Hodmadoddery started in Park Street, Bath, in about 1986. One of these days we’ll find something that will actually fix the date for sure, but for the moment that’s a pretty good approximation – it may even be an understatement.

We can blame some mutual friends for suggesting we might sound good together; let’s keep the guilty parties anonymous, they know who they are and they know what responsibility they bear. Throwing together a bunch of songs from both of our previous musical lives, and learning a few more from people we were very keen on at the time (Dick Gaughan and Christy Moore, for a start), we soon worked out we could get people to buy us drinks for playing, so out to play we did jolly well go.

The long and unwinding

A notorious but nice cider pub called The Beehive, long since closed [curiously it had a brief afterlife as an altogether posher bar called Grappa, a favoured tipple in a later era], that was the place; they’d give us unlimited farmhouse cider, the orange stuff – Thatcher’s? Cheddar Valley? it’s all a bit fuzzy from here – and allow us to take a collection round the pub at the end of the night.

This was all fine and funky for a while, but Tony got restless and went off to India, with Vanessa, another Park Streeter. When they came back they found materialist Bath a bit hard to take – honestly, I know the feeling – and took off on the road. Because of places Ness had been previosly, a lot of this was in Italy.

We’d enjoyed making music, but could we keep it up?
Tony & Nessa would live the travelling life most of the year, even up to three straight years on the road in a series of vehicles, and that lightweight Henwood would come out and play at being a traveller in the summer, play a lot of music and drink a lot of wine. The most remarkable of those vehicles was a former coach (“vecchio pullman” in Italian) – the back read: “Comfylux – Pearce Darch & Willcox – Yeovil, Martock & Maiden Newton” – we hoped people might have thought those were our names…

In August 1991 we wandered into Ferrara just as their soon-to-be-enormous Buskers Festival was ending for the year. Not knowing we weren’t supposed to – abusivi and screditati from the beginning – we played an arch just off the main piazza on the last night, the 1000 Lire notes fluttered into our guitar cases, and we went away with the resolve to do the festival properly the following summer. We were invited performers at the 1992 event, where we also met the legendary Cosmic Sausages, possibly our favourite ever carousing buddies, and other reprobates. There is no end to the great stories from there, particularly in the early years.
Even when Tony came off the road [and the rails?] the summer Italian trip had become a habit too delicious to break. We even used to make money at it for a few years. We played Ferrara for something like 30 years, every late August except two, so much so they gave us a long service plaque [really!] and many others: Castellaro Lagusello, Bassano del Grappa [both of those more than once], Novara, Linz in Austria, Santa Sofia (with its dreamy aftermath in the hills above), and tbat’s not even half of them… and then in time our eventual favourite, Pennabilli Artisti In Piazza.