Unplugged at Rose and Crown

Just a Lover a Wayward Sons classic which rocked the Rose and Crown on regular Friday night and Sunday afternoon sessions is performed by the band from a recording made in violinist Nick Pott's living room in New Street, Newport. It has all the rough edges of those smokey nights at the Rose and Crown. Nick Potts is currently in Australia recording an album with Tribal Trance who he joined for a tour of Australia last year. The Sons themselves are still recording in Newport but the music is stylistically different from the track recorded here:
Vaguely Sunny - Isle of Wight Rock anthology CD, price £10 p&p

Duncan Jones, John Wroath, Roland Jones
Isle of Wight Rock book launch, August 27th, 1995
at Northwood House, Cowes

The Wayward Sons

The long running band which has been through several personnel changes except for the two original members John Wroath and Duncan Jones. John and Duncan also work as a duo, Sporting Life, the Rose and Crown, Newport was their regular Friday night, Sunday afternoon gig. A tiny pub with a lot of heart and great music now turned into a French cafe.

Alias Wroath and Jones

Unplugged at the Rose and Crown

"Are we the fools for being surprised that a silence can end with no sound?
Like the silent movie era, like with snow, like when Sals burned down
Well yeah, there was noise, but nothing to mark the passing on
Of that great unspoken chance we had found
Where the night's end came well trod and familiar
Like the Charlie Chaplin walk that fades to black
And there wasn't anyone trying to sell their souls
They were only trying to buy them back."

When Sals Burned Down by Dar Williams

The Rose and Crown, St. Thomas's Square, Newport did not burn down. It just closed for a revamp. American songwriter Dar Williams wrote When Sals Burned Down about a bar in a Massachusetts town. It went up in smoke the night after John Prine played there. The Rose and Crown closed on bar stool troubadours John Wroath and Duncan Jones after a weekend set. The Rose and Crown will reopen with new landlords but will it ever regain the spirit of community previously fostered within those walls?

For the Rose was an institution. Musically and culturally. Big word culture. Kind of word that the suits at the Council might use. Not culture in the sense of sipping tea, eating finger cakes while discussing Pavorotti or ethnic minorities in art cafes. More like hearing Duncan Jones sing about Jack Kerouac while 60 year old men dance alongside Sunday afternoon footballers and Doc Martened girls. Kind of community culture across the generations.

The Rose and Crown has been a bar that has done more for Isle of Wight tourism than I can think of. The Wroath and Jones sessions on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons pulling in a host of regulars and visitors. Shopfitters from Port Vale, Irish pipe players from Liverpool, folk singers from Australia, have all been drawn there. During Cowes Week, 1996, four waiters on a week's sabbatical from a passing liner docked into the Rose and Crown. Never bothered to head back home to Manchester.

The attraction has been the buzz created by the Butch Cassidy and Sundance Kid of the barstool, Sporting Life, alias John Wroath and Duncan Jones. I have never been a fan of sad egotistical DJs prattling over songs on the radio. John Wroath can out quip them with one hand tied behind his back anyway. Always prefer to grab the Cranberries, Lemonheads, Oasis, Bluetones, Levellers etc. via the Rose and Crown on a Friday night. As did the regular punters who packed the pub.

Daniel Brodie dancing in front of the band and swirling a gal out into the square. Johnny Aggro duckwalking down to the carpet. The dancing girls swinging and reeling around the square all summer and into winter. Newport on a Sunday afternoon was like that old Ronnie Scott crack 'Let's join hands and make contact with the living'. Except at the Rose which would be jammed with fans and footballers seeing the last of the weekend off.

The Irish covers always caught the hearts of the punters. John Wroath would sing Ewan McColl's Dirty Old Town like it was written for the Rose. Duncan 'the voice' Jones would kill the place with the Waterboy's Fisherman's Blues. One night this year on John Wroath's birthday Chiz, from the Godsends, joined JW for a corking Bang On The Ear to place alongside DJs versions. What a night. The Rose closed for John Wroath's birthday party.

The musicians came, sat in and played some dynamite stuff. Early on the Irish pipe player from Liverpool, Roger Munt whacking a cracking set of drums, Chiz singing Shoot The Moon, Dave Pontin playing screaming saxophone. Rocked the seams off the joint.

The Rose was JW and DJs 'Hole In The Wall' retreat from the world. What made a visit to the Rose and Crown special, for me, were the Wayward Sons, Sporting Life's own songs.

Sure, you can see the Island's answer to Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid all over the Isle of Wight but somehow hearing them sing their songs in the bar they made their own was very special. Like the Shamrock drawn in the Guinness (And they consumed enough of that to get a sponsorship deal). The final touch.

John Wroath's Irish back bar, up and dancing, Just A Lover or his hand me a tissue ballad, The Other One. JW's bass ricocheting notes off the ceiling. One man maurading bear, slap bass, groove merchant supreme. Duncan Jones writing class songs at will. Sat there on his barstool every Friday night or Sunday afternoon. Voice soaked in soul, guitar chords ringing like razor wires. Older, braemer songs like Jack, for Kerouac, or the Bobby I Can Fly cracker Fall To Pieces. More recently my favourite of the new bunch Hit Me Like A Hurricane. Whatever they played the crowd went welcome to the weekend, whoopee, whacko, daft. The night always seemed to end with Bloody Fool. Sending home the patrons with grins like watermelons.

A snatch of the Rose and Crown's spirit was caught on film for Channel 4s half hour Downward Nobility. It featured John Wroath, larger than life (shome mistake shurely? Not possible), drinking and playing at the Rose. The night portrayed at the Rose, however, is a mite camera directed stiff. The dancing in front of the bar a bit like the Wooden Tops, but for all that it is the only visual record we have. Failing to get a video in there and catch the real Rose and Crown spirit only makes Dar Williams song sting deeper.

An Australian visitor, however, has left a recorded reminder of the Rose and Crown. Finding herself paddled up an obscure creek, Australian folksinger and travelling songwriter Penelope Swales ran into the Wayward Sons outside the Rose back in the summer of 1996. She needed help.

Having received an invite to play a folk festival here she discovered that the local Morris dancing, clog tapping folk were not too keen on some of her straight to the groin songs. Sure folk festivals are full of songs about maidenheads. It is all part of the tradition but the real earthy stuff has been sedated like a neutered cat. Back to the finger cake and tea in the art cafe again. John Wroath and Duncan Jones invited Penelope to guest a spot during their Friday night and Sunday afternoon sessions.

"They were great, really saved the day,'' Penelope told me when I caught up with her at the 1996 Cambridge Folk Festival. Sometime Wayward Sons roadie, Russell 'Dingle' Byrne leant his brick outhouse frame to hauling their PA for her. Set Penelope up to earn some money at another pub. Russ got a tape by way of thanks. We still owe him a beer for introducing us to one of the finest exports to come out of Australia. Penelope changed my attitude to Australia as a four xxxx of prawn on barbies and crap soap opera.

Penelope discovered "the world's best hecklers" at the Rose over that weekend. In return for goading her during her songs she wrote the Rose and Crown and those Wayward Sons, alias Wroath and Jones into a new song. Lost in London pokes holes through Australian stereotypes, describes London as vivid as any song I can remember and ends with these classic lines:

"And the pissed old farts at the back of the pub
Sang Skippy The Bush Kangeroo all through the chorus of Already Begun
In a smokey dive where I played with a band called the Wayward Sons."

Mike Plumbley, occasional visitor to the Rose and Crown