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The 2005 Ric Sanders Cropredy Interview by Jessica Reed
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Ric Sanders, Cropredy, 13/08/05
For most, Ric Sanders will need no introduction. One of the leading fiddle-players on the British folk scene he has been with Fairport Convention since 1985 and has also played with the Albion Band, the Soft Machine and his own trio, The Ric Sanders Group. .
We managed to corner Ric just before Fairport’s set at this year’s Cropredy. Ever the genial eccentric he was happy to talk about the festival, meeting childhood heroes and Fairport’s hopes for the future…
So Ric, what can we expect from tonight’s Cropredy performance?
Oh - as usual it will be a mixture of old and new – I just can’t wait to get on stage now!
I hear that there are to be a number of guest performances…
Yes, we’ll have the wonderful Beth Nielsen Chapman, singing some Sandy Denny songs. One of the great things about Cropredy is - not having a girl vocalist in the group anymore on a regular basis - it is our one opportunity to represent Sandy Denny. Having Beth Nielsen Chapman here this year it seemed obvious to ask her to select a couple of songs. And we also have the wonderful Jackie McShee who is an iconic voice if there ever was. She knew Sandy very well, and of course her partner is Gerry Conway, our drummer – so we thought we can’t have Jackie here and not ask her to do a Sandy Denny song!
She actually came out with a choice that delighted me – Come All Ye - because it’s one that I’ve never played and before. Also - when I started playing music – I took up the fiddle when I was 17 – I heard Liege and Leif I remember sitting in my mum and dad’s house in Solihull, Birmingham and putting on that first track Come all Ye and from the first second I heard it, it just blew me away and I thought ‘I gotta get that fiddle going, and I’d better scrape the varnish off it and put a pickup on it, and I’d better start growing my hair and buy some sunglasses!” It all came to me when I heard that track Come All Ye…
And Jackie – bless her heart – said ‘Shall we do Come all Ye?’ and we all yes! We jumped at the chance! Fairport at that time has an area of its music which hasn’t been pursued so much since, stuff like Tamlin and Matty Groves and Come All Ye, they’re kind of just a groove. There’s also A Sailor’s Life which is one of the first ones that they did like that, where you don’t really arrange it, you just jam it, its jamming folk. If we can find the time I’d certainly like to pursue that direction in the future.
Matty Groves has never been arranged, it’s the one number in Fairport that I can never remember ever rehearsing, even when I first joined the band. We rehearse the whole set and the ending of Matty Groves never but the song itself.
Does this spontaneous and unplanned playing make your long tours less tiring?
Long tours can be tiring, but it’s never the music that makes it tiring – it’s the travelling. Sometimes people do ask ‘Don’t you get fed up of playing that same stuff over and over again?’ And I don’t - because if a piece of music is good to start with then it’s good forever! I would never get fed up of playing Caravan by Duke Ellington or Tears in Heaven by Eric Clapton, because they are great pieces of music. I would never get fed up of playing The Hiring Fair by Ralph McTell as it’s a beautiful song, it always offers something new and it has grown. If we’d had a novelty hit and we had to play that every night, that would be a different matter, but if it’s good to start with it’s good for good, I guess.
And I suppose there are the old favourites that fans request time and again…
Yes, and there are a few things in tonight’s set that we haven’t played for along time. I think we may have done Red and Gold last year, but we’re doing it again, and that’s one that people request over and over again. But from that Glady’s Leap album, Wat Tyler is one that we haven’t played for ages - I used to play Dave Mattack’s keyboards for that one. Well we don’t have any keyboards in the band now, but I’m actually using my dad’s old home keyboard on stage tonight – it hasn’t even got an output – we had to have a special lead made up, I don’t think that Ric Wakeman is losing any sleep!
Tonight there is going to be a very different vibe to when you are normally touring…
Yeah – I think we all get pretty nervous. I know I do, I hope I hide it well, but am actually shaking. It means so much and you want everything to go right. It may be a little damp, but we’re just going to do the best we can. The Cropredy audience are just so special.
Obviously Dave Swarbrick was integral to the bands earlier sound. He has been quite ill recently…
I believe he’s here somewhere… And he’s had a double lung transplant! I think that he’s making as greater recovery as you can make and as long as he doesn’t try and take up smoking again, I think he may be in the clear!
He has been a tremendous influence on you…
He was a great influence, but in a fairly weird way really because I don’t actually play anything like him. In terms of style and technique I was much more influenced by jazz-fusion violinists, like David LaFlamme, Jerry Goodman and Sugarcane Harris.
At the same time as I was getting into Leige and Leaf I was getting into It’s a Beautiful Day by David LaFlamme and that took me off into the wonderful world of Miles Davis and John McCloughlin and Herbie Hancock. That was the music I was most involved in and I got into the folk-rock business because I was lucky enough to be asked to join Ashley Hutchings’ Albion Band, in about 1977 at a time that I had already joined the Soft Machine, a jazz fusion band.
I am an enthusiast for folk music, rather than an expert - and folk is a great vehicle for improvisation, more than half of what I play on stage is improvised. I find it very difficult to play the same thing twice. I recently heard that ‘great jazz is when you never play the same thing once’ and if you think about it – it makes sense!
So will Fairport be recording again anytime soon?
We will be, I don’t know where, because we haven’t got Woodworm Studios anymore – but I’ve got a very nice shed!
I heard that you sold the studio?
Yes, it’s still called Woodworm Studios and it is now owned by somebody else… But it’s available for hire – so who knows! I don’t know where we’ll record next but we are recording a lot of gigs on the winter tour, recording the warm up gigs and recording tonight. So we have loads of live tapes that can’t be modified or mixed or anything, they just are what they are… I’m flinging a library of live stuff at I-Tunes!
We already did a free four-track CD that we gave away with the first 500 tickets for Cropredy. The feedback that we had was that people really love those quite raw, live desk tapes.
Fairport has always been such a live band anyway…
Absolutely! And a raw one, warts - and all I certainly don’t mind listening through those recordings. So I think that we may well be putting out some of these ‘official bootlegs’ as that’s what people like. As for the next studio recording I don’t know – watch this space!
And you’ve got another winter tour coming up?
Yes. It’s business as usual, and I’m up for it more than ever before. When you go through a time of change in a band, you think ‘uh oh – what’s going on here!’ It was a very strange feeling thinking that Cropredy might not happen. For most of the people out there it is the most relaxing weekend of their year – it’s the least relaxing weekend of my year – but I love it! I’m just desperate to be out there and do it now.
With Cropredy being ‘under new management’ this year do you think that the atmosphere has changed or do you think that it is as it ever was?
I think as far as I can tell, from the audience point of view, there is little difference, I don’t know how much you’ve perceived, but I feel that it is pretty much the same. The bar’s the same! I really love the booking policy this year. Dare I say that in the future I hope that it could be a little more adventurous…
Actually for me there is a bit of a ‘summer of love’ vibe - we’ve all got these psycadellic t-shirts! I was backstage earlier chatting to Chicken Hirsh, drummer with Country Joe, one of the original Fish…
(…I was sitting in my bedroom at 17 years old listening to them, San Francisco could have been another planet and they were the coolest dudes on the planet, they were doing quite political stuff and they were far out – and here I am, I had to pinch myself – ‘I’m talking to Chicken Hirsh man, I can’t believe it!’ …)
…Anyway, he was great, he said ‘This festival has got a fantastic vibe; it’s just like the old days!’ And I was pleased to hear that, and I think he’s right y’know.
There are so many great bands, so many great young musicians and although Cropredy has never really embraced what’s called ‘world music’, if I’m anything to do with it in the future I would like to get acts from around the globe. And it’s always great to have classic stuff like Country Joe, so it could be a real mix.
Is it a folk festival? Is it a rock festival? I don’t know it’s just ‘a festival’!
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