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Kara  J Richards - Autobiography

 

The only time I remember my Dad saying anything nice about me was one day when he heard me singing along to the Joan Baez album Come From The Shadows, an album which, along with Bob Dylan's greatest hits double album in a beautiful wine red sleeve and Joni Mitchell’s Blue, formed what I would call my Religious Education.
It was about this time that I fell desperately in love with my class teacher who played the guitar and sang Don McLean's
Vincent. He left after his first year to pursue a career as a musician. I was heartbroken and started to write songs.

My first “big” break came when I was 10. Our class teacher, an Irish lady called Ronnie Sullivan, helped me and a couple of classmates, Robin Cook (he was big on Elvis and played a mean guitar) and Alistair Cook (no relation, and more of a classical guitarist) to form a Peter, Paul and Mary style trio called
The New Forest Rovers, which quickly became the star act of the school Friday afternoon performance assembly. This being well before the days when “appropriate behaviour” was expected of school teachers, Ronnie got us a slot at a pub where the local Irish band The Little People played on a Sunday night. We played a repertoire of murder ballads and folk songs. It was here that I discovered that crisps and coke (at this stage the brown fizzy type) were freely available to performing artists.

The rest of my education was frankly a waste of resources and probably most unpleasant for the poor lost souls who were charged with the task of inflicting it on me. Luckily Margaret Thatcher took control of the country and a generation rejoiced in the impossibilty of respectable employment.

I first went busking in a subway in Southampton that went between the car park and the art school. I was with my friend Ju, who sort of played the penny whistle. We needed money to buy supplies for a screen printing project (‘
Take What You Want And Leave The Rest’, ‘The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down’).

In 1983, on the day that Mrs T. got elected for the second time, I hitchhiked to Stonehenge Free Festival. I had a tent, a sleeping bag, home made dungarees (from the screen printing project) and a 12 string Eko. It was left handed, so just about impossible to tune. We were welcomed by a big banner proclaiming “WE ARE THE PEOPLE OUR PARENTS WARNED US ABOUT”.

 

I played mainly songs I had written so no one could say I was getting them wrong, and was quickly adoped by one of the larger drug cartels who operated on the Free Festival scene, to document in song life as an 1980s English outlaw. Don't Point Your Laws At Me was a particular favourite which very nearly got me arrested for contempt of court when I was busking under an open window in an acoustically perfect lane, which unbeknownst to me was directly underneath the chambers of a high court judge. He said I had very good diction and that my voice carried well.

The summer was good but the winter was hard. Living in a makeshift tent outside Salisbury, I would walk down to the town and busk outside Snells coffee house til I had enough money for coffee and a slice of their Death By Chocolate cake. I kept it up til just after Christmas then moved to London into a squat full of musicians in Kentish town, where I had the honour and pleasure of being educated into the art of busking the London Underground by Miko. I became a
Mikette, singing backing vocals with Jane Jameson and Jen-Jen. We lived spitting distance from the Kentish Town ‘Town and Country Club’, where we were treated to such delights as Moving Hearts and Hank Wangford. We didn't have a cassette or record player in the squat so all my musical influences came directly from hearing people play. I did a few gigs as a support act to a band called Dirty Works, (a busker by day, who was not above singing Norweigan Wood all day as it was his best earner).

 

Things went well and by May of the next year I hit the road again, this time armed with a beautiful new 6 string Yamaha and a repertoire of good earners. Cat Stevens, Donovan, a couple of Beatles songs and some Irish songs. The festival scene was getting pretty sketchy by this point, crack cocaine had undermined any sense of legitimate purpose that The Convoy had had, and instead of being the mind-freeing route out of Thatcher’s Britain, it just became a microcosm of everything she stood for - the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots’. The show did not go on for want of a mic lead (costs about the same as a pipe of crack).

The mass arrest of the entire Convoy at Nostell Piory left me in Leeds for the winter, standing by my man who had been accused of drug dealing simply because he had four grand in cash in his welly (call that evidence?). I appeared in court 6 months pregnant and gave the acting performance of my life. He got off and I realised what a total farce the legal system was.

The Convoy was finally smashed at Stoney Cross in 1986 when Thatcher sent the heavies in, threanening to take the kids and put them into care. All our “men” took their drugs and money and scuttled off into the hedgerows, leaving the women and children to face the police, who simply took all the vehicles that did not have a full set of legal paperwork (all but one), and gave the owners a choice of walking away with what they could carry, or a free breakfast and a police cell. The fantastic Mr Eavis of Glastonbury Festival gave us asylum, and while I gave considerable thought to the ‘New Age’, I wrote a couple of songs including
Pandora's Box, which got played in several TV documentaries about our lifestyle. Someone gave me twenty quid which went into the free food kitchen. Nothing like a bit of pressure to boost creativity.

Forced into sharing a living space with 6 or 7 women and their kids quickly led us to see how much easier life was that way. Instead of us sitting at home in our individual buses and trucks waiting for a partner to come home from having fun (fun tending to be getting out of their minds with the latest influx of wannabe bus wives); one woman could stay in and mind the kids each night, while the others got to go out in the festival and enjoy themselves. The summer passed well travelling down to Cornwall with a good busking crew we called The Brill Bill Dodgers - Joanna Harvey on fiddle and vocals, Rico on Saxophone, Rick on guitar and me on guitar and vocals.

At the Elephant Fayre, Jen-Jen (a Mikkette) told me that her friends
The Oroonies were playing and had invited her to do backing vocals. She asked me if I would like to do it too. The Oroonies played very early trance music, an invocation of Pan, normally in a state of vague delirium. I at this stage had managed to accumulate an impressive selection of lurex dresses and some fantastic wigs. Whichever member of The Oroonies had invited Jen-Jen to sing, they had forgotten and certainly not told the others, the effect being, we rock up on stage looking like recent arrivals from another planet. The band being unsure if we are real or just a figment of their deranged collective imagination and we proceed to, well, invoke Pan. He came...

Summer came to an end and a group of girls, myself and Joanna included, decided to open The Home for Wayward Women in Wales. We just waitied til before the first snows and asked a recently divorced Welsh farmer who was consoling himself with crack cocaine and dabbling with the idea of hosting a festival, if we (6 women, 3 with little children and 3 pregnant) could pop round and use his washing machine. We were snowed in for months, by which time his farm and half of the neighbours' had gone up in smoke. We treated his friends, who despite the snow regularly turned up with bottles of whisky and bicarbonate of soda, to witty banter and the singing of songs we had learned from the Christy Moore song book. These burly farmers posed little threat to our honour because A, we didn't have any and B, for the most part we could drink them under the table.

The house was a wreck, impossible to heat, and we had nothing to eat but Jerusalem artichokes. By May I had had enough. I got a mandolin (easier to carry with a two year old than a guitar) and flew to Austailia.

On my return, nothing was left. The man who I had left my truck with had sold it and spent the money, and the festival scene had been totally obliterated by a drug called ecstacy, which turned everyone into a sloppy mess that thought acid house music was nice. In fact everything was “nice”. (What she could not achieve with violence she achieved with chemical love).

The only way to escape the incessant banging of House Music was to get off grid, away from motors (motors=batteries=house music). So I got a horse and barrel top. My travelling companions over the next six months were Mikki Barry, Tasha Child and Joanna Harvey. Our only form of making a living and entertaining ourselves was making music, which we did on the street, in any pubs that would let us in, on the verge and at horse fairs and gypsy festivals from Hereford to Devon. I think it is fair to say we got the hang of singing close harmony.

Hippies, having had their own festivals destroyed by Mrs T. and her lovely E, had started frequenting horse fairs and had been banned from all the pubs in Stow on the Wold. So we were not really expecting to be allowed into the Bell, but one of the gypsies sat at the bar gave the barman the nod and they let the four of us in then locked the door. We spent the night singing and arguing for our lives, explaining to the gypsies why we wanted to be gypsies. As long as we had another song they were not going to kill us, but as long as we kept singing we had to keep drinking. A man called Georgie Biddle had taught us a song called
Will There Be Any Travellers In Heaven (an adaptation of Will There Be Any Box Cars In Heaven), which brought them to tears and disarmed them for long enough to decide that they wouldn't kill us but we would have to agree to marriage.

In the morning I sold my horse and got a lift to Ireland with a very bad young man who had been carrying on with two young ladies who had recently made each other’s acquaintance and were now conspiring to destroy him.

About a month later I was strolling down the main drag at Spancil Hill Horse Fair with my daughter Keda, when I was approached by a beaming man whom I vaguely recognised. “Sure I knew you would follow me over”, he declared. It was Sean, who I was engaged to marry. However the discovery that I had a daughter caused him to be so severely derided by his peers (“You're a lazy fekker Sean, you'd be marrying a women who already has a child, all because you can't be arsed to make one yourself”) that I was released from my promise if I just went to the pub and sang Spancil Hill for them right there in Spancil Hill.

Playing music in Ireland was easy, everyone loved it and wanted more. Busking festivals were big news and participating buskers were treated very well. By the end of the summer myself and Joanna, who had also escaped the incessant banging of the UK “music” scene, had enough money for a truck and a boat ticket to France. We took a bunch of entertainers with us including John Nee and Annette, and a man we called Big John, who played guitar and who apparently was in love with me, although I can't imagine why as I was a total bitch to him most of the time. We busked down to Spain and spent the winter playing tiny mountain-top bars to people who had never even heard of England or Ireland. We squatted an empty house which had belonged to an Englishman who had died in dubious circumstances on a mountain pass. The locals were delighted - they liked music and the house being the only one in the valley with a flushing toilet, it was a shame to see it not being used.

By May it was too hot and one of Joanna's ex-boyfriends had turned up and immediately got himself arrested and was awaiting trail in Malaga jail. She was busy trying to get him out or at least get some chocolate to him. I jumped into a van with 10 sweating refugees and a cat which we smuggled all the way to Amsterdam, while I learned to play the violin. When we got there the cat got out of the van and disappeared, never to be seen again.

I busked the Amsterdam plazas and got bought drinks by businessmen in the Irish bars. I got to play on posh private barges and in really smart squats and managed to sneak in to see Lou Reed play at The
Royal Theatre Carré.

By August I was back in Ireland and everything was going fine til one day I suddenly fell in love with a poet. It must have been something he said. We got a grubby little flat in Cork city behind the Murphy's brewery. Contraception was illegal and according to the neighbours I was going to hell anyway just for being English, so the fact that I was living in sin was neither here nor there. Jack was born in June and I went back to England to get a driving licence.

It took a year to get my driving licence and almost immediately I left England and headed for Turkey with a tall dark handsome guitarist, my two kids and and his two kids. We busked across France. Keda and Amber learnt to play harmonies on penny whistles, Rico learnt to juggle and Jack learnt to walk. We met up with Niall and Jane in Austria and headed out in two busses past the newly dismantled Berlin Wall. We made it across Yugoslavia with the war on either side and the value of the dinar losing decimal points from one motorway toll booth to the next and across Bulgaria, but they would not let us into Romania, even though we had learnt a Romanian Folk song (obviously from the wrong side). We ended up spending the winter in Greece, busking ouside the bouzuki shop in the little streets around The Acropolis and all the way down to Kalamata. We spent Christmas in the mountains of arcadia with the wrinkliest people I have ever seen. But they liked music and we liked goat.

It was on this journey that Keda started going to school. Just about every time we stopped the bus she would wander off and find a school. She finally got her own way in Brittany when she simply refused to get back on the bus. Luckily houses in the area she chose where dirt cheap (there are very good reasons for this as the next 15 years revealed), so we busked the Breton coast all summer and bought a reasonable ruin. Bretons like celtic music so we managed to keep playing.

Over the next 15 years I had 2 more kids, making a nice round 6, and played in all sorts of bands:

  • Lugnasa (Celtic heavy metal band with mental guitar whizz Cyril Corre and Amsterdam punk drummer, Ton DeRuiter)

  • The Joseph Schnider Set (Punk Croon with Joe Schnider, G Wagstaff and the D'amour twins)

  • The Soup Queens (glam a capella quartet)

  • Eskandalo (Ska / jazz with Sylvain Guyonnet, Claud Monet)

  • The Easy (French Jazz with Christian Baudu, Jean Yves Fadet, Tadeg Guillaume, Gary Wagstaff and Marco Huchet)

    In 1996 I came briefly back to the UK and recorded an album called
    Shame and Ruin.

 

In 2008 the French finally drove me round the bend. With only two kids left at home and the possibility of getting any kind of job that did not involve close personal contact with dead animals slim to nil, I was getting pretty bored. So I offered to help out with the oganisation of the local Fete de la Musique. They just told me to get on with it. Two days after the fantastic five stage extravaganza passed off to humungous applause, I was hospitalised with Meningitis. I was in bed for about 3 months, during which time the kids proved that they were more than capable of looking after themselves and I started to seriously question my reason for being in Brittany, in fact for being at all.

 

One day I was in the studio with double bass player Jean Yves Fadat. Double basses are big and the studio was small. The room seemed to be overflowing with guitars, so I counted them. Thirteen! When my husband came home from work, I mentioned to him that he had thirteen guitars and that thirteen and a wife might be too many to give them all the attention and room they needed. His answer was that one of the guitars was mine and that if I found the studio too crowded I was welcome to keep it somewhere else. I put it in the car and busked my way to Andalucia.

In Andalucia I started to get seriously into writing again. I moved into the Morgue in Comares with
7 Kevins guitarist ,singer and genious song writer Jimmy Bergin. I met a musical saw player. She asked me to come to do some gigs with her in London and Berlin. So from having gone nowhere for 15 years I was back out there and liked it.
 

Over the next 5 years I spent most of my time in Andalucia, writing and learning how to produce a record. I got a weekly residency in the beautiful Comares Hotel and sang backing vocals with Rrradio Gee at Irish weddings on the coast.

Jimmy and myself set up Rrrip Records. Our first paid job was to write and record a song with Kate Midlane (Jimmy's long term Ex), for her son’s 21st Birthday present. In 2010 we released
Till Now, a compilation of the work we had done up until then, including Rrradio Gee's Christmas hit Santa's Gee.

In the summer of 2011, I contacted Mikki to ask her to help out with the recording. On meeting up and singing together again for the first time in 25 years I quickly realised that this was something I should be doing more often. So I popped the recording equipment into the back of a transit van, headed down to Southern Morocco where I was joined by Mikki and Joanna and we recorded an album of great bluegrass, country and folk songs, The Banjo The Bucket and The Gun, which was released on Rrrip Records in May 2012
 

Finally in  May 2013, after five years of intense research and experimentation, A Short Study on the Nature of Love and Drink was completed and released, again on Rrrip Records. 

In January 2014 I met incredible violinist Lela Mai at a session in Glastonbury and after a few tunes together we decided to have a go at gigging together playing my songs and her tunes. Summer has gone by in a heat wave of gig, sessions, recording and good times.


I am currently doing lots of solo gigs as well as working with The Senile Delnquents  as well as working as a producer for Rrrip Records doing tour management for Mama Music ... See you out there

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