“It’s a beautiful band to play with at the moment”

What Steven asked Rob Shepherd and Chris Allen of legendary Medway band The Singing Loins.

The Singing Loins, in one form or another, have been a mainstay of the Medway sound for over 40 years. Steven met the two longest-serving members, Rob Shepherd and Chris Allen, in the Nags Head in Rochester. Over several pints, they talked about how Chris Broderick brought the band together, what makes something a Loins song, the next generation of Medway music, and lots more.

The Singing Loins. Chris Allen is on the left, and Rob Shepherd is second left.

Who currently is in the Singing Loins?
Chris: Oh god.
Rob: It's me on banjo, mandolin and an occasional accordion. Chris on vocals and acoustic guitar.
Chris: 12-string guitar.
Rob: Chris’s boy Oli on electric guitar.
Chris: Richard Moore is the fiddle player.
Rob: And Chris Grenfell on drums.

When I've seen the Singing Loins, your son has been on drums?
Chris: Yeah, when we play with Billy (Childish), he plays the drum.

What happens with the drummer on those nights?
Chris: He just doesn't turn up. We started the thing with Billy before we had the drummer.
Rob: We've also started calling the thing with Billy the North Kent Folkways Revival, which is to differentiate. Well, Billy called it that. We didn't have a lot of say.

When were the Singing Loins formed?
Rob: Over to you.
Chris: It's a long time ago, but I think around ‘92.

Who was in the band then?
Chris: Well, initially, it was just me and Chris Broderick, who passed away a few years ago. To go back, he was always chasing the deal. He was a writer, and he wanted to be a famous writer. He did get signed by one of the big labels. He was always doing something. He had a manager. Chris was always putting bands together and trying to get deals. He had one, and their bass player left before they went on a short tour. He asked me to join on bass. I couldn't play bass, but...

What band was that?
Chris: Dumbfounded, it was called.
Rob: Who were a great band. They were a great band, and another member of the band was Glenn Barnes.
Chris: Oh, Glenn Barnes, who was a local musician.
Rob: His sister's my wife. She would take me to see them.
Chris: And so, things were supposed to be happening, but they didn't happen, and it all just sort of collapsed, and then we didn't really see each other for a while. One night, I had a knock on my door, and it was Chris Broderick. He said, ‘I’ve got this idea, do you want to have a listen?’ It went from there. He had the words and the melody to ‘Hauling in the Slack’, our very first song. We used that as a blueprint.

How many members of the band have there been? Can you remember?
Chris: Oh, god. Quite a lot. I’ll try to jot it up.
Rob: The first album was you and Broderick. And then Chris left for a bit and Glenn Barnes was in, and that took them up to the second album. Then Chris came back halfway through the second album.
Chris: Half of it is mine and half is Glenn's music.
Rob: When Chris came back, Glenn would play occasional stuff.
Chris: Then we had a Scottish friend of mine who started playing banjo mandolin. Then we got a couple of girls in that Chris met, who would play tambourine and dance. Who else?
Rob: That took you up until you split up in what, 1997?
Chris: Yeah, we split up in like ‘96, acrimoniously. Then we got back together, and Chris had been writing with Rob doing other stuff.
Rob: There were quite a few years there, wasn't there?
Chris: Yeah, there was a heck of a lot of years.
Rob: About ‘99, I started writing with Broderick. We wrote musicals and things like that.
Chris: I knew Rob from seeing him around, but that's when I knew he was doing stuff with Chris. We were doing a recording and wanted Rob to join, but he said he didn't want to join at the time (laughs), although he did play on the album.
Rob: (laughs) I wanted to write my own stuff. But then the second time they asked me, I went ‘alright.’
We've still got 20 years.
Rob: Oh yeah.
Chris: It's mad. 2004, I can't remember. We just sort of plodded.
Rob: There was the three of us, and then John Forrester came in on bass.
Chris: Before that, we'd done a lot of stuff locally. We'd done stuff with Billy around Europe, but as the Loins, we hadn’t travelled. We started going to Germany and Serbia. It picked up. It was a good combination of people, and we’d have a right laugh.

Has stayed the music stayed the same? Or is it different?
Rob: It started as really acoustic, but towards our end, we were quite all over the place, in a good way.
Chris: Yeah, initially it was me on the twelve-string and Chris singing. He banged the tambourine and banged a stick. It was like that for years, and deliberately so, deliberately luddite. Not least because when we were working with Billy, he wouldn’t let us (laughs). When we stopped working with Billy, we started introducing a few more sounds when we recorded. Then as it went on, obviously we got Rob in, and he was always adding stuff to it. It just progressed…
Rob: It did feel natural.
Chris: Oh yeah, you need to do that, otherwise you aren’t progressing.

How would you describe the band today?
Rob: Oh, crikey.
Chris: Oh, bloody hell.
Rob: Well, we've jumped a few years. 2013, we split up. Broderick wanted to end the band. That happened for four years. Then Broderick got in touch with us two and said, ‘I want to make another album.’
Chris: Was that the 13 Moon songs? We hadn't been working with Broderick, we were just working on our own stuff. The weird thing is we both write music and songs, and we didn't write any different, but it wasn’t a Loins song. Somehow, giving it to Broderick for the lyrics made it a Loins song. We were doing synth stuff and all sorts, and to our surprise, when Chris heard it, he liked them.
Rob: That was 2019, and then we went our own ways again. Chris died in 2022, and us two got up at his funeral and sung an old Loins song. Since then, there was a lot of people saying it would be great if we would do an evening of Loins Songs. So we did, and we'd get Oli in just to do percussion, and then Billy wanted to do some things in memory of Chris and the three of us joined him. Billy already knew Richard on fiddle. He brought him in, and Richard then joined us in the Loins as well and then finally, Chris Grenfell came in on drums. That brings us up to date.
Chris: Broderick was a larger-than-life character and a brilliant performer, very theatrical, and so that's difficult to follow. I think we tried to do it the same as it was, and it just didn't really work. It felt like it couldn't. Then we thought, well, we've got Richard, we've switched Oli on to electric guitar, and it’s the Loins songs, but it's a bigger sound.