And as much as I thought that all of these feelings didn’t add up to much, I thought I might as well post a posthumous tribute to Gerry Rafferty, as Popular won’t have a thread which can do so in its own right.

Coming back at least partway on-topic, the last I heard of Billy Connolly’s old mucker Gerry Rafferty was that he’d been dangerously ill but was now off organ support machines. Hope he’s recovering.

Jimmy The Swede, News At Ten, Brisbane. Well…Eastbourne.

Yep, I thought it was the same bloke until recently.

Clifford Davis, the manager who put Stretch together as Fakewood Mac, released a single of Man Of The World b/w Before The Beginning in 1969. Peter Green gets the writing credits, but every other conceivable credit includes the words Clifford and Davis. So it’s not so surprising that he got up to such underhand antics five years later.

During Mac’s wilderness years Peter Green turned up at their rural retreat looking somewhat the worse for wear.

Then guitarist Bob Welch recalled in his wry, slow drawl:

“I knew he was in a bad way. He came to the door with a piece of cheese in his hair. And it was still there when he left
Now, I don’t know what cheese it was, whether it was caerphilly, cheddar or whatever but I do know that if I had a piece of cheese in my hair on Monday, I can guarantee that by Tuesday it would be gone.”

“All Around My Hat” is splendid; an Olde Englishe folk song which eventually became an Easter Rising lament, produced proto-punk style by the unknowing Mike Batt. See also “New York Girls”* from the parent album (Commoners’ Crown) featuring Peter Sellers on ukulele and assorted Goon voices. Electric Eden – isn’t that the book which says that the history of English folk music culminates in Coil? Maybe in another lifetime.

*which bpm-wise fits very nicely with “New York Groove” – subsequently covered by Ace Frehley of Kiss!

“Sky High”; hello, Lexicon Of Love (arrangement-wise)? Taken apparently from the George Lazenby movie The Man From Hong Kong. Blackburn: “No, I didn’t see it either.”

As for All Around My Hat, the chapter in Rob Young’s Electric Eden on how Steeleye Span’s Rocket Cottage single-handedly killed the folk rock movement in Britain is maybe the best piece of music writing (funniest, deffo) I’ve read all year.

I’d also like to nominate this no.1 (the My Ding A Ling of folk? Try listening to it after the Humblebums’ gorgeous Her Father Didn’t Like Me Anyway), Max Boyce’s omnipresence and Mike Harding’s Rochdale Cowboy as nails in the cottage roof.