Lea Nicholson

The single track here is from the album The Concertina Record (Sonet/Kicking Mule SNKF 165) which was re-released at archive.org under a Creative Commons licence. The original record has been remastered and issued on CD. See:

http://www.jayls.com/jamring/

The following autobiographical details are from the recent concertina CD English International:

“I began playing concertina at the beginning of 1965. I had been given a concertina and told I could keep it if I learnt to play it. I got an Alf Edwards Concertina Tutor from somewhere and picked up the fingering and the beginnings of musical theory from that. My main interest at that time was folk music and within six months I was playing in local folk clubs. It was a good time to be buying a concertina since, with the exception of the folk revival, interest in the concertina had just about died out. A concertina could be picked up in a junk shop for three or four pounds. The going rate for an Aeola was five pounds. If the box was in old pitch then a friend of ours in Burnley put us on to Tommy Williams in Battersea who would do a full retune for three pounds. I don´t think the prices really started to go up until the beginning of the 70s.

My first recording came out at the end of the 60s, this was a track on the Topic compilation of Lancashire Folk Songs called Deep Lancashire. This is still available, I believe. Other recordings included Horsemusic, God Bless The Unemployed and The Concertina Record albums. There were also three singles God Bless the Unemployed (Transatlantic), Lazy Afternoon (Virgin), and The Dam Busters March (Virgin). Lazy Afternoon was a minor hit in France, and probably the closet i will get to my fifteen minutes of fame.

I did a lot of session playing and there are lots of other recordings, many of which I can´t remember. More information is available from Kai Willems who keeps a discograhy at http://home.arcor.de/kai63/lnicholson.html

I played with among others Mike Oldfield, John Renbourn, Richard Thompson, Russ Ballard, Steve Ashley, Robin Dransfield and some BBC Philharmonic Orchestra or other doing William Walton´s The Bells (wich contains about 16 bars written for concertina somewhere near the end).

I stopped playing in 1992, but when Alan Day rang me at the beginning of this year and asked me to contribute a couple of tracks to the English International CD, I bought a Lachenal Excelsior with a big hole in the bellows off Ebay for 500 GBP, and a fine repairer from Ipswich called Mike Acott fixed it for me.”