Dear God, I had forgotten how unpleasant mainstream audiences were. These aren't people who drifted in off the street; the tickets were hard to get; Laura’s last gig in Bristol sold out overnight: people must, like us, have leapt onto the website first thing in the morning to nab tickets while they were available. Maybe all the truefans had headed for the, er, mosh, and we foolish ones who had taken the front row of seating were surrounded by people who didn't really want to be there in the first place.
Yeah, I'm a grumpy old man and everything, I've read serious critics (well, Jule Burchill) arguing that only a total saddos listen to music: it’s there to subliminally affect your mood while you are doing something else like washing dishes or having sex. Someone on Facebook was surprised to be asked to shut up when he talked over the music at a Billy Bragg concert, and concluded that he’d wandered into some weird religious cult. Which is a fair point, actually.
So, they talked, all through the first support act, Pete Roe, a local singer with a guitar and a flat cap and some decent singery songerwritery tunes. They talked all the way through the second support, Timbre Timbre, who I concede was one of the most hopelessly misjudged performances I've ever seen, droning barely audible cod blues at an audience who were leaving in large numbers. They talked about Aunty Angela's lumbago, and about who that cute boy was who keeps showing up in the office canteen.
Maybe I've misread this: I'm used to concerts where the support is "someone who the main band like and want to give some exposure to" or "a local act the promoter thinks is quite good": maybe young people regard them on a level with the adverts before the movie. But they talked, gesticulating and raising their voices to be heard above the PA, actually seeming to have some kind of full scale domestic dispute, through the main act. Quite astonishing. Folkbuddy 1 (*) actually resorted to the old “don’t bother, he’s not worth it" gambit when I leaned forward, quite politiely, and said words to the effect of “Oh, please, be nice, he’s doing his best.” I’m a librarian. I tell people to be quiet for a living. A customer threatened to kill me the other day. What was the question again?
So, anyway, Laura Marling. I believe I understand why Laura has become A Phenomenon. There literally isn't anyone like her. She sounds like a young woman of about nineteen possessed by the spirit of the 70-year-old Bob Dylan: world weary, rambling, occupying some space between blues and folk-Americana, long, structureless narratives that you can’t make sense out of suddenly giving way to beautiful little melodic hooks; a sound that buzzes like a bumblebee on a hot day; a sometimes preposterous naivity – ("there's a house across the river but alas I cannot swim" could be taken for a child's skipping rhyme) with a horrible maturity behind it. There’s also a hint of the Kimya Dawson type baby-voiced antifolk patter in some of the poetry. The fact that she’s awfully English but singing in a more or less American idiom and sometimes accent makes her all the more unpinable down. I could list the brilliant songs on the fingers of one hand (Alas I Cannot Swim, Give Me To A Rambling Man, I Only Love England When Covered In Snow, It’s Not Like I Believe In Everylasting Love) and there are an awful lot of songs which are likeable only in so far as thy somewhat remind you of the good ones. But that's still more classic songs than many people manage in a career.
I thought that the purely or mostly acoustic numbers came through pretty well tonight, despite the audience; but I am not convinced by the addition of a band, which appeared to entirely drown out out the Suzanne Vega type recitative. She doesn’t have much stage presence or persona, but she makes a connection with her fans through sheer niceness.(She mentions in passing that the Colston Hall was the place where she went to her first gig: a young girl in the balcony calls down "This is my first gig!" "Well maybe in a few years you’ll be up here" she calls back.) And although I am in principle pleased that she’s fighting a one man rearguard action against pointless encores. ("If you want an encore, then that was my last song.") it gives the evening a rather anti-climactic finish.
Laura Marling picking away on a guitar, singing cryptic lyrics like an infinitely old little girl, I shall listen to again, but I am not quite sure I'll have the stamina to face another one of her concerts.
We're left in no doubt as to what we've
let ourselves in for. The band rush on to the stage, and without ado,
akapella the opening track of their album: close
harmony, through the nose, copper-familly-ish; not specifically based on
any song, but sounding like "arise ye men of england" or something of that kind, except that it's about the modern world and people who want their magical 15 minutes of fame. And then, still without ado, the electric guitars and the drums blare out, and we're straight into a heavy rock take on Mr Richard Thompson's Roll Over Vaughan Williams. This is most definitely going to be folk and it's most definitely going to be rock.
The programmes says New Albion
Band but they definitely want to be thought of as simply the Albion Band with a new line up. Blair Dunlop, (guitars and vocals), is the son of Ashley Hutchings who founded the original band, but that's the only direct link, and Hutchings says that the new generation have largely gone it alone. Singer and squeezebox man Gavin Davenport actually seems to be the driving force, writing or arrange about half of the songs on the album, and acting as front-man in the live show. He has a deep, rich, northern voice where the younger Blair sings with a Moray-ish twinkle; they go excellently together. Katriona Gilmore contributes two songs, fiddle-playing and the only female voice.
The live show plays right through the album, but peppers it with number from the
Albion Bands back catalogue. "You will be able to see that the guitar arrangement is based on the monster rock stylings of.... Martin Carthy" explains Gavin at one point; and yes, as a matter of fact, without being
either parody or pastiche, you could see a lot of Carthy in Ben Trott (lead guitar's) performance of "I was a young man, I was a rover." (Carthy did indeed appear on one album in 1973. I recall that Phil Beer once remarked during a solo gig that, statistically speaking, two out of three members of the audience would one day be members of the Albion Band.)
We are told that Vice of the People is an album with a concept, although it isn't a concept album. The concept (and stop me if
you've heard this before) is the vacuity of celebrity culture. If
getting to know Simon Cowell is the only way you have of getting
famous, then there really isn't much hope for you as a human being, says Gavin. "Almost as bad as inhering a folk rock band from your dad"
interjects Blair. (The bands on-stage rapport is slightly self-conscious,
but still convincing.)
You can see why folkies would make
slebs their target: as Bernard Shaw might have said, martyrdom and reality TV shows are the only two ways in which
people can become famous without ability. I suppose you could say that its a
bit much for folkies to complain that the common people don't stand up and sing in pubs nowadays, and then complain when what's basically a glorified pub talent show becomes
popular TV viewing. (Susan Boyle and the folklorization of the West End Musical, anyone?) But it presents a very good hook to hang an album on: not necessarily music of folk, but very definitely music about folk. The band is really, really, really good at voicing modern
concerns in a folk idiom; and
presenting it in a combination of traditional and rock arrangements. "Thieves Song" starts with the nursery rhyme "Hark, hark the dogs do bark"
and turns it into a rant against dishonest politicians – we might
as well be robbed by poor people as by MPs. Not a terribly new
insight, as it happens, but the combination of vernacular and folkie
dialect is spot on:
"And yet you scorn the beggar man who cries out for each crust But on the pinstripe wolfshead you invest your faith and trust And put the biggest rogues of all your parliament within So don't despise the poor man though his clothes be awful thin"
Even cleverer is
the following "How Many Miles To Babylon?" also based on a
nursery rhyme. They are not the first people to whom the idea that ancient Babylon is in modern Iraq has occurred, but it's used here with considerable ingenuity. The person in the rhyme who is trying to get to Babylon and back by candlelight turns out to be a soldier from the gulf war:
"Come see there's little left of me But longing for my love And to see the child I never saw I thank the stars above Weary of the killing Ravaged by the fight I must go before the dawn Snuffs the candle light"
He is in fact a ghost and the nursery rhyme has morphed into a hauntingly contemporary "night visiting" ballad.
Unusually, I thought the stand-out tracks in the live gig were the purely instrumental sets particularly the "Skirmish Set", a collection of infectious morris tunes in which the drums and amps are kept firmly in the background and the melodeon and fiddle take centre stage. (The melodeon player is Tim Yates from our own beloved Blackbeard's Tea Party. There is, when it comes down to, only one folk band in the world, but that folk band is very big.) The songs, I can't help thinking, came out better on the CD than
live, because, as too often happens in folk rock sets, the very loud
volume made the lyrics disappear so you couldn't quite follow what was being sung about: a great shame when the group so clearly has
something to say.
The show winds up with Wake a Little Wiser, which you might see as a modern take on Ragged Heroes (with maybe a hint of the aforementioned Roy Bailey's Song of the Leaders.)
"From Wilberforce to Nightingale from Anderson to Paine Our ragged heroes built this land come sing their praise again And leave your tinpot idols out a rusting in the rain And wake a little wiser in the morning."
This is great
music; I haven't stopped playing the CD since the band wrote their names on it Polished, intelligent, fun but above all, loud.
Frome, pronounced Frome, is a picture-skew town between Bristol and Bath; small tea-rooms and quaint
terraces into which a small modern shopping centre has been unceremoniously dropped. It boasts one of the only surviving
branch railway stations from Brunell's era, and no
trains back to Bristol after 10PM at night. Up to this point in my
life, I have always found my lack of a drivers' licence to be a very
minor inconvenience. I have a very good working relationship with
Megabus and regard, to the occasional consternation of visitors,
distances of up to 70 minutes as "well within walking distance".
Having recently discovered that the main thing I wish to do with my leisure is
attend music festivals, the lack of a car becomes quite a nuisance. This weekend was, I therefore swear, the first time in my adult life
I have stayed in a hotel my by myself. A pleasant room above a pub,
with tea making facilities and a trouser press.
Only one though: since I was there for a folk festival, there should
surely have been two corbies. (1)
This was the first time there
has been a folkfest in Frome: I note that if I had turned up a week
late, there would have been a potato festival in the same venue. (2) The main venue was the cavernous
Cheese and Grain; sometimes used for shows but clearly often used for
markets. One of the acts commented that, looking out into the
audience -- some of us eating egg-and-bacon breakfasts, some of us (I
use the term "us" advisedly) in Morris dancing kit, bunting
and flags hanging from the ceiling and a big advert for an Indian
curry house on the wall -- was the most English scene you could possibly
have imagined. (3) There were also smaller gigs in
an absolute gem of a local cinema, with a proper sweet kiosk and
tip-up seats, just like cinemas used to be in the olden days; and a
small room in a masonic hall. Since my various folkbuddies had crazy
ideas about wanting to attend friends weddings and take care of
elderly relatives I was on my own. I always find that a level of
obsessive panic descends under such circumstances: if I had had
folkbuddies with me, I would have happily sat out one of the acts to
have lunch or a beer – as it was I felt I was doing something
appallingly wrong if there was a single minute of the day when I
wasn't listening to music: even if it was only the little girl with the
"I love Sam Sweeny" cardigan playing her fiddle to an empty
"open mic" cinema or escaping from the rain into the Blue
Boar pub where a lady from one of the morris groups was standing at
the bar singing my fifth favourite folksong. (The version in which the miller is hanged and the elder sister is boiled in lead.) Not to mention a man with a mandolin singing about the Yankie Clipper.
And music there was a lot of, provided
by many of the most eminent Usual Suspects – a veritable "who's
who" of modern English flok, impressive for a brand new
festival, albeit in a lower key than some: Spiers and Boden sans
Bellowhead; Jim Moray sans trio, Steve sans Phil, etc. And – I
mean this in a caring way – it was nice to see the weekend get
progressively less shambolic as it went on; as if the organisers were
(very understandably) spotting things which weren't going right and
sorting them out. The main venue, the Cheese and Grain, had a bar in
the back, which very naturally meant that there was a lot of ambient
bar noise, some times quite intrusive, during the acts. They
progressively put up notices and kept the bar lights down to minimize
this. I got the impression – knowing nothing whatsoever about this,
admittedly – that the sound engineer didn't know what was about to
hit him; having to set up for a big loud five piece like Mabon and
immediately re-jig for the very exacting guitar stylings of Chris Wood. (Or maybe the machine was experiencing machine problems. Or maybe the bands were being stroppy.)
Chris Wood was evidently getting annoyed by the P.A problems. Someone
remarked on the Sunday morning that he had "used the f-word." I
didn't have the heart to tell him that a gig in which Chris Wood
doesn't use the f-word is more comment worthy. One of his songs (the
funny tongue twisting Carthyite one about man who doesn't want to get
married yet) completely broke down; I rather suspect he finished on
John Barleycorn because it was an absolute foolproof crowd pleaser.
But who is going to complain about having to listen to Chris Wood singing John Barleycorn? The compère was at least acknowledging that the PA had been a problem on the last day; it actually seemed to be much improved at the end of the weekend and will presumably be thoroughly sorted next year.
The other thing they'll get better next
time around is the programme, which listed names and times but no
other information, leaving those of us who still don't know
everything about music at a bit of loss to know whether "Fallen
Tide" or "Hips and Haws" was more likely to be the
kind of thing we would enjoy. (And no use of the interwebs, even
though lots of us can haz smart phones nowadays: what price a
fromefolkfest hashtag to tell us that such-and-such a set has been
cancelled and so-and-so are starting late?) So my listening was a bit random and I probably missed some good stuff.
I'd never heard Belshazzars Feast
before: a duo consisting of the One From Bellowhead Who Is Niether
Spiers Nor Boden and A Man With a Beard. This is quite definitely the
best fiddle + squeezebox comedy duo you will ever heard. It really does come across as musical stand-up comedy: sequences in which Paul leads and Paul appears to follow with the wrong
notes; sequences in which the audience is asked to sing along with
tunes which keep changing; songs with silly words. It takes a very
high level of musicianship to pull this kind of thing off. I don't
know how long it would stay funny for – I don't think I'd
necessarily want an album – but this set was brilliant.
Jim Moray did a characteristically
splendid acoustic set, complete with "a song about a sinister
woodland elf rapist" (Hind Ettin) and an "invisible child
murderer who can walk through walls" (Long Lankin.) Also "If
It's True What They Say", on piano, from the Orpheus folk
operetta, off the new album, in which he veers convincingly into "My
Way" territory, having a fully fledged dramatic emotional crises
at the keyboard. And he wound up with one he said he hadn't song
before, the old American ballad "Peg and Awl". It really is very
impressive the way he turns his hands from the traditional song to
the power ballad to the folkie sing-a-long to the sweeping
semi-classical piano accompaniment. I think I'm starting to like his
stripped down acoustic act almost as much as the fully fledged electronica he's made his name with.
Pilgrims Way get better every time I
hear them. (Bristol's Best Known Citizen Folk Journalist suggests
that they need to pay more attention to building a set rather than
just playing some songs.) There's an increasingly long list of "good
ones" while waiting for their eponymous signature song –
Handweaver and the Factory Maid, Tarry Trousers, and Light Hussar
are all first rate.
Greatly enjoyed Sean Lakeman and
Kathryn Roberts. I've been trying to work out what "Carrie
Love", the unbearable account of a miner during the 1980s NUM
strikes, reminds me of. It's completely original; but it somehow
sounds like June Tabor interpreting Bill Caddick, without being much like either of them. Really deserves to be much better
known.
Spiers and Boden did a Spiers and Boden
set, frankly, but you can never have too many Prickley Bushes and Spotted Pigs. I like the way they now finish up
with New York Girls, but it does rather rub in the fact that
Bellowhead now informs Spiers and Boden rather than vice versa.
Earlier in the weekend, one of the acts whose name has erased itself
from my notebook tried to get the audience singing along with one of his songs. The left
hand side were to be singing a different tune from right hand side; everyone was supposed to be clapping on the off-beat. Total disaster. You can't help but admire
Boden's expertise in getting this kind of thing to work. "Volume is more
important than accuracy here...good. And don't worry too much about
the consonants, just do the vowels...."
Steve Knightley wound up the weekend.
No-one, as I have mentioned, works a crowd like Steve Kightley. Phil
without Steve is a completely different act: Steve without Phil is,
well, pretty much Steve without Phil. (This evening he went as far as
delivering some of his one-liners to the spot where Phil would have
been.) He did take the opportunity to do slightly more restrained versions of some of his numbers. I don't
quite think that the thumping angry A.I.G quite works as a slowed
down Dylanesque guitar piece, but it was worth a try; on the other
hand the Galway Farmer is in its natural environment as an unaccompanied piece of story telling. There's real complexity and
multiple levels to his song-writing: he opened with a piece about
drugs and drug pushing that I hadn't heard before: the dealer
travelling round the M25 selling heroin is a "poppy seller"
like the British Legion charity sellers on Remembrance Day; the heroin comes from the poppy farms in Afghanistan, where soldiers are still being killed, like in Flanders Fields, which is where the poppy metaphor got started....But it's all worn lightly, and
one feels one has heard a story, not a leading article pro or against
the warren drugs. "Transported" is basically just a good old funny "trick" song about the modern sheep thieves who pull the wool over the police's eyes. Steve plays the audience for all they're worth in the refrain
There's no transportation down under
No gallows in the old county gaol
At best in the morning we're fined with a warning
At worst in the evening we're back out on bail...
But I loved the way he followed it up with the contrasting traditional and depressing Oakham Poachers. ("Oh it never happened before / Three brothers hanged together / For the doing of one crime.) I
thought the only off note was winding up with a medley of Cousin Jack
and Country Life; not that the two songs don't work
as a medley and not that the audience didn't mournfully join in with the
"aaa-aaa-aaa" bit. But honestly. "No schools / No
homes / No shops / No pubs / What went wrong? What went wrong?"
It's a bit of a downer to finish a set, let alone a festival on. I
accidentally heard him doing more or less the same set in Bristol a
week or two later, and he very sensibly added the sing-a-long Aunt
Maria from the Cecil Sharp Project, which also has a very serious
point, but is a much more up beat song with which to finish an evening.
Highlight of the weekend, in many ways
was Luke Jackson, introduced by the aforementioned Steve Knightley, if only because I had never heard, or heard of, him before. Luke is, I think, seventeen. He has a powerful, deep voice and can pull off
bluesy Americana like Poor Wayfarin' Stranger as well as anyone; but
he also writes his own songs.
Now, nearly every third support act you hear is
a singer-song-writer. They all have exactly the same floppy hair and self-effacing stage manner; they are all pretty good at guitar picking; and they all sing the same agonized monologues about having been dumped by the same girl, set in the same flat at the same time of day (4AM.) God often becomes involved in the proceedings, although the singers mood isn't improved by having to admit that he doesn't actually believe in God. Luke Jackson is not like this.
Luke Jackson writes honest, hugely affecting songs about his actual
life. "Kiss us at the door and wish us luck" he sings to his parents. "' 'Cos everyone grows up."
Oh. My. God. That's actual proper poetry. There
is something enormously affecting about the way in which his big deep
singing voice sometimes gives way to a spoken phrase which sounds terribly immature and teenage. When a man in his forties talks
about "childhood" (4) it can come across as romantic bullshit; when Luke
Jackson talks about taking his dog for a walk in the park and hanging
out with his friends and adds "seems as if my childhood songs
have been song" he's not talking about those blue remembered
hills. He's talking about last year. (Two years ago at Trowbridge he was singing about the school bus, I'm told.)
I was born in the countryside
But I spend my day in town
Waste the whole morning sleeping in
And then just wander round...
But who are you to judge me?
Who are you? Let me be.
You or I might have had those kind of sentiments when we were 17. We might even have written them down in that kind of poetry. But you are or I didn't have a killer voice, an impressive guitar style and Steve Knightley as a mentor. Frankly, I've got no right to be listening to his
album. It ought to be being passed around every sixth form in the country as a big secret that the old people won't really understand. His Youtube stream is instructive, as well: he
covers a lot of songs which are frankly much to big for him – it
clearly isn't 25 years or
more since he did anything at all – which seems to be exactly
the right kind of mistake for a person of his age to be making. And
actually, his version of Blowin' in the Wind is rather brilliant: note the way he combines elements of Young Bob's version of the song with elements of Old Bob.
So, essentially: roll on next year's Frome, and see you all at the Brizzle fest in May.
(1) Sam Dodsworth, all rights reserved. You will, Oscar, you will.
(2) Oooo that's mean. Local gardeners getting together to sell or exchange seed. Perfectly sensible.
(3) Sensitive readers, freaked out by my reference to the toxic brand "England" are given due warning that by the end of the weekend I may well find myself listening to Mr Steve Knightley.
(4) Say with reference to old comic books and space movies
Well, that’s a thing I never expected to see. Chumbawamba in panto.
Okay, it isn’t actually a pantomime. It’s a political riff on Victorian musical comedies. For all of us who grew up in the 70s and were sometimes allowed to stay up past our bedtimes, Leeds City Varieties is synonymous with Music Hall (“Mr Larry Grayson, the entire and indefatigable orchestra, but this time, chiefly, yourselves”). But the real thing was apparently a good deal ruder and less well behaved than the Edwardian world conjured by The Good Old Days, and Boff Whalley’s programme notes say that he wanted to salvage Music Hall from that genteel image. We are told that analogies be drawn between Victorian times, when bankers had bankrupt the country and Etonian politicians were leading us into pointless wars, and modern times, when, er...
Well, analogy would be overstating it somewhat. The company marches through the gallery, down the stairs, through the foyer, up to the aisle and onto the stage singing:
"We’re all in this together! As equals we will brave this stormy sea! I will be the Captain, and you can work the oars In our Big Society!"
I think we all get the point.
The set up is a little like an episode of the Muppet Show, alternating between songs and turns in front of the curtain and soap opera and back-biting back stage. It all feels rather like a college revue into which one of the best live acts in the country, a famous comedian and a first rate theater company have somehow fallen. "Panto" will do.
The role of the Big Society Band is taken by the Chumbas themselves, sans Lou, but with Harry Hamer (the band’s regular drummer before they went all folkie). Harry also has a big acting role as the hopeless conjurer Magic Barry; Phil Moody (the one with the accordion and the percussive tie) has a small one as the hypocritical journalist (the man from the Double Standard) who wants to close the theatre down for using the word “bollocks”. Jude, laying aside her trumpet in favour of a euphonium, spends most of the acted sections sitting at the back of the stage knitting. The other acting parts are played by members of the Red Ladder theatre company, along with Phil Jupitus (a.ka.“that man off the telly”) who can, of course, also sing.
Anything the songs may have lacked in subtlety is more than made up for in gusto, enthusiasm and bloody good tunes. Beatrice (Kyla Goodey) does a Marie Lloyd style tribute to the police doing any number of filthy things with a truncheon, while delivering lyrics along the lines of
"Spare a thought for the dear old boys in blue What the prisoner has sworn, well its not true Yes the head of the accused Acquired a most alarming bruise I blame the station wall that he chance to walk into"
Phil Jupitus steals the show with his turn as the entirely non-specific public schoolboy turned prime minister. He can not only sing and deliver jokes, but has a lovely knack for throwing comedy tantrums on the stage. (“Claimants and shirkers / Manual workers / We’ll hang em by the old school tie”) The entire company winds up act one doing “It’s the same the ‘ole world over, it’s the poor wot get the blame”, with new words about an MP who is let off for fiddling his expenses because he knows the judge, while a pauper is hanged for stealing bread and water.
Subtle is not the word. But I suppose it never was.
The backstage plot is a good deal less convincing than the musical turns. We have Beatrice, the suffragette, assuring us (you’ll like this) that everything will be better when we have a woman as prime minister; and Eve, the conjurer’s partner, trying on lots of different religions until she discovers (stop me if you’ve heard this before) that she’s happier thinking for herself. (“I thought you were a Presbyterian?” “No, that was this morning.”) One feels that Boff has taken to heart the old “Well, you wouldn’t dare say that about Muslim, would you?” line and is attempting to poke fun at everyone equally. (“Don’t you know you’ll have to give up sex?” “Oh...I thought they said ‘celebrate’.”) Poor Barry has a magic wardrobe which repeatedly fails to make volunteers from the audience vanish. The Master of Ceremonies had a horrible time at school because his best friend was an invisible monkey. (“It’s a cold hard world Marcel / Nobody cares or understands / A place where a man and his monkey / Can’t walk openly hand in hand.”)
If I were the sort of person who was inclined to over think things, I would say that it’s hardly fair to satirize Eve's endless quest for spirituality and then to tell the MC that it’s okay to be friends with Marcel after all. (“Sometimes / You have to step out into space / Sometimes / To an unexpected place / Sometimes / You have to take a leap of faith.”) But I suspect that this isn’t the kind of show you are meant to think about very much at all. But it is the kind of show in which Boff himself takes the role of the invisible monkey. Who turns out to live in a magic kingdom. Entered through a portal in Magic Barry's wardrobe. Obviously. It may be trying quite hard to make you like it, but it's very hard not to. We need no encouragement at all to sway along to the last chorus of :
"We’re not in this together! Cos I can plainly see There’s rules for the toffs and the better offs And different rules for me..."
One can quite see why Boff would want to embrace music hall. Chumbawamba are about an endless quest for voice-of-the-people authenticity; making records with Coope, Boyes and Simpson and quoting Carthy and in almost the same breath suggesting that the whole idea of of folk music is a bit of a con. Lots of people have spotted that the aforementioned Cecil Sharp was "preserving" folk music at exactly the moment when actual folk had stopped singing songs about princesses sewing silken seams and decided that they preferred ones about the lady gardener who sits among the cabbages and peas. (Which, as everyone knows, was later changed to "she sits among the lettuces and leaks".)
I’ve been listening my way through Chumbawamba’s back catalogue. Surprising, with all the electro dance beats and punk shouting, how much they sounded like Chumbawamba, or put another way, how much of the punk sound survives in the acapella folk collective. Strange to listen to the ghost of rages past: who now remembers what the Alton Bill was, or what Paul McCartney did to upset them? In a way, I wish Nick Clegg could be subjected to that kind of fury. But the strategy of just poking fun at these ridiculous people is perhaps just as valid, more effective, and certainly more fun.
Phil Jupitus does a ventriloquists act in his “David Cameron” persona, with Nick Clegg as his puppet. "I like him sitting on my knee" says Dave "I like it best when he pisses down my leg. Feels nice and warm. I call it getting a Nick Leg." And then, to audience, "Nick Leg, you see. Nick Leg. Because his name's Nick Clegg".