The POACHERS and The IDLE DIDDLIES

LIVE at Maldon Folk festival 2001 is to be released on August 30th 2024.

LIVE at Maldon Folk Festival 2001 is the 43rd release of the Australian Road Crew Association’s (ARCA) Desk Tape Series.

The Series was created by ARCA to raise badly-needed finances for Support Act’s Roadies Fund to provide financial, health, counselling and well-being services for roadies and crew in crisis.

The live tapes are recorded off the mixing desk by a crew member – in this case Simon Glozier who was doing the honours at the Maldon Folk Festival. The live tape is released on ARCA’s Black Box Records through MGM Distribution and on all major streaming services.

Over 40+ artists have now thrown their hats in the ring to help support those in need.

The ARCA Desk Tape Series is acknowledged in media for its historical importance in capturing great live music from great live acts.

Huge thanx to Andrew Heath and Anthony O’Neill for the photos, Nprint for the artwork, Phil Dracoulis for the mastering, and especially The Poachers and The Idle Diddlies for their support of roadies and crew.

The POACHERS and The IDLE DIDDLIES

The POACHERS

• Penny Boys          – lead vocals, percussion
• Cathy Bell            – vocals, fiddle, accordion
• Andrew Heath    – guitar, mandolin, banjo

The IDLE DIDDLIES

• Anthony O’Neill     – bouzouki, banjo, guitar, mandolin, fiddle
• Steve Simmonds    – vocals, guitar, fiddle
• Dan Bourke             – fiddle     

FESTIVAL CREW

• Simon Glozier    – sound
• Stuart Hassell   – stage

TRACKS

The POACHERS

• Reels
• Lydia
• Rake And A Ramblin’ Man
• Sleepless Sailor 
• Three Long Years        
• Walkaway          
• Water Is Wide    

The IDLE DIDDLIES

• The Boston Burglar     
• The Lament Of Limerick Set 
• Welcome Poor Paddy Home  
• Tobin’s Set        
• Hector The Hero
• The Gold Ring Set

The Poachers and The Idle Diddlies LIVE at Maldon Folk Festival 2001 live tape and all the ARCA Desk Tape Series recordings are available through Black Box Records – ARCA (australianroadcrew.com.au) and the following:

https://ffm.to/liveatmaldonfolkfestival2001   (paste into browser if it fails to work)

• Amazon Music
• Apple Music / iTunes
• Black Box Records
• Deezer
• MGM Distribution
• Spotify
• Tidal
• You Tube Music

Maldon Folk Festival

The long-running Maldon Folk Festival is located in Central Victoria goldfields, each November offering three days of anglo-celtic folk, bluegrass, blues, world, exotic instruments, dance, theatre and workshops.

 The first one, in 1974, was on a football oval with a makeshift stage made from hay bales and attended by 180 people.

By 2001, it was drawing 5,000 to 6,000 over a number of venues in town.

Simon Glozier and his long-time associate Stuart Hassell, who did stage, worked for nine consecutive years at the festival.

“The festival was fun, and we always looked forward to them,” relates Glozier.

“We’d go in a day early, we had a system and I ran delays throughout, and made sure none of the cabling was on the ground.

“You hoped it wouldn’t rain, one year it just pissed down and the grounds became a bog!

“There was no security, so I’d sleep at the sound desk. If it was really cold I’d be mixing while inside my sleeping bag.”

Folk music is appealing for its simplicity. But it can be an issue for the sound mixer, especially with bands with panpipes, Glozier notes.

“They can need half a dozen microphones, from small to large, when they change ther pipes, each one of those guys would play 4 or 5 different pipes through their performance.

 “They go from quiet to loud, so to mix them you had to know who was going where, they’d change their pipes two or three times during one song. All with radically different volumes.”

A big fan of various shades of folk music, Glozier taped the sets by Poachers and Idle Diddlies because he was so impressed with them.

“They were both similar,” he states. “They were melodic, well-rehearsed and they were excellent musicians.

“You had to be with this kind of music to shine. They most definitely shone.”

The POACHERS

Poachers formed in Brisbane. Cathy Bell and Andrew Heath played around the folk clubs, and were good friends. They met trained and evocative singer Penny Boys after she put an ad in The Folk Rag.

They played their first show in Lismore NSW in October 1998, and went on to play 60 shows in the three years they were together in round one.

Heath explains: “The name came from the fact we were poaching material from all over and giving it our own treatment.

“Our interests at that time were Anglo-Celtic, Australian folk, some of our own numbers and some US roots music.

“All three of us grew up as teenagers listening to English folk rock bands like Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention.

“In fact Penny had a voice that sounded like their singers, Maddy Prior and Sandy Denny.”

Of his own guitar inspiration, he cites Richard Thompson.

 “I’ve listened to him for years and years. He’s got the full package – amazing guitarist, amazing songwriter and a great singer.

“I saw him play in Sydney about 20+ years ago, it was a phenomenal show.

About Poachers’ appeal he says: “The strong characteristic of what we were doing was having Penny as an accomplished and powerful vocalist leading the way, supported by Cathy with her melodic harmonies and accordion, and me sitting in the background supporting them.

“This ARCA Maldon tape gives a very good and broad representation of what Poachers were about.

“It was around those voices and presenting the songs from different traditions as sensitively as we could.

“Ours was not a dancing audience. An ideal gig for Poachers would have been a quiet gentle listening audience, with people more getting a feel for the music and a feel for the words.”

Poachers made two albums, The Poachers and Back In The Woods, available at: https://thepoachersaustralia.bandcamp.com.

Some of their tracks got some radio airplay. “Walk Away” got exposure on ABC Radio. Their version of “Scots Of The Riverina” also gets a lot of airplay around ANZAC Day.

“Scots Of The Riverina” was based on a 1917 Australian bush poem by Henry Lawson. It is about a boy who leaves the family farm in the Riverina NSW (an unforgiveable thing for a Scot to do in those days) to fight in World War 1.

He is shunned by his family – they burn his letters, remove his name from the family Bible, and his father is adamant he will never speak to him again – until he dies in the fighting in Flanders, in Belgium.

For Heath, “Bands like ours were never there for a commercial purpose as such. It was about making ourselves happy first and hopefully making the audience happy as well.

“If they did get happy, we go to go around the country and it wouldn’t cost us too much money.

“Going to a festival like Maldon was a mutual thing where they’d pay you a fee which would cover air fares and accommodation, so it wouldn’t cost you to go there.

 “And if you were lucky you’d get to sell a few CDs as well.”

Live Attraction

Poachers quickly became a live attraction, playing all the major folk festivals as Woodford, National Celtic, Illawarra, Wintermoon and Port Fairy. Heath estimates they did Maldon Folk three times.

He remembers playing at the 2001 festival. He knew the Idle Diddlies were also on the bill, and two of its members came from The Bushwackers, whom he loved since the 1980s.

“Meeting those two boys and talking to them was such a thrill for me.”

Poachers took a break when Penny moved to US to work for eight years. Cathy formed Jeremiah, and Andrew played with Tulca Mor, which focussed on traditional Irish dance music and song.

They reconvened when Boys returned from America in 2010 and cut another record and played more festivals.

These days Boys and Bell play in Brisbane band Tinstar and Heath plays in Irish traditional music with the Tulca Trio.

The IDLE DIDDLIES

Among the 30+ cracker players that have travelled through the ranks of The Bushwackers were Anthony O’Neill (fiddle, mandolin, banjo) and Dan Bourke (voice, guitar, fiddle).

Bourke joined in 1982 around the time Tommy Emmanuel and Freddie Strauks came in, and O’Neill about 12 months later.

The two displayed great skill on their instruments. There are workshop videos online of O’Neill and his mandolin.

The two put The Idle Diddlies together with Steve Simmonds whose array of instruments included bouzouki, banjo, guitar, mandolin and fiddle.

Diddley music is a vocal-less part of Irish traditional music.  An Idle diddley is about a vagabond or artful swindler.

O’Neill would further experiment with jigs and ballads with Saoirse (Gaelic word for freedom), a vibrant group of jigs and ballads, who became festival favourites and released albums as Singin’ In The Scullery, Candlelight Sessions and Music Evermore which received the Australian Celtic Music awards for both album and song of the year.

Songs Remain The Same

In the folk explosion that took place in Australia in the 1960s and 1970s, musicians found material mostly in import record shops, ABC Radio and later community radio, or from the sets of touring musicians.

That of course changed with the internet, when musicians and fans could find and exchange songs quickly and from wider sources.

The material from The Poachers and Idle Diddlies sometimes goes back hundreds of years, slipped alongside modern contemporary fare.

“Welcome Poor Paddy Home”

Homesick and patriotic Irishman wants to return home – “I was born in sweet Tipperary town/

Three thousand miles away” – in time for the harvest.

“The Scotsman can boast of the thistle,

And England can boast of the rose,

But Paddy can boast of the Emerald Isle

Where the dear little shamrock grows.”

“The Water Is Wide”

Ancient Scottish song but finally published in 1906.

The words reflect how love changes from the honeymoon stage of a relationship, with “Love is handsome, love is kind” and then with time, “love grows old, and waxes cold”.

Even true love, the lyrics say, can “fade away like morning dew”.

“Sleepless Sailor”

“I once was a sailor, a young man and brave/ La da dum day, la da dum dee/ My nights were once sleepless/ My peace I did crave/ Carry me home to the sea.”

English song by Kate Rusby from her 1999 album Sleepless which was nominated for the Mercury Prize and won the BBC Radio 2 Folk Award 2000 for best album.

“The Lament Of Limerick Set”

From 18th century Ireland, its stirring melody is usually accentuated by fiddle and nylon guitar.

“The Gold Ring Set”

Traditional Irish jig with a lovely tune and allows for jubilant fiddle workout.

“The Boston Burglar”

It’s about a privileged young man brought up in Boston but turns to crime at 23.

On the train to jail to start a 20-year sentence, he warns people to stay within the law and avoid his plight.

“I was put on board an eastern train on a cold December day

And at every station that we passed I’d hear the people say

There goes that Boston Burglar, see how he’s all bound down

For some great crime or another, he’s off to Charlestown.”

A Number One hit in the Irish Charts for Johnny McEvoy in 1967, the song is thought to have been an adaption of the sea shanty “The Whitby Lad” / “Botany Bay”.

“Rake And A Ramblin’ Man”

Written by US country songwriter Bob McDill – “stay with a friend, stay with the rich and poor, I never linger too long” – it was a hit in 1978 in the US and Canada for Don Williams.

“Lydia”

A totally down song: “her little child was taken from her arms/ and she never was the same.”

“Hector The Hero”

Scottish fiddler James Scott Skinner wrote this in 1903 about his friend and Scottish hero, highly decorated Major-General Hector MacDonald who killed himself after being accused and charged with homosexual activity with young boys.

For more information on ARCA, go to https://australianroadcrew.com.au/ and to check out the 40 other Desk Tape releases, go to The Desk Tape Series – ARCA (australianroadcrew.com.au)

ARCA would like to thank the following sponsors of The Desk Tape Series:-

Sponsor      Industry Roles

• Showtech     Rigging                           
• CMI          P.A and Production                     
• Clearlight   Lighting                                    
• DSE Trucks   Transport                                  
• Scully Outdoors  Outdoor Production          
• Gigpower     Crewing and Staging              
• Lock and Load   Crewing                          
• Chameleon Touring   Production and Lighting            
• JPJ          P.A and Lighting                        
• Novatech     P.A and Lighting    
• Phaseshift   Lighting                                    
• Show FX Australia    Pyrotechnics                    
• Event Personnel Australia   Crewing          
• Norwest      P.A and Lighting Production
• Nprint       Artwork 

Ian Peel and Adrian Anderson

ARCA Co-founders and Directors.

Note from founders:-

“ARCA and The Desk Tape Series is a small way we can help our mates get some self-worth and recognition for their contribution to the Aussie music industry and help if they are in crisis. It is a great honour for us to be able to present these memories to all.”

All Hail Roadies and Crew

“Looking after OUR OWN with FEELING and a WHOLE LOTTA LOVE”

All enquiries contact :

          Adrian Anderson     0409 789 440

          Ian Peel            0415 667 221