Richard Hammersley has been playing the harmonica for 35 years and also plays guitar. He writes and sings his own songs, mostly in the blues vein. He has also published poetry and short stories here and there over the years. He began performing as a concrete and sound poet in the 1970s but gradually moved into music, ending up in the simple blues and folk forms where he started. Some of the concrete and sonic work he was involved in during the 1970s is gradually appearing on the website of his collaborator from those days: www.taborpoet.co.uk
Ken Mullen has been playing guitar for longer than he is willing to remember. Used to accompany Stanley Robertson, the master of the traditional Scottish ballad. When the hippies got tired of traditional singing he become the prime mover in some early pre-historic garage Ceilidh bands in the North-East of Scotland instead: The Dog Swallower's Ceilidh Band, the Reel Aleians, and the Afro-Gaelic Ensemble. Has a cherished certificate signed by Hamish Henderson for coming second, as part of an instrumental pair, at a Keith folk festival.
Influences
Charlie Patton, Walter Horton, James Blood Ulmer, Captain Beefheart, Blind Willie McTell, Don Cherry, Johnny Cash, the 60s folk blues guitarists, but we are not copyists.
Sounds Like
Old acoustic blues played by ear before it was codified into western notation. Richard Hammersley has also made a lot of sound poetry and ambient/ electronic works over the past 30 years. See website for more details
More music, including electronic and sound poetry stuff at http://www.last.fm/music/Richard+Hammersley
Richard Hammersley and Ken Mullen are an acoustic duo based in Glasgow. They mainly play Richard's original songs with some traditional material. They try to play improvised and loose and to use non standard harmonic material in the blues (which was always there).
Richard Hammersley began writing poetry aged 13 in Edinburgh and was appearing in small press magazines by the time he was 18. He was also struggling to play the harmonica and the guitar. In his twenties in the late 1970s in Cambridge he was co-editor of Perfect Bound with Peter Robinson, helped organise the Cambridge Poetry Festival and was associated with Richard Tabors Lobby Press. During those years he became interested in sound poetry and was part of a performance group with Richard Tabor, Nick Radin and Mark Chinka. Lobby Press published a sound poetry book AOL. At the Centre for Music Experiment at University of California, San Diego, he recorded AOL and a number of other sonic works. He also attended the seminars organised by Jerome Rothenberg and became even more interested in poetry as a spontaneous activity that connected with traditional practices. Since the early 1980s he has written conventional poetry, short stories and a couple of abandoned novels, a lot of songs mostly in the blues or country vein and also more sonic work. Sometimes the sonic elements leak into the blues work and his love of free jazz and other a- and micro-tonal music is obvious. From the mid 1980s to the mid 1990s he was a regular member of the Glasgow SF Writers Circle, but as his academic career got more successful, the demands of that seem to have exhausted his capacity for fictional prose. He has published poems and short stories here and there but long ceased to try and make it as a 'great' poet; there is enough rejection in academia thank you.
