Making a living as a musician is hard enough in the USA. What’s it like in the UK?
The Star got a report from anti-folk busking band Slack Mallard, who are from the region of Cornwall in southwestern England.
The group consists of Aaron Barnes on Mandolin, Brian Dunbar on percussion, Ash on banjo, and Adam Whittaker on guitar.
Together they travel England in their lorries (vans) which also serve as their homes. They earn income from tips and by selling CDs whilst performing on street corners, city centers, pubs, and festivals.
Adam Whittaker recounts a month and a half of life on the road:
We started out in the Forest of Dean on the border between south Wales and England, near Gloucester. It was Easter, and we hadn’t played together on the street for over nine months. My van had its annual MOT (annual safety) test due, and it was a race against time to fix the numerous problems before hoofing all our live-in vehicles 200 miles East to the Cosmic Puffin festival in Essex, our first gig of the year.
The Foresters, as they’re known in the Dean, are a friendly folk. We made our camp outside the ex-mining town of Cinderford and encountered nothing but positivity from the locals. We eased ourselves back into our busking routine in the nearby cities of Gloucester and Cheltenham, and after a nail-biting 2 weeks waiting for parts, busking up the diesel money and endlessly imitating the local dialect, “Drive it up ’em shag!” (Give it your best, buddy!), my van was fixed up, legal, and good to go.
Sad to leave the humble beauty of the Forest for the suburban prosperity of Essex, but hungry for the journey, we drove in convoy late at night to stop over in Oxfordshire, another of the immensely wealthy “Home Counties” that circle London.
We met up with trad-folk friends The Devil’s Doorbells and busked in Oxford together. By now we had refined our act, and were making a decent wage. Just as well, as next we had to load our vans beyond feasible capacity to transport the stage and marquee we’d be playing on over to Essex. Our good friend Gail, organizer of Something Else events, needed the help.
The communal aspect of our lives on the road is a beautiful thing. If someone’s in the shitter, we all reach in to pull them out, and don’t complain about getting shat on in the process. We’ve been through a lot together over the years, and we work together without resentment or blame. Things go wrong, people fuck up, but it’s easier to love and accept each other’s flaws when you know they love and accept your own.
So again, late at night and in convoy, we skirted the M25 around London and hit Mersea island in Essex a little before midnight. Deep in the heart of Toryland, the people in the places we busked were elderly, white, conservative and wealthy. Travelling the UK, you get no better example of the disparity between rich and poor than to drive from Cornwall or the Dean to the Home Counties.
The festival was over all too quickly. A whirlwind of great bands, good friends and intoxicating substances. By now though we were running low on CDs, sales of which make up the bulk of our busking wages, and had many more miles to cover. We ordered 200 more to be delivered at a friend’s house back in Oxfordshire, returned to drop off the stage & marquee, grab the CDs and hit Oxford again, before heading 100 miles North to rural Shropshire.
We visited a friend there and had two day’s work doing odd-jobs on his land. We had our best busks yet in Chester, a wonderful Tudor town where we were met with gifted ales, free pizza, and friendly folk, then by the weekend drove the short distance to the pub where we were putting on a two-day event with Gail.
Somewhere along the road, disaster struck.
Shropshire is a very agricultural county. A farmer had laid his slurry pipe across the road, and made an unusually steep ramp over it. One by one we slowly crossed the ramp. I was second to last, and thought nothing of it. A few miles down the road and Brian, in our run-around hatchback, overtook me whilst gesticulating manically out of the window and shouting something indecipherable. I thought he was imitating being strangled by a jellyfish. He raced to the front of the convoy, and we stopped.
The dodgy ramp had ripped off the plug in the bottom of my fuel tank, and the tank had been pissing out diesel like an elephant’s knob for ten miles. I plugged the hole with my finger whilst Ash found a receptacle to save the rest of the diesel in. We saved some, but must have lost £100 worth.
By some strange serendipitous stroke of luck, a chap emerged from a nearby farmhouse. He inquired about our trouble before taking me to his yard full of bits of old trucks. We picked out a replacement tank, and he towed me to the pub where, after the gig, we successfully bodged it onto my van where it still sits now, held on by good fortune and bad metal.
The gig that weekend was our best yet. By now we were five weeks in, and with one more festival to go in nearby Derbyshire, called Bearded Theory. This one wasn’t a dog-friendly party, so half the band parked up outside of the “Designated Fun Cage” (the band’s name for the festival site), opting instead for the woods. We met with Cara Means Friend and busked a few towns together. We played two gigs at the festival to a packed-out tent, amazed and honored to be the recipients of such warmth after our time off.
Sadly, after the festival we parted ways. I drove over the Welsh mountains to see my family, Aaron and Bri went South to Devon and Cornwall to see theirs. Ash went Southeast to help Gail at another event.
Eight years we’ve been doing this for a living. After weeks or months of living, working and travelling together it’s always sad to say goodbye. These people are my family and, as we said to the private security bullies in Lichfield as they tried to move us on, all we want to do is share our songs and make people happy. It’s one small thing we can do to brighten people’s day, and bring people together in a country that is increasingly fragmented. Music has always had that power. It transcends the imaginary lines we draw between ourselves and others and reminds us that there is more that unites us than divides us – and that we all deserve to be heard!
Adam Whittaker is a singer-songwriter-guitarist and member of Slack Mallard.
Check out the band online at: www.facebook.com/slackmallard
And buy their music here: http://slackmallard.bandcamp.com/
