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The short version
And that’s it so far...
You want more details? Oh all right. Early Days I was born in North London on the 13th February 1949. I have two older sisters and one younger brother and I love them all dearly.
Aaaaah! Aged 5
I went to St Michael’s Primary School, Wood Green, and then Minchenden Grammar School, Southgate. I had piano lessons from quite a young age but, although I ended up being able to read music, I wasn’t really able to improvise. A question of too many/not enough lessons. I also learned to play the recorder at school (didn’t we all?). Somewhere around 1963 I met people who were into playing music. Half of them seemed to be rock climbers who would spend the nights singing traditional folk songs accompanied by banjos and mandolins in wooden huts. The other half played guitar and listened to Pete Seeger, Big Bill Broonzy, Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and Woody Guthrie. Quite often, the two lots would mix and end up at folk clubs like the Atlas Folk and Blues Club in Fulham or Bunjies.
1st Band - ‘Judy and the Folkmen’ It was 1964 so I must have been still at school. The rot set in early!
Bruce West – Guitar; Rod Braxton – Guitar, Ernie Balding – Vocals/Guitar? And me – Vocals. I think there was also a mandolin player called Alan but he’s not on this splendid picture.. We had one gig at the Hornsey Conservative Association’s ‘Candlelight Soiree’. This was the one and only live performance by this band. It was a good time (even though the people at the table looked faintly horrified!) and a time of learning. One of Bruce’s friends suggested I try playing an autoharp. I was into obscure instruments and it was smaller than a piano so I got one. It kept falling off my lap so a banjo player suggested holding it upright and using a clawhammer technique. That worked. Nearly every pub around where we lived seemed to have clubs in the back rooms. Different clubs on different nights. Folk; Jazz; Blues; Soul; Rock ‘n’ Roll. My sister and I used to go and sometimes I’d get up and sing at the folk clubs. She was at the same school as Ashley ‘Tyger’ Hutchings and recognised him at most of the clubs. Gradually I got to know Ashley, who lived around the corner from me, and then Simon Nicol and Richard Thompson and other groups of friends of friends of friends. By this time I had left school. I started to work at a library and decided I’d be a Librarian. To get into Library School I needed 5 ‘O’s and 2 ‘A’s and my librarian career path looked all set.
2nd Band - Fairport Convention - 1967 Ashley, Simon and Richard had now met up with Martin Lamble and Fairport Convention had convened. They quite fancied having a girl in the band and I guess I was the nearest, so I was asked. I agreed, thinking it would be a hoot. I can’t remember when my first Fairport gig was but it was probably June or July 1967. In September 1967 my eldest sister got married and I was a bridesmaid. I sang at the reception dressed in elegant pink satin and then dashed off to a gig with Fairport (not in pink satin) on a boat. I seem to remember the boat sank. We all had jobs, Tyger as a journalist; Richard started work with stained glass artist Hans Unger. His fingertips were usually cut to ribbons. How he played guitar so brilliantly with sliced fingers never ceased to amaze. Simon had a job as film operator at one of the local cinemas. Martin’s only previous job was, (as he so delicately put it), ‘child’.
On a ‘memory-lane’ trip to Muswell Hill in 1978-ish, this photograph was taken of me with my son Dan (aged one) outside Fairport.
One by one the day jobs fell by the wayside and I had to make a choice between Library School and Fairport. No contest, and we set out on the upside down life of being in a band. It was fun, even the old Commer van, with no heating and a hole in the bottom where the snow came in, was fun. Bradford, (Harvey the roadie’s dog), did keep me warm in a later Transit by lying on my feet blocking up the holes in the floor… Anyway on it went, Cilla Black was glimpsed freaking out to us at the Speakeasy (I’ve got the press cutting!), Joe Boyd professed himself ‘knocked out’ (oops sorry, Joe!) and there we were in Sound Techniques Studio recording our first album. OUR FIRST ALBUM!!!! I’m pretty sure Iain Matthews (Ian McDonald as he was known then) joined us as we were making the album. He added sort of spoken vocals to ‘If I had a Ribbon Bow’ and added harmonies to songs that I had been singing on my own or with Richard, and it all seemed to be going swimmingly. The single ‘Ribbon Bow’ was released (to stunning silence!) and we continued to gig and have a good time. This photo shows me wearing a long dress, which was hired for a concert at the Saville Theatre, October 1 st 1967, with the Pink Floyd, Tomorrow featuring Keith West, The Incredible String Band and us. I don’t know who took the picture. But it is lovely.
Richard and I had been sort of ‘going out’ since before I joined the band as singer, but that ground to an unspoken halt and then I was unceremoniously dumped by the band just before the album was released. Hmmm. I asked to do the last gig in Rome (why?) and then that was it. I gave them back my beloved electric harp and left to go to the airport. Then I had to go back because I’d forgotten to ask for my ticket. No one came with me and there was no one to meet me… That was May 1968. Now that all sounds far too gloomy. In fact, had it not been for leaving Fairport, I would not have been in the next right place at the next right time and never have come across my 3rd band…
3rd Band - Giles, Giles, Fripp, McDonald and Dyble - 1968
This picture is courtesy of Peter Giles and Robert Fripp. Well they both said they didn’t mind me using it.
Somehow, somewhere I met up with Ian McDonald (not Iain Matthews) who was, at the time, at the Army Music School, but in the process of buying himself out. He played saxophone, flute and guitar and just about a million other things. We sang a few songs together and were a couple for a while. We wanted to play with more people so we advertised for musicians. Peter Giles answered us and we met up with Peter, his brother Mike and their friend, Robert Fripp. They had just released an album called ‘The Cheerful Insanity of Giles Giles and Fripp’ and very splendid it was too, but I don’t think the world was quite ready for them. Ian and I spent some time at their flat in Brondesbury Park, Kilburn and tried out a lot of songs together. We recorded a lot of them on Peter’s Revox, I guess so that we could hear them back. Robert made me really stretch my voice to sing what had been worked out, and, let me tell you, the improvised vocal booth that I think was carpet underfelt draped over a frame, was the hottest, itchiest place ever. These tracks have since been released as ‘The Brondesbury Tapes’; some on the vinyl album ‘Metaphormosis’; and one on ‘The Young Person’s Guide to King Crimson’. For that was what became of Giles, Giles, Fripp, McDonald and Dyble when Dyble left and Pete Sinfield joined them.
4th Band - Trader Horne - 1969 I left home, and moved into a flat in Fulham with my best friend Soup. We had met while working at Boots the chemist in Moorgate as Saturday assistants. We were both at school then, but we remained friends and still are today. We met the band Steamhammer, and Soup fell in love with Martin Quittenton the guitarist who fell in love with her, so the next move was to Notting Hill Gate where we three shared a flat. Martin knew Davy Graham who became an infrequent visitor to our flat. Famous for his fabulous guitar playing, he was sadly a very scary figure at this time. I remember hiding in my room when he came to call, I didn’t know how to deal with him at all. I was working at the Revolution Club as a membership secretary, and next door was the Bryan Morrison Agency. Bryan asked me to record a song by the Pretty Things – ‘Loneliest Person’ from ‘S.F.Sorrow’. A beautiful song but it didn’t really work. I wish I had a copy of it. My room had a spiral staircase leading down to one of those wonderful communal gardens you get in Notting Hill. Next door in the basement lived Brian Patten, one of the Liverpool poets. He was sweet, looked like an elf and always spoke in poetry, naturally, like breathing. He took my breath away. I used to look after his typewriter whenever he had to go away. He gave me a poem that I finally set to music last year. It became ‘Enchanted Garden’ on my CD. In the meantime, Martin had been asked to work with Rod Stewart, along with Pete Sears. Pete shared a house with Jackie McAuley and somehow I got together with them and we rehearsed some songs. Then Pete disappeared (he was very much in demand and went to America to form Silver Meter with Leigh Stevens, and then on to join Hot Tuna and Jefferson Starship and just about every other good band in the known universe) leaving Jackie and me to form Trader Horne. The name came from the late John Peel who said it was the name of his nanny. John gave me the only other solid body electric autoharp in the country at that time. The one I’d played in Fairport had been a stereo one, and was a casualty of their dreadful, tragic accident. The Trader Horne one was mono. I still have it. It still sounds lovely. So, Trader Horne then. Barry Taylor who had been Steamhammer’s manager managed us in the beginning. He got us work for a while and then somehow Barry Murray found us and took us to Pye Records. Barry was Pye’s producer for their groovy psychedelic new label, Dawn. We were signed to the Red Bus Company for management and agency, Barry was in partnership with them as the production side (I’ve recently discovered that he’s younger than me. Crikey, he seemed so grown up at the time). He went on to huge success as Mungo Jerry’s producer amongst other things
(including inventing and producing the children’s TV programme, Wizbit with Paul Daniels. Clever thing.)
This was a publicity picture taken in Holland Park I think Jackie is 8 ft tall. I am a midget.
Trader Horne set off on the road. And what a road it was. We seemed to be careering from one side of the country to another, then up and down with not a lot of breaks in between. I seem to remember being really tired and as for Jack - well he was doing a lot of the driving as well as playing. At one time we were appearing on a lot of those local TV magazine shows, the ones that followed the six o’clock news. We did travel to Belfast , it was in the middle of the dreadful times there. It looked forlorn in the rain with all the barbed wire. But the welcome at the TV station was warming. We recruited a couple of extra musicians to play with us, Hugh Thomas on Guitar and Ian Gumblefinger (I do believe that was not his real name…..) on bass and xylophone. Hugh also helped with the driving, so I guess we must have acquired a van from somewhere, perhaps it was Hugh’s… One nice memory of Trader Horne. Appearing on a Grampian TV music programme along with Cat Stevens amongst others. The flight back from Aberdeen was delayed by fog, so Jack and I listened to ‘Tea for the Tillerman’ being virtually written in front of our ears, and singing along with it. That was magical. Anyway, Jackie and I made the ‘Morning Way’ album, (Brian Patten wrote the sleeve notes) and released a single and then I don’t know what happened. We were supposed to play at the Hollywood Festival but I had some sort of tantrum/brainstorm and ran away from everything. I was living with my husband to be at the time, Simon Stable, DJ and music writer extraordinaire. I left everyone in the lurch and I hereby now apologise to all. So that was the end of that.
5th Band - Dyble Coxhill & the MB’s (occasionally known as Penguin Dust) - c1971 This was a strange one. Through Simon (I was married to him by now) I met up with Lol Coxhill and Steve and Phil Miller of the Caravan/Delivery/Canterbury Bands circle. We formed DC & the MBs, (Dyble, Coxhill and the Miller Brothers) a truly strange band. We did a few gigs in Holland and then fell apart. Nothing remains of them. No recordings, no photos, just an old set-list. It was good though and very jazzy as Lol tended to be. I’m not sure who the drummer and bass player were –Jack Monk and Laurie Allen according to one family tree. Lol still playing, as is Phil Miller. Steve sadly passed away in 1998.
1973-1997 That was really it for my career in music for the next 25 years. Simon and I left London for Northamptonshire. I went back to library work and he began a small cassette duplicating business, which began to grow and grow. We moved to a small village in Oxfordshire and the tape company really started to take off. We had two children and just kept working. Oh, and I did make a cassette single called ‘Satisfied Mind’ with two guitarists that had come to record a charity single in our basement in Northants. We were called Septic Tank (no, I don’t know why - stupid name). I did briefly come out of retirement twice to guest at the Cropredy festival, in 1981, at Broughton Castle, and again in 1982. I was scared stiff both times and I’m sure it was noticeable. I also appeared in two village pantomimes and that was that. In 1994 Simon died, and I spent the next few years in a state of numbness. The children grew up and went to University. In 1997, Fairport asked me if I would sing at the 30th Anniversary Cropredy. I said yes, without thinking, and spent the next few months chewing my fingernails and trying to think of a way of getting out of it. The first rehearsal at Woodworm felt very awkward. Remember I hadn’t seen any of them for 20 years, and although they were all still playing and had never stopped, I had really not sung a note. I was completely out of practice and felt very shy of all these now famous musicians. I could barely string two words together and I really felt that it had been a mistake to ask me. I was then told that I was playing at the warm-up gig at the Mill as well. ‘What?’ I thought, ‘I’ve got to do this twice? Oh heck!’ But a peculiar thing happened at the Mill. I came on stage to start singing at the rehearsal and suddenly the years fell away. I remembered where to stand and how to sing. I think the others were a bit surprised. I know I was really startled, but happy, and when it came to the evening performance it went really well. The audience was so friendly and positive and all at once it was wonderful to be singing with Richard, Simon and Ashley again. Just like the old days (and I shall always be grateful for the little puffs of cold air coming from Dave Mattacks’ drum kit - that was a very hot weekend). Cropredy itself was a total joy. It was early evening when I played and all I could see was a sea of welcoming faces. Mojo’s review said I had ‘gracefully aged’ (thank you, Colin Harper). |
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©Judy Dyble 2008