Keith Clark talks to Dave Sharp about his new band, which has been inspired by the music of Woody Guthrie, and is playing the Trowbridge Village Pump Festival

In the 1940s, Woody Guthrie sang:
"I've been havin' some hard travelin', hard ramblin', hard gamblin', I've been havin' some hard travelin', Lord"

Ever since punk-rooted band The Alarm acrimoniously split in 1991, guitarist Dave Sharp has also been doing his fair share of "hard travelin'" on both sides of the Atlantic.

And it is to the music of Woody Guthrie that he has turned with brand new project, The Hard Travelers, a band dedicated to celebrating the music and the life of the dustbowl troubadour who died in 1967.
"The point when I first heard Woody Guthrie it felt as if it was already inside of me," he said. "I'm not sure when that point was but I felt I had almost had Woody's songs in me before I even started."

If a punk musician from The Alarm and Stiff Little Fingers playing the songs of one of the seminal figures in folk music is a little unexpected, then so is the band of high-profile musicians who have formed around him.

There's Henry McCullough from the Grease and Wings and the keyboardist Zoot Money of the Big Roll Band.
Add to this Gary Fletcher from the Blues Band and drummer Colin Allen who has played with almost everyone including Focus, John Mayall's Bluesbreakers, Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan's band, and you have an eclectic bunch of musicians.

"I think that the wonderful thing about Guthrie is that he lends himself to so many different interpretations but I think the sad thing is that so far a lot of people have understood Guthrie in only one light," said Sharp with the passion that typifies this man.

"Guthrie is not an exclusive spirit, he is an inclusive spirit and I think the spirit of Woody Guthrie has been there through Woodstock, through punk rock, through glam rock, through grunge, through rave and back and then back again. I think that Woody Guthrie was the original punk. What we are trying to do with Hard Travelers is not try to define Guthrie. So many people have tried to define him and every time that's happened it hasn't hit me right. I don't think it has hit anybody right. What we're trying to do is... well, we ain't trying to do nothin', you will have to take us as you find us," he added with a laugh.

Prior to the decision to form a band to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Woody Guthrie's death and try to bring his music to a new audience who perhaps had not come under the iconic songwriter's spell, Sharp had never met the other musicians.
Of course, he knew them by reputation.

"We had all been aware of each other because we were all part of music, we're all fans, but as far as I was concerned these were all people I'd read about in the newspapers.
"One by one, as Noah discovered the animals coming into the ark, I think we realised that we loved Woody Guthrie's songs and that we all had this within us. When it became evident that it was Woody's 40th anniversary since passing, we were all thrown together by a mutual party, by somebody with a bit of wisdom who realised that there was something going on here."

The band did their first gig in January and the general consensus of opinion was that something rather special was being forged.
After the Alarm split up, Dave Sharp, who had become seriously disillusioned with the music scene in the UK, decided to move to the States and follow the trail of Woody Guthrie.

"I knew that I could either hang around the UK and be negative or get off my backside and do something positive. I decided to follow my instincts and go make some music and go be happy."

Within a year his first album had been recorded and released, produced by Bob Johnson who'd worked with Dylan and Leonard Cohen. The album was called Hard Travellin'. And, in 1991, he was invited to perform at the Woody Guthrie 80th anniversary concert in Central Park, New York, where he met Guthrie's sister Nora, and the songwriter's manager and friend Harold Leventhal.

For 10 years he toured as an acoustic performer, becoming friends with long time heroes such as Willie Nelson and Johnny Cash, both of whom have appeared on his widely acclaimed solo albums.
"A little Limey from Salford, I found myself on a global stage, meeting like-minded people who had wisdom beyond what I could even imagine. I was fortunate enough to accept that there was wisdom beyond what I know but I am an optimistic person and if you can act on your belief then wonderful things can happen."

In 2002, however, he decided to return to Britain and begin touring as a solo performer before forming the band The Soul Company.
But always alongside him of every project there was the spirit of Woody Guthrie and, eventually, The Hard Travelers wre formed.
"You know, we're a bit like The Band but instead of Bob Dylan we've got Woody Guthrie. We are just the band and we don't have a lead singer, all we have got is his spirit.
"The spirit of Woody Guthrie never dies, you know. "

Western Daily Express