RALPH, ALBERT & SYDNEY
Interview with Ralph McTell
December 2002
... for the Ralph, Albert & Sydney Web Site
by Michael Cohen
with John Beresford

A few weeks ago John Beresford and I suggested to Andy it may be interesting to do a fans interview with Ralph to tie up what has been another wonderful musical year for Ralph and his fans. It was typical of Ralph to readily agree to do this and after a couple of false starts I did a telephone interview with him on December 1st. Thanks to John for many of the questions. I was tempted to cut and edit large chunks but Ralph gave such a great interview and talked so freely that I have reproduced almost of all of it.
Mike Cohen 18 December 2002

Q: “You love being in Cornwall. In Ireland you are considered to be an honorary Irishman- can the same be said in Cornwall?” 

A: Well I wish. It’s a funny thing that you know because it’s as if I don’t love my own culture and country. Of course I do but I have always had a bit of a thing of siding with the outsider a little bit and you know how much I love Irish music and humour and everything. If I was a young fellow I dare say I would have been of the rebel persuasion but that’s another point. I absolutely love Cornwall. Wizz Jones introduced me to this place in the mid sixties and it was an instant love affair with the place. At that time my number of Cornish friends was very small and sad to say it has not grown that much but I think that Cornish people freely admit they are quite insular and they take a little while to get to know you. When I first used to come down to Cornwall in the sixties there was a landlord of the local pub who said he’d been there 25 years and they still called him a bloody foreigner! They do it half jokingly but it is actually an acknowledgement to themselves that they are a little bit hard to get to know.

“Do you divide your time equally between Cornwall and London?”

 I wish I could do that. We have sent the children to school here and we have had long summer holidays here on many occasions. Our children have grown to accept that this is where they come on holiday in the summertime and we have not bothered with   summer holidays abroad for very many years. My eldest daughter was deeply upset when we moved from London because she said “it’s our home” and I said well that’s true but we had to do things for business reasons, but I said you have the spiritual home of Cornwall and this will be a constant all our lives and hopefully all theirs.

“Do you think much of those early days in Cornwall now? How do you feel about them when you look back?”

I think they were among the most care free and happiest days of my single life. Nanna and I had met in Paris and then we had agreed to separate for a while. I’d come back here and one of my heroes invited me down to Cornwall to play music. I am very much on the periphery and I cannot not believe my luck that I’m with this wonderful musician, Wizz Jones, and great character and I am playing guitar with him. In a matter of months that we were here music opened up like the pages of a book. A whole subculture of music and friends opened up to me here and I got myself an old caravan wagon and put it behind a hedge in a field and lived there illegally. And I really cannot describe the thrill of sitting down and beginning to write songs and play them to an appreciative mate who was with me called Mickey Bennett who we called “Whispering Mick” and him saying “ Gee where did that come from?” and “Hey play that chord again”. Getting a little recognition and putting songs into the set I was doing. It was a wonderful time. It was frugal in the extreme-I had no vehicle- I couldn’t drive-but there was something blissfully uncomplicated about the thing as I recall with my rose coloured glasses.

“You mention Wizz Jones whose name often comes up when you are interviewed. He has obviously been a big influence on your playing and music”

I think he has been influential in many ways. First of all I think he is the best rhythm guitarist in the whole world well especially in the whole of England. No one swings like Wizz-he can’t help but swing. He has got a unique style that was borne without any affection from listening to our mutual blues heroes. In other words if he feels 14 bars he plays 14 bars. So to me I can hear where bars should fall just about and I’m subconsciously counting them. I’m very “white” in that respect but I learnt through Wizz that you don’t have to be white and you can follow your heart and the soul of the music. That is what Wizz did and so it was like having an old black guy playing the music next to me and I always say to anyone when they are learning to play the guitar bang your foot-you must bang your foot and concentrate on the rhythm. I suppose that is what I got from Wizz. He also has a seamless ability to drop in a third harmony or a fifth when we were singing. He would just take the high line and I’d be expecting to harmonise with him and suddenly he’d let me take the lead in lots of songs. Then he would harmonise with this driving rhythm and his respect for my playing especially I was a young fellow was awesome. I was twenty one or thereabouts and it was tremendous. To me Wizz has got impeccable taste in music-the way he picks songs as wide ranging from Tom Lehrer to Mance Lipscomb-if it’s right Wizz will sing it. From Clive James to Blind Lemon Jefferson-it’s all of that.

“Talking about influences am I right in thinking that Gary Petersen was a big influence on your guitar technique and style? Can you tell us a bit about that and is Gary still around? Do you keep in touch with him?”

We try to keep in touch. He was the son of a Californian millionaire who had several families and dropped youngsters all over the place. He owned the Jack in the Box chain of hamburger restaurants in California. When Gary was 21 he was give his trust fund of several thousand dollars and at that time it was an enormous amount of money. Gary immediately went to New York and bought himself a Les Paul and a 1941 D28. He met Melinda Patterson who was an extraordinarily quirky girl

 “wasn’t she the girl who illustrated your first song book?.. 

She did- she did some of the drawings in the first favourite that’s right. She was as nutty as a fruit cake- they were an absolutely delightful couple. We met them in Paris and Gary was simply the most musical guitar player I had ever come across. He had separated his thumb from his fingers in the sense that he could get his thumb to play a bass line independent of the rhythm fingers and more importantly he loved to share it with other people. He smoked an enormous amount of hash from a small pipe and there was music going round for hour after hour. He became friendly with us and then we moved back to London and he came over and moved to Croydon of all places

 “you must have been a big influence on him as well!?

I always felt a bit guilty about that! Yeah that was the down side- the upside was that they had a great apartment in an old Victorian house and as he was stoned most of the time he didn’t mind! He formed a band called “Formerly Fat Harry” and they made an album after five years of constant rehearsal and great clouds of marijuana smoke! The band comprised of Gary, Phil Greenburg, Bruce Barthol of “Country Joe and the Fish” and various drummers. I think in the end they settled on Jim Marshall from the “Soft Machine” in the end and they made a very interesting album which really doesn’t show off Gary’s work to the best. Anyway they moved back to Paris but sadly they split up later. Gary when we last heard had met an old childhood sweetheart and had moved in with her back in California. He said to me on many occasions that the co-write on Girl on a Bicycle had kept the wolf from the door and kept him in clothes for a while!   

 “Didn’t his band help you out on My Side of Your Window?”

All the guys were experimenting with strange times like 7/8 and mariachi riffs and so on from Mexican music. So they had a huge influence on me and I thought it was very clever to match with timings. So for example on the end of “I’ve Thought About It” it goes into an 11/8 thing-something they were all very impressed with! They used to play riffs over and over again, hour after hour, improvising and it was very clever but a bit beyond me. It certainly shaped me into the idea of how to make something jagged smooth. For example on “When I Was A Cowboy” you drop a beat and it wrong foots people but it adds interest to the song. Yeah they were great guys. 

“Ralph, I want to talk to you about the road. I know one of your favourite songs is Never Tire Of the Road by Andy Irvine. You seem to love the pull of the road despite the traffic, the weather, and collapsing roofs. What is the magic of the road for you? ”

It’s the adventure. It sounds extraordinary to say that at my age. No matter how grim the night before may have been, or how grotty the hotel is you leave that behind you and get in the truck and it’s just like starting out. I say to Donard sometimes “look man that was tough but tomorrow they’ll still be here- we are on our way”- the ever open door. I think it probably works better for me than it does for Donard because I know on the last tour the man was totally…I can see a young fellow….it’s not lifting the gear in and out, it’s dealing with people that should know better. They sometimes don’t treat you with the right respect when you get to the theatre and we have had problems dealing with promoters who haven’t agreed percentages with the office. It wears you down. He is only a young fellow and I take a perverse pleasure in keeping up with him. He says “Ralph you sleep in the car” well of course sometimes I do because I find it easier to sleep in the car than in a hotel room. I sometimes pay the price in that I drink too much in the evenings to make sure I do sleep

 “we call that medicinal” 

Yeah medicinal! The road is what I do. The scariest thing about this coming year for me is the fact that I won’t have it. But even when I don’t have it I say to Nanna “can we just go somewhere-lets go somewhere” My mother used to say (whether we had Romany blood in the family or not is not proven) as a little boy you never sat on a chair. When I got wheels I just wanted to drive. Before that I wanted to hitchhike, before that I wanted to be on my bicycle, before that I was on my roller skates. I like people and I don’t get tired of them. I’m beyond cynicism now. You have to get that way because they are still there tomorrow. You were the man that had the freedom to move and it’s that you have to bring to your music or to your presentation. There was a time I feel probably in the mid eighties where I was taking things too seriously and taking some things for granted. I really didn’t understand what was going on but I’ve certainly passed through all that now and I am so grateful for the audience and for the road and everything that goes with it. 

“I’m interested in that because you give so much to your fans and it’s a wonderful thing. But do you ever feel “peopled out” and want to get away from it all sometimes?”

 When people say your work is important to them what are you going to say “oh yeah” and walk away? And they say what a particular song has meant and they mention the music again and you realise that the music, the music is more important than you thought it ever could be. Because it is a part of peoples lives, if they want to tell you the least you can do is listen. You don’t hold them up, you let them talk and usually my lot are so wonderful that they say they can’t keep you any longer because there is long queue of people waiting so later they write me a little note or something. 

“Do you ever think of yourself as a counsellor to your followers because your songs do speak to us and, speaking personally, have given tremendous comfort and reassurance when going through troubled times” 

Well no but I have always sought to touch that nerve. I would regard that as being much more important than showing off how well you can play the guitar, or how loud you can sing, or how high you can reach, or how well you can rhyme. To touch someone’s soul is fantastic. Metaphorically often you might have an emotion but it is no use just expressing the feeling if it doesn’t reach out to somebody else. The craft then is how do I bring somebody else into my emotion? You see if it is too dark I don’t think it should be done as a song. And lets face it you know-you shouldn’t quote yourself but-“before my colours turn darker than blue” is where I stop. Someone wrote to me once “How can sad things make you feel so good sometimes?” I’ll try to come up with something like “the sweet comfort of melancholy”. There is a kind of comfort in it and, especially by identifying it, to touch common ground and people don’t feel so burdened.

“I am sure you are right but not many people have that ability to do it, in fact I think it is quite unique”

I wouldn’t know about that it is just the way it has kind of gone. But I must say, deep down, it has got to be the most rewarding aspect of the communication business.

“There seem to be a lot of people coming to your shows recently who probably haven’t seen you before and maybe are seeing you for the first time. This must give you a tremendous deal of satisfaction?”

I’d love to know where they come from Michael and where they go and how they found out about what it is we do. Because I said to people one day when I was trying to talk about poetry I said “this is why we are here”. It is like we are here. So when I say we had a good show I do not mean the royal we, me and the guitar. I mean we had a good show. When people talk to me about the business I am actually losing it a little bit because I know I write songs. I know I play the guitar and sing the songs to people in public but what happens out there and between us, the audience and me, seems to me from what I’ve learned to be a bit special. I don’t know if it is something you can market or say let’s do more of this or that or whether we’ve reached the nadir of it all I really don’t know. I think probably at a much bigger venue it wouldn’t be so easy to communicate and Donard says to me “talk less, you’re talking too much, don’t tell the stories between the music” and then people say “why didn’t you talk last night- we missed the stories!” You know it’s a weird one so I am trying to get a balance. It is because you are one man and a guitar and you are not beating the living shit out of the instrument you are coaxing melody and stuff out of it and they know you are vulnerable. Someone wrote to me once and said they would see when you get goose bumps during the set and that they could see when your hand trembled when you picked up a glass to drink. And that is human frailty if you like. In my experience I find when I put other musicians together with my stuff I lose something- I don’t gain anything.

“Ralph, talking about venues and musical establishments you’ve played over the years, what makes for your ideal venue and do you have any favourites in which to play?”

One of the things we’ve touched on is depth of communication. I have to say, and I’m not the only person who would say this, I’m sure others would say it too, but there was something very very special, and in fact something that will not be equalled in my life about playing Belfast during the troubles. Here was this Englishman of undeclared allegiance in a particular struggle. No one asked who was carrying what card when they came into the audience. Belfast has changed and it is funny how we quickly forget those really bad times and get on. At one time there were not many people coming over from England to play because of the troubles and they made a tremendous fuss of me. It was a marvellous feeling and deeply deeply spiritual. 
When it comes to favourite places to play the secret is to make every place a favourite place to play and that can depend on a large part on how you are hearing yourself. Now this is a technical thing and I don’t want to get boring but the biggest single advance in my career has been better monitoring. You started with me with a monitor speaker at shoulder level on a table, low volume with juts a touch of reverb. It was to make every stage seem the same. A black backdrop, muted lighting in red, blue and a spot. Now with the advent of new monitoring I can achieve that. I can hear myself as never before. I’ve gained a new confidence, I feel much more relaxed, much more positive with respect to my singing and it is now more like listening to a record of mine in one ear and in the other getting all you lot which is fantastic.    

“Which recent project has pleased you most National Treasure, National Tour, Irish Tour, or the Summer Lightning book?”

That is very hard. I think probably, because of my eldest boy’s help and a bit of a coming together a year or so ago, the National Treasure album. We had some laughs and he made me try things, and he made me pitch songs up several keys. And it has been a bonding thing although we have never been estranged because he lives in the same house, but sometimes things are strained as they would be in any family. No one has criticized any aspect of that album. It is rougher than many of the albums I’ve done but people seem to like that more organic approach. There were live versions of just everything you know and I think that was very important and very enjoyable. Touring is touring. The book…..well lets put it this way, the aftermath of the  book, the fact that handing over the past in such a way was OK. It was all done higgledy piggeldy. I’d write about living in a squat in Poole or going to nursery school and then it was separated into two distinct halves and we had to do some judicious editing to protect certain people that are still around. I must say it muddied the water of my perceptions a little bit and I’ve had quite a difficult time. It is not something anyone should go into lightly but I think that hopefully we are out the other side of it now and I cannot wait for the book to be out. I think it is something that has to be viewed with great care. Emotionally speaking it has been a tough one. It was written in 1998 and it has been lying around and edited with little bits taken out or rewritten and so on. I think you will find it interesting. It won’t be quite the same as Angel Laughter which has charm. In this one the boy becomes a man so it’s a bit…..you know….”oh I didn’t know that about Ralph” or “that’s a bit heavy” or “what is going on here- we are not being told” and all of that has gone in. I could have written exactly the same amount again I think about that period and as I lifted the lid over things I’m sure just like you the years between sixteen and twenty one were crammed full. We were never still, my gang, we were everywhere and music was our driver- music and girls

 “well I wish the same could have been said of me but there we are!”

“What about the long awaited guitar book that Roger Brown and you have collaborated on? I believe the number of songs grew and grew. Are you satisfied with the final product?” 

Well first of all, technically, I don’t know how Roger has done it. It is an enormous tribute to his patience and a great compliment I think to me, that he feels that the tunes are worth that total type of scrutiny. It is all my own work and he has written it out so that other people can bet a better handle on it and I am immensely grateful. In fact I was talking to someone the other day about the fact that there is not much video film of me unless it’s me doing the alphabet songs or growing old in front of your eyes singing the same song because, you know, whenever I’ve gone on television they’ve wanted to hear Streets of London. So here is a tangible thing, a book of songs and if you learn them then you can play them like me. Some of them will be quite challenging and you maybe surprised at how challenging some of them are. 

 “Talking of videos I remember you filmed at least one of your two nights at the Institute of Contemporary Arts at the end of 2000. Will these see the light of day?” 

I hope so. One of the reasons why Tickety Boo and I parted company was that because I don’t think anyone ever bothered to look at it. There are many reasons for that but partly it is that I was very small beer in that organisation. I don’t want to cast any aspersions but it’s like I was something that was going on over there and probably my commissions didn’t pay one of the girl’s wages in the office. But when I realised that no one had had a look at it I thought it bode rather poorly for my status in the company. Steve’s life has changed a lot and so what is done is done. I would love to have had the QEH filmed but I don’t think I can afford it. I mean it costs thousands to do a three camera shoot. I’d like to think that perhaps in my sixtieth year we will do an amalgam of all kinds of things- out takes from Tickle on the Tum, some early footage. There is in existence a documentary that was filmed in 1970 by Granada. I was living in a council flat in Croydon and there was a bit of Nanna boiling an egg for the artiste’s breakfast!

 “So what projects are in progress or planned for 2003?”

 Well, talking to old Donard who is wiser beyond his years he says he has seen the downside of the road in me. Musically we don’t agree on very much but that is to be expected, but he says the road should be more fun for me and we shouldn’t have the problems we have to face sometimes on a nightly basis. He said to me “what you should do is just forget about music for a year.” Well that is actually totally impossible and as we speak I have at least three projects I would like to do. So the first one would be due to the Billy Connolly film I’ve had enormous re interest in the song England, and I would like to do an album called England. I’d like to do some of our lovely songs, perhaps a few traditional ones, perhaps put some down I have written myself like “Girl from the Hiring Fair” or “Barges”. I think something that has an essence of what it is like to be lucky enough to live here, especially given our modern state of affairs if you like. I’d like to make a little statement and do some traditional songs like Scarborough Fair and Spencer the Rover- I want to do that one because it is about being on the road. I’d love to have a few friends help me with the odd violin here, a bit of accordion there, a very simple acoustic based songs album. So that’ll be one. The next thing is that I’ve always wanted to do an album of slightly more obscure standards if you know what I mean. I’d love to do something with piano, bass and brushes, or Jango Reinhart two rhythm guitars and violin and vocals. It would be fun to do little twists on the arrangement but very pure versions of things like Stardust, When Did You Leave Heaven, As Time Goes By or maybe a Bing Crosby number. I’d love to do that with a nice tight piano thing and would love to have a go. The next thing is I would love to do another blues based album where the guitar is king type of album. I’ve just acquired another wonderful resonator guitar, a brand new Chinese Tritone and it is as loud as a bloody brass band and it’s enormous fun. So that is also on the horizon and the best of all possibly is I have the beginnings of two new songs which is the most exciting thing of all.

I’d also like to take some bass lessons this year. Outside of the pleasure I get from playing the guitar I just love sitting in with other people playing the bass. I have got it covered. I’ve already got a double bass, a fretless electric, a fretted acoustic bass, and I am going to get a fretted electric bass. If you look at the website you will see a picture of Danny Thompson and I this summer having a plonk outside with the bass playing each others songs from the old days which was really nice.

Mainly it is an amazing feeling of lightness that I haven’t got dates in my diary knowing that I’ll probably be able to have another day somewhere and just see what comes.

“Have you put down any tracks for the autobiography CD yet and have you any new songs for that?”

Yes I have, I have written one which I’m really pleased with called “As Far As I Can Tell .” It is a play on words-it’s about time, distance, and memory. I composed it on the mandolin and it is going to open the book-the words will open volume two and the tune will open the album. Sam and I made huge strides on it during the summer but Sam’s own work has taken over recently so it remains unmixed which is a dangerous in a way because it does mean that I probably will want to start re-recording some of the songs. Obviously songs like Daddy’s Here, Mr Connaughton, All Things Change, and In Some Way I Loved You are in there. It was played on just guitar and piano at home so it needs mixing and errors in reading need cutting and tightening. I am thinking of taking it to Mark Tucker’s studio in Devon and having him “nip and tuck” it together. That might be something that will come out in the New Year.

“I love the way you can play several instruments as well as provide backing vocals single handily on some tracks. A few years ago I remember Lay Your Money Down and more recently Hard Travelling. Does this happen spontaneously or do you plan this in advance?”

I suppose I think what could I put on it which is not going to obscure the track and it is really realising your limitations. I think I said to you the other day when we were talking about the harmonica don’t try to be Larry Adler or Bob Dylan or Sonny Terry. Use chords to tighten things up. Let it off there, add a couple of notes there and don’t play there. I think often I have a clear vision what I want than I can get from another musician. With other musicians you have to bring them into your frame of reference. If you say to a guy improvise over this there are very few who will do it the way you want. The exception would be Maartin Alcock who is an absolute bloody genius and can play you anything at all. I think sometimes my limitations make me concentrate more on the harmony aspect than actual virtuoso playing so that with something like Lay Your Money Down the bass is my acoustic Harmony Sovereign guitar up close on the sound hole and the wooden Indian flute that I bought from an Oxfam shop.

Six notes were alright-the seventh and the eighth which had the octave were like an Indian scale so I could only use the notes I could play in tune so I had to make my solo on six notes. My mandolin playing is extremely dire so I made sure it was in a key that I could handle and I found a couple of chords and you can hint at things by just changing the rhythm. So I’m a bit of a Jack of all trades.

 “And the backing vocals? The Red Sky Album with Chris While and Julie Matthews and also your own ability to harmonise-is that something which comes naturally or do you have to work on that?” 

You have to work on that. When there is music playing have the confidence to sing along with it and if you cannot reach up above drop down and see if you can do a bass line on it. My favourite backing vocals are on Mr Connaughton and you can hardly hear them. Martin Levan mixed that one (a lovely man who has just come out of the woodwork again). There is a really strange one that comes out on Candyman where I add a voice each time a verse goes through. Some of the blues players though wouldn’t like it at all. I love that- I love harmony singing. Nanna’s favourite album I think is Right Side Up because of Tony Rivers and The Castaways wonderful vocals. The girls you mention Chris and Julie are gifted. They have a fantastic knowledge of the way black girls sing or folkies sing together. They sat in the studio and it was like watching a great keyboard singer because they had listened to the songs in the car coming down and had come up with ideas. And I’d watch them deciding and it was all things I would never have thought of. I didn’t tell them to anything they were so imaginative. Icarus was marvellous and I love the vocals on Fin- where that came from I do not know it is just perfect and I am in awe of them.

“Over the years several of your recordings still lie in the vaults undisturbed. Do you envisage any of these being released for an official bootleg or resurfacing on a Song for Six strings album?” 

I’d love Chris Hockenhull to put some input into this as he is extremely knowledgeable about all this stuff. I know from the BBC archive there is tons of stuff there because someone got in touch with us and asked if we could make an album and I said no simply because we were not sure of the quality. I have recorded hundreds of songs for the BBC most of them being versions of songs which are already out there. There are one or two that are in the archive that have never gone out on albums. There is one that I remember in particular called Put Me In The Picture but there would be songs like Ludlow Massacre and other versions of Woody Guthrie songs that I used to do to strive to give myself more credibility in the BBC than just being the bloke who wrote Streets Of London. And I really tried hard in that respect. The Shel Talmy tapes may come out depending on the state of the masters which could be unplayable and that would be a shame. One or two have already come out as B sides to singles. Randy Newman’s Marie still lies in the vault together with some tracks with Hank De Vito and Lee Clayton when I was still in my Californian hangover days and much admiring the new country music they were doing in America. I managed to get James Burton who was Elvis’s guitar player on one track with Hank de Vito on several when they were over here playing with Emmylou Harris. We poached them out of the hotel and they couldn’t wait to get into the studio which was great. I remember doing Sweet Girl On My Mind, another version of Winnie’s Rag, and me and Swarbrick did a version of Big Tree. I wouldn’t say they were gems

The most interesting stuff will be this early pre album contact stuff. It is quite good quality despite being recorded without a microphone. It was recorded without us having a PA and someone recorded us from the audience. It comes over quite well and there is some jug band stuff as well. I do not think it has commercial legs and we may do it for people on the mailing list who would be interested in completing a collection. 

“Have you seen the page on the Ralph, Albert & Sydney web site where fans have suggested songs they would like included on future releases in the Songs For Six Strings series?”

I have seen it once when I was leafing through. I was very surprised to see how many times In The Bleak Midwinter came up. I had recorded it and that was available to us for Travelling Man and I didn’t think we should put a Christmas song on. But there is a nice version there. I’d like that to be explored more because it might help us pick the right songs to introduce for coming albums. I would like to have alternative solo versions of nearly all my songs but I don’t know if that would ever be possible. 

“The Boy with a Note cured your writers block, and the word is out that you still have more to say about Dylan Thomas. What can you tell us about that?” 

They are planning to have me for two nights at Swansea next year as it’s Dylan’s anniversary. One night I’ll do The Boy with a Note again if I can and they’ve got some ideas of making it a bigger production. The other night is to sit down and be interviewed by Geoff Thomas who owns the Dylan bookshop in Swansea.

But there is a preamble to that. Have you noticed in the work there is a recurring theme? Begging to be excused fame, begging to be excused shame, begging to be excused blame. It’s like a poem within a poem. It is to do with Dylan needing to drink sin, and having sinned having to drink to forget it so he could sin again. I don’t believe what Dylan said about himself and the stories he invented about red mouthed girls who had their wanton way with him. I don’t believe a word of that. I think he was a rather plain looking lad with sexual energies that young men have which were largely unrequited and that he invented an identity for himself and painted himself as a bit of a card and a bit of a lad. And although he was successful in that it did not fit easy with him. He was apparently not a very good lover and probably inadequate in some departments. But some of his downward spiral was connected with the church in the sense that the chapel background that he would have come from was coupled with this kind of morbid obsession with death which is a recurring theme in all his work.

His love and passion of words made people say that his poems had a magical effect on them, and magic is like conjuring, and conjuring implies a trick, and trick implies a deception, and deception and sinning was all part of his downfall. Is suspect perhaps he would never have been totally honest. Perhaps it was something he recognised in himself very early on and I feel this is something I must develop before I do this talk.

They say those who the gods love die young. I don’t think the gods wanted Dylan-I don’t think they expected him to come and I think he was not meant to be called as a young man. He was supposed to have drifted on into drunken middle and beyond age and he didn’t. He tripped up through an over zealous doctor who may have over prescribed something for him and he being a diabetic or something which sent him into a coma. We do tend to lose the James Deans, we do lose the Jimi Hendrix’s, we do lose these young beautiful artistic people. But Dylan was not beautiful he was a bit sordid and grubby and a bit soiled. The gods must have looked and said “Christ what are you doing- here you are not supposed to be here?” And poor Caitlan she was totally betrayed and took years to come to terms with it although in the end she did. There are all sorts of apocryphal stories about when she was put in the grave next to Dylan an eighty year old or whatever she was that there was a sudden flash of lightning across the sky to Laugherne but who knows.

I love his prose writing which is immensely enjoyable and when the BBC was the BBC we used to hear his work on the radio and hear people who could almost talk like Dylan. I remember a guy called Winford Vaughan Thomas who was a lovely loquacious Welshman who could charm and delight in the language. Will Self tries to do essays and things on radio 4 and they pale by comparison to that. It is something that can be said for the old grammar school system that got people to enjoy language and words just like Dylan did and I took delight in that. But I can understand the temptations away from home, the tiredness and jet lag coupled with the over fawning praise from intellectuals. He dodged direct questions because his art was so unusually and specifically Dylan’s- there was no one that wrote like him and he didn’t want to be subjected to analysis. He was like a composer using notes and voices to create the music he wouldn’t have fully understood himself. The line had to have a rhythm and resonance and that pleased him. But when people talk about a musical Dylan I do not accept that he was musical-only in a very abstract way is Dylan’s stuff musical and you have to have a deep understanding of art to find the real music of Dylan’s work. I bet he couldn’t sing in tune. In every book I’ve read I have never seen more than a passing reference to him humming a snatch of a tune or talking about music at all. Caitlin on the other hand was very musical or aspired to be. You see all great art depends on a tension. It’s like the blues-you set up two lines and create the tension and then you resolve it in the third line. It is a sort of poetic form. You make a statement, you repeat the statement, take the line somewhere else- where is it going to? You bring it back here- there is the third line and then it is resolved. These two people as a couple were a poem themselves because they were opposites and equals and they were passionate and they were different. And I have tried to line that up in The Conundrum of Time. I have tried to outline what that’s like you know the marital kind of competitiveness by trick and absence of fun

“That sounds great on the 12 string”

Does it?

“Yes it sounds wonderful”

Good!

“You will soon be reaching another landmark Ralph. At your thirtieth birthday you were out with the lads at The Albert Hall watching some boxing. How do you think you will celebrate your sixtieth?” 

Basically I would love to play the Albert Hall in the next couple of years. I would love to landmark my career with that because it is my favourite place to play in the world because it is my town, it is my London and it is my Albert Hall. I have played there a couple of times on my own and I am very sentimental about that. I’ve been there a dozen times or so playing with other people and I love it. I think people love to go there. It is a special occasion. Donard is of the opinion if we are careful we maybe able to do it for my sixtieth if we work at it for the next three years. If everyone on the mailing list came we would sell out no problem. Show of Hands achieved something but I want to see people to come and see me. I don’t want to put on extra attractions or choirs or bloody drums! I’ll do an hour first half and an hour second half and try and fit in as many songs as I can and we’ll have a good evening. 

I think truthfully I must break the touring thing. I have to do it now and give it my best shot. What I see myself doing is some satellite gigs. Say we are doing Manchester, the Lowry Centre, the day before we’ll do Bolton, the day afterwards we’ll do a little 200 seater Arts Centre in Chorlton cum Hardy. Then I’ll go home and have beans and soup. Then we’ll go out and do Newcastle, Middlesborough and Hexham and an Arts Centre or something. I do not want to stop working but I don’t think the touring thing is the best way. 

What starts out as a great adventure becomes your career and becomes your life so all the edges become blurred and I am not dependent on the industry because the industry does not support me. But I’ll keep busy. I am going to have a holiday and enjoy the grandchildren for a bit and get back into the home when it is cleared up from being a building site. However I can reassure you that the creative juices are flowing around quite nicely!

Ralph on behalf of all your fans and the Ralph Albert and Sydney website may I wish you, your family and all the crew a Happy Christmas and a peaceful and healthy 2003. May your compromises never fail you and we shall patiently wait until the next time we meet. 

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