For the last eight years, rock journalists and musicologists Chris Tiller and Andy Blackwell have been working on ‘All the Suns of Albion’, a thirty-six-volume compendium of neglected British music.
Chris Tiller
Born in Henley-on-Thames in 1961, Chris Tiller learnt his journalistic chops at local paper, the Wargrave Advertiser, having convinced the editor to take him on as ‘rock and pop co-respondent’. Largely as a way to promote his own band, Tiller set about writing features on the local acts around the area in the hope of discovering an emerging scene. This, however, proved difficult and with only three local bands (including his own) the emerging scene failed to emerge. Both parties acknowledged their mistakes and he left the paper after three weeks by more or less mutual consent.
Relocating to nearby Reading, he soon realised he didn’t have what it took to follow his own musical ambitions and focused instead on documenting those that did. It was at the newly launched Chiltern Sounds, the Thames Valley’s premier music publication, that Tiller, in the words of a colleague, “honed his skills to the point of near invisibility”.
His breakthrough came with his now classic account of life on the road with stoner-fantasy-metal merchants, Goblin’s Ring, with whom he briefly shared a squatted tithe barn in Binfield Heath. With no definitive style to speak of, Tiller’s work is notable largely for its sheer volume and variety, contributing features to Q and Mojo, reviews and word-puzzles to heavy-rock glossy Powerkord as well as editing and self-publishing home-spun folk fanzine, Fields of Wicker.
A growing preoccupation (referred to as ‘obsession’ in his divorce hearings) with overlooked folk legend Vic Briggs led to further investigations into the stories of Britain’s forgotten musical heroes and for the last eight years he has been working on ‘All the Suns of Albion’, an exhaustive and exhausting thirty-two-volume compendium of neglected British music, with fellow writer Andy Blackwell.
A keen amateur walker with a passion for Dutch cuisine, Chris Tiller is now single and lives with his grown-up son, Pat, just outside Sonning Common.
Andy Blackwell
Born in Farnham in 1953, Andy Blackwell is a writer, poet, rock and roll archivist and former teenage bowls prodigy who shot to fame with a series of seminal pieces on the burgeoning British music scene of the mid to late seventies. Largely unpublished, his writing attained underground status and set the benchmark for his subsequent output.
His passion for music developed during a stint as roadie for folk duo Albion Parade, a position he gave up when it soon became apparent that, between the two members, there wasn’t really that much to carry. Turning his back on a life on the road, Blackwell devoted himself to his writing and his work reached a larger audience when he was invited to write the liner notes for Turnham Green’s debut album, ‘A Place in the Parsley’.
Having received only a spoken brief, Blackwell misinterpreted the title and his sleeve notes were based almost exclusively on well-worked fish metaphors, relying heavily on the words ‘hook’, ‘scale’ and ‘bass’. It was only after the initial run of records was released that the mistake came to light and these early pressings have since attained mythical status, often fetching up to £35 at record fairs and boot sales.
He has written and self –published many books, including ‘Upon the Mossy Stump’, an anthology of bucolic poetry, several bowls tuition pamphlets and ‘Fleet Services, 3a.m.’, a biography of late-seventies pub-rockers London Bedsits, widely regarded by a few to be the definitive work on the band. Along with rock journalist Chris Tiller, he is currently writing the monolithic ‘All the Suns of Albion’. Eight years in the making and tipped to be the last word on the forgotten music of the British Isles, this ambitious work incorporates large swathes of Blackwell’s earlier Albion Parade memoir, ‘Kit, Vic and Me’.
A keen amateur photographer and schoolboy swimming coach, Andy Blackwell lives with his mother just outside Hastings.
Albion Parade 