Where Have I Been All This Time?

Newcastle

As summer turns to autumn, readers of this blog may have the impression that I haven’t done much travelling this year. The blog usually features a blend of music, books and travel (or, indeed, ‘time travel,’ as it says on the blog’s strapline.)  It’s true that recent blog posts have been dominated by music reviews (with the occasional gig or book review.) But, if anything, in 2026 I’ve done more travelling than usual – I just haven’t had time to write about! So, for the record, here’s a quick summary of my gallivanting so far this year.

Edinburgh

April saw me make what has now become an annual trip to Newcastle and Edinburgh which centres on the Nonsuch Dulcimer Club’s ‘Spring Fling.’ If you’re a member of this national society for dulcimer players you’ll have read about my adventures ‘up north’ in the autumn edition of Nonsuch News. If you’re not a subscriber to that esteemed publication, you’ll just have to take my word for it that, while in Newcastle, I visited some of the best pubs in Gateshead and,  while in Edinburgh, I got caught up (in the nicest possible way) in Northern Streams – a festival of Nordic and Scottish Music centred around the Scottish Storytelling Centre.

Totnes, Devon

In May, I celebrated a significant birthday in a big way in Cardiff, with the help of lots of friends and family and a host of talented musicians in the form of two bands with whom I have the privilege of playing – dark-folk collective Bullo Pill and the delightful five-piece folk outfit Brandy for the Parson. Later in May, to some extent escaping the heatwave over central England, I headed south-west to the Devon town of Totnes – an idyllic few days in my campervan which involved a little busking with my dulcimer and a nostalgic revisiting of the South Devon Railway. I plan to write a piece based on this trip for a forthcoming issue of Nonsuch News so – once again – apologies to any blog readers who don’t subscribe!

Copenhagen

In June, I fulfilled a long-held ambition to visit Scandinavia, undertaking a seven-day journey with the tour operator Great Rail Journeys (sadly not sponsors of this blog – at least, not yet!) I visited Oslo, Stockholm and Copenhagen, mostly travelling by train. I’m currently writing a series of pieces on this adventure with a view to publication elsewhere. As no dulcimers were involved, these pieces won’t be published in Nonsuch News!

In July and August, I was back in my campervan in Gloucestershire taking in the Tewkesbury Live Festival and the Three Choirs Festival with a mixture of solo and band gigs, followed by a trip to Dorset for the Purbeck Valley Folk Festival.

Purbeck, Dorset

September has been fairly busy with more gigs and then, before the year is out, I’m planning one more trip away – this time writing and researching a book I’m working on.

In the course of all this travelling I’ve certainly gathered plenty of material for books, short stories, articles and songs. What I haven’t had is much time to let the dust settle, to reflect on my experiences and to put pen to paper. But we have the long winter days and nights for all of that.  

A World of Our Own - Cherry Red Records invite us to revisit the mid-sixties 'folk explosion'

Various Artists

A World of our Own: The UK & Irish Folk Explosion of 1965

Cherry Red Records

Being born in 1961 meant that a lot of the pop music I grew up listening to was infused by the folk revival of the mid-1960s. Itself drawing on blues and skiffle as well as traditional folk song native to the UK and Ireland, these folky vibes found their way into the pop songs I imbued from radio and TV. I'm not ashamed to admit that the first pop record I ever owned was The Settlers' infectious theme tune to TV series 'The Lightning Tree.' At the same time, it was the loose, jangly acoustic guitar solo on Unit Four Plus Two's 'Concrete and Clay' that made me want to play guitar, as much as the distinctive sound of the 12-string electric Rickenbacker of The Byrds' Roger McGuinn. So I was delighted to hear that the ever-reliable Cherry Red Records had released a compilation focusing on what they describe as the UK & Irish Folk Explosion of 1965.

Back in 1965, folk music was a very serious business. While The Beatles and The Stones had begun to reinvent pop music, a fervent army of artists throughout the UK and Ireland were engaged in an effort to interpret the folk tradition.

Shirley Collins, The Dubliners and Martin Carthy were delving into the tradition and reinvigorated it for more modern tastes. Donovan, Julie Felix and Vashti Bunyan were following in the wake of Dylan by taking elements of folk – storytelling, a simple accompaniment – to develop the concept of the ‘singer-songwriter.’ The Seekers, The Settlers and Unit Four Plus Two were mixing in ingredients from pop music.

At the heart of all of this, the acoustic guitar was often front and centre with some outstanding players – Davy Graham, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch are all represented here – but other acts got away with more rudimentary playing, compensated for with lashings of earnestness. Some sounded like they hadn’t yet learnt to have fun. After all, the sixties hadn’t yet begun to ‘swing’ but, before the year was out, The Byrds’ version of ‘Mr Tambourine Man’ and The Beatles’ ‘Norwegian Wood’ would demonstrate how to combine ‘folkiness’ with ‘cool.’

This new three CD compilation is not exaggerating when it refers to an ‘explosion’ of folk in 1965. There are 86 tracks collected here from as many artists. Some inclusions are a bit odd – Paul Simon, I suppose illustrates the transatlantic cross-pollination going on (with Martin Carthy teaching Simon ‘Scarborough Fair’, for example,) and Nico (who came to England in 1965 and found herself signed to Immediate Records.) 

As important as the physical discs is the lovingly-compiled booklet. Apart from the informative rabbit warren of the sleeve notes, listeners of a certain age will melt at the mere sight of images of the original singles, with their Pye and Decca labels. With thrumming 12-string acoustics and trilling voices, this music paved the way for folk-rock and psych-folk, where musicians really did seem to be striving for a world of their own.

When the Yukon Came to Quatt

Diyet & The Love Soldiers
Live at Quatt Village Hall, Shropshire
14 May 2026

On the road between Kidderminster and Bridgnorth, just over the Worcestershire border into Shropshire, lies the village of Quatt. Quatt is home to only around two hundred people and the majority of them seemed to have turned up at the village hall on a pleasant May evening, like me, to enjoy some live music provided by Diyet and The Love Soldiers.

What’s remarkable about this is that singer/bassist Diyet and her band The Love Soldiers had travelled all the way from Canada’s Yukon territory – a journey of over 4,000 miles – on a tour that took in various parts of rural England before moving onto Belgium and the Netherlands. Diyet grew up in the ancestral lands of the Kluane First Nation people and her songs reflect her indigenous world view. She sings both in English and in her native language of Southern Tutchone.

Her multi-instrumental backing band is made up of Diyet’s husband and musical collaborator Robert van Lieshout (who, impressively, plays acoustic guitar and drums at the same time) and award-winning producer Bob Hamilton (who switches effortlessly between electric guitar, pedal steel and mandolin.)

I wasn’t sure what the Shropshire audience would make of Diyet’s blend of Americana, alt-country and folk but they seemed to love it and the songs relating to Diyet’s First Nation heritage – and those sung in Southern Tutchone – received an equally rapturous reaction. Some of the songs are hard-hitting and deeply moving. In ‘Give Me a Reason’ Diyet sings of “the girls that are stolen ...and those that know something” and “for those who stop believing because justice is fleeting.”

The enterprising people who help run the Quatt Village Hall and organise events such as this (with the support of organisations like ArtsAlive) are to be congratulated for hosting such a remarkable band as Diyet and The Love Soldiers and the audience were rewarded with an emotional and uplifting performance.

Diyet & The Love Soldiers' new acoustic EP, 'Seeds Of Dreaming - ‘Acoustic Edition’ is an exclusive release for the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands in celebration of their spring 2026 tour.

Three albums to help us to spring into summer - new releases by Juni Habel, Amy Hopwood and Anna McLuckie

Juni Habel's
Evergreen in Your Mind 

As we ease into summer, I’m still enjoying three beautiful recent releases that arrived in a springtime flurry, like a succession of refreshing musical April showers. These albums are all by talented female singer-songwriters and, to my ears at least, they hark back – each in their distinctive ways – to the golden age of early 1970s folk and pop.

Norwegian Juni Habel’s third album Evergreen in Your Mind is an exquisite collection with simple but effective arrangements that would make a perfect soundtrack for snuggling down in your woodland cabin after a stroll in the rain. Many of the tracks were recorded in Juni’s home or on the piano at the school where she works. Her songs often have a plucked, repetitive accompaniment (as typified by the title track) and the whole effect reminds me of the music of Vashti Bunyan and Bridget St John.

Amy Hopwood’s Gone to Flowers is an altogether quirkier affair. It takes a playful approach to various aspects of mortality. Based on the south coast of England, Amy is a multi-creative – singer, songwriter, musician and animator – inspired by folklore and fairy tales, but her songs are nothing if not down-to-earth. The album opens with ‘A Nice Wooden Bench’: “But I think I’d quite like a bench / with a lovely old view of the sea / where strangers can quietly sit / And ponder their mortality...

Amy Hopwood's
Gone to Flowers 

” Amy shows her self-deprecating humour in ‘I’d Rather Be Older Than Dead’ while the gorgeous ‘She Became a Bird’ – an unflinching but hopeful song about death and release – moves me to tears on every listen.

There’s something childlike about Amy’s songs that reminds me of the music of Melanie (perhaps the use of pianos and recorders, combined with her whimsicality.) Yet, there’s a wit and wisdom in songs like ‘The Closest Thing to Holding Hands’ and ‘All Shall Be Well.’ Above all, there’s comfort and joy in these songs, exemplified by her Mexican Day of the Dead take on the traditional English folk song ‘Like a Leaf’: “What's the life of us each any more than a leaf / we all have our seasons so why should we grieve / for though in this wide world we work and we play / like a leaf we will wither and must fade away...”

Anna McLuckie's
The Little Winters 

The Little Winters is the title of AnnaMcLuckie’s new album, named after an American term to describe the late frosts that arrive during springtime. Anna is an Edinburgh-born nu-folk singer and player of the clarsach (Celtic harp.) If you’re expecting something quite traditional, think again. The rich arrangements, featuring contributions on bass, cello and banjo, add immense warmth to tracks like ‘New Northern Lullaby’  and ‘I Promise to Linger’ the music is as enticing as the cover art, which shows Anna and friends enjoying an afternoon tea of jam tarts and berries. In some ways, The Little Winters is the perfect album for the transition from spring to summer. In the jaunty ‘Jay Bird,’ Anna sings, ‘summer breaks out, it’ll break out into fever. Time is easy. I have plenty here...”

Juni, Amy and Anna are all touring the UK currently so try to catch them live if you can but, at the very least, seek out these refreshingly original albums. 

• Juni Habel’s Evergreen in Your Mind (Basin Rock)
• Amy Hopwood Gone to Flowers (Self-released)
• Anna McLuckie The Little Winters (Hudson Records)

The Pleasures of Reading Uneasy Tales – The British Library’s ‘Tales of the Weird’ series

I don’t read much modern fiction these days. The last few contemporary novels I’ve read have included Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, Tove Jansson’s The True Deceiver and Per Petterson’s Men in My Situation. You’ll notice those are by Japanese, Finnish-Swedish and Norwegian authors. The truth is that most British modern fiction doesn’t appeal to me. I’m also a fan of the short story form, finding that novels often fail to hold their initial attraction after a while. Many novels either lose momentum for me – or I lose the plot. I often get the impression the author is spinning things out, simply because a modern novel has to be 80,000-100,000 words.

I’m pleased to say, though, that The British Library has come to my rescue. Since 2018, they have been curating and publishing classic strange fiction in their Tales of the Weird series. There are now more than seventy of these handsomely-produced paperbacks and you can take out a subscription to receive a new one each month. So far, I’ve received – and enjoyed reading – a wonderful selection of novels and short story collections.

Weird fiction is hard to define. It’s usually set in a recognisably realistic world but one where supernatural things happen. It can be seen as a subgenre of speculative fiction that began to appear in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It’s a kind of fiction that has elements of other genres (science fiction, horror and fantasy) but doesn’t necessarily conform to the usual tropes of those genres. This might explain why – although I don’t read sci-fi, fantasy or horror – I really enjoy weird fiction!

Edgar Allan Poe might be considered a founding father of the genre, and H.P. Lovecraft is often cited as a key figure (both have stories featured in the Tales of the Weird collection Spores of Doom – Dank Tales of the Fungal Weird.) But far from drawing on purely American writers, many of the books in the series feature stories from the heyday of British weird fiction, often by writers who might now be considered old-fashioned and quintessentially English. For example, stories by E.F. Benson, Walter de la Mare, Daphne du Maurier and Edith Nesbit are included in the short story collections Phantoms of Kernow – Classic Tales of Haunted Cornwall and The Wayfarer’s Weird – Wild Tales of Uncanny Rambles. I enjoyed these immensely but my favourite book in the series so far has been a novel – The Lost Stradivarius by J. Meade Falkner. First published in 1895, this is a compelling tale involving a bewitching piece of a music and a violin with a sinister history. It sounds like a bizarre premise for a plot but, unlike so many modern novels, it carried me with it right through to the end and I was struck by the originality of the idea and the confidence of the author’s voice. Falkner is best known today for Moonfleet (a tale of smugglers that’s become a children’s classic) but were it not for Tales of the Weird I’m sure I would never have discovered The Lost Stradivarius.

Of course, not every book in the series is to my taste. I admit I struggled with the stylistic quirkiness of Violet Hunt’s The Tiger Skin and Other Tales of the Uneasy. That said, ‘Tales of the Uneasy’ is another helpful way of thinking about weird fiction. Unease is a pervading mood in weird fiction (and is often all the more effective for it.)

I didn’t get on too well with Bird of Ill Omen – The Gothic Tales of Catherine Crowe, though the introduction tells an interesting and sad story about how Crowe seems to have suffered a psychotic episode in which she was found naked in the streets of Edinburgh, believing that spirits had rendered her invisible. It being 1854, this damaged her considerable literary reputation and, shamefully, even her contemporary Charles Dickens weighed in to make fun of her ‘madness.’

I did manage to finish E.H.Visiak’s novel Medusa, but it left me a bit baffled. It’s said to combine Conradian sea adventure with Atlantean mythology ...but I got a bit lost! Still, who can resist the book’s subtitle – ‘a novel of mystery, ecstasy and strange horror’? Surely we need more novels of mystery, ecstasy and strange horror and, thankfully, it looks like there is no shortage of them in the archives of the British Library.

The full range of The British Library's Tales of the Weird series can be found here. 

'A Passenger in Time' out of print

 

Back in 2009, I self-published a novel for children called A Passenger in Time. The story was set in 2005 and involved a young teenager – Jessica Martyn – who inadvertently travels back in time to 1955 in an adventure that involves a heritage railway. Almost as soon as it was published this book (which centred on the vagaries of time) became a victim of the real-life passage of time. In 2005, the central character Jessica did not have access to a smart phone but only a basic ‘flip phone’ while her younger brother, (with Spotify a decade away,) listened to his iTunes music on an MP3 player. Both devices play a role in the plot so, sixteen years post-publication, Jessica’s ‘present day’ of the 2000s would seem as odd and antiquated to today's children as the 1950s seemed to Jessica.

This problem (of the present dating as much as the past) was less of an issue for authors of earlier time travel books. Philippa Pearce’s classic Tom's Midnight Garden, for example, was published in the 1950s and involved time travel back to the 1880s but the technology is broadly the same in the book’s 'past' as it is in the book’s 'present.' Whether it's 1885 or 1955, railways use steam locomotives, telephones are not portable.

In 2010, I created this blog – Passengers in Time – partly to promote my book (and other books) and also to explore my other interest of music. That’s why the blog has the semi-serious ‘strapline’ adventures with books, music and time travel. Over the past fifteen years I’ve continued to blog about music and books that I like books and, less often, ‘time travel’ (by which I mean real-life travel often combined with a feeling of nostalgia, rather than – sorry to disappoint – actual time travel.) The blog moved on while the book that started it became more and more forgotten (by me, as much as by any potential readers.) The longevity of the book wasn’t helped by the publisher going out of business in 2016. As it was only ever available on print-on-demand, the publisher’s demise meant the handful of printed copies I held were the only ones available (apart from those that could be borrowed from public libraries and the copy held in the good old British Library.) A few kind friends and readers had suggested I republish it but, for all the reasons above, I felt it was something that had dated and was best left as a thing of the past.

I had all but forgotten about A Passenger in Time. And then, a few weeks ago, I performed at a folk club and was surprised when the host introduced me as ‘Tony Gillam – a singer-songwriter and writer,’ and went on to announce, ‘Tony is the author of a time travel novel involving steam railways...’ I’ve never had A Passenger in Time referred to at any of my musical performances and I wasn’t sure what the audience would make of it. I wasn’t sure what I made of it, to be honest.

The upshot of this mention of the book to the folk club audience was that, the following day, I received two enquiries from people who wanted to buy a copy. And the upshot of this unexpected level of interest was that, after sixteen years, no more copies of the book remain. A Passenger in Time is now, well and truly, out of print. The end of an era.

And what does this all tell me? First, that it might be possible to find a readership for my books in the audiences at my gigs. Second, it’s high time I got on and wrote another book.

Radiating thoughtful beauty - Yosef Gutman’s 'Resisei Lyla' reviewed

I’ve been an enthusiastic follower of Yosef Gutman’s music since I reviewed his album Soul Song in 2023 (a collaboration with his friend, guitarist Lionel Loueke.) Gutman has an impressive stream of releases to his name – a dozen albums over the past seven years.

For those unfamiliar with Gutman, he was born in South Africa and grew up listening to American jazz fusion. Inspired by the music of Weather Report's Jaco Pastorius he put down his skateboard and took up bass guitar, winning a scholarship to study at Boston’s Berklee College of Music. He relocated to New York where, for many years, he was part of the city’s jazz scene and then, in 2009, he emigrated to Israel, taking a long hiatus from music.

By 2018 he had returned to music, using his five-string acoustic bass guitar to become both a prolific recording artist and the curator of Soul Song Records, a label Gutman founded to promote "modest, soulful music that radiates a thoughtful beauty." According to his website, the label “focuses on encouraging artists to create honest, improvised, and inspired music, regardless of religious background.” In some ways, for me, Soul Song Records fills the space once occupied by Wyndham Hill Records – an amazing community of musicians releasing instrumental music which is hard to classify but always life-enhancing. Some of Gutman’s albums are largely improvisational, others more composed - but they are always played exquisitely, with originality and verve, by a trusted team of musical collaborators.

As expected – based on Gutman’s previous albums – the latest release, Resisei Lyla, is a thing of great beauty, with Omri Mor (piano), Yoed Nir (cello), Itamar Doari (percussion) and Tal Yahalom (guitar) blending with Gutman’s acoustic bass guitar and double bass. Levitt sometimes plays surprising melody lines high on the extra top string of his bass, while Doari’s percussion is always subtle but perfectly judged. The simple act of putting this record on the turntable brings a big smile to my face but it’s also rewarding and fascinating to watch the videos of the studio recordings as a masterclass in how a group of musicians can play so instinctively and sympathetically together.

The music shifts effortlessly between traditional folk-like themes to jazzier excursions, often settling into a meditative mood. Most of the tracks are original Gutman compositions, and the album ends with an unplanned solo version of a traditional Moroccan tune from pianist Mor. Resisei Lyla is a deeply soulful, transformative and restorative journey. This album provides much-needed balm in a troubled world and Gutman has certainly succeeded in his mission to  create “soulful music that radiates a thoughtful beauty.”   

Resisei Lyla is released January 2026, available on LP/CD/DL from Soul Song Records.