Friday, November 11, 2011
Thursday, November 10, 2011
All Tomorrow's Celidahs
June Tabor and the Oysterband
St Georges Bristol
Nov 1 2011
One reaches for words like "statuesque" and "stark" to describe June Tabor. Once one has exhausted ones like "wonderful" and "astonishing." There's often something cross in her delivery; as if the bonny bunch of roses-oh is telling off young Bonaparte for his silly idea of conquering Europe. (What. A. Great. Song. "O, son, look at your father for in St Helena his body lies low /And you may follow after, so beware /Of the Bonny bunch of roses”.) She plants herself on stage, head on one side, and then comes to life and declaims at the audience. She doesn’t do her thing of reciting poems between songs tonight, but her spiels often sound like recitations. She says that she chooses songs for their words and their imagery before their melody. Whether it's the teenage girl who wishes she’d listened to her mother (“But if I had kenned what I no ken / and taken my mummy’s bidding oh / I would no’ be sitting by our fireside / Crying hush to my babby-oh”) or the sailors saying fairwell to their Captain, she has an empathy with the characters in the songs. Even the utterly bizzarre pagan Christian thang about the Kent farmer who names his smallest bonfire after Judas Iscariot. (She’s good at different dialects.) She has great respect for the source singers, and never approaches songs ironically (in the way that Jon Boden or Jim Causely arguably do). She introduces a sentimental Easter carol about the Virgin mourning her son with the matter of fact observation: "Gypsys are very religious people; today many of them are born-again Christians".
The pairing with
the Oysterband is not an obvious one; perhaps. She is minimalist,
narrativist, a voice which is expressive and dramatic rather than
beautiful. They are at the rocky end of folk rock, drums and guitars
as well as fiddles and squeeze boxes. She wears a dramatic open
buttoned long red coat and stands at the front of the stage; with
aging folkies in eighties suits behind her. The one acts almost as a
counter melody to the other, as if the Oysters are riffing off the
meldoy of Bonny Bunch of Roses or My Captain Calls and June's stripped
down singing is hovering in front of it.
There are points
where it doesn't perfectly come off. The words of June's ballad about
the man who pretends to be dead so that his lover, who won't answer
his letters, will have to come to his funeral gets slightly lost in
the arrangement (we were, admittedly, towards the back of the
auditorium.) There's some cheeky non folky stuff, not
all of which I get. June loves the Tradition, but she also loves
Songs. On the record All Tommorrows Parties (which I understand to be
by one Mr Underground) is dominated by June’s echoey voice, the
instruments providing not much more than drum beat. Tonight there’s
a more pointedly folkie instrumental. (“We have our own Nico, who
can actually sing”). It stands as a song, not as a pastiche. I
wasn't sure if the show finishing White Rabbit (by a Mr Aeroplane) merrited its inclusion, except as a joke which everyone
apart from me got. But by that point in the evening, everyone,
including me, was eating out of the band’s hands to the extent that
they could have sung Baa Baa Black Sheep and got a standing ovation. (Chris Wood sometimes sings One Man Went To Mow, come to think of it.)
But the songs. I
can be at a gig, admiring the technique and enjoying the noise it
makes, and then a song comes and punches me in the solar plexus. The
first half ends on a barnstorming rendition of the practically
obscene Bonny Suzie Cleland. The last time I heard this song,
Alisdair Roberts whispered it to his guitar and left the audience
genuinely horrified. Today,
if you weren’t paying attention, the sweet refrain (“there lived
a lady in Scotland / oh my love, oh my love / there lived a lady in
Scotland / oh my love so early oh”) could be any ballad or any love
song, and you are brought up short by where it goes “there lived in a lady
in Scotland / she fell in love with an Englishman / and bonny Suzie
Cleland’s to be burned-ed in Dundee.” The fiddle adds a sweet
diddly-dee between the stanzas. This is an almost celidah version of
a song about a woman being burned alive by her own family because
she’s married “out”. But angry. None of the horror is lost.
It’s in the story. And the tune.
Her father dragged her to the stake
Oh my
love, oh my love
Her father dragged her to the stake
Oh my love so early oh
Her father dragged her to the stake
Her brothers
the fire did make
And Bonny Suzie Cleland was burn-ed in Dundee
And then in the second half, June quits the stage and leaves the Oysters to do The Bells of Rymney. Who could have guessed that this was going to be the evening’s climax? A decent enough song, Oranges and Lemons rewritten by a distinctly unjovial Welshman and set to music by Pete Seeger during his Union Sub-Comittee Agenda Blues phase? It outstays its welcome even when Robin Williamson warbles it, and my tolerance for Robin Williamson warbling is considerably greater than the next man’s. But here, the lyric, done pretty straight, competes with a raucus, twangy reggae-ish drum-led background racket. "Who made the mine owners says the black bell of Rhonda; and who killed the miners cries the grim bell of Bliamma?” Mr Seeger, being a folk singer, sang the poem, which is not exactly short, twice. Here it seems to stall or freeze on the first repeat. "Who killed the miners, say the grim bells of Blaimma. Who killed the miners. Who killed the miners.” This, rather than the second encore, was the point in the evenign where I felt like doing a spontaneous standing ovate.
And the last
pre-encore number was Seven Curses; morphed from a whining lament
into a rhythmical country hoe-down; with the final curses given
multiple repeats. A lot like Phil Beer's fiddle cover of the same
song now I come to think about it - is there, I wonder, an
intermdiate version I don't know?
"So this is
the Oysterband and June Tabor playing Bob Dylan, back together"
said front man John Jones. "What could be better than that?"
Well, quite.
Wednesday, November 09, 2011
Come Gather Round Friends And I'll Tell You A Tale
Martin Simpson
Chapel Arts, Bath
Oct 22 2011
"Why aren't you all at Martin
Simpson?" asked Chris Wood on Friday in Bristol. ("Because
he's also playing in Bath on Saturday" replied Folk Buddy #1.) Chris said that he was Martin's
house guest a few weeks ago, and that he appears to do nothing all
day but play his guitar.
It shows.
I don't know anything about guitar
technique, but I can see the way his fingers run up and down the
fret, and that he's doing obviously tricksy things involving small
re-tunes mid song. Trying to describe his guitar sound makes one
grope for words like "ethereal" and "subliminal";
on the record you could mistake him for a harpist; and as everyone
says, it sounds as if there are at least two guitars playing. He
comes onto the stage and seems to go up and down the scales, as if
he’s improvising, sounding as if it’s going to be Spanish
classical guitar, with a hint of some tune you know from somewhere beneath
the surface, and then starts to sing “They used to tell me I was
building a dream....” He’s just made a record of standards. I’d
rather envisaged that Chris Wood would be the dark, depressing part
of the weekend, but Brother Can You Spare A Dime sets the mood of
Martin’s set. Before we leave, we’ve had unemployment
(North Country Blues) natural disasters (What Has Happened Round Here
is that the Wind Has Changed) and ship wrecks (Patrick Spens.) “What
about the happy tune about the old man who played the harmonica every
day until his 92nd birthday” I ask “You mean, the one
who was kicked out of his home when his daddy died in the first world
war?” replied my Folk Buddy #2.
He doesn’t have the greatest singing
voice: tonight I felt, more than usual, that he was speaking some of
the songs rather than singing them; but this hardly matters because
they are perfectly phrased and beautifully felt. One wonders if he’s
going to do a whole album of Dylan covers one of these days: I’ve
heard him tackle Boots of Spanish Leather and Masters of War.
Possibly, tonight's North Country Blues didn’t quite ascend the heights of
last year's Mr Tambourine man, where I felt that he was (tentatively,
even falteringly) creating his own version of the song. This was very
definitely Martin Simpson singing Bob Dylan’s version of the song.
But no-one can doubt the craftsmanship with which he retells His
Bobness’s depressing story, and how much thought has gone into the
surgical changes he makes when the original words just can’t be
said in an English accent. (“One morning I woke and the bed it was
bare; and I was left all alone with three children”.)
He’s a very autobiographical writer; he can sing a blues as well as anybody
("loo-weeze-anya, they’s tryin' to wash us away..") and
spring back into his own (slightly idiosyncratic for my taste)
versions of British ballads like Patrick Spens; but the voice he
seems most comfortable with is that of the Englishman abroad; the
Scunthorp lad who can’t quite believe how far he’s come. (He never fails to sings "I've been to Gary Indiana, Bethlehem P.A....but the furnace never burned as bright as down East Common Lane".) There
are wonderfully observed vignettes about a pissed English actor he
met in a boarding house in New Orleans; and the Tom Waits-y account
of a series of a chance encounters over coffee:
Love never dies, lust loses its
shine for sure
Friendship can fade or be forced to a close
Frost follows clear skies in the flat lands I come from, but
At that Arkansas truck-stop, love never dies
Friendship can fade or be forced to a close
Frost follows clear skies in the flat lands I come from, but
At that Arkansas truck-stop, love never dies
Anyone
who can write a lyric that perfect has clearly studied long and hard
at the feet of almighty Bob.
While he is by some distance the finest musician I’ve ever heard perform [*] I think Folk Buddy #2 is correct that he doesn’t quite reach Chris Wood’s level as a song writer: he hardly ever gets beyond the specific. It's a person he saw in truck stop; an eccentric Englishman he met in the Deep South; the incredibly unlikely story of the shepherd who toured the world playing the mouth organ at the very end of his life. This is even true of the monumental Never Any Good, a song which loses little of its power even on the tenth or twentieth listening. He says that it's so personal and specific that he didn't expect it to resonate with other people. Well, it depends what you mean by "resonate". It isn't universal; it hasn't told us anything about Fathers and Sons or War that we didn't already know. But it has told us, in six or seven simple verses, a very great deal about Martin Simpsons' father, and a very great deal about Martin Simpson himself.
You showed me eye-bright in the
hedgerows
Speedwell and travellers joy
You taught me how to use my eyes
when I was just a boy...
"You taught me how to use my eyes...." These
are the songs of a man who notices things; you or I would probably
not have spotted, or thought to put in writing, that the fellow
fixing his car had “two skeleton’s screwing” on his teeshirt.
It's unhealthy, of course, to imagine that you've got to know someone
because you follow their Twitter feed, but I smile every time Martin
tweets something like "Beautiful day for dog walking.
There was a pair of Great Spotted Woodpeckers in the pine tree this
morning. Makes me feel good.".
Some time ago, someone tweeted a review to the effect that Martin is
the best finger-style guitarist in the world. "I am
not the best finger-style guitarist in the world"
he riposted "But I mean what I play".
What a lovely man.
[*] Well, there’s Kathryn Tickell, but she doesn’t count. Too many notes.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Songs of Innocence and Experience
Chris Wood
Colston Hall, Bristol
Oct 21
I'm sure Chris Wood would hate it if I described him as a prophet. He hates absolute truth and is deprecating about his own talent. "Little folkie me" he calls himself at one point.
We're a very long way from Christmas, but
he opens his set with While Shepherds Watched their Flocks By Night.
Perhaps he's telling us that tonight won't be an evening of high
seriousness? Or perhaps he just likes the tune? He fills the line
about tidings of great joy with a rich, smiling warmth.
Isn’t this
the man who wrote Come Down Jehovah?
But he's an English folksinger, so the
great big important subjects keep cropping up. Love. Marriage. Death.
Childhood. War. And England; above all England. There is no getting
away from England.
His songs start from the
heartbreakingly specific; not "childhood", but his
children:
hard, my little girls hard;
she's only six but don't cross her
look out here she comes; lock up your
sons;
she takes right after her mother
not “marriage”, but his wife:
just last wednesday evening
she kicked off her work shoes
i pour her a large one, and I tell you
no lies
she swigs and she shimmies, she looks
to the bedroom
and then she looks at me with those
great big beautiful downsized eyes...
And not “England”, but particular a
bit of ground, a particular street, and a particular point in
history:
their's was a gritty England
Workers Playtime saw them through
and an oily rag or two
But he has an astonishing knack of
turning a song in the final line, so he's suddenly talking about
something bigger and more universal. There's an unbearable intensity
when the whimsical anecdotes about his daughter give way to
hard? 'course it's not hard
oh there's no better reason for
living....
And I really do mean "unbearable":
there's a reflective depth in the way he sings the word "hard"
which I found genuinely difficult to listen to. "Last time I
sang it, this song sneaked up and bit me on the arse"
he explains, and suddenly his is talking about his own childhood,
about having been a choir boy. You wait for the cynical punchline,
but there is none: he’s just remembering singing Jesu Joy of Man’s
Desire at weddings. Didn't he call Handmade Life "church music
with drums"?
It’s hard to work out who to compare him with. The Colston Hall's blurb calls him the
best English song writer since Richard Thompson, and one can see the
comparison: very personal, strong narratives, songs that you could
almost, but not quite, mistake for traditional. Chris has an
endearingly naive habit of using traditional "tags" in the
first lines of songs, almost as if he needs a jingle to get him going
("all the kings horses and all the kings men, I'm sorry but they
haven't a clue") but he keeps bringing you
up short by lapsing into an unaffected vernacular. Not many lines
separate "Awaken arise you drowsy sleeper; awake arise, it's
almost day" from
from the front door they'd had him
covered
they were right behind him from the
start
and though the video was buggered
someone decided he looked the part
The more obvious comparison, the one
which he himself makes, is with Martin Carthy. Carthy was the first
person he looked up to, he says. You can see the influence in the
very un-rock-and-roll way he jerks his guitar in time with the music;
with his habit of singing the melody to himself while playing
difficult guitar riffs (“come on”) and the way that he is
prepared to let the song tell its own story. His tongue twisting
delivery of the throwaway joke song Up in The North
There Lives a Brisk Couple almost seems to be channelling Martin on
the stage. But most of the traditional songs he makes his own. In the
hands of the Imagined Village, Cold, Haily, Windy Night is a sing-a-long rabble rouser where you thump your real-ale glasses in
time with the chorus. Chris recasts it as an understated, sinister
murmur. ("The English traditional version of Sexual Healing",
he assure us. “Just let it work for you.”)
He thanks the sound engineer at the
beginning of the set, rather than at the end of it because it sounds
“so fucking brilloiant” tonight. I don't know what was done to
Hall 2 during the refurbishment, but acts keep commenting on how good
it is. The acoustics seems to give Chris the confidence to do a more
than usually subtle, understated performance. ("He's in the zone tonight" I whispered to my Folk Buddy.) He goes straight into
his only instrumental of the night, a traditional tune and one by his
friend and squeeze box expert Andy Cutting. "It’s a cracking
tune, but it’s a bastard on the guitar." He uses the guitar as
if he's having a conversation with the audience. I was about to say
"as if he's making love to the audience" but that would be
impolite to one who sings so much about marriage.
He's a big fan of marriage -- not
Marriage in the politician's sense, but the love between husbands and
wives. Before going into My Darling's Downsized he quotes Jake Thackray . [*] This
particularly pleased me, as Jake's name came to mind the first time I
heard My Darling's Downsized, a "grown-up love song" of
domestic commonplace which keeps on raising laughs from the audience
my love for her can't be overstated
it's deep and it's not final salary
related
while remaining a powerful celebration
of love for a long time partner, and the concept of marriage in
general.(He quotes his friend Hugh Lupton on the subject: "I am
not your partner. I am your husband. We are not a firm of
solicitors.") He shares with Thackray a very English virtue of
sensibleness. (I ower this point to my Folk Buddy.)
Indeed, "England" sometimes seems to be a
privileged, incantatory word in his singing. I note that the MP's
expenses scandal has gone from being "such a quiet revolution"
on the CD to "such an English revolution" here. Mentioning
England is probably enough to get you labelled “right wing” from
some quarters, but he’s very clear that the idea-of-England can be
manipulated in bad ways:
sometimes I hear the story told
in a voice that's not my own
a land of hope and glory voice
and anglo-claxon over blown
rule brittania? No thank you
And when he chooses to lay into England, he doesn't spare any punches. The always devastating Hollow Point tonight became a quiet, understated, chilling exercise in forensic rage, a dissection of an appalling injustice by a man who is almost too fatigued to be angry any more, coming to life to delivery the devastating final lines
And when he chooses to lay into England, he doesn't spare any punches. The always devastating Hollow Point tonight became a quiet, understated, chilling exercise in forensic rage, a dissection of an appalling injustice by a man who is almost too fatigued to be angry any more, coming to life to delivery the devastating final lines
just a brazillian electrician
christ only know what he came here for
but hollow point was the ammunition
it's our turn now for some shock and
awe
The words "hollow point" are
delivered with a maniacal glee, like the punch line of a joke, and he
almost seems to jig during the final guitar riff, like some musical
folk-devil. The song really is almost too intense to listen to.
People ask me how I can have made the transition from opera to folk
music so suddenly, but Chris Wood shares with Wagner the trick of
starting from silence ("awake arise you drowsy sleeper")
building emotional intensity until you think he can't go any higher,
and then laying on some more ("and through the hourglass the
sand is falling / and there is nothing they can do") and, then,
crucially, taking you back down to where you started, calm of mind
all passion spent, as the fellow said. It's hard to think that he, or anyone, has ever performed this song, or any song, better than he did tonight.
Martin Carthy, Jake Thackray, Richard
Thompson, English church music, Jesu Joy Of Man's
Desiring...a choir boy who doesn't believing in God singing about
gardening and small children and little fascists and wrongful
executions. Ever since I first encountered Chris (singing the song
about the man who loved his own little bit of England too much to
sell it, back when we were still allowed to have folk music on the
wireless) I have felt that the closest comparison is really with
William Blake. And not only because he occasionally calls England "Albion". The combination of sentimental romanticism and
sometimes brutal social realism; the depiction of children and
hearkening back to his own childhood; the sense that we are in the
presence of a specifically English revolutionary prophet. A few songs
into the set, Chris told us he had been working on some new songs,
but "they hadn't quite come" yet....and seemed to go off on
another of his tangents. He's been reading about English history, he
says, and it's mostly horrible. Wonderful moments like the invention
of the National Health Service were blips in a long history of
violence and robber barons, and we are now reverting to type. And
then he started to play a strange, almost melodyless elegy, another
aching tune of homesickness for a country you never quite knew, sung into
the middle-distance almost as if he was improvising it on the spot.
And the words? What else could they
possibly have been?
and did those feet in ancient times
walk upon england's mountains green
and was the holy lamb of god
on england's pleasant pastures seen....
[*] "There may be better looking, better cooking women / better slung and better at buns that you..../ but they've all got as like as not / better taste in men than you have got / so darling I'll just have to make do with you."
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