Rob Barratt, Bodmin Folk Club’s Poet Laureate
When people think of performers at a folk club, the usually think of singers and musicians with the occasional storyteller, but Bodmin Folk Club offers more than that amongst its regular performers. Meet Rob Barratt….
It is very flattering to be asked to write a bit about myself for Bodmin Folk Club’s website as I’m amazed that anybody might be interested in my life. For anybody who doesn’t know me, I’m a retired teacher, comic poet, singer, improv comedy actor, and now a writer of children’s stories. But I am first and foremost a performer and always have been from an early age. I grew up in Dudley. I sang in the local church choir and acted in school plays and musicals. Years later I was lead singer in
local duos and bands in Kent and Cornwall. In Kent that was a new wave/rock/comedy and covers band but called Ted Turd and The Toolsheds (1979-80) and a duo with one of that band, Roger Stevens, in The Wrong Brothers (1983-85). In Cornwall it was a duo called Rock and Soul (1998 – 2002). But it wasn’t till 2010 at the age of 56 at Warwick Folk Festival that I did my first-ever paid gig using all my own self-written material. I finally found out what it was that I did. It seemed to go down very well and thought “Here we go…” but it doesn’t work like that and I didn’t go anywhere much. Having said that, since I retired from teaching in 2011 after 34 years full-time, I have performed all over the British Isles and have been to Australia three times to appear at folk festivals and I had to cancel a fourth visit to Canberra and New South Wales in April 2020 because of Covid.
Nobody knows who I am anywhere but I’ve been lucky and in the right place at the right time a few times to get those gigs. I spend hours and days and weeks trying to persuade people to book me. I think one of the reasons most folk clubs and folk festivals don’t book me is because I am not a musician or a folk singer. I think the irony is that what I do is actually very traditional – mostly rhyming, topical or ridiculous. I have often heard folk performers talk about the broadside ballads
going back to the 16th century. Amongst other topics they included politics and current issues which were printed in the form of rhyming lyrics without a tune but with a suggested tune of a well-known song that would fit. Along with nonsense poems that is basically what I do.
I am not a musician so to tell you what bands or musicians influenced me would be meaningless. But as I’ve got your attention, I’ll tell you anyway. As an eight-year-old I was so glad when The Beatles came along as there was so much mediocrity around in the early sixties in Britain – all those Elvis look-alikes and sound-alikes. The Beatles changed everything in my opinion.
I have always been as much influenced by comedy as by music. They are both an essential part of life to me. I can’t stand films and TV dramas which take themselves too seriously and include no humour. Our screens seem to be full of them. I loved Peter Cook and Dudley Moore, Morecambe and Wise, and I’m Sorry I’ll Read That Again. More recently it’s been Bleak Expectations on Radio Four. As a teenager and twenty-something I wanted to be Paul Rodgers (Free), Roger Daltrey (The Who) or Joe Cocker but there were no courses for that so I became a teacher instead after a degree in Psychology in London and Bolton.
One of the best concerts I ever went to was Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers (weird and funny!) in the late seventies in Canterbury. In the eighties I loved The Roches, a three- woman vocal group from New Jersey who were very quirky and thrilling to watch live, which I was able to do in London. I also discovered Kate and Anna McGarrigle around the same time. I still listened to mostly rock music and singer-songwriters like Joni Mitchell and James Taylor but I kept an open mind. I was aware of folk-rock groups but not really folk music per se and I only ever went to a folk club once or twice. Two of those were to see Mike Harding at my college folk club in Bolton and an unknown Jasper Carrot at a folk club in Guernsey, where I was working at the time. I loved both of them.
When people at folk clubs now recall past performers and the etymology of songs I haven’t got a clue who they are talking about. For me a song is either good or not, on a spectrum, and obviously subject to my subjectivity, so to speak. Some traditional songs are great, some are good and some are very boring and go on far too long, in my opinion. And it’s important to remember that even the most traditional songs were written by a person who was a contemporary songwriter at the time, although I realise that they get changed over time. The regional or local differences of some of these songs I find just as tedious as some people must find me. What I really don’t like are cliched, sentimental songs which are meant to sound “traditional”. The LP collections of various flat- mates were very important back in the seventies and eighties. One flatmate even introduced me to Planxty.
But I’ve always been a singer of some kind so in May 2002 when I was feeling very sorry for myself as I had split up with my wife and was living in a pathetic bedsit flat in Lostwithiel and missing my three daughters, I made myself go out to Bodmin Folk Club, which I had seen advertised in the local newspaper, at The Garland Ox one night as complete stranger. I was made very welcome by the MC Vic Legg and I found that I knew his sister Viv Legg who was also there. Within a few minutes I was up doing a song and I’ve been a member ever since. In the past I had often spoofed songs throughout my teaching career at teachers’ farewell dos so it wasn’t odd for me to start writing things to try out at the Bodmin Folk Club and I still do. So thanks for that. I have self-published three books of performance material – Men From Mars In Bumping Cars (2010) illustrated by Mike Jelly of Polperro, Distressed (2015) and Earwhacks (2019) both illustrated by Heather Finney of Callington. In 2022 Heather and I self-published a book of my children’s stories called The Shoebox Under The Bed.
In the last ten years I have also experienced a lot of joy from doing improv comedy with local actors Teresa Holcomb and Dave Richey. It’s great fun and in 2022 I led my first improv comedy workshop for beginners at Beardy Folk Festival in Shropshire. It went well. As a student in 1974 and 1975 I spent two summers working and travelling in the States and I worked in Cologne for six months on my return. I’ve always loved travelling so it’s been great to do a lot of that with my partner, Liz, since I retired.
That’s about it!