Pale Arthur Unbound

If finding Bombadil 2 wasn’t luck enough for students of Chester arts-scene apocrypha (see Speedboat 2), then finding this cassette in a box full of old Ian Allan trainspotting books and Chester FC football programmes (from the 78-79 season) in a Garden Lane loft surely must be. The words ‘Pale Arthur’ in biro jolted the team into action and after a frantic search for a working cassette player, the hiss and crackle revealed…a cover version. Not the original by the mysterious Cheshire troubadour described in the (slightly histrionic) folk club review by ‘Riverman’, but a later country-rock version by - according to the scribbled cassette liner - ‘Redmond & Shaw’, of whom history tells us nothing. Once you get past Redmond (or Shaw)’s peculiar American accent it is clearly the same song - the central Cheshire place names, the account of Arthurs’ eerie wanderings - which perhaps drifted through folk clubs and into a studio session for some local wannabes by the end of the 70s. The cassette has been over-dubbed several times, and fragments of original content swim out of the 1979 Top 40 palimpsest intermittently. Apart from Pale Arthur, the other tracks on the cassette include someone reading a very dull letter out to a girl called Rhiannon who lived in Bebington and a Welsh-language punk band, apparently called ‘Bleiddiaid Troseddol’, (which Google translates as ‘Criminal Werewolves’) with a  song called ‘Nac Oes’ which only lasts 80 seconds and yet still somehow manages to overstay its welcome. Anyway, the best version of ‘Pale Arthur’ the Speedboat audio technicians could recover from the cassette is available here - enjoy.