Thursday, February 09, 2012
Wednesday, February 08, 2012
for those who care, and frankly that's a pretty small demographic, my predictions for the UKs second most prestigious folk awards are as follows:
FOLK SINGER OF THE YEAR
Jon Boden
Jackie Oates
Emily Smith
June Tabor
Jon Boden didn't get it for Folksong a Day last year, because it was (quite rightly) Chris Wood's night...so he has to to get it this year, no question.
Winner: June Tabor, leaving me feeling like a proper Charlie.
BEST DUO
Tim Edey & Brendan Power
Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell
Spiers & Boden
Marry Waterson & Oliver Knight
I'd love it to be Kearny and Farrell. "So understated, they are practically not there at all" I said when they oppened for (the mighty) Bellowhead.
Winner: Tim Edey and Brendan Power. Instrumental duo. Never heard them. Clearly stunningly good. Not my kind of thing.
BEST GROUP
Bellowhead
The Home Service
June Tabor & Oysterband
The Unthanks
If it isn't June Tabor and the Oysterband, then something has gone seriously wrong with the world. I mean, an evening which arguably contains three of the years best performances (Seven Curses, The Bells of Rymey and Why I Hate The French, sorry, The Bonny Bunch of Roses, oh) can't not be the years best act.
Winner: June Tabor and the Oysterband. Yay!
BEST ALBUM
Last – The Unthanks
Purpose & Grace – Martin Simpson
Ragged Kingdom – June Tabor & Oysterband
Saturnine – Jackie Oates
Assuming that June and Oysters can't win everything, then I'd go for Martin Simpson, although none of my favourites are on the list. Perhaps he will play you North Country Blues or Brother Can You Spare A Dime at the ceremony. (I will note, however, that everyone else likes the Unthanks a lot more than I do. Because it is clever to sing quick songs slowly.)
Winner: We assumed wrong. June Tabor and the Oysterband can, in fact, win everything.
BEST ORIGINAL SONG
The Herring Girl – Bella Hardy
Last – Adrian McNally (performed by The Unthanks)
On Morecambe Bay – Kevin Littlewood (performed by Christy Moore)
The Reckoning – Steve Tilston
I think Steve Tilston ought to get it. I also think he will get it on the basis that he is a Legend.
Winner: Steve Tilston got it, but he had to share it with Bella Hardy, with whose ouevre I am not terribly familiar. I have to say the song about the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers was awfully good as well.
BEST TRADITIONAL TRACK
Bonny Bunch of Roses – June Tabor & Oysterband
Lakes of Ponchartrain – Martin Simpson
Maids When You’re Young – Lucy Ward
Sweet Lover of Mine – Emily Smith
"Oh so don't talk so venturesome / For England is a heart of oak / And England Ireland Scotland / Their Unity has ne're been broke." No brainer.
Winner: As I said, no brainer. (That's June Oyster and the Tabor's again.)
HORIZON AWARD
Megan Henwood
Lady Maisery
Pilgrims’ Way
Lucy Ward
Pilgrim's Way (by Pilgrims' Way - watch the apostrophes) was one of my utter top tracks of the year, so naturally I think they ought to win. I have to say that I don't particularly know the other performers on the list, so am probably more than usually biassed.
Winner: Lucy Ward, about whom I shall not form an opinion until I have heard her play.
MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR
Andy Cutting
Tim Edey
Will Pound
Martin Simpson
Now that's a hard one to call, since everyone knows that Martin Simpson is one of the best guitarists on the planet and Andy Cutting is one of the best squeeze box men on the planet. Simpson, yeah. Because he's a nice man who sings Bob Dylan covers. I wouldn't want you to think that this was anything other than purely scientific.
Winner: Tim Edey, on the grounds we are following the Oscar principle of having one or two acts win all the awards.
BEST LIVE ACT
Bellowhead
The Home Service
Peatbog Faeries
The Unthanks
Bellowhead clearly are the best live act, but they won it last year. Might they give it to the Home Service simply to thank them for coming back into existence? Haven't heard them live in their current incarnation, but when I was doing Medieval Studies I saw the Mysteries. Twice. So I have heard Bill Caddick (fella who wrote the one about unicorns) live, even though I didn't know he was at the time. Maybe they'll sing Babylon or something. There is a real danger they'll give it to the Unthanks though. (I only heard them once. They are probably great. Everyone else thinks they are great. I like the one about the girl who works down the mine, and the clog dancing, come to that.)
Winner: Home Service, as exclusively predicted in these pages.
Sunday, January 29, 2012
THE "WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING WITH NOMINATIONS WE ALL KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO SAY 'CARTHY'?" AWARD
THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE JUDGES OVER ALL FAVORITE ACT OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS
Chumbawamba
Boff changed the words of Voices, That's All from "from the Albion Taproom to California" to "from the Bristol Folk House to California". A small thing, but a lovely thing. He's a showman, you see. He knows how to make a connection with his audience. What Chumbawamba are, and I suspect what they've always been, are a political cabaret act. Anarchists they may be, but each gig is beautifully planned. Coming onto the stage and opening the second half with musically and lyrically grim Homophobia, and winding up the encore with the poignant farewell song Bella Ciao; perfection. There is no sense that you are being preached at or harangued but every song has some point. Everything they do has some point. They walked onto the stage at Glastonbury wearing "Bono, Pay Your Tax" tee shirts. I have mentioned that before. That was quite a big thing, actually.
Martin Carthy
Sir Patrick Spens. Sovay, with David Swarbrick, twice. Famous Flower of Serving Men, all of it. Three Jovial Welshman (“why does that always get a laugh”), with Chris Wood. That version of My Son John re-located to Iraq. The Treadmill Song. The Trees They Do Grow. No different on stage in a classical venue (St Georges); three miles from the audience (Scarborough); or three feet from the audience (Camden). I may have mocked Green Note cafe, but honestly, sitting this close to the stage, knowing that only 50 people will ever hear this particular performance of this particular song? Does Martin Carthy know he’s a legend? Or does he just think of himself as a man who sings songs?
Alasdair Roberts
Alasdair has been described as "jaw dropping", "gob-smacking" and "Scottish" (by me) and as "like some coat hangers who've clubbed together and bought a guitar" (by Bristols Top Citizen Folk Journalist). He says that his songs have a cosmological bent, and thinks nothing of rhyming "heroes" with "thanatos and eros". I was so blown away by his Bath gig that I went to Camden specially to hear him again (have I mentioned the Green Note cafe?) and had to travel back on a 5AM train to go to work. Some cosmic force arranged for him to do another one at the Cube, supported by that film about wierd English folk customs. It's hard to choose between his weird rambling philosophical odes and his witheringly authentic takes on traditional songs. He makes Barbary Allen seem like a new and heartbreaking piece of news you haven't heard before, and, I swear, literally reduced the audience to stunned silence when Bonnie Suzie Cleland was burned in Dundee. His weird unaccompanied version of the Cruel Mother, with a refrain that wandered in from somewhere else but somehow seems to fit, is like nothing else on earth.
THE WINNER
You remember how Francis Spufford said that he only read other books because he couldn't always be re-reading the Narnia series? (You do, because I've quoted him here repeatedly. Neil Gaiman said the same thing, irrelevantly.). Well, some days that's just how the judge feels about Martin Carthy and other musical acts.
Chumbawamba
Boff changed the words of Voices, That's All from "from the Albion Taproom to California" to "from the Bristol Folk House to California". A small thing, but a lovely thing. He's a showman, you see. He knows how to make a connection with his audience. What Chumbawamba are, and I suspect what they've always been, are a political cabaret act. Anarchists they may be, but each gig is beautifully planned. Coming onto the stage and opening the second half with musically and lyrically grim Homophobia, and winding up the encore with the poignant farewell song Bella Ciao; perfection. There is no sense that you are being preached at or harangued but every song has some point. Everything they do has some point. They walked onto the stage at Glastonbury wearing "Bono, Pay Your Tax" tee shirts. I have mentioned that before. That was quite a big thing, actually.
Martin Carthy
Sir Patrick Spens. Sovay, with David Swarbrick, twice. Famous Flower of Serving Men, all of it. Three Jovial Welshman (“why does that always get a laugh”), with Chris Wood. That version of My Son John re-located to Iraq. The Treadmill Song. The Trees They Do Grow. No different on stage in a classical venue (St Georges); three miles from the audience (Scarborough); or three feet from the audience (Camden). I may have mocked Green Note cafe, but honestly, sitting this close to the stage, knowing that only 50 people will ever hear this particular performance of this particular song? Does Martin Carthy know he’s a legend? Or does he just think of himself as a man who sings songs?
Alasdair Roberts
Alasdair has been described as "jaw dropping", "gob-smacking" and "Scottish" (by me) and as "like some coat hangers who've clubbed together and bought a guitar" (by Bristols Top Citizen Folk Journalist). He says that his songs have a cosmological bent, and thinks nothing of rhyming "heroes" with "thanatos and eros". I was so blown away by his Bath gig that I went to Camden specially to hear him again (have I mentioned the Green Note cafe?) and had to travel back on a 5AM train to go to work. Some cosmic force arranged for him to do another one at the Cube, supported by that film about wierd English folk customs. It's hard to choose between his weird rambling philosophical odes and his witheringly authentic takes on traditional songs. He makes Barbary Allen seem like a new and heartbreaking piece of news you haven't heard before, and, I swear, literally reduced the audience to stunned silence when Bonnie Suzie Cleland was burned in Dundee. His weird unaccompanied version of the Cruel Mother, with a refrain that wandered in from somewhere else but somehow seems to fit, is like nothing else on earth.
THE WINNER
You remember how Francis Spufford said that he only read other books because he couldn't always be re-reading the Narnia series? (You do, because I've quoted him here repeatedly. Neil Gaiman said the same thing, irrelevantly.). Well, some days that's just how the judge feels about Martin Carthy and other musical acts.
Saturday, January 28, 2012
ETERNAL CIRCLE AWARD
THE NOMINATION FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE BEST LIVE GIG OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS:
Chris Wood is always amazing, but this is the best I've ever heard him, which is to say, about as good as the "one man with a guitar singing ballads" genre ever gets. He praised the acoustics of the room and the sound engineer, and was more than usually under-stated, nuanced, a conversation between guitar and audience. Assume I'd made all the usual remarks about the English not valuing their national treasures.
Show of Hands
at Bristol Folk Festival, April 30
I don't like everything Steve Knightley does. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say that the thing which Steve Knightley does doesn't come off every time I see him do it. This time it did. It was Day 2 of Bristol folk festival and local resentment against the seventeenth or eighteenth branch of Tesco being plonked on Stokes Croft had just boiled over into a full scale riot, about half a mile from the stage, and not one single artist had even mentioned it, or seemed to be aware that Bristol was in the news. So Steve Knightley stepped onto the stage and launched straight into "to the cutthroats, crooks and conmen running this gaol: is there anything left in England that's not for sale?" and "I hope some day we'll all be freed from your arrogance, your ignorance, and greed" and "Agri-barons, C.A.P in hand strip this green and pleasant land...." He is, in a way, a demagogue, a revivalist preacher without any single cause, and on this occasion he judged the mood of the hall, he took it into himself, he channelled it back at us.... And then went to the Silent Disco and danced along with Remember Your A Womble. A bona fide folk-god.
at Bristol Folk Festival, April 30
I don't like everything Steve Knightley does. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say that the thing which Steve Knightley does doesn't come off every time I see him do it. This time it did. It was Day 2 of Bristol folk festival and local resentment against the seventeenth or eighteenth branch of Tesco being plonked on Stokes Croft had just boiled over into a full scale riot, about half a mile from the stage, and not one single artist had even mentioned it, or seemed to be aware that Bristol was in the news. So Steve Knightley stepped onto the stage and launched straight into "to the cutthroats, crooks and conmen running this gaol: is there anything left in England that's not for sale?" and "I hope some day we'll all be freed from your arrogance, your ignorance, and greed" and "Agri-barons, C.A.P in hand strip this green and pleasant land...." He is, in a way, a demagogue, a revivalist preacher without any single cause, and on this occasion he judged the mood of the hall, he took it into himself, he channelled it back at us.... And then went to the Silent Disco and danced along with Remember Your A Womble. A bona fide folk-god.
Stuart Giddens (now positively identified as one of the two morrismen who performed what we all now know are traditional Morris double jigs with the Demon Barber Roadshow at Scarborough) has replaced Paul Young as singer in the band, and added a camp wildness, an awful lot of jumping, but probably not that much subtlety to the act, cranking the live show a notch or two above either of the records. It appeared that a lot of people who had really come for the rocky punky music that the Croft is more famous for drifted into the back room for the Tea Party and stayed until the end. There was singing along; there was dancing; there was jumping in the air...and there was a sense that Blackbeard's Tea Party had just gone from being a really very good busking and celidah outfit to being a major musical force.
WINNER
Back in May, the judge said that the Show of Hands show was the best live gig he'd ever seen, and he isn't going to go back on that now. But he's never seen anything quite like Blackbeard Tea Party either. Obviously, one can't blame the apple for not being as orangey as the orange or or the orange for not being as apply as the apple. So for the first time in their history the 2011 Monty will be awarded jointly to Show of Hands and Blackbeards Tea Party. Fortunately, since it is an imaginary award, there is no problem imagining it being in two places at once, like that puzzle involving an imaginary duck in an imaginary bottle.
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