Both records brought mainly covers of quite unknown blues- or folksongs, sometimes you hear a reggae or a south-american jive or other 'exotic' styles.
In the meantime Croker along to the Shadows had another project running with an old pal: Steve Philiips, who didn't only play the guitars built build them too.
This was the basis for the later Notting Hillbillies.
Through Philips, who had been befriended with Mark Knopfler for some years, he got in contact with Knopfler, with whom he had already jammed around Leeds before. 
Mark Knopfler got interested in Brendan Croker's music and wanted to assist the duo. To the sessions he brought along Guy Fletcher, who played keyboard and guitar with Dire Straits.
Through Knopfler Croker got contact with London musicians as well. He had been playing with the Mekons before as well as on Tanita Tikaram's debut LP, where he sang on 'He likes the sun'. For the British TV-series 'On The Big Hill' (about the climbing of Mount Everest) he wrote the soundtrack - with Guy Fletcher.
His third album 'Brendan Croker and the 5 O'Clock Shadows' was produced by John Porter. Croker was the first artist to be signed by Silvertone, Andrew Lauder's label. 
On this album Croker is joined by Mark Knopfler and Guy Fletcher from Dire Straits, Eric Clapton, Tanita Tikaram and others. There were 2 Shadows left: Mark Creswell and Marcus Cliffe. 
(Both were jazz musicians, who had studied at the Leeds College of Music.) Now the music is much more polished, the edges are gone.

Until now Brendan Croker was relatively unknown. This changed when in 1990 the first Notting Hillbillies album was published: 'Missing ... Presumed Having A Good Time'. 
This was a Croker album too, some songs were sung by him, but he plays on all of them. The album sold quite well and was followed by a 6 weeks tour through the UK.

After a short intermission the 4th Shadows album was released: 'The Great Indoors'. It was released together with Dire Straits opus: On Every Street.
It remained in the that shadow and was hardly noticed.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

"… his marvellous voice; sometimes a howling Blues shout and other times a husky, gentle roll your own …
Don’t be deceived by the determinedly uncomplicated Croker … he's got deep roots…"
- Mark Knopfler.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Independent, London, April 15

Brendan Croker Is a Genius
But will we ever give him the acclaim he deserves? Acknowledged as a world-class songwriter, admired by Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler, "Britain's Ry Cooder" speaks to William Whiteside about his eccentric career and his homage to Hank Williams;
I first met Brendan Croker three years ago, on a mutual friend's stag night in a small town just outside Mexico City. The latter stages of the evening have mercifully passed into oblivion, thoughtI do remember him steering the groom's father - an OAP with an artificial leg, who had never previously travelled outside the UK - into a vile-looking cantina, with the words "Did you ever have cocaine, Herry, when you were in the army?"
Once inside the bar, whose facilities included urinals that had been installed but never plumbed in, our party's arrival excited a lively response from the regulars, who engaged us in friendly conversation for a couple of hours. Then - influenced, perhaps, by the torrent of Victoria beer and mescal - the atmosphere took on a character of mounting hostility, which became unmistakable even to the more exhilarated foreign visitor when our one fluent Spanish speaker began to interpret phrases such as "knife fight."
At the height of our unease a guitar appeared in the way that they do - seemingly by magic - in Elvis Presley musicals. Croker picked it up and sang them Hank Williams's "Your Cheatin' Heart." It was a high-risk strategy, but within the first few bars of the song - which he followed with the Jim Reeve number "He'll Have to Go" - I could sense a second volte-face by our fellow-drinkers, this time from psychotic loathing to a kind of transfixed awe. We then left immediately, our would-be assassins' leader discreetly pressing an unsolicited packet of hashish into the singer's hand on the way out.
"I'm really glad we went in there," Croker told me, out in the street.
"Mexico - what a fine country. What a busy people."
First impressions can be misleading, of course, but the incident illustrates a number of Brendan Croker's qualities, not least his convivial nature, his fondness for adventure, and the emotional power of a singing voice that has an affecting combination of roughness and sensitivity.
The term "maverick" miht have been invented for Croker. Over the past 15 years, he has produced a number of breathtaking rhythm and blue and country-influenced recordings, and is admired by such figures as Eric Clapton, John Mayall, and his frequent collaborator Mark Knopfler.
"He is a world-class songwriter," says his long-term ally Andy Kershaw, "and a tremendous singer. I have always thought of him as a British Ry Cooder. He has one of those rare voices that sound almost black. If Brendan Croker had surfaced in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in 1969 instead of Yorkshire in 1979, he'd have made a bigger impact than he has."
I met up with Croker again earlier this week in the bar area of a Pizza Express in central London. The arrival of the 45-year-old, with shaven head, diamond ear-studs and tattooed forearms, seemed to inspire - as it usually does - a certain foreboding among our fellow customers.
He had come to talk about Dying to Sing, his week-long series of concerts at the Twelve Bar Club, Tottenham Court Road, dedicated to the work of dead pop artists. But Croker, who is uninterviewable in any normal sense and appears bored by talking about his own work, was soon reminiscing about the problems currently besetting an impoverished earl who, he says, accompanies him on woodpigeon shoots at home in Yorkshire.
"As I told him," Croker boomed at one point, "what do you expect if you turn up outside the door of every woman on your estate demanding droit de seigneur?"
The Twelve Bar project - at which Croker, with a varied supporting cast of musicians, will perform the work of dead stars including Kurt Cobain, Bob Ma rley and Vivian Stanshall - is a typically idiosyncratic scheme.
"It started from a conversation about the Little Feat singer Lowell George," he told me. "One of my friends said 'My God, don't you miss him, as a songwriter.' Then we got talking about Rick Nelson."
Nelson, Croker recalled, blew his own plane up, reportedly because he insisted on freebasing cocaine while the plane was landing.
"I'm fascinated by these people," he said, "as they made other people's lives better, often at the expense of their own."
Brendan Croker himself has made several magnificent records - notably Boat Trips in the Bay in the late Eighties, and the splendidly titled Redneck State of the Art in 1995. Shortly before that, he wrote What It Takes for the American country star Wynona Judd: it sold 4 million copies and earned Croker more than £100,000. Then, just as he had established himself as a Nashville songwriter, collaborating with the legendary Chet Atkins, he apparently lost interest and set off on an acoustic tour of Belgian prisons. It was a typical career move for the singer who has, I suggested, frustrated many supporters with his perverse indifference to success.
"Well, I'm sorry I've been a disappointment to you William," sneered Croker. "I do believe I've had the potential to make big-selling records, but nobody's really known quite what to do with them."
Brendan Croker, who was born in Bradford and studied at the local college of art, was 30 when he started recording seriously. Before that, he had something of a chequered CV.
"i had jobs - I was a bin man and a railway guard," he said, "but I generally got fired for enjoying myself. Yorkshire Electricity Board- that was a good sacking."
He was painting scenery at Leeds Playhouse when he fell in with the virtuoso blues guitarist Steve Phillips, who taught both Croker and Mark Knopfler, and still performs with their occasional group, the Notting Hillbillies.
"One of the things I like about the band," said Croker, "is the way that it isn't overburdened with ambition. One of my favourite songs is the single by Johnny Paycheck: "Take This Job and Shove It: I Ain't Working Here No More."
What about his retreat from Nashville, just as things were taking off?
"I loved the innocence of the place at first," he said. "Before it all turned into a cynical big business. I don't like what they are doing now, musically or socially, so I don't go there." Boredom, says Brendan Croker's associate Paul Crockford ("manager", in relation to Croker, is probably not a meaningful term) is a recurring problem.
"He gets tired of things," Crockford said. "He has always adhered to the principle of 'don't do what you can do, do what you can't,' and that's why he's so interesting. If he were richer," Ceockford added, "he'd be eccentric, but he's poor, so he's mad."
Croker's live shows are always compelling, if only for his fondness for involving the audience - often with terrifying prominence - and his refreshingly unpretentious philosophy. Last year, at a Notting Hillbillies concert at Ronnie Scott's, Mark Knopfler, looking slightly out of place among his old Leeds pals in a hand-stitched grey silk shirt, introduced a number as "One of my songs that just about everybody's recorded."
"OK," said a gruff Yorkshire voice at his elbow, "who's done it then? Dame Thora Hird? Archbishop Tutu?"
On stage or not, Croker is a man who knows no sense of shame.
"One of the worst moments in my life," says the journalist Mark Ellen, " was with Bredan Croker in a London pub, packed with city traders in red braces. He had a guitar case with him, and he said 'What's your favourite Woody Guthrie song?' I told him 'Grand Coolee Dam.' He got to his feet, shushed these hundred bankers to silence, turned to me and bellowed 'Sing it man. Sing it now.'"
The stage backdrop at the Twelve Bar Club, Croker told me, will consist of Jon Langford's portrait of Hank Williams, pierced with arrows, in the pose of the martyred Saint Sebastian.
"I do slightly regret," said Croker, "that I can't do the odd song by people who are still alive. I don't wish ill on anybody," he added. "That said, I am aware that a rock star's life is an uncertain business, and pavements can be slippy when wet. Late-comers will not be ruled out."
In a few months, Croker's entire back catalogue will be reissued, together with a "best of" compilation. Was he planning a new album, given that his last CD, Three Chord Love Songs, came out a couple of years ago?
"I've started to feel I've made too many records," he told me. "The next one I make, I want to die for every line I write."
His immediate plans after the London shows, he told me, are to spend some time in Leeds looking after his two carthorses.
"I think I like carthorses," he said, "because they don't do anything they don't want to do. That," Croker added, "is a good example for anyone."

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Dying to sing

"My friend Steve Phillips said once...", declared Brendan Croker,"...drinking lager is good for you : it makes you sociable - and you sleep well".
Certainly, the booze at the bar aided the atmosphere between the 19th and 24th of April 1999 at Soho's Twelve Bar Club for Brendan's Dying To
Sing nights - but the power of the music performed was more intoxicating. The week was dedicated to preserving the memory of singers who enriched the lives of many at the expense of shortening their own; all comers were invited to pay tribute to those of their heroes who, in Brendan's words, "just exploded".
Come they did - and what a vaguely surreal bunch they were. Comedian Tony Hawkes, film actor Adrian Dunbar, ex-Wah! singer and all round Scouser Pete Wylie and pedal steel maestro BJ Cole (not to mention "the legendary Marcus Cliffe", as Brendan exclaimed at Ronnie Scott's last year, and percussionist Danny Cummings, who Dire Straits fans will remember from their 1991-2 tour) were among the less than insane but not quite sensible rabble that assembled around the idea, all united by their need to keep alive the memories of the songs that shaped them.
Jon Langford's portrait of Hank Williams as Saint Sebastian provided the backdrop to the tiny stage, and Hank himself was well represented in Brendan's choices - but he also created a spine tingling version of The Doors 'Light My Fire' and a take on Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit that was nothing less than disturbing.
Brendan will insist the series was about those who gave their lives for us -but he deserves credit for being the driving force behind a crazy, drunken, emotional week. "It's not karaoke" he repeated late on Saturday night for the umpteenth time.
You can say that again, Brendan!
Reviewed for MKNews by Daniel Dlark. ©Daniel Clark, 1999

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Mark Knopfler about Brendan Croker

Mark Knopfler line notes in "The Kershaw Sessions" record: I've been listening to the incomparable Jimmy Reed lately and thinking how like Brendan he sounded and how much the great man must have been an influence on my pal. But there have been so many - Croker had raked through much of the roots music of America, black and white, before we met in Leeds in the mid-seventies.
At the time I was teamed up musically with Steve Phillips and attending 3 Newport Mount, Headingly as a sort of University of the Blues and getting my first taste of real guitars - Nationals, Gibsons and old, old Martins. I was delighted by Brendan - his love for the music, his formidable knowledge of songs and his marvellous voice, sometimes a howling blues shout and other times a husky, gentle roll-your-own. He looked like a footplateman, which as it turned out, he had been. Here was my first singing brakeman, sounding as though he had been performing this music for thirty years. One of the first things I did was lend him an old Fender Concert amp which I didn't see again for years afterwards. I got my favourite acoustic guitar, one of the gorgeous few that Steve made, though Brendan. He and I are 'kit men' and we like to supply each other with 'kit' when required or not. We like old case penknifes, proper tailors and good capos. Mind you, Bren, I'm still not exactly sure what I'm to do with those black suede chaps you gave me... Fuelled by coffee, nicotine and plenty of beer, (Brendan was always, regrettably, a lager tout, though now, thanks to me, is more civilised and a convert to wine) we spent some time singing and picking before he took my place alongside Steve when I left town. He was already using his vast trove of roots music as a means to inspire his own writing, which went from strength to strength, as he did his experience in froning his own hot little band, the 5 o'Clock Shadows, 'the Shads' as we'd refer to them.
I've realised that one of the joys of my life is introducing my friends to each other and seeing them get on. So it has been with Bren - he hits it off with Chet Atkins in Nashville or an old school pal from Northumberland with equal ease and is quickly a part of their lives, his music ringing out in their homes up and down the country and all across the world.
Don't be deceived by the determinedly uncomplicated Croker approach to people and music. The lad's been to college and he's quite crafty tha' knows. He's got deep roots, so he can put down new ones all the time.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Notting Hillbillies

It was in Leeds, 31st May 1986, Brendan Croker and Steve Phillips played in the Groove pub in Holbeck, with Mark Knopfler on guitar and Brendan & Steve on guitars and vocals, they played a small but hugely enjoyable gig, playing songs like "Your cheating heart", "Love me tender", "Wedding bells" or other rock and roll, blues, country and folk classics, they had a great time together, and each of them being paid 22 pounds for their efforts!
Brendan Croker and Steve Phillips wanted to do an album together and asked to Mark Knopfler to produce and play on it, Mark accepted and included the Dire Straits keyboardist Guy Fletcher, during the sessions in Mark Knopfler house studio an idea came, isn´t this a band? Yes! This is a band. The band was named "THE NOTTING HILLBILLIES", a mixture of Noting Hill, a nice place in London famous but his carnival and the Portobello Market, and Hillbillie.
The album was titled "Missing... presumed having a good time", with a nice western covern showing the four members with his National Resonator guitars. This album involved the great pedal steel player Paul Franklyn, from USA, and Guy Fletcher programmed the bass and the drums.
The album included some classic songs, and a new song from every member except Guy Fletcher, Mark Knopfler wrote "Your own sweet way", Steve Phillips "Will you miss me" and Brendan Croker "That´s were I belong"
The album was a great succes and the band decided to do a small tour in UK, a great succesful tour playing some classics (When you got a good friend, Shake, Rattle and Roll, Mistery Train, That´s all right Mama etc), two Mark Knopfler new tunes (When it comes to you & Think Ilove you too much), some from Brendan (Running on down this road...) the NHB songs and the last song that the own MK wrote for the duet album with Chet Atkins, "Neck and Neck", titled "The next time I´m in town"
For this tour they had with them Ed Bicknell, Dire Straits´s manager on drums, Marcus Cliffe, 5 O'Clock Shadows´s member on bass, Paul Franklyn on Pedal Steel Guitar and in some of the shows Chris White, from Dire Straits on sax.
This was in 1990, after this tour, The Notting Hillbillies played some small charity gigs during 1993-1996 and the line-up was the same except Paul Franklyn and Chris White, with Alan Clark from Dire Straits replacing Guy Fletcher in one show in Leeds, 1993.
After this charity period, some summer concerts, 1997 with a small British tour, summer 1998 with a lot of concerts at the Ronnie Scott´s Jazz Club in Birmingham and in London, and the last, summer 1999 again in Ronnie Scott´s Jazz Club in London.
July 2002 was the last date for the NHB to play live, this time with Danny Cummings, from Dire Straits on drums, in three shows in the Shepperd´s Bush Empire in London and one in Beaulieu, near Southampton.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Touring again with Steve Phillips