A TEESDALE musician who once performed as a warm-up act for sixties chart-topper Billy J Kramer has penned two songs about his home town, Barnard Castle.
Keen guitarist Eddie Tinkler, 74, says he had a lifelong love of music, performing with a variety of bands over the years in a number of locations. In the late Sixties, his band – Kordz – performed alongside Dave Berry and the Cruisers and Billy J Kramer in a musical extravaganza behind the King’s Head Hotel as part of the town’s Meet festivities. Before lockdown he set up a regular jamming session at the Cricketer’s Arms pub in town with the help of fellow musician James Dykes. Although restrictions during lockdown didn’t allow for meet ups, the group continued to inspire each other online with Zoom sessions.
It was these sessions which led Mr Tinkler to compose songs to perform at the sessions. He said: “When I retired my ambition was to work on my music and fix up classic cars, so at least I’ve been able to do one of those.
“Sometimes the ideas come out of nowhere and during lockdown I had been looking at social media and there were old photographs of the town’s railway station and it brought back loads of memories. I thought I would craft them into a song.”
The result is a four-verse folk rock song with a catchy chorus called Barnard Castle Station. It laments the loss of the branch line, which got the chop after Dr Beeching’s controversial report in the Sixties.
“Barnard Castle Station
didn’t take a lot of writing at all,” he added. “I used to travel to Bishop school by train from Barney and we used to take trips to Whitley Bay as a child. And it’s all factually correct.”
The song has been well received when it has been performed at lunch clubs in Teesdale by Mr Tinkler and Mr Dykes, alias Two Local Blokes.
Castle Walls is another catchy rock-folk tune, which Mr Tinkler calls his “one and only protest song” .
He hopes it will spur officials into action to do something to do more to preserve Barney’s ancient monument.
“I was having a Bob Dylan moment,” he added. “Castle Walls pretty much wrote itself.” The song includes the lines: “They’ve sat around for ages, discussing every stone, but no-one wants to be the dog that gets hold of the bone.”
Mr Tinkler said: “They were just something to do on the Zoom jam sessions. We’ve performed Barnard Castle Station a few times and by the end a lot of the folk are joining in the chorus, which is great.”
He hopes Two Local Blokes will get the call to be part of the line-up for this year’s Meet.
