Thursday, March 25, 2010
Friday, March 05, 2010
Olden Days (4)
Ashley Hutchings and Ken Nicol
Redgrave Theatre, Bristol
Feb 26th
Friday came down to a straight choice: Ashley Hutchings at the Redgrave, or Steve "Fifty per cent of Show of Hands" Knightly at Colston Hall. Apparently, everybody else picked Steve Knightly. You know things aren't too good when the usher asks if you wouldn't mind sitting near the front.
Ashley Hutchings is one of the founders of the aforementioned Fairport Convention; Ken Nicol performs with Steeleye Span, so together they account for both the folk groups I had heard of before I started listening to folk groups. (They've also been in the Albion Band, but then so has everyone else.) I know Mr Hutchings primarily as a producer and arranger of traditional music, particularly the Morris On series. (Black Joke from the Mother of All Morris album would almost certainly appear on my list of all time top ten folkie tracks (*)) Tonight, the focus is on their own, self-written music. There is, of course, a new album.
The pair don't seem phased by the relatively poor turnout. Much of the evening has a light, even zany atmosphere. Ken tells a long, punchline-free anecdote about meeting a professional regurgitator while queuing for an American visa. Ashley speaks of his enthusiasm for ten pin bowling, and then sings a song in which he imagines Francis Drake refusing to go up against the Spanish Armada until he's finished his coke and hotdog. There's a ragtime (it says here) number in which the birds and the bees ask the groundsman to leave some wild space for them on the cricket pitch (please make this corner a short boundary / for the sake of good grave, that's W.G) and a surprisingly sombre one about apprentices being sent to fetch stripy ink and buttonholes on April Fools Day.
But it's also quite literary. Before Ken plays a traditional Irish hornpipe ("written by me, in Preston") Ashley recites from memory a long passage about clog dancing from Arnold Bennet; a song about the Ponte Vecchio is introduced with some lines reminding us what Wordsworth felt about Westminster Bridge.
The absolute stand out number is the reworking of Gypsy Davy in which the lady declines to go away with the raggle taggle gypsy but instead remains in her fine house -- but with just the slightest hint that she's going to regret it afterwards.
The absolute stand out number is the reworking of Gypsy Davy in which the lady declines to go away with the raggle taggle gypsy but instead remains in her fine house -- but with just the slightest hint that she's going to regret it afterwards.
They look old, slightly weather-beaten, even dishevelled; as if they've been together for so long that making music no longer takes much effort. The evening opened with a haunting psychy piece called Prologue and ends with an identical song, this time called Epilogue. The temptation to draw Samuel Beckett analogies is overwhelming.
A funny, mellow, melodious evening. But I do start to think that 60s style folk rock may not really be my thing.
[*] Assuming that the Bible and Shakespeare are already there:
10: Birth of Robin Hood (Spiers and Boden)
9: Black Joke (Jim Moray / Ashley Hutchings)
8: King of Rome (June Tabor)
7: Muir and the Master Builder (Dick Gaughan)
6: Roots (Show of Hands)
5: World Turned Upside Down (Billy Bragg)
4: Little Pot Stove (Nic Jones)
3: Sovay (Martin Carthy)
2: Passing Through (Peter Seeger)
1: Grand Coulee Dam (Woody Guthrie)
Chris Wood
Folk House, Bristol
27 February
Any attempt at objectivity must now go out of the window.
Since hearing Chris Wood for the first time at the Hatfield mini-festival last July, I have become quite evangelical about this performer. Given that his most famous song is an ode to atheism, this is perhaps a little ironic.
Or perhaps not. Wood says that he is a little uneasy about Richard Dawkins' endorsement of his "atheist spiritual", Come Down Jehovah. On the other hand he's rather pleased to hear about a choir-master who wants to re-arrange the song and perform it in church. "I don't have any more problem with Richard Dawkins than I do with any other fundamentalist," explains Wood. He doesn't like anyone who thinks they've arrived at absolute truth. He is the kind of atheist who counts English hymn-writer Sydney Carter as one of his heroes. Before Jehovah, he leads the audience in a rousing chorus of one of Carter's carols. (I'll crow like a cock, I'll carol like a lark / In the light that is coming in the morning!) [*]
While I've greatly enjoyed his performances with the Imagined Village and the Handmade Life group, tonight's intimate performance – just the singer and an acoustic guitar – seems to me to be the Real Thing. He tells us that Cold, Hard Windy Night was taught to him by Martin Carthy, and you can hear it in every line.
I don't think any of the recordings capture the impact of Wood's stage act. For one thing, he talks a lot. He comes onto the stage pretty much as soon as the support act has left ("we don't want to be precious about this") and immediately starts moaning that the sound team have put on a random music CD in the gap between the performers. "You wouldn't go to Stratford and expect them to be playing fucking Alan Bennet on the way in..." His songs are lyrically dense and complex so in some cases they benefit from his explication. It may not be immediately obvious that Spitfires is a response to Nick Griffin's Euro-election leaflets; or that No Honey Tongued Sonnet is partly about the 11+ exam or exactly what it means to "watch the spuds chitting".
If you only know Come Down Jehovah from the version with Kathrine Polwart on Trespasser, you might be surprised by the humour which he brings to the song live: the way he looks up and pauses for a second before singing "my neck is terribly...stiff"; or the dripping sarcasm he brings to the Cottager's Reply ("this Cotswalds house that you call...nice...")
He has a bit of a reputation for being relentlessly downbeat, but in fact, there's quite a range of tones and styles. My Darling's Downsized – a song about love and gardening in which every line is funny but every sentiment entirely sincere – may perhaps invoke the very English ghost of Jake Thackray. There's perhaps a hint of Steve Tilston in Spitfires and a smattering of Billy Bragg in the more ranty political ones. (There's no more mandate for you soiled institution / we're all praying here for divine retribution / don't you go asking for another contribution. If Chris chooses to cast a satire about the MPs' expenses scandal in the form of a riff on Ballad of a Thin Man then who are we to ask why?)
If he has a chink in his lyrical armour, it's slightly tendency to the sentimental, even the corny. (Louise observed that, like all cynics, he's a romantic at heart.) So three accutely observed vignettes about his six year old daughter lead to the not very profound observation that when she's with me / I get much more than I'm giving. It's notable that when Martin Simpson sings Come Down Jehovah, he omits the last couplet (if we've done our best / we'll be ready for a rest) to the over all improvement of the song.
I hadn't heard the epic One in a Million before, although I'm told it was the best new folk-song of 2006. The lyrics (by an oral storyteller named Hugh Lupton) are like a modern Chaucer: they start with a realistic setting (a fish and chip shop) populated by absolutely naturalistic portraits of "stock" characters and only gradually allow you to realize what you are listening to is, in fact, a fairy tale. The melody creeps up behind you: in verse one, I might almost have said "this is pretty much a recitation; the words, not the tune, are doing the work" but on each repetition the actually quite jaunty verse and the almost dirge like refrain works their way into your head. It's a long, long, song – he's a demanding performer and you have to pay attention right the way through to see where he's going with his stuff. In the end it's the way the character's voices (speaking, as the fellow said, "the very language of men") merge naturally with the persistent melody that makes the song so heartbreaking. (She said Billy love I'm sorry / I never meant no harm /Oh you're kindly and you're comforting /And I love it when you sing / But in all the years I've known you/You never said a thing.)
I've bought all his CDs, but I haven't been able to listen to them. Not right through. The songs are too...intense? The chilling Hollow Point remains the only piece of music (the only piece of music which doesn't involve warrior maidens setting fire to themselves) which makes me cry ever time I hear it. I think that it was written with the Handmade Life band in mind, and a great deal of the song's power comes from the threatening instrumental heartbeat which gets louder and louder as through the hourglass the sand is falling / and there is nothing he can do. It's impressive that Wood can achieve the same effect on stage with his guitar alone. When I've heard something like that on my I-Pod I don't want to -- I can't -- just go on and listen to the next track. I'm left feeling, as the other fellow said "that I need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda."
He really is that good.
Chris Wood
Folk House, Bristol
27 February
Any attempt at objectivity must now go out of the window.
Since hearing Chris Wood for the first time at the Hatfield mini-festival last July, I have become quite evangelical about this performer. Given that his most famous song is an ode to atheism, this is perhaps a little ironic.
Or perhaps not. Wood says that he is a little uneasy about Richard Dawkins' endorsement of his "atheist spiritual", Come Down Jehovah. On the other hand he's rather pleased to hear about a choir-master who wants to re-arrange the song and perform it in church. "I don't have any more problem with Richard Dawkins than I do with any other fundamentalist," explains Wood. He doesn't like anyone who thinks they've arrived at absolute truth. He is the kind of atheist who counts English hymn-writer Sydney Carter as one of his heroes. Before Jehovah, he leads the audience in a rousing chorus of one of Carter's carols. (I'll crow like a cock, I'll carol like a lark / In the light that is coming in the morning!) [*]
While I've greatly enjoyed his performances with the Imagined Village and the Handmade Life group, tonight's intimate performance – just the singer and an acoustic guitar – seems to me to be the Real Thing. He tells us that Cold, Hard Windy Night was taught to him by Martin Carthy, and you can hear it in every line.
I don't think any of the recordings capture the impact of Wood's stage act. For one thing, he talks a lot. He comes onto the stage pretty much as soon as the support act has left ("we don't want to be precious about this") and immediately starts moaning that the sound team have put on a random music CD in the gap between the performers. "You wouldn't go to Stratford and expect them to be playing fucking Alan Bennet on the way in..." His songs are lyrically dense and complex so in some cases they benefit from his explication. It may not be immediately obvious that Spitfires is a response to Nick Griffin's Euro-election leaflets; or that No Honey Tongued Sonnet is partly about the 11+ exam or exactly what it means to "watch the spuds chitting".
If you only know Come Down Jehovah from the version with Kathrine Polwart on Trespasser, you might be surprised by the humour which he brings to the song live: the way he looks up and pauses for a second before singing "my neck is terribly...stiff"; or the dripping sarcasm he brings to the Cottager's Reply ("this Cotswalds house that you call...nice...")
He has a bit of a reputation for being relentlessly downbeat, but in fact, there's quite a range of tones and styles. My Darling's Downsized – a song about love and gardening in which every line is funny but every sentiment entirely sincere – may perhaps invoke the very English ghost of Jake Thackray. There's perhaps a hint of Steve Tilston in Spitfires and a smattering of Billy Bragg in the more ranty political ones. (There's no more mandate for you soiled institution / we're all praying here for divine retribution / don't you go asking for another contribution. If Chris chooses to cast a satire about the MPs' expenses scandal in the form of a riff on Ballad of a Thin Man then who are we to ask why?)
If he has a chink in his lyrical armour, it's slightly tendency to the sentimental, even the corny. (Louise observed that, like all cynics, he's a romantic at heart.) So three accutely observed vignettes about his six year old daughter lead to the not very profound observation that when she's with me / I get much more than I'm giving. It's notable that when Martin Simpson sings Come Down Jehovah, he omits the last couplet (if we've done our best / we'll be ready for a rest) to the over all improvement of the song.
I hadn't heard the epic One in a Million before, although I'm told it was the best new folk-song of 2006. The lyrics (by an oral storyteller named Hugh Lupton) are like a modern Chaucer: they start with a realistic setting (a fish and chip shop) populated by absolutely naturalistic portraits of "stock" characters and only gradually allow you to realize what you are listening to is, in fact, a fairy tale. The melody creeps up behind you: in verse one, I might almost have said "this is pretty much a recitation; the words, not the tune, are doing the work" but on each repetition the actually quite jaunty verse and the almost dirge like refrain works their way into your head. It's a long, long, song – he's a demanding performer and you have to pay attention right the way through to see where he's going with his stuff. In the end it's the way the character's voices (speaking, as the fellow said, "the very language of men") merge naturally with the persistent melody that makes the song so heartbreaking. (She said Billy love I'm sorry / I never meant no harm /Oh you're kindly and you're comforting /And I love it when you sing / But in all the years I've known you/You never said a thing.)
I've bought all his CDs, but I haven't been able to listen to them. Not right through. The songs are too...intense? The chilling Hollow Point remains the only piece of music (the only piece of music which doesn't involve warrior maidens setting fire to themselves) which makes me cry ever time I hear it. I think that it was written with the Handmade Life band in mind, and a great deal of the song's power comes from the threatening instrumental heartbeat which gets louder and louder as through the hourglass the sand is falling / and there is nothing he can do. It's impressive that Wood can achieve the same effect on stage with his guitar alone. When I've heard something like that on my I-Pod I don't want to -- I can't -- just go on and listen to the next track. I'm left feeling, as the other fellow said "that I need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda."
He really is that good.
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
Olden Days (3)
Ian King
Bristol Folk House
20th Feb
The Ash Keys folk nights have decamped from the quaint, out of the way arts centre in Southville to the community education center and tea-shop on Park Street. I am going to quite miss the old venue's church hall chic and the crazy barmen who sang Basque protest songs and claimed that Chumbawamba saved his life. But the Folk House is easier to get to. (Once the Hobgoblin music shop has finished relocating, it will be very convenient for any performers who need to nip out in the interval and buy a quick accordion.) The big room where they do the gigs, which used to look like a school hall, has undergone some refurbishment recently, and now looks like a school hall.
The new venue retains the slightly rough-and-ready club atmosphere of the old one with local artists opening for the big names. Rachel Dawick, who has recently arrived from New Zealand and apparently spent last week busking in Broadmead started this evening off with some self-written swingy country stuff. Then a local choir called the Roving Blades did a short set of acapella folksy harmony stuff. Rather good, this, I thought: any set which finishes with the audience singing "hi, ho, chicken on a raft" is a good one. I'll even forgive them the extra "local" verses. ("Saturday morning nothing to do / think I'll go to B & Q").
As to the main performer.
Hmm...
Ian King clearly knows and cares about his folk. We're told he used to be a dry stone waller; he talks Yorkshire although he sings with a rock'n'roll accent. He name checks Chris Wood several times. He sings almost entirely traditional material. He's got a band with two electric guitars, a three man brass section and one of those percussionists who plays drums with his hands but also uses the box he's sitting on as an instrument.
His first number was Death and the Maiden. The electrics twanged out a rhythm. The brass kept coming in with little "stings", like an 80s cop show. When Ian eventually started singing, I couldn't quite tell if he was singing the traditional tune, or had simply swiped the words and put them to do new young-people's repetitive beat type thang.
As the evening went on it started to grow on me a bit. The second number was Adieu to Old England, which confirmed that he was sticking to the traditional melodies, more or less. The brass section was largely "replying" to the vocal melody, while the drums carried on doing much the same thing as they had been before. I positively liked the version of Flash Company we finished on: Mr King sort of softened it up so that what's often a beat-out-the-rhythm-in-the-air marching song came out almost as a romantic ballad.
Lots of people have done, and are doing, performances in which someone sings folk songs in a relatively folky way, while something different and modern and instrumental is going on behind it. What makes your Jim Morays and your Bellowheads work for me is very largely the element of surprise: each song is different, and you don't exactly know what's going to happen next. (Bellowhead turn Flash Company into a rather desperate, discordant, out of tune muddle, as if it was being song by a hopeless drunk.) After I'd heard the first couple of songs, I felt I'd "got" Mr King's schtick: trad folk songs with (sticking my neck out here) a "ska" beat behind it. And that sorta kinda worked: but it wasn't interesting enough to keep me excited through a whole set.
Not surprisingly, my favourite part of the evening was the bit where he got out his acoustic guitar and did a rather heartfelt "What is that blood on your shirt sleeve?" without the band. (Not a song I'd heard before, although it's obviously related to the second part of Lucy Wan, which Jim Moray does that weird hip-hop version of, where the young guy who's killed his sister (in that version) and his brother (in this) tries to pass the blood off her blood as horse's blood and then realizes he's going to have to leave the country. One of the fun things about listening to to this stuff is drawing the lines and connecting the dots between different songs and different singers.) He followed this by bringing the Blades back on stage and doing a nice, Raahbin Gentle Raahbin, with them repeating the chorus and him improvising a bit around the verse.
All of which sounds rather more negative than I actually felt. King seems like a good guy with a nice stage manner who cares about the material. The audience (much younger than the usual crowd) seemed very enthusiastic; the girl in front of me tried to start a standing ovation; a young bloke kept shouting "good one, man."
Tell you what. Disregard this review altogether, I'll go get the CD and listen to it a few times and then let you know what I think. Mike Harding says it grew on him.
P.S.
Looks to me if there are still tickets going for Chris Wood on Saturday. If you're anywhere near Bristol it would be almost sinful to miss it.
Friday, February 19, 2010
Olden Days (2)
Martin Carthy
Green Note, Camden Town
17 Feb
Last week, Martin Carthy on a stage with dry ice and synthesisers and lights and amps in front of an audience of a thousand. This week, Martin Carthy in a vegetarian cafe not much bigger than my Mum's front room, playing to an audience of fifty -- thirty-five of whom arrived in time to get seats, the rest perched on stools or standing around the bar. (Slightly cheeky, arguably, to charge money for tickets and then set things up so you only get a seat if you also buy dinner. Good cheesecake, though.)
Carthy comes onto the stage, or rather, onto the raised bit in the corner of the cafe, and without ado, launches into "Come listen for a moment lads, and hear me tell my tale / across the seas from England I was condemned to sail..." I loved this song when Dylan turned it into a pop ballad; I love it when Mawkin: Causley do it as a big production number; but Carthy strips it right down to the simple melody and stark, harsh words so you can actually hear it being sung by a real poacher on a real convict ship. And then straight into Broom, Green Broom, which he points, out shows that dads and teenagers haven't changed much over the centuries. ("He had a son, his name it was John/And he stayed in his bed until noonday, noon / The father arose and to his son goes / And swore he would fire his room...")
He gives us a fair old sample of his vast repertoire -- he claims that he only needs to hear a song once to know it by heart -- in two generous sixty minute sets. He refrains from singing the dirty words to Cuckoo's Nest, but if we're paying attention during a perfectly timed, unaccompanied Tailor of Whitby, we can work out what the title means. (And doesn't it give you some kind of hope for the future of the human race that a cock joke can remain funny for two hundred years?)
He does a lot of the Famous Ones, of course. There's a poignant My Bonny Boy Is Young But He's Growing; a long, dramatic Prince Heathen, with many instrumental breaks. No female highwaymen, though, to my very mild disappointment.
There are a few minor departures from his very traditional brief. The second half starts, unannounced, with a dotty bit of half-sung, half-recited Victorian music hall whimsy ("don't go in them lions' cage tonight, mother"). He does the Imagined Village version of My Son John, in which the young man's legs are replaced with carbon fibre blades rather than crutches. The Three Jovial Welshmen ("Can someone tell me why that always gets a laugh?") mistake a haystack for Barbara Cartland -- which gives some indication as to how long he's been singing that particular version of the song. I'm guessing that the stanza about Crookback Richard's taxation policy is even older.
What I like best of all are the long, long narrative ballads. The boy in the forest who sends his friend to take a love message to married woman, resulting in him losing his head. (Completely new to me: Carthy says it's one of his six or seven favourite songs, and one can see why.) The witch who curses a woman so that she will get pregnant, but never give birth, and is caught out by one of those ruses that only work in fairy tales. And the final, daft encore about the farmer who bets his soul that he can find an animal that the Satan won't recognise.
Although he obviously knows which songs work as opening and closing numbers he has no set-list, and sometimes seems to genuinely pause and say "I think I'll sing...no, maybe I'll do this one first."
Louise said that Carthy, for all his fame and influence still seems to be saying "I'm just going to sing you a few songs I like -- I hope you like then too." I think it's the modesty of the true folk singer -- he knowns that the songs are the star: he's just a conduit for them.
Genius.
Carthy comes onto the stage, or rather, onto the raised bit in the corner of the cafe, and without ado, launches into "Come listen for a moment lads, and hear me tell my tale / across the seas from England I was condemned to sail..." I loved this song when Dylan turned it into a pop ballad; I love it when Mawkin: Causley do it as a big production number; but Carthy strips it right down to the simple melody and stark, harsh words so you can actually hear it being sung by a real poacher on a real convict ship. And then straight into Broom, Green Broom, which he points, out shows that dads and teenagers haven't changed much over the centuries. ("He had a son, his name it was John/And he stayed in his bed until noonday, noon / The father arose and to his son goes / And swore he would fire his room...")
He gives us a fair old sample of his vast repertoire -- he claims that he only needs to hear a song once to know it by heart -- in two generous sixty minute sets. He refrains from singing the dirty words to Cuckoo's Nest, but if we're paying attention during a perfectly timed, unaccompanied Tailor of Whitby, we can work out what the title means. (And doesn't it give you some kind of hope for the future of the human race that a cock joke can remain funny for two hundred years?)
He does a lot of the Famous Ones, of course. There's a poignant My Bonny Boy Is Young But He's Growing; a long, dramatic Prince Heathen, with many instrumental breaks. No female highwaymen, though, to my very mild disappointment.
There are a few minor departures from his very traditional brief. The second half starts, unannounced, with a dotty bit of half-sung, half-recited Victorian music hall whimsy ("don't go in them lions' cage tonight, mother"). He does the Imagined Village version of My Son John, in which the young man's legs are replaced with carbon fibre blades rather than crutches. The Three Jovial Welshmen ("Can someone tell me why that always gets a laugh?") mistake a haystack for Barbara Cartland -- which gives some indication as to how long he's been singing that particular version of the song. I'm guessing that the stanza about Crookback Richard's taxation policy is even older.
What I like best of all are the long, long narrative ballads. The boy in the forest who sends his friend to take a love message to married woman, resulting in him losing his head. (Completely new to me: Carthy says it's one of his six or seven favourite songs, and one can see why.) The witch who curses a woman so that she will get pregnant, but never give birth, and is caught out by one of those ruses that only work in fairy tales. And the final, daft encore about the farmer who bets his soul that he can find an animal that the Satan won't recognise.
Although he obviously knows which songs work as opening and closing numbers he has no set-list, and sometimes seems to genuinely pause and say "I think I'll sing...no, maybe I'll do this one first."
Louise said that Carthy, for all his fame and influence still seems to be saying "I'm just going to sing you a few songs I like -- I hope you like then too." I think it's the modesty of the true folk singer -- he knowns that the songs are the star: he's just a conduit for them.
Genius.
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