Our BBC interview with Rob Jelly about the local stories we tell in words and music is broadcasting across the Eastern counties on Sep 25 at 6 pm, Sep 27 at 6pm and any time after that on the same link https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08q3hsh
It's a lively, zany and altogether excellent weekly 2 hour show and we're chuffed to bits to have had a few creations on there in the last couple of years. But this is the BIG INTERVIEW.
September 25, 2025
September 23, 2025
New Dylan EP From The Peacocks!
We went to see "A Complete Unknown" in King's Lynn when it came out at the Corn Exchange. We went at noon to avoid the Bobomania, met a folk guitarist and Dylan fan we knew from a Folk Club in nearby Marks and Spencer's and, talking this as a surefire sign of how the town was embracing the film assumed the cinema would be full. As it turned out, we watched the film on an epic screen in a cavrounous empty space with two octogenarians and a carer. Not even the guitarist was there. It was however a superb film and the image of Dylan hurtling off on his motorcycle into an almighty fall at the end powered by all those brilliant Icarus songs soaring out of control and off balance along the edge of his life and apocalyptic times was unforgettable. We came home, got out our old Dylan vinyl from the 1962-1966 period, played them for days and then started covering some of our favourites. In all the hype, the genuine race/generation/culture wars, and all the philosophical swerves he made to try and stay on his own course, you can forget what a skilled guitarist and powerful voice he was and what tremendous songs they were. And what a performer, standing alone up there holding the zeitgeist like a note and later with a rock band in front of a crowd not always on his side. Th e first three of the songs on this album are a reminder of the quality of that songwriting. The fourth is some counter-genius female context to all the lone wolfing.
credits
released September 18, 2025
Lead vocal and acoustic guitar (fingerpicking on track 1)- Maz
Bass, foot drums, overdubbed snare/common flute) - Gaz.
In deference to the folk vibe, most of this is the two of us live and acoustic as seen in the films.
Lead vocal and acoustic guitar (fingerpicking on track 1)- Maz
Bass, foot drums, overdubbed snare/common flute) - Gaz.
In deference to the folk vibe, most of this is the two of us live and acoustic as seen in the films.
September 17, 2025
It Ain't Me Babe
One of the many impressive things about this 1964 Dylan classic (from the album 'Another Side of Bob Dylan') is the way the fifth line changes key on the guitars but stays the same on the vocal. So you get a very pretty and poignant change of mood but no change in the determination of the statement. Yet the song is as tender as it is (characteristically) caustic despite its broadside of complaints and triumphant rejection in the chorus. Not a song the recipient would enjoy, we think. A joy to sing and play though.
WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN
Go ’way from my window
Leave at your own chosen speed
I’m not the one you want, babe
I’m not the one you need
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Never weak but always strong
To protect you an’ defend you
Whether you are right or wrong
Someone to open each and every door
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
Go lightly from the ledge, babe
Go lightly on the ground
I’m not the one you want, babe
I will only let you down
You say you’re lookin’ for someone
Who will promise never to part
Someone to close his eyes for you
Someone to close his heart
Someone who will die for you an’ more
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
Go melt back into the night, babe
Everything inside is made of stone
There’s nothing in here moving
An’ anyway I’m not alone
You say you’re lookin' for someone
Who’ll pick you up each time you fall
To gather flowers constantly
An’ to come each time you call
A lover for your life an’ nothing more
But it ain’t me, babe
No, no, no, it ain’t me, babe
It ain’t me you’re lookin’ for, babe
Copyright © 1964 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1992 by Special Rider Music
September 16, 2025
Girl From The North Country (Dylan)
From the 1963 album "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan" and later re-recorded with Johnny Cash for the back to country/ acoustic/no more hippy "Nashville Skyline" album in 1969. ( Reprising the infamous 'Judas' in the other direction in 1965). We both bought Freewheelin' as teenagers, our first Dylan album, probably because of "Blowin' in the Wind" but in this track the wind is not so much the divine one in Genesis as the heavy hitting one on the Canadian border. We started rehearsing this in the summer but recorded it as the season changed not so slowly into autumn, buffeted by winds and getting rapidly colder and darker. An early love song full of lingering emotion and regret, something of a Dylan genre by the time he'd added Suzi, Joan and Sarah to whoever this tenderly evoked North country woman was. It's a beautiful poem of pathetic fallacy, the oncoming winter and lost summer beautifully evoking a cherished but passed love, as well as being a damn good sound picture of that terrain and climate. We changed the line "many times I've often prayed" slightly to remove the redundancy.
WRITTEN BY: BOB DYLAN
Well, if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Well, if you go when the snowflakes storm
When the rivers freeze and summer ends
Please see if she’s wearing a coat so warm
To keep her from the howlin’ winds
Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
If it rolls and flows all down her breast.
Please see for me if her hair hangs long,
That’s the way I remember her best.
I’m a-wonderin’ if she remembers me at all
Many times I’ve watched and prayed
In the darkness of my night
In the brightness of my day
So if you’re travelin’ in the north country fair
Where the winds hit heavy on the borderline
Remember me to one who lives there
She once was a true love of mine
Copyright © 1963 by Warner Bros. Inc.; renewed 1991 by Special Rider Music
September 05, 2025
Dodgy Bob of Houghton
Robert Walpole (1676-1745) the Whig MP for Castle Rising (1701-02) and King's Lynn (1702-12 and 1713-42) was the first and still longest serving Prime Minister of Great Britain: 21 continuous years, 1721-1742. He also built and stocked with treasures one of the most palatial houses in England, that architectural wonder amid the fields and lanes of West Norfolk: Houghton Hall.
August 30, 2025
Genesis of a Church BBC Upload
As read at a quiet and contemplative Compline service Holy Monday 2025, a performance subsequently broadcast on BBC regional radio in August 2025. The church has currently celebrating 700 years "on this higher ground" in its idyllic setting.
Genesis of A Church, Fring, 1330 AD
On this higher ground
Let us house an altar
Where the Word may resound
Through time, prayer and psalter.
On this heavenly spur
Let us grow a tower
Where the great stir of Easter
May bud, leaf and flower.
He cam also stille
Ther his moder was
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the gras.
Defeats, factions, debts,
A weak tyrant king’s
Gone the way of all flesh
Burns for higher things .
In these emerald trees
Lifting monks’ eyes above
Earthy labour, dis-ease,
Let us sing divine love.
He cam also stille
To his modres bowr
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the flowr.
In these sandcastle days,
A boy on the throne ,
Let us hold fast and raise
Firm foundations of stone.
Let here be Light
To summer the heart
Through spring, heyday, fall, blight,
Candling the dark.
He cam also stille
Ther his moder lay
As dew in Aprylle
That fallyt on the spray.
Let here be stillness
On strips, hill, vale, farm,
Green pastures and waters
That flow like a Psalm.
Frea’s folk, we are grass, bone,
We come to pass;
But soul-fashioned stone,
We build to last.
August 17, 2025
July 30, 2025
Don't Think Twice, It's All Right (featuring the actual song!)
We did actually have think twice because the previous film went up without sound.
Reprising our Joan'n'Bob act ( see Diamonds and Rust Gareth-calway – Diamonds-and-rust) with a return fixture, Bob's trademark protest song against one of his early women. His second album but the first to feature a more or less complete sweep of his own songs, unlike the first which mainly showcased him as a performer of other people's. In other words, the real Dylan. Who was the discarded lover? Some internal evidence suggests this may even be pre-New York with its rustic setting of roosters and dark roads and sense of setting out and travelling' on in which case it might be a memory of some Mid Western affair rather than Suzi Rotolo but who knows. "You just kinda wasted my precious time" is pretty damning but mild compared to some of his later accusations and restless attacks on whoever was upsetting him at the time. We both bought this album about 8 years after it came out probably on the strength of Blowing in the Wind as one of those must have vinyl classic albums from one of the masters of folk rock and Americana and fellow architect of the 60s (with the Beatles) first heard as children but now understood as teenagers and were sent back to it recently by the brilliant film about Dylan's early years (up to 1966) 'A Complete Unknown' which ends with him roaring away from Pete Seeger type folk on a rocknroll motorbike. Around the time of Hendrix there was a rumour that Dylan couldn't really play guitar but made up for it with a unique dramatising voice and the poetry of the lyrics but one listen to the original will banish that thought: his guitar picking (honed by all those folk club performances) is astonishingly good and drives the song.. And contrary to most people's recall, this is not a solo track but has a band behind him playing drums, two bass guitars, piano and a second guitarist. Our version concentrates on the heart-yearning pretty tune. We have a female lead vocal, bass, percussion and add some vocal layers. On the liner notes Dylan protests that it isn't a (slow and easy going) love song. And so of course that's exactly the way we do it.
Don't Think Twice It's All Right
Reprising our Joan'n'Bob act ( see Diamonds and Rust Gareth-calway – Diamonds-and-rust) with a return fixture, Bob's trademark protest song against one of his early women. His second album but the first to feature a more or less complete sweep of his own songs, unlike the first which mainly showcased him as a performer of other people's. In other words, the real Dylan. Who was the discarded lover? Some internal evidence suggests this may even be pre-New York with its rustic setting of roosters and dark roads and sense of setting out and travelling' on in which case it might be a memory of some Mid Western affair rather than Suzi Rotolo but who knows. "You just kinda wasted my precious time" is pretty damning but mild compared to some of his later accusations and restless attacks on whoever was upsetting him at the time. We both bought this album about 8 years after it came out probably on the strength of Blowing in the Wind as one of those must have vinyl classic albums from one of the masters of folk rock and Americana and fellow architect of the 60s (with the Beatles) first heard as children but now understood as teenagers and were sent back to it recently by the brilliant film about Dylan's early years (up to 1966) 'A Complete Unknown' which ends with him roaring away from Pete Seeger type folk on a rocknroll motorbike. Around the time of Hendrix there was a rumour that Dylan couldn't really play guitar but made up for it with a unique dramatising voice and the poetry of the lyrics but one listen to the original will banish that thought: his guitar picking (honed by all those folk club performances) is astonishingly good and drives the song.. And contrary to most people's recall, this is not a solo track but has a band behind him playing drums, two bass guitars, piano and a second guitarist. Our version concentrates on the heart-yearning pretty tune. We have a female lead vocal, bass, percussion and add some vocal layers. On the liner notes Dylan protests that it isn't a (slow and easy going) love song. And so of course that's exactly the way we do it.
July 20, 2025
On Cley Hill
The rest is history, or Arthur Lee legend
A lost summer country hollow, an Inn,
The Green Man, cheering on a great British win,
An Avalon that isn't there in the morning.
A dream awoken to this light's cold day
Where in spite of my shin-struck wounded need
For thundering hooves in defence of these islands,
Thundering hooves in defence of these islands,
He doesn't come back. 'And he was never
Called Arturus Rex, whoever he was
And in some accounts not even Arthur
And he was never mediaeval and never a king.'
And who cares? Not Me. I stand on tis tumulus
Of boyhood, layers of chalk written on clay,
Craters and knolls, his monk-buried legend
Scarred in my flesh, his doubt-defying
Desperate defence of wonder (which
Is what he was) an earth ditch like mine;
His weapons, TOYS of tin and strapped wood and skin
Like mine, on a May hill that may have been Badon
And may have not, blades of peaceful grass troubled only
And not just now - by rain and ghosts
And a White Horse, God-large in memory,
God-large still.
July 18, 2025
Siegfried Sassoon
Wandering around the churchyard of Mells (an idyllic Somerset village near Frome) we found the grave of the great First World War poet Siegfried Sassoon so in the presence of such integrity, I ransacked my memory for this, a war poem I remember being printed incorrectly in our O level history book and corrected in an addendum.
The General
Good morning, good morning the General said
When we met him last week on our way to the Line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of the dead
And we're crying his staff for incompetent swine.
He;s a cheery old card, grunted Harry to Jack
As we trudged up to Arras with rifle and pack.
But he did for them both with his plan of attack.
The video and stills from Mells church are framed by the beautiful Stations of the Cross carvings at Frome St John's and the music (our homage to Edith Cavell) opens out into a general meditation on the First World War.
July 16, 2025
The Light Within The Lamp of Britain
"Logres is the light within the lamp of Britain" says King Arthur in Rosemary Sutcliff's thrilling version of the stories. And whenever I go on the train through Westbury, I feel again what I felt as a boy growing up in nearby Frome - that the white horse God-huge atop the valley side is Arthur's, eternally about to ride again to save us from mundanity.
The musical soundtrack is "Gwenhwyfar" which we wrote together in different centuries. I wrote the words in the 1980s; Maz the music in 2022 and we recorded it in 2024.
Lord Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved:
Cross on invincible shield, blood-red,
Dragon on young-summer green, red,
The terrible clatter of returning hooves.
I never quite believed. Always feared him
Dead. But he always came.
Arthur is gone, I laud my Beloved:
Swift white charger swooping like a spear
On the bonfire builders, the wolvers of women,
Scourging the rat run barbarian inroads,
Animal tracks of attacking Saxon,
His spur-tensed Britons beat back the Beast.
And little the faith I had yet in Arthur,
The Angel campaigner, strong as light,
His sun-bright stars above the wicked forest
Seeming to fade. Rusty the scabbard,
Still magic the sword. And, once more, he came.
I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession.
At last I understood. The flincher from spears,
Medraut, was part of Arthur, his shadow,
Chancel and gargoyle had to be cancelled
Where all deeds are drowned, all swords returned:
Avalon. And I’ll run no more.
I’ve believed too little. I make my Confession.
Night and this nunnery will fall. Ravens
Will flock on the gore. Let others keep
A glimmer, a glorious page, of Logres alight
Until the dawn. My confession’s done.
Still my heart waits for hoofbeats.
(Still, my heart waits for hoofbeats…)
© Gareth Calway 1991 (first published by Aude Gotto in my King of Hearts publication "Coming Home")
July 06, 2025
Peacock's Tale and a Pixie Harpist... In an English Country Garden live music video
We get together with our old bandmate and soul mate Vanessa Wood-Davies to play this homage to a young man from our village of Sedgeford who spent his 19th to his 25th year flying and fighting above the two main fronts of the Second World War (Europe and Asia) before dying in a tragic crash trialling an advanced training plane at home a month before the hostilities finally ceased. Our hosts and most of our audience were already born and have lived the entire 80 years since, grateful for the many young men like him who risked (and lost) it all on a wing and a prayer.
June 30, 2025
June 28, 2025
The Keeper
@PeacocksTaleMusic for all our videos
We performed this at our recent summer solstice party expecting our pagan friends to know it and join in. They didn't and didn't, citing a Christian-indoctrinated primary schooling. My class in Milk St Primary School Frome (the one before the 11 plus year) used to sing this with hip, miniskirted Miss Millington who possibly got it from the Pete Seeger version and worldview. Seeger was deeply involved in the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and no doubt enjoyed the progressive implications of the song, the keeper freeing the doe into the woods (among the leaves so green-o) rather than killing her or holding her captive. In the early 70s, as the English folk rock band Steeleye Span took Irish Republican folk songs like "All Around My Hat" ("I will wear a green willow) and McCartney singing "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" up the charts, I assumed "The Keeper" was a similarly progressive song about the changing relationship between England and Ireland. It could be though I'm not sure it started out like that. Apparently, it's just one of those eternal hunter/hind songs about sex, "under his cloak he carried a bow for to shoot a merry little doe." I prefer the green 1965 version with miniskirted Miss Millington where, despite our incipient pubescence and a propensity for innuendo, Class 7 thought it was about a keeper hunting and then releasing an elfin doe among the trees into a semi-magical wood, like the ones we knew in Somerset. (It was a progressive school but also marked by the limitations of its time : when the whole year group sang together, the 'remove' class was always and only given the percussion instruments.
Pic of me as the Keeper by Bhas Allan.
June 21, 2025
Cruel
@PeacocksTaleMusic for all our videos.
Our take on Kate Rusby's "Cruel".
Traditional folk but also a deconstruction of it, as is Rusby's thoroughly contemporary way; the 'female' side of all those 'heave away, haul away' shanties, revealing a tender human story of cruelly divided lovers. Nowadays, they'd probably stay and build a home together...
Cruel were my parents, to tear my love from me
Cruel was the pressgang that took him to the sea
Cruel was the little boat that rowed him off the strand
And cruel was the big ship, that took him from the land
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away, boys, haul away
Cruel was the water, that ship it sailed upon
Cruel was the fair wind, for now my loves he's gone
Had you blown a roaring gale they'd have left him on dry land
Where he would walk besides me and I would hold his hand
Haul away boys, haul away
Haul away boys, haul away
The ring beneath my pillow, is the ring he gave to me
I'll wear it on my finger, for all the world to see
But cruel was the captain, the bo'sun, and the men
For they didn't give a farthing if I saw my love again
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away boys, haul away
Cruel were my parents, to tear my love from me
Cruel was the pressgang that took him to the sea
Cruel was the little boat that rowed him off the strand
And cruel was the big ship, that took him from the land
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away, boys, haul away
from Poachers on the Common (LP), released September 8, 2022 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/poachers-on-the-common-lp
Song by Kate Rusby
June 03, 2025
In An English Country Garden (Peacocks' Photoshoot with Bhas Allan)
https://www.tiktok.com/@peacocktale/video/7511661056788303126 for Bhas's film of the performance
May 27, 2025
Skirting Heresy (The Story of Margery Kempe of Lynn) with Vanessa Wood-...
"Skirting Heresy" is the title of an epic play by New York author Elizabeth MacDonald which I edited for a production in Lynn Minster in 2018, mainly adding several existing songs from a previous play of my own which which you'll find on the Peacock's album peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mas…for-margery and - in different versions - on the album the Penland Phezants ( Andy Wall, Vanessa, Melanie and me) created for the Skirting Heresy show. Andy and Vanessa wrote the folk tunes; I wrote the lyrics and the beat-based rap and chant bits. The "Skirting Heresy" score is collected on thepenlandphezants.bandcamp.com/album/son…ery-kempe
This track "Skirting Heresy" using the title of the play as a refrain was written by Andy and I to cover a lengthy curtain call for the epic cast of 70 and to tell the whole story of the Book in a summary form. We both rather extended ourselves and we were all still performing it about 4 minutes after the epic curtain call ended! I recall pointedly singing "You're a menace to churchman but a mystic to me" to possibly the least facilitating churchman ever to host a play about one of his most famous ancestral parishioners.
This is the abridged Peacock version. The full Peacock version is here- soundcloud.com/gareth-calway/skirting-heresy-in-full
The lovely upbeat Andy-led folk performance is on the Phezants album link above. This version features the three other performers on that track (adding Vanessa's beautifully measured harp to our usual Peacock duo) taking it somewhere more mediaeval.
This track "Skirting Heresy" using the title of the play as a refrain was written by Andy and I to cover a lengthy curtain call for the epic cast of 70 and to tell the whole story of the Book in a summary form. We both rather extended ourselves and we were all still performing it about 4 minutes after the epic curtain call ended! I recall pointedly singing "You're a menace to churchman but a mystic to me" to possibly the least facilitating churchman ever to host a play about one of his most famous ancestral parishioners.
This is the abridged Peacock version. The full Peacock version is here- soundcloud.com/gareth-calway/skirting-heresy-in-full
The lovely upbeat Andy-led folk performance is on the Phezants album link above. This version features the three other performers on that track (adding Vanessa's beautifully measured harp to our usual Peacock duo) taking it somewhere more mediaeval.
May 03, 2025
April 23, 2025
April 21, 2025
Marie Mouri
• Marie Mouri by Peacock's Tale Musical...
Same recording technique and target sound as Pallet On Your Floor.
lyrics
Chère 'tit zozo quoi t'apré fé?
T'apré sauter, t'apré chanter
To pas connais n'a p'us Marie
Marie mouri, Marie mouri
'Tits herbe tout vert, 'tits herbe tout moux
Faut p'us to fais un lit pou nous
To pas connais n'a p'us Marie
Marie mouri, Marie mouri
Quand jou fini n'a p'you soleil
Quand nuit fini n'a pas sommeil
Quand monde content mo p'us ca ri
Marie mouri, Marie mouri
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), track released January 24, 2022 peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untie…mericana-lp
Maz - guitar, vocal;
Gaz - drum & bass.
A David L. Greely song which we learned in the version by Linda Ronstadt/ Anna Savoy.April 18, 2025
Septuacentenary of a Parish Church
scenes from the Passion
in an Easterly procession
line a Norfolk lane
and heavens above
turn heaven-lent snowdrops
through an orientation
to daffodils of fire…
through death
we remember
with bread
poppies
wine
music
good
words
thoughts
deeds
to
LOVE
A real communion with infinite repercussions
Bringing all Faiths together like beads on one string
(Though whether preventing, or after, a Flood, God knows.)
I am Not. You and I are not We but One.
Let there be:
Light broad-churched in through
angel wing mirror-rainbowed
clean glass, open door
ONE
heaven-blue earth-green blood-stained
eastern window;
An orientation; a turn to the East.
This Early English new build that went up all in one go
(The Tower taking a tad longer) as English emerged
From Norman French as the national language. And
Structurally stable for seven hundred years.
Unusual. Amid a green and pleasant, wooded farmland
(Non-Satanic mills!) well pastored, well wardened,
Well furnished with flowers, cheerful, friendly,
On a well-lit, airy hill and reached by idyllic lanes. A
Congregation with an ear for a Book of Common Prayer,
An uncommon hymn and a warm word of welcome. This
Is the heart of the matter. This has lasted. This is eternal.
in an Easterly procession
line a Norfolk lane
and heavens above
turn heaven-lent snowdrops
through an orientation
to daffodils of fire…
through death
we remember
with bread
poppies
wine
music
good
words
thoughts
deeds
to
LOVE
A real communion with infinite repercussions
Bringing all Faiths together like beads on one string
(Though whether preventing, or after, a Flood, God knows.)
I am Not. You and I are not We but One.
Let there be:
Light broad-churched in through
angel wing mirror-rainbowed
clean glass, open door
ONE
heaven-blue earth-green blood-stained
eastern window;
An orientation; a turn to the East.
This Early English new build that went up all in one go
(The Tower taking a tad longer) as English emerged
From Norman French as the national language. And
Structurally stable for seven hundred years.
Unusual. Amid a green and pleasant, wooded farmland
(Non-Satanic mills!) well pastored, well wardened,
Well furnished with flowers, cheerful, friendly,
On a well-lit, airy hill and reached by idyllic lanes. A
Congregation with an ear for a Book of Common Prayer,
An uncommon hymn and a warm word of welcome. This
Is the heart of the matter. This has lasted. This is eternal.
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