Me and Clarrie have been going to listen to folk concerts. There is nothing wrong with that. We have been going back to her kitchen and drinking beer and talking about them. There is nothing wrong with that either. But then we decided to record our conversations and post them to the internet. Which is probably a terrible, terrible mistake....
The Islanders, launched without very much fanfare in the studio area of Bristol's Old Vic and transferring to Edinburgh for the summer, is a charming piece of performance art that does exactly what it says on the tin.
The tin, in this case, containing blue paint the exact colour of the sky on the Isle of Wight.
Amy Mason performs a spoken narrative, ostensibly about a holiday she and her boyfriend took in 1999, but spreading out into a general evocation of teenage life at the turn of millennium. It's clearly real life that's being transmuted into art here: the post cards and snapshots which flash from the powerpoint are obviously the real McCoy. There is an impressive specificity to it: real and funny without seeming to try too hard; two teenagers in a bedsit, living mostly off Hubba-Bubba ("please don't hate us") and eating only orange things, deciding to try to have a grown-up holiday.
The boyfriend in question, Eddie Argos ("he's in a band, they've done quite well") provides the other half of the show. He interleaves her narrative with his songs, telling his side of the story, accompanied on guitar by "our friend Jim". Amy mentions that she is relieved when they split up because it meant that she would no longer have to listen to Billy Bragg every day. Eddie's performance is perhaps what you might expect a Billy Bragg fanatic to mutate into after thirteen years of knowing better: very expressive, strongly rhymed, unselfconscious speaking songs. (He issued a killer cover of Between the Wars to celebrate the recent happy event, but wound up this evening with a record of the bard of Barking himself singing "I was twenty one years when I wrote this song...") Eddie's memories of the holiday are mostly upbeat; Amy remembers it as a disaster. She remembers being scared to death on a theme-park ride; he thinks she was weeping with excitement. I particularly enjoyed his description of staying in a hotel for the first time, not quite knowing what the rules are ("B &; B / Anxiety") which rang slightly truer that Amy's fears that the room was haunted.
I overheard some punters on the way out complaining that they couldn't see where the piece was going or what the point of it was, which seemed rather harsh. I suppose if you were expecting it to build to a big revelation or plot twist, you'd be disappointed. I thought it was as nice a memory piece as I've come across: a poignant evocation of a particular time and place and sub-culture and yes, it does seem strange to us incredibly boring old people to hear grown-ups looking back on 1999 as the olden days. Like all autobiographical fiction, it's less about the memories themselves than about the process of remembering them.
I liked what that fellow was doing with his guitar, said a man I had been chatting to in the bar before hand.
Chumbawamba crept up on me. Mick and Lester kept opening Folkwaves with "Add Me", back in the days when we were still allowed to have folk music on the wireless. They were never really folkies, but in their final phase, their stripped down, acoustic, often acapella music fitted better in folk clubs than anywhere else. It's not that big a jump from using electronically sampled speech and sounds in your punk records to incorporating fragments of "They Sent Him To The War To Be Slain" and "I Dreamed I Saw Joe Hill" into your acoustic set. Not that they were ever exactly punks, either. They did some straight folk-songs: I adore the song of the Idris Strikers on English Rebel Songs: so raw and artless, part way between a football song and a Morning Star editorial, sung so sweetly and with such respect. But they remained entirely sceptical about the whole concept of folk music. Their first folkish album was called "Readymades", which give the clue to what was going on.
When I first saw them at the Bristol South Bank I honestly didn't know their history; when the support singer claimed that they had saved his life -- the police had knocked him down at a demo, and if that song had not been playing on the radio, he might not have found the strength to get up again -- I was only vaguely aware that Tubthumping was widely regarded as the worst record every made. (Actually, like everything else they ever did, it's a brilliant, witty piece of work, but not something you want taken out of context and used as a sing a long football album.) I truly hadn't heard of the Prescott Incident. I only knew that their response to the London bombings was one of the most touching political songs I'd ever heard.
I assume it was the chart success of Tubthumping that gave them them the freedom to do whatever they wanted, politically engaged folk albums and politically albums; and that irony is part of the point of what they were doing. They told stories between the songs at gigs of how they'd allowed records to be used in adverts for companies they didn't like and then donated the money to radical causes. What they did, better than anyone, is create what would in the 60s have been called Happenings; using their minor celebrity to make points. The Bono teeshirts at Glastonbury; chanting "Free Mumia Abu-Jamal" in the middle of a chorus on the Letterman show.
I'm not sure when this final record was made. Since it contains a little fragment in Spanish called "Pinochet mourns from beyond the grave" I assume it must be later than 2006: after Readymades but before The Boy Bands Have Won, in other words. It's the last of their Happenings. They'd been saying at concerts for years that they had recorded some songs to celebrate the death of Margaret Thatcher, and, if you gave them a fiver and wrote your address on a piece of paper, they'd send it to you on the morning after "the glorious day". Sure enough, on Tuesday morning, a neat little envelope with the Chumba logo appeared on my door mat.
It's basically a ten minute EP, with something in common with the the Smash Clause 29 sound collages and something in common with their later acoustic sound. It's basically two new-old songs a couple of fragments and a lot of noises off. "So Long..." is a twinkly swingy musical comedy skit ("Goodbye, goodbye; it's so familiar to see you lie"); "The Day the Lady Died" is pretty much only there for the title, which will make anyone who knows Chumbawamba's back catalogue smile. "Waiting For Margaret To Go" is an impression of the early home life of our own dear prime minister, not entirely unlike the Larkin song on Boy Bands Have Won (which it sounds a bit like as well). Its a clever and oddly poignant song with lots of pointed lyrics ("grocers and methodists lay her down low") which could merit a posthumous release as a single. But its the sampled sound scape which really makes the record, partly because of its cleverness but mostly because it reminds us of the older Chumbawamba sound. The hint of Ding-Dong the Witch is Dead wafting over perfectly chosen quotes. (I shall go orn and orn and orn ; and the still cringe making attempt to perform the Dead Parrot sketch).
It deserves to be more widely heard than by those of us who handed over our fivers at long-ago concerts. Like everything they did, it holds different things perfectly in balance: the sweet harmony of the tunes; the wit of the lyrics; the conceptual art cleverness behind the whole idea; and the genuine, uncompromising satirist's rage holding everything together. The whole thing only runs to ten minutes, and one wishes that Mark Radcliff or someone could it in its entirety on the wireless. I bet they would do something really funny with the royalty cheque.
Memo to Folk House management: when you have sold this many tickets, take on more bar staff and bake some more chocolate brownies. Folkies like cakes and ale. I must remember to keep it in my head that the Folk House cafe is open when there isn't music: a good place to get a coffee and a bun which isn't the Boston Tea Party. Maybe I can persuade Brian to come and listen to some country music with me.
The crowd was caused by Sam Lee, new to me, but has appeared on Radio 3. Winner of the Froots "best album" prize.
First there was a man with a big African thing.
Then Sam came on. Sam is young, with something of the 1950s in his hair, and, get this, one of those knitted white sweaters, as if someone in 1972 had been briefed to do an impersonation of a folk singer. There is a brief moment of panic. Is this going to be one of those middle class music students having a sort of go at that folk stuff because its cool? Evidently not. The first thing he does is introduce Thomas McCarthy, who he describes as a national treasure. Thomas isn't the support act: he is sitting with the band, interspersing his numbers with theirs. I have heard him a couple of times before, at the Cellar Upstairs Folk Club and way back at the Folk Against Fascism benefit. He's one of the last people to genuinely grew up in the oral tradition, performing songs, or versions of songs, that he learned from his grandparents. He was raised as an Irish traveller, which, as a lady who has slightly missed the point explains to me in the interval, means he isn't really a gypsy. He gets a small round of applause when he mentions that the makers of Big Fat Gypsy Wedding were successfully prosecuted for racism. "The whole country has gone mad; they think that travelling people are some lost tribe; we've always been here." He sings in a style that you probably thought only existed on wax cylinders. Everything has roughly the same tune; hovering part way between song and poem and recitation. His mouth quivers at the end of lines, giving a strange, vibrato sound. He does the one about the man who wakes up in bed with a pig and the man who marries a lady who turns out to be ninety, not nineteen as she had claimed and the woman who married a man with no balls at all. They aren't all bawdy: there is also a quite chilling one about a lady having a conversation with her dead husband. I sometimes say of a support act that I could have listened to him all night. In this case I probably couldn't have. But I bought the CD.
Thomas's presence is important to the way that Sam Lee is setting outs his stall. Sam has a very specific relationship to folk music. Lots of folk singers tells us where they learned their songs: but they are usually talking about current folk performers, or archive recordings. Sam seems to have collected his songs first-hand; he talks of songs he heard from working shepherds and songs he collected on traveller sites. But (despite the sweater) there is no sense that he's doing a pastiche of the source singers. They're his songs now. His voice is sweet, rather alien. His movements can be a little fey; part conducting, part dancing. He ends the first set by encouraging the audience to sing along to a traveller song called Phoenix Island and for once the audience is sweetly adding to the performance, which I'm sure is due to Sam's gentle, swaying movements.
Sometimes there is a sense that we are listening to a relatively traditional folk singer, performing in a relatively style while a band gently improvise around him. It's not quite like anything I've heard before; not like Jim Moray recasting ancient songs in a modern idiom, or Ian King trying to reinvent folk music for the twenty first century, More like dressing the old songs in a fresh suit of clothes. Possibly the climax of the evening is his chilling performance of the Jews Garden. When he played it on the radio, he says that there were complaints ("written on paper") because it is a version of Little Sir Hugh of Lincoln -- the blood libel, the tale of the supposed killing of a Christian child by an evil Jewess. It's a stark, disturbing, uncompromising rendering, with jews harps twanging all round it. The story goes back to the sixteenth century, but is still known by Romany and Scots travellers today. Sam says that if the story is not told and the song not sung, we might forget about the murders and pogroms it provoked. He's from a Jewish background himself.
This is not what I usually think of as traditional music. Sam is not the sort of person who is going to produce a clever new take on Clyde Water or Two Sisters. These are songs you haven't heard before (or at any rate, songs that I haven't heard before); even the time honoured tale of the girl visited in the night by her dead lover is an unfamiliar one. This a a man who has taken the oral tradition, grabbed it with his hands, and done something with it; there is a sense of him immersing himself in orality and then bringing his own musical sensibility to it -- as if he's a link in a chain, not a revivalist. That's why the presence of Thomas McCarthy is so important. (Sam listens, intently, eyes closed, whenever Tom is singing.)
I shall be honest: I need to listen to this again before I decide how much I like it. But I have no doubt that we were in the presence of something new, exciting, important.
The Cube is a bit niche. The last time I went I saw a documentary about morris dancing. The time before that I saw a man with a paper bag over his head singing lyrics that went "Grr! Grr!" The foyer is like 1980s Sussex University, all dark and crowded with the latest bottled beer and young people with hats. The performance space is like a a time capsule of the 1970s Barnet Odeon. I am always nervous at gigs where a large number of young people are present. Have I walked in on something popular by mistake? Am I the only one who isn't a friend of the band?
I have never heard of Richard Dawson. New Cyberfolkbuddy tells me that he is Britain's greatest undiscovered talent and the best folk lyricist who isn't Nigel Blackwell. I tactfully don't mention that I don't have the faintest idea who Nigel Blackwell is.
First up was Two White Cranes. There is only one of her: the cranes are industrial machinery, not birds. She walks past a building site on her way to work. Her music is what I think of, possibly erroneously, as Antifolk, because some years ago I heard Kimya Dawson on a boat. She picks out fairly simple melodies on a guitar and sings simple, performance poetry lyrics in a slightly chanty baby-voice. Cyberfolkbuddy thought she recalled Billy Bragg, not necessarily in a good way; he has also sometimes been saddled with the Antifolk label.
You say I love you
every day
but then almost every day
something changes
all of my old thoughts
replaced with new ones
I want to stay still
but I move on
I thought it worked. It was simple; it was honest; it was well observed; ("You fell asleep / In the middle of ET") it was witty; it was human and what you saw was what you got. When she spoke between songs she seemed nervous and awkward but still the same person as when she was singing, as if her music was freeing up her voice. I would pay to hear her again.
Next up was someone calling himself Tom O.C Wilson, very likely because that was his name. He was a young male with an electric guitar and the only person in the evening who had what would normally be described as self-confidence. He played rocky fifties-ish electric music which sometimes veered into show-tune territory with audible lyrics which seemed to mean something. Someone is driving around America in the 1960s ("this is the land of bubblegum and the Klan"). Someone else is adopted by a stray cat.
The cat came crawled in one day
vulnerable and probably a stray
but dangling from her neck
a silver bell proclaimed her has a pet
Singer songwriters often get adopted by cats. What OC had in common with Ms Cranes was pointedly unlyrical lyrics yoked to relatively simple tunes. I would pay to hear him again as well.
It's quite alarming that the two local supporty people were quite so worth listening to. Every cafe and bar on Stokes Croft has acoustic nights with people I have never heard of playing at them. How many quite worth listening to people am I missing? How many of this years quite worth listening to people are going to turn out to be next years quite famous people? So much live music, so little time.
Richard Dawson isn't local. He is from Newcastle and on tour. You haven't heard of him, I haven't heard of him, I doubt if Mark Radcliffe has heard of him. He has made records, but they appear to have mostly been on vinyl.
He shambles onto the stage and starts chatting. He's performed before in a cinema in Newcastle that was inspired by the Cube, so now he's in the Cube, his brain feels a little bit wrong. We probably think that the guitar is a prop and that we've accidentally come to a really lame stand up gig. "I'm worried that I might go ballistic and get my cock out or something". (The man behind me thinks that this is the funniest remark he has ever heard. "Ballistic cock!" he exclaims.)
And then more or less without warning, he starts to sing, and my jaw drops several inches. It's the purely traditional "I am a brisk lad". (You know the one: sheep stealer chappie, whose fortune is quite bad and is intending to build him a house on the moor, my brave boys, build him a house on the moor.) He doesn't so much sing it as bellow it; going from something so deep that it's almost a growl to something high and sweet without anything in between. He has a disconcerting habit of bending over double by the end of a song, at which point his hat falls off. Momentarily I wonder if this is intended to be a very subtle parody of a folk singer, but no, it's an eccentric performance, certainly, but it's meant seriously and he seems to own and respect the song and bring his own strange, eerie power to it.
There is some more chat. He introduces the band (there isn't a band) which largely consists of dead pets, and does a long eccentric guitar piece and then a rambling self-written song about a wooden bag and the various sentimental objects that he keeps in it.
It closes with a click
and fastens with a clasp
In the shape of a bumblebee.
He's doing a project based on objects and papers in the Discovery Museum in New Castle. He bellows out one of the songs from that project, which has some relationship to Poor Old Horse but which appears to be derived from a report he discovered in the museum of a nineteenth century animal cruelty scandal.
His palms around the hilt of the axe
delivered such a horrible blow
the horse emerged a terrible cry
it struck him just below the eye
poor old horse
see what they did to the poor old horse
And then a creditably sweet William of Wimsbury. And another long free form piece about the eye complaint he suffers from. ("Its not a sad thing, it just a thing, other people have bigger things to deal with.").
The silence of the dead
the slow coagulation of the sky
drowning out the light
thrown across the void by a spinning ball of fire
Lyrically, he put me in mind of Alasdair Roberts. Musically he reminds me of no-one on earth. It all seemed genuine and unaffected. At one point he gave a long introductory spiel for one of the museum pieces, and then said "Do you know, I don't feel like singing this song, because we're in a cheerful mood...". I don't think it was part of the act; I think he genuinely changed his mind about the set list. ("Ballistic cock!"" shouted the man behind me.)
Greatest living folk lyricist? I wouldn't go that far. Undiscovered talent, part traditional nasal growler, part psychedelic wierdness, part self deprecating comedian, utterly original – more like Robin Williamson than anyone else I've heard, if Robin Williamson were a slightly bewildered Geordie who isn't quite sure how he ended up on the stage but is damn well going to give it is best shot while he's there.
The person, in short, for whom the word "quirky" was invented. I would travel to Newcastle to hear him again.
The Cube cinema. A bit niche. Isn't Stokes Croft great?
Half man half Biscuit. Don't write in. I looked it up.
Obviously, the exact moment I say that no-one will have heard of him, it turns out he's playing a big festival. I'll shut up and go away now.
Richard Thompson is a folkgod. He wrote Beeswing, which may actually be the best "authored" folksong ever. I remember when there were some folkies having a session in the Hillgrove and one of them started to sing Beeswing and pub went quiet, or our table, anyway. And also the one about the motorbike. And the one that Norma Waterson sings about meeting the old opera singer in the pub. And the other one that Norma Waterson sings called "God Loves a Drunk". And From Galway to Graceland that I remember Ron Kavana singing in the tiny little room above the pub in Clifton. And Meet on the Ledge.
The drummer tonight was awesome. I don't know anything about drummers, but I could tell he was awesome. I think that all the songs were off the new album; I didn't know any of them, and I couldn't hear the words because the drummer was being awesome.Thompson was being awesome on his guitar, I think, and so was the other guy on the other guitar. I do not go as far as the person who said that guitar solos are basically masturbating on the stage.
The first time I heard the band currently trading as Fairport Convention, I didn't think a great deal of them, but then I heard them as Fairport Acoustic Convention and quite liked them, and some of the old discography has grown on me a lot, although I wish it didn't remind me so much of the Wombles, which only proves that influence runs backwards. I have heard Ashley Hutchings once and Dave Swarbrick lots of times.
Very possibly at some point a light will go off above my head and I will see what other people see in Richard Thompson's current incarnation. The audience were standing-ovation-ecstatic and a couple of people I respect have written things on line about how gobsmacked they were by the physical quality of his guitar playing. Someone pointed out that he is astonishingly prolific and a good way of writing several of the best songs ever written is to write a lot of not such good ones as well.
There was a man who came on before who sang songs about liking other places but being happy when he was on his way home to Texas and Bible belt churches not being great places to gow up. He was very good and I could hear all the words.
Though greed and stupidity fuck up the show
Are we downhearted? No?
Robb finishes his main set with a bit of downbeat optimism, but comes straight back on to do an English translation of This Land is Your Land, (with a touch of the Manchester Rambler folded into it):
As I went rambling
I saw a sign there
On Kinder Scout said
No trespassing
But we followed our footsteps
Now there's no sign there
This land was made for you and me.
The words almost entirely fail to fit the tune; I almost got the impression that they were being made up on the spot. About as faithful to the spirit of Woody Guthrie as they could have been, in other words. But also pure Robb Johnson:
In the squares of the city
In the shadow of the steeple
In the jobless centres
I saw my people
Some of them were grumbling
Some of them were wondering
Is this land still made for you and me?
WELL, IT IS!
He describes one of his songs -- about a scary man with a fierce dog on a railway station as having "a Key Stage 1 chorus". He may ask the audience to join him in a hearty "Fuck You!" to authority, but there is something in his voice and manner which reminds you that his day job is a teacher. "Well, it is."
The audience still want more. He gives us a vaudevillian summary of socialist ideology ("We haven't any money, cos they got lots and lots....").but we still won't let him go home until he's done his utopian signature tune "Be reasonable and demand the impossible now."
I gather that he was slightly taken aback my my review of his last Folkhouse gig. ("Oh dear, was it really like that? I thought I behaved myself."). The first half of this evening is much more focussed on lyrical, reflective, story songs. A young man says goodbye to his sweetheart on the eve of World War I; a stranger's grave near Shrewsbury reminds him of his father. Yes, he can rant, but he can also take your breath away with the unexpectedly personal:
I don't believe in heaven any more
I don't believe in hell any more
I had a friend die in my arms once
You know what? He wasn't there any more.
He says he was once asked to teach a songwriting workshop, but couldn't do it: song writing is a "mystical alchemical process." So maybe I mis-sold him as a punky, Braggish agitpop protest singer. He does talk a little about the Tottenham riots, but instead of going into When Tottenham Burned he sings a song about cookery:
We decided what we're doing
We decide who does what
Some of us are chopping onions
And some of us are not
Which is what he understands by anarchism: "nobody telling you what to do". Sex Pistols punk anarchism just means being social nuisance.
Something seems to happen in the interval. He comes back crosser, seeming to stumble over his words in the inter-song raps. After a pointed piece about importing flowers from African -- where children are dying of starvation ("let them eat blood-red African roses") he stops talking and shoots out four or five increasingly angry songs without a break. The sing-a-long "we all said stop the war"; the bitter "we're here because we're here on the North West Frontier"; a hysterical diatribe against yummie mummies taking over pubs ("ignored and bored their little dears run riot everywhere / Granny Thatcher's bastard kids and the spawn of Tony Blair"); and a rant against Rupert Murdoch and the Tabloid press ("we're sorry, we're sorry -- we're sorry we got caught").
His politics is certainly uncompromising. The personal is the political: it's not only about all getting together to make curry, it's about noticing that the scary man doesn't have any friends and that the soldiers Tony Blair killed were human beings with names. I could have managed without quite so many caricatures of people with posh accents: that could make you suspect that we are dealing with the wrong kind of class war. It's quite jarring to realise that this nice, smiley man is quite such an unreconstructed communist. He's heard that East Germany was a brilliant place to live. When he visits the former DDR he is sad to find that the once pristine Karl Marx Square is full of people who enjoy the same freedoms we enjoy -- joblessness, homelessness, drinking larger in the middle of the day, teenage mums... "Hurrah for democracy, eh?" This kind of thing may makes our Guaridan-reading hackles rise, bit it leads straight into a daft song about Karl Marx coming down from his pedestal and learning to ride a skateboard ("He wrote lots of dialectic but not that many jokes"). He does concede that on the anti-war memo, along with the Christians, Muslims, socialists and communists "we've even got a liberal or two".
This is the kind of evening which reminds you what political songs are for. (In fact, it reminds you politics and songs are for.) You may want to quibble about some of the specific, but it leaves you in in no doubt that there is some kind of hope for England's green and pleasant etc etc etc.
Are we down hearted? No.
Is this land still made for you and me? Well it is!
