I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)
*
And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”
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Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good as
Bellowhead.
On the other hand, Bellowhead do not play in
the back rooms of pubs at the bottom of my street (while young people play
speedcore in the front bar). Although, come to think of it, I did hear Mr
Spiers and Mr Boden perform on this very stage back in 2007. And Mr Carthy.
Still, it's the least folkie venue ever. All the young people were in black. I
was in my floral waistcoat. The pub was smashed up during the pretend riots last July. I
think they thought I was a hippy bouncer.
As I was saying: Blackbeard's Tea Party are not
as good as Bellowhead. But they generate an energy, a physicality, a sense of
musical theatre (completely improvised, I think) and a spontaneous response
from the audience which I have never seen any folk band apart from Bellowhead
come within a hundred miles of.
They do, in pretty much every conceivable
respect, rock.
They came onto the stage at 9.40, after the
usual local support who we will tactfully pass over. Stu the singer –
not the singer on the albums, a new singer who has joined the band in the last
month -- asks if there are any miners in
the audience. Someone is related to one. He launches into "I can hew"
. ("And when I die boys know full well / I’m not bound for heaven, I am bound for hell /
My pick and shovel Old Nick he will admire / and he’ll
setting be hewing coal for his hell-fire”). There is a thumping drumbeat and an electric
guitar which, I shouldn’t wonder goes up to 11. And Stu, I swear,
doesn't stop moving for the rest of the evening. He encourages the audience to
pogo dance by leaping three feet off the ground. He gesticulates in the
narrative bits. He nips back stage at one point and re-emerges in sun glasses
and pink tie-dye shirt. The whole band follows him into the physical
space. Yom Hardy the cajun drummer bangs his head in time with the rhythm so
his long black hair flaps up and down like a muppet. When Martin Coumbe the
guitarist does a solo, the band get down on their knees to worship him.
The sound mix, I have to say, is perfect: too
often in this kind of thing I have said "I believe that there may have
been a folk song going on somewhere, but all I could hear was the drum".
Tonight you could hear every one of Stu's words. The songs are stories or jokes
played with a camp twinkle in his eye. Folk rock with the emphasis firmly on
the folk.
Oh, and there was rappa dancing. In a pub. At the bottom of my street.
I now need to tread carefully. One of the many
excellences about the Tea Party's first E.P (Heavens To Betsy) was the nuanced
vocals of Paul Young. Young credits his Barrack Street (version # 94 of the story
about the sailor being robbed by the prostitute) to the singing of Nic Jones,
and it was a close match in vocal style. If you are going to swipe, swipe from
the best, said I. Paul Young appears on the new album and he remains excellent.
The album version of Stan Rogers Barrat's Privateers (sadly not in the live
set) is quite stunning. He tones down the "roar" from the original
recording, plays it as a ballad, not a shanty, tells the story, while the group
weave in and out and all round the tune, even interjecting hornpipes a couple of
times. But I note that Paul claims to have learned two of the lighter and more
raucous pieces on the album from Stuart
and there is a perhaps a sense that Paul isn’t
fully comfortable with them. Not as loud and mad as Stuart is on stage at any
rate. But that may just be me being wise after the event.
Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass is a venerable
English drinking song with lyrics that get progressively filthier in each stanza.“I wish I had another brick to build my chimney
higher /Stop the neighbours pussy cat from pissing in the fire”.
It’s
quite lovely how Blackbeard’s Tea Party stay close to the basic beauty of
the melody and then put the heavy stuff behind it without the one swamping out
the other. Too often this kind of thing is done with a nod and a wink; isn’t
it funny that we’re singing “thee”
and “thou” while the electric guitar is drowning us out?
But this just seemed to just be a song. The drunken Landlord is followed by the
endlessly sobering Chicken On Raft, possibly my favourite song about egg on
toast. ("I sing "woo-woo" and you sing "chicken on a
raft": and then I sing "aaa-aa" and you sing "chicken on a
raft" and then I sing "woo-woo" and you sing...")
I never saw the original line up live and it may be
that their stage act was always this extreme. It may be that audiences in York are holding placards saying "Bring back Paul". When I first heard the album I
said that their musical arrangements were reminiscent of Mawkin and it strikes me that Stuart’s
manner is not a million miles away from Jim Causley. (Actually he's like the the bastard offspring
of Jim Causley and Jon Boden.)
I wish Paul Young all the best; I hope he left to
pursue a brilliant solo career and not (say) because of a quarrel about who
took the last slice of cheesecake. And it would be reckless to start saying
"gig of the year" in a year which has included Alisdair Roberts and Show of Hands. And that old American man who sings Bob Dylan songs. But it looks to me
that the addition of Stuart has propelled a band I was already very excited
about into orbit.
That's not a metaphor. He really does jump that
high.
Blackbeard's Tea Party. Not as good as Bellowhead. Yet.
Fisherman's Friends do what Fisherman's Friends
do very well indeed. But that really is all they do. The trouble with seeing
them headlining their own gig (as opposed to doing a set at a festival) is that
you get twice as much Fisherman's Friends for your money. And it turns out that
there are only so many rollicking bollocking buggering shuggering however it
goes songs of the high sea a man can cope with in a single sitting.
There are some attempts to change the tempo. In
between the shanties, we get a medley of Methodist hymns. From Sankey's Hymnal:
"We used to find that name funny when we were kids....we still do,
apparently." The trouble is that what Fisherman's Friend's are doing is
basically chapel singing (er, "a capella") and the chosen song is a
spiritual with a nautical theme. (“Row for shore sailor, row for the shore, heed
not the rolling waves but lean to the oar”) So it
isn't really that much of a change of tempo. "The Cornish Methodists were like
the Taliban, only without the sense of bonhomie and good fun".
When you go to hear the same bands more than
once, you naturally expect to hear the same jokes as well as the same songs. (I
probably know Robin Williamson’s story about putting his harp in the lift as well as
he does.) But Jon's patter has become an elephants graveyard of double
entendre. "We asked if we could appear on the Parkinson show. He wrote
back and said 'No, you can't.' I didn't know he was dyslexic." Despite
being famous, they haven't acquired any groupies. There are application forms
for us to fill out in the foyer "And for the ladies as well." To the
least tall member of the group: "Are you happy?" "Not really,
no." "Well, which one are you then?" And, every time someone
coughs "Do you want to suck a Fisherman's Friend?....That joke always
leaves a nasty taste in the mouth."
The role call at the end of the show pointedly
tells us what the boys day jobs are – fisherman, ex-fisherman, ship builder,
potter... Now, I don't know what songs Cornish Fishermen
really sing at work, but I'm guessing not ones about South Australia or Mexico.
I imagine they listen to Radio 1. These are songs from the British and American
navies that have become standards. There aren’t
about fishing. There is a song about whaling, but it's a modern thing showing
sympathy for the poor ickle cephalapodcetacean. (“Last night I heard the cry of my companion /
the roar of the harpoon gun and then I was alone.") Any melancholy mood is
immediately dispersed by Jon: "It's all right, it's only a big lump of
sushi.” His schtick is to apologise that some of the
songs are too depressing. The sad ones are actually welcome relief from all the
rollicking and bollocking.
Jackie "Jim's Brother" Oates opened
with a nice trad folkie set, including a Cornish version of the sublime The
Trees They Grow So High – "my pretty lad is young, but he's
growing". It sounded exactly as if someone had heard "my bonny
boy" once and reproduced it from memory, not quite getting the point. You
can really imagine some fishwives singing it while working on their lad's nets.
There is more authenticity here than in any number of roared out choruses of
What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? The Captain's Daughter was a whip:
"Give him a taste of the Captain's daughter." Not "Throw him
into bed with the Captain's Daughter". (Have you seen the Captain's
daughter? Ha-ha.)
But anything they lack in authenticity the make
up for in volume. When they get going on Bound For South Australia or A
Sailor's Ain’t A Sailor Ain’t
A Sailor Any More it would be churlish not to say "Arrr" and join in
the actions. ("Don't haul up the rope, don't climb up the mast, if you see a sailing ship it might be your
last.") Or Pay Me My Money Down. Or Woo Woo Bully In the Alley. Or the
penultimate encore, Sloop John B. ("The Beach Boys sang this, and now we've
immortalized it.") Last time, I mentioned that Les Barker once raised a
question which has always troubled me: what happened to the Sloop John A? But
it now occurs to me that this was Nassau, and it was probably actually the
Sloop Jumbie. A Jumbie being a corpse that a witch doctor has brought to life.
Prone to dancing back to back belly to belly. Serves you right for paying
attention to me.
There is a big Cornish Flag over the stage. They
play up to Cornish stereotypes straight out of central casting. It's not
surprising they ended up advertising fish fingers: Cleave’s
stage persona is basically Captain Bird’s Eye. So, they are staunch local people who
want us to laugh with them at they grokles and turrists and Americans who visit
their village in the summer. "Tin-taggle? Can you imagine King Arthur riding out of Tin-taggle?
That's where a fairy would come from. It's Tin-taj-il" "Yes dear. But
put the fish knife down." (A pedant would point out that King Arthur
didn't ride out of Tintagil, although in the most militantly Welsh version of
the story, he was conceived there, so I have.)
On the other hand, they play up to all the nasty jokes that the rest of
England makes about Wesk Untry. Port Isaac has just been made a world heritage
site for inbreeding. High six!
This makes their rendering of Cousin Jack a
little uncomfortable. Steve' Knightley's a serious singer; he's allowed to drag
you through dark places in his songs. Fisherman's Friends are a novelty band,
and arguably shouldn’t. Steve imagines a 19th century emigre seeing modern Cornwall and
despairing "I see the English....living on our house...I see the
Spanish....fishing in our seas...." (Although he often now changes it to
"these seas".) The Fishyfriends put it back into the main singalong verse
"the English they live in our houses / the Spanish they fish in our
seas". If anyone is allowed to be annoyed about international fishing
regulations, its a working fishermen. Peter Roe, the oldest member of the group
(he's 78, as we keep being told) does a song he wrote himself about how the
fishing trade ain't what it used to be due to European regulations. It's no
Tiny Fish For Japan, but it comes from the heart. But in the context of
rollicking, bollocking, swuggering and buggering, it feels a little
uncomfortable for Cleave to put his hand over his heart when he get to
"the Spanish they fish in our seas" and very uncomfortable for another member of
the group to make what seems to be a clenched fist salute.
I assume you all all saw Jamie Oliver doing his
chirpy cockney thing from St Pauls last week? The lady with the stew sells me my
coffee in the library canteen, so she does, and sometimes banana cake as well.
There's only so many times you can say "vibrant" and
"multicultural" in one cookery show; but I did think he was spot on.
Saffron doesn’t grow anywhere in England. Think of a famous
story set in Cornwall: Jamaica Inn. Think of a typical Jamaican street food:
patties. St Piran's flag seems to be an invention of 19th century Cornish
language revivalists.
There comes a point where irony gives out.
After seventeen or eighteen jokes, you start to think "That's not part of
a jolly jack tar persona; that's simply a dirty joke." And then you start
asking yourself to what extent the audience are in on the irony. They are
certainly enthusiastic. A lot of them stood up at the end. I didn't stand up
for Chris Wood. I'm certainly not going to stand up for what is basically a
quite good male voice choir.
As a 45 minute festival band, there's no-one to
touch them.
Not my cup of tea at all. They were Celtic folk jazz fusion. There were moments of perfectly nice songs. It's hard to do Lord Franklin's Lament badly, after all. But I don't get jazz. Pippa Marland does a perfectly good rendering of the song: bit too much shutting of eyes and having Emotions for my taste, but that's her style, fair enough. (Proper folk singers are dead-pan and let the song do all the work.) But then somewhere in between verse four and verse five, the violinist (she seemed to be doing long classical violin bow strokes not short stibbly fiddle player ones) starts making some long up and downy noises which don't seem to relate to the song and go on for several hours, after which the audience claps. In the middle of the song. The man next to me particularly claps the pianist, who seems to tinkle tinkle tinkle from one end of the keyboard to the other at the least provocation. (Chico: I can't-a think of the end of this-a song." Groucho: That's funny, I can't think of anything else.) The opening number was about birds of paradise. It seemed over lush, over sweet, over done. Dan was selling BOGOF tickets as if he was fearing an empty hall, but in fact, it seemed full of fans who had seen many permutations of the group and seemed to like them very much. I enjoyed the support act. His name was Mike Scott. He sang oldest-swinger-in-town observational lyrics with strong narratives and clever rhymes. (She sings bad falsetto on the number 14 bus / 'Rock of ages cleft for me', though she sings 'Cleft for us'.) I do not generally review acts I haven't especially enjoyed: not playing or singing myself, I could not begin to explain coherently what someone was doing wrong. It is demonstrably clear that people who like this sort of thing found that this was the sort of thing that they liked, since they clapped and demanded an encore. The forgoing is as much as to say "Andrew doesn't get jazz." Or possibly "Avoid anything that involves the word Celtic" (as opposed to say, "Breton" or "Cornish".) And possibly also "Avoid like the plague anything that involves the word Fusion."
Hodmadoddery Canteen, Stokes Croft 13 Nov 2011
Hodmadoddery, once described by Bristol's leading folk blogger (i.e me) as "two men with guitars who sing folksongs" presented a set guaranteed to please all the traddy folkies in the bar (i.e me). When First I Came To Caledonia; John Barleycorn; that one which starts out as King George Commands and We Obey and end up as Spanish Ladies; a really powerful Shoals of Herring. (But then you can hardly get Shoals of Herring wrong, can you?) The loud hairy one strums while the quieter balder one plucks, but there is clever, even witty stuff not drawing attention to itself. Tony goes all Spanish Guitar in Spanish Ladies. Steve introduces Fair Annie (surely the most beautiful song ever written about father-daughter incest) as "copied from Martin Simpson copying from Peter Bellamy" and sure enough Tony's fretwork ([C] Folkbuddy) really is lovingly copied from Martin Simpson. Particularly notable was a very decent Black Waterside, with creditable tinkly guitar that genuinely evoked the ghost of Pentangle.
As well as any ghost can be evoked on a Sunday afternoon in a bar on Stokes Croft where no-one is actually listening.
A search for the Facebook page of the
Louisiana bar in Bristol directed me to the town of Bristol in
Louisiana. Well, there’s a thing.
Not been to the Louisiana before. Tiny
little room above a nice pub, just far enough away from the
waterfront to be quiet, but not far enough away for it to be a faff
to get to. George Orwell would have liked it there. The music space
is very small and felt “exclusive” tonight: me and Folkbuddy and about 15 of the (presumably) keenest folkies in Bristol. (I spent an interesting ten minutes before the band came on chatting with Jim Moray about Bob Dylan.)
Emily and her trio (Rachel Newton from
the Shee, and Lucy “did a tour with Bellowhead” Farrell) finish
their set by coming down off the stage and doing an acoustic encore
from the floor. Brand new song. Acoustic. An adult lullaby. It was
going to have a werewolf in it, but Emily’s mum persuaded her to
leave it out. It’s in harmony, not that close harmony where
everyone is singing the same thing a tone or two apart, but
complicated harmony where everyone is singing different things and
the phrases keep echoing backwards and forwards between voices. I think we’re
sailing off to sleep in a boat; I think there is a monster of some kind that we
are going to put to sleep; I think it’s a riff on Where The Wild
Things Are, but it could just as well have been In the Night Garden. Fairy tales are what Emily Portman does. We’ve already had a song about a drunk lady who has physical wings
and learns to fly, based on a novel by Angela Carter which I haven’t
read. Angela Carter apparently used to come to folk nights at the
Louisiana.
In between the songs, they bubble like
schoolgirls; Lucy mentions that a character in one of the songs can
"apparate" and admits that they've been listening to
Harry Potter audio books in the car. Emily spends a bit too long tuning her banjo; Rachel
wonders how she would cope if it had thirty four strings like her harp But the music is astonishingly developed and mature. This doesn't
sound like the second album of a very young singer-song writer, but
someone has been doing it for years. It doesn’t sound like a gig in
a pub, either. The detailed harmonies, the other worldly melodies,
hardly seem to be coming from the actual stage.
Emily’s songs take the merest idea or
suggestion of a plot from a traditional tale, approaches them at
right angles, twists them like a Rubik Cube. It’s intense,
immersive writing: these are fairy tales which drop you into the
heroine’s head in the middle of the story, and leave you to work
out where you are. Who would identify:
Tongue Tied, I am bound
To weave my words with thistledown
Sickle moon, on the moor
Turns thistledown silver and fingers
raw
as being the opening of Hans
Andersen's “The Wild Swans”, about a princess whose brothers have
been turned into a ducks by their mother. (Emily says she’s made them ravens to
avoid any unfortunate rhymes. I am sure she knows perfectly well
that it’s ravens in the Grimm's version of the story.)
It takes nothing away from Emily’s
song writing to say that the climax of the evening was her version of
the folk staple The Two Sisters. (We have had cause to discuss it in
these columns before: rich suitor favours little sister; so big sister
pushes little sister into river and drowns her; passing musician cuts up her
body and turns it into a magic harp, as you do.) Emily has found an
American version in which the refrain is “oleander yolling” as
opposed to “oh the dreadful wind and the rain” (or "bow and balance to me" or " or “by the bony bony banks of London".) Although it's American it's still all about knights and kings and minstrels. Martin
Simpson says there version where it’s a banjo, but I’ve never
heard anyone sing it. This version ends:
And he took the harp to the kings high
hall
There was a court assembled all
And he laid the harp there on a stone
And the harp began to play alone
It sang "yonder sits my lover the king
How he’ll weep at my burying
And yonder sits my sister the queen
She drowned me in the cold cold stream".
I don’t think I’ve heard a version
which makes it explicit that the king in the final verse is the rich
lover of the opening, which makes the harp's vengeance far nastier.
(Carthy’s version has the King and the Queen as the mother and
father of the murdered girl, even though she’s not a princess in
verse one.) I don’t know to what extent Emily’s version is a
composite, but it seems to turn the ballad into one of the most
perfectly formed fairy tale plots I’ve ever heard, up there with
Gawain and the Green Knight and Rapunzel. Chris Wood was right. Anon really is
the greatest writer who ever lived
And Emily has clearly studied Anon’s work: her songs are too complex to be
traditional, but the sound traditional. Perhaps she holds the
tradition at arms length in the way she arguably does with fairy
tales; not immersed in them or in love with them, but scrutinizing
them from a distance, twisting them, taking them apart, even, dare I
say it, deconstructing them.
One reaches for words like "statuesque"
and "stark" to describe June Tabor. Once one has exhausted
ones like "wonderful" and "astonishing." There's
often something cross in her delivery; as if the bonny bunch of
roses-oh is telling off young
Bonaparte for his silly idea of conquering Europe. (What. A. Great.
Song. "O, son, look at your father for in St Helena his body
lies low /And you may follow after, so beware /Of the Bonny bunch of
roses”.) She plants herself on stage, head on one side, and then
comes to life and declaims at the audience. She doesn’t do her
thing of reciting poems between songs tonight, but her spiels often
sound like recitations. She says that she chooses songs for their
words and their imagery before their melody. Whether it's the teenage
girl who wishes she’d listened to her mother (“But if I had
kenned what I no ken / and taken my mummy’s bidding oh / I would
no’ be sitting by our fireside / Crying hush to my babby-oh”) or
the sailors saying fairwell to their Captain, she has an empathy with
the characters in the songs. Even the utterly bizzarre pagan Christian thang about the Kent farmer who names his smallest bonfire after Judas Iscariot.
(She’s good at different dialects.) She has great respect for the
source singers, and never approaches songs ironically (in the way
that Jon Boden or Jim Causely arguably do). She introduces a
sentimental Easter carol about the Virgin mourning her son with the
matter of fact observation: "Gypsys are very religious people;
today many of them are born-again Christians".
The pairing with
the Oysterband is not an obvious one; perhaps. She is minimalist,
narrativist, a voice which is expressive and dramatic rather than
beautiful. They are at the rocky end of folk rock, drums and guitars
as well as fiddles and squeeze boxes. She wears a dramatic open
buttoned long red coat and stands at the front of the stage; with
aging folkies in eighties suits behind her. The one acts almost as a
counter melody to the other, as if the Oysters are riffing off the
meldoy of Bonny Bunch of Roses or My Captain Calls and June's stripped
down singing is hovering in front of it.
There are points
where it doesn't perfectly come off. The words of June's ballad about
the man who pretends to be dead so that his lover, who won't answer
his letters, will have to come to his funeral gets slightly lost in
the arrangement (we were, admittedly, towards the back of the
auditorium.) There's some cheeky non folky stuff, not
all of which I get. June loves the Tradition, but she also loves
Songs. On the record All Tommorrows Parties (which I understand to be
by one Mr Underground) is dominated by June’s echoey voice, the
instruments providing not much more than drum beat. Tonight there’s
a more pointedly folkie instrumental. (“We have our own Nico, who
can actually sing”). It stands as a song, not as a pastiche. I
wasn't sure if the show finishing White Rabbit (by a Mr Aeroplane) merrited its inclusion, except as a joke which everyone
apart from me got. But by that point in the evening, everyone,
including me, was eating out of the band’s hands to the extent that
they could have sung Baa Baa Black Sheep and got a standing ovation. (Chris Wood sometimes sings One Man Went To Mow, come to think of it.)
But the songs. I
can be at a gig, admiring the technique and enjoying the noise it
makes, and then a song comes and punches me in the solar plexus. The
first half ends on a barnstorming rendition of the practically
obscene Bonny Suzie Cleland. The last time I heard this song,
Alisdair Roberts whispered it to his guitar and left the audience
genuinely horrified. Today,
if you weren’t paying attention, the sweet refrain (“there lived
a lady in Scotland / oh my love, oh my love / there lived a lady in
Scotland / oh my love so early oh”) could be any ballad or any love
song, and you are brought up short by where it goes “there lived in a lady
in Scotland / she fell in love with an Englishman / and bonny Suzie
Cleland’s to be burned-ed in Dundee.” The fiddle adds a sweet
diddly-dee between the stanzas. This is an almost celidah version of
a song about a woman being burned alive by her own family because
she’s married “out”. But angry. None of the horror is lost.
It’s in the story. And the tune.
Her father dragged her to the stake
Oh my
love, oh my love
Her father dragged her to the stake
Oh my love so early oh
Her father dragged her to the stake
Her brothers
the fire did make
And Bonny Suzie Cleland was burn-ed in Dundee
And then in the
second half, June quits the stage and leaves the Oysters to do The
Bells of Rymney. Who could have guessed that this was going to
be the evening’s climax? A decent enough song, Oranges and Lemons
rewritten by a distinctly unjovial Welshman and set to music by Pete Seeger during
his Union Sub-Comittee Agenda Blues phase? It outstays its
welcome even when Robin Williamson warbles it, and my tolerance for
Robin Williamson warbling is considerably greater than the next
man’s. But here, the lyric, done pretty straight, competes with a
raucus, twangy reggae-ish drum-led background racket. "Who made
the mine owners says the black bell of Rhonda; and who killed the
miners cries the grim bell of Bliamma?” Mr Seeger, being a folk
singer, sang the poem, which is not exactly short, twice. Here it
seems to stall or freeze on the first repeat. "Who killed the
miners, say the grim bells of Blaimma. Who killed the miners. Who
killed the miners.” This, rather than the second encore, was the
point in the evenign where I felt like doing a spontaneous standing
ovate.
And the last
pre-encore number was Seven Curses; morphed from a whining lament
into a rhythmical country hoe-down; with the final curses given
multiple repeats. A lot like Phil Beer's fiddle cover of the same
song now I come to think about it - is there, I wonder, an
intermdiate version I don't know?
"So this is
the Oysterband and June Tabor playing Bob Dylan, back together"
said front man John Jones. "What could be better than that?"
Well, quite.
"Why aren't you all at Martin
Simpson?" asked Chris Wood on Friday in Bristol. ("Because
he's also playing in Bath on Saturday" replied Folk Buddy #1.) Chris said that he was Martin's
house guest a few weeks ago, and that he appears to do nothing all
day but play his guitar.
It shows.
I don't know anything about guitar
technique, but I can see the way his fingers run up and down the
fret, and that he's doing obviously tricksy things involving small
re-tunes mid song. Trying to describe his guitar sound makes one
grope for words like "ethereal" and "subliminal";
on the record you could mistake him for a harpist; and as everyone
says, it sounds as if there are at least two guitars playing. He
comes onto the stage and seems to go up and down the scales, as if
he’s improvising, sounding as if it’s going to be Spanish
classical guitar, with a hint of some tune you know from somewhere beneath
the surface, and then starts to sing “They used to tell me I was
building a dream....” He’s just made a record of standards. I’d
rather envisaged that Chris Wood would be the dark, depressing part
of the weekend, but Brother Can You Spare A Dime sets the mood of
Martin’s set. Before we leave, we’ve had unemployment
(North Country Blues) natural disasters (What Has Happened Round Here
is that the Wind Has Changed) and ship wrecks (Patrick Spens.) “What
about the happy tune about the old man who played the harmonica every
day until his 92nd birthday” I ask “You mean, the one
who was kicked out of his home when his daddy died in the first world
war?” replied my Folk Buddy #2.
He doesn’t have the greatest singing
voice: tonight I felt, more than usual, that he was speaking some of
the songs rather than singing them; but this hardly matters because
they are perfectly phrased and beautifully felt. One wonders if he’s
going to do a whole album of Dylan covers one of these days: I’ve
heard him tackle Boots of Spanish Leather and Masters of War.
Possibly, tonight's North Country Blues didn’t quite ascend the heights of
last year's Mr Tambourine man, where I felt that he was (tentatively,
even falteringly) creating his own version of the song. This was very
definitely Martin Simpson singing Bob Dylan’s version of the song.
But no-one can doubt the craftsmanship with which he retells His
Bobness’s depressing story, and how much thought has gone into the
surgical changes he makes when the original words just can’t be
said in an English accent. (“One morning I woke and the bed it was
bare; and I was left all alone with three children”.)
He’s a very autobiographical writer; he can sing a blues as well as anybody
("loo-weeze-anya, they’s tryin' to wash us away..") and
spring back into his own (slightly idiosyncratic for my taste)
versions of British ballads like Patrick Spens; but the voice he
seems most comfortable with is that of the Englishman abroad; the
Scunthorp lad who can’t quite believe how far he’s come. (He never fails to sings "I've been to Gary Indiana, Bethlehem P.A....but the furnace never burned as bright as down East Common Lane".) There
are wonderfully observed vignettes about a pissed English actor he
met in a boarding house in New Orleans; and the Tom Waits-y account
of a series of a chance encounters over coffee:
Love never dies, lust loses its
shine for sure Friendship can fade or be forced to a close Frost
follows clear skies in the flat lands I come from, but At that
Arkansas truck-stop, love never dies
Anyone
who can write a lyric that perfect has clearly studied long and hard
at the feet of almighty Bob.
While he is by some distance the
finest musician I’ve ever heard perform [*] I think Folk Buddy #2 is
correct that he doesn’t quite reach Chris Wood’s level as a song
writer: he hardly ever gets beyond the specific. It's a person
he saw in truck stop; an eccentric Englishman he met in
the Deep South; the incredibly unlikely story of the shepherd who
toured the world playing the mouth organ at the very end of his life.
This is even true of the monumental Never Any Good, a song which
loses little of its power even on the tenth or twentieth listening.
He says that it's so personal and specific that he didn't
expect it to resonate with other people. Well, it depends what you mean by
"resonate". It isn't universal; it hasn't told us anything
about Fathers and Sons or War that we didn't already know. But it has told us, in six or seven
simple verses, a very great deal about Martin Simpsons' father, and
a very great deal about Martin Simpson himself.
You showed me eye-bright in the
hedgerows
Speedwell and travellers joy
You taught me how to use my eyes
when I was just a boy...
"You taught me how to use my eyes...." These
are the songs of a man who notices things; you or I would probably
not have spotted, or thought to put in writing, that the fellow
fixing his car had “two skeleton’s screwing” on his teeshirt.
It's unhealthy, of course, to imagine that you've got to know someone
because you follow their Twitter feed, but I smile every time Martin
tweets something like "Beautiful day for dog walking.
There was a pair of Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the pine tree this
morning. Makes me feel good.".
Some time ago, someone tweeted a review to the effect that Martin is
the best finger-style guitarist in the world. "I am
not the best finger-style guitarist in the world"
he riposted "But I mean what I play".
What a lovely man.
[*] Well, there’s
Kathryn Tickell, but she doesn’t count. Too many notes.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of The Viewers Tale or Fish Custard which collect all my writings about Doctor Who to date.
If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of The Viewers Tale or Fish Custard which collect all my writings about Doctor Who to date.