Steve Tilston "An Acoustic Confusion"

 1971 debut album by the very fine British acoustic guitarist and songwriter Steve Tilston. The album includes solo guitar and vocal tracks, as well as group performances with The Village Thing label mates Dave Evans and others. One can hear in this unique and original early work - much more clearly than in his later recordings - the echoes of Steve Tilston's mentors and contemporaries Bert Jansch, Wizz Jones, Nick Drake, Davey Graham, Donovan and and many others. The CD release of "An Acoustic Confusion" is intended to bring this long lost album from undeserved obscurity to be appropriately recognized as an important piece of Britain's folk tapestry.

All lyrics and music written by Steve Tilston. (2 bonus tracks) See below for more info.

Steve Tilston rambles...
"An Acoustic Confusion" was recorded during the early part of 1971, when I was twenty years old. The location was an old stone house in the wilds of Gloucestershire. All of the tracks, both solo and ensemble, were recorded live, straight onto a Revox 1/4" tape machine. Gef Lucena (owner of both the house and Revox) engineered the session and Id not long before set up a small record label called The Village Thing. The label was based in Clifton, Bristol, and when I saw Brunel's suspension bridge and those beautiful Georgian crescents stacked high above the Avon gorge like layers of wedding cake, I had a feeling that one day Bristol would be my home. In all I was to live there for 8 years.

Bristol also boasted, after Les Cousins, the second most revered folk club in the land. This was the Bristol Troubadour. Set in Clifton, it was based on two levels, which meant that no sooner had the last chord died on the first floor, than a replicate set was required in the basement for the audience below. The ensemble-based songs for "An Acoustic Confusion" were rehearsed in the basement one bitterly cold afternoon, the only source of warmth being the hot air blowing through the harmonica. At the actual session in Gloucestershire, during the recording of "It's Not My Place", the harmonica player Keith Warmington got a fit of the giggles. It spread like wildfire and took us about 20 takes to finally complete the song. The only way it was possible was to put Keith in the corner, with his back facing the rest of us. The trouble with this was that we could see his shoulders going up and down like the clappers, so the rest of us had to turn round and blast it as if we couldn't see his pulsating shadow. We nailed it in the end and though I could have cheerfully swung for him back then, Keith and I have remained firm friends over the years. Both Keith and the string bass player, John Turner (another good friend), now work for BBC Bristol. Saints preserve us!

The songs themselves were written over a 2 year period. For the most part I only remember how to play snippets of each, but "Simplicity", "Normandy Day", and "It's Not My Place To Fail" my fingers can still find with relative ease.

The heat in the house packed up for some of the sessions. I had to wear a long fur coat while recording, my fingers were freezing and I was too poor to buy new strings for the guitar, so we had to boil used strings for me to twang.

My guitar at that time was a scraped and stained red Yamaha FG 180, I wish I still had it. Dave Evans left his potter's wheel in Devon to come and play second guitar. We had been playing as a duo around the midland clubs, and were pretty tight. At a concert in Nottingham we met the legendary Wizz Jones (not even 30, but nonetheless a legend; he still wears it well.) It was he that suggested going down to London and playing at Les Cousins, the then-premier club in the country. I was banging on his door a week later and ended up sleeping on his floor with my head next to Clive (Incredible String Band founding member) Palmer's feet - two legends in a week, this was all pretty pungent stuff.

Wizz got me my first date at Les Cousins: I was last on the bill at one of the famous all-nighter sessions. I'll never forget emerging from that cellar into the early 'jingle jangle' morning of Soho, babbling and blinking like a battery hen. I knew then that I wanted to be a professional musician. Soon I became a regular at Les Cousins, left my job as a graphic artist in Leicester and moved to London.

At one of the Cousins sessions, I met Ralph McTell. He gave me a lot of encouragement and ultimately put me in touch with Ian A. Anderson, who had ran one of the great underground English folk labels of the early 70's, THE VILLAGE THING.