Would I Do It Again?

I think it's Parkinson's law, isn't it, which tells you that a job always takes longer than you thought it would, and this is true even if you take Parkinson's law into account.

Glastonbury is muddy. Really muddy. You just won't believe how deep and thick and sticky the mud is. You picture it as a music festival in a field, albeit a very big festival in a very big field. You don't realise that on Day 1 (Thursday) when the festival hasn't really started, that you are going to say "I might as well go and listen to Rory McCloud in the Avalon Cafe Tent." Rory is a man who plays the mouth harp and the spoons. And the guitar. And practically everything else. And has a band, consisting of clarinets and harps and what nots and thingamys. The Avalon Cafe Tent is the smaller of two performance areas in the Fields of Avalon; which is one of the smaller areas in the festival. (I don't think the BBC goes there at all.) But I still imagine that, on the night before the festival had even started, there were a thousand people crammed in listening to Rory. Or, rather, not listening to Rory. Everyone remembers that, in the very olden days, Beatles fans used to go to Beatles concerts with the express intention of not listening to the Beatles, of indeed, making so much noise that it was impossible for anyone to listen to the Beatles, even the Beatles. Glastonbury audiences regard acts as convenient breaks in the serious business of tromping through the mud did I mention the mud -- during which they can consult their programmes and talk loudly about which acts they've already seen, and which acts they are hoping to see, and which acts they are sorry to have missed. You might think it's hard to have a conversation over something loud amplified and electric, but it doesn't seem to deter them. They shout. But it occurred to me that this was about ten times the size of the audience which seemed like a pretty good turnout when I heard the redoubtable Mr McCloud singing about divorce and world peace and playing with a Mexican mariachi band in Bath last month.

I overheard a boy, perhaps fifteen, talking on the phone "U2 take to the stage on Saturday evening" he said. Take to the stage? It isn't clever to sound like a bad tabloid music correspondent even if you are a bad tabloid music correspondent; it's particularly not clever when you are on the phone to your mum.

So: by the time Rory has finished his set (and I repeat that the festival hasn't started yet) you realise that you are talking about, roughly, a 45 minute walk back to your tent. Through mud. Through the kind of mud into which you sink, ankle deep, at every step, more or less guaranteeing that at some point the quicksand is going to grab you and propel you forward so you are crawling though the mud on your knees; more or less guaranteeing that that the swamp is going to hold on to your boots and force you to walk a few steps in your socks. Tromping though unfamiliar areas called "Left Field" and "Green Fields"; finding that which ever way you are walking, there will always be at least 10,000 people walking in the other direction. It is genuinely quite scary to see a sign pointing to the field you believe to be quite near the one you left your tent in and see a vast lemming like migration walking towards you: do you wait 2 hours for it to clear; do you seek another one and get lost; do you force your way through the oncoming human tsunami. And once you get through the quick sand, you discover that "The tent with the orange flag, by the path, near the gate, overlooking the Big Top at the Dance Tent" which seemed easy to find in daylight looks a lot like 100,000 other tents. If you think "It would be fun to come in 2012", you must first contemplate me walking along a muddy path, holding one boot in my hand, at about 3AM, not entirely sure if I am even in the right field, saying over and over again: "This isn't fun. This is scary"

The mechanics of camping don't bother me particularly. I can go for a few days without washing my hair. I can happily sleep on an airbed, or, indeed, on the ground, although this is rather academic because the music goes on 24 hours a day and people coming back from Shangrila or the Hundred Acre wood are going to stand by your tent and shout at 4AM or 5AM no matter what you do. I rather wish I'd dispensed with the wriggling and rolling and just boldly stepped out of my tent and got dressed and undressed in the moonlight and the morning dew and let Nick take all the childish pictures he wanted. Oobviously, if you have a problem with outside toilets you shouldn't even think of going on a camping trip, but in fact the Bishop of Bath and Wells did a pretty good job of keeping the facilities as clean as any public loo is ever going to be.

(And unlike some people I am not offended by the presence, or indeed existence, of bands I don't want to hear. Glastonbury has not lost it's credentials as a music festival because it has appearances by novelty acts like the Wombles. [Blah, blah, blah excellent composer; blah, blah, blah Art Garfunkle; blah blah blah, Steeleye Span.] Mr U2 may be old and unhip but you don't have to listen to them if you don't want to: you can listen to one of the other 150 bands playing at the same time.)

So: granted that the entire lower half of my body is caked in mud; and granted that wellington boots are the least practical garment ever devised by man; and granted that it is either raining, or, worse not raining; I'm now standing in, say, the main Avalon Stage; or the main Acoustic Stage; or the Left Field Stage. And I am listening to Chumbawamba, or Pentangle, or Mr Billy Bragg. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the Avalon area was the best sub-festival: two tents, both of which likely to playing music I was prepared to listen to; a medieval themed real ale tavern; a cafe selling coffee and baguettes and home made muffins, and some toilets less than five minutes walk from the stage which no-one else seemed to know about. At such points, it became very nearly possible to forget the mud, and have a positively Good Time. I certainly heard a lot of bands that I would have travelled a long way to hear; a lot of bands who, since they were playing, I was very happy to listen to; and, of course, one or two bands that I would have been perfectly prepared to walk several miles through a swamp in order to avoid. The sensible approach is clearly to pick a stage on which there is a band that you would quite like to hear, head for that stage, and stay there all day, listening to whatever happens to be happening there. (My only subsequent disasters were when I violated that rule. On Friday night, I somehow found myself on the periphery of a vast crowd listening to Primal Scream on the main stage. The main stage was roughly as far away from me as my bedroom is from Cafe Kino. There were some pretty light shows, and the act seemed to be performing with some enthusiasm, but so far as I could tell, what they were playing was lift muzak. And when it finished, I was part of a crowd of 50,000 all of whom were trying to get away. This. Is. Not. Fun. This. Is. Scary.)

Wonderful moments, then, encased in mud and unpleasantness and generally being quite scared. (Not that I really ever thought I was in any danger. It's astonishing how good natured everyone is. When I found myself both literally and metaphorically stuck in the mud in the medieval themed tavern, four total stranger helped to pull me out. I'm sure if one had actually fallen down in the middle of a crowd, the crowd would have parted and helped one to one's feet. But being in the middle of a swamp in the middle of a crowd is just. not. fun.)

Best Moment


Chumbawamaba walk onto the main Avalon stage. All five of them are wearing T-Shirts reading "Bono: pay your taxes".

I do not particularly care, or indeed know, about Bono's tax position. In fact, until this weekend, I didn't know he sang in a group called U2, and still am not sure if it's Bow-no or Bonn-oh. But I love, adore and respect this side idolatry the fact that Chumbawamba make every show they perform a political "happening", and somehow manage to do so without seeming preachy. Possibly because the songs are so sweet and fine: I imagine they could charm even a died-in-wool liberal democrat. After the t-shirts, the act was almost redundant, but they ran through a nice greatest recent hits package -- the Last Nazi and Charlie and El Fusilado and an entirely redundant thing about Joe Hill that I've never heard before.(But then, that naivity is part of the package: they give the impression of reading a news item or the story of an historical injustice in the morning and turning it into a bouncy, poignant akapella secular hymn by tea time.) This was their first gig for over a year, and Boff hadn't quite straightened out all the words of all the songs in his head. But that's part of the package as well. I love them to bits.

The world is riddled with maggots
The maggots are getting fat
Their making a tasty meal of all
The bosses and beaurocrats
They're taking over the boardroom
And they're fat and full of pride
And they all came out of the woodwork
On the day the Nazi died.

Best Moment

Shortly after Chumbawammba, did hie myself forth to the Left Field area to hear Billy Bragg doing his thing. Never heard him live before. Hadn't been 100% sure if this was my best choice (I would also have liked to hear Mumford and Sons, who were on at the same time) Billy takes to the...walks onto the stage and immediately goes into the first bars of his thumping version of The World Turned Upside Down, which, if my I-Pod is to be trusted, is my 3rd favourite song [*]. And so on through a mixture of his teenage angst numbers (Milkman of Human Kindness, Walk Away, New England, of course) and his political songs. Which Side are You On introduced with a heartfelt rant about the coalition("It breaks my little heart to hear George Osbourne saying that we're all in this together that's not what his side believes: it's what our side believes"); There Is Power in A Union introduced with an equally heartfelt rant about the need to plan and organize: the anti-cuts demos didn't just happen, did they? Mostly, he didn't even bother with the choruses of his songs: just point the mic into the audience and let us do the work. The rabble is suitably roused. Why is there not one single professional politician who can communicate a political message with this clarity and conviction?

There is power in the factory

Power in the land

Power in the hand of the worker

But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand

There is power in a union.

Best Moment

I decided that I ought to at least see something on the Pyramid Stage, that's the big one, the one the BBC refers to as "The Glastonbury Festival". Sunday morning offered a sequence of acts I positively wanted to hear: Fishermen's Friends; Don McLean, Laura Marling and Paul Simon. (Also an American acoustic band called The Low Anthem who I believe I enjoyed but can't remember anything about.) I decided that the Best Plan was to proceed to the stage well before kick off, and take a position right at the front, scarcely more than a hundred yards from the stage.

The atmosphere was most jolly, with people from Westovingland waving St Piran's crosses, and a young lady who used to hear Fishyfriends in St Ives before they were famous. My view of the Friends themselves hasn't changed since I saw them at the Brizzle folkfest: they are a very good choir with lots of personality, but I don't quite see how choruses of What Shall We Do With Drunken Sailor and Sloop John B, however rousing, amount to million dollar commercial success for what is basically still a rather good shantyband. Added to their repertoire since I last heard them is a piece called Cousin Jack, which I may have previously referred to, a not even slightly traditional song of the Cornish diaspora, originally performed by Show of Hands, a west country folk band who I may possibly have mentioned. It worked wonderfully in the context of the sea -- well pool -- of white-on-black crosses in the audience, and those of us who knew the song dutifully raised our hands in air and bellowed along loudly and tunelessly. I was the loudest and tunelessest of all; it never fails to bring a tear to the old Rilstonian eye.

Where there's a mine or a whole in the ground

That's where I'm headed for, that's where I'm bound...

I'm leaving the county behind, and I'm not coming back

So follow me down, cousin Jack.


As the song finishes and they go into the cough-sweet joke ("no, we're not going to talk about sucking on a Fishermen's Friend, that joke  always leaves a nasty taste in my mouth") I notice that standing right next to me in the mosh is, er, Steve Knightley (The man who wrote the song. Do try to keep up.) So, of course, I turned round and asked him if he didn't think that the song Roots equivocated slightly over it's definition of the term "English."

Course I bloody didn't. I said "You should be up there, sir" and "It's great to hear them singing your song." He said "We will be...." (I did make it back to Avalon for Show of Hands own set, which was terrifically tight greatest hits sets, with very little chatter so none of the 45 minutes was wasted: the Fishyfriends were in the audience. There's something lovely about that, isn't there?)

Up to and including Mr Don McLean, I was finding the atmosphere in the Pyramid "mosh" quite congenial. It amused me that there were posh-girls who'd come to see Bouncy and were planning on sitting there, with their backs to the stage, through six or seven acts that they weren't interested in, just in order to be at the front for their idols. (They didn't seem to have heard of Don McLean, or even of American Pie.) But they lent us their seats between acts, and were bubbly and friendly. I don't think I could have had that kind of devotion, even if the top of the bill had been someone I really wanted to hear, like Bob Dylan or, well, Bob Dylan, actually. I am male and might have survived 12 hours without a trip to the lavatory, but I don't think that I would have especially enjoyed doing so. If you were watching the BBC coverage, then the man with coloured dots painted over his face who knew all the words to Vincent was standing just in front of me. I heard Don McLean live once before, a billion years ago, in the 90s. He wasn't very good: came across much too much like a man in his 40s still trying to do the songs he used to do when he was a man in his 20s. (The medical term is "Paul McCartney syndrome".) He's now a man in his 60s who is absolutely comfortable being a man in his 60s, dark glasses and face-lifted features, slightly paunchy, coming to the middle of the stage with his guitar and not moving and letting the songs do the work. Obviously one is supposed to be rude about him because he's mainstream: I myself went through a stage of saying that American Pie is really only Desolation Row re-written by someone who didn't understand Desolation Row. But he was terrific. Quite bravely, he stayed away from a "greatest hits" set. There was an impeccable Vincent, of course, and a 13 minute long reading of American Pie which only slightly outstayed its welcome. (Having gone right through the sing it fast sing it slow one more time thing, he decided that what we really wanted was to sing the first verse again.) But I give him a lot of points for not ending the set on his Famous Song, but sending the band off stage and finishing up with a slow sad one (the one about the man who builds a beautiful house on the beach). Not charismatic, perhaps, but a showman. Not Dylan, but still a poet. And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do...

But by the time Laura Marling took to the...started to sing, things were getting uncomfortably crowded, the sun was in my eyes, and one felt that two thirds of the crowd weren't listening to her delicately understated but maybe not especially festival friendly set. She's about 17, sings folk-Americana that sounds like Dylan-at-70, and is quite wonderful. There was more air available for Paul Simon, but the general feeling was that his set was too challenging for a festival, and of course, he doesn't sing any of the old ones I know because he stole them from English folksingers. Glad I'd heard him, though.

In my boundless naivety I had imagined that most of the people who wanted to hear Paul Simon and Don McLean would leave in order to avoid Pendulum and Bouncy. Possibly a thousand or so did, but then, three thousand or so were trying to get in at the same time. Rather surprised the organizers allowed that kind of thing to happen: I'd have thought it was dangerous. I don't think that at any point I felt that I was in mortal danger of being crushed to death by rampaging mobs of Bouncy fans, but not a pleasant experience.

So. I've done the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury and never have to do it again... Unless Steve Knightley's really up there next year, of course, obviously
Best Moment

Pentangle on the Acoustic Stage were unquestionably the best bit of music that I heard during the festival. Not as nice as the Avalon stage, on the grounds of being up a hill, but it had a similar feeling of being a self contained festival, with its own bar (sans slough of despond) and it's own eatery, serving the largest pieces of carrot cake ever exhibited in captivity, and run by by a religious group that wants to restore primitive New Testament Christianity...good luck with that.

Heard "Jacqui McShee's Pentangle" in Bath earlier in the year. They were sort of perfectly all right. This was Ms McShee with the complete original 1960s line up John Renbourne (guitar), Bert Jansch (guitar) Danny Thompson (cello/bass) and Terry Cox (percussion.) This was an absolute revelation; expecially, from my point of view, because they stayed very close to their old traditional brief, with readings of blood curdling ballads like Bruton Town, Cruel Sister, Demon Lover and Hunting Song. Jacqui's ethereal voice hovering above the tinkling folk jazz cadences. And then Renbourne, who is no spring chicken, sat on the floor to finish the set with his electric sitar. If anything felt like being in Glastonbury, when it was 1968 and everyone was a flower children, this was it.

Best Moment

On Saturday night I heard a group called Flogging Molly who are like the Pogues only without the subtlety. The atmosphere before hand was lovely. I found myself chatting to the other guy who had heard Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs (a traditional skiffle band) in the morning and thought them brilliant. Since I had also thought them brilliant, there was an immediate connection between us. Unfortunately, I had been at the acoustic tent all day, where the expected reaction to, say, Thea Gilmore singing the whole of John Wesley Harding to go "Jolly good! Jolly good!". I had not realised when, taking my place toward the front that everyone was planning to signal their appreciation of Flogging Molly by jumping up and down. Specifically, jumping up and down on my jacket.

Would I do it again? There is no doubt that it has a special atmosphere: everyone has a sense of being "at Glastonbury". The aforementioned Nick correctly noted that any band could guarantee itself a big cheer by telling the audience that they were at Glastonbury. It's hard to get tickets. The state-controlled media goes on and on about it for a week. So there is a real sense of being special, being important, being privileged because you are one of only a hundred thousand people watching Primal Screen on big TV screams. The sheer amount of music available is exhilarating: there is nowhere else where you find yourself thinking "Let me see: shall I go and listen to Bellowhead, or Suzzanne Vega, or maybe take a punt and hear the Streets." (Oh yes, I have heard of the Streets. Bob once played a track about a young man whose girlfriend had left him, and whose friend was trying, not very successfully, to cheer him up.) On the other hand, you don't enjoy Suzzanne Vega more because you are missing Bellowhead; in fact, because the whole thing is so huge, you perpetually find yourself thinking that somewhere there must be this really terrific gig that no-one told you about. (The rumour that Paul McCartney had helicoptered in, done an unannounced gig in a cafe, and helicoptered out seemed plausible at the time, as did the one about the Prime Ministers aid being found dead in a toilet.) If it hadn't been raining and muddy I would probably have had more fun wandering around the Stone Circle and the Green Field and just stopping and listening to whatever seemed to be playing in bars and tents I seemed to be passing. As it was, I felt reluctant to stop and just listen to the patch of Johnny Cash-ish Americana I heard issuing from the Jack Daniels bar because I was forcefully swimming through the swamp to get to the people I actually wanted to hear in thirty or forty or fifty minutes and was a afraid I might not make it.
 

So on the whole, yes, I would go again, but I think I would do it differently. Travel by coach to get the perks of being a "green traveller". Arrive first thing on Wednesday, to give me longer to explore the festival before the actual music started. Pitch my tent in Avalon (now, there's a phrase I don't often get to type), near where the acts I want to hear are playing, with no need to venture near John Peel or the Dance Village; and stay away from the big stage even if there are acts I want to hear there. Don McClean was unquestionably very good. A highlight. But if I'd missed him, I could have heard the Wombles.[**]

Did I mention that it was quite muddy?

Punks Not Dad - New Forbidden - Rory McCloud - Coccoon - Stonefield Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs - 3 Daft Monkeys - Katzenjammer Chumbawamba - Billy Bragg - Primal Scream - Kassidy - Isobel Anderson Emily and the Woods - The Webb Sisters - Thea Gilmore - Pentangle - Guillemots - Flogging Molly - Fishermen's Friends - The Low Anthems Don McLean - Laura Marling - Paul Simon - Show of Hands - Imelda May -- Suzzanne Vega
[*] Since you asked: Word Bomber (Chumbawamba); Roots (you know who); the World Turned Upside Down; Muir and the Master Builder (Dick Gaughan); Brother Gorilla (Jake Thackray); Hollow Point (Chris Wood); Botany Bay (Mawkin:Causely); Albion (Chris Wood); The Devil and Pastor Jack (Dick Gaughan); The Little Pot Stove (Nic Jones.)

[**] I had my reivew all prepared: "I have now met Tom Baker, and seen the Wombles perform live, so coul my ten year old self please fuck off and stop bothering me."

follow my twitter feed for my exciting adventures in Glastonbury. at least until the charge runs out on the phone.

Dick Gaughan

Bristol Folk House
11th June 2011

A Dick Gaughan gig is not for the faint-hearted.

He performs for ninety minutes straight, not singing so much as snarling. His voice has become more and more like a growl as he's got older, but that suits the angry tone of the songs. Fine old rabble-rousers like Tom Paine's Bones jostle with melody-free rants about former comrades who abandoned the Cause. ("I used to see you salute that poster of Che Guevara / I guess it wouldn't look too chic in the house you live in now"). But just when you are starting to wonder if he Dick an endless supply of shouty revolutionary anthems he sits down, chats about General Humbert and the 1798 rebellion and launches into an exquisite six minute Irish lament on his acoustic guitar. 

The invective kicks in early. He starts, as he always does, with the non-specifically inspirational battle hymn "Now what's the use of two strong legs if you only run away and what use is the finest voice if you've nothing good to say...." and then sings a story, new to me, about a man who finds that his vast wealth is no use to him after a shipwreck. ("Think of your favourite banker!") And thence to another new one about some unspecified people entirely failing to notice that their world is collapsing around them. "They all sang Hallelujah as the waves engulfed the land..." "At the time of the last election I decided to write a song venting my anger at a wee institution called New Labour" he explains "but I realized you couldn't write a whole damn song about New Labour..."

Although he claims not to use a set list the evening covers most of the most famous musical bases: we get Song for Ireland, Now Westlin' Winds ("I couldn't imagine not singing it"), Games People Play and the incomparable Both Sides The Tweed. He says he stopped singing the latter for a decade because he couldn't quite work out what it was about: the penny dropped when he heard the quote about it not being our differences which divide us, but our inability to embrace those differences. Prejudice is the most contemptible thing in the world: the one thing he really hates. (Well: one of the things he hates. He's half Irish and half Scottish and thus a passionate advocate "of English independence." The best thing about getting old is that no-one tells him he'll become a Tory when he grows up. "I hate all that patronising shit." But God escapes relatively unscathed this evening: no Pastor Jack or Stand Up, Stand Up For Judas or Son of Man although Old Tom Paine does tell us to kick off religion and monarchy.)

Any performer in this vein risks turning into the parody folk-singer who hates poverty, war and injustice "unlike the rest of you squares". You hate prejudice do you? Pretty controversial. And don't think much of rich bankers? Or New Labour? Very brave of you to say so. His signature song -- which, astonishingly, he says he hasn't sung for years -- assures us that he could sing happy songs if he wanted to "But that wouldn't help those in trouble / That wouldn't help make their pain disappear / And the homeless, the workless, the hopeless and helpless / Wouldn't be any happier, would still live in fear." Indeed, and will Sir be walking on water after Sir has finished singing?

But it doesn't feel like that when you're caught up in a Gaughan performance. Because the anger is so genuine and unaffected. Because the songs are so perfectly crafted. Because for every full-blown rant there is a lyrical traditional poem and that authentic snarling voice soars above the delicate guitar melodies and Robert Burns seem to become a living presence in the room.

Let virtue distinguish the brave

Place riches in lowest degree

Think them poorest who can be a slave

Them richest who dare to be free

We read that Mr Dylan was unhappy with the job-title of "protest singer": he thought of himself as just a singer. Dick Gaughan quite happily proclaims that it's his job to make people feel angry and sad in order to make the world a better place. There's a thin line between protest singer and preacher; between bard and prophet. But isn't the really great preacher the one who reminds us of the platitudes, the obvious truths that we're always in danger of forgetting?

When you're called for jury service

When your name is drawn by lot

When you vote in an election

When you freely voice your thought

Don't take these things for granted

For dearly were they bought...

Thank god that there are still guitar wielding prophets like Dick Gaughan.

Angry Scots-Irish Playlist

Jim Moray

Chapel Arts Center, Bath
10th June 2011

It would be terribly easy to underestimate Jim Moray.

The write up on the Bath "Listomania" website, said, in effect "Wow. He does, like, folk songs. But he does them, like, modern." Which he certainly does. But that's hardly a U.S.P, is it? I am told that folk singers were using electrical guitars as long ago as the 1960s. It's not exactly unusual to see an act with a modern drum kit. Where, exactly, are all these po-faced "protectionists" who think that songs should stay exactly the same as they always were?

When I first heard Jim (at Folk By the Oak in 2009) I said -- terribly unfairly -- "Oh...he's just singing standards that no-one else would do, and sticking electric beats behind them. Sort of folk mash up. Quite clever if you like that sort of thing, I suppose." Subsequently, I spotted that he has a voice, as the young people say, to die for. Which he does. He really, really does. His second encore tonight is Valentine (a "morris-waltz-lullaby") full of a poignant urgency which breaks out into bitter-sweet joy in the final stanza. I assume that the refrain "Throw the oats against the vine" means something extremely rude. It leaves the audience feeling warn and lovely, coming as it does after the more obvious show-finisher in which we have all sung about quiet and witty girls by the quayside to the point of exhaustion. And there's a casual informality ("I'm Jim...") to his stage persona which makes it impossible not to like him.

But none of this remotely gives him the credit he deserves as musician, an arranger of music and (it's now very clear) a student of folk music. There's no Early One Morning or Barbary Allen in tonight's set, but there's a fascinating version of an obscure Child ballad called Lord Douglas. He describes it as a work in progress: "cut down from the original 300 verses to only 238",  a composite of  21 different versions incorporating material from a cognate Icelandic saga. The more familiar Rufford Park Poachers is described as "cover version" of a song recorded in 1909  "on wax cylinders". He cares about this stuff.

He takes to the piano for a long Lord Bateman (not as good as Chris Wood's version, but basically, what is?) -- and Vaughan Williams Captain's Apprentice "a jolly song about torturing children" which he thinks inspired Britten's Peter Grimes. There's certainly something operatic about his piano style, sweeping up and down the scale, and weaving in out of the melody. But most of the act is done with a three piece band -- a melodian, a hurdy-gurdy and a freak-out drummer, with Jim himself on electric guitar. The traditional instruments lead and dominate the sound leaving the drums and the guitar to provide seasoning and interpretation of what's basically still a very traditional sound. One only has to watch the way he counts the band in, whisper comments and signal to them to see that Jim is the auteur of the music: not merely a singer with a band, but a conductor, arranger, producer even.

You could write off the four TV screens as gimmickry, a way of saying "this isn't how you imagine folk music!" It's quite fun to be looking at images of pretty girls on a quayside when he's singing about pretty girls on a quayside, though I wasn't quite sure whether the image of Jim stroking an urban fox had much to do with anything. But the screens come into their own in songs like Lucy Wan, perhaps the most representatively off-beat of Jim's numbers. It's one of the most viciously nasty folk songs in the repertoire: about a boy who makes his own sister pregnant, murders her to cover it up and then runs away to sea. The obsessive (almost psychotic) call and response rhythm of the original is transformed into Moray's characteristic keening delivery, so that the verse sounds more like a lament than murder ballad. But his performance is juxtaposed with a modern version of the same story, perpetrated by a Bristol rap artist improbably called Bubz.  "So he has taken his good broadsword / That hangs down by his knee / And plunged it into fare Lucy's heart / To spoil her pretty body"  morphs into "We screwed / You creamed / I stabbed / You screamed" ...." Bubz's contributions appear (as part of a video in the style of a news broadcast) on the TV screens, so that Jim is effectively singing a duet with a recording. As a piece of conceptual art, it comments cleverly on the idea that modern yoof music is frequently condemned for being violent and misogynistic, even though much worse stories have formed part of English popular songs  since the year dot. But the more I hear it, the better it works as a piece of music in its own right. The two versions of the story start quite separate, but by the end, the rap rhythm is existing, quite happily, behind Jim's traditional singing. Jim makes it appear that controlling the electronics, working with the band and singing along with a partner who isn't actually there is easy. I would wager that it isn't.

Is Jim Moray really the biggest thing to hit folk in 30 years? I don't know: there have been an awful lot of acts since 1982. It is very tempting to point at the jiggery pokery and the occasional weird mash ups and say that he's mainly a novelty act or an iconoclast, a man who uses TV screens and rap artists to deliver a well deserved shaking to all those people in po-faced sweaters who don't exist but would jolly well deserve to be shaken up if they did. There may be a small element of that, for example, when he decides to play a Fleetwood Mac song on the banjo. But he's mostly a musician.

 

Alasdair Roberts

Chapel Arts Centre, Bath
9th June

Most artists wind up their acts with something catchy and happy which the audience can sing along to so they leave with the gig with a spring in their step. Alasdair Roberts chooses to end his act with the Cruel Mother, a charming little ditty about a lady who strangles her babies and goes to hell. (Some people have tried to rehabilitate her, pointing out that in the Olden Days, baby-strangling may have been the only viable form of contraception but it's still not an obvious crowd-pleaser.) Granted, we get to sing-along-an-infanticide but it's not the usual "down in the green woods of ivory-oh" refrain. Oh no. Mr Roberts has dug up a version where the refrain goes: "The sun shines down on Carlisle Wall / And the lion shall be lord of all."  Which doesn't seem particularly relevant. He thinks the lion may be a celtic sun god, which hardly helps at all. Oh, and despite having two very good accompanists in tow (Rafe Fitzpatrick, double bass, Stevie Jones, fiddle) he sings it unaccompanied. He's tall and thin; his long guitarist's fingers are clenched like claws; his arms flail as he intones or chants the horrible words until I almost thought he was gong to go into convulsions.

It was in short, absolutely magnificent. As good a piece of straight ballad singing as I think I've ever heard. Readers of Twitter will already be aware that I was ****ing gobsmacked: I can't remember when I've been this enthusiastic about a performer after one hearing. (Mr Chris Wood was and is something of an acquired taste.)

Much of the rest of the evening is equally Scottish and equally miserable. We hear about Bonnie Suzie who was burned (in Dundee) for the unpardonable crime of marrying an Englishman; and the martyrdom of little St Hugh of Lincoln. Roberts is very much concerned about the provenance of his traditional songs. If he is going do a standard like Golden Vanity (the one about the cabin boy who single-handedly sinks a Spanish Galleon while sailing in the low coun-tree) you can be sure it is going to be based on a specific recording made in Edinburgh in 1901. 

But mostly he sings his own songs. Jaw-droppingly brilliant songs. (Literally so: Bristol's leading folk-journalist may be able to provide a sketch of me sitting at my table, open-mouthed, ignoring my beer.) When looking for someone to compare him with, I keep coming back to the Incredible String Band. Much tighter, more focussed, more sober, not to say dour, than the ISB ever were: but the same complex, rambling, freeform songs that take you on a melodic journey, you aren't sure where to. The same preoccupation with the mythic. The same slight tendency toward the overblown lyric. (I scribbled "the psychopomp of the cosmogenic egg" in my notebook at one point.) Some singers introduce songs by saying "this is about the miners' strike" or "this is about growing up in Scunthorpe". Alasdair says things like: "This is about Anankey, who in Greek mythology is the mother of the fates and the holder of the spindle of necessity." But you never feel that the words are taking over. The mythological song starts with an instrumental passage, almost like a Sydney Carter carol; from which the hymn to Ananke seems to arise naturally. "Who is the threader of the needle and who is orderer of all our states; who is the holder of the spindle and who is the architect of all our fates": he sings.  (You can hear the tune in the lyric.) Each gnomic question is repeated over and over, with it's own little tune, and the piece seems to end in a joyful chant "It is Anankey, it is Anankey, by whom we are all begot". (How many lyricists would say "by whom"?) The obligatory Scottish Folksong About Scotland which ends the first set consists of four or five seperate melodic gems, strung out on an end-of-the-pier fiddle-tune. The music-hall melody masks the cynicism. "It's nice to be here on edge of empire.....Oh Caledonia, my Caledonia!...Can't you get over your tiny self?"

It's not really like a traditional song: it's not really like anything else I've ever heard. But it seems to follow some kind of traditional logic: as if he's absorbed the old music's structure and is now freed up to do his own thing within it. (Different from Ian King, who opened for him, who takes traditional songs like Death and the Maiden and uses modern musical styles to explore their potentials.) One thinks of T.S Eliot's Tradition and the Individual Talent, doesn't one, where the most original poet is the one most influenced by all the poets who came before him? I think it comes down to a  particular way of marrying words and music -- or, let's be more specific -- of marrying poem and tune. Becuase tunes are what it's all about: mostly happy tunes, dance tunes, jigs and reels and carols. At times, you almost feel that you are listening to instrumentalists -- a slightly "out there" scottish celidah band, perhaps -- making beautiful music which just somehow happens to perfectly synchronize with the verses of a young poet with a beautiful voice. Or else that your are listening to a poet singer and the instruments just happen to be imitating the rhythms of his voice. Which makes it sound almost Wagnerian. Is that how traditional songs work? The words and the tune equally important; the words telling the story and leaving the singer little scope to pour his emotion or his experience into the lyric because the expression, the emotion, is already there, encoded in the melody. I'm tempted to wonder whether this two pronged attack was what made the performance so very, very powerful: whether simultaneously attending to dense meaningful words and complex melodic tunes draws the audience into a kind of fugue state.

Not wishing to come over all po-faced, but I find myself falling back on metaphors of possession and shamanistic ecstasy and speaking-in-tongues. Some people talk about "the tradition" as if she were a living thing which can speak through a performer who honours her. That was what this evening felt like. As if the Muse had literally taken possession of this thin, wiry guitarist.

Did I mention that I was ****ing gobsmacked?

Being For The Benefit of Mr Eden

Po-Faced Folkie Playlist

Appendix

"Roots" annotated

OK. Let's knock this thing on the head once and for all.

Here is a clip of a song by Mr Steve Knightley and Mr Phil Beer, collectively "Show of Hands".

Here are my comments on what I think the lyrics mean.

If anyone says that the lyrics are entirely transparent, and that any annotation is quite unnecessary, then it is quite likely that I will whole-heartedly agree with them.

Now it's been 25 years or more

I've roamed this land from shore to shore

From Tyne to Tamar, Severn to Thames

From moor to vale, from peak to fen

Played in cafes, pubs and bars

I've stood in the street with my own guitar....

This is literally true, in the sense that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer served an "apprenticeship" in pubs like the Albert, and still play small venues from time to time. But it's also appealing to the romantic image of the folk-singer as wandering minstrel. Steve's songs often mythologise a relatively mundane "life on the road": fights he almost got into; road accidents he narrowly avoided. Criss-crossing the UK in a touring van is the modern English equivalent to being a "ramblin' boy". The video which goes with the song shows the singer walking into the sunset with an acoustic guitar slung across his back, which isn't something professional musicians do very often in the real world.  

Any first-year English student can tell you that the "I" who speaks in a poem is not necessarily identical with that strange but uninteresting person "the author". [*] We should not assume that every line in the song is a simple statement of the writer's private opinion, any more than we should assume that he really has a younger brother who injured his hand in a farming accident: he's giving voice to an everyman English folksinger. (On the other hand, in performance, Steve sometimes changes the line to "stood on the street with my first guitar", which is quite specific.)

But I'd be richer than all the rest

If I had a pound for each request

For 'Duelling Banjos', 'American Pie'

It's enough to make you cry

The Singer complains that audiences would rather listen to artificial, inauthentic music than the English folk-songs which he loves. (This is a fairly clear example of the Singer being a persona, rather than Knightley himself: it is hard to imagine a request for American Pie at a Show of Hands concert.)

It is perhaps not quite fair to use American Pie as a by-word for plastic artificiality. Don McLean intended the song to be a cry for musical authenticity: he felt that John Lennon and Bob Dylan had ruined popular music by pretentiously pretending that it could be Art. But rock n roll isn't meant to be art: rock n roll is meant to be something you dance to.

But perhaps the Singer doesn't object to 'American Pie' as a song, but merely wishes that the the English would sing English songs and leave American songs to the Americans? Ewan MacColl famously set a rule that singers in his folk club could only sing songs in their own accents and from their own backgrounds. However, the song can hardly be a cry for purity in this sense: Show of Hands themselves are perfectly happy doing excellent covers of songs by Springsteen, Dylan or Earle. Eliza Carthy, in reaction to the Guardian's appalling remark about folk music being "arthritically white", said that she regarded English folk as part of "world" music (England arguably being part of the world) in which people from different backgrounds said "You show me yours and I'll show you mine".  


 

Rule Britannia, Swing Low

Are these the only songs the English know?

The Singer complains that the only time you hear English people singing together is at football matches ("Swing Low, Sweet Chariot") and Last Night of the Proms. ("Rule, Britannia!"). This is pretty uncontroversial. (He might have added "church services" to the list. Cynics have suggested that old-time revivalists like Billy Graham met with such success in England because people just kinda enjoyed belting out Blessed Assurance with five thousand other people)

Rule Britannia worked its way into Last Night of the Proms because it formed part of Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs. It could therefore be said to be part of the late 19th century notion that Home Sweet Home and the Sailor's Hornpipe weren't quite respectable unless they were dressed up as "classical" music.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is a church song (I looked over Jordan and what did I see?), but rugger players used to sing it in the changing rooms for reasons we probably don't need to discuss while there are ladies present.

For the last 300 days, Mr Jon Boden has been engaged in the "A Folk Song A Day" project, so called because each day, he sings a folk song and releases it for free on the interwebs. Some of the performances are very good indeed ("The Mistletoe Bough", "A Chat With Your Mother") some are frankly rather poor (his version of "The King of Rome" was a particular disappointment). Part of the purpose of the project is to encourage social singing. Boden thinks that everyone can, and should, sing, even if they can't do it in tune; and wants to offer a body of songs suitable for singing together. Mr Cecil Sharp, the inventor of folk music,  entertained a hope that the Olde Englishe songs which he was "collecting" would one day be taught to school children.  

After the speeches, when the cake's been cut

The disco's over and the bar is shut

At christening, birthday, wedding or wake

What can we sing 'til the morning breaks?

The Singer thinks it is a shame that the tradition of social singing has died out in England, and asks rhetorically what songs could fill the hole. The answer, obviously, is going to to be English folk music because he is an English folk singer. This appears to be the  primary point behind the song. Knightley has introduced "Roots" as being a plea for the English to rediscover a vast repertoire of songs that they could sing together.

With the Indian, Asian, Afro Celts

It's in their blood, below the belt

They're playing and dancing all night long

So what have they got right that we've got wrong?

This appears to be the offending verse, which has caused some people to question the Singer's credentials as a card carrying muesli quaffing Guardian-reading liberal. The plain meaning of the verse is that some cultures seem to have a greater tradition of communal singing than we do; and a greater sense of connection to their heritage. The Singer doesn't resent, hate or feel superior to these other communities: he specifically says that he thinks they are better than us in this regard and wishes that we could learn from them. This is a rather small peg on which to hang an accusation of racism.

It seems quite unexceptionable to say that you are more likely to hear singing in an Irish pub than an English one. And it certainly looks to me as if, over the festival weekend, the black British population of St Pauls, Bristol get into a spirit of carnival which I've never seen in Barnet or Coventry or York. They also hang out an awful lot Jamaican flags.

What is the white British equivalent of St Pauls or Notting Hill? A church fete? Last Night of the Proms? Morris dancing? Or having a riot after a football match?

Assumptions, as a very great man once wrote, are things that you don't know you are making. During the World Cup, British football commentators were inclined to describe South Africa as a "vibrant" country. This could (if you really wanted to be touchy) to be seen as betraying unexamined beliefs that Black Chaps aren't very clever but do have a wonderful sense of rhythm. (This doesn't mean that the football commentators were themselves racists: only that racist assumptions swim in the lower reaches of many a liberal subconscious. If you'd pointed out the buried assumption, they'd have been embarrassed and corrected it.) The phrase "in their blood, below the belt" could (if you want to be very touchy indeed) be taken as betraying primitivist assumptions: a belief that minority communities know traditional music because they are in some sense "closer to nature" than the majority culture - and that their music comes from their testicles, rather than their little grey cells. The implication that Celtic people are somehow intrinsically different from Anglo-Saxon people would, if pressed, contradict the main thrust of the song: that the English chose to stop singing for historical and sociological reasons and could choose to start singing again if they wanted to.

It could also be seen as implying that Steve was having difficulties thinking of a rhyme for "Celt". We are drilling awfully deep into four lines of song-lyric in the hope of finding something to be offended by.

Now the minister said his vision of hell

Is three folk singers in a pub near Wells

Well I've got a vision of urban sprawl

Pub's where no-one ever sings at all...

In 2003 Nulab passed legislation which required all institutions to seek licences before music could be performed on their premises (along with with possibly nit-picky fire regulations and other rules about health and safety). When it was pointed out that this would apply just as much to informal folk sessions as to actual concerts, Blair's culture minister, Kim Howells, who had previously described modern art -- all modern art -- as "bullshit" remarked that informal folk sessions were his idea of hell. (Did you get that? The bastard thought that his taste in music and his taste in art were somehow relevant to arts policy; just as Michael Gove thinks that his memories of being a schoolboy have some kind of relevance to education policy. That's why democracy is such a flawed system. You end up with lunatics who think that their opinion counts for something just because people voted for them. Gut feeling is not a good basis for law making. Ever.)

In performance, Steve sometimes changes the line to "some minister said" or even "Kim Howells said". He often states that Kim Howells' remark was the trigger for the song. He seem to want to tie the lyric to the 2003 licencing act very directly.

....and everyone stares at a great big screen

overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens

Australian soap, American rap

Estuary English baseball caps...

The Singer contrasts the vibrancy of live music (even if it is only three folk-singers) with the passivity of going to a pub in order to watch TV. He also contrasts a "bottom up" participatory approach to folk-music with the "top down" world of billionaire footballers and daytime TV stars, who are presented to us as godlike "celebrities". The professional folk-singer very likely started out as a busker or performing open mic nights; and people in the audience can think, without too much absurdity "Maybe I could learn to do that".

Since Pop Idol, it has been clear that anyone with reasonably androgynous good looks can be packaged and presented to the public as a "singer", regardless of talent. Even good looks aren't strictly necessary: a fat lady who could sing a mediocre karaoke version of a song from Les Miserables was briefly the most famous human being on the planet. (Nothing against Les Miserables. Nothing against fat ladies, come to that.)

Boy-bands are therefore a by-word for artificial, inauthentic music. In the rather maudlin song Hard Shoulder, Knightley recalls finding an old school friend he'd lost touch with performing in a pub. "But hearing you play all that boy-band cover trash / Now that's what really hurts me the most." It will be remembered that the full title of Chumbawamba's first folk album was "The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won."

I don't think this is entirely fair. I myself have recently come to a place where I value "authenticity" in art above almost any other quality. Not only in music. I will happily work my way through 2,000 pages of 1950s Superman comics printed on blotting paper, but can't quite be doing with the modern graffix novels, with its cinematic construction and decomposed story telling and newfangled good artwork. Jolly clever, of course, but no substitute for the real thing. I have even caught myself using "artless" as a term of approval. But there can be different forms of authenticity. I once had to write a review of a local reggae / hip hop band called "Laid Blak". (The reggae bit was the songs about every little ting turning out to be all right; the hip-hop bit was the performance poetry about teenage pregnancy in Totterdown, I believe.) It was clearly done very well indeed, and I rather enjoyed it, but it didn't speak to me because I'm not a sweary black teenager, and probably never will be. I'm not sure I should dismiss it as artificial because it happens not to be addressed to my condition. Even watching "your" football team play a game in the company of a large group of fellow supporters could be a life-affirming experience.

and we ought to be ashamed before we walk

of the way we look and the way we talk

Up to this point. The Singer hasn't strayed very far from his stated theme. It's been a song about folk singing, and he's in favour of it. However, in the last stanza the theme broadens out: the English who have decided that mindlessly watching Neighbours is more fun than singing songs become a sort of metaphor for a more general national impoverishment.

This is the only line in the song that I wouldn't be prepared to defend. I agree that the X-Factor and Neighbours are inauthentic; I agree that it's curious to go to a pub in order to watch television; but I don't feel particularly ashamed if young people adopt American fashions or American slang. They always have done. I'm not ashamed that white kids from Brizzle end sentences with "innit", any more than I'm ashamed that a previous generation ended every third sentence with the word "man", or that people used to describe things as fab, groovy, cool, wicked, safe, sound, mint or lush. Introducing American and Asian words into English doesn't destroy the purity of the language, any more than putting a funky beat behind "Keys of Canterbury" destroys the purity of the folk music.

 

UPDATE: Apparently, I've been hearing this line incorrectly all these years: what Steve sings is not "we ought to be ashamed" but "we're taught to be ashamed...". The printed lyric says "we learn to be ashamed". I understand that the have also killed the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green.

without our stories and our songs

how will we know where we came from?

I began by asking who the "I" was who speaks in the song is? Steve Knightley himself? A fictionalized version of him? An entirely imaginary singer?

This verse raises a much harder question "Without our stories or our songs how will we know where we came from." 

Who is "we"? And who is not "we"?

If "we" are yearning for the heather and the bagpipes, and wishing "we" hadn't been cleared off the highlands, then it's pretty clear that "we" excludes everyone living south of Dumfries. But -- it's and old question, and much more interesting than the one about West Lothian -- does "we" also include the young dark skinned man whose grandfather came over from Pakistan in 1950, who goes to Mosque on Fridays, and who makes his living selling deep fried Mars bars in a chip shop in Glasgow? (And who will certainly sound indistinguishable from light skinned people of the same age in the same area. When I first came to Bristol, I swear I caught myself thinking "Freaky! An Indian guy with a West Country accent! I thought Indian guys all had south London accents!" Assumptions are things you don't know you're making, innit?) Is he Scottish, or a British Asian who happens to live in Scotland? Is he part of the "we" that defeated proud Edward's army at Bannockburn? Can he pretend that he is if he happens to like Rugby Union? If not then should White British people living in Scotland suppress any nostalgic or romantic feelings they may entertain towards any great chieftains of pudding races that they may come across in their day-to-day lives, because of the non-inclusiveness of that pesky "we"?

I think that this question of nomenclature has troubled the song since line 12, and is never satisfactorily resolved. If the Indians, Asian and Africans and Celts who celebrate their own traditional culture are people who live in India, Asia, Africa and Celtland as opposed to the people who live in England, then all well and good. If they are British Indians, British Asian, and British Africans as opposed to White British, then also all well and good: only the person most determined to take offence could take exception to "some of Britain's minority cultures sing better than the majority culture". The difficulty is that "Indians, Asians, Afro, Celts" are contrasted throughout the song with "the English" and "the English" are referred to as "we". This opens the Singer up to the accusation that he thinks that Indians and Asians living in England are not "English": that, indeed, English has been conflated with White People.

Actually, I could live with this: I'd be very happy to say that the black kids in St Pauls who fly Jamaican flags once a year are "Black British" or "Jamaican British"; the people north of the border who put salt on their cabers are "Scottish British" or "Celtic British" and I am "English British". But it's a tendentious terminology that shouldn't be allowed to slip under the radar without examination.

Some minister said that he doesn't mind Muslims living in this country, provided they think of themselves as British first and Muslim second. I immediately felt jerking sensations in my knee: "Well I regard myself as Christian first and British second..." And then, on slightly less pious reflection: "I actually regard myself as human first, Christian second, Doctor Who fan third, Wagnerian fourth, folkie fifth, Marvel comics fan sixth, half-Cornish on my father's side seventh (**), adopted Bristolian eighth, European ninth, English tenth and British eleventh."

I was brought up, implicitly, to think that I didn't have a national or regional identity. Middle-class English was just English, which poor people and yokels got told off for pronouncing incorrectly. English food was just food, to which crazy foreigners sometimes added garlic or spice. Foreign children had something called "national dress"; we just had "clothes". I was also brought up, pretty explicitly, to think that I didn't have a religion: the English Church was simply a baseline of acknowledging a deity and doing what was right, without all those annoying holy books, coming of age rites and extra days off that Jewish children insisted on adding. (Muslims had not yet been invented.) Culture is what Johnny Foreigner has: we don't need one.

I was about to type that Nick Griffin and David Cameron and Jack Straw and David Blunkett have succeeded in making nationality a toxic subject: so that if I say "I would quite like to have a nationality, if only to find out what it feels like" you will hear "I am going to march into Native villages, tear down their shrines and force them to wear clothes, go to church, watch Doctor Who and paint their maps pink."

Why pink, by the way?

But that would sound altogether too similar to the paranoid fantasy about "political correctness". "You aren't allowed to fly the Union Jack in case it offends queers. They've banned Christmas, you know." And that isn't what I mean at all. What I mean is really much weaker and less interesting. We've allowed nationality to become an embarrassment. Countries are like bottoms. Everyone's got one, but we don't like to talk about them in public. I am really, really, reluctant to type "I like the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood (and Doctor Who, and Eric & Ernie, and Middle-earth -- especially Middle-earth) because I feel a kind of ownership in them: a kind of ownership I obviously can't feel about Woody Guthrie or the Ring Cycle." Not because people will think I'm a B.N.P supporter, but because they will think I'm a sentimental twat. They'll probably start whistling "There'll Always Be An England", ironically. 

I lost St George in the Union Jack

It's my flag too, and I want it back

The Singer wants the St George Cross back from the Conservative Party, who have declared that England, and Britain and the Monarchy are their personal property. And from the fascist Daily Mail and the hooligan white van soccer supporters. But also, I think, he wants the St George Cross back from the Union Jack: he feels that the country of England has been lost in the corporate branding of Britain.

I find this idea very attractive. I think that "Britain" means, at best, an admirably dull political system, constitutional monarchy, a flag representing a corporate merger, and the dullest national anthem ever devised by man. Nor woman niether. On important matters, we're all equally voters and citizens and consumers: there is no Muslim "they" to steal the Christian Christmas from the British "us". But if you are allowed your haggis and your leaks and your red stripe larger and your shamrocks is there really any harm in me having my fish and chips and my warm beer and my hey nonny no?



Seed, bud, flower, fruit: never going to grow without their roots

Branch, stem, shoot: they need roots

Football, I am told, is like marriage: you have to cleve only to one team, forsaking all others. You have to pretend that Bristol Rovers are always and in all respects better than Bristol City. In extreme cases, you might be expected to try to physically maim City fans.

I don't think that poems and songs and books are like that. I think that you make a contract to believe in a particular story-world while the singer is creating it, but that you are fully empowered to put it away an inhabit a different world when the next singer, or the next song, begins. I believe in Steve Knightley's angry, radicalized England while I'm in it; but I also believe in Martin Carthy's gentle old England and Bellowhead's radical subversion of it. In the right mood, I can lustily join in with both Land of Hope and Glory and Imagine. I find Mr Chris Wood's Come Down Jehovah deeply moving, although I don't agree with it (or at least, I don't think it means what he thinks it means). 

But "agreeing" with a song seems like a category mistake, like trying to determine if the jelly in the trifle logically entails the choclate sprinklies. 

I also reject the theory that there are only two kinds of art: the perfect and the evil. People embark on Moby Dick expecting it to be a perfect book: when they discover it has ideological flaws (it's about KILLING WHALES for godsakes) or even artistic ones (it sometimes wanders off the main point, a bit like this essay) they thrust their harpoon through the chink in its ideological armour, and never look at it again. If I ever interview Steve Knightley, I may well say "So, what about your definition of English, then?"; but that won't stop me joining in with "haul away!" bit at Glastonbury next month; but then. (I also intend to sing along loudly to Remember Your a Womble.) By all means place Roots alongside, say Dick Guaghan's No Gods and Precious Few Heroes and note that one singer offers a definition of personal identity rooted in a collective past; while the other snarls that we should dump that past altogether -- that it's precisely our stories and our songs which are holding us back:

I ask you, will we never hear the last

Of Prince bloody Charlie at Coludden field again?

Though he ran like a rabbit through the glen

Leaving better folk than him to be slaughtered

Are you sitting in your council house, dreaming of your clan?
Waiting for the Jacobites to come and free the land?

Try going down the dole with your claymore in your hand

And count all the princes in the queue...

And by all means chuck John Lennon into the mix as well

Imagine there's no countries

It isn't hard to do

Nothing to kill or die for

And no religion too

I can romantically and sentimentally enter into all three world views (Lennon's nihilism takes a bigger leap of faith, I must admit). Songs are funny place to look for final truths.  

Haul away boys, let them go; out in the wind and the rain and show

We've lost more than we'll ever know round the rocky shores of England

It may very well be that our roots don't go quite as deeply as we think that they do: that the songs we fondly believe are "traditional" are actually fairly new. Is there really an English tradition which has been thrown overboard? Or is that a nostalgic fancy? And if The Tradition is only a story, is there any good reason why it shouldn't be one of the stories we choose to tell ourselves about ourselves, like the one about the knight who killed the old lady's spotted pig, which very likely isn't true either? 

John Lennon said "imagine there are no countries": that's realtively easy. The difficult thing is imagining that there are. That's why William Blake's poem works so will as an English national anthem: it takes it for granted that England is an imaginary place, and then wonder if we might not make it real. (I'm going to live as much like an Englishman as I can, even if there isn't really any England.)

"Only back United if / It's where your from, or where you live" says Steve Knightley in a different song. That makes some sense to me. I feel some sort of special affection for Bristol (particularly Stokes Croft) because it's where I live; I'm free to arbitrarily decide that Cornwall is where I'm "from" because that's where my father grew up, even though quite clearly I'm actually "from" London. 


One last thing is worth mentioning. I have liked the song "Roots" ever since Mick and Lester played it on their St George's Day special (along with King of Rome and Place Called England and a Morris-y thing about St George by someone like Ashley Hutchings) when I was first getting into folk music. The strangeness of the melody; the fact that it's three different songs; the fact that the second chorus is being sung communally; the romantic idea of a past that's been chucked away; the sense of fury and committment in the singer's voice, the absolute contrast to politician and other professional decievers who use language only to obscure their true meaning. I can't get behind an idea of Britian based on the Queen and the Conservative Party, or on Fair Play and Being a Good Drone or whatever it was that Gordon Brown thought we were about; I can't get behind an idea of England based on kicking balls into nets or putting three sticks in the ground and defending them with a fourth; but I could, I thought, feel comfortable with this idea of an England based on gentlemen offering ladies the keys of Cantebury and men hunting bonny black hares (fnarr, fnarr) on the fourteenth of May. But I don't really think that any of it actually matters very much.


An Ambivalently Patriotic Play List



[*] Maybe the person who says "When I consider how my light is spent..." is John Milton; maybe the person who exclaims "Bright star would I were steadfast as thou art..." is John Keats. Maybe they are imaginary people that the respective poets have invented. Maybe they are imaginary people who happen to be a lot like the authors who invented them. The titles "On His Blindness" and "His Last Sonnet" (it wasn't) were invented after the fact by English teachers who didn't really like poetry and thought that good writing had to be Factually Accurate.



[**] Whatever the hell "Cornish" means. Daddy could point out RIlstone gravestones in Perranporth parish church going back several hundred years, but the family name presumably has something to do with Rylestone in Yorkshire, now famous for middle aged ladies taking their clothes off on calendars. So presumably, at some point in sixteen or seventeen hundred some Yorkshire people must have upped and moved West and there is no more Celtic blood in me than in Barack Obama. It's remains true that my granny made saffron buns and pasties and called people "my handsome" and that "Cousin Jack" is a wonderful song.

Bristol Folk Festival (5)

Sunday

I have done a bad thing.

Last night I drunked beer, and this morning I woke up feeling distinctly woozy, and found that I had nothing in the fridge for breakfast. What a shame there isn't some kind of, I don't know, supermarket at the bottom of my road. (OH! YOU CAD! YOU BOUNDER!) So I walked in via Cabots Circus and taken breakfast in, er, McDonalds. Not a very traditional way to greet the first day of May.

Apparently some of the Morris sides really did get up before the break of day-oh to great the May-oh at 4AM on the patch of grass behind the shopping mall-oh. (Fay Hield tells us later that the Newcastle's version involves washing you face in the May-dew, or, since the park in question is much frequented by pet-owners, the May-poo.) My enthusiasm doesn't extend quite that far, but when I get to Colston Hall, the seating has been removed from the main auditorium, and various groups are hey-nonny-no-ing away.

Some ladies are doing rapper dancing in doc martin boots, with a caller in a top hat. Another all-female group are doing something possibly connected to a May Pole dance, holding long flowery sticks in the air and making arches; followed by one of those ones where they bash sticks together. There is tiny girl of about eight, who seems to be as good a stick-basher as any of the others. A male group leaps around and waves hankies in the air.  "Before we go, can I draw your attention to this spot" says the old-timer who leads the group, pointing to one of the places from which seating has been removed. "That's where I was sitting when Bob Dylan played the Colston Hall in 1966."

Yeah. There can be nu-folk and folk-rock and punk-folk and people I wouldn't swear were folksingers at all but I deeply respect and approve the way the festival has tried to establish links with the old, the traditional, and, indeed, the silly.

Dyer Cummings, who I have never heard of, were a nice bouncy dancy band, who played a lot of infectious tunes with the usual fiddle-accordion-guitar combo, but topped out the set by leading the audience with an akapella John Ball (the aforementioned Sydney Carter carol about the preacher who was killed for supporting the Peasants Revolt). "Are all Protestant hymns like that?" asked Clarrie.

Only caught a little bit of today's Open Mic but I was glad I did. Tony O'Hare is a guitarist who haunts local folk clubs. He sang a silly ballad about the brouhaha that blew up a year or so back when a wartime bomb was discovered in the river (it turned out to be a supermarket trolley, of course). And a song about busking all day and earning "six quid and a banana". And splendid piece about MPs expenses, with increasingly preposterous Dylanesque rhymes for "sleaze". (The joke was compounded because the song used the harmonica riff from Lilly, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts, and I would totally have noticed that if Clarrie hadn't pointed it out.) He wasn't the best writer, singer or guitarist of the weekend. But he came the closest to embodying my idea of what a "folk-singer" ought to be like: a guy ploughing his furrow in the bar, playing to anyone who'll listen and trying to make them laugh. (He was also clearly a believer in Tom Lehrer's maxim that singing 50 verses is twice as enjoyable as singing 25). And he was the person during the weekend who most strongly made me think: "I want to learn to do that."

And thence to the main hall for the sellider (pronounced "barn dance) led by, get this Spiers and Boden. (That's like saying that you've waltzed to Yehudi Menuhin, isn't it?) There is in existence photographic evidence of me on my feet, wondering what a willow is and why one might want to split one, whether I am couple one or couple two, and precisely which is my left and which is my right. I may have initiated a couple of collisions. Tim, I hear, caused a major pile up. Clarrie claims to have taken a superb picture of Tim and I, but found no evidence of it on her camera when she got home, and has therefore supplied the above line drawing. Jon Boden sang the one about the spotty pig, but mostly, the two Jo(h)ns just played perfectly bounced tunes, with ebbing and flowing rhythms that you can't help dancing to. Well, or badly, as the case may be.

The Fay Hield Trio I almost overlooked, owing the fact that the programme decided helpfully to tell me which other artists her record label published, rather than the salient fact the other two members of the trio were Robert Harbron (as in "Kerr, Fagan and") and Sam Sweeny. That is to say: one of the best squeeze box men in the business and one of the best fiddlers in business. "Sam is in another group called...." explained Fay. "Bellowhead!" shouted the audience. "Kerfuffle!" I suggested. Actually, the trio could usefully have been billed as "a bit like Kerfuffle", in that you had virtuoso fiddling and melodian-ary behind exquisite female vocals, doing traddy material like King Henry and nearly traddy stuff like Oak, Ash and Thorn. (Mr Kiplings Poem, set to music by Peter Bellamy, who may have been mentioned before and may indeed be mentioned again.) Fay Hield is Jon Boden's partner. The last day of the festival was, as you might expect, Bellowhead-centric.

The small hall was a very nice space when it was half empty: you could sit on the floor or lean against walls -- but when there was nothing going on in the main hall, it got awfully crowded and became "standing room only". Balshazzar's Feast perform seated, so I only got a glimpse of the tops of their heads. This was a little frustrating, as it meant that one could hear frequent ripples of laughter from the front three rows who were (I assume) the only people who could see what were (I assume) hilarious on-stage antics. So I can 't say whether I would have found them terribly funny or (as I suspect) terribly irritating. I will certainly try to hear them again and see them for the first time at some point.

This was really the only logistical issue over the whole weekend. People formed neat, British queues without any rioting at all outside the main hall before the headline acts, but actually I think this was hardly necessary. For Bellowhead on Sunday night, frixample, everyone in the standing area mosh pit could see perfectly, and anyone who wanted to be there could be.

(Question: Why does Belshazzar's Feast use an image of two heads on platters on their album cover? Surely that was Herod? Belshazzar's was the fellow with the writing on the wall?)

Sheelanagig, preceded Bellowhead on the main stage. I could take them or leave them. They were clearly very good. I think it was slightly ill-judge to precede Bellowhead with a rhythmn based klezmer (didn't look it up, taking a shot in the dark) party band. However good they were (and Clarrie observed a small child, just in front of our party, who seemed likely to explode with excitement) they weren't going to be as good as Bellowhead. I suppose having gone to the trouble of clearing out all the chairs, it made sense to have another band people could dance to to. I'd maybe have preferred a total contrast. This was the only point where I felt I was watching a support act and waiting for the main group to come on.

Bellowhead are fantastic. Bellowhead are always fantastic. It is their job to be fantastic. There is plenty of space in the main hall, so people can stand if they want to. They can jump in the air to Frogs Legs and Dragons Teeth. They can indicate with their fingers whether Jack is up to the rigs or down to the jigs of London town. They can shake their heads in time with the Slo Gin set. There are rumours, in fact, that Bristol's Only Celebrity Folk Blogger (TM) may have attempted to few faltering polka steps with Bristol Leading Citizen Folk Journalist (TM) during Oh You New York Girls, Can You Dance The? Jon Boden eschews witty banter, and simply sings. When I first heard it in the Old Vic last year, I had my doubts about Port of Amsterdam, but I now think it's the best thing he does. A signature song. He seems to be in melancholic agony every time he sings it. He sings about the girl who will only marry the lord if he can answer six questions ("and that is three times two") as if no such song as ever been sung before, seeming to scratch his head and think for a moment before realizing that the cock was the first bird that did crow and the dew did first downfall. There is just the faintest trace of surprise in his face when he tells us that the finest month in all the year is the merry, merry month of May, as if he has only just noticed that he's singing the song on May Day. I still think that there are moments when the performance blots out the song: The Two Magicians ("wizard copulation") is too good a story to get lost amongst the ska style brass (I looked it up) -- and we only get to sing bide lady bide (there's nowhere you can hide a couple of times. But the Broomfield Wood utterly remains a folk song. You can hear the pique in the horse's voice when he's blamed for not waking up the sleeping lord. And Jon chews up the furniture for Cholera Camp, as always. ("Theeee chaplain's got a banjo....!") (Cholera Camp, Pilgrim's Way, Oak, Ash and Thorn: we have rather been followed around by Mr Bellamy's interpretations of Mr Kipling this weekend. You can't listen to Folk Song a Day and not realise what high regard Boden holds Peter Bellamy in.) The stage sprays the audience with confetti during the final number. With their songs about lusty blacksmiths seducing shape shifting wizards, and knights falling into magical sleeps in broomfield woods, and jolly sailors being ripped off by jolly prostitutes, and jolly prostitutes being ripped off by jolly sailors, and happy beggars, Bellowhead are, in their highly idiosyncratic way, painting a picture of yet another England. It is not clear with their piratical stylings are intended to impart a john barleycornish new life to Merrie Englande, or if they are actually taking the piss out of the whole thing. Probably both at once.

The bar stays open after the show finishes. It hasn't run out of beer. (When I first saw the revamped Colston Hall, I thought "Why have they attached an airport lounge to the theater." It has grown on me. How many theaters are there where you can get a drink after the show?) Someone starts playing the fiddle. Half-a-dozen ladies in civvies get out their rappas and start dancing; another lady, starts calling out the moves, just like she was doing, in her top hat, on the floor of Colston Hall this morning. The bar-staff turn off the lights as if they want us to leave, and then possibly think better of it and turn them on again. The rappa-ing finished, a guy and a girl start unselfconsciously doing leap-in-the-air scottish country dance steps. Someone produces an accordion to accompany them: it turns out to be Jim Moray. (Twenty minutes earlier, he'd been up on the main stage, giving Bellowhead the Froots prize for Best Album of 2010 in his capacity as winner of the best album of 2009. Hedonism was, incidentally, no way the best album of 2010. I think he regularly plays the squeeze box for Nonesuch Morris.)

In the end, Bellowhead is a party: a party going on on stage, to which the audience is invited. They aren't what this music is about. It's about ballads that make you think and make you cry and make you cross. It's about someone being up on stage one minute, and playing in the bar to an audience of none the next, presumably because he likes it. It's about amateurs who care about which work-song was sung on which ship when and strumming away to silly ballads about something they read in the newspapers.