The Young Willy Russell

At 13, real life for Willy Russell took place outside of school. He was 'sagging' off school to attend lunch-time sessions at the Cavern and during that time discovered the Beatles. "The Beatles were a truly great 'r&b' band in the 1960s." Later he would get to know band members a little better. John wished him well with 'John, Paul, George, Ringo ...and Bert' and Paul asked him to write a screenplay involving Wings. Willy spent a week up at Paul's Scottish home where Wings were recording the album, Back To The Egg. With long time friend and collaborator Mike Ockrent, Willy then decamped to Jamaica and wrote the film (provisionally titled Band On The Run).

Although the film was never made, it was, says Willy, "A great project with which to be involved. Apart from anything else, both Mike and I recognised that if the film had gone ahead it could have revealed something that became all too apparent during the various read-throughs with Paul - that Paul McCartney is a very capable actor indeed, one who would have been extremely convincing in the rather serious role that we wrote for his character. I think too that had the film been made it might have helped alter the (then) prevailing image that Linda had to bear. She was so far removed from the image that the press always pedalled and we took delight in writing a part for Linda in which she was a 'real hard bitch of a bruiser' - the real hardcase of the (fictitious) band that's at the centre of the story.'

Why the film didn't get made still remains something of a mystery but, says Willy Russell, " For one thing Paul got locked up in Japan for a few weeks and on his release he'd decided that as far as Wings was concerned he'd taken it as far as it could go. I thought that was a good decision. But it did mean that there was then no hope of making a movie when the script had been specifically written around the notion of an existing band. We'd had to fashion specific parts for people like Linda and Denny Laine and then, like the band itself, the script was redundant.'

Willy says that his abiding memory of that time is not the abortive movie itself but of being in the mobile recording studio where Paul was recording: " Especially around three or four in the morning when after a day of doing individual parts/overdubs and such, Paul and the band would gather together in the studio and play again the kind of kickass rock and rhythm an blues repertoire which he'd been playing all those years before when, as a kid, I'd first seen and heard the Beatles."

As well as being heavily influenced by The Beatles, the young Willy Russell later came under the spell of Bob Dylan (see article from FOLK ARTS NETWORK NEWS) and this eventually led to an interest in traditional British folk as well as American roots music.

Encouraged by Mick Groves of The Spinners - the Liverpool folk group, immensely popular both at home and nationally through their 1960s concert and TV appearances - Russell's newly-formed band The Kirkby Town Three Russell began to write songs of his own and perform them at gigs and the folk club that he and the Kirkby Town Three ran on a Thursday night at The Green Moose Cafe in Liverpool's Brooks Alley - The traditional songs he heard there filtered into his repertoire along with the comic and "deeply depressive social comment" songs he was writing at the time: " If you think Morrissey can be morbid you should hear some of what I was writing during those Green Moose days - wrist-slashing classics such as ' Bottle of Gin'/ 'I Played In My Backyard Yesterday'/ The Death of Georgie Perkins........ Misery on draught!"

"The Moose was a really important period for me though. I never for one second realised it at the time but I now see that from having to do that gig every Thursday I was learning all kinds of things about the nature of performance, about audiences, about what will and won't work, about how overwriting can kill a song (or, indeed, a play or any other form for that matter). Although none of us knew it at the time, all those folk places, cafes, pubs, old cellars were a fantastic training ground for all kinds of talent - it was a completely anti-commercial, anti music-establishment phenomenon. I recently had the pleasure of reading a book by Colin Harper that finally captures in print what all that period was like - "Dazzling Stranger: Bert Jansch and the British Folk and Blues Revival" really terrific for anyone who's interested in an area of musical and cultural history that's so often ignored."

It was during those early Green Moose days that Willy met future collaborator Barbara Dickson..... "I met him first in Edinburgh, then again, at a folk club the night before he got married. I became friendly with him and I used to go and stay with him in Liverpool when I was doing the folk clubs in that area. He liked what I did, liked my voice and in fact ran a club himself. I was actually staying with him as he finished writing 'John Paul George Ringo...And Bert' and I thought it was a real scream. Willy thought of me doing it, so it was my big break." (Barbara Dickson)

As Willy Russell's interest in writing drama developed, he found ways of linking it to folk music. Early experiments included setting up a contemporary parody group, The Brooks Alley Bummers, which lampooned folk song.

Russell's first truly 'serious' piece of work was an update, adaptation and relocation of the Robert Burns poem Tam O' Shanter. ' I'd become aware of (and greatly influenced by) the work of Burns. I think I could quite easily identify with a poet who was considered 'uneducated', the 'ploughman poet' and through my connections with Scots friends like Davey Johnstone, George Alden and Tich Frier I was able to hear as well as read Burns. I particularly loved Tam O Shanter, a great great narrative ballad, aching with great language, myth, dramatic pace, comedy, the macabre. Tich used to recite it marvellously and I always fancied having a crack doing so myself. The problem for me though was that the poem is written in dense Scots and even if I'd had a stab at the pronunciation the chances were that any English audience would probably be left understanding not more than one word in twenty. And so I solved the problem by, simply, translating the poem, resetting it in modern day Liverpool, turning Sam's horse into my battered old Ford Escort van, reshaping the devil as a graveyard Jimi Hendrix etc..

What I didn't realise when I was writing it was that, again, I was taking a kind of crash course in what writing was all about. Again I learned so much from the month it took me to render the genius of Tam O Shanter into what became Sam O Shanker."

Willy Russell later turned this adapted poem into a play, which along with two other one act plays, PLAYGROUND and KEEP YOUR EYES DOWN formed the trilogy, BLIND SCOUSE which appeared at Edinburgh in the 1972 Fringe festival. And later still, SAM O SHANKER became a play with songs which toured Merseyside pubs and clubs as part of the Everyman Theatre's Vanload experiment. This contained songs for which Russell used both original and existing folk melodies, an attempt at writing theatre in the voice of apparently ordinary people while revealing the extra-ordinariness of them, much in the same way that the likes of James Reeves and A L Lloyd (who was musical adviser to many post-1956 Royal Court plays) had attempted to do. "We were constantly trying, over-zealous as we probably all were, to convert people who had an antipathy towards folk music - to show that it had this sublime, majestic, universal power. I always wanted to harness that in theatre."

Later, Andy Roberts further encouraged Willy to sing and play during the Words On The Run tour (1995/97). The tour featured Willy and some old friends from the Liverpool Poets and Liverpool Scene, Andy, of course, Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten. Tupperware Girls, one of the tracks from the new album was featured during the performance. "At first I thought I was just going to accompany the poets and I'd written a melody called The Tap Dancing Poets which we were using as an intro. Then we were sitting around one day and I started to play a couple of songs I'd written and both Andy and Adrian were very supportive and enthusiastic. Having the support of a very established acoustic guitarist with me on stage gave me the courage and I ended up doing about five songs in that show."

Both Willy Russell and Andy Roberts have continued to perform together. They appeared together at Adrian Henri's Celebration evening at the Royal Philharmonic Hall in Liverpool during March 2000 and at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2002 to celebrate Roger McGough's 40th year Bash. 2002 also saw Willy and Andy in the recording studio creating Willy's new album - HOOVERING THE MOON.

 

 

CHINA | LISTEN HERE | BROADBAND REQUIRED ANY FATHER DIRTY LITTLE HABIT GENIUS THESE DAYS UNDERWEAR MY LITTLE SISTER GLAD TOWN MR KING SHE GIVE ME | LISTEN HERE | BROADBAND REQUIRED PINK LAMBRUSCO | LISTEN HERE | BROADBAND REQUIRED WHEN WE GET TO LONDON TUPPERWARE GIRLS | LISTEN HERE |BROADBAND REQUIRED CRAZY DAYS ALL COMPOSITIONS WRITTEN BY WILLY RUSSELL   HOOVERING THE MOON is now available to purchase on-line. Just click the 'Buy Now' button. The album is also available as an iTunes download from Apple.com ©.

 

"NOT since Noel Coward performed for London's café society has a British playwright dared to sing in front of a paying audience."

 

Well, Willy dared and earlier this year, to celebrate the release of his new album HOOVERING THE MOON, Willy and his band played two great gigs at the Walls Restaurant in Oswestry and two gigs as part of the Galway Festival.

 

The packed houses enjoyed full sets with Willy, firstly reading from Wrong Boy, and then joined by the full band to play a selection of Willy's compositions from his new album Hoovering The Moon.

 

The events were filmed and recorded for possible release.

 

The band composed some of the musicians who contributed to the new album. Andy Roberts (guitar & vocals) led the band, ably assisted by Tim Firth (piano & vocals), Mark Griffiths (bass & vocals), Paul Allen (drums), Iain Matthews (vocals & guitar), Dorie Jackson (vocals), Loreto Murray (vocals) and Phil Beaumont (percussion).

 

A successful tour in the Summer of 2004 followed the release of Hoovering The Moon with In Other Words & Singing Playwrights touring with fellow wordsmith Tim Firth and a full band comprising some of the original studio musicians plus music degree students, Vidar Norheim, Gavin Kaufman and Emily Jackson from the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts (LIPA). The show had a mini season at the Edinburgh Festival and their performance on a Live from Liverpool Radio 2 Mike Harding Show, alongside Ralph McTell and Janice Ian, became one of the shows most requested replays.