Bob Pegg – The Last Wolf
Talking Elephant – 29 June 2018
Having spent a good few years untangling the web that weaved Fairport to Fotheringay to Steeleye to the Albions, I was surprised to find out about Mr Fox. Alongside a track from the key players in the band, Bob and Carole Pegg, The Gay Goshawk appeared on the 1996 updated CD version of the 1975 compilation The Electric Muse, and my ears were opened to the wyrder shades of folk ‘n’ rock.
Before the mercurial Ashley Hutchings moved to another approach and lineup, Bob and Carol very nearly formed part of Steeleye mark two. Instead, they went on to create Mr Fox. Ostensibly a ‘folk-rock’ band, today they are as likely to be played on Stuart Maconie’s Freak Zone as Mark Radcliffe’s Folk Show.
The band held it together for two albums between 1970 and ‘72, then the Pegg’s marriage broke up and the pair went solo, before both falling off the folk-rock cliff (or ‘ledge’) in the mid-70s. While contemporary LP covers such as those on Morris On and Henry the Human Fly show professional musicians posed as eccentrics, Mr Fox seemed to be the real-deal. They weren’t grammar school boys pretending to be ‘out there’, they were genuinely weird. And genuinely wonderful.
So it seemed a huge loss to the stranger edges of folk that Bob Pegg’s unique voice fell silent (publically, anyway) after his solo release Ancient Maps in 1975. I’ve no idea why I didn’t hunt down The Last Wolf back in the 90s, so I am particularly pleased that Talking Elephant have re-issued this little gem.
The twelve tracks from the original CD compile a sort of ‘best of’ Bob Pegg’s hidden output for the 20 years since his previous album. Alongside a bonus studio track, are four live cuts from a brief return to public live performance. Bob’s voice has (understandably) changed but it still commands an ancient authority, a mystical magnetism.
Listeners hankering for an echo of that sly Mr Fox will find most delight in the 70s composition, Fiddler’s Cross – a mini epic in the mould of the title track from the band’s second album, The Gipsy. While it has the smoothness of a 90s production, Bob’s vocals and the playful arrangement of guitar, percussion, squeeze box and recorders give it a distinctly vintage English folk-rock feel.
Cherry-picked from two decades of output, this is a varied collection that jumps between styles, subject matter and arrangements. But the quality of each track is consistently high. Standouts for me include the frankly balmy Instructions for a Young Larkman, which is essentially a complete set of guidelines for how to capture a lark, train it to sing on cue and enter it into a (now extinct) Lark Sings competition. Like many tracks here it has a rhythmic, mantra-like rhythm and approach.
The Stone Head – about daily tributes brought to a ‘local god’ carved in stone in the village of Hainworth (near Bradford) – is both hilarious and creepy. There is a pleasant calypso-like bounce to the tune which, alongside Adam and Evie, shows that Pegg’s influences stretch far beyond the shores of Albion. The title track, The Last Wolf, has an echo (particularly in the female vocal accompaniment) of Leonard Cohen’s 90s output, with oboe replacing Cohen’s casio keyboard stylings.
The final tracks, recorded at the Highland Traditional Music Festival in Dingwall in 1998, are all live versions of songs from The Last Wolf. While a little rough-around-the-edges, they have a drive that is slightly smoothed out in the studio recordings and are all-the-more welcome given the dearth of live recordings by Pegg.
And, once again, after burning brightly in the late-90s, Pegg retreated back to his adopted home in the Scottish Highlands. Taking up life as a polymath with stories, songs and pastoral pursuits his stock-in-trade. A seemingly quiet but contented life. But I can’t help hoping this reissue prompts a release of the old Fox again, if only to show the folk-rock survivors that, while strangeness can be adopted, it’s better off in the bones.