Final day.
I am dictating this into my Iphone on a train. Apple notes has a built in speech-text feature, so what could possibly go wrong? The next station is Taunton. I heard Prescot Mutant give a talk about sea shanties. They think they derive from cotton-screwing songs. There is a popular Jamaican tune which goes almost exactly to Sam’s Gone Away. Why are there no English cathedral-building songs? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. They are not comfortable with the “she says she won’t but I think she will” line in Chicken on a Raft. I wish I had been taking notes. See it, say it, sort it. Against my better judgement, I sang McDermot’s War Song (By Jingo) to the Middle Bar group at the Anchor , but they seemed to think it was funny. Th he shanty people thought that “silver spades” and “golden chains” might be references to sea burials, the “silver spades” actually being an anchor. I don’t approve of automatic standing ovations, but I definitely stood up and clapped at the end of Peters Field, a cycle of songs by Sean Coolney, (Young Uns), Sam Carter (riding high still from last night), and Eliza Carthy (whose dad was in the front row). The folk opera format meant we got a very detailed account of the event with voices and names given to individual victims (and some of the soldiers) . Several songs are destined to become standards. The word “Peterloo” wasn’t mentioned until the last line of the final song. Spiers and Boden did what was very much a Spiers and Boden set, which is pretty much exactly what you want on the last night. There is still a wild boar in the woods, the bush still pricks their heart full sore, and the identity of the baby in The Birth of Robin Hodd is still a surprise if you haven’t heard it before.
[The shanty crew were actually called Pressgang Mutiny.]
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