The Young’uns first came onto my personal radar about six years ago. One of our children came home from school and announced that there had been a band in that day, singing in assembly and working with his class. He described them as a folk band and raved about how good they were, prompting us to buy their album. We loved it too, and so it was that The Young’uns crash-landed into our musical world. I recalled this to the trio’s songwriter-in-chief Sean Cooney in today’s lengthy Folk Radio interview via zoom, and he seems delighted. “What school was it in St. Neots? I think we might have written a song about St Neot himself…” beginning to sing, “this is a song about St Neot…duh duh duh du-duh.. it’s all coming back to me” he chuckles. He is a generous, good-humoured interviewee, especially considering the often heavy subject matter bound up in the songs of social awareness heard on the ground-breaking new album ‘Tiny Notes‘. It is a record which displays a remarkable growth and maturity to the music Sean Cooney writes for himself and his fellow Young’un troubadours, David Eagle and Michael Hughes. But, as they enter a third decade of performing, maybe it is time we stopped referring to maturity in relation to their age; as Sean himself observes during our conversation, “it never occurred to us it would be a career. If it did, we would certainly have thought very carefully about what we’d call ourselves; we wouldn’t have called ourselves anything as ridiculous as The Young’uns. It just gets worse and worse!”
Let’s begin with a soon-to-be-defunct question, how did the lockdown period affect the group? Is this an album born out of the pandemic?
In many ways, it gave me a bit more time to concentrate on writing the songs and giving them perhaps more time than I would have been able to in normal circumstances. The album was delayed; we wanted to get it out this time last year. Different work and life things with all three of us, it’s been a longer job getting it all together. I think that is for the best, really; if it came out a year ago, it would have been slightly rushed and wouldn’t have felt like it does. I am absolutely delighted with how it sounds, and a big part of that is Andy Bell’s vision at Hudson Records for putting some beautiful strings onto certain tracks and bringing Jon Boden in to arrange them; he wanted it to be our classiest sounding album instrumentally I think he certainly achieved that, delighted with the feel of it.
Tell me a bit about Andy Bell.
Andy Bell is a really good friend of ours, he’s a producer, and he runs Hudson Records, an independent record label in Sheffield, where I live and where David Eagle lives as well. For many years he has been our live sound engineer, our early albums about ten years ago or more were made with Andy. We were in a bit of a rush to get them out there, and we didn’t really have a vision artistically for each one and in the times since we worked with Andy, he has gone on to do amazing things, starting his own record label, it just felt like the right time to come home to him really and to think a lot more carefully about the songs and the arrangements of them and how it would all fit together.
How did Jon Boden come to work on this record?
Jon Boden is someone we’ve known for years; we supported Bellowhead once or twice a couple of years ago, we are pally with a lot of people and Jon’s based here in Sheffield as well; he’s friends with Andy, and it was Andy’s idea to get him to put some strings over these tracks. All along, there were certain songs, like the title track ‘Tiny Notes’, which felt like it would always have strings on it if indeed we were going to have strings on the album, but there were other songs which gave us a bit of a conundrum, really. There is a song called ‘Richard Moore’ which, when I originally wrote it, I envisioned it as a traditional ballad, unaccompanied, but it was so long that we had great discussions about how it might work. One idea was to send it off to Jon and see if he could do something with it in terms of strings. The interesting thing about all these wonderful string arrangements is that it is going to be quite different when we go on tour performing them because we are not going to be able to afford taking a string quartet around with us; the live sound is going to be something different.
You say writing about real, ordinary heroes has become a life passion for you; what is the root of that passion?
I think when I first got into folk music and when we as a group discovered folk music in a pub in Stockton in 2003, it was just an amazing revelation to know that there was this whole world of songs and stories and tradition. Lots of it was rooted in the area we called home, and the most amazing thing was that we had no idea this thing existed, that there were songs about where we came from. Entering that world and being welcomed so warmly in that world, we just sort of immersed ourselves, breathed it all in and learned as many songs as possible. Personally, I got so obsessed with the old and traditional songs because they opened up a whole other world. I’d had forays into writing as a teenager, but once I discovered folk music and traditional song, I remember thinking to myself, there’s no point in me trying to write songs because these traditional songs, hundreds and hundreds of them, say everything I want to say or might say about the world around me. They cover so many emotions and feelings and stories, so for years, I just thought my musical life will be dedicated to preserving and singing these old songs, and then, at one point, we started our own folk club in Hartlepool, in this pub called The Harbour Of Refuge which overlooks the sea, and it was whilst we were there that we realised there weren’t actually many old songs about Hartlepool, so that kind of felt like a good point to say we know lots about folk songs now, let’s try and write some songs about the history of Hartlepool, its legends and its myths, its tragedies and triumphs. So that became our thing, writing songs about Hartlepool, singing sea shanties and mining songs. Folk music being something that was rooted in the past but could say a lot about today. It was actually one review we got from an album called ‘When Our Grandfather’s Said No’ in 2012, that said, “folk singers often fight yesterday’s battles, but todays problems deserve their attention too,” and I thought, yeah, absolutely. It was almost like that was the thing that made me think, why not? Folk songs of the past were always telling the stories of the time in which they were written, so why not try and do that today? After having so many years learning all these songs and having that vocabulary and that repertoire, what Karine Polwart called an old jukebox of English and British Traditional song, available to you to borrow from and be inspired by, it felt a natural progression to start writing those songs.
Are you of the opinion that songs can still touch people’s lives and inspire positive change and action in the music world of today?
I think what drives me forward to keep doing it is the response I have had to certain songs I have written about real people. In particular, a song called ‘Be The Man’, which is the story of Matt Ogston, who lost his fiancé Naz to suicide because of his family’s reaction to discovering he was gay. Singing this song and having this beautiful relationship now with Matt, who uses the song when he goes around the country talking about his story and his mission to help people who are in this situation. I received several emails and messages from people saying directly that this song has really helped me. “Really helped me rebuild a relationship with my son,” said one person, “it helped me find the courage to come out,” said another person, and so in that sense, that is why I continue to do it because I know these things can make a difference. I suppose that is different from talking about political change or the world of protest song, but these are individual differences in people’s lives, and I suppose that is just as important to some people.
Considering some of the really quite dark and tragic real-life stories you are digging around in with these new songs especially, is there a danger of it having a negative emotional and mental impact in your own life? Are you able to find some separation?
I had a really interesting conversation with a woman called Rachel Robertson, who was the person who wrote to us five years ago asking if we’d write a song about her brother, Tim Burman, which is one of the tracks on the album. Tim lost his life at Lockerbie, the Lockerbie bomb, and she was asking for a song as a tribute to him and a song that would keep the Lockerbie families search for answers alive. The relationship we have developed with Rachel is a beautiful one, we’ve got this song, and it means an awful lot to her and the family. We met her and made a little film that’s going to be on social media shortly, we met her in Lockerbie, and she asked me a similar thing “it must take some toll on you this?” I was saying it’s what you’ve been through and your story; I can’t begin to imagine the depths of despair, not just with her but with other folks on this album, like the three Dads walking; each Dad has lost a daughter, Jack Merritt who was killed in a terror attack and how his family continue to deal with that and Rachel said: “you as an artist have gone into that space too and that must take some toll on you as a person?” It was the first time anyone had asked me anything like that, and it’s something I do think about, but for me, the passion that drives me forward is seeing the change that song has made to Rachel and other songs have made to several people, that continues to inspire me to do it really.
How do you approach a request like the one to write a song about the Lockerbie bombing? Do you think, “how on earth am I going to write that?” Presumably, you have to find something more than a straightforward re-telling of the well-known facts of the story?
I approach it with great difficulty. I didn’t approach it at all for a couple of years, didn’t know where to start or where to begin. Lockerbie is such a huge thing that has affected so many thousands of people across the world, but it also still remains in many aspects a great mystery; there is still lots of unknown things about it, so I began to try and take all of that in and do lots of research, but I wasn’t really getting anywhere. I went back to the original email where Rachel had said how he was a young 24-year-old man who was happy, who was in love; he was on his way to New York to meet his girlfriend and spend Christmas together; it was a life cut short. But then she said at the end I don’t see it as a sad song; I see it as a love song that keeps the memory of the Lockerbie victims alive. I was watching a great drama on two years ago by Jimmy McGovern, and he put the piece together in cooperation with the family of the young black man who was murdered in Liverpool, Anthony Walker. The whole programme was not dwelling on the murder of Anthony Walker in 2005, more the person he could have been. From 2005 to the present, it had him developing, becoming this person in the same way that inspirational people like Jack Merritt would have gone on to do so much more; it was a wonderful thing. In watching that, I then thought about what Rachel had said about Tim and this life cut short and scenes of a future that never could be. That got me writing the song and thinking of Tim and Rose in New York with snow falling and Christmas trees and so forth. Then I thought, this is what I want to say, I don’t have to read every book about Lockerbie; as someone who loves research and diving into academia, sometimes I just have to think, write something, get the pen on the paper.
To someone listening to a song like ‘Jack Merritt’s Boots’ who maybe are unfamiliar with the grave story behind the words, it might come across as quite an upbeat, joyous number. Is that the secret, finding something human and positive, something relatable?
‘Jack Merritt’s Boots’ was inspired by the words his Dad wrote that were published in the Guardian a couple of days after he died. It was like a rallying call, and it used great words like “burn with Jack’s anger, borrow his intelligence, share his drive and walk through the door he has booted down with his big black Doc Martins”, and it said through us all Jack Merritt marches on. That feeling was the inspiration for it; interestingly I’d written a song on the previous album, ‘Strangers‘, which was about a terror attack, ‘Carriage 12’. On the 15.17 train from Amsterdam to Paris in 2015, when a group of strangers bravely stood up and subdued a gunman and saved every life aboard the train, that song became a kind of celebratory thing. This was something different; two people lost their lives that day, but a lot of the media attention after focused on the people who did subdue the terrorist. You might remember one of them grabbed a narwhal tusk off the wall at Fishmongers Hall; a few people said, “that could be like your song ‘Carriage 12’,” but it instantly felt darker and different, so I didn’t, at the time that that happened, think it would be appropriate to write a song about Fishmonger’s Hall until those words from his Dad, but still I didn’t think it was the right time to try and write anything until one year passed. It was the first anniversary, and Jack’s family and friends had organised this social media hashtag of Create With Jack; they were encouraging people all over the world to do something creative, draw a picture, write a poem, do something kind and tell us about it on this hashtag so I thought if everyone else is doing it, I should try and write this song now. Even from that moment, it was still another year and a half before I felt I was going in the right direction, and the song, thankfully, is something that we are all happy how it has turned out. Especially Jack’s family as well, to get their blessing for it and see how much it impacts upon them; that’s the thing that they love the most, that it is uplifting and hopefully inspirational.
Many of these songs focus on people who will still have family and friends; when a song is born out of your own idea rather than a request from a relative, do you have to approach the connected people for permission or just to give them a notice about what you are doing?
I actually made a programme for Radio 4 a couple of years ago, all about meeting people who have had songs written about them, discussing their thoughts and the legacy for them. It is something that is always on my mind. There has only ever been one occasion when I have said to someone in advance, “I’d really like to write a song about you is that OK?” That was the idea of the Radio 4 programme; we approached Richard Moore, who has got the song on the album as well. A woman who comes on some of our workshop weekends said, “I really think you should write a song about my friend Richard”. I’d read his book, and I really thought it could be a great song, and I’d love to do it. Then this opportunity to do the radio show and the producer said, “why don’t you make it that thing of I have never done this before, I have never approached someone in advance, how’s it going to work?” The way I normally do it, I have many songs that I’ve started to write and haven’t got to a position that I’d feel comfortable with, I certainly thought I’d get to that wall with the Jack Merritt song. So I didn’t want to approach the family beforehand and say “I want to write a song about Jack is that OK?” because part of me was thinking I might not be able to do it, and where does that leave us? Knowing that I’ve got this song and maybe they’re wanting that, that’s the kind of dilemma as well. So usually, I take my time; sometimes, it’s a matter of years before I find a way towards a melody and a set of words and a feeling that I’m happy with. I take it to Mike and David, and we arrange it, and if it needs instrumentation, if it doesn’t, sometimes it starts with instrumentation, and then we strip it all back. In fact, at one point, ‘Jack Merritt’s Boots’ was going to have accordion and piano, but in the end, we got rid of that. Once we’ve got the song as good as we think we can make it, it is at that point that we approach people we need to approach, family and friends, to say, “we’ve got this song, is this OK? If it’s not it doesn’t have to go any further than this”.
Has it ever not been OK?
No, but as I say, there are songs that I wanted to write or tried to write that I haven’t got to that stage yet. For me, there have been occasions when it has not been, but thankfully, everything we’ve done so far has been OK.
Are you studying the newspapers looking for the subject matter, or is it more that an idea just comes to you?
No, occasionally, you get emails or messages on social media from people who say, “this would be fantastic!” There are so many inspirational people around, I was driving back from somewhere yesterday in the car, and there was a lad, he was fourteen from Liverpool, I can’t remember his name or his charity, but he’d founded this charity himself because he was a young lad who lost a Dad to suicide, but he was determined to make a difference. He spoke so incredibly, and part of me was thinking, “I’d like to write a song about him.” There are so many heroes out there, but going back to your point about going too deep into these things, I think we’ve got this collection of songs now, so maybe, personally, I should move on and give myself another creative challenge, do something else altogether?
Do you see your song writing turning more inward at any stage, maybe writing songs from a more personal perspective?
Always the big thing about folk singers is we don’t sing about ourselves; we write about other people. It’s people’s music. A lot of people have great disdain for people who only write about themselves; I think I was probably one of the disdainful people at the time when I was immersing myself in the traditional songs. Then I heard a couple of years ago when Adele brought out her latest album, there was a whole phone-in radio show on Five Live about it, and it was incredible because all her songs are about her and her experiences, but every single person who phoned in from all kinds of walks of life was saying “well that really resonated with me because the time I heard that, I was going through this and that made so much sense to me” and I thought that’s it isn’t it? That could be the same connection for someone as a folk song.
I’m doing lots of work at the minute writing for theatre shows, so that sets a different kind of challenge. I’ve a project on now for the National Theatre, which is their Public Acts Programme, every year they engage community groups across the country, and they are re-imaging The Odyssey this year and they’ve got four regional theatres; one of them’s in Sunderland, and I’ve been asked to write songs for this chapter of The Odyssey, but set in modern-day Sunderland, so it’s really quite bizarre. For me it’s a brilliant challenge, normally I get given these requests from people to write about loss and tragedy, or I see something on the telly that completely inspires me and spend two years trying to turn it into a song, suddenly to go from that to here’s a crazy idea for a play can you write some songs for it? It’s a whole different, but rewarding challenge; to have crazy creative diversions like that is really healthy.
In my opinion, a song like ‘Roseberry Moon’ does point to a romantic, melodic facility in your writing that certainly seems ripe for further exploration; I loved that piece.
‘Roseberry Moon’ was a lovely kind of song to write, wholly inspired by a photo of a couple kissing in the moonlight, and I did get into that world. Interestingly, sometimes when I write, I pick up a guitar and I’m working out chords and stuff, but in many ways, I thought if the three of us sang it, we’d have to do it unaccompanied because that’s kind of what we do with stuff like that. But part of me thought it’s not really our song, it’s for somebody else with a guitar, so still part of me thinks it could have a different life really.
How do the three of you work during the creative process? Do you bring the structure, and Michael and David colour it in?
It’s something that’s kind of evolved really nicely over the years. In some cases, I arrive with a song or a tune, words and a feeling and an idea; in some cases, that remains pretty true to what it was when I brought it to the table. In other cases, it can change completely; instruments might be added, the melody changed, but I think as our relationship has developed and gotten stronger over the years, the heart of the initial impulse to write the song and the initial storytelling spirit of it is always there and always at the core of any arranging process we do. I consider myself very musically challenged; I can’t read music, I can’t write music, I struggle to understand harmony, and so to have Michael and David around me throughout the entirety of this is something I am really, really thankful for. The songs would be very different, thinking about that ‘Roseberry Moon’, how that might have been I don’t know.
Do you live in the same area these days?
We’ve been distant for years now; Michael’s in the North East, I’m in Sheffield and Dave’s in Sheffield but it doesn’t seem too much of an issue. When we are touring, we make time; it’s slightly different now we have different responsibilities; David’s got an incredible growing stand-up comedy career, four nights a week, he’s in different parts of the country doing stand-up gigs. Michael is working full-time as well, so it’s a different set-up for us, that’s another reason why the album has taken longer to emerge, but it’s for the best, really.
When the three of you stumbled upon folk music in Stockton-upon-Tees in 2003, what had you been listening to before that life-changing moment?
David has lived and breathed music all his life, studied music technology and was always into all kinds of different music. I was kind of on the verge of getting into Dylan; my Dad was obsessed with Dylan, and growing up, I never understood why, as many kids don’t until you have that lightning bolt moment when suddenly Dylan makes sense and you realise the enormity of it all. That was my background; Michael was into all different things; he played the piano more than he does now as well, so it felt like we were very different music backgrounds, but finding the folk singing, it was just something incredible. Particularly when we found the Wilson family from Teesside, who are five brothers who have been singing together all of their lives over fifty years. They make such an incredible sound, that sibling harmony.
Did you have to dig around for your own folk repertoire? Where did you look?
We started going to the local folk clubs, and in those clubs, ordinary people would get up every week and sing songs. We didn’t know where these songs came from; could you get them in record shops? There wasn’t really much internet that we had access to in those days, so we couldn’t find them there, so we basically went back every week and listened as much as we could. Dave used to have a little digital recorder, and he’d record things; we’d literally record people’s songs, learn them and then go back the following week and massacre them in front of the people we’d pinched them from, thinking that these are folk songs and they belong to everyone, which they do, but we didn’t really have the wherewithal to think maybe it’s not a good idea to sing a song that someone else sang the week before. A lot of those early experiences were clouded by our first forays into grown-up drinking as well. When we first saw The Wilsons perform, they always go on stage with a couple of pints each, so we thought that’s what you have to do. So we tried to do that, but we were only seventeen, eighteen, and for the first couple of years (Dave’s got all the recordings to prove it), we were absolutely terrible. We were just shouting and screaming, but I think people saw in us a passion, and they knew that this world was one that we wanted to join. The reason we were called The Young’uns was because we were the youngest people there by about thirty years; not many young people were finding this folk scene, but I am glad we did.
So when did you stop being terrible? Was there a turning point?
In about 2007, we made a homemade album in Dave’s bedroom, and we called it ‘To Hell With Pirate John!’ for some reason. I think at that point, the voices started to sound a bit more smooth together, we thought a bit more about it, but it was also that the early gigs we did were sea shanty and maritime festivals, and lots of the stages you’re put on, and places you’re asked to sing are on the decks of tall ships or in the middle of a street, so you do have to sing up to make yourself heard. That was part of the culture, to sing loudly.
You played at one of our children’s schools in St Neots about six years ago, was that part of a general drive to get more young people into folk music?
We all had a bit of an educational background, my Dad was a headteacher, and he always told me, “never be a teacher”, and I never did. There was one point where I was close to it; I’d always gone into his school in Hartlepool and sung songs to kids and tried to write songs with kids; the whole history thing of Hartlepool we were talking about earlier was important. Giving kids the experience we got when we were teenagers discovering folk music, writing songs about where you come from and how that makes you feel. I think from the early day’s schoolwork has always been a part of what we’ve done.
Now that you’re in the realms of middle age, are you seeing young’uns coming up behind you on the folk scene?
What’s really been fascinating is the whole sea shanty, weather man, tik-tok sort of phase from a couple of years ago. At the time when that happened, we were really kicking ourselves; it was lockdown, so we weren’t together, we couldn’t be making these videos. We saw our friends The Longest Johns, they got a whole deal out of that; their profile rose, they’re constantly on tour all over the world off the back of that, which is brilliant. So for years and years when we’d been in schools, we always start with a song, and we say to the kids, “what kind of a song is that?” More often than not, none of the kids would tell you it’s a folk song or a sea shanty, but they all do now. If you sing a sea shanty, they all know it; it’s brilliant. I went to see ‘Fisherman’s Friends’, the musical, the other night in Sheffield and it’s incredible because there were a thousand people watching it and getting so excited by the songs that we used to sing in these tiny, smoky, dim-lit pubs in the north of England. We always knew at the time they were so brilliant, that’s why we kept going back because the songs were so good. So I think in that sense there’s an appetite there. Are those young people going to come behind us? I think more people are singing folk songs than they were twenty years ago. There’s a lovely festival here, the Sheffield Sessions Festival, every Easter and it’s just around four or five pubs, it’s all free, and there are a number of young people singing the old songs, it’s great.
We were also so blown away by the response to the 21st Century Folk Song Radio 2 project, but again it’s because of the songs, the human stories of today, that were really connecting with people. The production team, a guy called John Lewis and Kellie While, who is a singer as well, it was their vision for it to be a successor to the radio ballads of the fifties. Ewan MacColl and Bert Lloyd writing songs about going out and meeting real people, recording them and turning their stories into song. They didn’t want to revisit the past with that; I thought it was a brilliant direction to go into, let’s write songs about what people are going through now, write about Covid, write about foodbanks; the response was brilliant.
Do you see the Young’uns as an ongoing performing unit, is that the plan going forward?
Oh absolutely, we are in it for the long haul. Ever since that night, discovering it twenty years ago, finding the joy of singing and the joy of live music, the impact that can have on people in a room. One of our biggest passions in the early days was to just go into random pubs and just start singing, to see what the response was because you can be quite secretive if you don’t play an instrument; no one kind of suspects you. Walk in the pub with a guitar and everyone’s like “go on then give us a song” but if you’re just there and you start up (laughs), we’ve always had the joy of singing and long may that continue.
Tiny Notes is released on 7 April (CD/DL – Vinyl expected in late April)
Tiny Notes Tour Dates
The Young’uns are on tour from April 2023.
08/04 LIVERPOOL Philharmonic Hall
09/04 EDINBURGH Summerhall
10/04 SHREWSBURY St Mary’s Church
11/04 NORWICH Arts Centre
12/04 SHOREHAM Ropetackle
13/04 SANDWICH St Mary’s Arts Centre
14/04 LONDON Union Chapel
15/04 ALDEBURGH Jubilee Hall
21/04 SHEFFIELD Firth Hall
20/05 DUBLIN Pavilion Dun Laoghaire
26/05 GATESHEAD The Sage
27/05 CLECKHEATON Town Hall
28/05 BRISTOL The Redgrave Theatre
30/05 OXFORD North Wall
31/05 CARDIFF Acapela
01/06 LINCOLN Drill Hall
02/06 MANCHESTER The Stoller Hall
Tickets and more details can be found here: https://www.theyounguns.co.uk/live