A MUSICAL ODYSSEY
Presents
BILL & SUE-ON HILLMAN
RECORD ALBUM Volume 7
Featuring
SUE-ON
Recorded
On Tour In England
Maple Grove Records
MGS 1007

As we had done on Album No. 6, we planned No. 7 to be a double concept package: Side One: Sue-On - The Newcastle Sessions which featured some of Sue-On's favourite solos and Side Two: Road Songs: On Tour In England for which I wrote songs inspired by our experiences on the road, both in North America and in England.

Side One saw a return to medleys. We put together a "Rose" and a "Hawaiian" medley, and she did fairly driving versions of Silver Threads & Golden Needles and Please, Release Me, Neil Diamond's Song Sung Blue, and the gospel great, Why Me, Lord? We were pleasantly surprised when Why Me, Lord? went on to receive a nice bit of airplay in the UK and Germany.

Side Two featured seven more originals - two of them written by Al Jones who had organized and accompanied us on our first UK tour.  Sue-On had recorded the ballad, While You're Away, the year before in London's Gooseberry Studios. Boogie Woogie Band had come out of the Free Spirit sessions we had done the year before.

Outlaw Ramblin' Band narrates the events of the first tour: the rather scary decision to leave the Canadian prairies to embark on a 30-night tour of English clubs, our first flight in a 747, the hectic confusion of Heathrow Airport, the crazy London traffic, the long commute to Northern England in a packed Commer van, the challenge of playing for packed Workingman Clubs every night (adapting to going on after a warmup variety act and house band intro, playing a show set, getting off stage while the audience indulged in Bingo, and then going on for a dance set, and shutting the whole thing down by 11 o'clock), working with musicians we had heard about and admired for so long, exploring dressing rooms that the Beatles had used a few years before, playing up the novelty of our American accents and country-based music, being typical tourists through the day, and suddenly adapting to Canada again after being immersed in British culture for almost seven weeks.

One Night Stand is a sort of wistful reflection on our many years of performing one-night shows for just about every venue imaginable. This duet opened many doors for us as it became a Top Ten hit on many stations and we performed it on network television, the national Big Country Awards Show, the Opry North Show and shows in various Concert Halls. It was also instrumental in our receiving the Manitoba Entertainers of the Year Award, which led to media coverage on the CBC National, newspapers, magazines and TV/Radio interviews.

Swamp Romp is a bit of a screamer but its main theme is that we were open to all musical genres and gigs. Over the years we have performed just about every type of music for all kinds of functions: military bases, TV/Radio, fairs and rodeos, outdoor festivals, arena shows and dances, auditoriums, barn dances, high school proms, hoedowns, film soundtracks, commercials, churches, weddings, socials, Indian pow-wows, folk festivals... we love 'em all.

Montana shares the experiences we had while performing on grandstand shows in US state and county fairs. All of our tours have been summer tours, taken during our summer break from teaching high school. Our backgrounds as geography majors and high school teachers always influenced our appreciation of the geography and local colour of the places we toured. This fascination is quite evident in this song.

Good Time Jamboree  is a novelty song about our stage exploits and the experience of performing 30 years worth
of one-nighters. It was recorded during our Newcastle sessions in England. This studio, like so many of the places we played in England, was inaccessible in the extreme. We had to pull our gear up many flights of stairs and through a seemingly endless number of doors because the facility was situated on the upper level of a large bingo hall complex. After surviving this ordeal which anyone in his right mind would have left to roadies, I returned to re-park our Ford Transit van only to find that the meter maid had decorated it with a parking ticket - to add
infuriation to fatigue.

Impulse Studios were located above a bingo hall in Newcastle. Their main claim to fame was that the famous Chieftains had done some recording there. Our bass-playing friend, Mick Sandbrook, had lined up musicians for the session and it we were quite excited about working with a synth player for the first time. In 1977, synth players were still a bit of a rarity - the instruments were costly, not too versatile, and somewhat hard to master as preset sounds were not yet common. John Ashcroft's work on the Arp Odyssey Synth and his "string machine" really fattened and sweetened our sound.  We spent much of our time on the session trying to convey to him the arrangements and sound effects we heard in our heads but had no way of writing out.

As usual we put in long hours and did the entire album in two days. We did the final mix far into the night, a job Sue-On has little interest in, so luckily our friends Keith and Margaret Jones from Spennymoor showed up and offered to take Sue-On to a gambling casino. She did quite well in her gambling debut and even won about 30 pounds. Keith is Alan Jones' brother and we've since enjoyed many get-togethers with them on both sides of the Atlantic.

Since the album cover was designed to be a "reversible," double concept project with both sides serving as "front covers," we inserted a lyrics, credits and photo sheet. After pressing Brandon photographer, Terrence Fowler, for something unusual, he came up with a seldom used prism lens which produced a multi-imaged Sue-On for her solo cover. For the Road Songs side, he came up with another special lens for which the three of us wore our London patched chamois/buckskin gear as we posed in front of a white fur rug we had borrowed from our Maple Grove fireplace. The, by now trademark, filmstrip included some recent candid photos. We recycled some of our previous studio shots including the back-to-back picture that we had used on the cover of Album No. 6 and for promo 8"x10"s. Two photos are with Mick Sandbrook and some of our English musician friends.  During a open-house visit to the famed Pinewood Movie Studios we visited the main soundstage where they had just wound up a James Bond shoot and were bringing in truckloads of white styrofoam to create a North Pole set for the upcoming Superman movie. I stood under the studio's Superman sign, pulled open my shirt to reveal my maple leaf T-shirt  and assumed a heroic Captain Canuck pose. My hopes of being signed as a stand-in for Christopher Reeve never materialized.  Two London photos have me aiming a cannon at the Tower Bridge and Sue-On welcoming pedestrians on London Bridge. The last photo is of Sue-On seated during a break at an outdoor street dance on Main Street, Strathclair.

Our original song, One Night Stand, recorded in Newcastle, England for Album 7 spent many weeks on the Canadian country charts. Here, on the CHMM listing for November 25, 1978, it was riding at the number 11 spot.

PHOTO GALLERY



 

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