Folk and acoustic instrument specialists Hobgoblin Music, and distributor Gremlin Music Instrument Co. were founded in 1976 due to a series of family connections and happy accidents: ‘We'd both come from musical families, my wife Mannie and I, and through my cousin we came across a folk club in Southend-on-Sea and realised that was our kind of thing,’ explains Pete McClelland. ‘At this folk club we won a raffle and got an LP with all the currently touring artists, and we pretty much hunted those people down and went to listen to them all. One of them was a guy called Martyn Wyndham-Read who's based in Sussex. He'd been in Australia for quite a long time, gathering songs and singing, and he was back in England performing again.
‘We settled in Crawley and the only place we could find to stay turned out to be Martyn Wyndham-Read's family house, which was astonishing because we were in awe of their son, Martyn. In talking to him I said I liked instruments, and buying and selling things, and he said “well, the best way thing to do is to go to a market and offer what it is that you want to find, because whatever you put on your stall, people will come and offer you that back.” He wasn't wrong – we went to Burgess Hill market and people would bring supermarket trolleys full of instruments, gramophones, 78s, anything. It worked an absolute treat!
‘Someone brought to the market a couple of handmade musical instruments: an Appalachian dulcimer and a crwth, which is a Welsh stringed instrument. One of them had the maker's name still in it, he'd thrown it in a dustbin in Brighton. We went to visit him and became great friends, and together we designed a range of bouzoukis and mandolins. He was already making guitars, so we also got into instrument-making – all of it through this long string of connections. Winning that record led us fairly directly to this outcome.’
Stall to shop
In 1977 Hobgoblin Music moved into a shop in Crawley, in 1992 they opened a second branch in London, and since then in Bristol, Leeds, Manchester, Wadebridge, Birmingham, Canterbury, Brighton, and the newest shop, in Southampton, opened in 2015. But now it's all change at the distributors: Gremlin Musical Instrument Co. is to merge with Soar Valley Music to become Gremlin SV.
‘We've long known David Ledsam who owns Soar Valley Music,’ McClelland explains. ‘We used to be head-on competition actually, but over the years we've got heavily into designing and getting fretted instruments made, and he's settled down into being a specialist in percussion. We've crossed paths lots and lots of times, and we're getting older, David and I, and it seemed a very good idea to join forces. We're all quite enthused with the change.’
Ledsam himself picks up the story: ‘My background for the last 25 years has been in world percussion. We discovered back in the 90s that African and samba percussion was ideal for students of any age, any ability, and any disability to get into. We developed a series of instruments which were suitable for all key stages, working with educational distributors, but also with teachers and people who were delivering workshops: we bring in specialist percussionists from Africa or Ireland to teach the teachers effectively how to move large projects forward.
For instance, we did a huge project with Inspire-works and filled the Royal Albert Hall with our samba instruments, which was one of the highlights of Soar Valley's career and certainly the sort of thing we wish to continue with Gremlin. Then there was the Barnsley project which was done in conjunction with a retail store and a local samba band. The main arts-funded secondary school did an outreach project to 18 primary schools, and we brought them all in for the weekend and ended up with a 400-player carnival, a project which I believe is still going on in that area – it's been taken on by the local samba teacher.’
The dual advantages of the link-up with Gremlin, for Ledsam, are the increases to the offering and the reach of the company. ‘Gremlin have some very good lines in terms of educational strings – they can bring in violins, ukuleles and things like that, which of course are very important for schools to get kids into learning music. They do it for the right price and to the right quality, so that's something that I'm very excited about.’ With shops UK-wide and a vast hire-stock of instruments, he continues: ‘Putting the two companies together means it's much easier to deliver what we're doing nationwide.’
Optimism pours liberally from McClelland and Ledsam, and it's easy to get swept up in their excitement, but the usual fly stubbornly pollutes the proverbial ointment: ‘It's a privilege to be working with Pete and the team,’ says Ledsam, ‘It's going to be a lot of fun. Let's just hope we get a little bit more funding in the education system, because that's really all that anybody's talking about at the moment.
‘Having said that,’ he goes on with a smile, ‘there is still demand for musical instruments, and we're in a position to fulfil that!’
