Jez and the band tip hatto Tyneside radio hit

“The band just started as a hobby really,” recalls Jez, an award-winning County Durham singer-songwriter. “I had a relatively successful solo career, as I do have now, and I suppose I started the band much against the advice of everybody. It is still divisive. There are people that prefer my solo work; there are people that prefer the band, but we always take the band down to Arundel.

“The band just pottered along for a bit. It’s so difficult to keep a band going not just financially but also keeping everyone’s enthusiasm up. These people are singing my stuff! But the original line-up grew because we went to America and it went very well there. We signed with an American record label and did all the summer festivals for three or four years on the trot.

“But that petered out because everybody started having children. I revived the line-up a couple of years ago, and this current line-up is very strong, basically because it is a younger line-up and we have got Northumbrian pipes.

“We have always had the male/female vocal thing going on. That has always been a feature of the band. I have always had a female singer in the band to put across the woman’s point of view, so it’s not just a bunch of northern blokes on tour! And the band is now as strong as it ever has been.”

They are touring on the back of their latest album Wotcheor! which sees Jez tip his hat to Tyneside in a stirring salute to radio cabaret.

The album is a melting pot of 13 diverse new narrative songs, four choral curtain-raisers and final spoken credits that together pay homage to the legendary 1940s BBC radio cabaret show Wot Cheor Geordie.

“Wotcheor was a familiar greeting in north-east England until not so long ago, meaning ‘What Cheer?’ or ‘How are you?’, like the cockney ‘Wotcha’ and it was adopted by the BBC as the title of their popular weekly radio series, broadcast from Newcastle upon Tyne.”

The series, which made a star of County Durham entertainer Bobby ‘The Little Waster’ Thompson, showcased comedians and story-tellers alongside Geordie folk song singers, fiddlers and Northumbrian pipers.

The album emulates the mix.

The Willows gig is at 8pm (doors open 7.30pm) in the function room of Arundel Football Club.