At University Fred studied General
Arts. "That's what we called it. English, French philosophy
politics psychology, all that sort of stuff. Caving, climbing,
hockey and drinking Welsh beer! I did a General Arts degree
mainly because I wasn't academic in one direction because of
my scatter shot interests and because it gave you the chance
to meet all sorts of people. Being a kind of sociable show-offy,
organising type of chap they kind of put me in charge of lots
of the new intake. You got people from all over the world. It
was wonderful. It was kind of a living course that you were
doing."
As for working, a career, had
music taken a back seat? "I became a Youth Employment Officer
all but briefly. And then I thought nah, nah, nah, this is
bloody silly, because I'd never really done a job. I didn't
know about the world. I'd done the course but thought I'd go
and find out about the world of work, so I worked at Lewis's
for a while. This was before John Lewis, this was Lewis's Ltd,
next door to Debenham's in Broadmead. I was sales manager for
linens eventually. They put me on toys at Christmas, boy that
was an education. I'd learnt more in that year and a half
at Lewis's than I had learned at three and a half years at
University that's for sure. What make's human beings tick!"
"My hobby was singing and this was
something which developed at Uni. I'd gone there as a
singer/performer anyway, by then I was a banjo player. Oh God
we've got to go back a bit really. My Dad had a Ukulele, like
everyone of his generation he clattered out a bit of George
Formby. Anyway I found his Ukulele and found that I could
accompany some of the very rude songs that came out of Count
Palmero Varcarian's book of bawdy ballads" and Fred starts
laughing mischievously about those days.
Fred continues his story. "I was
in the Army Cadets as well. Rather fancied being an
apprentice assassin on behalf of her Britannic Majesty. My
mates joined the Boy Scouts and did useful stuff and I joined
the Army Cadets and learned to kill. Seriously though, I used
to sort of sing on camps. I used to take the ukulele along and
sing these rude songs which added to my popularity and they
bought me free beer and weird stuff like that."
Fred then discovered being a
singer and entertainer had it's advantages. "At the Youth
Club I had a bit of a reputation as a musician to pull the
crumpet, so I thought this is bloody good. You got free beer
and you got girls at the Youth Club. Thank You!"
He said laughing. "I think I know where I'm going! So I kept
on doing this hobby and then I got to University. By then I
was a banjo player because my Grandmother had played a banjo
in an end of the pier troop. She was arthritic before I even
knew her so I never heard her play the banjo to my great
regret. At the same time another banjo player arrived at Uni and
he took the spot in the Uni jazz band. He was better than
me and became very, very good friends. He also ran out of
grant in the first term and sold me his guitar.So I took up
the guitar and then another mate of ours had just discovered
American Folk music. The Allan Lomax book of American folk
songs which was our bible to begin with and then
we discovered Pete Seger and that was our inspiration. Then
we discovered Bob Dylan who came along and we thought 'oooh,
hello this is interesting stuff'. Of course we were all
protesting and stuff anyway, marching and banning stuff,
getting pissed and chemically re-arranged. You know going out
and pretending we were solving the problems of the world.
There was the occasional herbal ambience around. Marijuana
(speaking in a strong Bristolian accent), Mary-Jane, grass,
shit, good shit man. What? eh?"
It was the 1960's and folk clubs
started to arrive. Fred explained about the folk circuit at
this time. "Originally folk clubs in the very early days were
controlled by either the English Folk Dancing Society that
put dancing first before song and were a bunch of blue
stocking academics usually. They used to sing very very old
songs and very very long songs and all very tripsy and nicey
and all of that. Then you had the Young Communist League who
saw folk song as a brilliant means of expressing the working
class desires and ambitions so they were running clubs that
were specialising in the protest side of stuff, political folk
song. You had general purpose folk clubs arriving where you
could go in and do all sorts of things and things polarised
and generalised . You got people bringing the blues which
became a respectable thing as well and then very early protest
rock 'n' roll and proto country and western. A lot of
musicians came through folk clubs developed their style,
learned their stage craft there and went off in various
tangents. They selected more or less which bit of the whole
genre they fancied and then went and specialised. Some of us
went into comedy and some of us went into rock 'n' roll and
some went into blues. Some went to seed and some went and got
proper jobs!"
I'd read somewhere that some
people referred to Fred Wedlock as the West Country's Billy
Connolly, but wasn't Fred ahead of him even before Billy
arrived on the scene? "Actually
yes, only because I'm a little bit older than Billy. He was
also a folk singer and a banjo player as well, good banjo
player too. I worked with Billy at the Cambridge Festival
once, I think he'd just split from the 'Humblebums' then. He
was lovely, delightful man. But then back stage everybody,
almost everybody is. I can count the fingers on one thumb the
number of people I've not liked in our business. Out front,
yeah, you could see somebody trying it on and you're thinking
you posing pratt, come on, ok, alright I know the game, you
don't believe what you're saying but I know."
And what about his experience on
the Top Of The Pops? "Back stage, when I was doing Top Of The
Pops I was ensconced with all these highly famous
musicians.You know who can play what, you know who can play
triples, who can play that riff , you know who can keep in
tune and you know everybody knows. You can't bullshit one
another!" says Fred laughing
But when you were on Top Of The
Pops singing 'The Oldest Swinger In Town' did you sing that
live or was it to a backing track? Fred takes a sharp intake
of breath to try and stop laughing. "Ummm yes, do you want the
legal version? The rules were that you had to go in and do a
backing track before. You had to do your own track. If you
were going to mime you had to go in and actually sing the song
and then mime to it. So you'd do it in the afternoon and
record it. And then the backing was done by ........ well
there was some nice little arrangement, I won't go into
details where a certain group of backing singers were
given the job of doing the backing vocals. My backing
vocalists were as good as you could get anywhere and better
than ninety-five per cent, in fact they were a damn sight
better than the ones they wanted to put on there. So what we
actually did in the end was that my band went up and they did
a base track, the basic track and second time we were on Top
Of The Pops we actually used their track but we took it in a
different cover and rejected the track that the other (TOTP)
singers had done which wasn't as good. We used the original
although the other singers got paid and no doubt some of that
money trickled down to some of those who had little
arrangements"
Fred recorded the song 'The Oldest
Swinger In Town' in 1979 so was it a bit of a surprise he
found himself well and truly planted at number six in the
singles chart in 1981. But who discovered the song that pushed
Fred into the limelight on a national scale? "The song was on
an LP of mine. Dave Cousins of The Strawbs was a good friend
of very long standing from the folk days. He was then running
Stockton and Darlington Radio and said 'you've got to single
that'. We'd actually just done it as an LP track and we said
'bollocks!' At the time I was working with a guitar player
called Chris Newman, who was wonderfully, utterly brilliant
and we said 'no, no, no'. We're doing the college circuit,
we're a concept band, we're more. We are a thinking act,
we're not a singles band at all really. Dave said 'oh you are,
you single that'."
"My manager then was a pushy
dynamic go-a-head character in London and said 'well we'll try
asingle, we'll put one out.' We did a thousand copies of this
and put five hundred around the trade and then sold five
hundred off the stage for about fifty pence a time and that
would cover our costs. We worked it out if we go carefully
we'd make a tenner each, me and Chris and Kevin, our manager.
We didn't have a label and Kevin invented a name and called it
'Coast Records'."
Fred takes a sip of tea and
carries on with his story. "Noel Edmunds producer got a
copy and went straight into Noel and said 'this is great it's
going to be a hit'. At the time every radio presenter then had
to look for a band that they could kind of foster and say I'm
the one who developed them, I'm the one who discovered them.
They were doing this all the time. So Noel said 'yes OK we'll
play this' and he played it on his Sunday morning radio show
Dingley Dell. We were actually gigging in Brighton at the
time and we'd stayed with a friend down there. Feeling
slightly derelict we were driving back to Bristol at mid-day,
Sunday morning feeling absolutely knackered, may have been one
o'clock in the afternoon. Pulled up outside Chris' house to
let him go back home and his missus comes out leaping through
the window saying 'Noel Edmunds played your song, Noel
Edmunds played your song, he played your song! We went 'oh
bollocks go and make a cup of tea'. 'No, He did'. 'Oh alright,
fine, ok cup of tea please' and we sat down. Then the phone
rings and it just rang and rang for a month and that was
Chris' phone. Mine was going daft as well. Everybody had heard
this and Noel had apparently said 'this in going to be a hit.
I don't know who this bloke is, I've never heard of this
recording company but this is going to be a hit' and then he
played it again! Unprecedented on the same programme. He'd
never done that before. And suddenly the entire business
thought 'ooohh, whose this, whose coast records, whose Fred
Wedlock' and realised I wasn't signed up to anybody. And so
there were company limos colliding with each other outside my
manager's office in Pendonville and there was a great furore
going on trying to get my name on a piece of paper and
suddenly everything went really silly. Noel played the song
again the next week and by then he'd found out who I was and
saying he's not signed up to anyone and that's how it all came
about".
Fred's career has been varied.
He's done radio presenting and a lot of TV shows but has the
rock 'n' roller inside him ever wanted to get out? "Ummmm
....... well its got out on several occasions. I've done
stuff that has been pretty pure rock n roll. Ummm ...... I
mean, rock n roll are meaningful words. Maybe rock parody.
The old straight forward getting up and getting your rocks
off and thrashing a guitar on stage....... no no I don't do
that but it nice now and again to go animal. Put your brain
in neutral and get on with it and that's fine, but only now
and again. And then very shortly after that you think, lets
do something with words and concepts".
Working in the music and
entertainment industry is something Fred has really enjoyed.
"Going 'round a huge amount of the world meeting a lot of
interesting people, seeing lots of interesting things and
the pure adrenalin belt of having an audience at your finger
tips. That is terrific, the high is so high. The lows are
pretty damn dismal but then you develop a skin about that."
But when it comes to the lows of a career Fred doesn't think
he'd been affected that badly. "I haven't really had one.
Well maybe about five or six years after 'Swinger' I was
starting to think 'oh they'll loose interest in me now, oh
God I'm not getting the work'. You're always going to go
through a phase where you have a white diary in front of you
and you think 'that's it they've sussed me, they've sussed
me now'. And then it all starts again, your TV series comes
to an end and there isn't another one in the offing. And you
think oh that's it." adds Fred
Today Fred's diary is pretty
full. A lot of his gigs are not advertised as he tends to do
a lot of private, corporate shows for business's and sports
clubs for example.
"I did something for a friend of
mine. He runs Gloucester Cricket Club and wanted a little
favour, a dinner, a little speech and from that six well
paid gigs have come. Two people came up and said can I have
your card and then I do their gig and another comes up and
'can I have your card'" So a lot of Fred's bookings are self
generated and word of mouth. After all he is a hard act to
follow and what people get for their money is quality and
entertainment.
"I do things for
agents now and again of course but they just ring me up and
say 'are you free on that date and can you do this gig and how
much do you want?'" And you find him taking part in local
festivals too, but not the rock n roll type festival. "I'm
doing Trowbridge this year. And I do folk festivals, one day
festivals, tiny festivals like festivaletes and that sort of
thing. I did one in Manchester a few weeks ago and that was a
one day festival. I do Art Centre things now, general purpose
festivals like I'm doing in a few weeks time. I'm doing
Gillingham in Dorset and that is a Arts week so they'll be all
kinds of things going besides and I'm doing the Folksy music
side. I'm doing Chippenham Festival in November, comparing at
Trowbridge in July, I'm doing Poole as well. there's alot of
things like that." says Fred.
The Wedlock music tradition has
been passed onto his daughter Hannah. She sings in the Blue
Note Jazz Band on a part-time basis and from the way Fred
talks about her he is a proud Dad. "Hannah is a very very good
singer, very talented I think and even, just like her Dad she
is a very accurate singer. She can hear a tune and she's got
it. She can look at a set of words and she's got them. I can't
do that."
"We very very
rarely sing together because she tends to do jazz and I don't
tend to work with jazz bands that much. If she did country and
western or did folk then yes, I could sing with her quite alot.
But she does jazz, she does stuff that involves different keys
from what I play in and different chords, and chords with
numbers on the ends of them which I tend not to play. Things
like the cube route of F# minor demished third inversion with
flatted eighth. It's really not me." says Fred.
I had to ask the ultimate
question. What does the future hold for Fred Wedlock? "Ummmm
I want to work for world peace and do things ...... " he
says in a silly voice and then starts to laugh
again. "What am I doing in the future?.... I'm doing a play.
I've done plays before, I've done playlets and variety. I've
done sketches, I've done a proper legit play which no doubt
you're aware of because you read me web site. 'Up The Feeder
Down The Mouth' which I did with the Bristol Old Vic. So I'm
doing a play! In Bristol and it's in the Tobacco Factory in
November. We're also doing a couple of dates in December as
well. I'm doing this with a wonderful singer, performer and
all round humorous person called Kate McNabb who is highly
respected as a muso, and her partner Kitt Morgan who is the
guitarist of choice for anybody who wants a bit of decent
guitar played on anything. Another actor called Ross Harvey
who was in 'Up The Feeder' also has a part. So we know each
other well and have done for some years."
"Kate's been doing a series of
plays for some years now called nostalgia two handers, war
time stuff ....'Yes we have no bananas' ..... sort of what
is called ministry of entertainment very much forties stuff,
its very very popular and sells out. We spoke for
years saying we ought to do something at Christmas, work
together again but we never got round to it and then Kate
rings up and says 'Lets do it'. It's based on her fourth
play in the set is called 'Mrs Gerrish's Guest House' and
it's about this woman who runs a guest house in Weston in
the fifties. So this is now going to be 'Mrs Gerrish's
Christmas Stocking" where she has got a load of guests in
for Christmas but an unexploded bomb has been found in her
pond so she's got to evacuate the guest house at the last
minute and move in with her brother who has a big house in
Southville or somewhere. He is a camunchgendly old sod and
a founder member of the Ebenezer Scourge Society who don't
like Christmas. That's me!" Fred says with pride and a
beaming smile across his face. "I'm
her brother in the play and so we've got all these
characters flouncing in and poncing around and doing all
this and that. I'm really looking forward to it"
"I'm also doing a lot of gigs
between now and then. I've been asked to go to new Zealand
next year. Early November I'm in Spain, so it's a busy old
time. I keep thinking I'll retire and I keep meeting old
school mates and they've all retired, but I love what I'm
doing. I've never seen it as a job. I've always felt very
guilty for many years, in the early days, knowing that doctors
were being paid less than I was. It's not true now of course
because the buggers are earning a fortune. Umm .... but at the
time I thought he's a surgeon and I'm earning more than him.
That's stupid, but then you begin to realise what good you
could be doing for people. I know this sort of sounds like
sentimental stuff but I was doing a show with a local band
called 'Mechanical Horse Trough' and this dear little lady
came up to me and my friend and said 'that was wonderful'. She
had tears down her face as the audience had been peeing
themselves laughing and it was one of those nights it just
gelled. And she says 'It's wonderful it's wonderful. It's the
first time I've been out since my husband died and I'll be
honest I was going to do myself in'. And she'd come out and it
just changed everything for her. And you start thinking
blimey, you know, you're actually providing a service for
people as well. Psychologically helping a lot of people and
so I don't feel so guilty, then again I don't earn anything
like a doctor now!" concludes Fred.
