in the tale" and perhaps an indication of the importance other people
put on the English Tradition is the recent re-release of Chris's
Topic albums by a company in Japan. The covers are CD sized facsimiles
of the original LP sleeves with full text and song notes printed
in Japanese.
Vic Smith
Links, further
information and recordings:
DISCOGRAPHY
Solo recordings:
2003 TRACES
The
Tradition Bearers LTCD3003
2002 ALL THINGS IN COMMON Japanese import VSCD-837 CD re-issue of
the original Topic Records Vinyl album
2002 LAYERS Japanese import VSCD-832 CD re-issue of the original
Topic Records Vinyl album
1999 TRACES Green Man Productions GMCD 001 (now re-issued on The
Tradition Bearers label)
1994 STING IN THE TALE Green Man Productions GMSL 001
1979 ALL
THINGS IN COMMON Topic 12TS391 with guest performances by Graham
and Eileen Pratt
1977 LAYERS Topic 12TS329 with guest performances by Nic Jones.
Some Collaborations
& Sessions:
2001 AS WE WALKED
OUT Meersbrook Recordings MBCD01 Guitar accompaniments to a suite
of 11 songs written by Sally Goldsmith with older ramblers in Yorkshire.
1998 DEAD MAID'S LAND Wild Goose WGS 292 CD Traditional songs of
Devon and Cornwall from the collection of Sabine Baring-Gould with
amongst others Paul Wilson (musical director) Marilyn Tucker, Tim
Laycock and Chris Bartram
1998 ROLLIN' DOWN THE ROAD - Mick Strode Duke Records DUKE 1002
Bass guitar
1995 INTRUDERS - Leon Rosselson Fuse Records CFCD 005
1994 QUESTIONS - Leon Rosselson Fuse Records CFC 004
1981 NUCLEAR POWER NO THANKS The Plane Label IMP 2 with Leon Rosselson,
Roy Bailey, Frankie Armstrong, Martin Carthy, John Kirkpatrick,
Sandra Kerr, Alison McMorland and others
1977 FYLDE ACOUSTIC Trailer LER 2105 with Nic Jones, Martin Simpson,
John James, Vin Garbutt, Martin Carthy and others.
For bookings
and more information contact: Green
Man Productions, 15 Sebright Avenue, Worcester, WR5 2HH, England
Email: cjfoster@fsmail.net
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