Hebden Bridge Circa 1971-1974 by Trevor Beales.

Hebden Bridge is a small market town in the Calder Valley of West Yorkshire about eight miles west of Halifax. I can’t remember ever visiting there, but I’d like to if I ever get up to Yorkshire again. That is because these days it is a popular tourist attraction famed for its arts and culture and has a vibrant music scene. It is home to artists, writers, photographers, musicians, alternative practitioners, teachers, Green and New Age activists and more recently, wealthier 'yuppie' types. The popular TV drama Happy Valley was filmed there, and Dream Academy made the original video for Life In A Northern Town in Hebden Bridge. 

It hasn’t always been such a pleasant town. In the early 1970s it was a grim post-industrial town in decline with the buildings black with factory soot and polluted with asbestos from a closed mill where 12% of the former workforce had lung disease. Change was beginning to happen though. Hippie types had begun to move in, attracted by the ease to squat in abandoned houses and the proliferation of magic mushrooms in the surrounding landscape. The counterculture had arrived. Trevor Beales wasn’t one of these new arrivals, Hebden Bridge was his hometown. He was a gifted singer-songwriter and guitarist born in 1953. In 1971 at the age of 18 in the attic of his home at 1 Ivy Bank, Charlestown, Hebden Bridge he began recording his songs on tape. They lay dormant for decades until a chance meeting in 2018 between his wife Christine and an old friend of Trevor’s called John Armstrong led to the tapes being rediscovered. This led to the songs being compiled into an album by Basin Rock records and released in December 2022 as Fireside Stories, Hebden Bridge circa 1971-1974.

Photo by Christine Beales.

I first heard of the forthcoming release in November when I read an interview with Christine Beales in The Guardian. Then last week on a Facebook folk music group I read somebody singing the praises of this new album, saying it was a ‘lost classic’, which is a claim I have heard many times before. I decided to order the CD which arrived a couple of days ago, and I have been listening to it on this dark rainy afternoon. It is an attractive looking CD with monochrome photos of the area taken by Charlie Meecham in 1969/70. 

Listening to the music I must say I am very impressed with his deftness on the acoustic guitar. It created a nice peaceful atmosphere in my kitchen today. I read that Trevor was inspired by the likes of James Taylor, Chet Atkins, and Django Reinhardt. The names that sprang to mind when I first heard him were Bert Jansch and Jackson C. Frank, but I don’t even play the guitar, so others might think differently. I especially liked the fingerpicking of the opening track Marion Belle which is a seafaring yarn about a ship ‘sailing into hell’. It shows a flair for story telling in his lyrics. Tell Me Now is a similar type of song which tells the tale of young John who was hanged after an affair with the mayor’s daughter. It sounds like a traditional English folk song, but the sleeve notes say that all the tracks were written by Trevor, apart from Braziliana written by Dave Evans. Metropolis is a song about the loneliness of moving to a big city. Considering that these recordings were made during the ages 18 to 21 I think Trevor’s voice sounds very mature for his age, apart from some tracks where he sings in a higher register which I don’t think is so successful. For me, the outstanding track is Then I’ll Take You Home which I have shared below, so you can judge for yourself. To my ears it is very reminiscent of  Ralph McTell. If every song was as good as this one, I would say that it is a great album, rather than just enjoyable. In Hebden Bridge at the time, many of the hippie element had become followers of the guru Maharaj Ji and his Divine Light Mission. Trevor looked on this with disdain as shown in the lyrics and was contemptuous of charlatan mystics. The lyrics also show that he would rather have some beer than smoke pot. The bluesy last track Fireside Story made me think of John Martyn.

Later in the 70s Trevor formed a prog-rock group called Havana Lake who released one album called Concrete Valley in 1977 which didn’t have much success probably due to punk rock exploding onto the scene. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if it wasn’t re-released soon. Sadly, Trevor died suddenly in 1987 from sepsis at the early age of 33, leaving Christine and a daughter Lydia who was only eight months old at the time. It must be wonderful for Lydia to see her father finally get the recognition he deserved. I am glad I bought this album. I don’t think it is the greatest thing I have ever heard, but the guitar playing is excellent. If you like the sound of folky bluesy acoustic guitar songs, you might enjoy it as well.

Hebden Bridge Today.