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Bob Johnson

Just think, if things had gone just a little bit differently, Bob Johnson might be part of the whole glam rock scene, backing Gary Glitter today instead of becoming one of our leading exponents of electric folk. Or he might have been a trumpet player.

"When I asked my dad for a trumpet at the age of 13 he said he wasn't going to have any of that noise about the house, so I chose the harmonica," he remembers. "I was very hung up on Larry Adler but I wasn't really getting anywhere when I passed a second-hand shop and I saw a battered guitar In the window."

"It was totally unplayable, of course, but it was my 14th birthday so I got it. I just loved the feel of it around my neck, standing in front of the TV when 6.5 special was on and miming. I really had delusions of grandeur, I really wanted to be a pop star."

He got closer to his ambition when he was asked to join a group in Tooting called Earl Sheridan and the Houseshakers. "I played with them for a bit and then we all left Earl. So we changed our name to the Pack which was really flash in those days. We got picked up by this singer called Paul Raven, who is now known as Gary Glitter, and we backed him as Paul Raven and the Pack for about two years, but we never made any money."

He abandoned music for a regular job and was down on his knees charring, when Paul Raven's brother discovered him and introduced him to Andrew Loog Oldham who made him part of the house band at Immediate Records. By the time he joined a band called 'Thane Russell' he had already become interested in folk music folk.

"I'd been going to folk clubs for along time and I remember actually suggesting to Thane Russell's mob that we should do some traditional songs but I was just laughed out of the room so that was the end of that. Then I was so disillusioned with the pop world and so interested in folk music that I thought perhaps I could inject some of the life or commercial appeal that there was in pop music.

The only person I admired on the folk scene was Martin Carthy and the rest of it I thought was pretty hideous. I loved the music but the actual playing and singing was generally pretty barren. It's a hell of a lot better today, but it still tends to revel in its amateurism, If you get fairly good it's almost something to be ashamed of."

"Then I started working with Pete and what was nice about that was he had this classical feel and I had all this pop influence. Then Fairport and Steeleye happened and I was really jealous because this was what I'd thought of many years before. Peter got snapped up and then he asked me to join Steeleye which seemed to me the most logical thing which has happened in my musical career."

Despite his early admiration for Martin Carthy, it would be hard to find two instrumentalists more different from each other. For a start, when Martin first joined the band he was basically an acoustic guitarist, and he had to devise an entirely new technique for playing electric.

The result was that while Carthy's approach tends to be melodic, with fast runs and counter melodies going on, and arrangements based on interweaving of different strands from mandolin, dulcimer and guitar, with Bob playing guitar the sound seems to be heavier, more harmonic, with the overlays of instruments being based on different inversions of the same chords rather than melodic polyphonies.

The use of different tonal textures, fuzz, Fenderblender distortion, high treble boost, and all the other effects which are, literally, at the feet of today's rock guitarists follows naturally from this. Their last album, "Below the Salt," didn't illustrate the difference of approach as graphically as their new album, for it was something of a transitional affair.

As Peter says, "the arrangements were got together in quite a hurry to overcome any apparent loss of impetus with the leaving of two of the bands principal members, including its founder." But the change becomes more obvious with 'Parcel of Rogues,' on which the constant shift of sound textures is one of the most immediately apparent characteristics. Much of the time it is subtle, but if you listen carefully you will notice the way in which the instrumental blend is changing almost continually from verse to verse.

Often the changes are dramatic, to highlight the action of the story in the song, but most of the time they are so gradual that you wouldn't notice them unless you skipped the pick-up from the beginning of a song to the end.