The interlocutors were Michael Lane (MFL), Paul Halstead (PH), Mel Giles (MCG), and John Barrett (JCB).
Peter, Paul & Glynis (et al.) (a Greek Peter, Paul & Mary)
MFL: Who were your friends there?
PH: When I started doing a PhD?
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There was a bunch of us in my year and the year after doing broadly similar things, I think all influenced by Andrew Sherratt. We were all basically looking at settlement patterns, and, when we could get ahold of them, bones and seeds, and trying to make sense of some region of Europe. So one very close friend throughout all of this was Peter Rowley-Conwy. We were both in Magdalen. We shared a room as undergraduates, so we've been close friends ever since. Other people who I spent a lot of time with, when I started out: Jim Lewthwaite, who's gone out of archaeology now, Fred Hamond ... a guy name Coinneagh MacLean, who's also gone out of archaeology....
MFL: Are these people who are wiser than you?
PH: Yeah, evidently!
[Laughter]
... Andy Garrard -- who's still in archaeology, in UCL [University College, London]. We all shared a house -- most of us -- that's why I pick on those people. But very quickly we dispersed abroad after that, so that we've had to pick these friendships up years later. The interesting thing about that first year of research is you're required to spend your first year in Cambridge, even if it's completely pointless. You spend your first year gearing up to do things, and when you get abroad you find you can't do any of them. The interesting thing historically was that Higgs started in our third year as undergraduates a seminar series called 'The Bio-Archaeologists', which -- as people under his wing -- we were invited to. When I started my PhD under David Clarke, I was no longer allowed to go.
MCG: You joined the wrong camp.
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PH: By 1973, the McBurney faction was somewhat on the wane; there weren't that many people wanting to do flint typology. It was Higgs ascendant, with David Clarke as a sort of nucleus attracting students.
MFL: Where did you hang out? We have O'Hagans, where we are now.
PH: I don't recall there being a very vibrant departmental life. There were pubs near where we lived. Our company was mostly archaeology post- grads, but we were also personal friends. There was not a 'departmental pub' that postgrads went to.
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In 1973-74, I went to the British School in Athens, which is like crossing a time warp in a way, because you go from an institution where the discussion of archaeological method and theory is de rigueur to one where it's considered rank bad manners.
[Laughter]
So that was quite an interesting transition. It's also a good thing, because you're basically surrounded by people who weren't brought up with the same myths you were brought up with. When you start talking in jargon, they immediately are suspicious. People start questioning what you are saying. In Cambridge, because you tend to hang out with like- minded people, and you speak the same sort of dialect, you aren't actually forced to confront potential illogicalities in what you're saying. So you meet a bunch of people simply don't share any of this, who don't share any common ground -- what you've been brought up with -- and you're forced to defend it. In the course of doing that, you realise that quite a lot of it doesn't extend very far beyond being a dialect. I think that was a very good experience.
MFL: That's why I find it important to get away from the academy occasionally: one can start talking in circles.
PH: The other thing is that, through spending a lot of time with people who are much more likely to have a really deep understanding of some group of material culture than to be at the forefront of current theoretical and methodological debate, you also realise, in the course of research, that those skills are very necessary. On the one hand you might feel that what they are doing is a bit brain-dead at times, but on the other, you might also appreciate that they have skills without which one cannot conduct one's grand design. So I think that was a very salutary experience.
MFL: Shall we do this chronologically...?
PH: That was when I first got interested in Greek music. My two closest friends, while I was out there in Athens, were two people doing PhDs: one studying Greek folk music and one studying Greek urban music -- rebetika. They started out having an academic interest, but through that, got interested in playing the music. We started a band then.
MCG: One of my first memories of Sheffield, after I applied to come here -- I was in sixth form -- was when my mum said, 'Oh, there's something on the radio! It's some Sheffield lecturers playing Greek folk music.' It was you and Glynis [PH's wife and lecturer in archaeology at Sheffield]!
MFL: Is it true you were on Radio 4?
PH: It's true, yes!
MCG: I heard that when I was still at school. It was my first contact with anyone from Sheffield.
PH: Did you really!? That's funny!
MFL: Tell us a bit about the band.
PH: We basically went around the tavernas in Athens, the four of us. We used to sit in the corner and play music. It was brilliant! We had a fantastic time. By 1977, when two of us came back [for fellowships], we had started getting offers of regular slots in places where they play traditional music. It was very tempting; it was not a clear-cut decision to come back and take up a fellowship!
MFL: Did this detract from your research?
PH: Yes, very much so.
MCG: Presumably, in learning those Greek folk songs, you were having contact with the language in a way that was unique -- a cultural language.
MFL: Glynis told me that you keep notebooks of Greek folk songs, and that one of the reasons you keep them is to learn dialect. Is that true?
PH: It's not true that I keep them to learn dialect. I used to keep them; I must still have them. There are loads of records of all these things. At the time, quite a lot of what we were singing we either heard live by old musicians or we got off of old tapes which weren't in the public domain. We used to sit around with recordings we'd made ourselves, or with recordings made by one or two aficionados, and we used to work the lyrics out. Or we used to get them off the people who made them.
MCG: Did you perceive that as almost an oral history?
PH: No, no, no.
MFL: You never told anyone you were an ethnomusicologist then?
PH: But I wasn't!
MCG: You did it for the hell of it.
PH: No, we did it because it was fun! Well, that's not quite true. The two guys who were doing PhDs had pretty serious academic reasons for doing it. My reason for wanting to know the lyrics was because I was the singer in the band, so I had to know them. Anyway, that was terrific! What was great about it was that we all, as it happened, lived in suburbs that had quite big populations of refugees from Turkey, from the 1922-23 population exchange. There were quite a lot of tiny little places with a few barrels on the wall and a few old men.
MFL: Which suburbs are we talking about?
PH: I lived in Kaiseriani. The others moved around.
MFL: Kaiseriani was 'hotbed' of communism at the time.
PH: Broadly speaking, the refugee suburbs were communist suburbs. The oldest men in the community were from Turkey. If you went into the little koutoukia [small taverns, often in a basement] where the old men drank, you could hear them tuning in to Ankara radio on some crappy old radio set.
MFL: Was there quite a vibrant political scene there as well, generally speaking?
PH: Well, that's a slightly different story. I went out there to start my research in October of 1974. The junta had fallen in July of 1974, and some time in the autumn of 1974 there was the referendum on whether Greece was going to have a king, and it was decided not. So 1974 was a fantastically exciting time to be in Greece. There were huge vast demonstrations, since after seven years in which people couldn't say anything at all, suddenly they were free to say what they wanted. Everybody sang in tavernas at night; everybody wanted to sing Theodorakis' songs, because they'd been banned. That was tremendously exciting, because one little group at one table would start up and everyone would join in, and the whole taverna would be singing these songs. So that's really what got us involved in the music. We were drawn into that because it was such an exciting place to be politically, but from that we drifted into the stuff that my two friends were researching. There were demonstrations that would take hours to pass, getting smoke-bombed and tear-gassed by a riot police that were not really under civilian control at that stage. When there were rallies of the United Left in Sindagma Square, you would have everybody who was anybody in serious Greek popular culture performing. In 1974, any serious contemporary musician was a communist.
MFL: Is it true that you played at a TAG [Theoretical Archaeological Group] conference?
PH: Yeah. When I came back in '77, our band broke up. Two of us came back. The first public TAG must have been the one in Sheffield in 1979; the second public TAG was in Southampton. (TAG started out as a Sheffield-Southampton thing, to which outsiders weren't invited.) Renfrew had the bright idea that our band should go and perform. The problem was that our band didn't exist anymore, and the other two members could not be persuaded to come out of retirement. Luckily, because Roddy Beaton, our lyra-violin player was teaching in Cambridge once a week that year, and because Pete Rowley-Conwy played bouzouki ... he hit on the bright idea of trying to teach Pete to play Greek tunes, and Glynis to play the drum. We had about two months to create a repertoire with two new members of the band. We just about managed to do it, and we performed in Southampton. That is why the new band was formed. It was down to Colin Renfrew. He's a very good singer!
MFL: Colin Renfrew is a very good singer?
PH: Yes, and he's also a very good linguist, so he can sing in Greek very plausibly.... We actually had him up singing on the stage at that TAG, and there were lots of Greek students who were leading the dancing, so it was great fun.
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