Celebrating 50 years of recording Samphire Records will be issuing a series of archive Colin Lloyd Tucker recordings, kicking off with a one off live show from 1996.
Rescued from a cassette this set is of particular interest as 9 of the 11 songs have never before been issued in any form.
Inspiration for this batch of songs came, in a round about way, from country singer Carson Robison.
Colin on Carson
C.L.T. looks back to the mid 1990s and the genesis of his ‘Carson Robison & his Oxidol Pioneers’ project, soon to be available to stream as On Stage 12/09/96
“Rummaging through a pile of old letters and postcards in a junk shop I came across a letter, written in 1938 to a local lady from an American singer/songwriter Carson Robison.
Carson had visited England three times during the 1930s and his Radio show (sponsored by ‘Oxidol’ ) was broadcast on Radio Luxembourg and accessible in the UK.
The letter itself was full of ‘How-do-dees’, ‘Mighty nice folk’ etc. and it came with a flyer for the aforementioned radio show.
Staring at the picture of Carson and his band and having never heard a note of their music I began to imagine. I liked the name and how they looked. I set about making them into characters in a series of songs.
Nowadays we can access Carson’s music and history with ease on the internet. Many years after writing these songs I heard his music for the first time and enjoyed it very much although, predictably it was nothing like my imagined version!
12/09/96 was a very long day indeed, three hours for the band* to learn the songs and for engineer Kenny Jones to learn his cues for, among other things, playing in the dialog and effect clips, a short break followed by three performances…real seat of the pants stuff.
This is the only time that we played most of these songs.“
*The Band: Tim Broughton – drums and backing vocal, Andy ‘Wal’ Coughlan – electric upright bass and bass guitar, Neil Huckstepp – Fender strat. guitar, Maggi Ronson – backing vocal, C.L.T. – vocal, harmonium, euphonium, Eko 12 string electric guitar.
On Stage 12/09/96 is a Bandcamp exclusive. Listen or download here: https://colinlloydtucker.bandcamp.com/album/on-stage-12-09-96
