15th April 2019 will be the 11th anniversary of Michael Raven’s passing at the age of 70. In order to commemorate his life and work, I am publishing this interesting interview he gave to Simon Jones in 1999.
RAVEN ON
SIMON JONES meets the man who’s nearly done it all, MIKE RAVEN; hearing yarns of the early folk scene in Birmingham, lots about animals, Mary Hopkin, Lonnie Donegan, local history, how the police make good demolition contractors, the anti-hunting lobby and the terrible truth of Martin Carthy, flamenco guitarist!
Don’t you wish you could do what Mike Raven’s done? It seems he’s done pretty much whatever he pleased and there isn’t really anything he hasn’t had a bash at. In a life inadequately described as ‘full’ he dismisses forty years or so with a smile of the face and an easy-going phrase, “I like to keep busy.” We meet on a glorious afternoon, the sun out and a high breeze.
“ I love this area, “ Raven offers as we sit round a table, piles to talk about and so little time to do justice to such experience. “ There is so much in Cheshire, Shropshire and Staffordshire if you scratch the surface, stop, take time to talk to people and listen.”
He should know, covering three or four counties he complies books of local history, books of Victorian photos and then gazetteers as thick as a Liverpudlian accent. His attention to detail is amazing. “I like to amass information,” he bluffs “and I admit I see things as a challenge. If somebody says to me they want an article on a castle in, er… I don’t know, let’s say Market Drayton, I have to find out about it lock stock and barrel.”
Besides publishing most of his own work, he writes a wickedly-observed column for County set magazines – you know the sort, glossy ads for houses nobody can afford and pages of Society photos of nobody you’ve ever heard of – called Raven’s Eye.
“I love that,” he grins: “you can put anti-blood sport rhetoric on the next page to the local Hunt. I like to live dangerously!” And if there’s one thing bothers Mike Raven it’s blood sports. He is vociferous in his denial – why so?
“I love animals; always have, since I was a child. I won’t go into details but I think hunting, especially fox hunting, is loathsome. There’s just so much that’s repulsive. I must admit to being active as far as banning hunting is concerned. I’ll take photos, write articles, go on protests, whatever. As much as I like the traditions of our country, this is one that could happily be consigned to the dustbin.”
‘The Unspeakable Chasing the Inedible,’ he blazoned across full colour pages of a Staffordshire journal. His own conversion involved the painful loss of his beloved dogs to a gung-ho idiot with a gun; he still finds it hard to talk about the occurrence. Back in the mists of his own past he was once described as the “Robin Hood of the Black Country,” by a local paper which documented his RSPCA, PDSA activities. At mention of that he just smiles.
Let’s talk a bit about music Mike; after all it’s about time we did. Where did it start seriously for you?
“My father had a liking for classical music, so my brother (John) and I grew up with Mozart ringing in our ears, but I learnt to play guitar while I was at Keele University. I got into skiffle through Lonnie Donegan, who was an early hero. I got to meet him many, many years later when he was trying to re-establish himself. He’d bash out his skiffle hits every night at volume but the theatre establishment wanted him to play it safe and go for ‘family’ entertainment. I remember thinking, ‘God, this guy began something which turned music upside down and you want him to come to heel?’ It did, you know: skiffle was the root of rock and acoustic music in this country. It had feet in so many camps and turned so many people on to the fact that you could make your own tunes. This was twenty years before punk. Lonnie Donegan started it all. Thankfully now he seems to be getting his due recognition.”
This was? The late 50s?
“Yeah, about the same time I got hooked on flamenco guitar. I remember having a conversation with Martin Carthy about this and he confessed that he’d once tried to be a flamenco picker. Between University and various jobs here and there I was taught by a genuine gypsy in Barcelona and I spent time in Andalucia and Granada playing there with guitarists in the local bars.”
Returning to England, he and John got together to play folk music around Birmingham. It wasn’t long before they really were the centre of the Black Country trad circuit.
“We started a folk club in Wolverhampton and began researching old industrial songs, some ballads and we wrote a few ourselves in similar vein. As trios were all the rage in the early folk days – you know Peter Paul & Mary – we enlisted a flute player called Derek Craft and we bashed around the Midlands for years as The Black Country Three. We had an odd repertoire but we did loads of work, TV, radio: all short order stuff, phoned the night before – write a song and sing it in studio the next day. We were genuinely popular and I think we did have a huge impact on local research and folklore in Birmingham.”
Their voices were heard beyond too, they got to cut an album on the prestigious Transatlantic label, home to much of the happening folk action of the day, and a right lot they look on the cover: all suits and big smoke stacks in the background – very atmospheric. Rumour has it they were being chased by Philips for a follow up, “but we split up. There was the usual ‘musical differences’; so I went on to work solo and, to be honest, found that just as lucrative. Work came in from radio and television; I was, after all, one of the few guitarists who did a purely instrumental set.”
So it was guitar all the way until you got to play with Mary Hopkin?
“I did; that was a bit later, though, about 1971. I was her accompanist whilst she played on the south coast. A great girl – she was barely twenty when I worked with her, but whoever chose her music should have been shot; I mean, KNOCK, KNOCK! She wanted to be more singer-songwriter but it never happened, which is a great pity. Anyway, she dedicated herself to her family and, as far as I know, was quite happy to do that.”
Not long after Mike found a partnership of his own; a visit to a folk club in Stafford brought contact with Irish/English singer Joan Mills.
“Her mother was Irish,” Raven relates with a twinkle in his eye. “We’ve recorded ten albums or so together and worked with a band called Reynardine. It grew out of Irish sessions in Birmingham – Joan and me, a whistle player and a fiddle player.”
The results of the union are part of the Raven archive known uncannily as THE REYNARDINE TAPES. Yet, surprisingly, “We gave up playing folk music live for a time, though we still recorded.”
And you began to write guitar books and music books in general which often reflected what you were fascinated with at the time.
“Yes, I’ve done about eighty or so,” he deadpans, “but it isn’t all guitar music; there are books about dances, folklore, history and poetry. The death of my dogs got me writing poetry.”
What constitutes a Raven /Mills performance these days?
“A real mix of things actually; I don’t think you could actually say we play folk music in the real sense. There would be some Welsh tunes – I was born in Wales and got into Welsh music latterly – and I’ll play some lute-type pieces, which is another interest of mine. We rework the poetry of people like Housman to traditional music and I might even play a flamenco piece for old times’ sake.”
Raven’s regionality is something of a trademark specialism; not only does he trundle round Cheshire, Shropshire – where he now lives – and Staffordshire, but he digs wider into the border country of England and Wales, issuing recordings rooted in counties like Herefordshire. Strange to tell too, that for a man so steeped in music, he actually gave up playing his guitar for two or three years whilst working up his massive regional guides. As he puts it: “I climbed hills, nosed in churches and saw more secret places than you’d find if you searched with any old gazetteer. I had to give up everything else though; it really took time.”
First came the Staffordshire volume and then the Shropshire edition. “I’d like to do one for Cheshire,” he muses, as the tape clatters noisily to a stop.
And there’s more to Raven: his tales of life in the army really should be put into print and his guise as a landlord/building renovator, a phase of his life exemplified by the Stafford police bursting through a house wall in one of his properties on the pretence of looking for drugs. “They never found an ounce,” he mutters. “Took me years to get them to pay up for the damage.”
I flick casually through some promo pictures. On each of them, whether with Joan or just his guitar, Mike Raven looks the very picture of concentration. The same inscrutable gaze 1959, 1969, 1979, 1989 and, you guessed, it 1999.
Had he ever thought of putting his life into a book?
“I’ve thought about it, but tell me, Simon, who’d believe it?”
Look out for the next blog: the interview Mike did with skiffle king, LONNIE DONEGAN