The Making of a Masterpiece
A quarter-century after the release of Penguin Eggs, Ken Hunt looks back at the all-too-brief but brilliant career of Nic Jones

Issue in, issue out, our masthead has explained the inspirational connection. Now it is time to talk about Nic Jones. Folk music’s favourite tense must be the past continuous. One of the most influential people to wrest the past into my continuous was the Kent-born singer, guitarist and fiddler Nic Jones. Twenty-five years ago on 1 June 1980, Topic Records officially released 12TS411, better known as Penguin Eggs, a nine-track masterpiece that took the British scene by storm, much like Dick Gaughan’s Handful of Earth did in 1981.
Even though Nic Jones hasn’t played professionally for decades, those in the know with attuned ears will hear a lot of him about. Martin Carthy sourced him for the tune of Sir Patrick Spens on Signs of Life (1998), Kate Rusby his Drowned Lovers on 10 (2002) and Dylan regurgitated Jones’ Canadee-I-O uncredited hook, pillaged line and dishonourable stinker on Good As I Been To You (1992). His Annachie Gordon has been the starting block for most subsequent versions as well as inspiring John Hegley’s 1980 poem about first getting turned on to folk music.

The press release that accompanied the 1980 album release, written anonymously, as was the custom – but by Topic’s Tony Russell (the spare-time editor of Old Time Music) – was a model of concision and clarity. He did not ‘descend to panegyrics’. “Nic Jones is one of the most remarkable musicians in the country, in any field of music – a deeply accomplished singer and guitarist, whose music revives the almost lost art of the song-as-story. Getting the tale across is his first concern. As he says, ‘the real thing should be you standing up there singing and people listening to the song.’ And as one reviewer has said, ‘he has always selected his songs with an unerring taste…he is one of the very few really outstanding singers and stylists of his generation.’”
 
Nicolas Paul Jones, the youngest of three children, was born on 9 January 1947 in Orpington, England. As far as folk music was concerned, he never got his rightful Damascene conversion. It just slipped into his consciousness. “I never knew anything about this sort of music until about four years ago,” he told Melody Maker’s Andrew Means in November 1970, “when I joined a group that was partly traditional. I actually got to know about traditional music through that.”
 
The group to which he was referring, The Halliard – “a lurid chapter in my life,” he joked in the liner notes to Banddogs (1978) – was also the resident act at the Chelmsford Folk Club in Chelmsford, Essex. The group’s name was a variant of ‘halyard’, a nautical term for the rope or tackle used for raising a sail. By 1966 Jones had taken the plunge and become a full-time musician, replacing Geoff Harris in the group. Together with Dave Moran (“always the driving force”) and Nigel Paterson, he stayed until the group’s end in late 1968. Talking to Jerry Gilbert for Sounds two years later, he said, “The Halliard split because we didn’t get on together musically any more. We’d gone through a period of about six months when our ideas didn’t conflict but eventually we started having ideas that the others didn’t like.”
 
For Jones, The Halliard remains more than a footnote, no matter how uneventful their recording career. The one album that came out on Saga, one of the period’s budget labels found in all good Woolworth’s, set them up as mock-Dubliners to exploit their massive UK hit with Seven Drunken Nights. The real significance of the group was their reassembling songs in the old ‘trad. arr.’ way. “We’d beef doing a lot of broadside material,” he told Gilbert. But what they really did was beef up material.

Their failing was twofold: too little business savvy and too much modesty. They reset and remoulded Boys of Bedlam, Calico Printer’s Clerk and Lancashire Lads, without bothering with the paperwork, an oversight since remedied. (And a Halliard songbook is imminent.) Jones’ reworkings from this period include his 9/8 setting of Billy Don’t You Weep For Me. He chortles remembering how deviations from 3/4 and 4/4 were designed to increase the likelihood of him getting to sing.

1968 was a year of massive changes for our hero. The Halliard split; he went solo; he wed Julia Seymour; and the newly weds settled in Chelmsford. What is too often overlooked in the British folk scene narrative is that significant folk acts – witness Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger, Louis Killen and the High Level Ranters, the Spinners and the Watersons – ran folk clubs too; in 1968 the Joneses took over the running of the Chelmsford Folk Club as a professional business too.

  Jones made his solo debut album, Ballads and Songs (1970), for Trailer. It and its successor Nic Jones (1971) crystallise Jones’ contemporary folk club act. Ultimately they amount to signposts to things to come, portents of his signature guitar style – a composite of percussive, rhythmic playing with ringing snaps, tastefully deployed melodic ornamentations and, above all, economy. By 1971, Peter Bellamy, an early champion (“a great character”) made the observation, in my mind’s eye with a sardonic squint, “Have you noticed that all the people who used to sound like Martin Carthy have started to sound like Nic Jones?” Jones became one of England’s most distinguished stylist gurus for the acoustic guitar, having sopped up Charlie Byrd, Hank Marvin, Wes Montgomery, Martin Carthy, Bert Jansch and Davey Graham.

In June 1971 he had the experience of working on Shirley Collins’ No Roses (1971). It telegraphed the word about him around the world. He only appears on two tracks, singing and playing fiddle on The White Hare and, most notably of all, the album’s The Murder of Maria Marten. “Shirley was one of the most perfect singers,” he exclaims, “because she sang what she felt. She felt the words. She wasn’t one for flash settings. She found the beauty within the songs. The words meant a lot to her. She inspired me in many ways. She made me realise how important the words were: they’re more important than the accompaniments. I used to play flash things and people would go, ‘Wowee!’ Blokes especially can ‘do flash’, do a few riffs here, a few flash notes there. Everyone admires them. People don’t listen to the words; and that’s a bad thing. Shirley Collins showed me how important the words were. That was the key thing. That affected me a lot.”

  To this day, he gets animated – and competitive – about games such as Go, Othello and checkers – going so far as to get a guide to checkers strategies – but his passion for chess remains paramount. His third solo album, The Noah’s Ark Trap (1977), named after a chess ploy, and From The Devil To A Stranger (1978) made it plain that he was a major interpreter. Yet in January 1979, he told Colin Irwin: “My first two records were hideous and the last two have been less hideous.” Half-truths make great copy. A project with Pete & Chris Coe and Tony Rose called Bandoggs led to the one-off Banddogs and two promotional tours.

Next, Jones signed to Topic for what turned into a one-album deal. Belying the polished fluency of Penguin Eggs, much of it was pure spontaneity from the assembled team of Dave Burland (vocals), Bridget Danby (vocals/ recorder) and Tony Hall (melodeon). Burland had received a phone call the day before and went into the studio without knowing what the material was. Whatever they did, it soared. In 1998, the US songwriter Peter Case declared it “one of the finest acoustic albums ever made” to me. It is one of the ten definitive British folk albums of all time.

  One of the mysteries of Nic Jones’ career is how he found two of his most important repertoire items, The Humpback Whale and The Little Pot Stove – the latter the source of Penguin Eggs. Now, Jones was irrevocably secretive about his sources – “All the songs on this record have been learned from books, tapes, records and scraps of paper, all sent to me by friends that I have made around the folk club scene,” was his penny-pinching, ‘official’ low-down on his reworkings. He treated raw material as a vehicle to take him somewhere else. Over and over again Jones displayed an enviable ability to take a handful of musical motifs or lyrical cues and turn them into something inevitable in musical terms. Thus, initial pressings identified Humpback Whale as traditional and Stove as copyright control. Later, it emerged that they were by Harry Robertson (1923-1995), an Australian songwriter who sluiced true-life experiences into fact-and-fiction songs, especially from his days aboard whalers. Two such were Wee Pot Stove (sometimes called Wee Dark Engine Room) and The Ballina Whalers (Jones’ Humpback Whale). Penguin Eggs has several antipodean flavours, most likely picked up on tour in Australia. Robertson’s own Whale Chasing Men (1971), now reissued on ScreenSound Australia, was available – as was a songbook. But Nic Jones can no longer be definite… On 26 February 1982, driving home late from Glossop, he received massive injuries in his “argument with a brick lorry”. It robbed him of much of his memory of events prior to the accident; he fondly remembers tobogganing with his children, Heather and Joe that winter around the December. The crash itself is something that happened to somebody else almost.

Despite guesting on albums by Gerry Hallom, for example, effectively Jones’ professional musical career went on infinite hold. Compounding the family’s enormous distress, his albums prior to Penguin Eggs sank into a moral and legal quagmire – a tragedy they feel no desire to rehash. That Penguin Eggs remains one of Topic’s best-sellers is only partial consolation. Likewise the fact that Jones benefits from two anthologies of club, concert and studio performances, In Search of Nic Jones (1998) and Unearthed (2001) on their own Mollie Music label.

The Mollie Music releases remind how singular he was with their covers of Jeff Deitchmann’s The Jukebox As She Turned, John W. Bratton’s Teddy Bears’ Picnic and Ivor Cutler’s I’m Going In A Field and his own songs Green To Grey, Ruins By The Shore and Rapunzel. In 2004 three additions to the historical record from 1980 appeared on the Sidmouth International Festival compilation, Folk Festival on Gott Discs.

Thankfully, music still remains a constant, though. “There are things I like now,” he grins, “that I wouldn’t have liked then. I used to go for folksongs a lot. Now I tend to write pop songs and jazz things more. Radiohead’s my favourite group. I still keep in touch with old colleagues. I’m looking forward to hearing Barry Dransfield’s new album [Unruly]. If Robin or Barry Dransfield make a record, I want to hear it!”

I am of an age to have seen Nic Jones perform at the height of his powers. It pains me to say that in both cases, the visual images are stronger than the musical. Since my contemporaneous notes are lost, my musical memories are certainly contaminated by accretions of memory and too many hours of listening pleasure/sorrow. Each time I revisit Penguin Eggs, my mind’s ear hears Jones playing most if not all of Penguin Eggs in the back function room of Sutton’s Red Lion (where the Rolling Stones played and Pentangle formed). The word matchlessness comes to mind.

With particular thanks to Nic and Julia Jones, Jerry Gilbert and Phil Wilson. Visit www.nicjones.net for information about obtaining his recordings in Europe and North America.

You can read a review of Penguin Eggs here.