The Uke of Wallington by Mark Wallington : 2012

Tags

Mark Wallington, open mic, the use of wallington, ukulele

British Travel Books : Number 8

Travelling around the United Kingdom is a recurring theme in Mark Wallington’s books. Some of them are out and out travel books; Five Hundred Mile Walkies deals with the South West peninsular coastal path, Boogie up the River follows the Thames from London to its source in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds, Pennine Walkies takes in the Pennine Way (all featuring an amiable and disreputable dog companion), Destination Lapland (a bicycle tour that never gets to Lapland; never leaves these islands in fact) all follow the formula: first person narration of a journey with lots of information, anecdote and companionable presence of the storyteller. The one novel of his that I have read – The Missing Postman – is plotted around delivering random letters in a postman’s sack. In other words it is essentially a tour of Britain. I’ve bought and read all of the above so Mark Wallington has done very nicely out of me. On the whole though, I think I’ve had rather the better of the deal. He’s gained a few pounds (sterling). I’ve gained many hours of pleasure and plenty of chuckles and belly laughs. If you’re reading this Mark. Thank you very much indeed.My friend Jon thinks this is the best of the bunch. I’m not so sure. But then Jon is teaching his wife how to play the ukulele and this may be the key. The dear old ukulele is going through a late flowering in Britain. Seen by young music teachers as an alternative to the descant recorder in the ‘get everyone playing a musical instrument’ stakes, seen by older people as a late opportunity to pick up the musical instrument they always promised themselves they’d one day learn. And one that you can sing along to within an hour yet which has infinite possibilities in terms of progression. (Check out Youtube for many examples of virtuoso uke playing). At one time George Formby and Tessy O’Shea seemed to be the alpha and the omega, then George Harrison declared himself a devotee (he went to Joe Brown for advice and lessons*) and the popularity slowly (very slowly) spread. In the last ten years it has gone crazy. Everybody seems to own a ukulele (I have two!) and everybody seems to have discovered that they sound great accompanying rock’n’roll songs.The book is first rate on the appeal of this much maligned instrument (Hawaii’s contribution to musical heritage). Wallington is a little older than me (63), has lived his life through the rock and roll years, has had several careers, has decided that lack of ability means his dreams of reaching musical stardom by the conventional means of joining a five piece band with guitars, bass, drums and a piano player have come to nothing. So he’s bought a uke and is now setting out on an unofficial tour of Britain, travelling from Brighton to Cape Wrath playing his ukulele in every Open-Mic he can find.

N.B. An ‘Open Mic’ is a semi-formal singing session, usually in a pub where people get up and sing a couple of songs to a (usually) apathetic audience under the guidance of a host (who often hogs the microphone and plays most of the songs himself (it’s invariably a he)). Actually these are hit and miss affairs. Many are a little bit dreary, a little bit, well, er, dead. But if you get a good one it is buzzing. A succession of high quality musicians supporting each other and simply enjoying having a public sing. A free concert. A bloody good night out. Wallington experiences both ends of the spectrum. Both ends of the plectrum perhaps!

“A concert?!” said my wife.

“Why not?”

She didn’t want to tell me the truth. “In front of people you don’t know?”

“My plan is to improve as I go along.”

“You don’t think this is a young man’s activity?”

“Bob Dylan is 70.”

“Bob Dylan started playing when he was a teenager.”

“So did I.”

She could see she wasn’t going to get anywhere down this track. She said, “It’s hard when the children leave. You’re bound to feel at a loss.”

“I’m not at a loss. A rock ‘n’ roll tour is something I’ve always wanted to do.”

“How can you do a rock ‘n’ roll tour on a ukulele?”

“I’ll show you.”

“No it’s all right … I believe you.”

“You think it’s a mid-life crisis, don’t you?”

“No. You’re too old for a mid-life crisis.”

It’s a book I can relate to on more than one level.

Me busking in Nottingham with a ukulele. You see the world differently when busking. Incidentally it pays (pro rata) about the same as supply teaching.

And so he sets off, by public transport. We get a feel of the country, of the towns he passes through, of the nerves required to even enter a pub carrying a musical instrument, let alone get up in front of strangers and play a couple of tunes. He’s a good travelling companion (something that is absolutely essential in a travel book. He genuinely likes the England (and eventually parts of Wales and Scotland) he is showing us. A nice mixture of diligent observer, decent wordsmith and is always quite happy to portray himself as a comic character; a sketch that is based on self-deprecation, insight and the skills acquired by a lifetime of being a professional comedy writer.

This is a polite and kindly observer. Not the sort to write a place off as awful or send someone up as ludicrous. Nevertheless there is a subtle pen at work here and a skilful satirist.

“There were indeed some grand and designer houses by the beach, but no one looked more proud of their property than the beach hut owners. In Lancing a couple were sitting out in front of theirs. She was knitting what looked like a map of South America. He was listening to the tennis on the radio. On the table between them sat a fruitcake and a pot of tea with a cosy.”

The journey is a pleasant one. This isn’t a major physical or emotional challenge as some journeys are. This is a gentle stroll, minstrel style, though the summer acres of Britain with musical interludes. The book is never short of entertaining, enlightening and at times very funny. Very few of us will ever tour as a Bowie or a McCartney or an Ed Sheeran but there are literally thousands of us who know what it is like to go down like a lead balloon (zeppelin perhaps) or receive an unexpected ecstatic response to our couple of songs in an open mic. What we mostly receive is polite indifference and Wallington is excellent on how this feels too.

Simon on a Chesterfield Open Mic night. Drowning in a sea of indifference.

I’d recommend any of Mark Wallington’s books. I think it probably helps to have been born between 1955 and 1965 to really get the full impact but I’m all in favour of privileging the late baby boomers. He made a name for himself as a script writer on Not the Nine O’Clock News (one of several high quality satirical shows from the BBC in the line of succession from Beyond the Fringe, That Was the Week that Was (TW3) and The Frost report. And the programme that introduced us to Mel Smith, Griff Rhys Jones and Rowan Atkinson). His books now fill half a shelf in my study and are all well thumbed. This is reading for pleasure. And why not? It is also a book that does what good travel books should do, and that is to make us want to get up and do it all for ourselves.

Pass me my ukulele I’m off on a road trip!

 

*They had toured together in the days before The Beatles found fame and he rang Joe Brown up years later and introduced himself with the wonderful words “Hello, I don’t know if you remember me. My name is George Harrison.”

 

Day 226: The String Section

Tags

Arthur McBride and the Sergeant, George Formby, George Harrison, Joni Mitchell, mandolin, Mark Wallington, Paul Brady, Steve Earle, ukelele

Mostly Concerning Music

It’s funny how a song will come into your mind. Laurence used to play a lovely version of Arthur McBride and the Sergeant on the guitar. He knew his stuff did Laurence and could play an awful lot better than he let on. He did several versions. I can’t remember the provenance of most but he spoke very highly of the one that Paul Brady had made popular. Laurence used to drop the tuning down to drop D and though this shouldn’t have been too difficult to follow it was enough to freeze my brain. I could imitate the melodic roll alright but I was beggered at remembering the adjustments I had to make for the chords.

Laurence has been dead for over a decade now which means (he was almost exactly ten years older than me when we met in Manchester) that I am now older than he ever managed to be. And I’m suddenly reminded of the song. Must be twenty five years since I even thought of it and there it is dancing its jig in my brain and demanding to be sung.

I’m a better guitar player now than I was then but I don’t practice enough. I play it til my fingers bleed alright, but if you don’t play too often that doesn’t always take long. And then I don’t play it again for a month or two.

I’ve taken to leaving the two guitars I play most often (I’ve acquired 8 over the years) in places where they invite me to pick them up and have a sing. In recent years I’ve added a ukelele, a mandolin and a bass guitar into the collection. When another singer comes round I’ll play them until bedtime. But I’ve been writing a lot recently and those Thursday night and Sunday morning sessions don’t happen anymore. I wait until David come home from University and then we sing like old timers. He’s coming back on Thursday for Easter. Maybe that is what put me in mind of a song.

Paul Brady. Pic Myriad Artists.

I saw Paul Brady play. It was actually one of the most enjoyable concerts I’ve ever gone to. T and I went along to the Barnfield Theatre in Exeter and he gave us two hours of some of the best arranged songs I’d heard. It was during the mid eighties and he was borderline big time and was becoming as influenced by the over blown production techniques of the time as he was of traditional music and good old acoustic guitar singer song writing. He played an awful lot of very well made songs but he didn’t play Arthur McBride. I made up for the omission by singing a clumsy version before bedtime.

Youtube is a wonderful thing. You think of a song and then you think of a particular version of a song and then you think of a particular performance of a particular version of a particular song and you can watch and listen to it at the click of a button. Having been reminded of just how good Paul Brady is and of what a good version he sang I get out the guitar and try to emulate. It doesn’t work on drop D, but I start to get somewhere by simply playing around with how I play the chords up the neck. It’s a lovely mixture of musicianship and nostalgia. If I can be bothered (disciplined enough) to work on it for a day or two I’ll have a song worth playing. I print off a lyric sheet and take it downstairs where I expect the other guitar to be. It isn’t. No mystery. I’m at an age where things often surprise me by being where I left them. But the mandolin is there.

I only know a handful of mandolin chords but a simplified version of the song only has a handful itself. It is after all a folk song. The whole idea is that they were played and sung by people who played and sung for the pleasure not the cleverness. And I begin and, to cut the story short, it sounded fantastic.

The mandolin is brilliant for all of those rolling jigs and reels and the melody line plucked single (double) string stuff but it really comes alive when a strummer gets hold of it. Steve Earl on Copperhead Road, Mike Scott of the Waterboys, Levon Helm bashing out the opening chords of Evangeline. There may be no guitar but I settle down to a session of solo playing accompanied only by alternate mandolin and ukelele. (If a guitar’s strings start to cut into tender, underused fingers, then a mandolin does times ten. No wonder some call them the cheese grater. The uke is nylon strung and is almost balm to the pads after a clatter through The Rolling Stones Out of Time. Mark Wallington wrote a lovely book a couple of years ago about a middle age frustrated rock and roller who goes on a wayward tour of Britain performing at open mic nights on the ukelele and bringing the house down with Chuck Berry, Buddy Holly and Little Richard numbers. Not to be outdone on the frustrated middle aged bit at least I launch into a rather lovely ukelele version of Rave On. I have the undivided attention of a dog and a cat. The fact that it is feeding time doesn’t enter into it. You don’t come between a true musician and his audience.

Photo Credit Mark Wallington

The mandolin again and I think of trying Copperhead Road but give up after a few introductory chords and slip seamlessly into an impromptu version of My Old Friend the Blues. By the time I get the the higher register refrain I’m in seventh heaven.

Photo credit The Daily Loaf

The singing goes on. Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s brilliant medley of Somewhere Over the Rainbow/Wonderful World requires me to run off chords and lyrics but as soon as I begin to intone the introduction (an octave lover than the original and nowhere near as sweet) I’m carried away by the arrangement.

And so the morning pans out. Tim and Jeff Buckley, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Jake Thackray, Joni Mitchell (Both Sides Now sung in the style of George Formby), George Harrison (himself a devoted advocate of the ukelele) all get the four (eight) string treatment. My fingers bleed, my voice goes hoarse. Once it goes hoarse I move onto Merle Haggard and George Jones.

It was unintended and improvised throughout but this was one of the most enjoyable sessions I’ve had. Once we had two cats and a dog I had at least one cat to play ice hockey with the plectrums and to sprawl across the song sheets. David will be back home at the weekend and a good sing will be in order. I’ve got a few arrangements he may never have heard before.

Day 102: But It’s Nowhere Near Bolton

Tags

Arnold Bennett, Bolton Abbey, Booths, Bradford, Ilkley, Mark Wallington, Rick Stein, Sainsbury, Yorkshire

A Cycle on the Celtic Fringe … Part 13

 

 

Twenty per cent of the population of Ilkley are retired. A further 14% are involved in education. And the town is in Yorkshire. Was there ever a stronger recipe for a town that knows it’s right and is going to point out why you are wrong? It’s also one of those strangely wealthy towns that Yorkshire keeps quiet about. Yes, it boasts about Harrogate and its splendours. This is where the Bradford millionaires hung those silk hats. Ilkley though, like Otley, Malton and Northallerton is dripping with cash and the secret is largely kept in-house.

Cars used to be an indication of wealth but the boom in over sized vehicles has now added the prestige motor to the growing list, Burberry and Pringle have long been victims, of status symbols that no longer confer status. The polished pride and joy outside the average Ilkley house is as likely to be a Fiat 500 as a Mercedes. Mini Coopers are popular but there are still plenty of lane blocking four by fours which give drivers such advantages on the well ironed Yorkshire roads; especially on the four days when it snows.

Shops are what separates Ilkley from its poorer neighbours. As the crow flies, we’re only a few miles from Bradford and Keighley. In terms of living standards, and what middle class people like to call quality of life; there is no comparison. Asda, Sainsbury’s and Morrisons may clamber for space to trade to the south but here in Wealthyville we’ve got Booths. I don’t have a problem with this. I come from Cumbria (taking a 1974 boundary change into the reckoning) and we’ve got lots of Booths up there and a very fine supermarket it is. Booths outshines Waitrose when it comes to quality and provenance. You cannot go in and not buy something rather special and probably quite local.

 

Lishman’s is a butcher of some renown, but when you consider that much of that renown was conferred by the self-proclaimed food hero, Rick Stein, I’d give it a go before you make up your own mind. I did; it’s very good. Betty’s only have tearooms in five towns and Ilkley is one of them. Of course, in a town with so many current and retired teachers, there’s a bookshop, and an independent one at that. Groves should survive the threat of Amazon better than most. This is a town to be seen with a book in a tearoom or coffee shop.

I may sound mocking. I’m not. I don’t much care for the snobbery that is rife around town but, as far as being a centre of independent shops, I’d not only praise Ilkley, I’d go as far as to recommend people go there and have a very nice day out. Duttons for Buttons makes the journey worthwhile on its own.

I have some tea and cake at a nice tearoom a little out of the centre. Make a note that Darwin is celebrated as belonging to the town, though I can find no record of him doing more than staying in the local spa at Ben Rhyding for a few days. Grantham keeps quiet about a similar link with Tom Paine but Ilkley pushes the Darwin link quite hard.

The cycle shop is another of the new wave emporia where fashion seems to outweigh matters mechanical. I want brake blocks. The assistant tries to sell me designer blocks for £12. Who on earth cares what their brake blocks look like. He eventually sells me some without a prominent brand name. I crave a cycle shop where you get served by someone who knows about bicycles and who sells you what you need rather than what they want to convince you you need. I crave Edison’s Cycles back in Clowne.

I’ve enjoyed my stay but I’m more than happy to leave. There’s a cycle route past the golf club. This means having to avoid a mixture of large cars being driven by small men in diamond pattern jumpers who can barely see over the steering wheels, and the spandex and lycra squad balancing their over sized backsides on ultra lightweight mountain bikes. It’s the start of Wharfdale and I’m accompanied by them for the rest of the day.

Bolton Abbey is a real treat. Coming over the moor has been enough serious exercise after yesterday’s exertions. The man on the car park is getting real pleasure out of charging every passenger and every driver. He seems an awkward customer but is actually just anti-car. He waves me through and tells me a good place to fasten my bike.

The next two hours are among the best I’ve spent all year. I let the shop sell me an ice cream and then I wander dutifully around the ruins before laying myself out on the grass and reading sixty pages of The Old Wive’s Tale. It seems a very Alan Bennett place to be, and Arnold Bennett would probably be his choice of novel for the location. I’ve been reading the odd chapter but this proper read introduces me to Constance and Sofia and they’ve been with me ever since. If I recommend a day out in Ilkley, I definitely recommend reading as much Arnold Bennett as you can manage. Treat yourself to one of his excellent smoked haddock omelettes sometime as well.

Reluctantly I drag myself away from the idyllic riverside location. Despite its popularity with tourists and trippers, there’s still a sense of serenity and peace here. I know I’m following the Wharf for the rest of the day. That generally means gentle climbs, flattish sections and occasional rises. And that is what I get. My legs though have stiffened up while reading on the grass and though I can mange the gentle climbs, with some difficulty, the rises cause me to get off and push. Signposts warn motorist to watch out for cyclists. They do, but not always in the manner intended. “I’m a gentle fellow,” I tell them as they rev past, “You want to harass the fellows in the proper cycling gear.”

The one peculiarity of the cars in the dale is their travelling in convoy. They are obviously locals, in that they live in the valley. They have chosen to leave their native land to find peace and quiet, rest and repose in the countryside. To discover a slower way of life that taps into the centuries old traditions of the dale. And then they drive as fast as they can on the bumper of the car in front of them. For me, it gets cars though in clumps and then leaves a few minutes of having the road to myself. It seems a fair pay off.

I want to detour to Appletreewick because I haven’t been there before and, as well as Mark Wallington setting part of his wonderful Missing Postman, there, it’s also called Appletreewick and ought to be visited for that reason alone. I decide to stay on the main drag and tick off the miles to Kettlewell. I rather regret the decision. The road was fine and increasingly brought back memories of a week looking after a hostel up here. It could be a while though, before I get another chance to say I’ve been to Appletreewick. The locals call it Appletrethick. I think this a mistake. The town does have the strange claim to fame of being the place in Britain you’re most likely to receive a friendly gesture from a motorist. I wonder if these are the same motorists who are giving me all of two feet clearance as they fizz past.