NORTH, SOUTH, EAST & WEST

Blue Skies are over Cotswold and April snows go by, The lasses turn their ribbons For April's in the sky, And April is the season, When sabbath girls are dressed,  From Rodboro' to Camden, In all their silken best. - Cotswold Love (John Drinkwater)

I wonder. Is it possible when young to be nostalgic for a past life you didn't even know you lived? That's how the music of Johnny Coppin somehow made me feel back when I was eight and even now, listening to his music, I think he conjured a timeless atmosphere of Gloucestershire that summons centuries past before my eyes.

I think it's safe to say at this point in what I've disclosed to you all, I was a pretty unusual kid. Especially in so much as I seemed determinedly resolute in facing in the opposite direction to the winds of my generation's cultural zeitgeist, almost to a  point of pride.

Case in point. While many of them were listening to Michael Jackson, Madonna and A-ha, I found myself besotted with a local folk musician named Johnny Coppin. Small though he may have been in commercial terms, to my mind he was as much a colossus of music as the aforementioned favourites of pop music charting each week back then on Radio 1.

Coppin's niche was setting to music poems by local Gloucestershire poets from the Edwardian and inter-war period and bringing them to life to audiences previously unaware of their brilliance.

I first caught sight of this charming, curly headed man with glasses on my television screen, strolling across the familar looking hills of my beloved Cotswolds with guitar in hand, singing "Cotswold Love" to some traditionally attired Shire lasses. I believe it was from a 1986 BBC documentary entitled "A Song Of Gloucestershire". I would have been eight years old at the time and probably still drunk from the success of my recently abridged 'The Lord Of The Rings'.

That first impression of Coppin must have run deep as I then immediately went out and bought Johnny's latest album 'Forest and vale and high blue hill' on cassette from the local record store Trading Post in Nelson Street where I lived with my family in Trafalger House.

I remember playing it for the first time and being unsettled by the cold, wintry opening track 'In Flanders' which was suitably bleak given the World War 1 subject matter. In profound contrast, the second track 'A Song Of Gloucestershire' roused my spirit to the rafters as it brought a feeling of regional patriotism into my young heart, further cementing my love affair with the surrounding Cotswolds.

North, South, East, And West: Think of whichever you love the best. Forest and vale and high blue hill: you may have whichever you will, and quaff one cup to the love o' your soul, before we drink to the lovely whole. - A Song Of Gloucestershire (F.W Harvey)

Perhaps it was because of my love of hobbits that this jubilant anthem, which sounded as if it was composed in a nearby pub late one night, might so appeal. Visions of The Prancing Pony landlord Barliman Butterbur and his backward help Nob came to mind. I have often found I've almost too well empathised with Bilbo Baggins at times, and perhaps I found a subconscious synergy between Tolkien's Shire, my own five valleys of Stroud and Johnny Coppin's music.

From that first cassette onwards, the die was cast. I was destined to become Coppin's youngest fan, practically stalking the poor man from concert to concert as family members would take it in turns to accompany me to his events, as if I was serving a compulsive addiction.

Casting my eye around the audiences of his concerts, it was fairly obvious my youth stuck out like a sore thumb. The average age of his audiences must have been 40 plus but it made no difference to me. The coolest guy back then, even cooler than Prince or Michael Jackson, was Coppin with his black Yamaha keyboard and his band of musician brothers including Phil Beer (later of Show of Hands fame) and Paul Burgess. To my mind they were singing the soundtrack of my life and it made no difference who else realised it. My class mates were none the wiser and much like my later opera and Frank Sinatra obsessions, I kept it to myself. Sometimes you just instinctively know when to keep things private. Besides, I would have probably been mocked for my unusual music taste anyway.

The farm remains he laboured on, He cherished like a lover; The land remains but he is gone; The sunlit days are over. - Cotswold Lad (Frank Mansell)

As my love for Coppin's music increased, so too did my fascination with the specific places mentioned in the poems he'd set to music. One time I can recall, my architect father arranged for a local builder friend of his, Dennis Woolls, to show me the Holy Brook which he had known all his life from child to man, as familar with the five valleys as the back of his hand.

As we walked in the dusk through November woods, I could hear the quiet flow of water and felt an exhilaration of connecting ever deeper with the land described in the songs which Coppin sung with such tender sincerity.

Although Dennis was a little too rough and coarse to be the romantic figure I imagined the Cotswold Lad that Johnny sang about, I fancied it might just be me who was the embodiment of the character's spirit. So what if my father was a Londoner and my mother from Northern stock? My home was Stroud and I knew I'd been here before.

When I think of cool woods in the sunlight, Dark avenues trembling wih song, And sheep running wild in the bracken, I know that I cannot look backwards, Nor tread any road of my childhood, How far have I wandered. - Have Wandered (Leonard Clark)

Typically when finishing his set Coppin would finish with a particularly celestial sounding song entitled 'This Night The Stars' and as I listened in awe, I felt as if my perception of Gloucestershire was becoming increasingly mythic and quite the opposite of parochial. Perhaps that's why I've never felt particuarly insecure about my unabashed sentimentality towards this special region.

Some don't know how lucky we are to live in such a magical part of the world.

I'm glad I'm not one of them.

How can this ever pass away, This home of hills and trees? I rather think on judgement day, When all are on their knees, They'll find who through the clouds shall rise, that Gloucestershire is Paradise, And Heaven's fields are these. - This Night The Stars (Leonard Clark)