I was recently down in Cornwall so took the opportunity to drop in and see Mike O'Connor who runs a one-man folk music/storytelling industry down there. We had a good gossip, a lovely walk round the cliffs, a pub meal, swapped some stories and tunes and managed to squeeze in this interview.

There's the old saying that if you want a job done then ask a busy person; you strike me as being one of those 'busy people' with lots of fingers in many pies, tell us a bit about the various things you've got on the go at the moment...

I always seem to have about four things on the go at once and the thing that's taken most of my time in the past year has been a folk opera called 'The Cry of Tin' which a number of us put together and wrote songs for. The idea was to tell the tale of the mining industry in Cornwall from about the bronze age through to today. Of course it's not just one big story, it's lots of little stories rolled into that lot. We tell the tale through narrative, through drama, through songs in a folk style. That project started about two years ago and it took a year to put it all together, to write it, and we've performed it for about a year around Cornwall, getting to just about every theatre in Cornwall and we're now allowing ourselves a year outside of Cornwall - we're off to Sidmouth this summer - and we're going to finish off next May. The response has been terrific. It's been almost a full-time job to produce it and administer it. The team is 8-strong - we can do the show with 7 at a pinch. They are a very mixed bunch of people who just got together because they liked to write music in a folk idiom and after doing a few concerts someone said why can't you put a show together for a local festival and we did and it was so successful that it developed from there.

At the same time as I'm doing that I do a lot of session work for other people, not just folk musicians but for storytellers. Quite a lot of the time I'm providing things like, incidental music, you might say. The most recent thing of that nature I did was for Taffy Thomas' 'Tale Coat' CD. I'd written a 'Tale Coat' tune which got used as the theme music between the stories and there's other little bits of music which occur on the CD. I think it helps having a storyteller helping a storyteller and Taffy and I have known each other for quite a long time and find it very easy to work together.

I do a number of solo gigs and festivals a year as well as that, of course, so that's item 3. They include festivals like Whitby or Chippenham, both of which have been very kind to me over the years. I enjoy that tremendously because you share a stage with people like... well, Taffy was the first, but I'm thinking of Hugh Lupton; and Duncan Williamson quite a lot recently. He and I, quite unknowing of each other... I didn't know Duncan from Adam which is rather odd because I used to live 15 miles from him in Fife some years ago! I put together a cycle of seal stories and seal tunes called 'The Seal's Singing' and I was sufficiently ignorant to have no knowledge of what Duncan had done at all... I was aware of earlier written material, stuff that Marjorie Kennedy Fraser had been given, legends and songs and whatever, and Thomson's book the 'People of the Sea' and I was working on stuff which I'd found by just going out and working and living in the north of Scotland and of course I came along with 'The Seal's Singing' to be confronted with Duncan Williamson who is the world's living expert on all these things and it could have been a tense meeting but he was absolutely delightful and we were both quite pleased that from very different experiences we had come up with the same stories, the same experiences. The result was that at Whitby last year, along with Amy Douglas, we were able to do a live 'Seal's Singing' with the stories and the music and the songs - the whole thing. Ever since that experience I've found it very easy to relate to Duncan and I'm looking forward to meeting him again up at Grassmere in September.

How did you get into it in the first place - the music and stories?

I got into music entirely by mistake. I was living in a little village in Morayshire, miles from anywhere and everybody in the village, apart from me, played or sang or did something. Basically I was bribed with Glenfiddich to play Scots fiddle music and this I was delighted to do; for obvious reasons! I didn't know anything about Scots fiddle music until that moment but as soon as I started I realised there was a whole culture out there that was absolutely fascinating, that was wonderful stuff. I learned to play the violin when I was at school but I gave it up when I was 18 because it wasn't a very macho thing to do but I suddenly realised when I got dragged along kicking and screaming to Elgin Strathspey & Reel Society that there was a whole different way of playing the instrument and really I had to start all over again and learn all about the fiddle and the music. And that's how I got into folk music, way back in about 1968/70, something like that.

And then I gradually realised that with a lot of the fiddle tunes I played the introductions were longer than the tunes were; in fact the introductions were a lot better than the tunes were! And the tunes really just served to illustrate the introduction and I thought "Ah! I'm turning into a storyteller whether I like it or not!" I wasn't aware of there being a storytelling revival or that there were storytellers out there, it was just that some stories kind of leapt into my consciousness and said "Tell me!" and so I did. From that view point I suppose I'm an outsider, not in any nasty way, I've never been excluded or anything, it's just that I came by a completely different route. I just found stories which demanded to be told and I enjoyed telling them. Gradually, almost imperceptibly, I found that I was being asked to go to festivals to tell stories as well as to play the fiddle. That's how it started.

Down here at local Celtic festivals they very specifically have a time set aside for storytellers and they want stories from this part of the world and by then I'd been living back in Cornwall for a dozen years or so and the focus was to get out and do some research and to speak to local people... Cornwall's absolutely the ideal place to do that in because, as it's on an end, so to speak, it's not somewhere that's necessarily well known to other storytellers in the rest of the country and because of its relative isolation there was still a lot of folklore being documented in the late 1800s. In a way that helped preserve something that, maybe, was lost in other parts of the country. The myths and legends are never far below the surface, you don't have to scratch very hard to come across them. As I mentioned earlier the farmer over the valley is quite convinced he's got a fairy field and yet you wouldn't joke with him, he's a big, fierce, rugby-playing man but as far as he's concerned it's a fairy field and you don't argue.

You're living in Cornwall, you mentioned that you used to live in Scotland, where do you actually come from, originally?

Well, my family started out in southern Ireland and they left in the 'Troubles' in the 1920s and then went through a succession of places. They lived in South Wales at the time of the Depression and had a pretty hard time there. I was actually born in London which is where my mother's family happened to be living at the time. I lived in central and south Wales to start with. The reason I travel up and down between Scotland and Cornwall is because I used to be in the airforce for a while and the airforce had an air base in Scotland and an air base down in Cornwall and, because I enjoyed both of those places, I used to try to wangle it so that I got sent from one place to the other. It had the great advantage of enabling me to travel round the country telling stories, playing music and making lots of folk friends all around the place. But you were never in any one place for a very long period of time. I must say I thoroughly enjoyed the life. It was great stuff; but times change and I changed and the airforce had changed so about 5 years ago they had a redundancy scheme and I decided that it wouldn't be a bad thing if I was one of the people who happened to be made redundant. I used the redundancy money to pay for the house, which was utterly vital - to pay off the mortgage anyway, which meant that now I just have to support myself, if you know what I mean, which one just about manages to do.

It sometimes seems a bit bizarre that I've spent all this time in Cornwall and all the time in Scotland and they are a very long way apart but there's something about wilderness areas that's always appealed to me. When I was a young man I used to be a mountaineering instructor for the Outward Bound at Aberdovy and I think that's where I first got my love of wild places. It's also, I think, where I first heard any traditional music at all because there were other climbers who used to enjoy that sort of music there and from there I went on holidays to both Scotland and Cornwall to go hill walking, rock climbing, whatever... but hat all seems a very long time ago now and since then it's all been storytelling or being involved with helping other people to tell stories.

We mentioned doing some work for Taffy Thomas - my last job for him was - he was doing some work with the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra so he wanted me to turn one of my tunes into a little suite for a sub-set of BSO to play, which was great fun. And that's increasingly typical of the sort of thing I get invited to do as well as going out and telling stories myself. I don't think I'm ever going to be in the situation where I ever just play the fiddle or the concertina or just sing or just tell stories. If you come to a Mike O'Connor gig you're going to get the lot, I'm afraid, for better or for worse. I find that almost inevitably, no, definitely inevitably, the music helps the stories and the stories help the music.

When I was doing my recordings of 'The Seal's Singing' and 'The Whispering Forest' I was trying hard to recreate some of that atmosphere which you can engender in a live performance. In some ways it's a lot easier when you're there and you've got people's eyes and ears. Capturing that atmosphere on a CD is a lot more difficult so that's why I tried to make them quite intimate recordings, so you feel you are right there, and that I'm speaking just to you rather than declaiming as if you are addressing the whole of the Coliseum or something. You could do that but it probably wouldn't work unless you are Sir John Gielgud or Richard Burton or somebody. A recording is a more personal medium, you usually have one person who is listening to it so it's more valid if you make it a one on one experience.

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