Folk Duo Make ‘Mischief,’ Music Together

The first meeting of singer/songwriter Clive Gregson and singer Christine Collister was less than auspicious.

“It was in a folk club in Manchester (England) in 1984,” recalled Gregson, 33, by phone from Vancouver, where the pair recently began their first North American tour. (They play at McCabe’s tonight.)

“I was up for a weekend visiting my parents and I went with some friends to a club where Christine was singing,” he continued. “I thought she was amazing, so afterwards I bothered her. The immortal line was, ‘I think I could do something for you.’ ”

Collister, 26, laughs when reminded of the incident. “I don’t know if those are the exact words he used,” she said. “I think I was trying to buy a drink at the time and said, ‘I’ll talk to you later.’ It happened to me quite a lot. I had quite a few approaches like that.”

But the petite, husky-voiced Collister did consent to meet the balding, bespectacled Gregson a couple of days later, and a partnership--and eventually a romance--was begun.

“Clive talked a lot of sense and it clicked,” explained Collister, a native of the Isle of Man who had performed as a solo acoustic act throughout the British Isles and Europe before meeting Gregson.

Click it did. Gregson had just dissolved his band Any Trouble, which had released four fine but commercially unsuccessful albums between 1980 and 1984 and had so many business problems that it might have better been named Every Trouble.

With that behind him, Gregson set right to overseeing Collister’s career.

“The idea was I was kind of disenchanted with pop music,” said Gregson, a skilled musician and rich-voiced singer. “So the first thing I did was record a solo album (1985’s ‘Strange Persuasion’). The idea was that would be my last thing as a performer.”

But then the two were drafted into recording and touring with Gregson’s friend and hero Richard Thompson. At the same time they began to develop their own acoustic act, quickly establishing themselves as a prime attraction on the British folk-club scene. Readers of the English magazine Folk Roots voted them best live act of 1987 and named Collister the year’s top female vocalist. And “Mischief,” the pair’s first real album together, recently topped the same publication’s folk-oriented sales chart (though the songs are not truly folk, instead reflecting the English rock and American soul Gregson loved while growing up in Manchester).

On this side of the Atlantic, though, the two are relatively unknown. Besides the four Any Trouble albums, the only work by either that has been readily available to American audiences is Collister’s recording of “Warm Love Gone Cold,” which turned up as the theme to the BBC miniseries “The Life and Loves of a She-Devil,” which aired here on the Arts & Entertainment cable network. (“Home and Away,” originally a cassette-only recording of mostly live performances, is due to be released soon by the Chicago-based Flying Fish label.)

But the connection with Richard Thompson--whose following is rabid, if not massive--gives Gregson and Collister a foothold here.

“I think if people had seen us with Richard, they’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what we do,” said Gregson--though Collister countered that she doesn’t see many similarities between Gregson’s and Thompson’s songwriting.

One common element, though, is that both Gregson and Thompson often write about the dark side of love. But Gregson and Collister caution that people should refrain from drawing any parallels between their relationship and the ill-fated marriage and musical partnership of Richard and Linda Thompson, who divorced in 1983.

“We get along pretty well,” Gregson said. “But to be fair with Richard and Linda, when they played together it was a romantic thing that developed into a musical thing and that was hard to maintain. We got together as a musical entity before anything else, really.”

Concurred Collister, “I’m nothing like Linda and Clive is nothing like Richard. The fact that we’re male and female is the only comparison you could make. We get along fine. I don’t see any disasters in the wind.”