I first met Morelle Smith when I was up at John's place for a few days in 2007 whilst we were trying to set up John's home studio to work with a laptop that he had been given by Bert Jansch.
(as with most stories to do with John and computers, it's a long story.........but maybe for another time !)

As we came to the end of the first day, and much to both our surprise most things were working, as was our custom and practice at the time, we decided to celebrate with a curry. 

John said OK, "but there is somebody that I would really like you to meet." Sure enough about an hour or two later the three of us were sitting in a wonderful Indian restaurant outside Edinburgh.
The stories started flowing as they always did when John was around, and Morelle was teasing him mercilessly ( great spectator sport for me ! ) and adding several corrections to John's tales, and
adding several of her own.

I don't think that the three of us stopped laughing for about 2 hours.

It was an absolutely  magical night.

Anyway, about a week ago, I opened my post and here was this wonderful book written by Morelle. It is beautifully written and is a unique insight into their travels together when John was giving concerts
all over the world.

From a castle in Italy, to the art of "correct" beret wearing in Bilbao, to a bluegrass music festival in Kentucky, Morelle paints a picture for her readers of all the various locations with a poet's eye
for detail, and of course, no book about John would be complete without his sense of the absurd, lunacy, and humour, all of which Morelle shares in glorious abundance. I laughed out loud on page twelve and
from then on throughout the book, I could almost hear their laughter coming off the pages. For all those who knew John either as fans or friends, Morelle has captured him to a tee.

I hope that you will buy it.

The above link will take you to Amazon. Alternatively you can buy it directly from Morelle from her blog site Rivertrain here.

Rivertrain

17th November 2016

Two events worthy of mention this year.

In October, I was invited to the John Renbourn memorial concert at Cecil Sharp House in London.  There was of course a complete smorgasboard of guitar talent on stage,
but needless to say Clive stole the show, which of course the great man would have approved of. I met up with Roger and Moira Bucknall at the concert and Moira very kindly
invited me to Roger's celebration of his MBE. Which if anything was an even greater smorgasboard of guitar virtuoso's ! My all time guitar hero Nick Jones was there and sang Canadee. i.o accompanied
by his son Joe on guitar. I cried my eyes out..!! In case anyone is in any doubt, we could all go away and practice for 30 years and would still not even come close to Nick on guitar !

.........