If memory serves, not so long after Eddie Walker quit his precarious day job in local government for the safe, predictable and prosperous life of a travelling musician, he chauffeured Vin Garbutt to and from folk club gigs, and begged floor spots (and bookings) each time. The exposure helped earn him a reputation as a singer, and as a guitar picker steeped in the work of Bill Broonzy, Mississippi John Hurt and Rev Gary Davis.
Castle Café, released in 1981 on the Processed Pea label, was his third album. It was one of the very few records to hand when injudicious kissing brought me low with glandular fever later that year, so I played it over and over again; it became, and remains, a favourite.
For the most part it’s just voice and guitar, with support from Frank Porter on bass and Nick Haigh on fiddle and mandolin; a couple of times Eddie switches from his six-string Martin to a thumping great twelve-string. About half of the dozen tracks are ragtime or country blues standards. Delia’s Gone; Jimmie Roger’s lovely, melancholy Miss the Mississippi and You; Blind Willie McTell’s Statesboro Blues, as subsequently murdered by Eric Clapton and a thousand over-excited blues bands.
The other songs are Eddie’s own. There’s no great stylistic divide between them and the rest, but they’re rooted at home in the North-east — he was born, bred, lived and still lives in Middlesbrough. He’s not best known for being a song-writer, but his compositions still won several awards.
Bouncer (on the door of a downtown disco) is the album’s one misfire, a heavy-handed jibe. What does it take? on the other hand is a plaintive cry from a relationship at breaking point, a song that catches a particular mood and isolated moment, shorn of context. It’s the truth but not the whole truth, and goes out into the world to see if anyone feels the same way and wants to adopt it.
Castle Café itself is a postcard from a musical residency in Sczeczin in Poland in 1978, the trigger for Eddie to make the career change he’d been working up to for a long time. It’s a delicate thing that balances the allure and excitement of being on tour against the loneliness and isolation of being away from home. ‘The ladies down at the Castle Café dance until the break of day / And all the while the princes sleep tonight at the Castle Café.’
Listening to the record again I’m struck by the voice, first: high and clear, confident and kindly. Then by the deft and accurate guitar playing, across a range of styles and keys; it’s a lesson in light and shade, and in how to provide variety of tone, tempo and texture without carting along the contents of Hobgoblin Music’s stockroom.
He sustained a lengthy career, a well-loved, smiley, rather roly-poly presence in Hawaiian shirt and pork pie hat. As well as playing solo he spent some years working in Carolina Shout, a duo with Welsh ragtime guitarist John James. He’s retired now, happily back in Middlesborough, posting Facebook pictures of his garden and the wild creatures that come to visit.
