Bobbi Keith - The Fred Bloggs Band Interview

Barbara met Steve Brown, alias Fred Bloggs at Bristol University in the 1970s. She was singing at a local Folk and Blues club when he invited her to join his Top 40/original-song band. The foundation members in the picture above are Steve on guitars and keyboards, Barbara on vocals and percussion, Geraint (Taffy) Jenkins on drums, Big John Howe on bass, and various other musicians symbolized by the other tall guy at the back, John Boucher (he was the only one we knew who owned a suit). Shortly afterward, Bristol entertainer Fred Wedlock helped them get a spot on an HTV television program which led to many engagements in the West Country. They were invited to work at long-term engagements at U.S. Military bases in Europe, including Rota naval base in southern Spain and several in the former W. Germany. They also traveled to Norway to play a winter season in a disco near Oslo. The line up of the band changed over the coming five years and included Bristol native Paul Anstey on bass, college lecturer Tony Alcock on saxophone, Huddersfield imports Mick Avery and Stan Thewlis (now known as Stan Rivera) from the jazz-rock band Skywhale on drums and sax/flute, and Bristol Old Vic Theatre carpenter Martin Norie on lead guitar. Paul, Stan and drummer Tony Orrell also played with pianist Tim Richards in the seminal Bristol jazz band Spirit Level.

Arts School graduate Alan Edwards not only joined us as drummer but contributed much art work and publicity to the band and designed our wooden music stands (like the old Glenn Miller Band type of thing). Several years of playing rock, country and disco music gave them a chance to get their chops together and by 1978 they were ready to record their first EP (remember those?) of original songs (click to listen). During this time, Barbara also appeared on a live BBC broadcast singing one of her original songs about the Clifton Suspension Bridge and was honing her instrumental skills. But by the late 1970s the individuals in the band were beginning to go their separate ways. Barbara briefly formed her own band with bass player Paul, flute player Stan, and drummer Tony Orell. This song, Soldier, is one that they performed at the Ashton Court festival in Bristol in 1978: Then came the Seldom Scene Band with friend and bass player Ruth King, guitarist John Sweet and "Ceilings" vocalist Trevor on drums (the band name was chosen by our manager who probably had no idea that there was already a quite famous American Bluegrass band with the same name). After another stint in Spain playing Bee Gees and original songs, they recorded a demo tape and then disbanded, leaving Barbara to sing with some of Bristol's jazz bands.

-(From The bands site)

Are you originally from the UK? What was your childhood like growing up? When did you first begin to fall in love with music? Was this something that was relevant around your household growing up?

Steve Brown, who officially changed his name to Steve Bloggs in the 1980s, and I, who are the co- founders of the band, and indeed all of the original band members are from the UK. Steve is from Slough, which is probably most known to Americans as being a small town near London’s Heathrow airport, and near to Winsor Castle, where the royal family sometimes reside, and I am from London. We met at Bristol University in the 1970s. We both grew up on what is known in England as council estates, and to Americans as social housing. Steve grew up with three sisters though, and I was an only child. I think we both fell in love with music as teenagers in the 1960s. My father played the piano, and tried to teach me but when the Beatles became popular I think he could see that I was more interested in guitar so he bought me a Spanish guitar when I was 13.

What would you and your friends do for fun growing up? Who were some of your earliest influences in your more formative years? When and where did you see your first concert and when did you realize you wanted to spend your life pursuing and creating music?

Well I’ll speak for myself here as a teenager in London in the 1960s. It was great, because my friends and I found ourselves in the middle of what was called Swinging London with all the music and fashion changes going on. There was Carnaby Street and the clubs that The Beatles and Rolling Stones used to go to. We lived in North London, not far from Abbey Road Studios, and one of my teenage friends once tried to break into Paul McCartney’s house near there to get a glimpse of him. I remember a club called Samantha’s, just off Regent St. It had an E-type Jaguar car when you went in down some stairs to the discotheque and was James Bond themed. The embarrassing thing was that my father would come and pick me up at 11pm! I also remember seeing the model Twiggy on the bus on the way to school one morning. My parents actually took me to one of the first Beatles concerts at Hammersmith Odeon, and I remember just being stunned, like everyone else, by their presence, but I didn’t scream like all the other girls in the audience. My dad had just bought me that guitar and I was watching John Lennon play those chord shapes. Even though I was a girl (and still am), I thought, I want to do this – I want to write songs and sing. Then a couple of years later, one of my first boyfriends took me to see Aretha Franlin perform in London. It was just amazing to feel her soulful voice and piano playing go right to my heart. I met Aretha backstage after the show and she was so kind and loving, signing my theatre programme with a dedication. It was another realization for me that it would be difficult to keep me away from music.

When and where did you play your very first gig and what was that experience for you? How did you initially meet your bandmates? What were your first impressions of everyone and what commonalities and interests did you guys share right off the bat? What was that initial chemistry like and what led to the decision to first form the band?

Steve played in school bands in Slough, Rock n’ Roll and the pop hits of the time. In London, I had begun to play at a coffee bar on the Finchley Road, and then later at university I played in the folk clubs in Clifton, which was the student area of Bristol. Before I met Steve he was in a band with a girl singer, another student at Bristol Uni, named Sue Jones Davis. Americans might remember her from the Monty Python film Life Of Brian. I didn’t know Sue, but we were connected through a mutual friend David Rappaport, who was in my year studying Psychology. “Little Dave” as he was called, became a well known actor in the UK, then moved to Hollywood where he starred in Time Bandits and The Wiz. Sadly Dave died from suicide at the height of his US movie career. Steve saw me singing at the university folk and blues club where I’d sing my own songs, or English folk songs learned from some of the well known folk artists of the time, such as Martin Carthy, Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch, Steelye Span and Al Stewart. Steve asked me if I’d like to join his band. I was living in Royal York Crescent at the time, which is the longest Georgian crescent in England and full of architectural beauty, and Steve was living just round the corner in a rented house on Sion Hill, overlooking the Clifton Suspension Bridge.

We would sit in the living room of that house playing our guitars and harmonizing pop songs, and decided that we would try to make a living making music. Steve thought up the name The Fred Bloggs Band, the equivalent of the American catch-all name John Doe, although of course I wanted it to be the Gladys Bloggs Band. In the end I conceded to the Fred version because there was only one of me, a female, and four men, but I did form my own GB band later on down the line which I’ll describe later. The other musicians were a guy named Alan Edwards on drums. He was an artist and graphic designer, and he made our original music stands. We went though several bass players, but eventually found John Howe, and another drummer Geraint “Taffy” Evans through some friends at an audition at Bristol’s Mecca dance hall. They are from Nailsea, a little village outside Bristol. We would play local gigs, such as church dances and working men’s clubs. There were usually five musicians in the band, the fifth person usually being a sax or wind player. But on our promotion poster photo, this fifth person is a friend named John Boucher who is fact not a musician. He was a trainee lawyer at the time, and he was only person we knew who owned a suit. He was also quite tall, so we put him at the back of the staged photo pose, to match out John, who is also quite tall.

Our real break was when the folk singer Fred Wedlock, who I was friendly with, got us a spot on HTV, a local television station. I remember we performed the song Jambalaya, by The Carpenters. I was terrified, because it was live TV, but I remember we did a gig a few weeks later, and there were two ladies in the restroom and I overheard one of them say to other, ooh, that’s that singer who was on TV. We were contacted by a man named Jack Fallon from the Cana Variety agency, and he got us a long term gig at Rota US Navy Base in Southern Spain. We bought a Ford Transit van and got to Spain by cargo boat from Liverpool. That was where I bought my first microphone, a Shure 57. The boat was skippered by a drunken Spanish captain and I was very sea sick in the Bay Of Biscay. Afer docking at Seville, we drove down through Spain to Rota, near Cadiz, a very long journey. I had started out so excited to be starting a professional life in the music business but by the time we reached Rota, I was exhausted and definitely feeling a lack of female support, and the guys seemed to be taking it much more in their stride, drinking and partying with the American enlisted men and going out to the town’s canteenas and tappas bars. I was never a big drinker, but I did enjoy a cocktail I was introduced to on the American bases called a Tequila Sunrise – the one later eternalized in iconic Eagles song. Rota was a wonderful learning experience for all of us because there were other bands from England there too, and famous American bands there for one night. So there was a great exchange of ideas and talents. I remember one guy from another British band on the beach on one of our days off, and he taught me how to play Dust In The Wind on guitar. We also got a glimpse at US military life at the base. I remember the first time I saw an F15 fighter jet take off vertically – I coudln’t quite believe what I was seeing, and thought that I might have have smoked some funny cigarettes by mistake. Another time, on another tour of Rota, we were invited to have lunch on a nuclear submarine, and I remember standing right next to the nuclear missiles.

After Rota, we were given some more tours on the USO circuit, this time in Germany. When we were playing at Frankfurt we opened for Martha And The Vandellas, then also for Rufus Thomas, who had a hit with the song Funky Chicken. It was a good learning experience, because of course we were all white musicians trying to please an audience with many black enlisted men, who wanted funky music. We did our best, and personally, I loved that genre of music. In 1976 we were playing in Germany and it was the American Bicentennial 200 year celebration on July 4. It was an enormous event and I wrote a song afterwards about the experience called Funk Me, which you can hear on YouTube. You can also some photos of the band at that time at the official Fred Bloggs Band website. We used to wear different colored shirts matching my dress on different nights, and the guys used to wear Bowler Hats, which are symbolic of working men in Britain. I used to take care of the laundry and upkeep of the band’s stage clothes, and even did some of the roadying, setting up the drummer’s kit. I knew that I was mainly in the band as their “Female Vocalist”, which was a polite way of saying Sex Symbol - a commercial pull for the mainly male audience, but I insisted on having at least some say in deciding what songs we’d cover, and I did play percussion and my guitar on a few songs. Most of the men in the audience were very respectful, but when they got drunk it was sometimes a bit chaotic and I’d withdraw after our set and go back to our digs to my acoustic guitar rather than party with the guys. One of the songs I wrote at that time was called Soldier, and it is also available on YouTube and at my Bobbi Keith Spotify and Apple Music page.

Can you tell me about writing and recording the band's lone 1978 EP? When and where did recording begin at Dennis Mann’s Clifton Studio and what was the overall process and approach to this record? How did the deal with Firebrand Records come about? Can you tell me about songs such as “Mr. Sun”, “Seaside”, “Moonrock” and “The Tribe”?

By 1978, the band had had several changes of lineup. Steve and I were the solid core, and we often played with Bristol jazz bass player Paul Anstey, who is now quite well known. We went to Norway with a drummer and keyboard player chosen by our manager, Jack Fallon. We’d also become friendly with the Prog Rock band Skywhale, who’s sax and flute player, Stan Thewlis, and drummer Mick Avory used to do gigs with us. They also used to practice in the old cellars hewn out of the Avon Gorge by the side of the Clifton Suspension Bridge underneath Windsor Terrace where I used to live. During our five or so years together, touring Europe and the West Country of the UK, we’d gathered a good repertoire of cover pop songs and originals. Skywhale had just recorded their LP The World At Mind’s End at Clifton’s Mushroom Studios, and owner Dennis Mann, who sometimes played with Steve, asked us if we’d like to record there, with Mick Avory as recording engineer. There were quite a few session musicians on the EP, including Mick and Stan, and players known by Steve since his university days. Three of the four songs were written completely by Steve; Seaside, Moonrock and Mr. Sun, while the last track, The Tribe was cowritten by me, and I’m doing the lead vocal on the recording. The quirky fact about the actual physical vinyl record is that instead of having an A and B side, like most other records, it has a C and D side. Seaside is of course the first track on the C side. Steve has always had a rather eccentric side to his personality – I think that’s why I originally liked him when we first met. But after the record release he actually changed his name from Steve Brown to Steve Bloggs. This is quite a difficult process – you have to fill out lots of forms in the UK to do this. Firebrand Records did an original printing of 1000 records, and to be honest I still think Steve has some copies available in Bristol. But the LP is also available for streaming on the internet, and a few years ago a Los Angeles producer named Matte Bruce bought a publishing licence from Steve to release The Tribe on a compilation album he was producing. His company is called Forager Records, and The Tribe is included on an album of mainly psychedelic sounding songs from the 1970s.

What eventually happened to the band? Is there anything else you would like to further share with the readers

John and Taffy had left the bank a few years before we made our EP, and formed their own band with sax player Pete Dean, returning to the USO circuit in Germany. In fact John settled down in Germany, marrying and working as a band promoter and musical equipment manager. I left the band after our EP release, wanting to stretch out and pursue creating more original music. I was still friends with Steve and there were no hard feelings. In fact, Paul and Stan were part of my next band, The Gladys Bloggs Band, and we played at the Ashton Court Festival in 1978. My downstairs neighbor Tony Orrell was on drums, and guitarist Martin Norie on lead. Tony now runs a regular jazz session at The Fringe bar in Clifton, Bristol. Steve kept gigging with various Bristol musicians, and his wife Debbie, and I teamed up with my former university friend and bass player Ruth King, her boyfriend at the time John Sweet, and Bristol drummer Trevor Ceilings to from a band which Jack Fallon decided to call Seldom Scene. We went back to Rota, this time playing more female oriented songs like Fleetwood Mac covers. Then after doing a few gigs around Bristol as a solo songwriter, I decided to travel to California to see what it was like. I met my husband to be there, and eventually settled down over here, concentrating on writing songs and recording on my home studio. In between raising children and working as a substitute teacher I bought all the latest music recording gear, various acoustic and electric guitars and a synthesizer. I remember when the first digital studio came out by Boss/Roland, I was thrilled, and produced my first CD of original songs in 2000, called Nothing Between Us. My original dream while watching The Beatles live in 1964 had come true! Since then I’ve made five CDs, which you can check out at bobbikeith.com or Spotify. Both my children turned out quite musical, my son playing drums and my daugher Katie playing guitar and writing songs. Do check out her work at: katieferrara.com

https://www.angelfire.com/music2/alchemy/fredbloggsband.html