Mike Willoughby... Cumbrian Tune Sessions
Stan Laurel Pub, Ulverston, Cumbria, England
November, 1999

This is part of a recording I did of the Cumbrian tune session in Ulverston. I had driven up from Berlin in one of the rare experiences of being on my own for a few days with no family or restrictions. Unfortunately, that meant I could not only listen to music and stay out late, but drink a bunch of ale as I was on foot. So in this interview I am not exactly sober! I think it is a shame I have to cram all these various types of freedom some take for granted into one specific experience per year. They had also given me a fiddle to play and I just felt totally lost and too tipsy to play anyway. Just sober enough to talk.
Photo: The Lake District, 1999.

Talk to me, Mike.
Right.
Tell me about Cumbrian tunes.
Right, well, Mike who plays the flute in the session, Mike Kermode, has been collecting these traditional Cumbrian tunes for years and he has quite a massive collection in his house and as well we've been rooting out collections in local libraries of tunes that were played in Cumbria in the last century, really from 1790s to the sort of 1850s. Cumbrian music's tended totake a bit of a back seat in English traditional music, because its been quite a bit of a lost art over the last century really. And these have tended to die out, really,unlike the traditional music from the north east of England.which is pretty vibrant, so it's quite a bit of a revival I suppose. We're aiming for a few people who've come together with the right amount of material and create some really good sounds. And its quite exciting really, I mean this is a very traditional session, but we can do anything with these tunes, like with our band Striding Edge, we take the tunes and fuse it with rock and jazz and reggae and all sorts of other influences which...they're simple enough tunes to be treated in any way you wanted to, which is a great thing with English tunes in particular, I mean Irish tunes tend to have a little more decoration, they're a lot more difficult to reinterperet I think.
Yeh. It seems to me to listen to English music English people will do anything to it.
I didn't quite get that, could you say that again?
The music here in the background was VERY LOUD.
It seems that English people will do anything to traditional music and the Irish will sort of be very conservative.
Well, I don't think it's particularly the Irish being conservative about their music. If you go to Ireland, I think they're fairly laissez-faire about the way they play their music. It tends to be the purists in other countries, the way the English play Irish music in England is purer than the Irish, and they have a very purist attitude about it, it's gotta be played in a certain way. It's annoying as well because it's throughout Europe really. You know if you're playing English music, someone will always come out and say "You must be Irish because you're playing folk music" and it takes a while to convince them that you're English playing this music, so I mean, we've never had as strong a tradition in England as in Ireland or Scotland for that matter in terms of traditional tunes especially. It's nice I suppose in the last half of the century, a lot more of the revival, a lot more going on with English tunes, Liza Carthy is doing English tunes at the moment, bringing them over to a wider audience and really positiv effects.
Seems like she's always mentioned.
Well, that's the tip of the ice berg really, stuff that's been going on for years in sessions like this around the country you know. That's the wonderful thing about England, you know, music, any kind of cultural life. It's such a diverse country. Northumbrian music, just over the border in Northumberland you know, fifteen miles to the east, the music to me sounds totally different than it does from Cumbria. For example if you went to Yorkshire you went to a session, hearing Yorkshire tunes for example, some Pete Coe sessions he has up in the Rippington Moors, the music sounds totally different again, he has very different character, and southern dance music, especially, tends to be a little bit more slower, a little bit more pretty dare I say, you know all these area of England have a very different sound.in traditional dance musics, yeh.
Pete Coe actually does sessions up in Yorkshire, is that what you're saying.
Yeh.
If I could went up there could I actually see Pete Coe doing a session?
Yeh, Pete's a great friend of mine in West Yorkshire, he runs a dance club actually for ceili bands but he also hosts a big tune session up on the moors, I can't recall its name off hand. They play some wonderful tunes from the Dales and the Peak District, around there. Somewhat similar in character to Cumbrian music. Its actually quite cracky and quite harsh, just I suppose because of the environment those people hav lived in through the centuries up on the wind and the moors and the rain.You can breathe that sort of atmosphere and that brings forth that kind of atmosphere in the music.
If you listen to Cumbrian music, is there some sort of musical way you can typlify it...as a musician?
Well, these tunes actually...they're actually very difficult to play, because you'll get for example 8 bars...
I notice they're very difficult to play!
You'll get 8 bars that are really really easy and all of a sudden there'll be 2 bars that go all over the place just like we heard in the last tune. You're chugging along with this extremely easy tune for 8 bars and then suddenly there's 2 bars that come out of the blue that just whack you on your head and you think "wow, where's that tune going," and it's going all over the place and you'll go back to you're 3 notes for the next 8 bars. I think that typifies the Cumbrian dance music. It's strange, it really is, yeh.
Do they do some sort of strange dance to this?
Well, I think it's the instruments it's played in, I mean we're playing music with fiddles, harmonicas, accordions. Several hundred years ago they would have been played mainly on pipes and fiddles.
Is that like Northumbrian small pipes?
Well, a type of pipe similar to Northumbrian small pipes, border pipes, they're a little bit more simple to play, and also horn pipes which are kind of like a primitive reed instrument. They're probably fairly atonal I'd imagine and sometimes it's hard to gague what these tunes were and where they're coming from, because we're not actually playing them on the instruments they're originally played on, though sometimes it's kind of hard to get your head around that idea.
Oh oh, people are leaving. Bye! I was trying to think of my next question.
"Next Question!"
Next question...I could ask you about yourself!
About me? Oh yes, fire away!
You don't always play traditional music the traditional way. That was my number one question about you. And what kind of beer are you drinking?
Well, I'm driving, so I'm not drinking too much more of it, really.
I've been touring around Cumbria today singing in schools because I do a lot of school workshops with children rejuvenating the Cumbrian tradition, singing traditional songs, but also writing songs, because originally I was...I am a songwriter really first of all foremost. I started playing rock music when I was 15 and I kind of got disillusioned with rock music, I didn;t know how much that meant to me or how deep it was coming from me personally. I just stumbled across folk music really and it's the music that sort of seems to sum up where I come from. Its me roots, really.
Are you from right here?
Yeh I come from Windermere which is just up the road. That's the central part of the Lake District...the very touristy part of the Lake District. So this music, it's really poignant, really moving me, music from the place that I live and obviously I like taking that music as my source and then writing songs around it, writing songs interweaving history, legend, all those things, really. I think more and more people are getting increasingly disillusioned with electronic music, you know, sort of rock music that refers to the last 10 years of musical history. I think folk music means something to people a bit deeper, its something that is older and goes back deeper into peoples memory, and into their roots a bit more.
I think that the album I got of yours out of a magazine was advertised I think as "folk-thrash."
Folk-thrash!
Are you still doing folk-thrash?
I do have some friends in the folk-thrash scene. Who? There;s a band from not far from here in the northeast called the Whiskey Priests and they do a lot of touring in Europe at the moment, a 6 month tour, they're great friends of mine, but I try to throw off the punk-folk-threash tag really because it's not always very helpful really. In the 80s I was always being compared to Shane MacGowan and I always said to people "I'm a little bit less ugly than Shane McGowan, I hope!
There's several sides to my music. I like...
There's this band you were with before.
Yeh, I was with Urban Folk with Pete Morton and Roger Wilson, and we were doing quite a bit of touring around Europe.
You were actually in that?
Yeh, I was in that band for 2 years, and funny enough, we were talking about thrash folk, playing a lot of punk venues especially in East Germany, we used to play in some of the punk clubs as well as traditional folk clubs. I think that's the wonderful thing about acoustic traditional roots music, you can take it really into any context and play this music, whether a rock venue, traditional folk club or someon's front room. It's just such brilliantly versatile music and being on the road with that band and the band I was in before, the Strange Folk, we found oursleves playing in different locations every night to totally different sets of people. Like I said, I'm working a lot inm schools, playing this music to kids of 5 or 6, and then the next tight I'll be playing to a mixed crowd ranging from kids to adults. It's versatile stuff, yeh.
OK....if you listen to music, do you listen to all sorts of music? That's a common question I ask everybody.
Hmm. Yeh, I do. I mean I started off listening to a lot of music in the late 70s because I was brought up on the New Wave era and punk, for example I've been just listening to THE CLASH 's live album, which I think is absoluetly brilliant.and someof the more adventurous bands from that era, for example, Wire which was a progressive sort of punk rock band some of the more obscure sort of Indie rock bands for example Blythe Power is supurb sort of rock band that sort of intertwine folk roots, legend, mythology into their songwriting. So I mean I sort of just love that quirky pop-folk type of music really, anything I find in that realm I just love. That influences me just as much as traditional music, sure. I mean one momemt on the CD player I might be listening to Kathryn Tickell's CD, the next minute I might be listening to a Clash CD and they're both equally inspiring to me.
That's pretty scary!
Scary,..ha!
You have a new album...
Yeh....uh...yeh. Just released a new album...one with, it's a mini album actually. For the last 5 years I been touring with a band called Striding Edge. Striding Edge is actually a mountain in Cumbria and this big mountain ridge and that's what the band's named after. We started 5 years ago as a community ceili band playing dance halls, town halls, weddings, parties, anything. Any kind of gig where we can get people dancing, because we are a ceili band. We got drums, bass, guitar, trombone, fiddle, accordion, and we play a lot of these Cumbrian tunes, polkas, reels, and jigs, and we treat them in a different way, we got Johnny plays guitar. He's a really good jazz-funk player. So instead of having traditional folk rhythm guitar for example we got funk-jazz guitar.
John Who?
John Bowie. They rhythm section's very intersting because Ben and Elliot play a lot of samba-South American rhythms and the of course we got myself, as you say I'm a thrash-folkie.
Who are you now?
Mike Willoughby, as ever. We've got Carolyn Francis who plays fiddle, she's a very very fine traditional fiddle player, one of the best known traditional players in the Northwest.
I have never heard of her.
No. You probably won't have not. But amongst the band it's very eclectic band, big mix of influences, very grating at times. You can imagine having all these differnt people colliding form different musical directions, but I think there's some really exciting music that we're creating. Certainly the dancers find it exciting.
So what's on the album now?
Well, there's 6 tracks on it. There's all the songs we generally play out live when we're doing a big dance for maybe a hundred people. And we've got some tunes, October the 16^th, Cartmel, which is a little village just up the road. We've got a song called "Against the Wall." And that was a song I wrote to an old traditional tune called "throw Her Agianst the Wall." "Against the Wall" is the last winter of a farmer living up the valley of breatherdale which is a deserted valley up in the East of Cumbria. And it used to be a thriving community, but if you go up there now, there used to be about 20 farms but now there's just one farm left in the valley. And in fact this summer we went up nthere to make a film about our song "against the Wall" and...
Film? Like a music video?
A music video. Exactly. And in fact Mike, who plays at the session, he plays the flute, he was playing the part of the last farmer at Breatherdale. He's the only man we could find suitably weathered enough to play the part. We were in this ruined barn, freezing cold because it was the middle of February doing this really depressing video about this last farmer's last winter at Breatherdaleand the actual last farmer himself arrived on his c--bike, one of these 4 wheel motorbikes and he was as happy as Larry, he was the happiest man I ever met in my life, which is quite ironic seeing as it was this sort of sad song. Shows that life dowsn't always imitate life I think.
Is that it?
Well, we've got another song called "The Road To Alston" on that, which is another dance tune I wrote some lyrics to. Now the road to Alston is a big long road that streatches out in Cumbria all the way to the northeast and it's one of these roads, it's very very beautiful but it gets kind of strange because sometimes you'll find yourself stuck behind this huge lorry just itching for the road to be widened which is know is not always a very good thing, everybody seems to be building by-passes in England at the moment.
That's the one you sang at the session.
It is. Absolutely. And the chorus of the song is about guys out there in the last century building this road for John MacAdam. At the time it was a ground-breaking road, because they built the gradient so it was an even gradient so the horses didn't have to break pace as they were walking up it. And it was also extremely well drained,the best drained road that had ever been built up to that day. There's a bit of background information about that one, yeh.
Is that it?
Well, um, most of the tunes on the album, the tunes are from the village of Ambleside, where I've lived for the last 9 years.
Is that the one where you lived in the cave?
Yeh. Well, actually everyone said that I lived in a cave but actually it was a barn, a little stone barm.
Background voice, maybe Gordon Jones: It was more of a bordello.
Thank you. And...don't mind him...my cave is...was actually a little barn on the hilltop. Very drafty as it hadn't been properly rendered but very beautiful right up on the Kirkstone Pass there. Supurb view of Lake Windermere as the sun's going down. But as well as having some picturesque scenerey around Ambleside they've got a very good selection of tunes at the Armat (?) Library. A lot of these tunes were collected by the Brown Family.of Ambleside who actually lived in a little village called Troutbeck. Just a little stones throw from Ambleside. The Brown family went out to all the ceilis in about...in the 1850s collecting a lot of these dance tunes. They weren't musicians, they weren't trained musicians, academics, they were just locals who had an enthusiasm about the tunes and really wanted to record them. And you can say in a sense Mike Kermode, the guy who's playing at the session on the flute, he's the modern equivalent of mr. Brown, because he sits there year in year out collecting these tunes. If he hears a new version of a tune off anyone, he'll sit down, scribble it down, write it down. So this is an approach that is still going on today..
These are like local amateur ethnomusicologists?
Absolutely! Yeh, absoluteley you've put it ina nutshell there.
I wish I could...you want to describe him?
Mike?
Yeh.
Well, Mike is a very calm personality, actually. He's in the middle of a session with anarchy and chaos all around. He's a pillar of...
He looks pretty calm playing his flute.
He is. And like all great flute players, he is really really relaxed, but the speed his fingers move is amazing. I don't know he does it. Looking at him, you think "That looks really easy" until you pick up a wind instrument yourself and try and play that fluidly and that fast. And its really really difficult but he makes it look easy, don't know how he does it, the swine.

write: gennett at gorge dot net

The Columbia Gypsy