Frome Wasn't Built in a Day

Frome Folk Festival 
18 -19 February

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 

Five Anarchists Singing About the Good Old Days

Big Society

Leeds City Varieties

Feb 2nd

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".


What a pro.

P.S Top five pigeon themed folk songs not involving brass bands

for those who care, and frankly that's a pretty small demographic, my predictions for the UKs second most prestigious folk awards are as follows:

FOLK SINGER OF THE YEAR
Jon Boden
Jackie Oates
Emily Smith
June Tabor

Jon Boden didn't get it for Folksong a Day last year, because it was (quite rightly) Chris Wood's night...so he has to to get it this year, no question. 


Winner: June Tabor, leaving me feeling like a proper Charlie. 

BEST DUO
Tim Edey & Brendan Power
Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell
Spiers & Boden
Marry Waterson & Oliver Knight
I'd love it to be Kearny and Farrell. "So understated, they are practically not there at all" I said when they oppened for (the mighty) Bellowhead. 


Winner: Tim Edey and Brendan Power. Instrumental duo. Never heard them. Clearly stunningly good. Not my kind of thing. 


BEST GROUP
Bellowhead
The Home Service
June Tabor & Oysterband
The Unthanks

If it isn't June Tabor and the Oysterband, then something has gone seriously wrong with the world. I mean, an evening which arguably contains three of the years best performances (Seven Curses, The Bells of Rymey and Why I Hate The French, sorry, The Bonny Bunch of Roses, oh) can't not be the years best act. 


Winner: June Tabor and the Oysterband. Yay!

BEST ALBUM
Last – The Unthanks
Purpose & Grace – Martin Simpson
Ragged Kingdom – June Tabor & Oysterband
Saturnine – Jackie Oates


Assuming that June and Oysters can't win everything, then I'd go for Martin Simpson, although none of my favourites are on the list. Perhaps he will play you North Country Blues or Brother Can You Spare A Dime at the ceremony. (I will note, however, that everyone else likes the Unthanks a lot more than I do. Because it is clever to sing quick songs slowly.)


Winner: We assumed wrong. June Tabor and the Oysterband can, in fact, win everything. 

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
The Herring Girl – Bella Hardy
Last – Adrian McNally (performed by The Unthanks)
On Morecambe Bay – Kevin Littlewood (performed by Christy Moore)
The Reckoning – Steve Tilston
I think Steve Tilston ought to get it. I also think he will get it on the basis that he is a Legend.

Winner: Steve Tilston got it, but he had to share it with Bella Hardy, with whose ouevre I am not terribly familiar. I have to say the song about the Morecambe Bay cockle pickers was awfully good as well. 


BEST TRADITIONAL TRACK
Bonny Bunch of Roses – June Tabor & Oysterband
Lakes of Ponchartrain – Martin Simpson
Maids When You’re Young – Lucy Ward
Sweet Lover of Mine – Emily Smith


"Oh so don't talk so venturesome / For England is a heart of oak / And England Ireland Scotland / Their Unity has ne're been broke." No brainer.


Winner: As  I said, no brainer. (That's June Oyster and the Tabor's again.) 

HORIZON AWARD
Megan Henwood
Lady Maisery
Pilgrims’ Way
Lucy Ward


Pilgrim's Way (by Pilgrims' Way - watch the apostrophes) was one of my utter top tracks of the year, so naturally I think they ought to win. I have to say that I don't particularly know the other performers on the list, so am probably more than usually biassed.

Winner: Lucy Ward, about whom I shall not form an opinion until I have heard her play.

MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR
Andy Cutting
Tim Edey
Will Pound
Martin Simpson



Now that's a hard one to call, since everyone knows that Martin Simpson is one of the best guitarists on the planet and Andy Cutting is one of the best squeeze box men on the planet. Simpson, yeah. Because he's a nice man who sings Bob Dylan covers. I wouldn't want you to think that this was anything other than purely scientific.

Winner: Tim Edey, on the grounds we are following the Oscar principle of having one or two acts win all the awards.

BEST LIVE ACT
Bellowhead
The Home Service
Peatbog Faeries
The Unthanks



Bellowhead clearly are the best live act, but they won it last year. Might they give it to the Home Service simply to thank them for coming back into existence? Haven't heard them live in their current incarnation, but when I was doing Medieval Studies I saw the Mysteries. Twice. So I have heard Bill Caddick (fella who wrote the one about unicorns) live, even though I didn't know he was at the time. Maybe they'll sing Babylon or something. There is a real danger they'll give it to the Unthanks though. (I only heard them once. They are probably great. Everyone else thinks they are great. I like the one about the girl who works down the mine, and the clog dancing, come to that.) 


Winner: Home Service, as exclusively predicted in these pages. 

THE "WHY ARE YOU BOTHERING WITH NOMINATIONS WE ALL KNOW YOU'RE GOING TO SAY 'CARTHY'?" AWARD

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE JUDGES OVER ALL FAVORITE ACT OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS


Chumbawamba

 

Boff changed the words of Voices, That's All from "from the Albion Taproom to California" to "from the Bristol Folk House to California". A small thing, but a lovely thing. He's a showman, you see. He knows how to make a connection with his audience. What Chumbawamba are, and I suspect what they've always been, are a political cabaret act. Anarchists they may be, but each gig is beautifully planned. Coming onto the stage and opening the second half with musically and lyrically grim Homophobia, and winding up the encore with the poignant farewell song Bella Ciao; perfection. There is no sense that you are being preached at or harangued but every song has some point. Everything they do has some point. They walked onto the stage at Glastonbury wearing "Bono, Pay Your Tax" tee shirts. I have mentioned that before. That was quite a big thing, actually.


Martin Carthy




Sir Patrick Spens. Sovay, with David Swarbrick, twice. Famous Flower of Serving Men, all of it. Three Jovial Welshman (“why does that always get a laugh”), with Chris Wood. That version of My Son John re-located to Iraq. The Treadmill Song. The Trees They Do Grow. No different on stage in a classical venue (St Georges); three miles from the audience (Scarborough); or three feet from the audience (Camden). I may have mocked Green Note cafe, but honestly, sitting this close to the stage, knowing that only 50 people will ever hear this particular performance of this particular song? Does Martin Carthy know he’s a legend? Or does he just think of himself as a man who sings songs?

Alasdair Roberts




Alasdair has been described as "jaw dropping", "gob-smacking" and "Scottish" (by me) and as "like some coat hangers who've clubbed together and bought a guitar" (by Bristols Top Citizen Folk Journalist). He says that his songs have a cosmological bent, and thinks nothing of rhyming "heroes" with "thanatos and eros". I was so blown away by his Bath gig that I went to Camden specially to hear him again (have I mentioned the Green Note cafe?) and had to travel back on a 5AM train to go to work. Some cosmic force arranged for him to do another one at the Cube, supported by that film about wierd English folk customs. It's hard to choose between his weird rambling philosophical odes and his witheringly authentic takes on traditional songs. He makes Barbary Allen seem like a new and heartbreaking piece of news you haven't heard before, and, I swear, literally reduced the audience to stunned silence when Bonnie Suzie Cleland was burned in Dundee. His weird unaccompanied version of the Cruel Mother, with a refrain that wandered in from somewhere else but somehow seems to fit, is like nothing else on earth.

THE WINNER
You remember how Francis Spufford said that he only read other books because he couldn't always be re-reading the Narnia series? (You do, because I've quoted him here repeatedly. Neil Gaiman said the same thing, irrelevantly.). Well, some days that's just how the judge feels about Martin Carthy and other musical acts.

ETERNAL CIRCLE AWARD

THE NOMINATION FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE BEST LIVE GIG OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS:

Chris Wood 
at Colston Hall, Bristol, Oct 21

Chris Wood is always amazing, but this is the best I've ever heard him, which is to say, about as good as the "one man with a guitar singing ballads" genre ever gets. He praised the acoustics of the room and the sound engineer, and was more than usually under-stated, nuanced, a conversation between guitar and audience. Assume I'd made all the usual remarks about the English not valuing their national treasures. 

Show of Hands 
at Bristol Folk Festival, April 30


I don't like everything Steve Knightley does. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say that the thing which Steve Knightley does doesn't come off every time I see him do it. This time it did. It was Day 2 of Bristol folk festival and local resentment against the seventeenth or eighteenth branch of Tesco being plonked on Stokes Croft had just boiled over into a full scale riot, about half a mile from the stage, and not one single artist had even mentioned it, or seemed to be aware that Bristol was in the news. So Steve Knightley stepped onto the stage and launched straight into "to the cutthroats, crooks and conmen running this gaol: is there anything left in England that's not for sale?" and "I hope some day we'll all be freed from your arrogance, your ignorance, and greed" and "Agri-barons, C.A.P in hand strip this green and pleasant land...." He is, in a way, a demagogue, a revivalist preacher without any single cause, and on this occasion he judged the mood of the hall, he took it into himself, he channelled it back at us.... And then went to the Silent Disco and danced along with Remember Your A Womble. A bona fide folk-god.

Blackbeards Tea Party 
at the Croft Bristol, Nov 26

Stuart Giddens (now positively identified as one of the two morrismen who performed what we all now know are traditional Morris double jigs with the Demon Barber Roadshow at Scarborough) has replaced Paul Young as singer in the band, and added a camp wildness, an awful lot of jumping, but probably not that much subtlety to the act, cranking the live show a notch or two above either of the records. It appeared that a lot of people who had really come for the rocky punky music that the Croft is more famous for drifted into the back room for the Tea Party and stayed until the end. There was singing along; there was dancing; there was jumping in the air...and there was a sense that Blackbeard's Tea Party had just gone from being a really very good busking and celidah outfit to being a major musical force.

WINNER

Back in May, the judge said that the Show of Hands show was the best live gig he'd ever seen, and he isn't going to go back on that now. But he's never seen anything quite like Blackbeard Tea Party either. Obviously, one can't blame the apple for not being as orangey as the orange or or the orange for not being as apply as the apple. So for the first time in their history the 2011 Monty will be awarded jointly to Show of Hands and Blackbeards Tea Party. Fortunately, since it is an imaginary award, there is no problem imagining it being in two places at once, like that puzzle involving an imaginary duck in an imaginary bottle. 

SPECIAL AWARDS

THE META-AWARD FOR PERSON MOST CERTAIN TO BE MADE FOLK SINGER OF THE YEAR AT THE RADIO 2 FOLK AWARDS

The award goes to Jon Boden, for being the only person to have recorded a new folksong every day for 365 days. Some of them deserved to be consigned to oblivious (I am looking at YOU, Big Rock Candy Mountains, and YOU King of Rome) but many of them ( Four Angels, O'Hamlet) were worth repeated listens, and he introduced me to lots of cool songs (e.g The Mistletoe Bough, A Chat With Your Mother) which I didn't know, which was presumably the point of the excercise. 

THE "TAKES OUT AN ONION" AWARD FOR MAKING THE JUDGE CRY

Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts 
for Joe Peel at Bristol Folk Festival

Steve Knightley, Fisherman's Friends and the entire company, but this time chiefly yourselves, 

for Cousin Jack, also at Bristol Folk Festival

Chris Wood 
for Hard, Jersualem, and Hollow Point (duh!) at Colston Hall, 21 Oct 2011

WINNER

That miserable bastard Chris Wood.

SPECIAL "WELL HE OUGHT TO BE MORE CAREFUL WITH HIS BOATS" AWARD FOR BEST FAMOUS DEAD CANADIAN SINGER SONGWRITER WHO EVERYONE ELSE HAD HEARD OF BUT THE JUDGE ONLY STARTED LISTENING TO THIS YEAR

Chris Ricketts 
for Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage (on Port of Escape)

Blackbeards Tea Party 
for Stan Rogers' Barret's Privateers (on Tomorrow We'll Be Sober)

Jon Boden 
for Stan Rogers' Loch Keeper (on a Folksong A Day)

WINNER

Stan Rogers for Stan Rogers' Mary Ellen Carter, which, in a rare show of unanimity, the readers of this blog voted "single best song ever written by anyone about anything ever".

SPECIAL AWARD FOR THE JUDGE'S COOLEST MUSIC-RELATED MOMENT OF 2011

* Lustily and tuneless singing along with Fishemen's Friends singing Cousin Jack in the mud at the Pyramd Stage at Glastonbury, and noticing that Steve Knightley was standing next to him

* Standing on York station, desperately hoping that the old gentleman with the guitar case to whom he has just said "We really enjoyed your set, sir, such a shame you were so far from the audience" really had been Martin Carthy. (Or if, indeed, he had dreamt the whole incident.)

* Hearing the astonishing Emily Portman singing wonderful mysterious whispy ethereal fairy tale ballads in the upstairs room of the Louisiana Bristol, and realising that the audience consisted of eleven people, including the judge, Bristol's Leading Citizen Folk Journalist, Peter Lord and Jim Moray. 

* The aforemetnioned Martin Carthy singing Bob Dylan's Dream on the Radio 2 tribute programme. (Bob Dylan having originally based the song on Martin Carthy's version of Lord Franklin's Lament.)

* Hearing The Pentangle doing a set consisting entirely of traddy classics at Glastonbury, unaware that this was the last but one performance Bert Jansch would give.

WINNER

No award. You can't give an award for something sad.

THE JUDAS AWARD FOR BEST LIVE PERFORMANCE OF A BOB DYLAN SONG

Phil Beer 
for Seven Curses at Bristol Folk Festival 

June Tabor and the Oyster Band 
for Seven Curses at St Georges Hall Bristol, Nov 1

Martin Simpson 
for North Country Blues at Chapel Arts, Bath, Oct 22

Ralph McTell 
for Girl from the Noth Country at St Georges, Bristol, 29 Sep

Bob Dylan 
for Man in the Long Black Coat at Cardiff Arena, Oct 13

 WINNER

Martin Simpson.

It's shame Dylan didn't sing Seven Curses, so I could have had an award for "the best live performance of Dylan's Seven Curses."


THE GELDOF AWARD FOR THE BEST LIVE PERFORMANCE BY AN ARTIST NAMED BOB

The judge unanimously gave the award to Bob Dylan's show in Cardiff Arena.

The first night of an opera is generally judged a failure unless a sizable proportion of the audience boo; similarly, the Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll wouldn't have done a show unless some people claimed to have walked out of it. It is widely believed that Bob's promoters fill the back rows with an anti-claque who are only there so they can leave after the opening number. 

It must be admitted that, in order to understand Dylan's current approach to his muse (a.k.a "whatever the hell it is he thinks he's doing nowadays") you need to 

a: have heard at least three albums since MTV Unplugged

b: Be reasonably familiar with his lessor known material (NOTE: Knowing some of the words to Like a Rolling Stone doesn't count) 

c: Be sitting or standing in the front five rows. 

If you fulfil all those criteria, than you will be treated to a Robert Zimmerman becoming in his autumn years the artist I am convinced he has always wanted to be – the bluesy, rock-a-billy song and dance man, grinning and mincing and riffing and colluding with the audience. 

In short: this was the gig I am most likely to tell my non-existent grandchildren about.

"But Andrew, would you have praised this very strange show so highly if you had never heard of Bob Dylan?"

"If I had never heard of Bob Dylan then I would never have heard any of Bob Dylan's songs. Under those circumstances, if this grizzled old man in a sweaty cowboy hat had snarled into a small venue and started growling, I would have said 'What marvellous songs...get me a pen and paper, these may be the greatest lyrics that have ever been written...what fantastic tunes...what a weird-arse way of singing them." 

Which is precisely what everyone has been saying about Dylan since approximately 1959 

THE MUDDY WELLINGTON BOOT AWARD FOR THE MOST IDIOSYNCRATIC VENUE

The Canteen, Stokes Croft

The Canteen, a sort of perfectly legal squat in a disused open plan office, is allegedly the creative hub of the coolest, most creative street in England, or, if you believe the Bristol Evening Post, the place where crusty hippy commies hang out who ought to get a job and be forced to eat Tescos sandwiches and Banksy ought to be flogged like they did to that kid who painted graffiti on Singapore. I digress. One of the Canteens U.S.Ps, apart from real ale and very decent food at very reasonable prices (you get a free bowl of soup with a meal, which is a really civilised touch) is live music -- I've heard both the aforementioned Pilgrims' Way and the not yet mentioned Hoddamadoddery there. 

Well, "heard" is a slight overstatement: it's a bar. People are right up near the stage trying to finish designing their websites on the Macbooks, or with their course work on Brecht spread out in front of them; or else they are drinking and trying to have a conversation with their mates, wondering when the distracting noise at the front is going to stop. This probably works very well with that loud electrical rhythm stuff that the young people allegedly like but which no-one actually wants to listen to in the first place, but it's really not the environment in which to hear Pilgrims' Way telling you about the hand weaver who fell in love with the factory maid. Not sure what the solution is. Shame.

Scarborough Open Air Theatre

Plastic, football stadium style seating. Numbered seats, although this didn't make much difference, because the arena was about ¼ full. A river, possibly the river Derwent, running through the complex, separating the audience from the stage. The impact of Bellowhead is slightly numbed when they are several miles away from you, and with the best will in the world, its hard to get the nuances of the aforementioned Jim Moray doing the aforementioned Lord Douglas in that environment. During the Demon Barber's set, a man with a guitar ambled through the audience who were, by this time, standing on the tarmac near the rail. He turned out to be Martin Carthy.

Green Note Cafe, Camden Town

About 100 yards from Cecil Sharp House itself. Fits 50, of whom about 20 can sit down. Admission only granted to people who know a special hand shake (I made that up). If you want to sit, you need to buy a ticket AND book a table and eat. If you want a table near the stage, you have to form a queue at 6, and take you seat at 7, in plenty of time for the music at 9. In return, you get to hear Martin Carthy, Alasdair Roberts, Robin Williamson in surroundings that redefine the word "intimate". I love this place to bits. 

AND THE WINNER IS: 

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. .

CHAINS OF THE SEA AWARD

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR BEST NEW SONG OF 2011 ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Reckoning

by Steve Tilston

There are a limited number of performers who would use the word "misbegotten" in a song. But then there are a limited number of performers who combine a gift for melody, poetry and actual thinking in the way that Steve does. (He is in the category of "you may not have heard of him but you have probably heard some of his songs".) The Reckoning is a deeply reflective piece about the kind of world that we are leaving to the next generation. Refreshingly free from obvious target hunting or jerking knees, it has a melody which manages to be memorable without actually being catchy. 

"I offer you this toast should these troubles come to roost / for we ate the golden goose and left the reckoning to you."

Never Buy the Sun

by Billy Bragg

Thank God for Billy Bragg. Literally, thank God for Billy Bragg. I may or may not have mentioned before that Tony Blair became the the godfather of Rupert Murdoch's baby, in a ceremony which took place on the banks of the River Jordan. The nauseating -- literally nauseating -- hypocrisy of both teams -- the "socialist" politician in bed with an empire that is committed to destroying everything he stands for, the empire cultivating the personal friendships of politicians they pretend to "hold to account" -- more of less guarantees that nothing honest or indeed coherent can ever be said in any parliamentary debate, op ed columns or media talk show. So it is left to people like Billy Bragg to use music and plain speach to tell it how it is. Or how they think it is. It hardly matters if you agree with him: it's enough that he uses words to to convey meaning, instead of to obscure it. He eschews triumphalism at the wounding of the Murdoch empire, and instead offers a lament. How did we let it come to this? 

"No-one comes out looking good when all is said and done / And the Scousers never buy the Sun."

What If, No Matter

by Tom Paxton

Joe Hill is supposed to have said that a leaflet, however well written, will be read once and thrown away, but a song will sung, and passed on, and repeated, and remembered. Tom Paxton's instant response to the Arizona shootings are a case in point. There were acres of newsprint and hand wringing and speculation, but Tom said all that  really needed to be said in five verses.

THE WINNER

Billy Bragg and Steve Tilston are cleverer and more complicated, but the judge has no hesitation in giving the prize to Tom Paxton. Songs like this are the reason I started to listen to this stuff in the first place. (There is still absolutely no excuse for the Marvellous Toy.)

FINGER IN THE EAR AWARD (LIVE)

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR  BEST LIVE PERFORMANCE OF AN OLD SONG ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Two Sisters

The Emily Portman Trio (at the Louisiana, Bristol, Nov 8th)

Oh, there are lot of things to say about this song. That it's a truly beautiful, rounded fairy tale. That the sound the trio created in an upstairs room in a pub was astonishingly close to what is on the CD. That the song runs to something like 20 verses, and the group use that space to create a small epic; full of different musical textures; more a symphony than a ballad. That Emily has made a tiny surgical change to the traditional lyrics (changing "yonder sits my father the king" to "yonder sits my lover the king") which gives the tale a tragic logic and inevitability that it never had before. I found I had eight different versions of this song (Child Ballad 10, I looked it up) on my I-Pod. This is by far my favourite. A person on Youtube says it makes them imagine themselves "in the middle of an elvin forest, morning dew kissing greenery". Well, quite.

Little Sally Racket

Bellowhead (at the Scarborough folk festival, 8 Aug)

Understand this: if you have only heard Bellowhead on CDs, then you haven't heard Bellowhead. They aren't only about music; they're about musical theater. You have to be there. One of my Folkbuddies, who hadn't heard them before, said Jon Boden was like a musical John Cleese. I see him more as a swaggering musical Captain Jack Sparrow. The CDs don't really convey how tall he is. Little Sally Racket is an infinitely long sea-shanty about local prostitutes, with the obligatory "haul away" refrain. Boden turns in a passable impersonation of the Johnny Rotten (or some fella of that kind) producing a sort of folk-punk hybrid with a hymn embedded in the middle. There are better Bellowhead songs. There are better Bellowhead songs about prostitutes. But this is always one of the highlights of their live act. The performance could scarcely be more over the top (and Bellowhead know about over the top) and coming in between two more restrained, or at any rate sane, pieces, it never fails to bring the house down, even when, as in this case, the stage was three quarters of a mile away from the audience.

Lord Douglas

Jim Moray (at Chapel Arts Bath, June 10th)

Jim diffidently presented this astonishing piece as work in progress. (There are more polished versions on the Cecil Sharp Project CD and on his new album, Skunk, to which we are likely to be returning at some point.) It's one of those traditional ballads (Child 7, I looked it up) which exists in dozens of different versions. Man elopes with girl; someone betrays them; they are chased by the girls family; man is killed; girl dies of sorrow; foliage grows out of their respective graves, as is more or less obligatory for lovers in folk songs. I can't imagine how Jim went about combining, and rewriting, the different versions, and apparently incorporating a sub plot from a similar Icelandic saga. It's a complicated story that I've had to listen to several times to get the hang of;  one of those sagas which you always seem to be lost in the middle of with feuds and love affairs and curses taken for granted before the story starts. And the tune seems to have drifted in from another world.

THE WINNER

The Two Sisters, by the merest wisp of thistledown.

FINGER IN THE EAR AWARD (CD)

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE MONTPELIER STATION AWARD FOR THE BEST NEW  RECORDING OF AN OLD SONG ARE AS FOLLOWS

The Bonny Bunch of Roses 

on Ragged Kingdom by June Tabor and the Oysterband

I think of June Tabor as "that lady who sings the rather distant, mournful, depressing songs about Scotland and the sea, often without accompaniment", which range from "my favourite songs ever(*)" to "oh, get on with it, for goodness sake!" In case you were wondering, her new album, Ashore failed to get nominated for the Nautical award because while it was undoubtedly brilliant it was also a teensy weensy bit how can I possibly put this boring. But of course, she can also more than hold her own providing the lyrics while the Oysterband are rocking out like it's 1990. There is a productive incongruity between the traditional text and the  electric arrangement. Hardly any band can mess this song up: how can you fail with lines like "I'll raise a numerous army/ And through tremendous dangers go /And in spite of all the universe /I'll conquer the bonny Bunch of Roses, O". June Tabor sings it like she's going to personally cross the channel and give Young Napoleon a jolly good talking-to. This song would have been nominated for the BEST TRACK FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T THINK THEY WOULD LIKE FOLK MUSIC award, should such an award exist. 


(*) King of Rome, Place Called England, Unicorns, A Proper Sort of Gardener, Hughie Graham, Best Patrick Spens Ever, etc

A Pilgrim's Way 

on Wayside Courtesies by Pilgrims' Way

Pilgrims' Way are the probably the most exciting new band of 2011. ("New" is here defined as "band I first heard perform in" by which definition, admittedly, Steeleye Span would count as "new" but let's not get bogged down at this stage). They're essentially traditionalists, with the touch of electricity on some songs not nearly as distinct as the jews harp (a.k.a "that thing which goes twang?") on others. Lucy Wright's vocals are forceful but sweet sounding ever-so folkie without ever drifting into nasal cliches. 

A Pilgrim's Way is also a pome by Mr Rudyard Kipling which was set to music by Mr Peter Bellamy. If you aren't careful it can go on for ever. (Jon Boden, and indeed Mr Bellamy himself, were not careful.) Pilgrims' Way (the band) give it a light, musical feel, free of trickery or fireworks; and Lucy navigates "Amorites and Erermites and general Avergees" as if she had some idea what it meant. 

It has been mentioned before that many of us in the blogsphere could be improved by a judicious application of the precepts of verse 3.

Bold Sir Rylas 

on The Works by Spiers and Boden

I have to admit to being slightly disappointed by The Works -- much as I love Spiers and Boden, I wished they could have given us an CD of new material, rather than new takes, however high quality, on material we already know pretty well. That said, any one track on the album is great, and this one is just about my favourite. The story of how Bold Sir Rylas cut an old lady in half is a great Pythonesque yarn with a sing-a-long chorus the singing along on the album is no lessor a person than Maddy Prior. (Martin Carthy contributes to Prickley Bush, but you’d hardly know.) All together now: He split her head down to the chin! You should of heard seen her kick and grin!

WINNER:

Pilgrims Way by a country mile. (BUT NOTE: It’s really “The People, Lord, thy People” not “The people, oh, the people.")