We're All In This Together

It went zip when it moved and pop when it stopped, apparently.

Tom Paxton
St George's Hall, Bristol
8 Nov 2010

Confession time. Although I am reliably informed that Tom Paxton is a living legend, I had honestly barely heard of him before tonight. Although it turns out I had heard a lot of his songs. All through his set, I kept saying "Hey...didn't Val Doonican used to sing that?" There are not too many performers in the world who can namecheck Pete Seeger and Vera Lynne in the same evening. Pete Seeger introduced him at Newport; he claims to still listen to the tape to hear Seeger saying calling him "A young guy..." Vera Lynne ("is she still around?") was the most gracious TV host he ever worked with. She covered one of his songs, "Whose Garden Was This?"

The phrase middle-of-the-road kept wandering into my mind.

Paxton is the product of that particular moment in the 60s when card carrying muses were bestowing painfully whimsical children's numbers and biting protest songs on the same performers. The Marvellous Toy ("it went zing when it moved and pop when it stopped etc etc etc etc") has been adapted into a children's book by a Bristol based illustrator, but in his very grandfatherly way, Tom claims not to understand the accompanying I-Phone application.

He gets away with the appalling cod-irish sentiment of "That's my Katie little lady and I love her" by doing it as part of a medley with two other songs about his children. "Jennifer's Rabbit" is much better bit of children's whimsy than the toy which goes zip and pop: it recalls Where the Wild Things Are and Little Nemo. He follows it with a song simply called "Jennifer and Kate": a more recent piece about being a grandpa, and what his two daughters are like now they're grown-ups. ("There is this thing about fathers, they live in their own zone / They tell ya "hi, how are you" then they hand your Mom the phone.")

One certainly can't fault his sincerity. Nor his ability to laugh at himself: he prefaces "Last Thing on My Mind" with an Internet parody of the song. He wishes he could have started a rumour that the Marvelous Toy, like Puff the Magic Dragon, contained hidden drug references. His liberal anger is undimmed by time [good phrase – delete in second draft]. "I hear your government is going to set the unemployed to work. For no pay. What are they going to build? A new pyramid?" But his contemporary protest songs still seem to me to be a little obvious, like Tom Lehrer on a bad day. "Seeing Russia from her back porch / Means she knows foreign relations / And it’s only left-wing media / Who ask for explanations." Sarah Palin not very bright! Hold the front pages! But it's nice, in a depressing kind of way, that "I'm changing my name to Chrysler", with a few name-changes, is as topical today as it was 30 years ago. 

The hall isn't full, but everyone there is a fan; everyone knows all the songs and sings them whether he asks them to or not. I prefer the straight folkie-ballads: "Ramblin' Boy" (knew the song; didn't know it was by him) is wonderful, of course; and his new-ish love song to the peace movement would sound like a hymn even without the Biblical refrain. ("Marching round the White House, marching round the Pentagon / Marching round the mighty missile plants / Speaking truth to power, singing peace in Babylon / Asking us why not give peace a chance"). And I'm finally converted to the ranks of Paxton's fans by the encore. "The Parting Glass" -- sung unplugged at the front of the stage -- is charming. The song about his days of playing coffee houses in the Greenwich Village ("I miss my friends tonight") is a genuinely touching piece of nostalgia. "There's nothing wrong with looking back" he explains "Provided you don't stare". But his tribute to the New York fire-fighters is nothing short of breath-taking.  Remorselessly imagined; terribly specific; and obviously deeply felt. "Thank God we made it to the street; we ran through ash and smoke / I did not know which way to run; I thought that I would choke/ A fireman took me by the arm and pointed me uptown / Then "Christ!" I heard him whisper, as the tower came crashing down" A genuine great contemporary folksong. In which nothing goes zip, pop, or indeed whirr. 

I'm not sleepy...

Martin Simpson

7 Nov

Colston Hall, Bristol

And then there are evenings which you can't even try to review: evenings when the singer -- and, come to that, the audience -- are "in the zone"; when nothing could possibly be better. Evenings which you just don't want to end. The environment had a good deal to do with it, I think: since I was last there, Colston Hall has spruced up the minimal Hall 2. It's still a small room, where you're up close to the singer (and bring your drinks in from the bar) but it's got a proper stage and proper lighting and people sit in rows and listen to the singer. In silence. You don't sing along at a Martin Simpson gig; that would be a kind of sacrilege.

I've sometimes felt he's the kind of performer who improves as he goes along, as if it takes him a few songs to get into the groove. Or maybe it takes me a song or two to get attuned to his musical style; or just that he tends to start with a couple of his Nworelans songs which don't speak to me in the quite the way the English ones do. (He recommends the Princess and the Frog, by the way.) But a few songs in, and I'm with him all the way. A lot of it's the usual Martin Simpson set-list: he has a formidable list of songs that the audience would be dispointed if he didn't play. He finishes the first set with "Never Any Good", of course, and I swear I've never heard him do it better: the left-turn in the final stanza hits me in the gut as if I hadn't heard it fifty times before; he opens the second set with "Come Down Jehovah" and I still maintain he does it better than Chris Wood himself. He does the unbearably sad "One Day". He does that wonderfully bittersweet piece where the oral memories of a nonogenarian folk-performer are set to one of his own accordion tunes.

But he also does a couple of things I've never ever heard before. He does a Leon Rosselson  song called "Palaces of Gold", a strange, bitter piece, written in a sort of mourning plainsong. It was originally written in response to the Aberfan disaster: the children of the rich, it says, don't go to schools where there is a risk of them being buried alive in mining debris. Now we have an old Etonian prime minister claiming that "we're all in this together", Martin thinks it's time to start singing the song again. The slide guitar continues to play the tune for several minutes after the last stanza; as if Martin is responding, musically, emotionally, to the devasting argument that the song has made.

It occurs to me that that makes three of my all time favourite songs are Leon Rosselson covers. Actually, four: Billy Bragg singing "The World Turned Upside Down", Dick Gaughan singing "The World Turned Upside Down" and, for reasons I don't propose to explain this afternoon, Dick Gaughan singing "Stand Up, Stand Up for Judas". (Chumbawamba wreck "The World Turned Upside Down", I have to say.) 

And then – then – Martin does "Hey Mister Tambourine Man", which he may be singing on Dylan's 70th birthday tribute album. He's only done it a few times before, he stumbles once over that swirling, complex lyric, growls at himself, and then carries on. And that may be why this is, I think, the single best thing I've heard during the forty or so gigs I've been to this year. Well, partly because Martin is the best musician I've had the pleasure of hearing, and partly because any reasonably unbiased commentator would regard Mr Tambourine Man as among the best songs ever written by human hand. But more, because this was still partly a work in progress; a performer exploring, coming to grips with, learning about a great song. To borrow a phrase from our friend Andrew Hickey: how can the human race be capable of producing such beauty?

Not to mention Boots of Spanish Leather.

The best thing about these small gigs is that you can grab a word with the performer after the show. I thanked Martin for the show, and asked him to reassure me that he'd be recording Mr Tambourine Man. And he said what a wonderful song it was, how great it was to be exploring those lyrics on the stage, how amazing that Dylan could produce such a song at the age of 20, when all he'd done up to that point was protest songs. Martin may be one of the worlds greatest guitarists and he must have known he'd just done a very special set, but we're all just fans basking under the genius of the almighty Bob.

An English Heart

Waterson : Carthy

Chapel Arts, Bath

Nov 4th

Norma Waterson looks like your granny. Eliza Carthy looks pregnant. Sitting at the back of the stage there's an old man with a warm smile doing that plinky plonky plonk thing on his guitar. The atmosphere is relaxed, informal, chatty. Norma asks if anyone in the audience remembered to bring hot water and towels. Eliza teases her mum about the hypocrisy of doing a song about the evils of rum-drinking. She goes off on an extended ramble about thinking that the Victorian folk music collectors had been literally collecting folk singers. She imagined Cecil Sharp as something out of Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang. "The Child Ballad Catcher." This kind of thing must come easily when you are the First Family of Folk.

Although "Gift" is billed as a mother and daughter album, this is definitely Norma's night. She has a big folder with the words of the songs in front of her, though she plainly doesn't need it. Any possible sense that she is a "little old lady" vanishes in the first bars of the first song; a rich, deep bluesy version of Lads of Kilkenny. She remains seated throughout, but she sings as much with her hands as with her voice, raising her arms to tell the audience to join in, poking the air with her finger to emphasise a particular line. Her Mum was a proper Victorian, she says, who had prints of Monarch of the Glen and When Did You Last See Your Father in the hall; and her muse seems to be located in the music hall and the parlour rather than on the village green. When the piano accordion and the double base are in full flight, you almost feel you are in a fairground or a circus. "I really, really love this song!" she exclaims before leading the entire company in a rousing ballad (with actions) about the famous lighthouse keeper's daughter. "But Grace had an English heart / and the raging storm she braved / She pulled away o'er the rolling sea / And the crew she saved."

The evening's theme, if it it has one, is looking back – the songs which have been important during Norma's lifetime. So it's not an evening of pure folk: one of the show stoppers is an astonishingly deeply felt "Brother Can You Spare A Dime?" (Although perhaps only in the context of folk music could an elderly lady with a Yorkshire accent deliver lines the about looking swell and full of that yankee doodle dum with so much feeling and so little irony.) And the next minute she inhabiting a hard, masculine Richard Thompson number like "God Loves a Drunk."

Mostly, Eliza harmonies and fiddles around her mother's voice, but she dominates and astoishing close harmony re-invention of an ghoulish ballad called "The Cruel Brother." ("What would you leave to your mother dear?" / "This wedding dress that I do wear / Though she must wash it very very clean / For my hearts blood stains every seam"). They wanted a big ballad for the album, so they got down their biggest book of folk lyrics, picked one, cut the lyrics down to a managable number of verses, came up with a new refrain and rearranged the melody. Eliza wanted to sing a song that she remembered from her own childhood, but says that the only ones she could remember involved monsters taking children away and people going to hell. So she settles on the beautiful "Praerie Lullaby". Her dad puts his guitar away and gets out a banjo. 

But it's the sentimental music hall ballads which own the evening. Norma says that for years, she didn't particularly see the pun in Bunch of Thyme. When she first heard Martin singing it, she thought perhaps he was just allergic to thyme.

"No more than the the rest of us" says the old man with the guitar.