Colin Randall writes: Salut! Live's Artist of the Week, here and at our Facebook group, is Steve Tilston, whose next album - due out in March - is not only called Last Call but is billed as probably just that - his final recording, at least of new songs.
Born in Liverpool, brought up in Leicestershire and for some years a resident of London and Bristol, Tilston now lives above Hebden Bridge - "great walking country" - in West Yorkshire,
Singer, songwriter, expert guitarist and novelist, he possesses a wide range of talents making him a thoroughly deserving choice for this site's modest accolade. And he also has a strange but fascinating tale to tell which may be new to some readers.
It is not every day that two of the world’s most famous people write to you. But it happened when Tilston was just 21 and the letter was signed ‘"love, John and Yoko".
But it never arrived on his doormat. In fact, he did not even know it had been written until 35 years later.
Steve Tilston at Club Passim, Cambridge MA in 2008. Wikipedia
The back story became fairly well known. Lennon had seen an interview in Zigzag magazine in which the young Tilston - on his own admission now, taking himself a little too seriously - said in answer to a direct question that yes, he did worry that possible fame and fortune might impair his songwriting.
Lennon was intrigued enough to write to reassure him. "Being rich doesn't change your experience in the way you think," he said. Precisely what then happened to the letter, and why it was not forwarded, is not entirely clear but may well - assuming Lennon sent it to Zigzag - reflect badly on someone at the magazine.
By the time it did surface, as you’ll have worked out from the above, the intended recipient was in his mid-50s. It became the inspiration for Dan Fogleman’s 2015 film Danny Collins with the English folk singer reinvented as an American, played by Al Pacino. Tilston met Pacino in a BBC news programme but never saw the original letter, only a copy.
"It is in the hands of an American collector and was clearly kept from me by someone at Zigzag magazine and sold on," Tilston tells me now. "I only heard about it when the now owner contacted me via email to get me to verify it. As you could imagine I was gobsmacked."
Steve Tilston with Al Pacino (facing him) and that letter or a copy of it
Even without Lennon’s unseen advice, Tîlston proved himself over and again to be an accomplished and enduring songwriter whose delivery of his own songs borders on perfection.
I have long regarded The Road When I Was Young as an exceptionally good song. Given the theme, fairly evident from the title, it is perhaps unsurprising that he receives requests to sing it at funerals.
"I'm flattered," he says. "But I had to sing it at a friend's funeral and choked up halfway through. Good job there was a pianist as well as me."
Tilston also rates The Reckoning, for which he won the best song category in BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, The Slip Jigs and Reels, which has been much covered, and the new digital single, As Night Follows Day, from what is being billed as his final album of original material, Last Call, due out in March. He plans to continue writing - possibly even a second novel (All For Poor Jack was published 14 years ago) - may record some more instrumental music and even insists on the right to change his mind anyway.
Now 74, Tiston has achieved much. If the riches envisaged by the Zigzag interviewer did not come his way, he has made a steady living from music and was able to profit from the film, for which Fogleman nobly listed him as a consultant.
He has worked with great fellow-artists, including his former wife Maggie Boyle, John Renbourn and Bert Jansch - all now deceased - as well as Jez Lowe and Chris Smither. His grown-up children - Martha, Sophie, Joe and Molly - are all doing well, Sophie as a homeware and fashion accessories designer, the others in music; Martha, after a string of well-received albums, was the driving force behind a film, The Tape, as writer, director and star.
What led me to assess Tilston's great body of work and nominate him as Artist of the Week was the instant impact made on me by As Night Follow Day, an engaging tale of lost love, its quality not so far short of The Road When I Was Young.
The guitar accompaniment is compelling, enhanced by the mournful effect of Alan Cook's pedal steel guitar (Johnny Fewings is there too, on banjo). I love the refrain (Did she say she loved me/ it was never set in stone), so much so that it is slightly disappointing to learn this romantic but lovelorn song came to him in a Travel Lodge.
Towards the end of 1990, I briefly reviewed Tilston’s instrumental album Swans at Coole in The Daily Telegraph. I’d forgotten; he had not and I have just located a cutting.
After describing him as a fine performer of his own and others’ songs, I acclaimed a “powerful collage of traditional and classical instrumental themes… his musicianship is beyond question while the arrangements set a standard against which other acoustic guitar albums ought to be measured”. Fast forward to 2024 and far from contemplating retirement, he has abundant ideas for further instrumental work.
What Steve Tilston wants least is to be remembered as "the fellow who didn't get that letter from John Lennon". But still he wonders what might have been. "John actually put his phone number in it," he says."I'd have been sure to call him."
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