WHITE ON BLACK
I saw White on Black perform three times around 1972/1973/1974. The first two times were in a folk club in Salisbury, Wiltshire and the other time was in a pub in a village, a few miles to the south west of Taunton, Somerset. It was at the pub in Somerset, which I am reasonably sure was the 'White Horse Inn' at Bradford on Tone, that I purchased their LP and which they autographed for me.
They mainly performed covers of songs by other artists. Most of the songs on the LP would be well known to most people, except perhaps for Bramble Cottage, which is also a lovely song. The photo below is not taken from my original LP cover and there in itself is a story - read the text below the photos to hear it.
In 1976 I moved to Swindon in Wiltshire, where I lived for five years. During that time I was burgled and the main thing that got taken was my (uninsured) record collection. It took me more than twenty years to replace all my original collection, most of it obviously being bought on CD the second time around.
However I never ever came across a replacement for my White on Black LP. With the advent of the new Millennium I'd almost given up hope of ever finding it. It wasn't owning the record I missed, but not being able to listen to the charming locally accented vocals, that this little group used to deliver the lyrics.
The tracks were Country roads / Snowbird / Big yellow taxi / Scarborough fair / Bitter green / Meet me on the corner / Carey / Nowhere man / Bramble cottage / Together forever / Norwegian wood / I don't know how to love him.
I searched the internet, in vain. Not only were there no CDs, but I couldn't even find a mention of the band. In fact I couldn't even remember if they were 'White on Black' or 'Black on White'. Obviously when your search criteria are the words 'White' & 'Black' you get 100,000 of hits. So I tried to refine my search by adding words like Folk, Bristol, Avon, Glos. etc., but to no avail. Then one day in July 2002, I was hunting around eBay and just on the off chance, I typed in 'White Black LP' and low and behold there was my missing album. Of course I was checking eBay every few minutes toward the end of the auction, terrified that I would be outbid at the last moment. Thankfully that didn't happen.
My next problem is that I live in Singapore and I don't know anyone here who has a record deck. So I had the record delivered to my friend Dave who lives in Croydon. Dave has already scanned the cover as best he could (yes LPs are bigger than most people's home scanners) and emailed it to me about an hour ago. I notice that this is also a signed copy and I was wondering if it was .....
No I'm just joking, I imagine that every copy they sold ended up being a signed copy, since I imagine their gigs were the main outlet for sales. Hopefully Dave will have the LP taped and in the post to me in the next few days. Then I will again be able to listen to the sad tale of Bill and Molly being evicted from Bramble Cottage, not to mention a lovely West country accent weaving it's way through Carey.
Since 'White on Black' gave me so much pleasure, I think they at least deserve a mention on the internet and this is my contribution to that.
White on Black were Sue Franklin, Jon Knowler and Suzi Lawrence. The LP was issued on the SayDisc label who were located at Badmington, Gloucestershire, England.
The tape arrived a few days later. There were a few pops, crackles and some tape hiss. So I fed it into my computer, did some playing around with Cool Edit and burnt it out to audio CD. It is so nice to once again be able to listen to White on Black, whenever I wish.
Many thanks to Terry Hickman for this picture of White on Black
Terry mentions that this was taken at their last ever public performance