Amy's new CD

So Amy has her new CD out, Only a Dreamer, featuring the songs of John Stewart. Already she has had some nice reviews and airplays including the BBC as well as commercial stations. The DJs all seem to choose different songs to play, which is nice. Many albums have one or two goodies interspersed with dross, but this seems to be appealing across the board.

We went down to Portsmouth a few weeks ago for the launch concert. As is her wont Amy had a stage set built to replicate the cozy corner of her recording studio, and drapes and lights and guitar stands and space for backing singers including ME. There was a lovely review – at least I hope that is what it was – that described my contribution: “father and daughter singing together has a special kind of bond to it, and A’s voice brings a sense of time and generations to the songs.” Ah, “time and generations” – how lovely. Or does he just mean that I sounded OLD…? A new “discovery” Danielle sang with Amy for many of the songs and did some solos and that really worked well.

The whole program was streamed live on a social media platform, so people in America and France as well as the UK were able to see the show in real time. The only problem we discovered afterwards was that somehow the iPad doing the filming presented the whole show at a 90 degree angle. Emails about having a crick in the neck came wafting to us through cyberspace, and I was minded of the prophet Ezekiel. For those not so well up on Old Testament prophets he had to lie on his side for 390 days to function. Amy’s show only lasted a little over two hours, but the vision field was incongruous. Fortunately the whole gig was videoed so maybe bits of it will end up on YouTube or similar. Maybe.

The background to the album is covered in my liner notes. I will end with a reprint.

Personally I blame Radio Luxembourg.

In those dim and distant monochrome days of the late 1950s British radio was the BBC and establishment and both dull and condescending to the youth audience. But a commercial station based in Luxembourg (although recorded in London) broadcast sheer pop heaven on the 208 medium waveband. Lying in bed with my value portable radio the size of a brick clamped to my ear, I listened and absorbed.

One show was the Capitol show, paid for by the Capitol record company. A crucial ingredient of this show each week was the Kingston Trio.

I favoured folk music from a very early age and the Trio, with their harmonies and banjo and humour appealed. I bought singles. I looked for other similar fare in the record shops and came up with the Cumberland Three featuring a very young man named John Stewart. Then, when the Kingstons lost Dave Guard and John Stewart joined them, I was on a roll. I saw them at the Hammersmith Odeon on their one visit to the UK in 1962, and then saw Stewart sing Greenback Dollar and cut his finger playing it live at the London Palladium on black and white TV. I bought all the Trio discs – generally second hand because money was tight – and more and more, Stewart with his gravelly “wobbly” voice and song writing skills came to the fore. When the group disbanded and Stewart went solo it was a natural transfer for me.

Stewart’s music was eclectic. His albums went from country to rock to folk to singer-songwriter Americana and there were lots of them over the next forty years. His peak for me was probably in the early 80s when Chuck McDermott sang back-up and played 12 string alongside him. But that is a generalisation – I enjoyed (and still do) tracks from Signals Through the Glass to The Day the River Sang.

In the 80s and 90s I had a collection of bootleg tapes culled from the albums that I played in the car. Taking my daughter to and from school, and later to and from work, she was exposed – whether she liked it or not – to a John Stewart fest on many a day. Fortunately, she did like it, and ultimately this album is the result.

When Amy began writing and singing herself one of the first songs she wrote and taped was a tribute to John Stewart. It was pressed and presented to me with a couple of Stewart covers as an anniversary present. The tribute song incorporated all the various themes of John’s music, and told his story obliquely with lines from songs and particularly the final riff from Mother Country. Later when singing and recording professionally she had Buffy Ford Stewart’s permission and blessing on the song.

This brings us to this special tribute album. Amy has re-recorded her tribute song using musicians who have backed her in live performance. And she has chosen from a huge list of favourites the songs that make up the rest of the album. They range from the 1960s (Some Lonesome Picker), the 1970s (Hung on the Heart, Last Hurrah) to the 1980s (Dreamers on the Rise, Queen of Hollywood High). (Spanning the whole range of Stewart’s work she has previously recorded Jasmine from 2006 on an earlier album). She was especially pleased that Chuck McDermott who sang with John on some of his most iconic recordings kindly agreed to sing harmony with her on some tracks. More songs were worked on than could ever make this one album, but as a singer-songwriter with three albums already out, more of John’s work may well slip into some of her future projects.

I enjoyed this album. Of course, I have a certain prejudice. But I hope that anyone who loves folk music and the work of John Stewart will also enjoy.

As John sang in Irresistible Targets – Keep it Flying.

                  Chuck McDermott and John Stewart (with banjo) c. 1984. Taken from the John Stewart Facebook page.

Feet

(written in 2017 but never posted then)

A sort of life story (from the ankle down)

I never thought I would end up as a podiatrist (old title: chiropodist) and a sometime writer of podiatry textbooks. It’s funny how life turns out.

I had a career mapped out in my head from early on in life. Had it been a secular career I would probably have gone for an English degree and become an archivist or librarian. The idea of research never left me, but became an amateur hobby instead. It probably meant I never got disenchanted as sometimes happens when a hobby turns into work.

But I chose instead to spend my life working for nothing for a religious charity. As it happens, that still worked out, but when I suddenly found myself pushing a pram many years down the line, plans to work abroad and travel disappeared somewhat dramatically and it was necessarily to earn real money to pay real bills.

I could have chosen accountancy, and in fact started a course. My father started his career as an accountant, but then a chance encounter with someone in the same sort of boat sent me into the wonderful world of FEET.

My research skills, such as they were, came in handy, when it came to supplementing course work and practical work, and shortly after I was let loose on the unsuspecting feet of the Welsh nation I started writing.

I mugged up on the wonderful world of fringe podiatry. For instance, there was (and still is) homeopathic podiatry. There was an excitable man whose descendants still promote the concept of using tincture of calendula in treatments (that’s heavily watered-down juice squeezed from marigold plants to you). The theory is that different genus of marigold can, on the one hand, promote healthy granulation and on the other can chemically enucleate helomas (in normal-speak, that’s burn out corns to you). If you are unsure of the concepts, they are diametrically opposite. There was an article in a now defunct journal that I sometimes wrote for, where hilariously he got the captions transposed on the grainy photographs. The worst case scenario from this was that - assuming the treatment had any validity - someone’s corns and callosities would grow to enormous size in one case, or you’d burn a nasty hole in your foot in the other. To the great amusement of skeptics, there was a frantic addenda sent out at considerable cost to subscribers.

Anyhow, I mugged up for another publication and did an article on homeopathic chiropody, even though I didn’t really believe in it. The result was that the person who unwittingly directed me into podiatry became a homeopathic doctor later in life. Yes, it’s strange how things turn out.

Then there was reflexology, a spin on an American pseudo-science called Zone Therapy. It was a bit too Ying and Yang for my liking, but if you left out the patter it made people feel good and feel relaxed and in some conditions with the elderly and terminally ill, that could ONLY BE GOOD THING. I mugged up and did an article on that too. I learned how to write “neutrally” at such times.

Then I wrote a history of the profession - warts and all. It started life as a podiatry seminar lecture. That sold extremely well, although it would need a considerable update for a modern audience, since in the UK chiropody has finally followed the American pattern and become podiatry, and protection of title has finally been achieved through legislation. Believe it or not, in the UK horses hoofs were protected by the Farriers Act of 1974, lower orders like humans had to wait until 2004.

But it probably sold because it tried to be humorous and sarcastic and was filled with cartoons - not what you normally found in traditional po-faced podiatry literature. Quite recently I got hold of a mammoth doctorial thesis on podiatric history and was gratified to find my humble work frequently referenced. How on earth could something like treating feet be humorous? Well, people like to feel elevated, and podiatry in Britain is no exception. Since 2004 new entrants to the profession need a first class BSc Honors degree to have the title, so they spend several years at Uni, get a mountain of debt for the next few decades, only to find that most of their working life is just cutting old ladies’ toenails. That’s assuming anyone will employ them. So they are forced into private practice and often fail because they lack people skills or business skills, while the older breed continues to make a killing. There was a lot of mileage in that story.

So the book covered attempts in the past to reach this elevated position, and all the shysters and chancers who sold trash courses when the titles were not protected. And how the profession started, with a London inn-keeper who coined the term “chiropodist” when he cut corns as a sideline to selling beer.

And then how the first corn cutters worked with the barbers - hair at one end and feet at the other. Actually, a hobby horse of mine, chiropody/podiatry in its British incarnation should have been a craft like hairdressing. A manual skill, supplemented by a knowledge of science - I mean if you put the wrong things on someone’s hair it can turn green or fall out - but a craft. But oh no - the powers that be decided that really they were “doctors” - well, from the ankle down. The American model moved into proper surgery and took over what in the UK would normally be handled by orthopaedic surgeons, so this isn’t a swipe at them; they have is a different story. But UK chiropody history has been a battlefield. Even today, with legislation and the like, it is still represented by four different associations who basically all hate each other, and will stick the scalpel in at a moment’s notice.

I also wrote a book on how to run a domiciliary practice. The plusses are very few overheads. The minuses are the limitations on what you can do outside a surgery and the need for special aseptic procedures for sterilization (sterilization of instruments that is). But it covered all sorts of things, like how to take case histories. People can be very vague about their medication - either because they just don’t know and don’t want to know, or because they are desperate for a treatment that might be denied in a particular environment. I remember one patient who insisted they were not diabetic or on anti-coagulants, but after I had done the deed I noticed a green card on the shelf - a hit-panic-button emergency card for someone with von Willebrand disease. That’s akin to haemophilia to you. I remember contacting the relatives and as we say in the UK wiping the floor with them.

It covered safety for female practitioners. (Tabloid newspaper headline - “but I stabbed him with a STERILE blade says chiropodist...”) And the business side of accounting without employing an overrated and expensive accountant - as long as you coped with basic numeracy to start with.

The books are long out of print, and impossibly dated, but I earned encouraging four figure sums from both of them in their time. 

And I have happily cut old ladies’ toenails, plus a few more advanced procedures on occasion, for the whole of my career. It has allowed me to still pursue my other vocation, while putting a roof over the family’s head. And I have seen off the competition time and again because I probably mastered certain people skills in another environment that helped me keep people sort of happy.

Just as long as they are not limping after I have gone...

But no, I never imagined things would have worked out like this when I first left school.

As I started off this ramble - it’s funny how life turns out.