Interview: Reg Meuross

Sitting outside the Friary, in the shadow of the imposing Beverley Minster, on a warm Sunday evening, Northern Sky spoke to singer songwriter Reg Meuross about Dragonflys, Jackie Oates and Clifford T Ward...

Picture: Liam Wilkinson

AW: I'm now with singer songwriter and one time member of the Panic Brothers Reg Meuross, how you doing?

RM: I'm okay, nice to see you

AW: Your first time at Beverley?

RM: It is actually yeah, first time I've played here. I've been here before as part of the rural touring, we've played in the area, but never played at the festival before. I've known of it for a long time and I've known of Chris for a long time who runs it, Chris Wade, and our paths have sort of crossed occasionally but I never got to play it

AW: We saw you earlier today when you just came into the site, picked up your guitar and joined Karen Tweed in the cafe there and you soon had a crowd around you, was that encouraging?

RM: Yeah, well completely since nobody knew we were here. We found out that me and Karen were going to be in the area because I was doing some rural touring up in Cumbria. I was doing some village halls and Karen was going to be around anyway. We'd done some recording on Friday with Bruce Molsky, the three of us. Karen's doing a solo album and Bruce was over to do the festival and she'd booked a church in Blyth in Nottinghamshire and we did some recording there, the three of us, then they came up to the festival, having called Chris and said basically can we have a pass and maybe you know, do some stuff while we were here. So we are like a real late addition and then I went up to Cumbria and did a couple of solo gigs and came back down to meet her last night, we did a little set and now we've got a couple today

AW: That's great. Well Bruce has been at the festival, he's been all over the place and he was well received

RM: I'm not surprised, he's fantastic

AW: He works just as well in a small room, a small gathering as he does on a main concert stage

RM: I'm sure, well he's the real deal as far as I'm concerned, he is absolutely right and we got on so well you know with basically me playing guitar, Bruce on fiddle and Karen on accordion, just doing her tunes. it was a magical magical session, it was really lovely

AW: Sounds like an excellent line up

RM: Yeah

AW: Well you came to my attention about a year ago when an early promotional copy of your album Dragonfly dropped onto my doormat and a quick scan of the sleeve indicated that you were in such company as Rabbit Bundrick on keyboards and BJ Cole on pedal steel as well as from the younger end of the spectrum Jackie Oates on fiddle, it made me listen with keen interest. How did you get to know these musicians?

RM: I've been around for a while, you know. The Panic Brothers was a long time ago, that was the late Eighties and at that time I met Hank Wangford who I worked with for a while and through him I met BJ and I always wanted to use BJ but never did. I've always been slightly wary of the whole country thing, whenever English people do country you're always in danger of looking like a tribute act or being a bit of an Americanophile or something, so although I've always loved country I've always been careful not to kind of lay it on too thick. Unfortunately when you start using a dobro or a pedal steel, people immediately think country and certainly because I'm not a country singer, I'm a pop folk singer if you like, but I'm not a country singer so I don't want to give people that impression, so I've been careful about it. On that album, the song "Without Love" just seemed perfect for BJ, in fact I wasn't even there. BJ turned up at the studio, Roy Dodds' studio where I recorded most of the stuff, put the stuff down and it was just perfect. I didn't have to tell him what to do; you don't have to tell someone like that what to do. Rabbit I've known for a very long time, he was married to my mother-in-law. My mother-in-law was married to Mike Vickers from Manfred Mann so my wife is the daughter of them, and they had a separation and she met Rabbit and so we've kind of known Rabbit and The Who sort of as family friends for years. As you can imagine, someone like Rabbit, whose day job is playing with The Who for which he gets handsomely paid, doesn't work all the time and doesn't work anywhere near as much as he'd like to and he's such a fantastic musician. He's in my opinion one of the best, not just piano players but keyboard players, certainly his Hammond playing and stuff like that, which is what I use mostly of Rabbit, his Hammond playing. He doesn't really charge me, you know, I couldn't afford to employ him, I certainly couldn't keep up with The Who's fees, so as a friend he loves playing with me, it gives him the chance to do different things, you know essentially he's a real musician he loves to play, so sometimes I give him a bit of money and he says I'll spend that on tapes or something, it's not really wages. So I'm very lucky, I'm lucky to do that. It's the same with Jackie Oates you know, a friend, and I heard her in a folk club pretty much before anybody knew who she was probably, a few years ago now and I just thought she had a sound, a really authentic sound. I love what Jackie does, it's so pure, her voice, her playing, there's no artifice about it, you know there's no attitude to what she does, she just does it and the way it comes out is the way she does it and I thought I would love to work with her one day but I never thought how. How does somebody like me with that whole background in pop music, rock music, singer songwriter, folk music, American folk music, how do we kind of bridge that gap? And it was really Phil Beer who achieved that and Phil Knew her as well and he said oh we've got this great girl called Jackie Oates and I said I know her and he said well shall I bring her to a gig and I said yeah, bring her along. She just kind of slotted in and we just did some recording, she did "Dragonfly" with me, I think that was one of the first things she did and it was dead right

AW: Well she's such an exceptional player and generous, I mean I saw her at Shepley and she did a workshop and just one chap turned up to do a fiddle workshop and she just treated it like a free hour-long master class lesson and the chap was thrilled. He learned some Cornish songs in that short space of time. You mentioned Phil Beer, we know that Karen Tweed's somewhere about, and with your work with Jackie Oates, is it important to have these people around you? I think of you as that one solo artist, the lone man with a guitar but there's always somebody who comes to join you on stage

RM: Well I think it's about breaking down barriers if that doesn't sound too pretentious, because if I play with Phil, there will be people there who have come to see Phil who haven't come to see me and they will hopefully go away liking what I do and visa versa. People will come and see me and say who was that guy, who was that masked man you know, totally impressed by what they've heard and it's the same with Karen. Karen's background is in Irish folk music, which she is an absolute virtuoso, you know she is absolutely brilliant and instrumentally leagues away from what I am but to be able to play with people like that I can hold my own as a singer songwriter and when people like that say I would like to play with you, which often happens, with Phil that was the case, I'm not going to say no. I also love the spontaneity of it all, I've always done that, I love the spontaneity of just going on the stage and bringing somebody on. Most people who are confident enough to walk onto a stage and busk with you pretty much know their stuff, if they don't you're in big trouble, but when you've got people with the ability of, well Miranda Sykes is another one you know, a bass player who will just get up and start playing and will hardly get a note wrong and Phil is the same, Karen is the same, it's just a real joy to play with people like that and also if it's my audience, just to see their reaction to those people and then they'll buy their CDs and I love all that. I think it's what it's all about, again it's quite a clichéd thing but that 'on the road' community that we have, I do think of myself as a soloist, I am a traveling singer songwriter, that's what I do but I have the freedom to work with whoever I want to and whoever is willing to work with me and why not?

Picture: Liam Wilkinson

AW: Exactly. Well listening to your songs, it's immediately obvious that you like stories are you always looking out for a good story to tell, do you go to libraries to delve in there

RM: No I don't, I'm not a researcher. I mean I love research, I really like that, there's a bit of journalism in the blood, I quite like writing, I like constructing articles and constructing pieces and whittling them down, but I think for me it's just slightly more just a quirky curiosity. I love the unusual, I love the twist and it's only certain things that will interest me. Quite often people will come up to me and even send me stuff saying this will make a good song and they don't. It almost has to be something that finds its way to me like the Dick Turpin song for instance, a guy suggested that as a song and I thought yes it would but I never knew what to do and I never knew how I was going to approach it or anything and then I bought this cut away capo which I got in America and it only covers three of the strings on the guitar, which gives the guitar a very particular sound, very different sound. I was playing with that and I was kind of singing to myself some rubbish, like the ham and eggs thing with Yesterday (sings) and I sang the line Lizzie loved a highwayman because I knew Dick was married to a girl called Lizzie and then that was it, suddenly that story became worth writing and then I quickly got on the Internet and I did some research, I read a lot about it and I put it all together. There has to be a kind of a spark really, I can write to order but I don't think they make the best songs. I think the best songs come to you to some degree

AW: Well songs about desertion, they've been a staple for folk singers throughout the ages and your song "And Jesus Wept" is poignant in that it addresses the case of Harry Farr, the first soldier to receive a pardon by the British government after being executed ninety years earlier by his own troops even though he was known to be suffering from shell shock. How did you come to write such a moving and sympathetic song?

RM: Again that came from sort of out of left field actually that song, because I originally played in a place called Airlie Kings in Herefordshire, that sort of way and I was a bit of a fan of Clifford T Ward in his day and I thought he had some interesting songs. I mean he could be very fey as well, but he wrote some quite interesting songs and I was quite moved by the story of Clifford T Ward, who got a debilitating illness and towards the end of his life was impoverished and they were trying to raise money to keep him and eventually he died, a few years ago. I was in Airlie Kings and I met a guy and I just happened to be talking to him about Clifford T Ward and he said well did you know that this is where he lived and I used to play in his band. We got talking and it turned out that this whole community had been devastated by the local industry closing down, I think it might have been the steel industry, I don't really know what it was, I just knew that this place had this feel. Then that mixed with that kind of pathetic feel about Clifford T Ward and that waste of a beautiful young man who wrote beautiful music and then deteriorated and that awful sadness that comes with all that gave me the line 'the hand of God came down last night and Jesus wept'. That's where that came from, which was the notion that something can be right and yet appear to be so wrong and just because it's right or religion says it's right or the government says it's right doesn't mean you can't question it and it doesn't mean you can't feel bad about it and it doesn't mean you can't rally against the inequity of it all. I only had that and then I came away and actually wrote a whole lyric about that. Somehow it wasn't quite right and then I just happened to read in the paper the Harry story and thought that's where it belongs, so then the rest of it was very easy. I did some research, I went to the website Shot at Dawn and read some stuff and was just so moved by the story. It just seemed to fit perfectly that feeling that this was so wrong and yet it could be justified by a government, a nation who could justify something like that, something so wrong and criminal and I think it's a shameful thing and in my mind it's an absolute crime, there's no question. There's a lot of that, we're surrounded by stuff like that so to write a story about it is probably my way of expressing my feelings about it and then hoping that other people will then listen to that and will sympathise with me and come up and say you're right and then that kind of makes it right in a way, do you understand what I mean?

AW: I do

RM: The reaction it's had from Mike Harding (radio show) and from doing it in the Albert Hall, which was wonderful, to be able to sing that in the Royal Albert Hall and to sing the line 'when the sun sets on England will you think of me', which I associate very much with the Albert Hall, Armistice and that whole centre of the British Empire and everything was very moving for me and I feel very right about it and you probably know that since then I've been contacted by his granddaughter who achieved a pardon and she's become a good friend and now there's talk about a film

AW: Oh really?

RM: Well there already was talk about a film called Shot at Dawn, based on the soldiers, there were 306 of them and it's in production now. They've approached me about using the music and stuff like that, so hopefully something might happen

AW: Fingers crossed. I know somebody called out for it today in the cafe

RM: Yeah, somebody had heard it on the radio, but it wasn't really the time and place for it

AW: Well we're sat right outside the Friary, right next to the Beverley Minster and the trains and the cars have been going by; you're playing in the Friary in about five minutes time actually, are you looking forward to it?

RM: Yes, we're wondering at the moment whether anyone is going to turn up

AW: Well it's not fully advertised is it?

RM: No, we did our best to try and let people know earlier on when we were playing in the cafe but we shall see. At the worst, me and Karen who are starting to do some work together, so far we haven't been able to have a rehearsal, we've done five gigs, we've done Southwell, Wombwell Mad-fest, and the 100 Club and we've just been winging it, so at the worst we'll get a bit of a rehearsal in

AW: Well I hope the whisper has gone around the festival and I hope you get some people in. Reg it's been an absolute pleasure talking to you

RM: Thank you Allan


Dragonfly is available now from Reg Meuross's website:

www.regmeuross.com