When England Went Missing...

Robin Williamson

Green Note Cafe, Camden Town

Oct 28

Have the salad, with a choice of five mini-portions of tapas. Or have the special: Louise spoke most highly of the Pumpkin pie. But get there early if you want a seat. I'd be surprised if the venue holds fifty, and all the chairs which aren't actually bar-stools are reserved for diners. We learned our lesson at the Martin Carthy gig in January. This time, I joined the queue at 6PM and kept getting mistaken for the bouncer.

"Which did you like more, the first set or the second set?" said the elderly gentleman I'd been chatting to in the queue. (He used to run a folk club in Newcastle and had lots of stories to tell about performers from the olden days.)

Well... The first set was based around the harp. The songs seemed to run into each other, as if Robin starts with a set-list but keeps finding that the spirit of the music has carried him away. He opens with a couple of traditional Scottish harp pieces, but then (maybe just when we're starting to wonder if this is going to be a purely instrumental set) starts to wonder who moved the black castle and who moved the white queen. Oh it's that old forgotten question: what is it that we are part of? And what is it that we are?

I've been trying to think of a word to describe Williamson. Whimsical? Psychedelic? There's certainly some nonsensical oddness in some of his lyrics ("an elephant madness has covered the sun / the judge and the juries are playing for fun") and some of the time he doesn't so much sing as chant -- even howl -- while his fingers move effortlessly over his harp. Strange? Surreal? But it feels as if the words and the tune and the music are meaningful; as if he really does see himself in the role of an inspired bard and is struggling to put his insights into mortal words.

He does a absolutely astonishing piece called Battle of the Trees – a story of King Arthur from the the Mabinogion or somewhere like that. He sings it, recites it, chants it, improvises around it on the harp. He stops playing to tell the us the names of the three treasures which Arthur was seeking ("Say their names with me") and the three worlds of Celtic mythology. Then he sings a strange ballad which references the song. He says that the stories of "this island" only lived on the printed page, and that was not the place for them, so he developed a way of turning them into performance pieces.

In the second half, he puts the harp away and gets out his guitar. (If the big drum is used at all, it's only for tapping with his foot.) He gives us October Song, of course, and that daft old country and western song called "You keep me stoned on your love" which he loves so much, and gets us all singing along to "Goodbye my sweetheart, goodbye my dear-oh" and an old blues song which goes something like "Whang-dang-doodle". Some singers ask the audience to join in. Williamson improvises around the audience. He growls out different versions of the "whang dang doodle" refrain while the audience keeps up the melody. But always, that hippy strangeness. A song about his mother and the various women who brought him up is called "Since words can fly invisible / I send this song to you my dear ones gone."

He tells us that he's going to finish with a song by "my old friend Mike Heron". This is, of course, Painting Box. The version on 3,000 Layers of the Onion has a slightly knowing whimsicality about it: here, it's distanced and made strange by Williamson's bardic delivery. But the songs seem to take over again, and without anyone having to ask for an encore, he goes straight into Way Back in the 1960s "This was funny when I wrote it, because it was about the future; but now, it's rather sad." No: it's still as clever and strange and funny as it always was, and it always was terribly poignant. "That was way way before before wild World War Three, when England went missing and we moved to Paraguay."

2011, he says, will be his 50th year as a performer.

The first set or the second set? Battle of the Trees is certainly the song I'd like to take home with me: I've literally never heard anything else like it; and I don't think anyone else could do anything remotely similar. Possibly some of the new songs in the second half -- the one about his mother, the one about Bina his wife -- had a slight sense of sameness about them.

But really, it's a half-remarkable question. We weren't there to hear the songs. We were there to hear Robin Williamson. The programme described him as "charismatic". And didn't "charisma" originally mean mean "one with a gift from God"?

Yes; that's the word I was searching for. There's a quality about Williamson and his music which I can only describe as "holiness".

Olden Days

Bob Fox

Landsdown Pub, Bristol

9 Oct

It's not even that good a song. I first encountered it as a nursery rhyme. It's repetitive. No-one could call it poetry. So why did I find it so very moving when Bob Fox started to sing – as natural as anything, as if no-one has ever sung it before –

Come here little Jackie now I've smoked me baccy

Let's have a cracky til the boat comes in

Dance to thy Daddy, sing to thy Mammy...

"Authenticity" is a risky word. It smacks of middle-class anthropology: I had a positively spiffing evening observing a strange species called 'Geordies' who apparently believe that everyone should "fettle reetly." But it's the best word I can think of. I mean that it's a live song, made out of live words that mean something. The singer says he's recently become a grandfather, and his affection for his grand-daughter comes through in his singing. (It's a dandling song, he says, one to sing while you bounce little children on your knee.) The words and the tune speak of a particular world, a particular place in time: a world of extended families, heavy manual labour and beer. Lots of beer. ("Yonder comes your Daddy / So drunk he canna stand.") It's not a world I ever experienced; not a world I would have felt comfortable in, as different as can be from the Olde Englande of, say, Martin Carthy. These aren't songs in which knights court ladies who sew silken seams: they're songs in which clumsy men trip over ladies' skirts and end up making small-talk with them. (" She mentioned confidentially that her uncle was a grocer / and her mother's father's cousin was a fiddler on the shore...") Not my world: it's hard for me to identify with the nostalgia of a song like Big River – which takes for granted that a river without industry is a dead river, or even Taking On Men in which workmen dream that the idle times are over and the shipbuilding industry is starting up again. ("Gone are the days they were taking on men / the quayside's a drunken man's playground". I get that bit: I've walked around the Bristol waterfront on a Friday night.) But a world which Bob Fox brings almost agonizingly to life. Can you feel homesick for a time and a place you never lived in?

Bob is a great humorist; almost a stand-up comic. He's well aware of the irony of the situation. He says he's the first generation of his family not to have been a miner: his father wanted him to stay at school and do something better with his life. "So here I am, singing about mining to people in Clifton." But the resentment about what was done to British industry in the 80s is still real and raw and current. He doesn't refer to Mrs Thatcher by name: he talks about what "she" did. He claims he once told an audience that she had a face like a sheep's arse, and two people walked out. "I ddn't realise there'd be any Conservatives in tonight". "We're not Conservatives; we're shepherds". Boom-boom.

No-one walks out tonight, which is just as well. It's a tiny audience, and it's clear that half of them are friends of the support act. (Which is an improvement on the last gig I saw in this venue, when half the audience was the support act.) Bob pushes on through two long sets and an encore telling jokes and anecdotes, teaching us the choruses, and reassuring us that if we don't want to sing the whole thing we can always join in on the last word -- but you feel he doesn't quite get the atmosphere going he'd have achieved with a fuller house. (What is it about Bristol folkies? Is the Landsdown to obscure a venue for them to venture into?)

It's hard to pick out a favourite song. Bob said afterwards that he aimed to alternate between serious and comic songs, and I had a sense of the whole evening building up a tapestry. I like the big Ewan McColl radio ballads, of course, oral histories set to music. But the song I'm still singing to myself two days later is the corny old music-hall waltz about the man who missed his chance to ask his sweetheart for a dance: "Now as often is the case / you'll find others in your place / if ye fail to shove ahead and fettle reetly..."

Authenticity. These songs are old, and in dialect, and emerging from a way of life I never knew and which hardly exists any more. But it's more than that. They're done without irony or preciousness; Bob Fox loves them and knows then and wants us to sing along and enjoy them and like them too. But there's no trick to them. No lying. No cleverness. It's the opposite of political language, newspaper language, bishop language. They're songs which use plain words to plainly say what they actually mean. These miners and railway men and long distance lorry drivers are under no illusion that the girl they met in the pub last night is the most beautiful in the world. She isn't. But still (all together) :

she's a big lass, she's a bonny lass, and she likes her beer

and they call her Cushy Butterfield and I wish she was here.

Yes.