The Fivepenny Piece recorded an album or two, and what Just Poets remember of those CDs is that interspersed amongst the comedy of "Pete Was A Lonely Mongrel Dog Who Lived In Central Wigan", were some fantastically evocative songs such as Staleybridge Market On A Saturday Night. Are such songs still in the set?

I know the songs you mean, and we still do some of them. We do Where There’s Muck There’s Brass and Eeh Bah Gum But Aah’m Cowd in among the old favourite funny songs like Big Jim was A Worm. Now when I first came into the folk scene, before joining The Houghton Weavers I was a member of Auld Triangle, a group that’s still going, running Westhoughton Folk Club at the cricket club, although for years the club was at The Red Lion. When I started out, The Fivepenny Piece, along with The Oldham Tinkers and Mike Harding were the forebears of Lancashire folk music. They were the ones we all looked up to. They were the ones who made us say well alright then, I might never make a pop star like The Beatles, who broke in sixty-two, but I could do what these folkies are doing. I thought, perhaps I could write a song. They are only writing about my childhood, the tin baths and the streets and the cobbles. So I started in folk clubs and loved them. It wasn’t them and us, it was everyone singing together and sharing the same sense of humour. The artists were singing songs audiences could identify with, about places they knew, like Staleybridge market, and about the kind of characters we all met there. That’s a great thing about folk music, especially Northern folk music. Mike Harding does it particularly well. He’ll take a lovely story, and exaggerate it a little bit. Now Billy Connelly does it and Jasper Carrot of course. They look at life and they just exaggerate it. The best example of such Northern humour at the moment of course is Peter Kay, on tv, with his look at the Workingman’s Club scene.

He talks about the same thing The Houghton Weavers used to talk about twenty five years ago; - memories of day trips to Blackpool, wearing the swimming cossy your nan had knitted for you. And audiences remember those times, of swimming against the waves with your cossy three waves behind you, and stepping out of the sea with the crotch of the cossy down round your knees. We used to walk down the prom in snake belts, thinking we were really posh. I’m fifty six now, and people ten or fifteen years either side of me seem to share those kind of memories.

When The Fivepenny Piece sing their songs, and I hear people in the audience saying, "that’s right, we used to do that". Keep your hand on your halfpenny, the kind of expression a mam would say to her daughter when she started courting a lad from the weaving sheds, is a saying our audiences all once used.

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