Part Two of an interview with UK musician Gary Reeves on the remarkable Reeves Brothers
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Janice: What is fascinating is your family’s allegiance to drawing on Medieval Music.
What are the connections, Gary?
Gary: As young children growing up in the 1950’s, my elder brother Brian and I listened to quite a wide range of music and the earliest musical influences came from what we heard on the BBC Light Programme. The radio was on from the time we got up in the morning, so we’d get used to hearing anything that was being broadcast. Mum & Dad also let us have an old radio in our bedroom and we’d lay in bed listening to Radio Luxembourg, who broadcast Pop programmes in the evenings.
Our Grandmother, Milly Thatcher, who lived with the family, loved to sing Music Hall songs, so we learned all the words to ‘Boiled Beef & Carrots’ and ‘I Like Piccalilli’ (among many others) from her. We were never shy of joining in and think that we gained a lot of confidence from doing that. Everyone in the family sang along to the radio, so it became a totally natural thing to do.
Our exposure to Medieval or Traditional music occurred quite a few years later when we started to frequent and perform in folk clubs. Brian eventually opened his own club, The Palais de Folk, at a pub a few minutes up the road from where we lived in Richmond, on the outskirts of London.
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| Brian & Katy |
Janice: So how did you start playing?
Gary: Oh that was definitely down to Bri. I can lay claim to being the one who first brought a guitar into the house, purchased from a schoolfriend for the very reasonable sum of thirty shillings (£1.50) but never quite got the hang of playing i.
On the other hand, Bri took to it like the proverbial duck to water and once Mum & Dad bought him a better guitar to play, he never looked back. He invested in Bert Weedon’s famous ‘Play in a Day’ book and was soon strumming along to his favourite Top Twenty songs.
He also started to go out to see bands like The Yardbirds at the famous CrawDaddy Club, which was where he first saw Eric Clapton play and became an instant fan. He also admired the Les Paul guitar Clapton was playing and made his mind up there and then he’d find a way of acquiring one of his own. It took him a while to find it but with the help of Dad’s signature on the HP Agreement, acquire one he di.
His speed of progress on the instrument was remarkable and he was soon lead guitarist with a local band. They needed a lead singer and, much to my surprise, I was also asked to join. We played a few low-level gigs - or ‘bookings’ as they were then known - but Bri was starting to write his own material by then and wanted to form a band of his own.
We played together in a few of these bands during the next few years, got close to ‘making it’ a couple of times but never managed to make the breakthrough to becoming professional musicians. He definitely had the talent to do it but in hindsight, don’t think I ever really did.
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| Brian, Aiport Studios |
Janice: When did the folk club years start?
Gary: That was back in 1975 and was purely accidental. The band we were in at the time were able to earn a few quid playing acoustic gigs at private functions (weddings and the like) and we were having a bit of a practice in the lobby of a pub before going on when the landlord approached us about maybe playing a few songs in his Saloon Bar. The regulars seemed to enjoy it and it became a regular, weekly thing. Word got around, more people started showing up and, before we knew where we were, a folk club was opened upstairs.
The folk club crowd liked a drink, made a very enthusiastic audience and we very soon began to feel at home. Yes, we very quickly had to make the switch to playing more traditional music, though the Folk Scene was very accepting and we were still able to slip-in a few modern numbers now and again.
Eventually, the band was slimmed down to a duo - Bri and a wonderful singer called Katy Heath - and it was they who ran the club mentioned above. They also travelled the country playing club gigs and festivals and built up a very loyal following until a few personal differences caused them to split in ’78.
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| Terry Reeves |
Janice: Tell me about Root Division
Gary: This is where my younger brother Terry enters the picture. He’d taught himself to play guitar because Bri would leave his laying around the house, so Tel would just pick the nearest available one and just strum away to himself. When he moved into a place of his own, Bri gifted him an old acoustic and the process continued until, unbeknown to us, he started to write his own songs. We had no idea until he sent us both a cassette tape, wherein lay all of this new material.
We were both impressed with what we were hearing and decided we should all get together to see what arrangements we could come up with. Within a few months, the concept of the three of us playing in a band together was born. Bri owned a good quality 4-track, reel-to-reel machine, Tel lived in a remote house on the edge of a playing field (ergo, no noise problems) so we picked out a few tracks, persuaded John Palmer, a bass player from one of our erstwhile bands to join us and set about it.
When Tel moved jobs we had to resume recording in the attic of a house Bri was sharing, eventually committing to tape about a dozen tunes which eventually became an album. We never played any gigs and weren’t signed to a record label so they were just distributed on cassette tape to family and friends.
All our lives underwent many changes in the ensuing years, which meant Root Division lasted less than eighteen months but they were certainly a catalyst for Tel’s songwriting talents and he’s been writing ever since.
Janice: And then, many years down the line, there was Cripple Club. How did that band come into being?
Gary: A sad tale. Bri was diagnosed with leukaemia in 2009 and died in 2012. Tel and myself spent many long hours on the phone discussing Bri’s situation whilst he was in hospital during the last year of his life. Of course, his playing years were by then long behind him but ours weren’t, so we thought it would be sensible to carry on whilst we both still could.
After Bri’s death, we set up the Mountain Songs page on SoundCloud as a tribute to he and his music and that was when the idea of Cripple Club really began to take shape. We’d made friends with some great musicians on the platform and started some tentative collaborations.
At first, we thought we’d probably just record a few tracks just to keep our hands in but it really started to become what it now is when our friendship with the great Hans-Michael Albers started. Of course, we’ve collaborated with many others too but the great majority of the songs are conceived with Hans in mind and he arranges and produces most of our output these days.
We’ve recorded and released our first album (‘Another Zero’) and are now on our way to producing another, tentatively titled ‘From London To Hamburg’, the latter being where Hans resides.
We’ll try to keep going for as long as we are able but given we are all at the veteran stage of our lives, who knows what’s in the future? Certainly not us…
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| Terry & Brian: Root Division |
rootdivision.bandcamp.com/album/root-division
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