Mum used to play guitar. Dad used to sing. For a while when I was a kid, I guess about 7 or 8 years old, whilst we were living in Kuwait they were involved in a local folk club. Scarborough Fair, House of the Rising Sun, Blowing in the Wind, that sort of thing.
Lots of lyric sheets handwritten out by Mum with the chords noted over the top were left around our house. Pretty straight forward stuff. A few of Dad’s favourite covers were by Adge Cutler and the Wurzels or Fred Wedlock. Sat out in the dust of the Middle East, I guess the West Country accents let him feel closer to home. And besides, the content of the songs was, in the case of the Wurzels frequently, and in the case of Wedlock always, hilarious.
So, when I set to picking up a guitar myself, I guess a couple of years or so later, I figured if folks were laughing along at the lyrics, they’d overlook the fact that the performer could neither sing nor really play. Amusingly, the double entendre in most of these songs was completely lost on my ten-year-old self.
It kind of worked; at least I’m still doing it all these years later.
Dad’s been a regular at almost every gig I’ve played over the last thirty-five years. These days, he’s mostly sat somewhere amongst the crowd with his camera, recording the set so that my brother Jay, our bassist, can pour over the footage in, I'm guessing, a funk of over-analysis and self-criticism into the early hours following the end of each gig. Hey, we all need our ways of bringing ourselves back down after a show, or we’d never sleep.
Last Saturday’s gig at The Railway in Fishponds, Bristol, was brilliant as always. We never take these things for granted, but it’s one of our favourite venues, so you can always be pretty certain it’s going to be a great one. So when Jay messaged me a little earlier in the week and asked if I fancied doing a Wurzels song for a bit of fun, it was pretty hard to resist.
So, ladies and gentlemen, this is my band’s cover of the Wurzel’s Twice Daily, featuring on lead vocals, Dad.
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