Colin-Harper.com

The next few weeks should see at least two CDs with my involvement and annotation appear on the market: the remastered 1971 Anne Briggs album The Time Has Come, from SonyBMG, with an apparently splendid booklet design from the always excellent Phil Smee; and a ‘new’ set of John Martyn unearthings entitled The Battle Of Medway: July 17 1973, on Hux. The Martyn album - released with the man’s full approval - is particularly noteworthy in being the first commercial release from the late Geoff Harden’s remarkable archive of folk club recordings which were bequeathed to me last year. Aside from Geoff’s recordings of folk club gigs spanning 1963-89, he also taped an assiduous amount of radio, including a tranche of late ‘60s sessions from all sorts of artists for John Peel’s legendary BBC Radio 1 shows Top Gear and Nightride, and material from other stations. The John Martyn CD draws from both wells in featuring the live gig in blistering stereo together with four bonus tracks in atmospheric mono from a European radio session in 1968 which almost certainly don’t exist in any other form.

The tracks have been mastered by Cormac O’Kane who is - among his many other activities
(not least being the driving force behind two bands currently storming Belfast’s café society, namely the Helen McGurk vehicle Vertigo Bird and the quite brilliant, if inelegantly named, Kyron & The Strangels) - also working on the near-forensic mixing of my friend Janet Holmes’ second album.. I’m not involved in this one in the same way as I was with her first - financially and creatively (I guess I just ran out of both) - but I’m certainly cheerleading from the sidelines. It will indeed be a great record, her magnum opus.. It may sell a million or it may sell 25 copies, but it will be the absolute best from one of the great voices - who has also become a rather fine songwriter. Meanwhile, here below is the tracklist and cover blurb from the Martyn CD:

Famed for the late-night cool of his ‘70s studio albums and the blistering live shows of the same era, John Martyn forged a unique path through the accepted forms of folk, jazz and rock, bringing electric power into the folk clubs and soulful balladry into the colleges. While Live At Leeds, recorded in 1975, has long defined the man’s sound during his breakthrough years on the college circuit, little has survived of his path-finding years in the folk clubs - until now. Recorded in July 1973, in ambient stereo by club organiser Geoff Harden at Medway in Kent, in between the releases of Solid Air and Inside Out, this is the sound of John Martyn - on one of his determinedly last ever folk club gigs - frightening the living daylights out of anyone who came there expecting ‘The Wild Rover’.

Tracks:

Live at Medway 1973:
1. Outside In
2. Mr Jelly Roll Baker
3. Don’t wanna Know
4. May You Never
5. Singing In The Rain
6. Head And Heart
7. Seven Black Roses
8. Sugar Cube
9. I’d Rather Be the Devil

Bonus 1968 radio session:
10. Flying On Home
11. Different From The Book
12. Dusty
13. Hello Train

Still on the subject of Geoff, a tribute show featuring many artists he admired, and who appreciated his support in print and on radio, will be happening under the banner of the Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival in Belfast on May 7th (check out their website for details), very capably organised by Geoff‘s radio protégé Kresanna Aigner, who has continued the Sunday afternoon show Geoff had anchored on Belfast’s U105 FM. Though confirmed too late to be included in the advertising, the bill features myself, in some kind of introductory capacity, and my friend Brian Houston, performing a couple of numbers.

Around the same date as the tribute show the Arts Council of Northern Ireland will be holding a press launch to mark the installing of the first cache of digitised recordings from the Geoff Harden Archive into the Arts Council’s Northern Ireland Music Archive project, located at Central Library, Belfast. An audio-visual set-up - and still just the tip of the iceberg at this stage - a selection of concerts will be available to the public to listen to alongside reproductions on-screen of the full set of Ulster Folk News, a local folk magazine published and edited by Geoff during the ‘80s. The concerts that will initially be available are a cross section of Geoff’s recordings made while based in Northern Ireland: seven reels worth of mono recordings from the now obscure Pike Folk Club in Belfast in 1967; three superb quality pro recordings from the mid ‘70s of shows in Belfast and Coleraine by Andy Irvine & Paul Brady, Clannad and The Bothy Band - seemingly made by BBC Northern Ireland, but probably now only surviving through the copies procured from BBC producers by Geoff; and several concerts from Geoff’s fondly-recalled Sunflower Folk Club in Belfast, including the very first night in November 1977 featuring Len Graham & Joe Holmes, and a selection of other nights over the next few years with notable local and international guest artists.

A great job has been done on the digitising thus far by music-technology graduate, spieliologist and local soft-rock sensation Tony Furnell, funded with a limited tranche of money from the Arts Council. If all goes to plan, Tony will be able to continue the process with funding directly from myself in conjunction with a not-for-profit group currently being constituted for the purpose. To comprise Geoff’s colleague at New Belfast Community Arts, Conor Shields, alongside myself, jazz/blues writer Trevor Hodgett and scientist Dr Kevin Cooper, the group will aim to secure lottery funding to continue the digitising/preserving process directly - unencumbered by the need to focus exclusively on Northern Ireland recordings, which has understandably hallmarked the process thus far - and distribute the digitised material to a number of recognised folk music archives around Britain and Ireland. It may well be that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland may secure further funding of their own to continue the Northern Ireland-focused work, which is absolutely fine by me: it all works towards essentially the same goal, which is to make Geoff’s legacy or recordings available to posterity.

One amusing aside to all this involves the Bee Gees: among Geoff’s off-air recordings of BBC radio sessions from the late ‘60s - which I’m still identifying and cataloguing (a painstaking process, whenever time allows) - I found five 1967-68 goodies recorded for John Peel by the brothers Gibb, which I’ve now had transferred to CD for Warner Bros/Rhino in the USA who are currently working on some rather exquisite Bee Gees deluxe reissues. There are doubtless many other artists/labels I could help in similar ways - obviously, with BBC broadcast material the copyright resides wholly with the BBC and said artists/labels need to make their own arrangements there - but it will need thought: even transferring a few tracks in a studio is a lot of time and effort and, even with the generous Bernard Flanagan doing the ProTools honours, a modicum of expense (hey, the Bee Gees owe me a tenner!). Time will tell.

A founder member of Atomic Rooster (who were featured rather heavily on the soundtracks to several episodes of BBC TV’s Life On Mars) the late Vincent Crane was something of a visionary, certainly a very singular and talented pianist/organist/writer who remains sadly under-known and under-rated to this day. Following on from my involvement with Sanctuary’s series of expanded Rooster reissues a few years ago, I’m delighted to be working on a 2CD anthology, also for Sanctuary, focused on Crane himself. Disc one will feature the best of his own compositions for Rooster from their five 1970-73 albums; disc two will feature his work with Arthur Brown, with Rory Gallagher, with Peter Green and Ray Dorset in Katmandu, with Dexy’s Midnight Runners, with reformed versions of Rooster and with performance poet Paul Green, along with one or two other rare or unreleased goodies, hopefully. The timescale of the release is unknown, but will certainly be this year. One factor that may influence the timing - or vice-versa - is a piece I’ve written on Vince for Mojo. Commissioned and delivered couple of years ago, I would love to see the piece finally in print and a compilation like this might be the very oil the wheel needs. That or a posthumous No.1 single.