The Singers Tale – Reviews.

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Two interviews & some reviews

Preview/Interview: The Singer’s Tale

London Jazz News, 13th February 2015

Link: http://www.londonjazznews.com

Carol Grimes was one of the very first performers to appear at St James Studio (preview from 2012). In this new interview with Sebastian, she talked about the first outings of her new autobiographical project “The Singer’s Tale,” for which she will return to St James Studio with performances on Feb 9th and 26th 2015.

LondonJazz News: What does the show consist of?

Carol Grimes: Songs, little beat poetry, it’s a tale interlaced with songs, a lot of them written by Dorian Ford and myself. It’s in two halves with an interval. Maggie Ford is directing. Neville Malcolm is on bass, Winston Clifford drums, Annie Whitehead on trombone and Dorian Ford on piano.

LJN: And the title?

CG: I nicked it from Chaucer – he never wrote a tale about a singer, but he travelled through South East London, knew it, trod the same paths I trod.

Like Geoffrey Chaucer’s pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales, Carol’s journey started in London. As a singer, she is the character Chaucer left out from his Tales. From her first gig, Carol has attracted enthusiastic followers who want to join her on her “pilgrimage”…..more on website http://www.carolgries.com

The Singer’s Tale

St James Studio, 9th February 2015

Link: London Jazz News

Large slices of British jazz history are disappearing. The music itself is documented, but the accounts of how it was made and the world for which it was performed are fading because they exist only in the frailest of formats – memory. So when an event like Carol Grimes’ The Singer’s Tale comes along, it forms an invaluable document.

For anyone who lived through the period from the early 60s on the London jazz scene, it will recall events, venues, and people long gone, but which form names to conjure with”, summoning up memories and recreating events and feelings with that, power goes way beyond nostalgia into reliving. For anyone who didn’t live through it, here is an account of the life of a talented but uneducated woman and mother who did not fit easily into musical categories. Documents on women in British Jazz and Rock – and of their treatment by the almost exclusively male scenes where they were often treated as props rather than musicians – are rare, and this sometimes harrowing, sometimes hilarious look at life is probably unique.

Born an unwanted, illegitimate, wartime baby in Lewisham, and put into care by her mother, Carol was in dead-end menial jobs when she found a life in jazz and singing and reinvented herself, including a new name. There’s a great scene when she tries to claim her pension and tries to explain having been known by four surnames. She recalls hippiedom, psychedelia at UFO and the Roundhouse, busking, motherhood, recording Country Rock in Nashville with the musical team who did Dylan’s Blond on Blond, alcohol abuse, riots at the Carnival, Rock against Racism and the first Glastonbury culminating in her return to her first love – Jazz. I particularly liked her account of touring Northern Ireland in the early 70s with roadies who owned a Japanese ex-school bus which just happened to be bright orange. continued on website http://www.carolgrimes.com

SOME PRESS FROM EDINBURGH

http://m.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/13621037.display/

Fringe Music and Cabaret: Carol Grimes with Dorian Ford and Arike: The Singer’s Tale, Lennon: Through a Glass Onion, Sinatra: 100 Years

Carol Grimes with Dorian Ford: The Singer’s Tale

FOUR STARS

Lennon: Through a Glass Onion

Assembly Hall

THREE STARS

Sinatra: 100 Years

Assembly Rooms

 Rob Adams

Carol Grimes needs longer than a Fringe slot to tell her life story. Heavens, she needs more words than a Fringe review has to accommodate the names she’s gone under, being as she candidly puts it “a bastard” London war baby who was put up for adoption, brought up in Lowestoft, wound up sleeping in Hastings’ caves, busked in Soho, joined a band, married, divorced, married again, and tied the pension authorities in knots trying to decipher who she really was.

To those whose lives Grimes’s singing has touched, she’s one of the UK’s great under appreciated talents and at seventy-one, she hasn’t lost the power to enthral with a blues or a jazz standard or with the song that ended this lunchtime gem so aptly, her friend, the late Sandy Denny’s Who Knows Where the Time Goes.

The Singer’s Tale is by turns charming, funny and a little sad without looking for pity. Grimes is a trouper, a survivor and with Dorian Ford’s splendid piano accompaniment and occasionally added harmonica, she variously defies and takes encouragement from a sizable cast of alliteratively named alter egos – Betty Blues belter, Procrastinating Patsy et al – to follow her dreams and get through some nightmares. The triumphs are underplayed – she’s happy being a non-celebrity – the laughs are genuine, and the voice really should have become better known. Run ends today [Monday].

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts_ents/13611679.Busker_s_bottler_sings_the_blues/

Busker’s bottler sings the blues

Carol Grimes might not include I Could Write a Book in her Edinburgh Fringe show, The Singer’s Tale. The London-born survivor of fifty years in the music business would, however, have every right to sing this Rodgers and Hart standard. Indeed, she is currently writing her autobiography after being given encouragement by a literary agent who subsequently disappeared.

“Typical,” says Grimes with a throaty laugh. “My timing has always been abysmal when it comes to business matters, and I know I’m not alone in this regard among musicians. I just like to sing. And write – I’ve been really enjoying getting the story down.”

Grimes’ problem as far as the publishing world’s concerned is that she’s not about to deliver a celebrity kiss and tell because, as she says, she’s not a celebrity. She’s known a few – Joe Cocker was reduced to sleeping on her couch when at a particularly low ebb – and she might have become a bigger name had the albums she made in Nashville and Memphis during the 1970s been promoted properly and had she not been silenced, as a recording artist at least, due to some dodgy deals shortly afterwards.

Promoted stories

The story, which includes Grimes pinching herself as she listens to tapes of Otis Redding rehearsals in Stax Records legend Donald ‘Duck’ Dunn’s Memphis home begins with Grimes not singing but being the ‘bottler’ for a character called ‘Paris Nat’ Schaffer on the streets of London. He would sing and entertain passers-by and Grimes would collect the takings and look out for the old bill as busking was illegal back in the early 1960s. Schaffer also saw the merit of having an attractive teenage accomplice and encouraged Grimes to pursue her dream as they moved from making quick escapes down dark alleys to playing in London’s folk clubs.

From the moment, as a fourteen-year-old who spent most of her childhood in care, she heard Ella Fitzgerald singing Every Time We Say Goodbye, Grimes had wanted to be a singer. Later, hearing the great British blues singer-guitarist Jo Ann Kelly and Julie Driscoll, who was in the frontline of Steampacket with Rod Stewart and John Baldry at the time, inspired Grimes further. And before too long she got to follow their example by selling out London venues including the Marquee, Klook’s Kleek and the 100 Club.

By this time she had signed with the B&C wing of Charisma Records, then home to Van der Graaf Generator and Genesis. The resultant album, Fools Meeting, would become a collectors’ item and featured Grimes with a band called Delivery, whose members went on to work with Soft Machine, Robert Wyatt’s Matching Mole, Hatfield & the North and other Canterbury scene notables.

The album’s jazzier, more progressive side took Grimes away from the rhythm and blues she’d previously favoured. But not for long as she was invited to sing some demos with the London Boogie Band, which included her then partner, guitarist Neil Hubbard from Joe Cocker’s Grease Band, and while that band morphed into the still active Kokomo, Grimes was propelled towards a solo career that promised much but delivered, as she says, “a nightmare.”

“It did get me to Memphis and recording with the Stax crew and the Memphis Horns, which was a fantastic experience, and much, much later that association led to me being invited onto Soul Britannia on BBC 4 and the subsequent tour, which was great,” she says. “But the album came out and stiffed due to lack of promotion and the guy who had me under contract wouldn’t let me out of the deal and stopped me from recording anything else.”

Grimes moved to Poland with her Polish husband and when she returned to London in the 1980s she became involved in The Shout, a choir organised by composer Orlando Gough that toured across Europe and America and visited Japan. She also took up teaching at the City Literary Institute and working with Parkinson’s sufferers through Sing For Joy, a choir that she conducts and finds hugely rewarding.

She’s never stopped gigging as a singer, however, and her Fringe show features the pianist in her current band, Dorian Ford, as her sole accompanist.

“I wish I could bring the whole band because my drummer, Winston Clifford has a great voice and he normally sings behind me as I tell the stories. But I’ll just have to do it with one mouth,” she says. “It’s one of the advantages of never having had a massive hit and having kept working my vocal muscles that I don’t have to go on these 1970s revival tours singing three keys down from the original. And never having been a star, I can be the fly on the wall who played at the first Glastonbury Festival and who can share memories of people who have been written out of history.”

Carol Grimes & Dorian Ford: The Singer’s Tale is at the Assembly Rooms, August 22-24.