Sidmouth Folk Diary: Saturday

I got a bus from the campsite to Sidmouth and then I got a bus from Sidmouth to Exeter and then I got a bus from Exeter to Bristol and then I got a bus from Bristol bus station to very nearly outside my house and then I had a nap and then I went to hear some folk music in a pub on Whiteladies Road. (*)

Thing to remember for next year:

a: Pack two more t-shirts. But stuffing everything into one small rucksack that I could carry on my back worked fine. I don't know why I didn't think to put the tent in a suitcase with wheels years ago.

b: Pack a notebook and pens so I am not jotting down the names of interesting songs on the back of tickets and loosing them. 

c: If you are going to go to late night singing sessions (finishing 2 or 3 am) don't imagine you can also go to 9.30 talks and still be compis mentis the next day.

d: Tom Pearse's Old Mare is funnier if you stop two verse before the end, let the audience start to clap, and then do "But this isn't the end of that 'orrid affair"

e: Similarly, the Two Ronnies Morris song is only funny if the singer doesn't get the double entendres (this was Eric Morecamb's advise to Andre Previn). Although "don't make up your own jokes" after "fill not my cup with liquor up" usually gets a laugh. 

e: Learn some camp-fire type songs -- can't really do a funny one when someone else is doing Turn, Turn, Turn and Which Side Are You On

f: Find out exactly what knowledgable singers mean by technical terms like "key". 

g: Although it saved money, it would have been better to buy the full all-in ticket (including the Big Name evening slots in the marquee) even if you are not going to use it, than to buy the cheaper season ticked (everything except the Big Name evening slots) and then fret about whether you want to hear Ralph McTell or not. 

(*) Liar. It was Sunday. 

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Friday

So: having had the Perfect Last Night of the Festival on Thursday, naturally, on Friday I went to the Best Gig of the Festival.

The Best Gig of the Festival was in the morning at the Kenneway arts centre. Labelled "eyes on the future", it was supposed to showcase the best young folkies on the circuit. First half were two young guys, Arthur Coates and Kerran Cotterell, doing an instrumentally driven set (powerhouse fiddle and guitar) but with forays into "Now Is The Cool Of The Day" and "The Fiddle and the Drum." They played the kind of instrumental music I can keep track of -- tunes that could have had words attached, rather than spirally didddly diddly dees which I get lost in. And also the kind which goes into an identifiable Tatooine jazz riff for no very good reason. Arbrevyn were a three handed mostly acapella traditional harmony outfit from Cornwall, offering a heartbreaking "Granite Is The Hardest Stone" and Cornish language number about salting pilchards. (Refrain: Pilchards! Pilchards! More Salt!). And they finished with a song about libraries. They were in favour of libraries. It became very easy to identify the members of the audience who do the same day job as me. We were the ones who were crying. 

TOO MUCH INFORMATION: I did, in fact, exert my Male Privilege and go through the door with Boys written on it (where there wasn't a queue) rather than the one with Girls written on (where there was). But since behind one of the doors there was a perfectly ordinary toilet; and behind the other door there was, er, another perfectly ordinary toilet, I can't imagine that even JK Rowling would have minded if everyone had disregarded the signs and gone into the next available room. Or am I missing something?

The Best Gig of Festival  was in the afternoon in the main Ham marquee. Chris Wood was having a reunion with his former duo partner Andy Cutting. (Andy Cutting is one third of Leveret, and probably the best box players in the world.) I associate Chris Wood with miserable political song writing, but one forgets that he is an absolutely stunning fiddle player as well. ("Can you turn the sound up because its hot in here and I can see you're all fucking asleep.") Another mainly tune driven exercise with a few outbreaks of singing (I have a dog and a good dog too, tum te tum, while game keepers lie sleeping.) They made a slight thing of not having rehearsed, but I guess that's true of these kinds of musicians. They just play. 

I went to the Middle Bar sing around. I sang Widdicomb Fair and Oor Hamlet ("there was this king sitting in his garden all alone when his brother in his ear poured a little bit of henbane") and having done a dead horse and a dead king I thought I'd better do With Her Head Tucked Underneath Her Arm so I had the set. I think I very nearly got away with it. 

The Best Gig of the Festival was in the evening at the Ham. I have heard Angeline Morrison's Sorrow Songs before -- I think I have even listened to the album -- but it really clicked with me tonight. It's a series of self written songs in a traditional style, trying to come up with an alternative folk tradition about black British history. Which makes it, er, quite bleak in places. The song about Fanny Johnson, a slave whose stuffed hand was put on display in a glass case by her loving owners (and remained there until the 1990s) is genuinely shocking. But there's some hope and affection as well: the set finishes with Slave No More, about a slave who was set up in business when his "master" died and was buried alongside him. (And also one, shanty style, about Billy Waters, the same disabled fiddle playing beggar who Martin Simpson did a tribute to earlier.) The singing is exquisite; but the band (including Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne, one third of Granny's Attic and probably the best box player in the world) pushed it to a whole nother level. The second half of the evening was the mighty O'Hooley and Tidow. A sentimental song about watching a neighbour take his crippled dog for one last walk, just as their baby was taking his first steps. The slightly silly one about Beryl the champion cyclist. A thought provoking one, new to me, about the duo's autism diagnosis.  And (not surprisingly) the set and therefore the festival finished with the audience splitting into two halves to sing the chorus of a certain ditty about a cross-dressed Yorkshire business woman. She's gentleman Jack behind their back, behind their back she's gentleman Jack. Someone should turn it into a TV show.

And apart from slightly too many drinks in the Bedford and another drop-in to the Middle-bar (where the week finishes with a deranged in a good sense rendition of "I am the music man and I come from down your way") that's it for another year.

Sidmouth Folk Diary : Thursday

Well that was just about the perfect end of the festival.

Someone has brought marshmallows to the Bulverton bonfire. There are some families with small kids, although I would have thought it was past their bed times. A young guy with an astonishing voice joins in towards the end. Rory McCloud does a good bye song, imitating the sound of a phone with his mouth harp and pretending to take a call from his auntie. A man with a guitar does “which side are you on”.

There are some anti war songs, Johnny No Legs maybe and one by Rory about not never needing a gun. On a wild whim I volunteer to sing my favourite pro war song — Woody Guthrie’s “good people what are we waiting on”. Rory and the man with the guitar bravely improvise around my noise. The other marshmallows toaster join in with “all you fascists bound to loose” which actually comes from a different song.

At about 2.15 am the guitar man apologizes for being corny, and sings Who Knows Where The Time Goes at the dying embers. 

As I say, the perfect way to end the festival. There is actually a whole nother day to go.

# The Middle Bar singing session finished on time, so unfortunately I didn’t miss The Breath (who were opening up for Martin Simpson.

#Martin Simpson sang Deportees, which he says is about dehumanizing migrants, and stuck to his promise to sing Palaces of Gold an every gig until the Grenville Tower families get justice. A new song about a one legged black nineteenth century London fiddler, to a shantyish tune. And one about his Dad, of course…

#There is a version of Another Man’s Wedding, where, instead of wondering how many strawberries grow in the salt sea, the jilted lover ties a yellow ribbon all around his hat.

# Hey John Barleycorn and Ten Thousand Miles away are synthetic folk songs invented by a music hall singer.

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Wednesday

 # MC signals to Rory McCloud that he has ten minutes left. Rory begins to chat about which song he will sing, which song he would have song, who this song is about, what someone once said to him about the person who the song is about. MC signals that he now has five minutes left. 

# If you’ve never heard Rory, look him up. He’s been described as a folkie Ian Dury. There is a rappish digressiveness to his songs, wild free association about people he’s kissed and fruit at Spitlefield market. An utter one off. 

# The final Oysterband gig was of course wonderful. But even better was the “pearls from the oysters” session in the morning, in which story teller Taffy Thomas told anecdotes about the band’s history, while the Oysters themselves chipped in songs. For all the eighties rock stylings, they are still very much a folk band. Hearing Hal En Tow Jolly Rumberlow acoustically in an intimate setting may be the highlight of the  festival so far. 

# Rosie Hood opened for the Oysters in the big tent. I will be singing the song about the ladies of Versailles who persisted for the rest of the weekend, and Roy Bailey’s “everything possible” never fails to evoke a tear. Her own song writing is exceptional: the one about the Norman monk who flew (or at any rate, plummeted) from the monastery clock tower I have heard before, but the one about the Victorian lady who was mauled to death by a circus tiger she had poked, told from the tigers point of view, was new to me.

# Rory’s set was followed by Robb Johnson, who plunged straight in with a song about racism (“the tories outlawed Robin Hood, cut down the hundred acre wood, but blame  it on the refugees) and a presumably week-old song in which a woman in the Blitz wonders which city the Nazis and going to bomb tonight, while a contemporary person wonders which city the far-right are going to riot in. He finished with Be Reasonable And Demand The Impossible Now. The MC described him as the best political song writer  who is also a primary school teacher. I expect the revolution to start any day now.

#Two talks about folk music and Child Ballads by Brian Peters

#Rory turned up to the campfire session on the top of the hill at midnight. He did three songs, joined the tune players on a plastic orange trombone, and listened to all the other singers. The lady who gestilicuates a complicated pagan reimagining of the Twa Magicians. The man who sings funny songs about people in his morris dance group that no one could possible know. The couple singing banjo accompanied songs in possibly Welsh. The big guy in the black hat who sings out of key sea shanties. It is even possible that he assayed The Day The Nazi Died.

Beer 3.5

Pasties 1

Lofty Talls Ships 2

Lakes of Cool Flynn (or somewhere else where there is deep and false water) 2

Didn’t We Have A Lovely Time The Day We Went to Bagor - Very definitely none at all

Total Hours 8 hours

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Tuesday

 

#not all geography teachers

#Nothing particularly against hymns in general, or And Can It Be in particular. You can sing it at my funeral if you like (not any time soon). Visions of heaven sustained us when John Wesley gave us a voice. Merely felt that the church choir on the sea front was a bit cringe.

Writing this at 10ish with coffee and bacon sandwich. Much more civilised than yesterday. Having stopped singing at 2am I naturally decided I needed to be in he art centre at 9:30 , this left no time for shower or coffee although the sea front bakery supplied the largest bacon bap I have ever seen. “Too much bacon” is a concept I was not previously acquainted with.

NO PASTIE all day. Consumed a large persian chicken wrap with salad flaffles,, humus, olives, peter gurney, petr davey, daniel whiddon old uncle tom cobley and all.

Early rise was to see a filmed archive folk club performance by Chris Sugden, aka Sid Kipper. Furiously wrote down some titles an lyrics that I might sing myself one day. The Female Highwayman might have too much cross dressing for modern tastes, but I feel I could attempt “wild mounting time”. Lady who runs ballad session mentioned that she knew Sidney Carter, and played him “I am bored of the dance, said she”. Apparently he was amused.

Thence to Big Tent for Phil Beer and his former musical partner Paul Downes, and then the Spooky Men. I felt the Spookies did a slightly less silly set than usual, which was to their general benefit. A patriotic Ukrainian song, jostled with a new one (to me) about the guy who can’t fix things but sill “just give it ago.” Eschewed Ralph McTell for the “traditional night out” a kind of all star folk club in the arts centre, including Martin Carthy, Tom McCarthy and Jez Lowe. Martin did the one about the Irishman who goes to a funeral snd finds that the fellow hasn’t died. Jez Lowe did one about the miners who worked through the ‘82 strike called The Judas Bus, interleaved with verses of the Blackleg Miner. A man I didn’t know sang a killingly funny song about Greek philosophers. An Irish man told a story about a family who moved to England and took their faithful house gobln with them. 

In tent close to midnight and will be firing on more cylinders today..

Hours of music: 8.25 hours
Beer 2
Pasties 0

Folk Diary Monday

If you tie a green ribbon around your hat you signify that your true love has gone away. If you wear a yellow handkerchief it means your are going to shun flash company. If you tie a bunch of white or possibly blue ribbons all around your bonny boy’s waist it will let tone maidens know that he’s married. Was this some kind of olden days emoji system? I think we should be told.

I believe it was Mark Twain who said that if you tell a man that the are a hundred billion stars in the galaxy he will believe you, but if a public toilet shows “engaged” (“occupied”) he will turn the handle just to make sure.

Some very polite children from the international language school have photographed my hat as part of a scavenger hunt.

Adopting my usual plan of eschewing the camp showers and putting a pound in the box by the rugby club. If a geography teacher would care to come and shout at us, we would have the full 1970s school experience.

Choir from local church singing And Can It Be on the sea front. Wild urge to join in with Joe Hill style communist lyrics. (If it had been a socialist group, would certainly have sung a hymn.)

 I do not think that a diet of beer and pasties is sustainable in the long term. Or even the short ter

 Patronisingly ask small child if they are a fan of Irish Music. Told no, but they are a fan of Mad Dog McCrae. Their favourite songs are Beeswing and Johnny No Legs (which turns out to be a speeded up Mrs McGraw/My Son John.)

 I remember when Mad Dog McCrae played after parties at Trowbridge and pop up gigs at Glastonbury. They are now mighty and legendary. They have undergone a reverse evolution, less punky and more folkie. I am not sure you are allowed to use the word “pikey” in a song, even if he did kill your goldfish, with a fag.

I definitely didn’t have something in my eye during Beeswing and actually sob during Gay Pirates (yo ho sebastian, let’s go far away, somewhere where the captain won’t be mad.)

Definitely the right call to hear the loud party band at the Bulverton and eschew Spiers and Boden at the Ham, (who are iconic, but whom I have heard many times before.) Which suggests that buying the Season Ticket (everything but the headline gigs) rather than the All In Ticket (everything including the headline gigs) was the right call

I am not a gate keeper, but I am far from sure that a funk band becomes a folk funk bad just because it has an accordion in it.

I Am not very good at dancing about architecture. Elye Cuthbertson is apparently winning awards for being most promising musician in any genre. He plays long complex tunes on the accordion: saw him comparing notes with Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne. My notes say things like “zig zag shaped phrases cut off from above”. This may not help anyone very much.

The Wilson Family sang loud unaccompanied harmony music, in the vicinity of Rolling Home and Union Miner Stand Together. Exceptionally good.

The Guide Hut was full for John Kirkpatrick. (I didn’t get in.)

 Ended night in campfire marquee again. Joined by entirety of steampunk morris side who know hundred of songs. Lady with brilliant voice sang a complex pagan inspired version of possibly Twa Magicians. I sang the dirtiest version of Landlords Fill the Flowing Bowl I known. Tom Pearse has sadly to be abandoned because this Devonian crowd didn’t know the chorus.

 It rained. 

On Wednesday there is a three way clash between Robb Johnson, the Oysterband and Granny’s Attic

Pasties -1

Bacon roll -1

Beeswing -1

My Bonny Boy is Young But He’s Growing -2

Songs by Leo Rossleson - 2

Total time listening to music -6.5

 (

Sidmouth Folk Diary - Sunday

Show of Hands is no more. Long live Dream in Colour. Spelt British style:

the last song involved singing “o o o” and “u u u”. And it abbreviates to DIC, and like Cyrano, they have already covered all the jokes. And there was a very rousing Battlefield Dance Floor, and even an encore of Galway Farmer. And some new songs, including one about wild swimming and one about the post office scandal, which isn’t quite AIG, but probably could be with repeated listens. What there wasn’t, of course, was Phil Beer. Instead there was Johnny Kalsi (huge Banghra drum) Bennet Cerven (extreme fiddle) and Eliza Marshall (flute and flute adjacent). So it’s a lusher, less overtly folkie sound. Two things immediately struck me: how recognisable a Knightley tune is,l regardless of what it is being played on; and how distinct and even strange Steve’s voice is. Perhaps the banter isn’s as natural as the old days - the fiddler was trying just that little bit too hard to fill Phil’s boots, but it’s clearly a joyous new direction for my favourite act. Just the same as it always was but at the same time completely different.




Perhaps Barbara Allen wasn’t hard hearted after all. Perhaps sweet William was hanging out in the bar with women of ill repute. Perhaps the kiss was an obvious ruse. Apparently in the gypsy version, her parents had forbidden her in advance from going near him. And that lad who was sent off to college for a year or two while he was growing — was fourteen or sixteen or eighteen? I spent the afternoon listening to Ballads in the hotel and Ballad Session in the hut. Which is a lot of ballads. A youngish guy named Seb Stone did an utterly compelling Tam Lyn, unaccompanied. One of the floor singers did a chilling George Colins. (“if we catch her will crop her she’s a perjuring whore”.)




Having not found much singing in the Swan, intended earlyish night. Stopped off at Bedford, where a singing session was in full swing. The aforementioned Seb Stone was singing, as was the aforementioned aforementioned Dera Yeates. After a few minutes, Eliza Carthy joined us. For some reason I was not called on to sing.




Lady in coffee / bakery shop said to a troop of morris dancers, pointing at me “be careful, he’s going to write about you.”




My singing “jumps between key’s alarmingly”, apparently.




Pastie - 1

Trees they do grow high - 3

Barbara Allan - 2

Beer 2.5

Total hours listening to music - 7

Sidmouth Folk Diary - Saturday

Saturday

“Well, if we like songs where you shout out rude words….”

Sidney Carter was obviously the influential modern hymn writer, but he only knew one tune. Lord of the Dance is a bit overtly religious for folk sing arounds, but everyone sings John Ball. (“I’ll crow like a cock I’ll carol like a lark in the light that is coming in the morning.”)) When everyone has had s drink or two, people can lose their focus on whether Adam delve or Eve span, and start putting slightly too much emphasis on the words “cock” and “coming”. 

We are in a small marquee adjacent to the Bulverton, which is a very big marquee. I have just listened to The Sea Song Sessions, a super group consistIng of Jon Boden and Seth Lakeman and Jack Rutter and Ben Nicolls and Emily Portman.  There is about to be a celidah (which is Latin for square dance). In the small marquee there is a camp fire and a song session. Everything from John Barleycorn to Yellow Submarine. 

I have failed in my plan to listen to music not stop for twelve hours. But only because the venues have changed: the small acoustic acts are now in the Girl Guide hut. Really. Steward has to keep explaining that , no, there aren’t any men’s toilets. The traddy folk concerts are now in the Harbour Hotel. They are about 25 minutes apart, so going straight from one to the other is no longer feasible. 

Still: 11:30, Guide Hut, Macdara Yeats (pronounced Dara.) Young Dublin man with huge deep voice singing Dublin versions of Irish Songs. Everyone knows The Cruel Mother (down by willow sidey-oh). In the Irish street version she is not visited by the ghost of her babies, but by a policeman. Who takes her off and hangs her. “The moral of this story is, don’t stab your baby.”

1:15, Guide Hut, Thomas McCarthy, Irish traveller singer, so traditional he falls off the edge. Long, long chats about Traveller history — Irish travellers are the indigenous population, and used to be greeted in villages as honoured guests. Anti gypsy racism was created  by the blue shirts in the 30s. Yeats was a Nazi sympathiser. The pope said that if the  travellers wanted to be accepted they should stop being thieves and rogues. He sings with his throat and his nose, a world-old drone. I probably couldn’t sustain prolonged exposure.

3.00 The Harbour. The Goblin Band are the most exciting traditional folk band on the circuit. They are young, queer, and dress like hobbits. They play fiddles and hurdy gurdies and huge recorders and concertinas. They do a traditional folk repertoire. It is hard to put my finger on what is fresh about them. Apart from a sustained fiddle improvisation half way through Tom Pearse, there is no overt jiggery pokery. Martin Carthy, in the front row, was visibly moved by I Like To Rise When The Sun She Rises.

Carthy himself did the second half. He is the same age as Bob Dylan now. His gigs run off the love the audience have for him. I hope I am still doing what I love when I am 83. No one sings a better Patrick Spens.

Realising   I wasn’t going to get to the second hour of the ballad session, I proceeded up the big hill to the Bulverton for the Sea Song Session super group. A man who remembers Strawhead also remembered that I was a Grace Petrie fan and confided that we probably didn’t see eye to eye politically. 

And thence to the small tent for the after hours campfire sing around. Robin the Hat from the Bristol shanties is singing Shallow Brown when I arrive. We rapidly get to crowing like a COCK in  the light that is COMING in the morning. So I take t he plunge with a traditional English song collected by Ronald Barker in 1977. 

to take the air and listen to

the twittering of the birds all day

the bumble bees at play.

Rather too much dark stout: the more everyone else drinks, the better I sound. I possibly Ben Kenobi and Sloop John A as well. Broke up with The Partying Glass at about 1am. Two folk gods are still dancing in the main tent.

Pasties - 1

Beer - 4

Barrats Privateers -1

Tom Cobley -1

 

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Friday

Friday

Breakfast at Lookout Cafe on sea front. I will definitely not eat a large cooked breakfast every day, I seem to recall promising my Slimming World rep that I would make good choices. Having sung “tomorrow we’ll be sober” last night, perhaps I will say “tomorrow I’ll be sensible.” I think the only t hing I ate apart from the large breakfast was a pain a raison (sp) from the Cornish Bakery. Beer counts as sensible, though? We are in Sidmouth the land of pasties and cream teas.

12:30 Middle Bar Singers in room above Anchor Pub are a social group that exists all year round, I think, They all know each other and there are ipn jokes I don’t get. They do the thing where they pass a large bunch of leaves round the room and when it comes to you you are allowed to sing, or else pass it on. I subjected them to A Chat With My Mother and Dont Go In Them Lions Cage tonight. No one left and nothing was thrown.

3.00 Steeleye Span in the Ham, which is a 700 seater marquee and the main festival venue. It was a more traditional set then I have sometimes heard them do, including Thomas The Rhymer and Long Lamkin. Maddy Prior’s explanation of how she interprets lyrics was particularly fascinating. She prefers the version where Lankin is a disgruntled mason to the one where he is an invisible child murder who walks through walls. Also New York Dolls They finished up with a song about a hat.

7:30 Harbour Hotel for Intimate Trad Evening. Sara Grey is an American singer and folklorists with a banjo and a detailed experience of where songs come from and who passed them on. Lovely version of Hills Of Mexico, which I know as Plains of Buffalo. She claims (no reason to doubt this) that Andy Irvin learned Arthur McBride from an American source singer who deserves mofr credit.

Apres Folk: To Swan Inn where usual suspects are singing Daydream Believer and DIVORCE. I recklessly say to a stranger that I hope to sing by the end of the week; she now refers to me as “singing man”. (The main thing is having a go, not staying in tune, everyone can sing a bit, you are probably much better than you think you are.) 

The barman recognized me, and remembered I like stout. The lady in the bakery recognized me and remembered that I write. A man I talked to at s Grace Petrie two years ago greeted me with “well we kicked them out.” Do I look particularly memorable?

Beer 3.5 pints

New York Dolls x 3

South Australia x 2

Pasties x 1

Breakfast x 1

Streets of London x1

Sidmouth Folk Diary: Thursday

 Items that I can cross of my Festival Bingo Card.

1: Ate a pasty. 

2: Ate an ice cream (coffee flavored.)

3: Bought items I forgot to pack. (Where oh where do my tent pegs go?)

4: Drank beer in festival branded plastic cup.

5: Joined in chorus of Streets of London

6: Heard “Bound for South Australia”, twice.

7: Saw Nelson kill the Turkish knight, and also saw The Doctor bandage Donald Trump’s ear. (*)

8: Drank beer.

9: Personally sang mildly risqué folk song to audience of strangers in pub, to polite applauses. (**)

10: Joined in chorus of New York Girls on bus back to camp site.  

Festival doesn’t officially start until tomorrow. 

(*) Mummers Play

(**) here’s to the man who drinks real ale and goes to bed quite plastered / never buys his friends a round / never buys his friends a round / never buys his friends a round / cos he’s a miserable bastard

Review: More Than Boys - Revisited

 

A child climbs trees with his two best friends and wonders what they will do when they grow up. A boy plays football with his four best friends and looks forward to the day when he'll score the winning goal. A teenager thinks about leaving home for the first time. Six young men go fishing and proclaim to the world that they aren't children any longer.

Collections of poems and songs sometimes have unintended unity. Luke Jackson says that he was puzzled back in 2012 when people called More Than Boys a "coming of age" or "growing up" album: he thought he was writing songs about what mattered to him at the time he wrote them. And yet the album had a profound thematic integrity.

There was a strong sense of perspective: it's a young man remembering being a child looking forward to the future; a father playing football with his son remembering when he used to kick a ball with his mates. The teenager getting ready to leave home imagines what it will be like when he has kids of his own. In the astonishing Kitchener Road, the singer dreams of going back to a home he's moved away from, knowing he never will. "We talked about what the future would hold, but that's all memories." Looking back at looking forward: that could stand as an epigram for the album. Seeing the future in the past. The album may not be about growing up, but it is certainly about Time. It may not be a coincidence that Luke's most recent album included a cover of a very well-known Sandy Denny number.

This is the second time I have reviewed this album. When it first came out, in 2012, I remarked that most pop songs about childhood are written by men in their twenties and thirties, through the rosey haze of nostalgia, and that it was remarkable to hear "It feels that all my childhood songs have been sung" from someone who was still a teenager. He mentions building hideouts in the woods -- what wholesome lives these millennials lead! -- and wonders if they are still standing. When he wrote the song, it might very well have been.

But ten years have passed. No longer a closely guarded folk-secret, Luke Jackson has shared stages with Fairport and Marillion and he is opening for his hero Richard Thompson. And now he's gone back and re-recorded that first album. Which adds a further wrinkle to the perspective. When he sings Baker's Woods --- the song about climbing trees with his "two allies" -- we're listening to today-Luke looking back at teenage-Luke looking back at child-Luke looking forward...

It's a risk. More Than Boys was one of those records that captures a particular moment in time -- where the circumstances of its existence is part of its meaning. Luke is no longer an inexperienced singer with a satchel full of great songs; he's a professional troubadour with a half a dozen decent albums under his belt and a show-stopping set-finisher about life on the road. I think that some of us were probably quite patronising when he first blasted onto the folk scene, but there is a certain naivety to the original album. Will a mature voice spoil that cusp-of-adolescence vulnerability?

But the songs stand up as songs. Maybe here and there is a rhyme that today-Luke would not have indulged in. (I'm not quite convinced by "fake" and "wake" and "all your wrong intentions.../all your miscomprehensions.") And I'm still puzzled about why the birds were singing a lullaby first thing in the morning. But the songs' emotional directness -- what I once described as their heart-breaking quality -- still shines through. His voice has got a touch more resonant, and his guitar playing, naturally, is more sophisticated. And the delivery is much more nuanced: he moves from melodic folk singing, to letting rip with his remarkable vocal cords, to speaking and even whispering, in the same song, sometimes in the same line. But they are still the same songs they always were and it is still the same album: I sometimes had to listen quite carefully to see what he had done with the old material.

The Last Train (about a soldier returning home to break bad news to a comrade's family) has acquired a more complex guitar riff, as well as a few bars of Dylan as a coda -- but its the whispered final line "until all that was left...was hope" which raises the emotional pitch. Two thirds of the way through Run and Hide Luke is rocking out, but he pulls it right back for the repeat of "you can't run and...hide." On the original record he seems to (if I can put it like that) just sing; but here he seems to tentatively engage with the material, like an actor trying to work out what the words could mean. "Reality is more fake until you fall...fall...fall...asleep" he sings, with each "fall" carrying a different nuance.

The first half of Winning Goal is a jingly jangly sing-along; but he drops the guitar and sings unaccompanied in the second half, when the boy footballer realises his dreams are never going to come true. ("These days he works, he slaves hard, he tries, he never played for the winning side.") The song used to end with the grown up saying to his son "Oh my boy; one day you'll score the winning goal": it now ends "Oh my boy, you're my winning goal", which ties the whole thing together beautifully. Speaking as one with a profound dislike of football, I have always had a soft spot for this song, and the new version is one of the strongest things on the album. I don't think it has ever made its way into a live set, and it really deserves to.

There are a few other places where a lyric has mutated slightly: whether as a conscious improvement, or just because Luke is still a bit of a folkie at heart and words change the tenth or hundredth time you sing them. He used to sing that he would give anything to go climbing trees with his childhood friends: he's now added a deeply felt everything. He used to say that he wanted his fathers pride in the man he hoped to become; now he talks about the man he's sure to become. Most intriguingly, the opening lines of Kitchener Road have changed from "I hope you're glad -- this is all your fault" to "Don't be sad -- this is no one's fault" which rightly takes the bitterness out of an elegiac song; allowing it to stand as a universal home-sickness piece.

Luke's signature song, More Than Boys, was always poised between the carefree chorus ("me oh my, where's our worry") and a sense of the poignant nostalgia -- the day's fishing is coming to an end, and so are the years when you don't have to worry about where the time goes. On stage, the song has sometimes become very slow and meditative indeed, but this version takes it a shade quicker than the original, allowing the fun and joy to dominate, with just a shade of wistful sorrow coming through in the final chorus. I think this is the way it should be: a happy-sad song, not a sad-happy one. The title track of a happy-sad album.

I love this album. It's not a deconstruction or re-invention of the 2012 version: it's simply older-Luke singing younger-Luke's songs in the way he would sing them now. As it says on the cover: More Than Boys Revisited. These are songs which are eminently worth revisiting.

My review of the original version of the album

The new version of More Than Boys is available on Bandcamp from Friday. 

Pour cowslip dew into my cup; a puritan am I!

Morris dancing is a mostly English tradition of highly stylized folk dance. It is definitely old -- Shakespeare's Dauphin mockingly compares the English preparations for war to a Whitsun morris dance. But like most things in the English folk tradition, it is not as ancient as we like to pretend: it goes back centuries, not millennia. I think I am correct in saying that without exception, present-day Morris sides all go back only to the Victorian folk revival; there are no places where there is a continuous tradition going back to the fifteenth century. Almost certainly it wasn't an ancient pre-Christian fertility dance, but it's quite fun to pretend that it was. Everyone involved seems to agree that on one level its quite silly: beery men with bells on their fingers and toes and waving hankies in the air -- but its also colourful and fun and almost always involves good tunes. The idea of a lot of groups of people taking a lot of trouble to keep up a tradition which is on the surface a bit ridiculous seems a properly English thing to be doing.

Every few years someone in the unfolkie media spots that a few Morris sides perform with black make-up on their faces.

I am not sure whether anyone is really (as opposed to theoretically) offended by the sight of fat white people with boot polish on their faces waving handkerchiefs in the air. (I thought that all the most important philosophers of the age were agreed that there was no such thing as giving offence or if there was it didn't matter?) But I am completely certain that no serious harm is done to the Tradition if the flanneled fools leave the boot polish off. I didn't see a single black face side at Sidmouth; I think all the Border groups have taken to painting their faces red or blue or green. Which definitely offends no-one and is actually more fun.

The etymological fallacy is just as much a fallacy when applied to folk traditions as when applied to -- well -- etymology. A word means what you mean by the word, and what other people understand you to mean by the word -- not what Simon Heffer says the word "originally" meant. Grammar nerds may or may not be correct in saying that at one time decimate meant "to reduce by one tenth": but right now it means "to lay waste to" because that is how people use it. They are both wrong and offensive when they claim that wog is not "really" a racial slur because it "originally" meant Worshipful Oriental Gentleman.

Blackface Morris may not originally have had anything to do with making fun of black people. I am inclined to think it did not. The boot polish represents the fact that the people who invented the dances were coal miners, or chimney sweeps, or people who didn't want their wives to spot them Morris dancing after curfew. But it doesn't make a blind bit of difference what it originally meant. What matters is what "white men doing song and dance routines in black make up" means right now.

Yes, there is some evidence that prick and cunt were at one time perfectly neutral medical terms for those particular parts of the body. No, that doesn't mean it's fine to say them kids TV.

"Blacking up" means a great deal more than "I am playing the role of a person of a different race from the one I happen to be." It means something morel like "I am well aware of the whole patronizing black-minstrel tradition and the whole sorry history of white people appropriating black people's art and I don't give a damn. My right to wave hankies in the air with black boot polish on my cheeks is more important."

God knows, it's not a great idea for a European person to pretend to be an Asian person either. There was a Doctor Who story in which that happened: I forget the title, but I understand that it still polarizes opinion. But "yellowing up" does not carry the same cultural baggage as "blacking up". I think that's why Johnny Depp got away with playing a Comanche where he would never in ten million years have got away with playing a Negro.

I don't think that it follows that you can merely add the suffix -up to the name of a particular group and take that as incontrovertible proof that no-one outside that group can represent a member of that group on stage or screen. I don't know if Christians can ever properly understand what it is to be Jewish. Probably they can't. I don't know if  Jews can convincingly play Christians. (I might be inclined, like Laurence Olivier, to ask "if they have ever considered acting, darling) But I am pretty certain that it is not helpful to accuse Kenneth Brannagh of "Danishing-up" or "wearing Dane-face" to play Hamlet.

There are exceptions and special cases and everything is a negotiation. Yes, I understand, you are constructing an authentic historical re-enactment of a festival in fifteenth century Shropshire and you want the Morris dancing to be exactly the way it was then, period instruments and period shoes and period face paint and all. No, that isn't at all the same thing as some big beery guys doing a country dance on a windswept Devon seafront. Yes, I get that your movie about the antebellum South included a loving recreation of a minstrel show; no that doesn't make the Black and White Minstrel show perfectly okay. If a lady can play King Lear, Prospero, or Hamlet, then a white man can probably have a go at Othello. But probably not with boot polish.

"But then won't all the racists just gravitate to the historical re-enactment events?" Aye, there's the rub. I came across a YouTube stream in which a fellow was working his way through the complete songs of Stephen Foster, Camptown Races and Hard Times Come Again No More and all. He explained that since this was partly an historical endeavor, he was singing the songs as Foster wrote them, while acknowledging that some of the language was offensive. Sure enough the comments section filled up with white people saying how wonderful it was to hear Oh Sussanah! with the n-word intact and how great it was to be standing up to the force of political correctness etc etc etc.

A man in the Guardian -- where else? -- went a bit further. He managed to go from "blacked-up Morris dancing has quite definitely had its day" to "the whole idea of folk music is inherently racist." This seems to be a caricature of a liberal position, the sort of thing that the sort of people who read the Daily Telegraph imagine that the sort of people who read the Guardian would think Yet here it is in, er, black and white:

But former Green councillor and parliamentary candidate Ian Driver has been campaigning for years against the way Broadstairs folk week supports blacked-up morris dancers. He calls the festival “institutionally racist” and says the organisers are all white and the acts are 90% white even though there is African-Caribbean, Hispanic and Eastern European folk music which would better represent the local area.

It is entirely true that from an ethnomusicological point of view, a traditional Afro-Carribean drum performance "is" folk music whereas Richard Thompson singing Meet on the Ledge is not. This is precisely as interesting a distinction as the pub bore who explains that there shouldn't be a Star Trek panel at the Science Fiction convention because there is no proper scientific rationale for warp drive. Yes: by one definition science fiction means "stories based on solid scientific conjecture". And those definitions might be quite helpful if you are writing your thesis. But what people at the science fiction convention are interested in is "stories about robots and space ships and aliens and shit, and, incidentally, dragons and swords and magic as well."

The line between folk music and not-folk music is very wobbly and entirely arbitrary. No-one raises their eye-brows if someone sings a Johnny Cash number or some blues tunes at Sidmouth; Jackie Oates includes a John Lennon cover in her set. But folk festivals play the kinds of music which the kinds of people who go to folk festivals want to hear; and there is a pretty broad consensus of what kind of music that is. There is a clear connecting line between English, Scottish and Irish folks songs; and between them and Canadian and Appalachian traditions; and between that and the singer-song-writers who were influenced by that tradition. The people who want to hear Nick Hart singing Child Ballad 10 demonstrably also want to hear Ralph McTell singing Streets of London. They mainly don't want to hear Dakhabraka's high octane purist baiting sound clash. And I suspect that man singing John Barleycorn with a violin in his ear would be laughed off the stage at WOMAD. A huge festival like Glastonbury represents a much wider range of taste.

Would it be a good idea if everyone had much broader tastes? Yes. Would it be a good idea for folkies to sometimes listen to something other than folk music? Maybe. Is it unhealthy to only read superhero comics? Probably. Would it be a good idea to insist on seminars on Racism in Mansfield Park at Comicon and panels about the Anti-life Equation at the Jane Austen Conference? Actually, that might be a really cool idea: get everyone to step outside their comfort zones. I'd like to imagine that that comic book nerds "get" Jane Austen better than the Eng. Lit. profs. "get" comic books, but I think it would probably be the other way round. Is it rather more important for white people to listen to non-white music and read non-white literature than the other way round? Yes, definitely: because everything you read or listen to or think about is part of "white culture" except when you make a conscious effort for it not to be. That's what "privilege" means. Is it institutionally racist for straight white middle class home makers to mainly read books about straight white middle class home makers or at any rate the kinds of books which straight white middle class home makers tend to like? That sounds an awful lot like political correctness gone. an attempt at political hyper-correction.

Not too long ago I mentioned to a friend that I was bingeing on Karl Ove Knaugsgaad, who they happened not to have heard of. I described the books, and they respond "Ohhh...Fathers and sons... It's a bit straight white male, isn't it?"

To which my only available response was to point to myself and say "Er...Hello."

I'm Andrew. I write about folk music, God, comic books, Star Wars and Jeremy Corbyn.

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Sidmouth 2019

A few more highlights....

Sidmouth 2019

A short walk along the promenade  esplanade.

Lindisfarne *  Ralph McTell * Kitty Macfarlane * Jeff Warner * Ragged Trousers * Alice Jones * Mary Humphreys & Anahata * Annie Winter & Paul Downes * Damien Barber * Tony Hall * Sheenah Wellington * Eileen O'Brien & Connor Keane * Harbour Lights * Bill Murray * Hannah Rarity * National Folk Ensemble * Nick Hart * Merry Hell * Mike O'Conner and Barbara Griggs * Steve Knightley * Robb Johnson * Jim Causley * The Dartmoor Entertainers * Matthew Byrne * Martin Simpson * John Kirkpatrick * Nancy Kerr and James Fagan * Sandra Kerr * Sam Kelly and the Lost Boys * Brian Peters * Broom Bezzums * Rachel McShane and the Cartographers * Harri Endersby * Granny's Attic * Iona Fyle * Grace Smith * Thom Ashworth * Ben Walker & Rob Harbron * Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith * Blackbeard's Tea Party *Amethyst Kiah * The Shee 

Friday

It rained and it rained and it rained. Piglet said never before -- and he had been coming to Sidmouth for goodness knows how long... two years was it or maybe three? --  had he seen such rain. And first they cancelled the fireworks and then they cancelled the parade. Then they moved all the things from the Ham to the Bulverton. And then they had to close the Bulverton, 20 minute into Granny’s Attic’s set, because it wasn’t safe. The marquee, I mean, not the band.

My very small tent didn’t literally blow away. In fact I am quite impressed by the extent to which modern tents behave like Chumbawamba during a high wind. But in the end one of the polls split. It was, however, pretty dry, so I decided my best bet was to sit the storm out in what increasingly resembled a large flat canvass bag. I should probably have arranged an interview with the media about world peace.

I did get to hear Sid and Jinmy being relaxed and chatty, and the Shee singing Tom Paines’ bones and an American gospelly bluesy lady who wasn’t at all my kind of thing. but history will record that the festival should have ended with the Thunderbird barn dance last night.

Written in Subway near Exeter bus station (on an iphone)

Thursday

Lady spent entire concert writing postcards and letters. Full on address book, envelopes, stamps on her knee. I found this both distracting and disrespectful to the band.

I am fairly serious: the difference between going to a concert and listening to a CD is that you are in a big room of people who all love the music and are all singing, or crying, or laughing, or stomping their feet. Kind of sacramental. One infidel spoils the magic.

She told me afterwards how brilliant the band was and what a great show it has been, so I couldn’t even decently “tut” at her.

I managed to hear eight different acts today, including four of my most very favourites. And also a lecture about Sabine Baring Gould, the Other Victorian folk song collector, who also wrote one or two moderately well known hymns. He realised (which Sharp did not) that the songs which “peasants” were singing at the end of the 19th century were in many cases not written by immemorial pagan bards in prehistory, but were for the most part seventeenth and eighteenth century pop songs.

Sid and Jimmy (Aldridge and Goldsmith) in combination with Nancy and James (Kerr and Fagan) is as good a double bill as you can get, and very possibly the best ticket of the week. Sid and Jimmy are up for a folk award for their traditional Norfolk love song “the Reedcutters Daughter”. They’d obviously been told to cut the chatter . Sid in particular was not allowed to talk about soil erosion or environmental issues. So they chattered about not chattering. But truthfully they need to rebrand themselves as folksingers and story tellers: each song has a narrative associated with its genesis which audiences need to hear. A little like Simon and Garfunkel, they don’t exactly sing harmony but their two voices some how merge into one perfect voice.

Nancy and James did Hearts That Long for the Land and Farewell to the Gold and Robb Johnson’s Herald of Free Enterprise, which is somehow improved by no longer being topical. And then they did Dance To Your Daddy and melted everyone’s hearts.

The weather arrived. There is apparently a serious danger that the Ham Marquee may blow away. They have already had to cancel the fireworks. I felt that spending a whole evening looking as if I’d fallen in a swimming pool was probably not going to be too much fun, so I stuffed dry clothes into my bag and changed at the top of the hill. Which actually made me feel quite smug. And dry. (Remind me to write an amusing essay about Modesty one of these weeks.)

Lady interrupts my writing to ask if she can sit at the empty table, because she lives here, and tells me that if I lived here it would be worth getting a loyalty card. When she first lived here no one locked their doors because their were no baddies, but it’s not like that now, oh dear me. She is in a choir, because she lives here.

Blackbeard’s Tea Party are basically my favourite band in the world. They started out, a decade ago, as a not un Mawkinish acoustic set up, busking in front of a church in York, but album by album they have become folkier and rockier. They now have two drum kits and arrangements which slip into the realm of self parody, in an entirely good sense. But there is still folk fiddle and folk accordion and a mostly traditional set list. Chickens are on rafts, diamonds are bound for the Davis Straits, Captain Kidd leaves William Moore in his gore and the landlord endlessly refills the flowing bowl. The lead singer and accordionist is a part time morris dancer who leaps around the stage and into the audience. They are a brand, a cult, a phenomenon, and they never forget it is folk music.

Today has been designated their tenth birthday, and there are balloons and party hats. Not only do they do a full electric set, but after a brief break they come back onto the stage and provide ceilidh music until 1 in the morning. In keeping with the ten-year-old birthday theme, they come on dressed as creditable Thunderbirds characters, to the International Rescue theme. The caller has been prevailed onto to dress as Jeff Tracey. In the interval, as is traditional, a rapper side do a demonstration. They do a full sword dance routine in the style and costume of the Tellytubbies. We take our folk seriously.

Before Blackbeard start, Thom Ashworth does a set. I heard him earlier in the day in the Bedford. He explained that he was in receipt of a bursary from Cecil Sharp House to research what it means to be English in a post colonial world. (I mean there are lots of things I am angry about and would like the money to make an album, he explains, but you can’t put that on a grant application.) Quite a tough gig, I would have said, being one man with a guitar in front of an audience who are waiting for the madness which his Blackbeard’s Tea Party.

He opened up with Alan Tyne of Harrow, one of the best highwayman songs and certainly the one with the best tune. (He sings “now in Newgate I am bound and by the law indicted / to hang on Tyburn tree’s my fate of which I’m much afrighted.” Nancy and James always sang it as “by the law convicted” which doesn’t rhyme. Jim Moray thinks Alan Tyne of Harrow may be closely related to an Irishman called Valentine O’Hara.)

There’s a man on the stage. Singing a song about a highwayman. A song that generations of singers have sung. A song which is very largely speaking for itself.

“But being of a courage keen and likewise able bodied,
Well, I robbed Lord Lowndes on the King's highway with my pistols heavy loaded.
I clapped my pistols to his breast which caused him for to quiver,
And five hundred pound in ready gold to me he did deliver.”

I don’t think I experienced a more perfect moment over the whole week. At that moment I would happily have hugged him, or prostrated myself before him. (Rest assured I resisted the temptation.)

At 2am my tent was still standing and reasonably dry.


Diary composed in Mocha

Wednesday

Nine days is quite a long time to spend listening to folk music, sleeping in a tent, and living on coffee and beer. Seasoned festival goers speak of the Wednesday Wall. So I decided to take it a little easy today, and started out at 930 with a lecture on Cecil Sharp followed by an 11.15 talk on Sydney Carter.

The first talk was called “Cecil Sharp - Saint or Sinner”. The conclusion, was (spoilers follow) “a bit of both”. There is a definite problem with English folk music being mediated through the mind of one Victorian gentleman’s idea of what folk music is supposed to be; but the specific accusations of cultural appropriation and exploitation of his sources are wide of the mark. He did record some songs from black people and some religious songs; he made friends with a a lot of his informants, stayed in contact with them and sent them generous presents. And “Aryan” didn’t means then what it does now.

Brian Peters knowledge and enthusiasm made what could have been a dry talk very engaging. He (Mr Peters) popped up again the Woodlands ballad session later in the day and sung all 100 verses of Child Ballad 56. Boy marries girl, other boy smuggles dead leper into girls bed, boy condemns girl to death, dwarf turns up and chops other boys legs off. Seriously. One of the absolute highlights of the week. Is there are technical word for that near chanting performance that traditional ballad singers do?

Sydney Carter once wrote a song about a lady folk singer who became an exotic dancer in Camden town. (“I used to play the fiddle / now I dance with a snake around my middle”). That one didn’t make it into the hymnbook. We start with John Ball and finish with Lord of the Dance and in the middle there is one I had entirely forgotten about a latter day innkeeper who will let baby Jesus in if he comes back “but we hope he isn’t black.” A lot of Carter’s songs were quite saucy; I knew he worked with Martin Carthy (who is the only person who can really make Lord of the Dance work) but was completely unaware he had had a long partnership with Donald (Flanders and) Swann. I didn’t think a lot of the early songs and poems stood up that well -- there was a sense of looking into a time capsule. I didn’t know he’d had the idea of the man who lives backwards before either Martin Amis or Alan Moore. The speakers are keen to play down Carter as an “official” Christian: he didn’t mind his songs being sung in church but was adamant they weren’t hymns; he thought the Church’s Christ was one more idol and that Jesus had been one of many manifestations of the eternal Dance. Well, maybe: but Lord of the Dance and a Bitter Was the Night and Friday Morning and Judas and Mary seem pretty steeped in mainstream theology to me. When I was growing up the Methodist Hymn book had a note in it explaining why Lord of the Dance was not too upbeat to sing in church.

Rachel (formerly of Bellowhead) Macshane is fabulous. Tune laden versions of mostly folk standards — Sylvia the female highwayman who nearly shoots her lover to find out if he’s a real man, the girl who shoves his sister in the river and a slightly less filthy Mole Catcher (by comparison with Nick Hart’s version). I love Martin Simpson to bits, and he was so lovely about the fact that so many people were turned away from the Roy Bailey show, and I will listen to him singing Never Any Good forever. His version of Carthy’s version of Rosselson’s Palaces of Gold is still chilling, and he has correctly redirected it at Grenfell Tower. (It was originally about Aberfan.) But I am starting to think that I have heard enough very fast very twiddly bluesy riffs about characters called One Eyed Bugsy McHarp.

Harri Endersby is, I fear, the kind of singer song writer who appeals hugely to people other than me. Granny’s Attic are sensational. I am reliably informed that Iona Fyfe is the best young Scottish female ballad singer on the circuit. She is very, very Scots, and I fear that by the time she took to the Kennaway Cellar stage, the Wednesday Wall had finally caught up with me....

Diary written in The Chattery