Bild-Softley-ZZ-01_04_71

Pete Frame Reproduced by kind permission of ZIGZAG Together! Issue no 1 April 1971

 

 

 

Mick Softley

 

 

 

 

 

 

TALKING ABOUT THE OLD TIMES, WHERE DID THEY GO? LIKE 1963-65 ... the folk era I like to call it. I was a weekend beatnik then, coming home from work to change my charcoal grey for denim and donkey jacket. The image.

 

Walking round the streets of Luton playing Dylan riffs on a Hohner Super Vamper, smoking a pipe though I found tobacco more repulsive than pleasant, sitting in Henekeys drinking unappetising wine and talking about painting, bragging that I actually knew someone who had once smoked pot, hanging around with various stereotyped birds as uniform in their bizarre (they reckoned) thoughts and dress as a crowd of parking wardens, making sure that either a Steinbeck or a Kerouac paperback protruded from my pocket. Musically what was hip and what wasn't was very important in those days - like Dylan was O.K. until he plugged in - electrified folk music was just too outrageous for words, Woody Guthrie was God, and so on. I was pretty straight in those days, and I guess, due to age, environment and the feel of that period, that most people were. One of the few people that did have it sussed out, even in those days, was Mick Softley.

 

Ian and I used to go to all the folk clubs - to the Festival Hall concerts to Pete Seeger and Bob Dylan. Then, together with Rod (our ex-photographer) we ran a folk club in Luton - Tom Paxton played there, Julie Felix, Donovan, Paul Simon and so on. And one of our favourite singers was this same Mick Softley. We'd come across him in the Cock, a pub in St. Albans where Donovan, Maddy Prior (from Steeleye Span) and the hardcore of Herts heads used to congregate - everyone would be singing and Softley's voice, ringing out like a bell, roared over the rest. It was all the standard numbers of the romantic beatnik dream period ... 'This land is your land', 'San Francisco Bay Blues', and stuff, but than Softley would start singing some of his own works - 'I'm a leaping man' and 'Roll your leg over the man in the moon' for instance and parodies of current hits like 'Sweets for my sweet' with the chords purposely misfingered ... amazing songs filled with laughter, barefeet and spilled beer. It seemed like he'd rolled any troubles he may have had into a ball, and simply cast them to the winds - everywhere he went he saturated the place with laughter. And the more we saw him, the more we dug his brown and laced jollity, the wild thoughts of his bearded mind, his singing and the harsh ringing of his flat picked Gibson. That was, like I say, 1965. But Mick Softley had already been a head free troubadour for 6 years.

 

"In 1959 I went to France ... I was going to go to Formentera for the winter on an old motorbike combination, but it didn't make it past Barcelona, so I came back to the Pyrenees. I really got to love the part of France from Ceret down to the sea, and I lived in this concrete hut for a few months - till my money ran out in fact.

 

I was working as an apprentice engineer until I got kicked out for absence ... and that was it - I didn't want to know about work after that. I was 18, I'd done a year and a bit of my apprenticeship and that was it - all over. So I just took a job filling in the air bubbles on the surface of concrete castings until I sprained my wrist clocking in, and off I went with £50 I'd saved.

 

Well, I spent 3 days, literally, trying to hitch hike to Paris, but couldn't get a lift, so I caught a train in the end, and I moved into a room over this bookshop called The Mistral, which was really owned by an American cat. In those days I really wanted to be a writer. I moved into the heart of the late 50's Paris literary circles ... they were all going in one door and out the other, muttering exactly the same sort of things, so I thought hello and goodbye. They really pissed me off, they were so pretentious ... I'd got in with them because I was trying to find out where I was at, and I thought I should get in with a crowd of writers, poets and painters and really dig it ... and I dug it, and got out of it.

 

So I moved out of that and onto the streets with my guitar. I could only play a few chords, but I could sing OK and I stood behind a tree, with my hat on the other side, trying to collect some money. Of course I didn't. Then I went out playing and singing and really hustling people and I started to make quite a bit of bread.

 

Not long after that I met a great saint, Alex Campbell - who couldn't play, but was totally real - and he got me along for a beer and I got into a much better circle of people, real people. I stayed on the Continent for 3 years, just playing.

 

Then I came back to England. I had this idea of riding a horse to America - across Europe and Russia, across the frozen Bering Straits, down through Alaska to the States ... didn't get it together. Got stuck here ... well and truly stuck. I went into the folk circuit here, playing in clubs and pubs and in 1964 I started my own folk club at the Spinning Wheel in Hemel Hempstead, which was really wild - the best folk club England's ever had without a doubt. It was to be open to 3 or 4 in the morning, with everyone jugging it up, sweating like hell ... well that was shut down after about a year, but it was really good while it lasted.

 

I decided that I'd have a go at starting a business; it was disastrous - but it got rid of the whole of the business scene for me. So I just walked out of the shop, locked the door and forgot it. After a 4 year absence, I got back to music, starting off completely from scratch again, going through a lot of hells and no heavens, a terrifying amount of personal pain, and got a bit of it back together. I wasn't interested in playing for money - I just wanted to play again and have people listening to me.

 

I started playing in pubs and clubs again until just after last Christmas Donovan said 'What publisher are you with now'? and stuff like that, and I told him I'd scrubbed all that scene. He said 'But you've got to record, man - it's your job to get your music on record', and I started thinking it might not be such a bad idea. So I went to CBS, and they arranged for me to make an album. I don't know whether it was something new or not, but CBS virtually gave me a direction contract, whereby I directed the whole issue, and approved everything.

 

I'm really pleased with - it everyone who was on it played beautifully. There was none of this coming into the studio and saying 'Yeah man isn't it beautiful, it's all so beautiful' - it was 'Right, let's get on with it' and they were really good, they knew exactly what and when to play.

 

I wouldn't have any drugs on the sessions at all. If people want to smoke, let them go and smoke - I've got nothing against that - but they can't smoke and work on my sessions because the two don't go together. I've been through all that stuff, and I know for certain that any form of art is a natural gift. it's not something you can induce by drugs, alcohol or anything else - they won't make you any more artistic.

 

The songs on the album are ones I've written comparatively recently - since about the middle of last year. I work very hard at songs. I don't just pluck them out of the air; I like to think of myself as a craftsman, particularly when working with words, because writing is one thing I hold in the highest respect."

 

The Donovan song 'Poke at the Pope' is one of the few songs Mick didn't write but frequently sings. I asked Mick about his education which I seemed to remember had a religious background.

 

"Yes, it was important, but what is more important is that the first 16 years of my life were spent living right next to Epping Forest, which had a far greater influence on me than anything else - it was my playground.

 

When I was 5, I went to a school where all the teachers were nuns - and I remember on the first day, one of them picked me up by my ears and shook me because she'd seen me kissing Margaret Richardson. Then later I went to a Jesuit College which had a phenomenally high standard of education. The object of the school was that all the boys should take the cloth, or if they didn't then at least they'd have been well educated in the ways of priesthood. What I really am interested in is girls - I love them. I love a feminine woman who's prepared to use her femininity to get exactly what she wants ... and usually she wins. It's a very strange time we're living in ... getting stranger all the time."

 

Mick Softley, living in the Transit which is his present home, with enough tales to fill several autobiographical volumes which someday he just might write, walking the earth's crust, soaking up Britain, the countryside which is vanishing as the builders propagate the urban sprawl, thinking about the meaning of life - his life, taking his music seriously and using his huge voice and his guitar to ease his feelings. I often think he's at this best sitting on a bench outside his local, sipping mild between songs, laughing and lolling, playing and singing.

Done