I thought I’d met Joe for the first time at Newcastle University in 1977 but it turned out that we’dplayed football against each other a few years before for our respective teams; Leek High school vs Leek College of FE. We had a lot of things in common – Leek Staffordshire, Stoke City FC, mandolins, politics, spliffs, Neil Young and more. So that was that. We started playing tunes together and didn’tquite make it to 30 years.
We’d got a good set together and in the summer of 1980 we stuck a pin in a map of southern France to decide where to meet up for a busking holiday. It took a few stabs but the pin chose well and we both turned up at midday, at the town hall in Fayence. Rianne, Joe’s honneponnetje, came later with her friend Karin and suddenly we started getting spots on the posh terraces.
The next trip was to Alicante from where we cycled down to Granada. It was so good that we did it again a few years later with Ian Carr which is when some of the acrobatic musical nonsense that became the Old Rope String Band began. Those first trips had proved that an exciting living could be found on the road and had whetted Joe’s and my appetite for something a bit more substantial.
By the summer of 1984, several months into the miners’ strike which had seen Joe out three or four nights a week doing benefit gigs in miners welfare halls up and down the Durham andNorthumberland coalfields with ‘The Country Pickets’ , he was ready for a break. The Pickets were a shit-hot C&W band usually composed of Steve Wegrzinski, Liam Arthurs and Gev Pringle with Joe onhis ‘electric’ fiddle, and their gigs were almost always an incendiary riot of passionate solidarity. Mining communities going wild to a Ewan MacColl meets Hank Williams groove.
We’d both been out picketing early mornings as well, heading into town to get a 5.00 am coach up to Blyth power station for a warm welcome to raw hatred as the scab lorries crawled in with their loads of Polish coal. Newcastle’s supermarket checkouts were crowded with shopping trolleys piled high with tins and packets that people were donating to the strikers.
That was the climate in which we fettled up our bikes, made the bespoke panniers to carry a banjo and two fiddles, and spent evenings of maps and beer, plotting a cycle route down through England via friends and family, through western France, over the Pyrenees and across northern Spain to the Portuguese coast where we ran out of plan.
The Pickets played their last gig with Joe in Ashington at the end of May 84 and the next day we set off for Middlesbrough with our friend Nigel who accompanied us on the first leg. We wound our way south, staying with Joe’s brothers Harry then Sam, zig-zagged down England to a stiflingly hot night with his granny in Abingdon where we performed our fledgling show for staff and residents of her nursing home and were billed as ‘Mrs Scurfield’s Grandson and his Friend’. The name didn’t grab us but it wasn’t till Spain that we settled on ‘The Challfield Brothers’ (we’d got a two week residency at a nightclub in Valladolid and they needed posters) -then down to Portsmouth just in time for the boat to St Malo.
We both kept journals of the trip and agreed to record alternate days, which seemed like the most sensible way of doing it and probably was but it has made for a frustratingly disjointed read as Joe’saccount has been lost. Mine gives a plodding flavour of the three3 months which followed. It’smostly taken up with acts of human kindness, punctures/ broken spokes, wild nights and memorable busking times but here is one snatch.
Day 26. Saintes – Cognac.
Joe woke me up to say that the park keeper wanted us to leave. I cast a badly focussed eye that revealed some concrete pillars which spoked up to the roof of the old Victorian style bandstand we were sleeping in. The concrete floor was deliciously comfortable so I told Joe to press on and I’d meet him in the bar we’d earmarked for breakfast. The park keeper came over again and I heard Joeexplaining to him that he didn’t know who I was, that he didn’t know if I spoke French or not andthat we were two complete strangers who happened to find themselves, with their bikes, sleeping in the same bandstand. Quite a coincidence he must have thought. Animals frolicked in a caged menagerie. Parky came over to say that breakfast was ready or something and that I had to get up. It was a lovely morning, quite warm already at 7.30. Joe re-appeared having forgotten his bike lock so we cycled off together presumably further unravelling the complete strangers narrative. I took a little short cut and got lost. Eventually found the bar, which was closed, just as Joe arrived carrying breakfast.
Recent Comments