The Corries: Giving up the day jobs?
By the middle of 1964 The Corrie Folk Trio and Paddie Bell had established themselves as the anchor group on BBC’s Hootenanny Show and were facing the prospect of a future in show business, an area in which they had little experience and no previous form. Having given up their day jobs they had become increasingly in demand for radio and television appearances, promoting their own concerts all supported by a self-imposed daily rehearsal schedule that involved agreeing and arranging new material, all of which, in turn, involved considerable research into Scotland’s rich heritage of song and verse. Suddenly, giving up the day jobs had become hard work and stressful to boot.
In truth, we relished the change. Paddie had worked previously as a personal assistant at the National Trust while Roy and Ronnie were both impoverished teachers and less than happy campers before the career change beckoned. I was a junior architect working at the Regional Hospital Board and, being slightly better heeled, had more to lose in risking a career in show business. We all had mortgages to pay, families to care for and an income of ten pounds sterling per week hardly seemed fitting for such a talented group of hopefuls. My mortgage amounted to thirteen pounds a month for my flat in Moray Place and was a considerable burden on my reduced income.
Income generated from the television contracts was surprisingly unrewarding. Radio paid even less. But we were stars. The televised shows beaming out from the basements under Victoria Street were generating a lot of viewer interest and rubbing shoulders with members of the cast, some “weel kent” faces, was a thrilling experience. And we were very much a part of it all. Rehearsing new material took up much of our time. Songs had to be note perfect and there was no opportunity for second takes. Each show was live. Once the cameras rolled you had to be on your marks.
As viewing figures climbed and interest in the shows spread, the various performers became household names across the country. The Dubliners and the Spinners from Liverpool made regular appearances. High-flyers such as Ewan McColl and Peggy Seeger, Carolyn Hester and Nadia Cattouse all appeared alongside local singers Archie and Ray Fisher, while a casually discarded ocelot coat in the green room on one occasion announced the arrival of the Australian group, The Seekers. During one rehearsal, I recall Judith Durham taking a telephone call from their London agency announcing that their current hit recording had topped a million sales. This prompted a light-hearted response from Roy of… “door to door?” which raised a smile or two.
To keep abreast of our unfolding success, we continued to work long hours to develop material, having signed to Waverley records for a series of discs to be released to coincide with the televised shows. In some ways I was ahead of the game having collected material, songs and tunes, during visits to traditional music festivals in Ireland. In addition, I had played guitar with a number of traditional jazz groups throughout my years at Art College and had a good grasp of the instrument, chord inversions and finger picking styles. Paddie had some experience of playing the guitar and had studied piano. Roy’s guitar playing in the beginning was rudimentary, although as the demands rose, he began to excel on mandolin and concertina which added to the flexibility of the sounds we created. We all had good pitch and near perfect vocal skills and within a short time we had established a range of harmonies that defined us as a group. I adopted responsibility for most of the arrangements and this seemed to suit everyone since we all had a great deal to remember.
The folk scene in Edinburgh at that time was short on venues with the Edinburgh University folk club and the Crown Bar on Lothian Street vying for support. From their initial festival run at the Tryst, followed by a spell at the Bothy, the Corries as a group had been invited to perform at folk clubs across the land as well as planning their own tours around Scotland. For three weeks or more the group would travel around the country playing in village halls, Nissen huts and concert venues to capacity crowds who seemed to congregate from nowhere in some very remote parts of the country. In some instances, without benefit of electrical supply, we performed an acoustic show which all seemed perfectly normal at the time. Shure microphones and sophisticated amplification systems were the stuff that dreams were made of.
In May 1964 we extended our reach by hiring the Usher Hall in Edinburgh for a one- off event. The success of this undertaking would determine whether or not we could survive financially and in time the Usher Hall became known as The Corries Folk Club, as the venue regularly played host to a stream of talent. On that evening in May the cast included Bobby and Peggy Clancy from Carrick-on-Suir in Ireland, part of the famous Clancy dynasty, Roy Guest and Nadia Cattouse from Belize in British Honduras.
The evening was a success despite the fact that ticket sales in the afternoon had indicated that the hall might be half empty at curtain time. Arriving that evening for the performance, my taxi stopped short of the hall as a huge crowd blocked the road and halted the traffic. Making my way round to the stage door I was reassured that the crowd were only heading in one direction and that was to occupy the hall.
Our fears that we might have overstepped the mark and misjudged our audience were very real. Months earlier, Ella Fitzgerald, world famous jazz singer, had played the Usher Hall to disappointing attendance figures. Marlene Dietrich and Burt Bacharach had suffered similarly during a spell at the Lyceum Theatre. As it happened the hall that evening was filled to capacity and any misgivings we might have had about our ability to attract an audience were dispelled. The big question however remained; could it continue and just where would it all lead? For a while at least, that question would remain unanswered.