Inspiration
The ideas behind the songs
'Salamander' came from a few different places. I've always known I was
from gypsy stock but when I became 40 I learned that my bloodline comes
from Romany heritage. I did some research on Romanies, found out that
they arose in Northern India and slowly made their way west over the last
1000 years.
I thought I'd write a romantic history about how my ancestors may have
travelled from the east unto here in the west. In the song are 'key' words
and phrases that I'd stored up over the years just waiting for a song
to put them in - like, I'd always wanted to put 'Fellow travellers' in
a song. Or this vague concept called 'the ironland' and names like 'Samarkand
and fair Cathay'......'a city built on crimson sand'....'the crystal sea'.
The concept of a storyteller that 'spins a yarn'. Luckily all these yearnings
came together in one song. I was lucky.
'Finagle's Dream' came from my interest in Celtic and British mythology.
Back in mystic times there were many travellers...wizards, witches, bards,
bandits, outlaws, storytellers, minstrels and musicians.
 I
had this idea of a minstrel harper in his youth who is in my song 'The
Harper' (also on Sailing
To The Moon & Man of The Earth)
when he was young and healthy and carried the news from town to town.
I cottoned on to the name 'Finagle' from a frequently used curse in a
Larry Niven sci-fi novel...Ringworld I think it was. Finagle was the same
harper but in his Autumn years when he was full of remorse and regret
over his unfulfilled ambition. A bit like me really (he jested).
Some of it may come from the historically factual blind Irish harper
Turlough
O'Carolan, who travelled the length and breadth of Ireland some 200
years ago and composed some of the most beautiful tunes ever written for
the Celtic harp.
I was walking home from work one day in 1972 I think it was, when I spied
a council gardener leaning on his spade doing nothing in particular. I
thought (somewhat cynically) 'Well there's a real man of the soil, man
of the earth, man of the soil'.... A half melody clicked into my mind
and I ran the last mile home to my guitar. I got it! You could lose potential
songs if you didn't run fast enough in those days, before portable cassette
machines were available to the public. I fused that experience with many
visits to my Grandfather's allotment in Horden Colliery. He didn't have
a shed at the allotment, he had an old Gypsy Vardo (a traditional caravan
with the curved down roofs at both ends.) I thought this was normal and
I wondered why his allotment neighbours had square sheds.
As far as I can gather nowadays my ancestors (The Romany) travelled from
the Northern India to the Near West. They seemed to have surfaced in Ireland
and some of them crossed back across the Irish Sea to England. They settled
in Staffordshire when the Potteries were booming, a branch of the family
peeled off and went to County Duham when the coal mines were opening up
(that's my branch). Imagine....Romany Gypsies working down the pit. My
Grandfather was different, he went to work in the Steel/Ironwrks in Hartlepool.
When I wrote 'Man Of The Earth' I thought I was going to be stuck working
in steel factories for the rest of my life, hence the last verse.
One day this guy called Vin Garbutt (www.vingarbutt.com)
phoned me and asked me if he could sing 'Man Of The Earth'. I said 'Yes
Vin, please do, I'll send you it on a cassette'. Vin replied ' No! I've
got a recorder here, sing it down the phone'. I didn't want to but I did,
and without a guitar in my hands. It must have sounded a bit strange,
but Vin got it.
The rest is Folk History.
A few ideas came together at one time. I have a cousin who had a bit
of a speech impediment when he was young. His pronouncement was incomplete.
Because he lived in a smallish rural town he became known as the 'Village
Idiot' because he couldn't speak properly. But he was a 'savant' in his
early years. He knew where all the flowers grew, he knew where the birds
nested, he knew where the weasels and the badgers lived. Nowadays he's
a normal, very intelligent guy who's done very well.
I watched an early TV dramatisation called 'The Roses Of Eyam' about
the Derbyshire village that, in 1665, bravely cut themselves off from
the rest of world so that their received 'disease' would not spread from
them. The actor that portrayed the village idiot was brilliant.
I crossed the early memories of my cousin 'the savant' with that actor
and the idea of him from 'The Roses Of Eyam'. Hence 'The Village Fool'
came to exist.
I've always been attracted to the idea of travelling (I put it down to
my Gypsy blood). I love to go to places I've never been to before.
Back in my 20's I read a novel 'Davy' written by Edgar Pangborn about
a guy that travelled in a post Holocaust life in North America. The images
from the novel were strong, the disasters and the effects of nuclear war
were horrible. But there was a certain humour throughout the novel that
permeated itself into my song 'Davy'. And then I wrote the chorus. The
song and the chorus clicked. Probably the best chorus I've written to
date.
When my brother and I were about 11 and 12 years old we heard about a
hermit who lived in a self-built driftwood shack on the wildest, most
inhospitable coal beach in County Durham. We went to visit him, (a good
six mile walk) and there he was sitting outside his shack with a Naval
Captain's cap on his head. We took him things that we thought would be
useful to him..a ball of string, a couple of tins of beans, and, once,
a can of paraffin. We dragged the beach collecting driftwood and sea coal
for his fire.
He claimed to be sailor fallen on hard times but we knew that he'd been
a coalminer who'd had too much time underground. That was all we knew
about him. He seemed to be a genuinely nice bloke. The main thing I remember
is that, while he wasn't ecstatically happy, he had settled for his lot
in life. I heard in later life that the "Welfare people" took
him from the beach and placed him in a 'Home'. He died very soon after.
I like to think that he died of comfort.
I tried for so many years to write a song about him. He was known locally
as 'Old Jack'. In my first attempt at the song I called him 'Gentle John'.
Well.... I was young....it was a bit twee, but I think I got it right
in 'Jack Of Hawthorn'.
It's a particular favourite of mine, for both the lyrics and the very
satisfying way of playing the guitar. I've found that people who know
the song really want me to sing it on a gig. For technical reasons I save
it for the encore, which can be a bit risky.....especially if I don't
get an encore. Ho ho!
I've always been fascinated by theatres. In my somewhat chequered career
I've occasionally found myself alone in a theatre or performing space
long before the audience arrive. In empty theatres I swear I can feel
a kind of phantom vibrancy touching me just behind my arms and down my
back. Sometimes, at the end of the gig I'm the last one to leave the theatre,
and I always say 'Goodnight' to whoever is there. They're there, Hamlet,
Cinderella, Peter Pan, Falstaff, Harlequin and Columbine, Macbeth and
Widow Twanky - ghosts of the characters, not of the actors. That's what
this song is about.
One day I noticed a new café on a row of shops just around the
corner from me. It was called 'The Bethlehem Café'. I thought it
was a strange but nice name for a transport café. One day I went
in asked the man behind the counter just why it was called 'The Bethlehem
Café'. He informed me that it was run by the Church (I found that
the café was actually part of a church half hidden by newer architecture
and buildings).
I took this romantic notion of 'The Bethlehem Café', made it
into a kind of haven for lonely people. I moved the Bethlehem to a rough
seaport (probably Hamburg). Memories of my teenage years in various Bedsits
were fused into the idea/song.
Sadly, the Bethlehem Café is no more.....It's now called 'The
Rumbling Tum'....not the same really.
I spent some time back in the early 90s busking with a mad, wild fiddler
whom I named Joe Priest. That wasn't his real name, it came about because
he'd been up in front of many Justices Of The Peace (JPs) for taking drugs.
He is probably the nicest man I ever met and socialized with. OK he sampled
every dangerous drug known to Man, but he never robbed anyone or stole
anything to fund his 'hobby' as he called it. He never ever tried to persuade
me to sample his drugs and he passionately loved his lady partner.
His 'hobby' eventually and inevitably took over his life and he died
after taking a dose of 'impure' heroin. I wasn't in the room when he died
but in the song I said that I was, and I also said he took 'the pure white
dose'. I'm not well up on drugs but I believe that Heroin is brown. I
don't know, thank goodness. A bit of poetic license here!
He was a very undisciplined violinist but he was great! His music just
flowed out of his soul. He never played a piece the same way twice. Different
every time. He was truly 'a free soul, a wanderer with a gypsy violin'
and 'I hope that there's a place where the free spirits go'.
MY HEART LIES IN YOUR HANDS (From RandomFandangos)
A sailor is another kind of traveller. A gypsy of the oceans. A last
passionate, lusty night with his girl before he sails away to Spain and
Barbary and to the far Japans. He says 'I won't be long..back in 18 months'.
I pitched this song very high...too high for me to sing now ten years
later. But I consider this to be one of the best tunes I ever composed
for a song.
A barbecue in my back garden in the early 90s! Lots of family present.
A Grandneice of mine (about 8 years old with the lovely Gypsy name of
Carla Moskovita) says (nay, demands...) 'Uncle Bernie, write me a song'!
I got my guitar out and tried to make things up as I went along. She
said 'That's a good line Uncle Bernie...write another one now'.
I have never before or since been so pressured into writing a song. Anyway,
Carla loved the song but she's probably forgotten all about it now. A
song I teasure though. A pretty good chorus as well.
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