Bristol Folk Festival (3)

Saturday Afternoon

Arrived about 12. Clarrie and Tim inform me that I have missed the first spontaneous full on standing ovation of the weekend, for Wildflowers, a trio consisting of three children around the age of thirteen (two fiddles and a guitar). They do a spontaneous set in the bar later in the evening, and they do indeed seem to be astonishing.

I start the day in the upstairs bar where the always reliable Hodmadoddery are applying their inventive guitar stylings to John Barleycorn -- and what better way is there of feeling that it is really spring and you are really at a folkfest then by listening to two men with guitars singing John Barleycorn in a bar? This is followed by an open night. The standard is extremely high, as you'd expect. She has a beautiful voice, but isn't at all confident on the the guitar (says me, who can't play a note). A young girl named Catherine Holt, accompanied by her father on the guitar, looks fantastically nervous, and then delivers a flawless, and quite emotive cover of the Soldier and the Princess.

Tim and Clarrie went off to see the Mummers Play about the life of Brunel. (If you don't know what a Mummers play is, it's part way between Morris Dancing and a pantomime. If you don't know who Brunel was, then, all you need to know is that he came from Bristol. They said it was great.) I stayed in the bar to hear a band called the Bristol Shantymen, because they come from Bristol and sing sea shanties. They were stunning. Not because they sang great tunes, were a decent choir, and had one man with a rather weak voice but who was brilliant at doing the funny lines and the silly long-drawn out yodels, but because they really, really, really, really, cared about the history of sea shanties. They could tell you about particular old sailors who used to sing these songs in pubs in the 60s. They cared about which songs were specific to Bristol and which came from elsewhere. They sang a shanty with the "call" lines in French but the "response" lines in English, because that's how French sailors sung it. They loved their material. It oozed authenticity and love for tradition. This is the kind of thing I'm here for.

Had to take a bet on whether I'd be more likely to enjoy Mabon ("interceltic funk folk") or Pilgrim's Way ("gimmick free folk at it's finest) in the smaller Fred Wedlock stage (named after Bristol's oldest swinger in town.) Naturally went for Pilgrim's Way. They ran though some very adequate versions of traditional songs (Weaver and the Factory Made, Tarry Trousers) before utterly blowing us all away with the songs which gave the band its name. They called it "a great humanist song" but I must admit that during the compulsory "all join in" bit, I sang "The people Lord, thy people are good enough to me" (as opposed to "the people, oh the people"). Because that's what Kipling wrote. What a great poem! It deserves to be far better known than the horrible "If..." And what a stonking tune Peter Bellamy made up for it. I have occasionally thought that a couplet from might stand very well at the top of this very blog:

And when they bore me over-much, I shall not shake my ear

Recalling many thousand such whom I have bored to tears

And if they labour to impress, I shall not laugh or scoff

Since I myself have done no less and sometimes pulled it off

Phil King has a big local following. Lots of people clapped him. I could really take him or leave him. He can play his guitar, no doubt about that, but his voice doesn't excite me, and his songs seem.... Artificial. Inauthentic. It reminds me of that review of Virginia Woolf, where the reviewer wanted to shout "No, she didn't!" after every line of the novel. Apparently, when the singer was stung by a scorpion, it reminded him that Orion, the only constellation he can recognise, died from scorpion wound, and that he feels as if that hunter has somehow watched over him through his life. "No, he doesn't!"

Other people seemed to like him a lot.

Caught the very end of Elfynn in the main hall. They appeared to be rather good.

Bristol Folk Festival (2)

Friday Afternoon and Evening

Officially, the Bristol Folk Festival started at noon on Friday, although there was no scheduled music until three. Until then you could hang around and buy kaftans and hammered dulcimers and having your feet nibbled by fish, though. There were two men dressed as Wallace and Grommit outside the theatre. Whatever anyone else may say Wallace and Grommit are from Bristol. And Banksy. And Blackbeard. And Cary Grant. There was also the biggest collection of Morris Dancers ever assembled in captivity. One of the best things about the festival was hearing the tinkling of tiny bells and noticing that the person behind you in the queue at the bar was in full Morris regalia.

Oh, what foreigners must think of us, and how little we care!

However, I think the festival really began at 8.15PM, when Three Daft Monkeys, (a sort of sub-Bellowhead gypsy influenced dance band) performed a song about the legend of the Strasburg dancing-plague -- when lots of people supposedly developed a mental illness which meant that they heard music in their heads and couldn't stopped dancing to it. "They danced, they danced, they danced, they danced..." went the refrain. "Can you guess what they did then?" asked vocalist Tim Ashton? "They danced...they danced...they danced". Now, this isn't precisely my kind of thing. I'm more in my comfort zone when it's a guy with a guitar telling me he wants to share a very old story, about a lady, probably one sitting in a tower, very probably sewing a silken seam. Never mind. Everyone was seated, in a very English decorum Westminster Abbey kind of way. We worked out that the closest we could get to dancing...and dancing...and dancing...was swaying...and swaying...and swaying....in time with the music. We swayed. A couple in the front row got up and bopped vaguely. And then two people started dancing. It was perhaps more a tango than a waltz. Didn't matter. We were at a folk festival. And the folk were dancing. Dancing in the aisles....

Actually, I'd already had two personal highlights by that point. The first group on the main stage were Sean "Seth's Brother" Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts. Initially, I thought they were going to be a bit shouty and electric for my taste. But two numbers in, Kathryn announced that she was going to sing her favourite song "which I learned from the singing of June Tabor." (And there is no better place the world to learn you favourite song.) This was a lovely deep expressive cover of a Pete Bond's Joe Peel, the beautiful terrible ballad in praise of an ordinary life. "You'd never have believed it you'd known / How many people mourned your going / And how lucky folks still feel / To say they knew Joe Peel". Broke my heart all over again. Really. She also did her own, rather brilliant modern song in the persona of a coal-miner, explaining to his wife why its his duty to join the strike, even though their livlihood is going to fall apart.

I was indifferent to Phoenix River Band – local sub-American electrical country rock, although I did enjoy the mock dust bowl ballad about praying to God for rain.

But next up (we didn't stir from the main hall for much of Friday) was Jim Moray, one of my utter favourite performers. Rather surprised he wasn't a bigger draw, actually, although it was early in the festival and he was up against the reasonably large name Bella Hardy in the other hall.

To be honest, I am indifferent to some of his electrical jiggery pokery. He had an apple mac on the stage ("just need to check my e-mail") and was doing clever things like sampling his voice on the spot, so that he ended up singing multi-part harmonies with himself. All jolly clever, but I don't think his voice needs that kind of enhancement. (Not that the electrical stuff and weird traddy/ hip-hop mashups on the Low Culture album aren't brilliant, or course.) He's at his best sitting at the piano singing the cod-traditional Poverty Knock -- often done as light Morris style sing a long, (Poverty poverty knock / My loom it is singing all day-oh / Poverty poverty knock / The gaffers too stingy to pay-oh) but here a mournful lament to a life wasted in the factory; or standing with the guitar to draw out the melody of the Rufford Park Poachers or yet another version of the Cruel Sister. ("Here's a song about beating your sister to death with a stick and throwing her body in the river".) I find his voice impossible to describe: I keep resorting to words like "choirboy" "innocent" "cheeky" "ethereal" -- the album covers with him as a kind of nature spirit somehow seem appropriate. There's a perpetual catch in his voice, as if the story of Lord Bateman's love for the King of Turkey's daughter or the three poachers murder trial is bubbling up from inside him, or as if it's so sad he can hardly bare to sing it. He really is something extremely special and unusual. And he clearly loves the traditional song book enough to muck around with it.

I can't remember one thing about Ruarri Joseph, so I assume I didn't like him very much.

The headline act, Seth Lakeman, I hadn't ever heard him before. He's the patron of the festival, and very popular. I'm afraid he was the one low point of the weekend for me. I just didn't quite see the point of him. Certainly, he's a mean fiddle player, and the climax of his main set, doing that faster-and-faster -and-faster blazing fiddles thing, was quite exciting. Intellectually, I understand what this kind of music is meant to be doing: my heart is supposed to beat in time with the rhythm (horror movie makers try the same trick, I am told) and this is supposed to make me so excited that I want to dance to it. All as theoretical as some of that young people's electrical drum and guitar music I've occasionally heard. (Nick made me listen to someone called The Wedding Present last year. Very interesting they were, but I kept thinking "I wish he'd send this nasty band away and let me listen to the obviously quite clever lyrics.") Of anthropological interest only: the main lyrics were clarly based on traditional folksongs, but it was so overwhelmed by rhythm that he could have been singing anything at all. Do folkies like this kind of thing, or is he "the folk musician for people who don't really like folk music?" I quite like the Pogues and seem to remember enjoying Gogol Bordello a year or three back, so clearly electric noise and folk can be brought together in ways I like. He went down very well with the rest of the audience.

Bristol Folk Festival (1)

Friday - Morning


I walked out on a bright may morning, like a hero in a song
Looking for a place called England, trying to find where I belong...

It's the banality which gets to me. The father of the bride is "proud". The couple are "happy". The dress is "white, with lace". Some of the crowd has "waited for days to catch a glimpse of the happy couple". Someone had the good sense not to let Rowan Williams, Arch druid and Incredible String Band fan, into the pulpit. He would have said something incredibly incredibly inappropriate and controversial, although it would actually have made much difference, because no-one would have understood it. The curate who stood in for him gave the sort of sermon you could have heard in any parish church in the country: apparently, it's not just about being in love but also about the serious business of learning to live together. When the groom's Mum got married, there was a song by a proper popular opera singer. When she died, there was a song by a pop singer I'd actually heard of. This was all fourth rate classical music, with Perry promoted to the rank of "England's best loved composer" on the say-so of Dimbleby-lite. I, along with everyone else, I get, was astonished to learn that he (Perry, that is, not Dimbleby-lite) wrote anything apart from Jerusalem, and wouldn't Billy Blake have laughed to have heard his great revolutionary and mystical poem described as "a great patriotic hymn".

All said and done, I would still rather be a cynical monarchist than an enthusiastic republican. I like the way we all get together ever ten year or so to play dress-up and pretend that we're a fairy tale kingdom with palaces and glass coaches and princesses. This is, I think, a big part of the story that we've been telling ourselves about ourselves for the last thousand ears, and I haven't heard anyone suggest a better one. (When it all became too much for me, I just muttered "President Blair, President Blair" under my breath.) But this week, it's a story which feels hopelessly corrupted and appropriated -- a story which is meant to be about All of Us was one from which I felt pretty comprehensively excluded. It was clearly not a coincidence that Cameron (Tory) and Major (Tory) were invited to the big shindig, but Blair (Labour, alleg.) and Brown (Labour) were not. (Thatcher (Tory) was invited but asked that a very polite refusal be conveyed to King George on her behalf.) The message "The head of State is a Tory, the British State is a Tory only club, is you ain't Tory you ain't part of the story" was hard to avoid. It started to make you wonder if the President of the USA wasn't quite our sort of chap, either, and thanks to the Guardian for pointing out that the King of Yugoslavia got an invitation. (*) The State seemed to have spent the week before the wedding making pre-emptive strikes on anyone it thought might have voiced Dissent on the happy day. It may or not have been a coincidence that seven days before the happy day, my street became a riot zone. It almost certainly was a coincidence that, at the exact moment when the next head of state but one ws taking his marriage vows, the police finally closed down the building which absolutely no local person has ever referred to as Telepathic Heights. (The local name for it is "that building with the pretty mural that I've walked past a thousand times and never paid the slightest attention to." The night after the Riot, the building next door hosted a gig by the Wurzles.) It was undoubtedly a coincidence that when I set out to go to the folk festival, I found that I couldn't walk down my own street because the police, who swear an oath of loyalty to the Queen, had erected barricades. Again. But it all seemed awfully symbolic.

A big old wall there tried to stop me / a sign was painted, it said "No entry"

But on the other side, it didn't say nothing / that side was made for you and me

[*] No such country as Yugoslavia exists, and anyway, it isn't a monarchy.

Bristol Folk Music Festival (0)

Summary

This weekend I have

1: Drunk Gem Ale

2: Worn flowers in my hair (artificial)

3: Danced (there may be photographic evidence)

4: Drunk Gem Ale

5: Eaten three different kinds of hamburger

6: Played a hammered dulcimer ("You might want to hold those sticks by the other end")

7: The flowers, I mean, not my hair

8: Laughed (e.g at the little man singing about busking, and at Phil Beer's joke about the nerd in the music shop.)

9: Cried (about Joe Peel, John Ball and (actual proper sobs) Cousin Jack)

10: Points 1, 4 and 9 may be related.

11: Joined in, frequently.

12: Worn a union jack tie

13: Seen Steve Knightley dancing along to Remember You're A Womble

14: Seen Jim Moray playing his accordion in the bar

15: Seen English people queueing politely for the bar

16: Drunk Gem ale.

Thought for the Day

I have not rejoiced at the destruction of him that hated me, or lifted up myself when evil found him
Neither have I suffered my mouth to sin by wishing a curse to his soul.
Job 29

and the really great news is...today is the BRISTOL FOLK FESTIVAL, so there's more of this to come.

Just as well there's nothing on TV at the weekend.

Robin Williamson / John Renbourne

Bristol Folkhouse 23 April

You remember Robin Williamson. I've mentioned him before: described by the Archbishop of Canterbury as "sacred"; by myself as "holy"; and by Bob Dylan as "quite good". He really does just radiate warmth and joy from the stage. There are different kinds of Williamson sets; this one was quite heavily focused on the bluesy (Don't Let Your Deal Go Down, Whang Dang Doodle) the whimsical (Sweet as Tennessee Whiskey) with a bit of Dylan (Buckets of Rain). When you go and hear a singer more than once, you expect to hear the same songs. I could listen to him plucking out Dylan on the harp a thousand times over. I still can't tell if he's parodying the song -- accentuating Dylan's tortuous rhymes ("well everybody can be like me, obviously / but not everyone can be like you, fortunately") or just drawing out a humour that's already there. And I'd have been positively disappointed if he hadn't, with that twinkly voice, finished on "Will anybody tell me where the blarney roses grow?" ("set to folk tune number 2). I love the way he makes the audience speak the words before joining in the chorus; as serious and deadpan as when he was teaching us names from Irish mythology, the last time I head him. You do, however, after several gigs, start to get used to some of the jokes and in-between patter. However, the story about how Don't Let Your Deal Go Down was taught him by Tom Paley was new to me. (As he loves to say, the song is usually played on blues harp, but works okay on an actual harp.) He's changed the chords, the tune and some of the words from when he learned it, but its still bacislly the song that Tom Paley taught him. (Tom Paley's the old guy (must be 90) who played at the Folk Against Fascism gig in London last year, notable for having appeared in a duo with Woody Guthrie --or, if the biography I'm reading is to be believed, for playing by himself because Woody Guthrie hadn't turned up. I love it that there's a tenuous continuity between Woody Guthrie and the Incredible String Band.) John Renbourne's moody jazzy slippy slidey guitar playing is never less than wonderful, but I was surprised by how passive he was tonight: Steve said you could have mistaken him for an accompanist, even though he's at least as eminent and venerable as Robin. No Incredible String Band songs or story telling tonight. Just tunes. Magical, magical tunes. Quite good, indeed.

Pentangle

Chapel Arts Center Bath April 15th

That damn woman with the nasty sister. She gets about, doesn't she? This time the bad sister throws the good one in the sea rather than in a river, and it's three minstrels who fish her out, with no miller in sight. She still gets dismembered and recycled as a harp, and the harp limits itself to singing "Lay the bent to the bonny broom", as opposed to "bow and balance to me" or "oh the dreadful wind and the rain" or (more helpfully) "my sister dunnit".

"You obviously like songs about death and doom and killing" said Jaqui McShee after the very enthusiastic ovation that the song elicited. Well, yes, possibly: or possibly the audience were (like me) giving their approval to a very traditional song, given a very satisfactory make-over, without losing any of its narrative drive.

Pentangle were, of course, one of the very biggest names of the second (or was it third?) folk revival of the 1960s, and more or less invented "jazz folk". This group is, in fact "Jacqui McShee's Pentangle", with Ms McShee's astonishing unearthly voice being the only link with the original group. This incarnation seemed more jazzy than what I've heard of the original: several numbers had longish sax and flute interludes which sounded (to me, and you really shouldn't pay much attention to anything that I say) like fairly traditional jazz riffs.

I associate Pentangle with "jazzy, tinkly versions of old songs" and I could have wished for a little more of that this evening. The opening number, with a whirring, droning undergrowth over which McShee's crystaline voice comes over, first with a traditional number, then with a self penned piece about the very important subject, life, thrilled me with its strangeness.  But over the course of the evening, I felt perhaps I had had as much "ethereal" and "jazzy" as I needed, and would have liked some more, er folk songs.

The Old Dance School

Bristol Folk House April 8

Ah, yes. Eight horribly talented young people. They met at the Birmingham Conservatoire. All the boys were studying jazz and all the girls were studying classical music. One of the girls teaches classical violin. They all think Andy Cutting is wonderful. They finish the night with a long jiggy instrumental piece that leads into John Ball, which it will be remembered that Andy Cutting's friend Chris Wood sometimes plays. (It's almost compulsory for modern folkies to play at least one Sydney Carter song. What price a contemporary version of Friday Morning?) It's always an inspirational number whoever plays it. The jazz-classical influence is very obvious. I don't swear if you had played me the instrumental stuff, I would have instantly identified it as folk. Not that that matters. It's all music. The instrumental riff ends with two fiddles going "peep-peep-peep" like a string quartet, not "diddly-diddly-dee" like a folk group. There was something of Lau in the jazzy way the melody gets passed around, although it was more like melody and less about rhythm, and never stopped being music. The double bass provided some rhythm in lieu of percussion, like Miranda Sykes does with Show of Hands. It was clearly very clever indeed but for my personal taste, I couldn't help feeling that there were, er, too many notes.

Steve Tilston

Wed 16th Feb Jazz@ Future Inns

Don't seem to have taken any notes at this one.

Steve Tilston was every bit as good as he always is, and his sidesman and mouth organ player Keith Warmington is simpy charming. He was mainly trying out material from his forthcoming album: regret to say that I wasn't taking notes. He sang one about a Mexican rebel, and one about what this generation is leaving to the next. He carried off all his new songs with aplomb, and almost got through My Love She Speaks Like Silence withut a hithc. ("What comes next -- come on, there must be some Dylan-heads here?") .....and then managed to mix up the verses of Slipjigs and Reels on the encore. But no-one minded at all because he's so wonderful. What the correct procedure for getting the Queen to declare someone a national treausre?