Fascinated by such recollections Just Poets begin to wonder who will write of today and preserve these times for posterity.

When we started out we were on the back of the American Folk Revival that involved the likes of Peter, Paul and Mary and Tom Paxton. Following in their wake the Irish had The Clancy Brothers and Scotland had The Corries. For England, it was The Spinners. Folk music isn’t all about writing new songs, though. It is also about preserving the traditional songs. The Houghton Weavers didn’t write many songs. I wrote a couple, but mainly we carried on the tradition by singing songs sent to us by others. Peter Seal from Handforth only wrote one song, called The Room In The Sky, and I still do that song today twenty five years later. It was written at a time when people were being moved out of houses into multi storey flats. It deals with the loneliness of living on the fifteenth floor but it is still relevant to so many people today. It might not seem pertinent now all those flats have been knocked down but the song is a reflection of life at a particular time. We had people like Howard Broadbent and Alan Bell. We didn’t think we could write songs as good as theirs, so we sang theirs.

The Fivepenny Piece include songs by the original line up as well as still singing the songs of Howard and Alan. I’ve lost contact a little bit with the folk scene today. I know it’s not a thriving scene, it seems somewhat fragmented, and is something of a minority kind of music.

I hope there are still people writing English folk songs. We took a few from a poet called Ernie Ford, who brought about 3,000 poems round when we had the tv series and asked if we’d like to put music to them. We worked our way through them all, some lovely stuff, and recorded a couple of them.

Warwick suggests that The American Folk Revival of the sixties certainly did spawn a generation of singer / songwriters in a way that perhaps the British folk scene didn’t. Warwick naturally mentions his own favourite songwriter (as he will, no doubt, in every Backstage Pass interview!). Former Kingston Trio lead singer John Stewart went on to write Daydream Believer for The Monkees and has recorded over thirty solo albums since leaving the trio in 1967. Warwick suggests to Norman Prince that writers such as Alan Bell must have felt The Houghton Weavers were a fantastic vehicle for their writing.

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