GAY AND TERRY WOODS

Gay met Terry Woods as a teenager when the young guitarist came to her parents house to play music with her brothers. They married and Terry became part of 'Sweeney's Men' an Irish band that caused a furore at the 1968 Cambridge Folk Festival with their electric sound. The following year both of them joined Steeleye Span and later The Woods Band but despite two well-received albums, husband and wife were back in Ireland by the end of 1971. Gay, inspired by her early recordings, began to write seriously for the first time whilst still pursuing the idea of living in a rural retreat.

Having been on the road, when we got home I said I wanted to live in a cottage in the country, so we found one. That's all we did until  I started writing songs.It was the emergence of my expression and how I felt about the seasons like 'Winter Poem' on 'Backwoods' which is one of my favourites. I was really impressed by living in a cottage, a gamekeepers lodge beside a lake. It was a beautiful place. There was nobody there and everyone thought we were mad living there, which of course we were but it just started to inspire me and we loved it. Then all of a sudden it seemed like it was "she's a songwriter" and that was the way it all came out. All of a sudden we got a manager, he was very good and got us a deal with Polygram and a publishing deal and then l  we had committments to write songs. All the albums were recorded in England I think. We had a three or four deal package with them.Now they won't let the tapes out ! We used to just go to Holland though and places like that to play. It wasn't until about 1979 that we did a folk club tour in England.We had various people playing with us every now and again but it never worked out. It always got back down to the two of us which I didn't really like because I got so weary of it all. By 1979 I had had enough of the lifestyle and the whole of the background - all the other stuff that was played on the radio had changed, there was a whole new world of music. We had got quite a bit of airplay in Ireland and had become quite famous and one or two of ours could have been hits but for me it just wasn't enough. I was fed up doing it. The following year we were going to do another record and I met Trevor Knight and said "I have had enough of this folky music, I want to play something different." Then of course, there were rows with Terry because he didn't want to do it but he did try. I just think he had had enough to - so that was when we split up. I went after  Trevor who was a keyboard player with a jazz/rock band . I did actually play three gigs with them. They were called 'Dirty Harry'. One of the gigs, in a club, I got up and sang one of my songs and got such a great applause and said to myself "Oooh, I think its time I sang with a band...." .

Terry Woods

Gay Woods

photographs courtesy Record Collector.