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*Katherine Priddy: “Always found myself wandering back, craving the comfort and nostalgia of the past,” she says.*

KATHERINE Priddy grew up in the first house on the left, the title of the first single from her second album, The Pendulum Swing, whose title came from a lyric in that song.

“Despite its soft and dreamy sound, this song provides the cornerstone around which the album and its themes orbit,” says the Birmingham contemporary roots singer-songwriter and finger-picking guitarist, who plays at The Crescent, York, on Wednesday night (15/5/2024).

“It’s inspired by the little old house where I grew up and all the memories captured within those four walls – both for me and for all the other inhabitants who’ve lived there over the centuries. It might just be another terraced cottage to passers-by, but to those who’ve called it home, it’s everything.

“There’s something magical about past inhabitants. That was something that intrigued me as a child, digging in the garden, finding old toy soldiers and bits of china: it’s a reminder you’re not the first to live there and you won’t be the last. It’s a comforting thought, how a house can look like any old terraced house outside but inside a scratch on the wall means everything.”

Explaining the album title, Katherine says: “It describes the urge to leave and the even stronger urge to return. Something I’ve felt a lot in recent few years as I’ve tried to carve out a corner for myself elsewhere, but always found myself wandering back, craving the comfort and nostalgia of the past.”

Released in February on Cooking Vinyl as the follow-up to 2021’s The Eternal Rocks Beneath, The Pendulum Swing is a step forward for Katherine. “My songs have matured since my debut, seeing as most of those were written in my childhood, but despite moving forward and feeling the need to do something different with this second release, I still can’t help but return to those fundamental, unchanging things at the root of it all: home, family, love,” she says.

“Overall, I wanted this song and the album to feel lived in, and this is captured in part by the ghostly atmospheres, mechanical clockwork sounds, creaking floorboards, indistinct whispers and old tape recordings of my family that are littered throughout. I want to invite the listener to come in, sit down and inhabit the album for a little while, and First House On The Left is right at the heart of that.”

Describing the rural village house, Katherine says: “It’s an old terraced house in Alvechurch, 11 miles from Birmingham, quite a few hundred years old with a lot of history. It’s where I grew up; I’ve moved out, moved back in again, moved out, then moved back in again with my parents over lockdown, with mixed feelings.

“When rapidly approaching 30, you feel you must move out, move on, but at the same it’s really hard to deny the pleasure of being back home with your parents.”

Katherine reflects on the itinerant nature of a singer-songwriter’s life. “Being a musician, it’s always about picking the most scenic route. I will find my home,” she says, having moved out again. “At the moment I’ve found a lovely little flat in Birmingham by the river.”

Will she write about it? “Who knows! Maybe I will. Probably I have another house song in me,” she says.

*The cover artwork for Katherine Priddy’s sophomore album The Pendulum Swing*

Katherine wrote her first album in her teens. “It dealt with mythology, which I was more interested in then. Now I’ve turned back to more fundamental things because they are there all the time and I’m trying to find myself. When everything else seems unstable, these things stay the same, and I wanted to capture that nostalgia, which is something I crave.”

Craving comfort in the past, Katherine says: “I’ve picked a fairly unstable career, which is very much about being in the moment, planning but not sure if things will come to fruition, but I feel very lucky to have a family that’s an unchanging bedrock and are always so supportive.

“Sometimes you just want to go back and feel like a kid again, and I think it’s fine that I feel grateful to have that feeling of nostalgia. It’s impossible not to want to still be back there and re-live those moments – and I can do that in song.”

She returned to the same producer, Simon J Weaver, who had recorded her first album at his Rebellious Jukebox studio in Birmingham, joined by guest musicians John Smith (lead guitar), Harry Fausing Smith (strings), Marcus Hamblett (brass and double bass), George Boomsma, from Northallerton (guitar and backing vocals), and Polly Virr (cello).

“This album feels like a step up in being more cinematic in places and taking me out of my comfort zone,” says Katherine. “I really like it on albums where you can hear things that take it from being a song to be more immersive, and that what’s we’ve done for The Pendulum Swing

“I wanted it to feel like you are entering a house, but also bookending the album with instrumentals that convey returning to the house and then leaving again at the end. It’s that urge to stay and that urge to leave that I’ve been doing battle with.

“Some of the songs are very personal to me, like when I’ve featured clips throughout of me and my dad talking from a tape that I found at my parents’ house – and I’ve squeezed my family into a cameo on the last track.

“I thought there’d be more resistance, but my dad loves his vinyl and a credit on an album is something he couldn’t resist, so it’s a family affair with my brother and parents on there.”

Katherine’s 14-date tour finds her expanding from a duo format to a trio with support act George Boomsma and Harry Fausing Smith joining her on stage. “It’s lovely to have Harry for this tour, capturing some of the soundscapes from the album, as well as integrating some of the samples into the set,” she says.

“It’s really emotive to have the strings. I’ve been getting goosebumps listening to these musicians adding their beautiful skills to songs that have been occupying my head for so long.”

Katherine Priddy plays The Crescent, York, on May 15, supported by George Boomsma, 7.30pm; The Live Room, Saltaire, May 16, 7.30pm. Both sold out. Box office for returns only: katherinepriddy.co.uk/

Katherine Priddy: the back story

*Katherine Priddy: Singer, songwriter, guitarist*

First set foot on stage to play Dorothy in school play The Wizard Of Oz, aged nine.

Wrote first song at 14/15.

Love of language, literature and poetry rooted in English Literature studies at University of Sussex, Brighton. Favourite novel Wuthering Heights would later inspire her first album title: “I loved how Cathy described her love for Heathcliff as being ‘the eternal rock beneath’,” she says.

Folk luminary Richard Thompson chose her as “The Best Thing I’ve Heard All Year” in Mojo magazine on the strength of her 2018 EP, Wolf.

Received airplay on Guy Garvey, Gideon Coe, Tom Robinson, Cerys Matthews, Radcliffe & Maconie, Steve Lamacq and the late Janice Long’s radio shows.

2021 debut albumThe Eternal Rocks Beneath (Navigator Records) drew glowing reviews from the Observer, the Sun, Uncut, Songlines and Folk Radio UK with its songs of mythology, childhood and growing up. Charted at number one in Official UK Folk Chart and number five in Official UK Americana Chart, rounded off the year on Mojo’s Folk Albums of the Year list.

Played Cambridge Folk Festival, winning Christian Raphael Prize; Glastonbury, appearing on BBC Two’s coverage; Green Man; End Of The Road; Beautiful Days and BBC Proms.

*Katherine Priddy and John Smith performing together at Selby Town Hall in November 2022*. *Picture: Paul Rhodes*

As well as headline tours, she has supported Richard Thompson, The Chieftains, Loudon Wainwright III and Vashti Bunyan.

In 2022, she played in Australia, including Port Fairy Folk Festival, plus showcase in Kansas City, USA, as part of Folk Alliance International.

In 2023, she recorded I Think They’re Leaving Me Behind for double album The Endless Coloured Ways – The Songs Of Nick Drake, on Chrysalis Records, featuring alongside Self Esteem, Aldous Harding, John Grant, Bombay Bicycle Club and more.

Supported Guy Garvey at The Roundhouse, London.

In February 2024, she released second album The Pendulum Swing on Cooking Vinyl.

Past shows around here: The Magpies Festival, Sutton Park, near York, August 2021; National Centre for Early Music, York, June 2022; Selby Town Hall, with John Smith, playing 14 songs together over 100 minutes, November 2022.

One last question

Do you consider herself to be a folk musician, Katherine?

“I THINK I’m just outside, with one foot in folk and one foot elsewhere, but what I appreciate about folk songs is that they tell stories.”

*Jasper Carrott and Alistair McGowan: Comedy and impressions for sharing on a Sunday night in York*

JASPER Carrott had decided his Stand Up & Rock gig with Brummie schoolmate and ELO drummer Bev Bevan in Barnstaple would be his last show.

June 6 2022. Age 77. Joke cracker Carrott and sticks basher Bevan in Devon. Exit the Queen’s Theatre stage left, the finale for the Lifetime Achievement winner in the 2008 British Comedy Awards. The Funky Moped now defunct.

But what’s this? An Evening Shared With Jasper Carrott & Alistair McGowan, heading to the Grand Opera House, York, on Sunday on their comedy and impressions double bill.

“I gave it up last year to see how I felt – and I missed it terribly,” says comedian, actor and television presenter Jasper, his nickname since the age of nine when growing up in Birmingham.

“I’m having a golden autumn. There’s an audience out there that’s not catered for and I cater for it. I get standing ovations, and these days I like to say it would be 100 per cent…if 100 per cent of the audience could still stand up!”

Carrott, 78, and Evesham-born McGowan, 58, who now lives in Ludlow, Shropshire, first shared a bill as a one-off at the 2017 Reading Festival. “They had a spare spot on the Sunday, and my agent asked if I’d like to do it, My first thought was, ‘Not on my own’,” recalls Jasper (real name Robert Norman Davis, by the way).

“I’d previously worked with Phil Cool for about three years [from 1992] on the Carrott & Cool tour shows, where the comedy nights felt different because of Phil’s impersonations. Anyway, my agent said Alistair would be interested in doing the festival with me, and it went really well.”

So much so, they went out on tour in 2018, playing York Barbican in their An Evening With Jasper Carrott & Alistair McGowan format on November 19. “That was one of the first shows I did with him.”

How did they settle on who would open the show? “Alistair really wanted to go on first. I think he thought it would be more difficult if he had to build on my energy. We first did it that way at Reading, and it worked, so, each half, Alistair does 20-25 minutes, then I come on and do 30,” says Jasper.

In a long, long career, Jasper has spread his wings to star in the television series The Detectives from 1993 to 1997; play Koko, the executioner, for the D’Oyly Carte Opera in a 96-show run of Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado at the Savoy Theatre, London, in 2002, and host 300 episodes of the ITV daytime game show Golden Balls from 2007 to 2011.

*Jasper Carrott, centre, and The Bev Bevan Band line-up for their Stand Up & Rock shows in 2021*

Yet raconteur Jasper has always returned to performing stand-up, cracking quickfire gags, spinning yarns and singing ditties to guitar accompaniment solo on stage: the most exposed and exposing form of self-expression on stage.

“Now then, I’m going to paraphrase Bill Shankly [the legendary Liverpool football manager of the 1960s and ’70s],” says Jasper. “When he signed Kevin Keegan, he walked him on to the Anfield pitch and said, ‘you can run anywhere on this pitch, but you can’t hide’, and that’s the same for me, doing my comedy.”

Ten years away from the stand-up microphone had passed when best friend Bev Bevan said, ‘Let’s do some shows together. That’s when I rediscovered the essence of it, going eyeball to eyeball with an audience. It stirred up all the adrenaline again, which is a very addictive drug.”

Preferring that eyeball-to-eyeball experience to playing 5,000-seaters “where everyone just watches the screens”, Carrott and Bevan did shows together for more than eight years. Now he is back on the road with Alistair McGowan.

“Times have changed in comedy. You can’t talk about anything [because of political correctness], but it’s like you have to have Tourette’s to go on stage to talk. That’s comedy today, long, hard and woke. For ages I’ve been watching a lot of comedians, and with all the young stand-up comics, I don’t really laugh,” he says.

“Storytelling is an art and not many comedians now tell stories, but I do sets with machine-gunfire gags and three or four stories with jokes in them that are hidden, and that’s what I’ve always done.

“That’s because I was a product of the American style of comedy: Tom Lehrer, George Carlin, Bob Newhart, Shelley Berman. I still don’t swear on stage, but I talk about topics that need discussing, however awkward.”

Looking ahead, Jasper says: “Lots of comedians have performed into their 80s: George Burns, the Marx Brothers, Ken Dodd, and I’ll know when it’s time to stop,” he says. “I have no ego about it. I really enjoy it, and one of things now is the nostalgia, where I go on stage and I’m part of the audience’s lives. I feel their warmth.”

A comedian to the last, he ponders his final curtain. “When I get asked, ‘what do you want on your gravestone?’, I always say, ‘I never died in Glasgow’!”

An Evening Shared With Jasper Carrott & Alistair McGowan, Grand Opera House, York, Sunday, 7.30pm. Box office: atgtickets.com/york.

*Jasper Carrott: Comedian, actor and TV presenter*

Jasper Carrott on playing Koko, the executioner, in Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Mikado for D’Oyly Carte Opera

“That was an experience and a half! I was a bit shaky at first as I had to learn so much. Someone said, ‘you can know it, but you don’t own it’, and remember sitting down and thinking ‘how do I go about doing this?’.

“I was a pain in the a**e for everyone on the staff, from the actors to the director, really trying to glean the essence of the part, which I then really got hold of.

“Why pick me for Koko? I suppose they looked at it and thought, ‘who can we get to front this?’, when people like Eric Idle had done it before. I said I’d be very interested, and they sent the director out to Spain, where I was playing golf, to play the piano to see if I could sing.”

Surely D’Oyly Carte must have heard Jasper’s 1975 hit single, Funky Moped? “My musical passport!” he says, with laughter in his voice.

Once Jasper received the OK, rather than KO, for playing Koko, “the rest was a long, hard slog, getting to learn the part…and learning never to do it again! I never realised how much work went into performing opera.”

Jasper Carrott on hosting the ITV game show Golden Balls

“I thought, ‘I’m a raconteur, not a game show host’, but I did the pilot and they liked it. When my agent said how much I’d be paid, I said, ‘is that in lira?’, but no, it wasn’t! I ended up doing 300 episodes.

“I learned so much about human nature in that show, about just how deceitful people are!”

Jasper Carrott on fellow comedian Stewart Lee

“Stewart left a couple of books for me at a gig after he’d played there a couple of days earlier, saying I’d inspired him. He’s not always funny but he is very interesting, and he’s probably the link between what I do and the young comedians of today.”

Jasper Carrott on the essence of comedy

“Comedy is the only measurable artform. People laugh or they don’t. You can’t tell me how much you enjoy a Rembrandt painting, but if there aren’t any laughs at a comedy gig, you won’t be performing again.”

Tag: Birmingham

Katherine Priddy ponders the pull of home, family and love on second album The Pendulum Swing as she plays The Crescent