John Richards

John Richards

John’s first venture after running the college folk club was to record with Bev Pegg from Kinver in the West Midlands.

From these sessions emerged one co-written song Did you like the battle?, and this was eventually covered by Robin Dransfield and then Paul Downes.

During these sessions, John met Mike Tinsley, an excellent mandolin player, and they joined forces in the early seventies. After local success as a duo, they joined Greenmantle, a Kidderminster based traditional band who were seeking to expand a new electric line-up.

This experiment didn’t work, but a band - Springheel Jack - emerged from the attempt. The band played a combination of Richards’s songs, traditional classics and contemporary covers.

After Jack came Ivor or more particularly The Ivor Smallpiece Big Band. This was very much a fun band but did have its serious side, and continued to play some of John’s songs. An EP was produced at Zella Records in Birmingham which included Did you like the Battle? Smallpiece was very successful in the West Midlands for a number of years but finally split into two new bands.

Ivor Small Piece Band

Richards’ half recruited additional musicians and called itself Maurice and the Minors. After a period of settling in they went to Woodworm Studios to record the bands’ first cassette

Honour and Praise was the only Richards song on the album, but Dave Pegg heard it, loved it, and Fairport recorded it, on their Gladys’ Leap album.

Maurice’s finest hour came with the vinyl LP Run by the moon in 1987. The album was very well received, but still did not enable the band to break down the door of professional success, and the band split in 1989.

Maurice Minors

From the ashes of Maurice, Three Desperate Men emerged, and after a year of playing folk clubs and festivals the three craved a bigger sound to enhance the arrangements of the material that John was writing. In 1991, Dave Jones and Paul Dowswell joined the band to provide that enhancement and the Desperates story appears in the About Us section.

After 13 very happy years of the Desperates Dave Jones decided it was time to fulfil a long term dream and move to Southern Ireland. (Roaring Water Bay to be precise) where he continues to play the drums for a number of roots based bands. After Dave’s news the rest of the band decided that it was time to call it a day which meant that John could commit all of his time to the new band and the ongoing story of the John Richards Band appears on the ‘About Us’ page.

John plays:-

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