Bringin' it all back home

First published in Let's Talk! Cambridgeshire, July 2004

Deep in the heart of Cambridgeshire is a little piece of America's Deep South.

You'd hardly guess it. The house is almost hidden in very English greenery, dappled silver birch, hawthorn and rambling honeysuckle. Nearby stands an old red phonebox.

Yet here lives the man named in 2001 by the Tennessee-based Country Music Association as International Country Broadcaster of the year.

For those who like their music, both traditional and up-to-date, spiced with a bit of twang, Nick Barraclough is the British voice of country.

And though he's on first-name terms with all the greats of country music, from Hank to Dolly, his is a very British voice.

His weekly Radio 2 show may keep you in touch with the latest sounds from Nashville, but you can never forget it's the BBC you're listening to, not WSIX Big 98.

Leaning back in a lumpy, zebra-striped armchair in the home he shares with his interior-designer wife Judy and their two children, Nick reveals his origins.

"My parents met at the Dorothy Ballroom in Cambridge just after the beginning of the War.

"My father was in the RAF at Feltwell in Norfolk and my mother was a Cambridge girl.

"I was born in 1951 in Mill Road maternity hospital in Cambridge. I've got two sisters and a brother and we all still live around here.

"I went to the Cambridgeshire High School for Boys, a very posh grammar school in Cambridge , but managed to get through it without learning anything at all.

"I came out with three O-levels, which wasn't exactly what you were expected to do at that school. I'd learned the guitar at the age of 11 and that was it - I stopped doing anything else that involved work.

"After school I got various jobs of no account, just so I could keep playing.

"I met my first wife, Anne, on a bus in Cambridge. She was a blonde American girl with a Martin guitar case. It was the guitar that did it.

"She already had a record deal, so we got a band together, and that was the start of about 12 years of playing professionally.

"We travelled all over this country and halfway round the world, and never found anywhere I'd rather live. I was always happy to come home."

Nick was 21 when he and Anne formed the folk-rock group Baby Whale. After that he played banjo in a bluegrass band called The Grand Ol' Opry Roadshow - British country's band of the year in 1975.

From there he formed Telephone Bill and the Smooth Operators, who played in a variety of styles, made three albums and did well enough for Nick to buy his first house.

He enjoyed playing and singing and says they were "a great band" - but he never felt totally at ease as the group's leader and organiser.

"I'm immensely proud of some of the stuff we did - but I wouldn't do it again!" he laughs.

The experience taught him all he needed, though, for his subsequent career as a radio presenter, DJ and producer.

"When the band packed up in 1982, Radio Cambridgeshire had just started. I'd done a lot of radio with the band, playing sessions, and I thought, 'This has got to be easy'. I applied for a job - and didn't get it.

"I thought, 'There's something wrong here'. So I went back to them and said, 'You've made a mistake. I've got to work here.'

"I was taken on as a freelance, given two programmes a week - a topical phone-in and a specialist music programme, two hours a week.

"The first programme I did was on the mechanics of local government. I had two guests who were local government officers and three records, an hour to fill with a phone-in, and nobody rang.

"It was a baptism of fire. But fortunately the station was rubbish in those days, so I was able to learn my craft with nobody listening."

The real craft of radio is to seem as if there is no craft. After listening to Nick for years on the radio, meeting him for the first time was like meeting an old friend. He sounds exactly the same - which, he says, is a presenter's aim.

"When I'd been in local radio a year or so they asked if I wanted voice training. I thought, 'I don't need that'. But I said, 'OK, for a laugh, then'.

"A man called David Dunhill, who was going round the BBC, gave me a script to read. I read it with no mistakes, didn't trip over any words.

"Then he asked, 'Who are you talking to?' And I said, 'I'm talking to Cambridgeshire'. And he said, 'Let's think of one person you're talking to. Is it a man or a woman?'

"I said, 'Oh, a woman'. He said, 'How old is she? What's her name? What does her husband do? Does she have children? Where are they? Where's the house? Where is she in the house? Where's the radio she's listening to?'

"I had her in the kitchen, listening to a radio which was on top of the fridge about two feet away. And he said, 'Now read the script again, and you're talking to her, not to Cambridgeshire'.

"So I read it again, and he played it back to me, and of course the difference was huge.

"When you're in a band on stage you're talking to a mass of people. On the radio you're talking to one or two people.

"Now on my country show I tend to talk to someone in their car, on their way home."

After three years as Cambridgeshire's breakfast and mid-morning presenter, Nick went to Manchester to work for Radios 1 and 2.

There he produced sessions for Andy Kershaw and made a 13-part documentary series on the history of country music, Hit It Boys, presented by American bluegrass star Ricky Skaggs.

In 1987 Nick moved again, becoming producer of the Gloria Hunniford show and Wally Whyton's Country Club for Radio 2 in London . But the big break came in 1992.

"I was back at Radio Cambridgeshire when I heard from a colleague of mine that the then controller of Radio 2, Frances Line, was looking for a 'new country' programme. Apparently by that she meant things like The Carpenters.

"So this guy said to me 'You ought to be able to do something with that' and I said 'Absolutely, I'd love to do it'."

As it turned out, that meant setting up his own production company, Smooth Operations. It started in a shed in his garden, and has led to programme-making in places as far flung as Cuba , New Orleans and Rio , where he presented a five-hour show about the carnival from the balcony of the Copacabana Palace Hotel.

Mike Harding's Radio 2 folk show is a Smooth Operations production, as is the new Mark Radcliffe show.

But for Nick, the great joy is that it has enabled him to go on doing his own country show from Cambridge - playing a part in what he calls the Golden Age of Radio 2.

The show has also taken him to Austin , Texas , and many times to Nashville , where he broadcasts live each year from the glitzy CMA Awards show.

His musical Odyssey, then, has taken him from the affectionate parody of the Grand Ol' Opry Roadshow to a backstage place at the original Grand Ol' Opry itself.

But for a teenager in England in the mid-1960s, getting into country music was hardly the coolest thing. So how did it come about?

"I started going to the Cambridge Folk Club at the Red Cow when I was 15. There was a resident band called The Blue River Boys. They were probably the only resident bluegrass band in a club in the Sixties in England .

"To me they were pure magic. This music, I'd never heard it before, but soon I was buying records by Flatt and Scruggs. Those records and that band just blew the top of my head off.

"There was this banjo that sounded like a machinegun, and this great steam train of noise behind it.

"So I'd go every week and I saw what the band did and I'd sit in and get them to teach me stuff.

"The banjo player, Erik Grainger, lived just up the road from me and I'd go up every evening my parents would let me out and every weekend. He had all the books, instruments and everything and I bugged him all the time about this stuff.

"He got his own back on me - he made me play guitar so he could practise the banjo.

"I just locked on to bluegrass. Country music I was a little more wary of, because I was never one for overt sentimentality or the arrangements and treatments of Sixties and Seventies country music.

"Then about 1973 I heard the first Emmylou Harris album and started thinking I could deal with this.

"I went to the States in the mid-Seventies and went to a bluegrass festival in North Carolina and met this guy with ridiculous hair and a very high-pitched voice.

"I was in the dressing-room picking out some chords when this guy - it was Ricky Skaggs - said, 'Do you know Sweet Georgia Brown?' So I said, 'Yes I do', and we played it together.

"Then Ricky joined Emmylou's band, bluegrass got absorbed into mainstream country music and I started to feel I had a stake in that world.

"I'd been to Nashville as a tourist - then I went back in 1986 as a producer, interviewing just about everybody for Hit It Boys.

"That series was a fabulous thing to do. Nowadays journalists, reporters and presenters are crawling all over Nashville , but back then it was quite a novelty, so I got Chet Atkins to talk, and I got Roy Acuff, and Bill Monroe and so on."

The highlight of all his travels was his last meeting with the late, great Monroe , the Kentuckian acknowledged as the founder of the banjo, fiddle and guitar music known as bluegrass.

Nick explains, "If you go to interview a modern star like Tracy Byrd or Kenny Chesney, you're in some chrome and glass room on Music Row and it's such a big deal, such a big reception. Go to meet Bill Monroe, who to me is one of the most important people in country music ever, it's way outside Nashville on a rough old road. There's two old tour buses decaying in the forecourt and it's not in a proper building, it's in an old trailer that's his office.

"Bill, who must have been well into his seventies, was dressed immaculately. He gave a wonderful interview, then he said, 'I've just written this tune called Pocahontas, would you like to hear it?'

"He got his mandolin out and played it for me. It wasn't a session, he just wanted to play me his new tune, because that's what he did. That was quite special. He was just so gracious - and he was the man who invented the music that's been a lifelong passion for me."

Another passion, rather closer to home, has been the Cambridge Folk Festival, which this year, for the first time, is sponsored by Radio 2.

Nick was not at the first festival, in 1964, but he has been involved in one way or another in every one since.

"I've done every job there that I think anyone can do. I was a steward on the gates, I've worked behind the bar and in the restaurant, I've compered on all the stages, I've played on all the stages, I've presented it for televison and radio, and now I produce it for radio, television and online."

He also admits to having some say in who appears on the bill - which may be why every year there seems to be at least one very fine country artist performing. One of the top attractions this year will be the Western swing band Asleep At The Wheel, with whom Nick has a long association.

He says, "The festival is fabulous for me, being just about the classiest festival in England , and about halfway between my home and my office."

It can't be bad, can it, for a real fan of real music, to be able to invite veterans like Ralph McTell, Bert Jansch, Tom Robinson and reggae legend Jimmy Cliff to play practically on your doorstep - not to mention country stars Gillian Welch, Mindy Smith and of course Asleep At The Wheel. All of whom are at the Cherry Hinton festival site over the weekend of July 30 to August 1.

His passion for music, and his love of talking about it, has taken Nick Barraclough to some exciting places. It's even better when he can bring it all back home.