Interview Peggy

[Snafje JT]

British folk-rock duo plays working holiday

By Jim Bohen • Daily Record • June 25, 2008

British musician Dave Pegg has played for sold-out arenas with Jethro Tull and festival crowds of 20,000 or more with Fairport Convention. But his current musical incarnation draws a more intimate audience.

Pegg and guitarist PJ Wright, currently on a U.S. tour, will bring their acoustic duo act to the Cloverleaf Tavern in Caldwell July 1.

"We started it for a bit of fun, really," Pegg said by phone from Brittany in France, where he has a home. "I wasn't doing anything with Fairport at the time. I've always loved playing the guitar and the mandolin, and I don't get much of a chance, being a bass player."

The two of them got together a couple of hours of music, did a few gigs and had such a good time they booked some more. Eventually they recorded an album, "Galileo's Apology." Now they're coming to America.

"It's kind of a working holiday," Pegg said. He and his girlfriend are coming over early to see "Love," the Beatles show in Las Vegas, before he plays eight or nine dates with Wright.

The duo format spotlights Pegg's singing, rarely heard aside from backing vocals with Fairport Convention, the pioneering British folk-rock band he joined in 1970.

"With Fairport we've got two very good singers in Simon Nicol and Chris Leslie," he said. "I never really enjoyed singing before. I've spent all my life being the bass player in a band. But playing guitar and mandolin, I've found it's given me a lot more confidence."

The two also tell funny stories about their lifetime in music.

"We'll do any requests that the audience shout out, as long as we know them," he said. "If we don't know them and they do, they can sing and we'll back them."

Pegg is a product of the Birmingham rock scene that also produced the Move, Electric Light Orchestra, the Moody Blues and Led Zeppelin's John Bonham (with whom he played in the '60s). He has been a mainstay of Fairport Convention through nearly four decades of changing lineups, hiatuses, reunions, highs and lows.

Wright, a singer-songwriter and stellar slide guitarist, most recently played with a folk-rock band called Little Johnny England. He also played for many years with British blues-rocker Steve Gibbons, and joined Gibbons, Pegg and some other Fairport members in a spinoff group called the Dylan Project.

"It's not like a Bob Dylan tribute band," Pegg said. "It's all Bob Dylan songs, but Steve Gibbons has got his own take on it."

Pegg served with Jethro Tull from 1980 to 1995, overlapping his Fairport tenure. On one American tour, Fairport opened for Tull and Pegg played with both bands.

"I had a 15-minute changeover to drink as much beer as I could," he said.

He and Wright perform an unreleased song by Tull's Ian Anderson, "Jack Frost and the Hooded Crow." The duo played at a Jethro Tull convention in Italy last year, and Pegg himself joined Tull for a couple of dates in England last month to mark that band's 40th anniversary.

"I really enjoyed doing big concerts in America," he said. "American audiences are so up and so vibrant and so lively. They're much different to English audiences, even for Jethro Tull. We'd play a huge kind of shed (in America) and people would just go wild. Then you come back and play Hammersmith Odeon and people all sit in their seats."

The folky Fairport and rocking Tull aren't as different as it might seem at first.

"Ian went through a period, 'Songs From the Wood' and 'Heavy Horses,' when he was writing seriously great folk-rock songs, much more advanced than people like Fairport or Steeleye Span were doing. The guys in the band were serious rock musicians, and they were way out there in their arrangements. My favorite album that I played on, 'Broadsword and the Beast,' there are some very folky things on there, like 'Slow Marching Band.'"

Pegg occasionally got to break out the mandolin during his Tull years.

"Martin Barre, the guitarist, he used to hate playing the mandolin. Ian utilized the mandolin in things like 'A Christmas Song' and 'Pussy Willow' and 'Fat Man' way back in the '70s. It wasn't an instrument common in rock music. Tull were one of the first bands to use a mandolin."

Pegg shared in Jethro Tull's 1986 Grammy Award, the first ever given for hard rock/heavy metal performance, for the album "Crest of a Knave."

"I have my Grammy Award in my toilet," Pegg said. "Mine eventually arrived in two pieces."

At the time, nominee Metallica was expected to win.

"We got a lot of stick from the press and the media," Pegg said. "It was nothing to do with us. We didn't vote for ourselves. Tull obviously has elements of its music that could be considered heavy metal. It was more of a gesture to the band's longevity."

Fairport sees its own fanatical following gather at its annual festival (Aug. 7-9 this year) in the English village of Cropredy, near where the band members live.

"We get lots of people coming over from the States," Pegg said. "We only put bands on that we like. It's a real kind of mixture of music. You can't say it's a folk festival and it's not a rock festival. It's very eclectic."

Fairport's Saturday night closing set will include a tribute to the group's beloved former vocalist Sandy Denny, who died 30 years ago.

"PJ and myself, we do a couple of Sandy songs, 'Bushes and Briars,' and a song I wrote as a tribute, 'Sandy's Song.' We're doing those in the States."

Pegg was absent from Fairport's last American visit, and on a 2005 tour he dropped out before the group reached Morris County.

"I had some things health-wise," he said. "I was going through a rough patch.

"I went on holiday in America. It was quite wonderful. I've been to America so many times but I never really had a chance to see anywhere. I just took the time off. It was better that I didn't do the tour.

"It's very hard for bands to tour America," he said. "Not just the financial aspect. You have to travel so far, and you can only do it by car. The last tour we did, we kind of killed ourselves driving up and down the I-95 backwards and forwards over the same route.

"Coming over with PJ is great for me. We don't have all those expenses. We're treating the whole thing as a working holiday. We want to come to America to play music and see our friends."

[Ulla]

Thank you, nice interview.