The 50th anniversary of the death of Adge Cutler was recently marked. reflects on the life of the much-loved West Country folk hero
Late on the evening of Saturday May 4, 1974: Adge Cutler and The Wurzels had just completed a successful week-long run at the Crystal Room, Hereford, and the band were looking forward to some time off.
Tommy Banner, Tony Baylis and Pete Budd all left to drive home, while Adge Cutler remained a little longer to sort out the group’s money with the management and discuss possible future engagements.
Adge Cutler and The Wurzels had been going, with slight changes of line-up, since 1966, and while The Wurzels have since become a household name nationally, they were not particularly famous in 1974 …
… Except in the West Country of course. They were big around here. Drink Up Thy Zider had not made much impression on the UK charts, but it was already an unofficial national anthem of Somerset.
Other songs – When The Common Market Comes To Stanton Drew, the suggestive My Threshing Machine and the equally risqué Twice Daily, not to mention Don’t Tell I, Tell ‘Ee, Aloha Severn Beach, Champion Dung Spreader, and Thee’s Got’n Where Thee Cassn’t Back’n, Hassn’t? – were hugely popular in the region.
If the band had not made the big time yet, they were getting plenty of work.
Look at newspapers from the time and you’ll find they were working pubs, clubs, theatres and other venues most nights of the week. These lads worked hard.
Adge Cutler himself wasn’t going to get much rest.
He would drive home down the Wye Valley to the home he shared with his wife Yvonne at Tickenham, but could only expect a few hours’ sleep.
Later the following day he was due in a meeting about various business prospects, including a possible TV programme to be broadcast in Canada.
At 4.10am that Sunday morning, 25-year-old quantity surveyor Michael Kelly had just left the M4 at the Newhouse roundabout in his Ford Capri, and was starting to head up the A466 for the Wye Valley when he saw a white MGB coming in the opposite direction.
It was being driven at something between 30 and 40mph, he later said – nothing excessive.
“My offside window was open,” he later told police, “and just after the sports car passed me I heard a squeal of brakes and a squeal of skidding tyres.”
Adge Cutler’s car had hit a triangular traffic island on the approach to the roundabout. It must have spun in the air three times before coming back to rest on its wheels.
Mr Kelly slammed on his brakes and turned back to help.
He found the driver of the MG had been thrown from the car and was now trapped under the rear nearside wheel, face downwards.
He tried to push the car off the driver, but could not move it. Others arrived on the scene and went to call the police and an ambulance.
Help was there in less than 15 minutes, but it was no use. Alan John Cutler had passed.
The inquest was told that he had been over the legal alcohol limit, but was not drunk.
More likely what had killed him was – falling asleep at the wheel.
He had only recently got his car back from being repaired following another accident on the M4 which occurred after he had dozed off.
And so the West Country lost one of its most distinctive and charismatic personalities.
To most, he was the guy who wrote crowd-pleasing stompalong songs about cider and agriculture and Bristol – Scrumpy and Western, as the title of a 1967 record had it – but there was more to him than that. lan John – AJ, hence “Adge” – had been born in Portishead in 1931, though much of his life had been in Nailsea.
He had had a varied career, as, perhaps was more normal than one might think for those days. Left school at 14, National Service, assorted jobs in the building trade, a spell in Spain (he became fluent in Spanish and returned several times), later drifting towards Bristol showbiz, worked for Acker Bilk …
And he had an idea, more of a bee in his bonnet, really … When he was a young man, singalongs around the piano at the pub and parties were very popular.
The problem, as Adge saw it, was that in pubs in Bristol and north Somerset they were all singing raucous party anthems like Knees Up Mother Brown or Roll Out the Barrel – which was fine if you were in the East End of London, but not so good for Nailsea.
Hence Adge Cutler and The Wurzels, hence all those songs which played to authentic West Country themes, and
Awhich you could yell along with the chorus to heart’s content.
No beard-stroking World Music fan would ever take this stuff seriously, but that’s exactly what it is. People throng to the WOMAD festival to hear musicians from around the world singing songs which are often about the everyday trials and joys of ordinary folk, often from rural settings. Adge Cutler and The Wurzels were the equally authentic voice and humour of the ordinary peasant folk of, well, Nailsea and thereabouts.
If the big time evaded them, it was a decent enough living, and Adge Cutler was a shrewd and careful businessman. Besides, it looked as though real success on the national stage was just around the corner.
In his book Adge: King of The Wurzels (Bristol Books, 2012), former Western Daily Press journalist John Hudson explains how the band’s manager John Miles dissuaded the others from disbanding after the tragedy.
He told them that if they announced they were splitting up, that would be irrevocable. If they stayed together and found it didn’t work out, they could always go their separate ways later.
In a meeting on the Monday after the accident he persuaded them to stay together in honour of Adge’s memory, and that if they did, they would have a UK Number One hit within five years.
They did it in two. Combine Harvester, released in May 1976 did indeed reach Number One, and it’s likely that most people who remember it think it must have been an Adge Cutler and/or Wurzels’ composition. In fact it’s nothing of the kind; it was written by Irish comedian and singer Brendan Grace – it goes without saying that agricultural humour is big in Ireland, too – as a spoof of American singer/songwriter Melanie’s 1971 hit Brand New Key.
The Wurzels followed up this success a few months later with another chart-topper, am a Cider Drinker.
The rest is history. The Wurzels have been local, indeed national, treasures, for decades now.
A string of chart hits, several appearances at Glastonbury Festival and the semi-official bards of Bristol City FC.
They’re not quite a novelty act, but nor are they likely to be discussed with beard-stroking intensity by Serious Music Buffs. With The Wurzels, what you sees is what you gets.
But it all started with a bloke from Nailsea who thought that they could have better singalongs down the Royal Oak pub – where there is now a bronze statue of him – than My Old Man Said Follow the Van.
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