Talking To...Stephen Fearing
The Wheelhouse,
Wombwell
October 9
The flags were out once again at the Wheelhouse in Wombwell as part of the Barnsley House Concerts series. As the red maple leaf fluttered above the wooden cabin, with its cosily decorated interior featuring signed promotional pictures and posters of former guests including the likes of Stacey Earle and Mark Stuart, Rachel Harrington and Zak Borden, Corinne West and Doug Cox and Carrie Elkin and Robby Hecht, and that's just the duos, the room filled once again with a capacity audience keen to be a part of another quality night of acoustic music here in the heart of South Yorkshire.
Canadian singer-songwriter guitarist Stephen Fearing totally missed the fluttering flag as he made his way down to the Wheelhouse from the main house, not once but twice, noticing it later during dinner at the Jones's. Hedley Jones, a local music enthusiast with one eye on the local folk scene and the other on what's coming over from across the pond, likes to make his guests as welcome as the audiences they attract and both of which are rapidly expanding in numbers. I arrived early and made my way down to the cabin to have a few words with the songwriter before his performance. Relaxed and talkative, Fearing was happy to talk about his new album THE MAN WHO MARRIED MUSIC, a life on the road and what it's like to have a Juno on your mantelpiece:
AW: Hedley (Jones), when he does these house concerts, he always likes to welcome guests from other shores by putting the flags out.
SF: Yes.
AW: Has he got it right this week?
SF: Oh yes he's got it right and of course I came down the drive and I didn't notice it, back and forth twice and I was sitting in their front room having dinner and I looked out the window and I went oh there's a big Canadian flag, it's a very lovely thing to do.
AW: I think the last time Hedley put the Canadian flag was out was for Doug Cox who was here a few weeks ago.
SF: Oh yeah.
AW: Okay well you're from Canada, from Vancouver originally?
SF: Yeah originally from Vancouver, grew up in Ireland, lived in the Sates for a couple of years and moved back to Canada in 1982 and I've been there since.
AW: Were you very young when you went to Ireland, do you remember anything about your formative years in Canada before moving to Ireland?
SF: Yeah, not a lot but my folks split up and you know when that happens you tend to, you know it's a bit jarring and so you remember it, so yeah I have some strong recollections, it was a much smaller place in some ways, some of the highways hadn't been built yet. I was only six when I left but, yeah I have some pretty strong memories and certainly when I moved to Ireland I hung onto my Canadian-ness, it was a sort of nostalgic thing I guess, nostalgia for a six year-old.
AW: Well I like to think of Ireland as a hotbed for great musicianship, there's such a wealth of traditional music in Ireland and I think of Canada as a hotbed for songwriters and so there is a bit of a mix because you are a songwriter but also a fabulous guitar player. Do you think you got most of your influences from that Irish upbringing in Dublin?
AF: It's funny, because I totally agree with your assessment, like I think of Canada as songwriters as well; I think of the States as being a lot of instrumentalists but there's such a culture of the arts in general in Ireland, you know playwrights, dance, theatre and certainly music.
Traditional music when I was living there, first of all it was mandatory to have Irish studies, we learned to speak Gaelic and Irish dancing, of course we hated it, it was late Seventies, it was punk rock, new wave and all that coming through and the music from England and the English culture and then the music from America and the American culture was so prevalent that Irish music at the time seemed so parochial and old fashioned, it was always either some fellows in the pub singing Black Velvet Band or a guy on the pier playing the pipes really out of tune and what my mother would call 'diddly-dumpty' music.
When I left Ireland and moved to the States, I was there off and on for about two years and that's when I started playing and I realised it had sort of seeped in; not so much learning traditional Irish music or playing Irish music but the choice of chords, melodic ideas and maybe even subject matter. You know there's a melancholy in a lot of Irish music that even when they're playing what you might think was party music it still has that melancholy about it and think that really influenced me.
AW: I think it did I mean your first album OUT TO SEA has Dublin Bay on it.
SF: Dublin Bay yes.
AW: I mean that's straight forward traditional Irish music, it's got everything in that song and it sounds authentic, was there ever a time when you thought I'm into this music so much that was the way you'd go, doing that kind of music, or did you always have this hankering to be a songwriter?
SF: Honestly there was never any decisions really being made it's more that you are sort of aware of things that have influenced you and the way they've woven in and sometimes disappeared from what you do. Like, I used to have a strong Dublin accent, which people have accused me of deliberately losing my Irish accent so I could fit in with American culture, which is just preposterous because if I wanted to be more successful, having a strong Irish accent is sometimes a positive, you know there's lots of professional Irish people as my friend Andy White would joke. But it's one of those things, to be philosophical, you don't necessarily choose the path you're on you just realise that you're on it.
I was born in Canada, I was very aware of that when I moved to Ireland and then when I left Ireland I realised that I loved Ireland and that there was very strong influences just in the way that you go to school, you learn to study arithmetic and the three Rs, all that stuff it makes up who you are and so it becomes a part of what you do. I never really had the facility or the root to be a traditional Irish musician, you know
I think that takes generations and the stuff that we were listening to at home both in Ireland and certainly before my folks split up, they were deliberately playing classical music to us as little kids and jazz and stuff like that so it was quite broad. When I was living in Ireland again it was top forty, I was listening to what my stepfather had his record collection, a lot of Frank Sinatra, James Last non-stop dancing and then what we were buying ourselves, you know pop music so it was just another one of the musical things.
What was interesting was just before I left Ireland, Guinness as I recall started running commercials in Irish. It was very radical and I don't think it sparked it, but I think it was indicative of what was going on, which was bands like Stockton's Wing, Moving Hearts, these bands that where coming out, even Horslips, that were very clearly flagging their Irish heritage if ot being very strongly traditional, it was always front and centre of what they did and I think it started to become hip and in to have a strong Irish root but for a long time and certainly most of the time I lived there it wasn't, it was thought of as old hat.
So it wasn't really an option for me but later, as a writer, and I guess I've always been drawn, to answer your question in a very long an round about way, I've always been drawn to words and I think the desire to express myself, songs in particular, I was always drawn to singer-songwriters so it came out in that way. The instrumental part of it, I quickly realised that to be in a band was difficult and financially very difficult so I made a decision, and it's one of the few decisions I clearly made to myself, I had to figure out how to do this on my own and if I was going to do this on my own, to not just sit and strum all night long but to come up with arrangements.
My friend Roy Forbes calls it a band in a box, to try to sketch out a full band, so a drum sound, a moving bass line and counter melodies and stuff and gradually the guitar starts to adapt to what you're doing and you adapt to the way you can get things out of the guitar and you have a style. So I think a lot of it is just the desire to keep people's attention without one colour and one texture.
AW: Well I think that's a good point. We've always said that to be a good songwriter or a great songwriter you've got to have the songs, you've got to have the melodies, it's also nice to have a good voice, it's also nice to be able to play the instrument. If you've got all three, that's it, that's all you need. I mean England's got Steve Tilston who does just that, he's got all three.
SF: He's great, absolutely, yeah..