With a passionate interest in early music, Vic Briggs initially trained as an instrument maker, focusing mainly on reproducing medieval and pre-medieval instruments. The seeds of his maverick nature were sown when, for an end of year college assignment, he presented a pair of flint bongos to the examining board and was asked to leave the course.

Keen to move into performing, Briggs teamed up with singer Kit Hamdy to form Albion Parade in 1969. Hamdy, a stalwart of the UK folk circuit and former member of Badger’s Ladder, handled vocals and guitar. This left Briggs free to experiment with his early instruments; hurdy-gurdy, sackbutt and an instrument of his own invention, the boghorn, a bizarre construction of horse stomach, hazel-wood and pigs knuckles.

They toured relentlessly and their first record, an album of fourteenth-century ploughing ballads was released on their own label, Pigswill Records. The album soon attracted the attention of fellow musicians, Fairport Convention’s Dave Swarbrick commenting at the time, “These were songs that hadn’t been heard for about six hundred years. And when you listen to the album you really get a sense of why that was.”

By the time they recorded their second album, ‘Two Men In A Haystack’, tensions were beginning to grow, with Kit Hamdy, tired of the constraints of the purist folk community, keen to move in a more mainstream gypsy-blues direction. Vic Briggs, however, remained resolutely rooted to the past (his one concession to the modern age being a taste for ‘Mellow Birds’ coffee powder) and further creative tensions led Hamdy to quit the band in 1973.

Having dealt with the aftermath of the break-up, Briggs went on to record several sessions; appearing uncredited, and often uninvited, on other people’s albums. Sadly, as fashions changed, demand for his boghorn sound soon waned and he drifted from public view. There were rumours he worked for some time at a model village in Hertfordshire but despite unconfirmed sightings and an inconclusive Polaroid, his current whereabouts remain unknown.

To sit beneath the silver stars
And watch the firelight flicker
To rise at dawn and walk unclothed
Through golden fields of wicker

from ‘Fields Of Wicker’, Albion Parade

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