Interview with Fred Wedlock.

Fred Wedlock - Tales From A Bristol Boy.

My first recollection of Fred Wedlock was seeing him on TV when I was a child, presenting local TV programme 'The Good Neighbour Show'. And if he's reading this opening sentence I can hear him say. 'Wahoo, I'm not on my last legs yet, you know'. And he'd be right.

Grabbing the opportunity to interview Fred despite his initial hesitation when he was quoted as saying "My contact with the rock scene is about as close as a Morris Dancer is to Swan Lake", I explained that Bristol Rocks was embracing every genre of the music scene and he deserved inclusion even if he did say "I'm not sure it would do your cred any good to interview an ancient folkie comic like me!" However after his jokey comments Fred admitted "After 30-odd years of showing off on stage I am always happy to talk about myself!" So the date, time and venue was set. What had Fed let himself in for?

I have to say Fred Wedlock makes a good cup of coffee and should he ever open a Coffee House, it would be a great success. My plan was to do a short interview take a couple of photos for the feature and thank him for his time. However it turned out very different. The thing with Fred is that he has a happy go lucky personality and it's like meeting an old friend, someone you haven't seen in ages and you just catch up on everything that's been happening since you last saw them. Fred has this ability to draw you in, capture your imagination, whilst you listen to his stories and anecdotes. You want to know more and he can talk 'until the cows come home' and they say women really know how to hold a conversation ... well that's until you meet Fred! His life is fascinating. All too much to print here, but you get a glimpse of Fred Wedlock's world and his take on life. And along the way you may learn a new word or two that is not mentioned in the dictionary. Must be part of the Bristol dialect or Fred simply inventing new words!

He was born Peter Frederick Wedlock on the 23rd May 1942 in Southwell Street, Kingsdown, which was where the Maternity Home was at that time. Life began in Redcliffe and for all of his childhood Bristol was his home.

"I'm a Bemi boy really. We were slum cleared to Bedminster Down. Then I married a Hotwells girl and we lived in Clifton to begin with, then we had a house in Hotwells and then for tax reasons I moved out to Somerset.". Summed up quite nicely by Fred.

I referred to Fred as being part of the Wedlock Dynasty and at this point he starts laughing. "I've never heard it called a dynasty before!" Well yes, I think we should call it a dynasty. The family has a long tradition with football and in particular Bristol City Football Club. Wasn't your Grandfather captain of England? I ask. "Yep, Billy Wedlock captained England, captained Bristol City, bought a pub opposite the City ground called 'The Star' back then but it was always called Wedlock's anyway by all the locals. Eventually they said oh lets call it 'Wedlock's and in the early '80's we had a naming ceremony and it became 'Wedlock's'. It's now closed, ceased as a pub sometime ago, but its about to cease to be if the developers get planning permission and there's a fair bit of people jumping up and down about that one."

I asked Fred how he felt about that, after all it was a piece of Wedlock history and I cannot recall his opinion being asked by anyone in the media. "It's very difficult. I should for sentimental reasons say oh we should keep the pub and the family name, you know....... But what are you going to do with it? It failed as a pub through bad management and bad luck. If the Bristol City Trust was to buy it or any Bristol City fan was to buy it you'd probably get people in there every Wednesday, once a fortnight and every Saturday once a fortnight. How are you going to run the pub then? There's competition around. It didn't pull the crowds, so whether it's viable as a pub I honestly don't know."

Fred continues with his assessment. "I don't know exactly what they want to put there. Maybe it's the usual mix. Maybe flats and a shop or something like that. A lot of the neighbours say damn good idea, yes, yes, lets go for that. Tidy it all up because the place wasn't being used and it's a nice location, BUT it would be nice if it was some sort of extension to the City ground. I'm all in favour of the name 'Wedlock' being plastered around the place because, well you're bound to aren't you really". And Fred starts to laugh. "A lot of younger people say 'Was that you they named the pub after then' and 'Oh you've got that stand named after you'. Well Granddad did have something to do with it. It's nice and I'm very proud of Granddad".

So what about football, did Fred play a part in the family tradition or did he go in another sporting direction? "I played a lot of football at Junior school. We all kicked around because we played in the streets a lot. Everybody played football, of course you did. We'd clear the glass off bomb sites to play football. I was brought up in an area which the Luftwaffe gave a right old seeing to and they kindly provided us with the most wonderful of playing areas of ruined factories and cellars and jungles all colonised by willow and all sorts of marvellous places. Clearings were taken over by grass so you had chance to play games. You'd get a scruffy old ball and have a kick around."

"I went to Bristol Grammar School where they regarded football as some kind of work of the devil and you had to play rugger and cricket". With Fred switching to a posh voice near the end of the sentence. "But I became short sighted fairly early and not being the world's biggest, vertically challenged, well vertically defeated I accept that fact. So I wasn't really involved in rugby,. I wasn't much good at that, well I was a half decent scrum half. Small, nippy and sneaky, but hockey became my game because that was the nearest I could get to football and wear glasses. I played hockey for years. I played for the Old Boys, I played for the University, once for the County and that to me that was the equivalent of playing football except you can play a damn sight longer playing hockey because you don't get the twists or the bashes and strains that you get playing contact games".

And Fred's interest in music, did that start at school? "Yes. There are various clichés in my musical development. I was ill as a child. I had Bronchitosis when I was very small and spent about six months in Frenchay .... Its kind of bronchitis and asthma. Bear in mind I was living an area where smoke was the norm. We had the railway just over the road quite literally. The shunting yards in Redcliffe way. We had tobacco factories all around us. The docks were just one block over. We had Proctors chemical factory just up over the railway. So the whole atmosphere was total glorious pollution and so I was an asthmatic kid. It was the Doctor that recommended singing as a therapy! So I was duly recruited into St.Mary Redcliffe Choir. We literally lived under the shadow of St Mary Redcliffe, we were that close. It was a natural thing to trot over the road and be in the choir. Some things you can do and some things you can't and I just happened to be able to pitch a song and sing."

"I also enjoyed showing off because I was so ill as a kid. My Grandmother taught me to read. I couldn't move around too much so I became a very fast reader very early so I found that was a way of getting attention. When you are a small weak-ish kid, if you make the big blokes laugh and if you can sing them songs and entertain them they look after you and they don't hit you!" Fred starts laughing at this point. "So I became the sort of troubadour idiot. I could always stand up, sing a song and tell a story and read the long words for the big boys who needed signs translating for them!" with Fred still laughing. "So that's how I developed. I joined the choir and got my musical grounding there and then joined the school choir at Bristol Grammar School. I guess you could say I went into show biz very early because I just loved standing up, showing off and people looking at me. I just liked it." said Fred.

His first public performance was at the age of four. "I was standing on a chair in the public bar of the York House in Redcliffe which is now part of a car park. And singing 'Ghost Riders In The Sky' to the customers for which I was given thruppence, a twelve sided thrupenny bit which was a fortune" He starts laughing again with fondness of those days. "I don't know what I spent the money on, probably being a tight little bugger I probably horded it somewhere ..... almost certainly or it might have been .... you could get four chews for a farthing each. So four chews for a penny. We had farthings then and silver thuppeny bits, no silver sixpences, I mean. That was the favourite, yes four chews and you'd have liquorice rope and barley sugar. That was slightly more expensive, so if you were a little flush you'd have a barley sugar stick and liquorice root. We used to chew that and lemonade crystals, remember those? Vivid red and vivid yellow things and you had a little spill of them and you'd lick your finger and dipped it in. What you were eating was pure citric acid with colouring." So Fred's intake of food additives began at a very early age!

So what did he plan for his life? Did he have ambitions that he wanted to follow? "Well, go to University, didn't have any ambitions at that stage. It was the natural process. The school I went to were sending people to Oxford and Cambridge and then around the Empire to run things, to be professionals, have at least fourteen letters after their name. That was what the school was about. I was a slight oddball, didn't fit in. Creatives were regarded with some suspicion. Kind of a nodding acceptance but it wasn't a creative school."

At University Fred studied General Arts. "That's what we called it. English, French philosophy politics psychology, all that sort of stuff. Caving, climbing, hockey and drinking Welsh beer! I did a General Arts degree mainly because I wasn't academic in one direction because of my scatter shot interests and because it gave you the chance to meet all sorts of people. Being a kind of sociable show-offy, organising type of chap they kind of put me in charge of lots of the new intake. You got people from all over the world. It was wonderful. It was kind of a living course that you were doing."

As for working, a career, had music taken a back seat? "I became a Youth Employment Officer all but briefly. And then I thought nah, nah, nah, this is bloody silly, because I'd never really done a job. I didn't know about the world. I'd done the course but thought I'd go and find out about the world of work, so I worked at Lewis's for a while. This was before John Lewis, this was Lewis's Ltd, next door to Debenham's in Broadmead. I was sales manager for linens eventually. They put me on toys at Christmas, boy that was an education. I'd learnt more in that year and a half at Lewis's than I had learned at three and a half years at University that's for sure. What make's human beings tick!"

"My hobby was singing and this was something which developed at Uni. I'd gone there as a singer/performer anyway, by then I was a banjo player. Oh God we've got to go back a bit really. My Dad had a Ukulele, like everyone of his generation he clattered out a bit of George Formby. Anyway I found his Ukulele and found that I could accompany some of the very rude songs that came out of Count Palmero Varcarian's book of bawdy ballads" and Fred starts laughing mischievously about those days.

Fred continues his story. "I was in the Army Cadets as well. Rather fancied being an apprentice assassin on behalf of her Britannic Majesty. My mates joined the Boy Scouts and did useful stuff and I joined the Army Cadets and learned to kill. Seriously though, I used to sort of sing on camps. I used to take the ukulele along and sing these rude songs which added to my popularity and they bought me free beer and weird stuff like that."

Fred then discovered being a singer and entertainer had it's advantages. "At the Youth Club I had a bit of a reputation as a musician to pull the crumpet, so I thought this is bloody good. You got free beer and you got girls at the Youth Club. Thank You!" He said laughing. "I think I know where I'm going! So I kept on doing this hobby and then I got to University. By then I was a banjo player because my Grandmother had played a banjo in an end of the pier troop. She was arthritic before I even knew her so I never heard her play the banjo to my great regret. At the same time another banjo player arrived at Uni and he took the spot in the Uni jazz band. He was better than me and became very, very good friends. He also ran out of grant in the first term and sold me his guitar.So I took up the guitar and then another mate of ours had just discovered American Folk music. The Allan Lomax book of American folk songs which was our bible to begin with and then we discovered Pete Seger and that was our inspiration. Then we discovered Bob Dylan who came along and we thought 'oooh, hello this is interesting stuff'. Of course we were all protesting and stuff anyway, marching and banning stuff, getting pissed and chemically re-arranged. You know going out and pretending we were solving the problems of the world. There was the occasional herbal ambience around. Marijuana (speaking in a strong Bristolian accent), Mary-Jane, grass, shit, good shit man. What? eh?"

It was the 1960's and folk clubs started to arrive. Fred explained about the folk circuit at this time. "Originally folk clubs in the very early days were controlled by either the English Folk Dancing Society that put dancing first before song and were a bunch of blue stocking academics usually. They used to sing very very old songs and very very long songs and all very tripsy and nicey and all of that. Then you had the Young Communist League who saw folk song as a brilliant means of expressing the working class desires and ambitions so they were running clubs that were specialising in the protest side of stuff, political folk song. You had general purpose folk clubs arriving where you could go in and do all sorts of things and things polarised and generalised . You got people bringing the blues which became a respectable thing as well and then very early protest rock 'n' roll and proto country and western. A lot of musicians came through folk clubs developed their style, learned their stage craft there and went off in various tangents. They selected more or less which bit of the whole genre they fancied and then went and specialised. Some of us went into comedy and some of us went into rock 'n' roll and some went into blues. Some went to seed and some went and got proper jobs!"

I'd read somewhere that some people referred to Fred Wedlock as the West Country's Billy Connolly, but wasn't Fred ahead of him even before Billy arrived on the scene? "Actually yes, only because I'm a little bit older than Billy. He was also a folk singer and a banjo player as well, good banjo player too. I worked with Billy at the Cambridge Festival once, I think he'd just split from the 'Humblebums' then. He was lovely, delightful man. But then back stage everybody, almost everybody is. I can count the fingers on one thumb the number of people I've not liked in our business. Out front, yeah, you could see somebody trying it on and you're thinking you posing pratt, come on, ok, alright I know the game, you don't believe what you're saying but I know."

And what about his experience on the Top Of The Pops? "Back stage, when I was doing Top Of The Pops I was ensconced with all these highly famous musicians.You know who can play what, you know who can play triples, who can play that riff , you know who can keep in tune and you know everybody knows. You can't bullshit one another!" says Fred laughing

But when you were on Top Of The Pops singing 'The Oldest Swinger In Town' did you sing that live or was it to a backing track? Fred takes a sharp intake of breath to try and stop laughing. "Ummm yes, do you want the legal version? The rules were that you had to go in and do a backing track before. You had to do your own track. If you were going to mime you had to go in and actually sing the song and then mime to it. So you'd do it in the afternoon and record it. And then the backing was done by ........ well there was some nice little arrangement, I won't go into details where a certain group of backing singers were given the job of doing the backing vocals. My backing vocalists were as good as you could get anywhere and better than ninety-five per cent, in fact they were a damn sight better than the ones they wanted to put on there. So what we actually did in the end was that my band went up and they did a base track, the basic track and second time we were on Top Of The Pops we actually used their track but we took it in a different cover and rejected the track that the other (TOTP) singers had done which wasn't as good. We used the original although the other singers got paid and no doubt some of that money trickled down to some of those who had little arrangements"

Fred recorded the song 'The Oldest Swinger In Town' in 1979 so was it a bit of a surprise he found himself well and truly planted at number six in the singles chart in 1981. But who discovered the song that pushed Fred into the limelight on a national scale? "The song was on an LP of mine. Dave Cousins of The Strawbs was a good friend of very long standing from the folk days. He was then running Stockton and Darlington Radio and said 'you've got to single that'. We'd actually just done it as an LP track and we said 'bollocks!' At the time I was working with a guitar player called Chris Newman, who was wonderfully, utterly brilliant and we said 'no, no, no'. We're doing the college circuit, we're a concept band, we're more. We are a thinking act, we're not a singles band at all really. Dave said 'oh you are, you single that'."

"My manager then was a pushy dynamic go-a-head character in London and said 'well we'll try asingle, we'll put one out.' We did a thousand copies of this and put five hundred around the trade and then sold five hundred off the stage for about fifty pence a time and that would cover our costs. We worked it out if we go carefully we'd make a tenner each, me and Chris and Kevin, our manager. We didn't have a label and Kevin invented a name and called it 'Coast Records'."

Fred takes a sip of tea and carries on with his story. "Noel Edmunds producer got a copy and went straight into Noel and said 'this is great it's going to be a hit'. At the time every radio presenter then had to look for a band that they could kind of foster and say I'm the one who developed them, I'm the one who discovered them. They were doing this all the time. So Noel said 'yes OK we'll play this' and he played it on his Sunday morning radio show Dingley Dell. We were actually gigging in Brighton at the time and we'd stayed with a friend down there. Feeling slightly derelict we were driving back to Bristol at mid-day, Sunday morning feeling absolutely knackered, may have been one o'clock in the afternoon. Pulled up outside Chris' house to let him go back home and his missus comes out leaping through the window saying 'Noel Edmunds played your song, Noel Edmunds played your song, he played your song! We went 'oh bollocks go and make a cup of tea'. 'No, He did'. 'Oh alright, fine, ok cup of tea please' and we sat down. Then the phone rings and it just rang and rang for a month and that was Chris' phone. Mine was going daft as well. Everybody had heard this and Noel had apparently said 'this in going to be a hit. I don't know who this bloke is, I've never heard of this recording company but this is going to be a hit' and then he played it again! Unprecedented on the same programme. He'd never done that before. And suddenly the entire business thought 'ooohh, whose this, whose coast records, whose Fred Wedlock' and realised I wasn't signed up to anybody. And so there were company limos colliding with each other outside my manager's office in Pendonville and there was a great furore going on trying to get my name on a piece of paper and suddenly everything went really silly. Noel played the song again the next week and by then he'd found out who I was and saying he's not signed up to anyone and that's how it all came about".

Fred's career has been varied. He's done radio presenting and a lot of TV shows but has the rock 'n' roller inside him ever wanted to get out? "Ummmm ....... well its got out on several occasions. I've done stuff that has been pretty pure rock n roll. Ummm ...... I mean, rock n roll are meaningful words. Maybe rock parody. The old straight forward getting up and getting your rocks off and thrashing a guitar on stage....... no no I don't do that but it nice now and again to go animal. Put your brain in neutral and get on with it and that's fine, but only now and again. And then very shortly after that you think, lets do something with words and concepts".

Working in the music and entertainment industry is something Fred has really enjoyed. "Going 'round a huge amount of the world meeting a lot of interesting people, seeing lots of interesting things and the pure adrenalin belt of having an audience at your finger tips. That is terrific, the high is so high. The lows are pretty damn dismal but then you develop a skin about that." But when it comes to the lows of a career Fred doesn't think he'd been affected that badly. "I haven't really had one. Well maybe about five or six years after 'Swinger' I was starting to think 'oh they'll loose interest in me now, oh God I'm not getting the work'. You're always going to go through a phase where you have a white diary in front of you and you think 'that's it they've sussed me, they've sussed me now'. And then it all starts again, your TV series comes to an end and there isn't another one in the offing. And you think oh that's it." adds Fred

Today Fred's diary is pretty full. A lot of his gigs are not advertised as he tends to do a lot of private, corporate shows for business's and sports clubs for example.
"I did something for a friend of mine. He runs Gloucester Cricket Club and wanted a little favour, a dinner, a little speech and from that six well paid gigs have come. Two people came up and said can I have your card and then I do their gig and another comes up and 'can I have your card'" So a lot of Fred's bookings are self generated and word of mouth. After all he is a hard act to follow and what people get for their money is quality and entertainment.

"I do things for agents now and again of course but they just ring me up and say 'are you free on that date and can you do this gig and how much do you want?'" And you find him taking part in local festivals too, but not the rock n roll type festival. "I'm doing Trowbridge this year. And I do folk festivals, one day festivals, tiny festivals like festivaletes and that sort of thing. I did one in Manchester a few weeks ago and that was a one day festival. I do Art Centre things now, general purpose festivals like I'm doing in a few weeks time. I'm doing Gillingham in Dorset and that is a Arts week so they'll be all kinds of things going besides and I'm doing the Folksy music side. I'm doing Chippenham Festival in November, comparing at Trowbridge in July, I'm doing Poole as well. there's alot of things like that." says Fred.

The Wedlock music tradition has been passed onto his daughter Hannah. She sings in the Blue Note Jazz Band on a part-time basis and from the way Fred talks about her he is a proud Dad. "Hannah is a very very good singer, very talented I think and even, just like her Dad she is a very accurate singer. She can hear a tune and she's got it. She can look at a set of words and she's got them. I can't do that."

"We very very rarely sing together because she tends to do jazz and I don't tend to work with jazz bands that much. If she did country and western or did folk then yes, I could sing with her quite alot. But she does jazz, she does stuff that involves different keys from what I play in and different chords, and chords with numbers on the ends of them which I tend not to play. Things like the cube route of F# minor demished third inversion with flatted eighth. It's really not me." says Fred.

I had to ask the ultimate question. What does the future hold for Fred Wedlock? "Ummmm I want to work for world peace and do things ...... " he says in a silly voice and then starts to laugh again. "What am I doing in the future?.... I'm doing a play. I've done plays before, I've done playlets and variety. I've done sketches, I've done a proper legit play which no doubt you're aware of because you read me web site. 'Up The Feeder Down The Mouth' which I did with the Bristol Old Vic. So I'm doing a play! In Bristol and it's in the Tobacco Factory in November. We're also doing a couple of dates in December as well. I'm doing this with a wonderful singer, performer and all round humorous person called Kate McNabb who is highly respected as a muso, and her partner Kitt Morgan who is the guitarist of choice for anybody who wants a bit of decent guitar played on anything. Another actor called Ross Harvey who was in 'Up The Feeder' also has a part. So we know each other well and have done for some years."

"Kate's been doing a series of plays for some years now called nostalgia two handers, war time stuff ....'Yes we have no bananas' ..... sort of what is called ministry of entertainment very much forties stuff, its very very popular and sells out. We spoke for years saying we ought to do something at Christmas, work together again but we never got round to it and then Kate rings up and says 'Lets do it'. It's based on her fourth play in the set is called 'Mrs Gerrish's Guest House' and it's about this woman who runs a guest house in Weston in the fifties. So this is now going to be 'Mrs Gerrish's Christmas Stocking" where she has got a load of guests in for Christmas but an unexploded bomb has been found in her pond so she's got to evacuate the guest house at the last minute and move in with her brother who has a big house in Southville or somewhere. He is a camunchgendly old sod and a founder member of the Ebenezer Scourge Society who don't like Christmas. That's me!" Fred says with pride and a beaming smile across his face. "I'm her brother in the play and so we've got all these characters flouncing in and poncing around and doing all this and that. I'm really looking forward to it"

"I'm also doing a lot of gigs between now and then. I've been asked to go to new Zealand next year. Early November I'm in Spain, so it's a busy old time. I keep thinking I'll retire and I keep meeting old school mates and they've all retired, but I love what I'm doing. I've never seen it as a job. I've always felt very guilty for many years, in the early days, knowing that doctors were being paid less than I was. It's not true now of course because the buggers are earning a fortune. Umm .... but at the time I thought he's a surgeon and I'm earning more than him. That's stupid, but then you begin to realise what good you could be doing for people. I know this sort of sounds like sentimental stuff but I was doing a show with a local band called 'Mechanical Horse Trough' and this dear little lady came up to me and my friend and said 'that was wonderful'. She had tears down her face as the audience had been peeing themselves laughing and it was one of those nights it just gelled. And she says 'It's wonderful it's wonderful. It's the first time I've been out since my husband died and I'll be honest I was going to do myself in'. And she'd come out and it just changed everything for her. And you start thinking blimey, you know, you're actually providing a service for people as well. Psychologically helping a lot of people and so I don't feel so guilty, then again I don't earn anything like a doctor now!" concludes Fred.

Kathryn Courtney-O'Neill

Copyright: Kacey-O'Neill (c) 2007. All written work and photos not to be used without my permission.