Songs of Innocence and Experience

Chris Wood

Colston Hall, Bristol

Oct 21

I'm sure Chris Wood would hate it if I described him as a prophet. He hates absolute truth and is deprecating about his own talent. "Little folkie me" he calls himself at one point. 

We're a very long way from Christmas, but he opens his set with While Shepherds Watched their Flocks By Night. Perhaps he's telling us that tonight won't be an evening of high seriousness? Or perhaps he just likes the tune? He fills the line about tidings of great joy with a rich, smiling warmth. 

Isn’t this the man who wrote Come Down Jehovah?

But he's an English folksinger, so the great big important subjects keep cropping up. Love. Marriage. Death. Childhood. War. And England; above all England. There is no getting away from England.

His songs start from the heartbreakingly specific; not "childhood", but his children:

hard, my little girls hard;

she's only six but don't cross her

look out here she comes; lock up your sons;

she takes right after her mother

not “marriage”, but his wife:

just last wednesday evening

she kicked off her work shoes

i pour her a large one, and I tell you no lies

she swigs and she shimmies, she looks to the bedroom

and then she looks at me with those great big beautiful downsized eyes...

And not “England”, but particular a bit of ground, a particular street, and a particular point in history:

their's was a gritty England

Workers Playtime saw them through

and an oily rag or two

But he has an astonishing knack of turning a song in the final line, so he's suddenly talking about something bigger and more universal. There's an unbearable intensity when the whimsical anecdotes about his daughter give way to

hard? 'course it's not hard

oh there's no better reason for living....

And I really do mean "unbearable": there's a reflective depth in the way he sings the word "hard" which I found genuinely difficult to listen to. "Last time I sang it, this song sneaked up and bit me on the arse" he explains, and suddenly his is talking about his own childhood, about having been a choir boy. You wait for the cynical punchline, but there is none: he’s just remembering singing Jesu Joy of Man’s Desire at weddings. Didn't he call Handmade Life "church music with drums"?

It’s hard to work out who to compare him with. The Colston Hall's blurb calls him the best English song writer since Richard Thompson, and one can see the comparison: very personal, strong narratives, songs that you could almost, but not quite, mistake for traditional. Chris has an endearingly naive habit of using traditional "tags" in the first lines of songs, almost as if he needs a jingle to get him going ("all the kings horses and all the kings men, I'm sorry but they haven't a clue") but he keeps bringing you up short by lapsing into an unaffected vernacular. Not many lines separate "Awaken arise you drowsy sleeper; awake arise, it's almost day" from

from the front door they'd had him covered

they were right behind him from the start

and though the video was buggered

someone decided he looked the part

The more obvious comparison, the one which he himself makes, is with Martin Carthy. Carthy was the first person he looked up to, he says. You can see the influence in the very un-rock-and-roll way he jerks his guitar in time with the music; with his habit of singing the melody to himself while playing difficult guitar riffs (“come on”) and the way that he is prepared to let the song tell its own story. His tongue twisting delivery of the throwaway joke song Up in The North There Lives a Brisk Couple almost seems to be channelling Martin on the stage. But most of the traditional songs he makes his own. In the hands of the Imagined Village, Cold, Haily, Windy Night is a sing-a-long rabble rouser where you thump your real-ale glasses in time with the chorus. Chris recasts it as an understated, sinister murmur. ("The English traditional version of Sexual Healing", he assure us. “Just let it work for you.”)

He thanks the sound engineer at the beginning of the set, rather than at the end of it because it sounds “so fucking brilloiant” tonight. I don't know what was done to Hall 2 during the refurbishment, but acts keep commenting on how good it is. The acoustics seems to give Chris the confidence to do a more than usually subtle, understated performance. ("He's in the zone tonight" I whispered to my Folk Buddy.) He goes straight into his only instrumental of the night, a traditional tune and one by his friend and squeeze box expert Andy Cutting. "It’s a cracking tune, but it’s a bastard on the guitar." He uses the guitar as if he's having a conversation with the audience. I was about to say "as if he's making love to the audience" but that would be impolite to one who sings so much about marriage.

He's a big fan of marriage -- not Marriage in the politician's sense, but the love between husbands and wives. Before going into My Darling's Downsized he quotes Jake Thackray . [*] This particularly pleased me, as Jake's name came to mind the first time I heard My Darling's Downsized, a "grown-up love song" of domestic commonplace which keeps on raising laughs from the audience

my love for her can't be overstated

it's deep and it's not final salary related

while remaining a powerful celebration of love for a long time partner, and the concept of marriage in general.(He quotes his friend Hugh Lupton on the subject: "I am not your partner. I am your husband. We are not a firm of solicitors.") He shares with Thackray a very English virtue of sensibleness. (I ower this point to my Folk Buddy.)

Indeed, "England" sometimes seems to be a privileged, incantatory word in his singing. I note that the MP's expenses scandal has gone from being "such a quiet revolution" on the CD to "such an English revolution" here. Mentioning England is probably enough to get you labelled “right wing” from some quarters, but he’s very clear that the idea-of-England can be manipulated in bad ways:

sometimes I hear the story told

in a voice that's not my own

a land of hope and glory voice

and anglo-claxon over blown

rule brittania? No thank you



And when he chooses to lay into England, he doesn't spare any punches. The always devastating Hollow Point tonight became a quiet, understated, chilling exercise in forensic rage, a dissection of an appalling injustice by a man who is almost too fatigued to be angry any more, coming to life to delivery the devastating final lines

just a brazillian electrician

christ only know what he came here for

but hollow point was the ammunition

it's our turn now for some shock and awe

The words "hollow point" are delivered with a maniacal glee, like the punch line of a joke, and he almost seems to jig during the final guitar riff, like some musical folk-devil. The song really is almost too intense to listen to. People ask me how I can have made the transition from opera to folk music so suddenly, but Chris Wood shares with Wagner the trick of starting from silence ("awake arise you drowsy sleeper") building emotional intensity until you think he can't go any higher, and then laying on some more ("and through the hourglass the sand is falling / and there is nothing they can do") and, then, crucially, taking you back down to where you started, calm of mind all passion spent, as the fellow said. It's hard to think that he, or anyone, has ever performed this song, or any song, better than he did tonight.

Martin Carthy, Jake Thackray, Richard Thompson, English church music, Jesu Joy Of Man's Desiring...a choir boy who doesn't believing in God singing about gardening and small children and little fascists and wrongful executions. Ever since I first encountered Chris (singing the song about the man who loved his own little bit of England too much to sell it, back when we were still allowed to have folk music on the wireless) I have felt that the closest comparison is really with William Blake. And not only because he occasionally calls England "Albion". The combination of sentimental romanticism and sometimes brutal social realism; the depiction of children and hearkening back to his own childhood; the sense that we are in the presence of a specifically English revolutionary prophet. A few songs into the set, Chris told us he had been working on some new songs, but "they hadn't quite come" yet....and seemed to go off on another of his tangents. He's been reading about English history, he says, and it's mostly horrible. Wonderful moments like the invention of the National Health Service were blips in a long history of violence and robber barons, and we are now reverting to type. And then he started to play a strange, almost melodyless elegy, another aching tune of homesickness for a country you never quite knew, sung into the middle-distance almost as if he was improvising it on the spot.

And the words? What else could they possibly have been?

and did those feet in ancient times

walk upon england's mountains green

and was the holy lamb of god

on england's pleasant pastures seen....

[*] "There may be better looking, better cooking women / better slung and better at buns that you..../ but they've all got as like as not / better taste in men than you have got / so darling I'll just have to make do with you."