....AND A HAPPY NEW YEAR!

(possibly my favourite new record of 2011, and a fine New Year's resolution for us all)

Two Nips of Gin.

I think that in retrospect, everybody could see that Tom Baker was just too good. He wasn’t necessarily the best actor to play the Doctor. He wasn’t the first to think he owned the role, or even to get himself and the character mixed up. But he was the most charismatic incumbent. His ad libbing made him a de-facto co-writer. The credited writers naturally played up to his sense of humour. They wrote Tom-lines, and the audience tuned in to see Tom in a way they never had to see Jon or Pat or Bill. The TARDIS became less and less a fictitious space craft; and more and more a stage set or a TV studio. When Tom was discovered learning oil painting or playing chess with K-9, it didn’t occur to us to ask why, or what he was doing before, or what he did the rest of the time. It would have been like asking what Geoffery and Bungle did in the Rainbow House when they weren't singing songs or reading stories or making finger paintings. We understood, from a very early age, that people like Tom Baker and Rolf Harris and Zippy didn’t exist when the camera wasn’t pointed at them. Tom’s bundle of mannerisms and surrealism and jokes and gestures and one liners held the series together as the narrative around it became less and less coherent; less and less relevant; until it all but ceased to exist. You could have dropped Jon Pertwee into Web of Fear or Wheel in Space, or Pat Troughton into Silurians or Curse of Peladon, and very little about the story would have changed. Horns of Nimon or Nightmare of Eden or Armageddon Factor couldn’t be imagined without Tom Baker at the center. “Story” had become nothing more than a series of corridors to run along, monsters to offer jelly babies to, villains to deliver hammy speeches to. And it was all wonderful because Tom was wonderful but once Tom wasn’t there being wonderful any more it all started to fall apart: not because Peter Davison was a poor actor, but because Peter Davison was only an actor, and he could only deliver the lines he was given, in the script that was written. Hartnell, Troughton, and Pertwee were leading men in mostly well crafted costume dramas and thrillers; Davison, Baker II and McCoy floundered around in a star vehicle without a star. (McCoy could, in fact, have saved the series. But he didn't.)

*

And that’s pretty much all I have to say about “The Doctor, The Widow and the Wardrobe.” As a wise man once said: “Piece of shit. Walk away.”

If you have enjoyed this essay, please consider buying a copy of The Viewers Tale or Fish Custard which collect all my writings about Doctor Who to date.

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Three French Horns

And if one green bottle, should accidentally fall, there'd be four green bottles, hanging on the wall.

Five Rings For the Elven Kings Under The Sky

Six, six, the Lilly White Boys, Clothed All In Green, You Know.

Seven swans a swanning

Maids a milking. Almost Definitely.

Nine lords a leaping, no, hang on, we've had that

...Ten ladies dancing....

Eleven lords a leaping...

Twelve drummers drumming....

Not As Good As Bellowhead

Blackbeard's Tea Party

The Croft, Bristol

26 Nov 2011

Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good as Bellowhead.

On the other hand, Bellowhead do not play in the back rooms of pubs at the bottom of my street (while young people play speedcore in the front bar). Although, come to think of it, I did hear Mr Spiers and Mr Boden perform on this very stage back in 2007. And Mr Carthy. Still, it's the least folkie venue ever. All the young people were in black. I was in my floral waistcoat. The pub was smashed up during the pretend riots last July. I think they thought I was a hippy bouncer.

As I was saying: Blackbeard's Tea Party are not as good as Bellowhead. But they generate an energy, a physicality, a sense of musical theatre (completely improvised, I think) and a spontaneous response from the audience which I have never seen any folk band apart from Bellowhead come within a hundred miles of.

They do, in pretty much every conceivable respect, rock.

They came onto the stage at 9.40, after the usual local support who we will tactfully pass over. Stu the singer – not the singer on the albums, a new singer who has joined the band in the last month --  asks if there are any miners in the audience. Someone is related to one. He launches into "I can hew" . ("And when I die boys know full well / I’m not bound for heaven, I am bound for hell / My pick and shovel Old Nick he will admire / and he’ll setting be hewing coal for his hell-fire”). There is a thumping drumbeat and  an electric guitar which, I shouldn’t wonder goes up to 11. And Stu, I swear, doesn't stop moving for the rest of the evening. He encourages the audience to pogo dance by leaping three feet off the ground. He gesticulates in the narrative bits. He nips back stage at one point and re-emerges in sun glasses and pink tie-dye shirt. The whole band follows him into the physical space. Yom Hardy the cajun drummer bangs his head in time with the rhythm so his long black hair flaps up and down like a muppet. When Martin Coumbe the guitarist does a solo, the band get down on their knees to worship him.

The sound mix, I have to say, is perfect: too often in this kind of thing I have said "I believe that there may have been a folk song going on somewhere, but all I could hear was the drum". Tonight you could hear every one of Stu's words. The songs are stories or jokes played with a camp twinkle in his eye. Folk rock with the emphasis firmly on the folk.


Oh, and there was rappa dancing. In a pub. At the bottom of my street.

I now need to tread carefully. One of the many excellences about the Tea Party's first E.P (Heavens To Betsy) was the nuanced vocals of Paul Young. Young credits his Barrack Street (version # 94 of the story about the sailor being robbed by the prostitute) to the singing of Nic Jones, and it was a close match in vocal style. If you are going to swipe, swipe from the best, said I. Paul Young appears on the new album and he remains excellent. The album version of Stan Rogers Barrat's Privateers (sadly not in the live set) is quite stunning. He tones down the "roar" from the original recording, plays it as a ballad, not a shanty, tells the story, while the group weave in and out and all round the tune, even interjecting hornpipes a couple of times. But I note that Paul claims to have learned two of the lighter and more raucous pieces on the album from Stuart and there is a perhaps a sense that Paul isn’t fully comfortable with them. Not as loud and mad as Stuart is on stage at any rate. But that may just be me being wise after the event.

Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass is a venerable English drinking song with lyrics that get progressively filthier in each stanza.“I wish I had another brick to build my chimney higher /Stop the neighbours pussy cat from pissing in the fire”. It’s quite lovely how Blackbeard’s Tea Party stay close to the basic beauty of the melody and then put the heavy stuff behind it without the one swamping out the other. Too often this kind of thing is done with a nod and a wink; isn’t it funny that we’re singing “thee” and “thou” while the electric guitar is drowning us out? But this just seemed to just be a song. The drunken Landlord is followed by the endlessly sobering Chicken On Raft, possibly my favourite song about egg on toast. ("I sing "woo-woo" and you sing "chicken on a raft": and then I sing "aaa-aa" and you sing "chicken on a raft" and then I sing "woo-woo" and you sing...")

I never saw the original line up live and it may be that their stage act was always this extreme. It may be that audiences in York are holding placards saying "Bring back Paul". When I first heard the album I said that their musical arrangements were reminiscent of Mawkin and it strikes me that Stuart’s manner is not a million miles away from Jim Causley. (Actually he's like the the bastard offspring of Jim Causley and Jon Boden.)


I wish Paul Young all the best; I hope he left to pursue a brilliant solo career and not (say) because of a quarrel about who took the last slice of cheesecake. And it would be reckless to start saying "gig of the year" in a year which has included Alisdair Roberts and Show of Hands. And that old American man who sings Bob Dylan songs. But it looks to me that the addition of Stuart has propelled a band I was already very excited about into orbit.  

That's not a metaphor. He really does jump that high.

Blackbeard's Tea Party. Not as good as Bellowhead. Yet. 

More Sea Men Than I Could Cope With

Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends

Colston Hall, Bristol 25 Nov 2011

Fisherman's Friends do what Fisherman's Friends do very well indeed. But that really is all they do. The trouble with seeing them headlining their own gig (as opposed to doing a set at a festival) is that you get twice as much Fisherman's Friends for your money. And it turns out that there are only so many rollicking bollocking buggering shuggering however it goes songs of the high sea a man can cope with in a single sitting.

There are some attempts to change the tempo. In between the shanties, we get a medley of Methodist hymns. From Sankey's Hymnal: "We used to find that name funny when we were kids....we still do, apparently." The trouble is that what Fisherman's Friend's are doing is basically chapel singing (er, "a capella") and the chosen song is a spiritual with a nautical theme. (“Row for shore sailor, row for the shore, heed not the rolling waves but lean to the oar”)  So it isn't really that much of a change of tempo. "The Cornish Methodists were like the Taliban, only without the sense of bonhomie and good fun".

When you go to hear the same bands more than once, you naturally expect to hear the same jokes as well as the same songs. (I probably know Robin Williamson’s story about putting his harp in the lift as well as he does.) But Jon's patter has become an elephants graveyard of double entendre. "We asked if we could appear on the Parkinson show. He wrote back and said 'No, you can't.' I didn't know he was dyslexic." Despite being famous, they haven't acquired any groupies. There are application forms for us to fill out in the foyer "And for the ladies as well." To the least tall member of the group: "Are you happy?" "Not really, no." "Well, which one are you then?" And, every time someone coughs "Do you want to suck a Fisherman's Friend?....That joke always leaves a nasty taste in the mouth."

The role call at the end of the show pointedly tells us what the boys day jobs are – fisherman, ex-fisherman, ship builder, potter... Now, I don't know what songs Cornish Fishermen really sing at work, but I'm guessing not ones about South Australia or Mexico. I imagine they listen to Radio 1. These are songs from the British and American navies that have become standards. There aren’t about fishing. There is a song about whaling, but it's a modern thing showing sympathy for the poor ickle cephalapod cetacean. (“Last night I heard the cry of my companion / the roar of the harpoon gun and then I was alone.") Any melancholy mood is immediately dispersed by Jon: "It's all right, it's only a big lump of sushi.” His schtick is to apologise that some of the songs are too depressing. The sad ones are actually welcome relief from all the rollicking and bollocking.

Jackie "Jim's Brother" Oates opened with a nice trad folkie set, including a Cornish version of the sublime The Trees They Grow So High – "my pretty lad is young, but he's growing". It sounded exactly as if someone had heard "my bonny boy" once and reproduced it from memory, not quite getting the point. You can really imagine some fishwives singing it while working on their lad's nets. There is more authenticity here than in any number of roared out choruses of What Shall We Do With A Drunken Sailor? The Captain's Daughter was a whip: "Give him a taste of the Captain's daughter." Not "Throw him into bed with the Captain's Daughter". (Have you seen the Captain's daughter? Ha-ha.)

But anything they lack in authenticity the make up for in volume. When they get going on Bound For South Australia or A Sailor's Ain’t A Sailor Ain’t A Sailor Any More it would be churlish not to say "Arrr" and join in the actions. ("Don't  haul up the rope, don't climb up the mast, if you see a sailing ship it might be your last.") Or Pay Me My Money Down. Or Woo Woo Bully In the Alley. Or the penultimate encore, Sloop John B. ("The Beach Boys sang this, and now we've immortalized it.") Last time, I mentioned that Les Barker once raised a question which has always troubled me: what happened to the Sloop John A? But it now occurs to me that this was Nassau, and it was probably actually the Sloop Jumbie. A Jumbie being a corpse that a witch doctor has brought to life. Prone to dancing back to back belly to belly. Serves you right for paying attention to me.

There is a big Cornish Flag over the stage. They play up to Cornish stereotypes straight out of central casting. It's not surprising they ended up advertising fish fingers: Cleave’s stage persona is basically Captain Bird’s Eye. So, they are staunch local people who want us to laugh with them at they grokles and turrists and Americans who visit their village in the summer. "Tin-taggle? Can you imagine King Arthur riding out of Tin-taggle? That's where a fairy would come from. It's Tin-taj-il" "Yes dear. But put the fish knife down." (A pedant would point out that King Arthur didn't ride out of Tintagil, although in the most militantly Welsh version of the story, he was conceived there, so I have.)  On the other hand, they play up to all the nasty jokes that the rest of England makes about Wesk Untry. Port Isaac has just been made a world heritage site for inbreeding. High six!

This makes their rendering of Cousin Jack a little uncomfortable. Steve' Knightley's a serious singer; he's allowed to drag you through dark places in his songs. Fisherman's Friends are a novelty band, and arguably shouldn’t. Steve imagines a 19th century emigre seeing modern Cornwall and despairing "I see the English....living on our house...I see the Spanish....fishing in our seas...." (Although he often now changes it to "these seas".) The Fishyfriends put it back into the main singalong verse "the English they live in our houses / the Spanish they fish in our seas". If anyone is allowed to be annoyed about international fishing regulations, its a working fishermen. Peter Roe, the oldest member of the group (he's 78, as we keep being told) does a song he wrote himself about how the fishing trade ain't what it used to be due to European regulations. It's no Tiny Fish For Japan, but it comes from the heart. But in the context of rollicking, bollocking, swuggering and buggering, it feels a little uncomfortable for Cleave to put his hand over his heart when he get to "the Spanish they fish in our seas" and very uncomfortable for another member of the group to make what seems to be a clenched fist salute.

I assume you all all saw Jamie Oliver doing his chirpy cockney thing from St Pauls last week? The lady with the stew sells me my coffee in the library canteen, so she does, and sometimes banana cake as well. There's only so many times you can say "vibrant" and "multicultural" in one cookery show; but I did think he was spot on. Saffron doesn’t grow anywhere in England. Think of a famous story set in Cornwall: Jamaica Inn. Think of a typical Jamaican street food: patties. St Piran's flag seems to be an invention of 19th century Cornish language revivalists.

There comes a point where irony gives out. After seventeen or eighteen jokes, you start to think "That's not part of a jolly jack tar persona; that's simply a dirty joke." And then you start asking yourself to what extent the audience are in on the irony. They are certainly enthusiastic. A lot of them stood up at the end. I didn't stand up for Chris Wood. I'm certainly not going to stand up for what is basically a quite good male voice choir.

As a 45 minute festival band, there's no-one to touch them.

Also, this:

Carmina

Colston Hall

12 Nov 2011

Not my cup of tea at all. They were Celtic folk jazz fusion. There were moments of perfectly nice songs. It's hard to do Lord Franklin's Lament badly, after all. But I don't get jazz. Pippa Marland does a perfectly good rendering of the song: bit too much shutting of eyes and having Emotions for my taste, but that's her style, fair enough. (Proper folk singers are dead-pan and let the song do all the work.) But then somewhere in between verse four and verse five, the violinist (she seemed to be doing long classical violin bow strokes not short stibbly fiddle player ones) starts making some long up and downy noises which don't seem to relate to the song and go on for several hours, after which the audience claps. In the middle of the song. The man next to me particularly claps the pianist, who seems to tinkle tinkle tinkle from one end of the keyboard to the other at the least provocation. (Chico: I can't-a think of the end of this-a song." Groucho: That's funny, I can't think of anything else.) The opening number was about birds of paradise. It seemed over lush, over sweet, over done. Dan was selling BOGOF tickets as if he was fearing an empty hall, but in fact, it seemed full of fans who had seen many permutations of the group and seemed to like them very much. I enjoyed the support act. His name was Mike Scott. He sang oldest-swinger-in-town observational lyrics with strong narratives and clever rhymes. (She sings bad falsetto on the number 14 bus / 'Rock of ages cleft for me', though she sings 'Cleft for us'.) I do not generally review acts I haven't especially enjoyed: not playing or singing myself, I could not begin to explain coherently what someone was doing wrong. It is demonstrably clear that people who like this sort of thing found that this was the sort of thing that they liked, since they clapped and demanded an encore. The forgoing is as much as to say "Andrew doesn't get jazz." Or possibly "Avoid anything that involves the word Celtic" (as opposed to say, "Breton" or "Cornish".) And possibly also "Avoid like the plague anything that involves the word Fusion." 






Hodmadoddery
Canteen, Stokes Croft
13 Nov 2011

Hodmadoddery, once described by Bristol's leading folk blogger (i.e me) as "two men with guitars who sing folksongs" presented a set guaranteed to please all the traddy folkies in the bar (i.e me). When First I Came To Caledonia; John Barleycorn; that one which starts out as King George Commands and We Obey and end up as Spanish Ladies; a really powerful Shoals of Herring. (But then you can hardly get Shoals of Herring wrong, can you?) The loud hairy one strums while the quieter balder one plucks, but there is clever, even witty stuff not drawing attention to itself. Tony goes all Spanish Guitar in Spanish Ladies. Steve introduces Fair Annie (surely the most beautiful song ever written about father-daughter incest) as "copied from Martin Simpson copying from Peter Bellamy" and sure enough Tony's fretwork ([C] Folkbuddy) really is lovingly copied from Martin Simpson. Particularly notable was a very decent Black Waterside, with creditable tinkly guitar that genuinely evoked the ghost of Pentangle. 

As well as any ghost can be evoked on a Sunday afternoon in a bar on Stokes Croft where no-one is actually listening. 

The Power of Myth

The Emily Portman Trio

Louisiana Bristol

8 Nov 2011

A search for the Facebook page of the Louisiana bar in Bristol directed me to the town of Bristol in Louisiana. Well, there’s a thing.

Not been to the Louisiana before. Tiny little room above a nice pub, just far enough away from the waterfront to be quiet, but not far enough away for it to be a faff to get to. George Orwell would have liked it there. The music space is very small and felt “exclusive” tonight: me and Folkbuddy and about 15 of the (presumably) keenest folkies in Bristol. (I spent an interesting ten minutes before the band came on chatting with Jim Moray about Bob Dylan.)

Emily and her trio (Rachel Newton from the Shee, and Lucy “did a tour with Bellowhead” Farrell) finish their set by coming down off the stage and doing an acoustic encore from the floor. Brand new song. Acoustic. An adult lullaby. It was going to have a werewolf in it, but Emily’s mum persuaded her to leave it out. It’s in harmony, not that close harmony where everyone is singing the same thing a tone or two apart, but complicated harmony where everyone is singing different things and the phrases keep echoing backwards and forwards between voices. I think we’re sailing off to sleep in a boat; I think there is a monster of some kind that we are going to put to sleep; I think it’s a riff on Where The Wild Things Are, but it could just as well have been In the Night Garden. Fairy tales are what Emily Portman does. We’ve already had a song about a drunk lady who has physical wings and learns to fly, based on a novel by Angela Carter which I haven’t read. Angela Carter apparently used to come to folk nights at the Louisiana.

In between the songs, they bubble like schoolgirls; Lucy mentions that a character in one of the songs can "apparate" and admits that they've been listening to Harry Potter audio books in the car. Emily spends a bit too long tuning her banjo; Rachel wonders how she would cope if it had thirty four strings like her harp But the music is astonishingly developed and mature. This doesn't sound like the second album of a very young singer-song writer, but someone has been doing it for years. It doesn’t sound like a gig in a pub, either. The detailed harmonies, the other worldly melodies, hardly seem to be coming from the actual stage.

Emily’s songs take the merest idea or suggestion of a plot from a traditional tale, approaches them at right angles, twists them like a Rubik Cube. It’s intense, immersive writing: these are fairy tales which drop you into the heroine’s head in the middle of the story, and leave you to work out where you are. Who would identify:

Tongue Tied, I am bound

To weave my words with thistledown

Sickle moon, on the moor

Turns thistledown silver and fingers raw

as being the opening of Hans Andersen's “The Wild Swans”, about a princess whose brothers have been turned into a ducks by their mother. (Emily says she’s made them ravens to avoid any unfortunate rhymes. I am sure she knows perfectly well that it’s ravens in the Grimm's version of the story.)

It takes nothing away from Emily’s song writing to say that the climax of the evening was her version of the folk staple The Two Sisters. (We have had cause to discuss it in these columns before: rich suitor favours little sister; so big sister pushes little sister into river and drowns her; passing musician cuts up her body and turns it into a magic harp, as you do.) Emily has found an American version in which the refrain is “oleander yolling” as opposed to “oh the dreadful wind and the rain” (or "bow and balance to me" or " or “by the bony bony banks of London".) Although it's American it's still all about knights and kings and minstrels. Martin Simpson says there version where it’s a banjo, but I’ve never heard anyone sing it. This version ends:

And he took the harp to the kings high hall

There was a court assembled all

And he laid the harp there on a stone

And the harp began to play alone

It sang "yonder sits my lover the king

How he’ll weep at my burying

And yonder sits my sister the queen

She drowned me in the cold cold stream".

I don’t think I’ve heard a version which makes it explicit that the king in the final verse is the rich lover of the opening, which makes the harp's vengeance far nastier. (Carthy’s version has the King and the Queen as the mother and father of the murdered girl, even though she’s not a princess in verse one.) I don’t know to what extent Emily’s version is a composite, but it seems to turn the ballad into one of the most perfectly formed fairy tale plots I’ve ever heard, up there with Gawain and the Green Knight and Rapunzel. Chris Wood was right. Anon really is the greatest writer who ever lived

And Emily has clearly studied Anon’s work: her songs are too complex to be traditional, but the sound traditional. Perhaps she holds the tradition at arms length in the way she arguably does with fairy tales; not immersed in them or in love with them, but scrutinizing them from a distance, twisting them, taking them apart, even, dare I say it, deconstructing them.

With a lovely tunes and lovely lovely harmonies.