Cambridge Folk Festival’s evergreen artist still draws ’em in

John Holder had a good folk festival – as he has since the very beginning of the Cambridge Folk Festival tradition in 1965.

“I wasn’t actually the very first performer,” says the illustrator and bluegrass musician, sitting in his Milton garden while on a break from illustrating Dogs Like Us, the follow-on from last year’s Christmas best-seller, No Dogs On The Bed.

“I was playing a bluegrass set with Pete Sayers – Pete and I had the first bluegrass band in Europe in the 1950s, we used to meet on the train from Suffolk into Cambridge. I was going to art school and he was working as a French polisher.”

“We were bottom of the poster, and Nick Barraclough (band leader of The Federales who were regulars at the Flying Pig until recently) said to me: ‘You’re on first.’ But before we started playing the son of a local councillor, a little kid aged about five, stood up and did ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck’ [a poem by Felicia Dorothea Hemans published in 1826]. The audience thought it was part of the set.”

The French polisher went on to be a country and western star in Nashville, where he had his own TV show for five years, and really hit the spot with his Dennis of Grunty Fen character whose fan base, says John, “included everyone from Stephen Hawking to country boys”.

John, who trained at Cambridge School of Art, stayed in the city and stayed close to Pete Sayers, whose widow Cheryl says they were “as close as brothers”.

After the first festival, John started a 30-year run drawing the poster for Cambridge Folk Festival in 1966.

“I didn’t do the first poster but I did go round putting bits of paper over the misspellings on it,” he grins. “I did the second one and onwards for 30 years. I retired when Ken Woolard (the original organiser of Cambridge Folk Festival) died. Ken was the man who started it all.”

After John stepped back Gaye Lockwood, his wife – who had been doing the lettering, typography and lithography around John’s drawing – took on the role for several years and John’s role gradually morphed into the honorary artist-in-residence he is today. He hosts an artist’s workshop near The Den: in recent years he’s run this with Jim Butler. The duo call themselves ‘A Pair of Drawers’.

“Jim’s great fun to work with and I couldn’t do it without him,” says John cheerfully. “We run two sessions a day, in the morning and in the afternoon, and we brief who’s there and they bring the results back in the evening, and it’s very interesting and mostly successful – people say ‘Oh, I didn’t realise I could draw.

“The first brief is to draw hats which are usually easy to draw. It’s something people can do without feeling embarrassed. It’s about looking, and being conscious of what things look like and not what you want them to look like.”

If you want to join in the fun you’ll find John at ARU’s life drawing class – “it starts again this month after a summer break”.

“The class is called P.O.S.E.R.S – the Painting, Observational Sketching and Expressionistic Rendering Society.”

P.O.S.E.R.S. meets in the Ruskin Building of Anglia Ruskin University most Tuesdays of the year, 6.30-8.30pm.