Woolly Wolstenholme, singer songwriter,mellotron, 12 string guitar of Maestoso and BJH died on monday

As his talent and charisma when alive seem to have gone largely unnoticed. Please look at the links to his music if you have time, if you havn't been aware of his music before.
He took his own life on monday 13th december aged 63, suffering depression.
The prog sites or his band's discussion forum show his profound influence, to a few, who give up on radio or mainstream ever acknowledging this music properly, and just play the vinyl to themselves.
On the BJH forum there is a discussion purely about the poetry of his lyrics... another about funny anecdotes, as he was quite a comedian and frontman of the band, though self effacing and unassuming also.

His recent solo work isn't on spotify, but although some of the CDS are already deleted its available for download on sites like Amazon or http://itunes.apple.com/ie/album/uneasy-listening/id318988137

Some of his music can be quite disturbing and depressing, but yet uplifting and comforting...maybe why so many of his fans are now seeking consolation by playing his music to themselves more than ever.
I made a playlist on spotify of my favourite songs that Woolly wrote with Barclay James Harvest, as some of the bjh back catalogue (especially after Woolly left for a while went a bit soft and cheesy in the 80s) so picked out Woolly's songs.

http://www.woollywolstenholme.co.uk/biog.htm

book of condolences for Woolly is at

http://www.bjhforum.co.uk/woolly/guestbook.cgi

realised the spotify link didn't work...try again

My Woolly BJH favourites

spotify:user:matildayarrow:playlist:0ATqVuJJzzzuUlERcppAYd



lyrics to 'Prospect of Whitby' last song on Maestoso link player

"A winter break for Jill and me on the north coast. Great waves clawing at the sea wall and eventually ripping it apart. The hotel had been turned off - along with the water. Steve Broomhead's "thousand mandolins" paint the picture of our chattering teeth. Images of The French Lieutenant's Woman with fish and chips".


Lyrics:

We stood alone on the empty beach.
We felt the spray on our open face.
The ocean line was within our reach.
Leaving our lives on the rocky ledge,
We came to stand at the water's edge.

We saw the lamps on the higher ground
Like pools of moonshine in evergreen.
We didn't say much above the sound;
Hearing was harder against the wind.
We stood in awe as the sea came in.

The sea wall faltered and lost its place.
Like broken diamonds the waves washed in.
They stole the shore from the shore itself;
The ground was moving beneath our feet.
We broke for home and our safe retreat.
We broke no rules, we were not the thief.

(For Jill)

Stuart J. Wolstenholme
© 1979 St. Annes Music Ltd.


This one's been going round and round my head, when it's not Devils or Deceivers or Has to be a Reason, or ...
But then, they all did the rounds anyway, it's just more prominent, now.




[url=spotify:user:matildayarrow:playlist:0ATqVuJJzzzuUlERcppAYd ]My Woolly BJH favourites[/url]

depressions that lead to suicide I always call soul cancer.
It's so sad he lost his fight against the monster in his soul...

He had had such a creative, apparently happy period over the last few years TL, He had been writing new stuff and touring with the band. Last gig was a festival in the summer in portugal, He even had bought a new travel digital memotron as old mel was too heavy for taking abroad. Then he pulled out of this autumn's UK gigs and wasn't at the ITV filming for the Legends series to be aired next spring, as the monster got hold of him again.

lucky with disease wrote:

How media driven we all are nowadays...

Sad that you felt the need to say that. Don Van Vliet deserves remembering for his music, and the influence it had on subsequent artists. The thread has nothing to do with Stuart Wolstenholme. As it happens I read of Wolstenholme's death in the media (the MEN) but did not know the man or his music, so have no comment to make other than it is terribly sad that someone should feel such despair that they wish to end their life. His music and his passing have obviously had a powerful effect on you, but it is a shame that you had to imply that the remembrance of Beefheart was somehow less than genuine.

I do not imply, I say what I mean, and to be genuine and true to yourself and others is important, don't you think? Nowadays media seems to be even more driven by the fame, name, money and numbers culture. Integrity is being lost.

You quoted the guardian. I had emailed the guardian... and the bbc letting them know of their omission, several days ago now. See comment by another guardian reader that could be bothered, so I was not the only one that could see the irony. Still not happening.
Only the ManchesterEvening News and connected local paper the Oldham chronicle, as he and his band actually came from Manchester, have paid tribute, no other mainstream media has.
So are you implying that if 'Don Van Vliet deserves remembering for his music and his influence on subsequent artists' which I never disputed, that the founder member of Barclay James Harvest from a prolific musical career which spans from 60s to the present day, who was unique and important in the mellotron world, and always stayed true to himself, does not deserve remembering?

you said 'To be honest, Beefheart is not someone I listen much to nowadays...'

Enough said, I'm sad that any of this had to be said.

The thread is about tributes to a musician, my comment was that the Guardian and BBC have paid tribute to one musician and not the other....both from the same era. Don't both deserve being remembered?

I simply don't know Stuart Wolstenholme.

Lots of people didn't know Elbow or I Am Kloot, and used to say the same thing
....why don't you find out, and make your own decision if music rocks your boat?

Sorry I meant floats your boat ;-)


Did you ever watch 'Cockleshell bay' on TV as a kid, and listen to the theme tune?

http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1552683/

lucky with disease wrote:

you said 'To be honest, Beefheart is not someone I listen much to nowadays...'

Enough said,

Yes I did say that as the opening part of the sentence, followed by "...but he was one of those artists who made me understand that music knew no boundaries other than the imagination." A cheap journalist's trick is that, using partial quotations to spin a discussion.

You say "Nowadays media seems to be even more driven by the fame, name, money and numbers culture. Integrity is being lost. " Can't really argue too much with that other than the "nowadays" bit - it was ever thus.

As for the rest of this argument - I really don't know why you have taken such umbrage at my tribute to Beefheart, or the fact that Dano had not heard of Wolstenholme. You ask "Don't both deserve being remembered?" Well yes - I started a thread on the Captain to express my feelings, you on Woolly. What the Guardian does is their business.

Anyway I apologise for any offence caused and will cue up your playlist in Spotify this afternoon.

Hey, I'm not offended. Your thread is getting lots of hits over this anyway so your popular ;-)

I don't want to have an argument with you, just commenting on the guardian news and bbc news ignorance.

The 'cheap journalist's trick' was just me being too lazy to finish the sentence, I'm crap at typing, and I should have hit the quote box, sorry. So no need to get defensive.


'Nowadays....' yes, 'it was ever thus' No...it's definitely going down hill more....X factor, 'celebrities' who aren't celebrities and are talentless fame grabbers...get me out of here, worth being measured by how many stadiums can be filled, or how many tweeters are following, or how many posts can be make, often regardless of quality ....it really is going down hill more.

That Spotify playlist is just some of the older stuff he wrote with the band.
Investigate Maestoso links, collaboration with Mandalaband and stuff on Amazon for his recent
output, challenging and plenty to get your teeth into.

this is the music Woolly wrote that was used on a 'Life on Mars' episide


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2ZjEZdDrAn4https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fS2j8j7DgjM&feature=player_embedded



and this is one of his Maestoso songs

Seems like our discussion has been interfered with, so my reply not making much sense now.
Back to Beefheart.

lucky with disease wrote:

Seems like our discussion has been interfered with, so my reply not making much sense now.
Back to Beefheart.

Indeed - it's all a conspiracy, I tell you!!

Anyway - I do agree with the gist of what you were saying, and the celebrity culture is utterly tiresome at the moment, but I tend to think that society is constantly evolving and along with shit like the X factor you also have bands using the internet and readily available and reasonably affordable software and hardware to distribute their music, as well as live music becoming the only way that bands can really earn a living, therefore rewarding those who can actually play! I guess I'm a glass half full kind of person, for the most part.

And finally back to the point of these threads - just because Beefheart's music has been acknowledged doesn't make it any less important to me, just like Stuart Wolstenholme's relative lack of recognition does not diminish his music's brilliance to those who enjoyed it! (In fact it probably made you value him more - much like I did with Hammill in the early 80s when you had to trawl through second hand record stores for his music!).

So RIP to both, and as I said earlier, the world must seem a terrible, terrible place to make one want give up life. Horrendous, no matter who you are.

Anybody listened to any of his music? What did you think?

Thankyou to Cerys Matthews, who mentioned him and played a track on her BBC6 sunday show of that week, and the following sunday BoB Harris played 'Poor Wages' track with a little tribute on radio 2.

http://www.justgiving.com/WoollyWolstenholme/
a page was set up yesterday in his memory for the Mental Health Foundation charity

Obituary in the Independent


Woolly finally made the national press...Obituary in Independent today, exactly a month later.
I think he might even get a mention in the Guardian soon!

Quote :

Thursday, 13 January 2011

Always more popular in continental Europe than on home soil, the British band Barclay James Harvest played a pastoral, whimsical, occasionally bombastic style of progressive rock laced with vocal harmonies, medieval folk references and orchestral arrangements, and were often overshadowed by their more famous contemporaries, Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Nevertheless, fans of a certain vintage treasure their enchantingfirst four albums issued in the early 1970s on Harvest, the EMI progressive label whose name they inspired, and in particular 1971's cosmic, epic offering Once Again.


The multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter Woolly Wolstenholme was a mainstay of the group from its inception in 1966 until 1979, and a major contributor to their Harvest albums as well as their more successful subsequent releases on Polydor, including the double Live set, Time Honoured Ghosts, Octoberon, Gone To Earth and XII. He had a brief solo career but quit music to become an organic farmer, first in his native Lancashire, and then in West Wales. Wolstenholme thus missed out on the high point of BJH's career when they played A Concert For The People in front of the Reichstag in the then divided city of Berlin to a record audience of 250,000 people in August 1980, an event captured on a best-selling live album.

Born in 1947, he picked up the banjo and played the tenor horn in a brass band as a teenager, but switched to 12-string guitar and harmonica as a member of The Sorcerers and The Keepers, two beat groups led by the guitarist John Lees, whom he had met while studying at Oldham School Of Art. In September 1966, Lees and Wolstenholme joined two other local musicians, bassist Les Holroyd and drummer Mel Pritchard, to form The Blues Keepers, who pulled the hipper-sounding name Barclay James Harvest out of a hat the following year after spending several months perfecting a new direction at Preston House, a run-down farm in the Lancashire Moors. It was at this juncture that Wolstenholme became a pivotal member, a "Jack of all trades, master of none" as he put it, but in actual fact a fine vocalist, consummate arranger and deft multi-instrumentalist. Notably he mastered the Mellotron, an electronic keyboard whose warm tones and quasi-symphonic sound became a BJH trademark as they attempted to bridge the gap between Gustav Mahler and Vanilla Fudge.

In April 1968 BJH issued their first single, "Early Morning", on the EMI subsidiary Parlophone, but by the June 1969 follow-up, "Brother Thrush", they had moved to Harvest under the auspices of the fomer Beatles engineer and Pink Floyd producer Norman Smith. Wolstenholme composed some of the best tracks on the group's eponymous 1970 debut and Once Again – which contained The Lord Of The Rings-referencing "Galadriel" written by Lees and famously recorded with John Lennon's Blond Epiphone guitar – as well as And Other Stories (1971) and Baby James Harvest (1972). The move to Polydor for Everyone Is Everybody Else (1974) signalled an improvement in their fortunes, while Time Honoured Ghosts (1975) contained Wolstenholme's elegiac composition "Beyond The Grave".

However, many critics remained immune to their charms and tagged them the "poor man's Moody Blues", a put-down cleverly turned into one of their best songs by Lees, though it was eclipsed by "Hymn", another of the guitarist's compositions on Gone To Earth (1977). Wolstenholme contributed the excellent "In Search Of England" and "Harbour" to XII (1978) but left soon after. Fans had a lot of affection for him and rightly felt BJH lost their unique character at that point, platinum sales in France, Germany and Switzerland notwithstanding.

"I'd never been satisfied with my involvement with the band," he told the BJH archivist Keith Domone. "I'd always felt that I was either trying to maintain old values musically, some sort of classical English-sounding thing, or, on the other hand, I felt I was a lead weight, I was holding people back from doing what, apparently, they must have wanted to do: to be more West Coast. We went into rehearsals, and it just felt so pointless. My heart just wasn't in it any more. It had become a bit like a nine-to-five job."

He released an album, Maestoso, supported Judie Tzuke on tour, composed music for film and television and collaborated with David Rohl in Mandalaband. In the late '90s he joined Barclay James Harvest Through The Eyes of John Lees, a splinter version of the group. He subsequently recorded and gigged with both Lees' BJH and his own Maestoso project, and compiled a two-CD set of solo material entitled Uneasy Listening.

Wolstenholme had a madcap sense of humour and ready wit and enjoyed recalling the days spent recording at Abbey Road in London or 10cc's Strawberry Studios in Stockport in the '70s. But for many years he had suffered from a severely debilitating form of depression and spent time in a psychiatric hospital. He took his own life.

Wolstenholme considered his finest moments with BJH had been "on stage with the orchestra. When it worked, it was fantastic. When you're on stage and there's four of you thrashing for dear life and the crowd is going 'Yeeaaah', your importance is overblown," he said. "But when you do that with the orchestra, you're just like a little piece of the whole spectacle, and that felt good for me."

by Pierre Perrone

Stuart John Wolstenholme, musician, singer and songwriter: born Chadderton, Lancashire 15 April 1947; married (marriage dissolved); died 13 December 2010.

Thanks for drawing this to my attention. I've listened to quite a lot of BJH over the years and can attest to his talent. I was sorry to hear of Stuart Wolstenholme's tragic death.

Thanks Glendarian...hit me hard
I met him a few times. I'd been following his re-connection with his old band and all his solo Maestoso project, which I appreciate more now, for the same amount of time I've been following Elbow.
In fact it was one of his gigs that first got me going back to seeing bands live again... and then I went a bit mad seeing Elbow, and Kloot etc...

Quote :

Thursday, 13 January 2011

and were often overshadowed by their more famous contemporaries, Genesis, Yes and Emerson, Lake & Palmer. Nevertheless, fans of a certain vintage treasure their enchantingfirst four albums issued in the early 1970s on Harvest, the EMI progressive label whose name they inspired, and in particular 1971's cosmic, epic offering Once Again, ....then more succesful releases on Polydor....

The multi-instrumentalist, vocalist and songwriter Woolly Wolstenholme was a mainstay of the group

I notice both Stuart Maconie and Guy Garvey are featuring 'Yes' on their sunday shows this week, Guy played Genesis week before and Maconie's featured album was Captain Beefheart...naturally.
As a southerner, I often ponder what it was that made me fall in love with some Manc Music and some of the home grown music some Manc DJs played.