Beggars' Hill - Welcome                  Welcome to Beggars' Hill   The Group   Planning and Rehearsals   Recording the Album   Producing the Records   Songs   Photos   Reviews   After Beggars' Hill   Before Beggars' Hill: .......... Flyntlocke .......... King Bill Folk Club   What's new on the website?   Acknowledgements   Contact us by email   Interesting emails   Wrong website? If you are looking for the other Beggars Hill group, which started in 2001 at Gdynia in Poland, click here.         BEGGARS' HILL  This is the story of the Beggars' Hill folk-rock album from 1976 which is now much sought-after by collectors of vinyl records. In 2010 it was professionally restored and officially released on CD for the first time by Talking Elephant Records.       Welcome to Beggars' Hill Welcome to our website. As you're reading this, I guess you're probably a member of the group, or friend or family. Or maybe you're a stranger who's arrived here by following some obscure search on the internet. Well, whatever the reason, this is the story of a record which seems to have taken on a life of its own, many years after the group which produced it had split away in different directions. Back in the 1970s, we started as a group of friends from school and youth club who found a common interest in making music. Over the next few years we played in clubs, pubs, church halls and the local technical college. Our standards of musicianship steadily improved to the point where I felt we could make a record of fair quality, so I started investigating how this could be done. There was no record company involved, so we had to do it all ourselves. Even worse, as it was my mad idea, I had to arrange everything and to pay for it! About a year later, we had 500 copies of our 12-inch vinyl album to sell at our gigs. Unfortunately this time delay came when most of the group were moving away from the area, mainly due to jobs or marriage, and we were scattered all around the country. It was not possible to promote the album, and the group faded away. We had all moved on in our lives, which had taken off in different directions. So that should have been the end, shouldn't it? Well that's what we thought. However, many years later, strange things started happening. It seemed that our album was becoming popular with record collectors, especially in Germany and Japan, apparently. The album was spotted for sale for £250 in a specialist record shop. I had phone calls from a collector in Germany and from a U.K. record dealer. It was offered for sale on eBay at crazy prices. It is now listed in specialist internet sites, blogs, books and magazines. Following a reunion in 2003, I began to realise that this had been a big event in our lives, and something which our children found interesting, now that they were young adults themselves. So I started trying to copy the music and photos. Remember, all the recordings and photos were made before the digital age. Personal computers, compact discs, digital cameras, DVDs, MP3 players - none of these had been invented back in 1976. Our music was on vinyl and cassettes, and our photos were prints (and over the years the colour photos had turned a horrible shade of orange). So they all needed converting to digital form and then cleaning up to a presentable standard. So here is our website, recording it all for posterity .............. and anyone else who may be interested!         Dave Frohnsdorff (bass) & Pete Roberts (drums) in the recording studio      JM Davis (dulcimer) rehearsing at home      Chris Walker (acoustic guitar) in the recording studio