Sitting on the grass in the sunshine at Warwick folk fest the other week, one eye on what the sky was doing - the previous night there had been a torrential downpour - I had an interesting chat with James Findlay.
"I was invited to take part in some workshops at the South Bank Centre, which were for the casting," he said. "It was a really interesting, fun week. John Tams had invited me but there were some other pretty well-known folk musicians there are well, including Nancy Kerr, doing workshops and groups.
"At the end of the week John offered me the role of the Common Man in the show." The role has also been taken by Tim van Eyken, Saul Rose and - currently - Dogan Mehmet and Ben Murray. "But, from my point of view, the trouble was that it would have involved committing to it for two whole years. And I thought that I'm not really well-known enough on the folk scene to go away for two whole years without everyone forgetting who I was. So I had to say no.
"But interestingly there were a couple of women in the workshops - younger female folk musicians - who were also in the running for the role. So they'd definitely have a woman in that part and I can't see anything wrong in that. Women suffered through the first world war, just as the men did. They may not have been doing much of the killing or dying but there's more than one kind of suffering. They lost husbands, brothers and fathers."
To say nothing of the generation of women who lost their chance of a family as a result of there being too few men to go around.
"The part is called the Common Man," said Findlay. "But it could just as easily be The Common Woman."
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"It wasn't a conscious decision to monopolise the Bellowhead writing process. I'm going through a very prolific period," said Pete Flood (below). He arranged five of the twelve tunes on the new album, Broadside, to lead singer Jon Boden's seven and theirs are the only credits on the sleeve this time around.
Making his point neatly for him, the reason I was in touch was because he's also done the incidental music for a new version of Pinocchio at the Little Angel Puppet Theatre in Islington, a venue I know from childhood. Pungent are the memories of Saturday mornings spent there: my sister and I hugely excited, mum and/or dad barely able to keep their eyes open after a long week. There was always a strong smell of coffee in the foyer.
"I haven't seen it yet," said Flood. "I've been away for two weeks, which has been a source of worry. Did the music turn out OK?" Yes, everything went off without a hitch.
"I worked very closely with Peter O'Rourke, the director. We did two weeks' worth of R&D back in January and he's a meticulous director. He writes everything down and thinks everything through. The number of notes he sent me was astonishing, even to the point where in July he sent through an overview of where he thought the music was needed, exactly how much and where it should change.
"There are pros and cons to working like that. If I were to write everything according to the script, he would have had no flexibility. I tried to give him enough so that, in the more complex scenes at least, he would have options. But we always knew I'd be away for the first week and so wouldn't be around to help out."
Flood hasn't been around because he's been touring the country promoting Broadside. When we spoke he was aboard the band's tour bus as it pulled up outside the Sage in Gateshead - they'd been at the Lowry in Manchester the previous night.
"It was a strange gig. I was tired and feeling a bit under the weather and there was a sit-down audience. For me a sit-down gig is so wrong: if I see an audience sitting down I can't get into it. And in the really well-appointed theatres you can't even see a sit-down audience because there are too many lights, so you don't get any sense of engagement. Other members of the band like the perfectionism that a sit-down audience asks of you. But after last night several people who'd seen us before said it was one of our best. You can never tell..."
I expressed my admiration for the latest Bellowhead album, which I've been listening to on a rather spanky pair of noise-cancelling headphones. Bellowhead are often referred to as "theatrical" and likened to "a juggernaut" and in this format the album is a bit like being run over by a carnival float populated by characters from a Tim Burton movie. It's dark, complex and multi-textured, deeply rewarding when listened to on hi-fi and, truthfully, cinematic in scope rather than theatrical. Could film be Bellowhead's ultimate medium?
"About ten years ago I did some incidental music for a film and I'd like to get back into it. But I'm really enjoying myself at the moment. I've spent a couple of years thinking about the ideal group to involve myself with: I'm considering putting together a trio that's going to take the world by storm."
This is especially interesting in the context of what he said the last time I spoke to him, aboutthe practical and financial difficulties of being in a band with so many members. His candour at the time was disarming, something I'm coming to associate with him.
For instance, one of his arrangements on Broadside - The Wife of Ushers Well - similarly stopped me in my tracks and left me wondering how on earth one gets from this...
... to this
"Ha! The real trouble with trying to explain this song - and I've tried a couple of times - is that I end up sounding like the most pretentious man on earth. There's a special problem with Bellowhead, which is how to you do a straightforward main verse ballad with a band that's known for its theatricality? One idea I had was that it should be quite incantatory, like a spell."
That makes sense: the woman in the song is essentially bringing her three sons back from the dead.
"Yes. There was also a specific interest I had in delivering a large amount of information quickly, flying through it and yet still making it compelling. We get a bit of stick now and then for unintelligibility. But I grew up with punk, with Echo and the Bunnymen, and you never had a clue what they were on about. To me, that was an incentive to listen to it again. Similarly, with The Wife of Ushers Well, if you don't get the story the first time around we have CDs these days and you can listen to it again and that's fine. So this chanting... it would take a few listens to get to the bottom of it if you didn't know the song."
It's the atmospherics that stay with you though, like a cross between the Carmina Burana and the Wicker Man. The overall effect is quite terrifying.
"Er. Thanks."
So how did he get to the point where this was possible? Is a Bellowhead album written down and did he go to music school?
"Oh god yes. It's completely scored out, though not particularly rigorously adhered to. There has to be a trust with the other musicians that maybe they'll come up with something better. And yes, I went to Goldsmiths, though it took me a long time to get on to a music degree. I was told at every step of my academic career that I shouldn't do music. I wasn't massively talented and I still feel like a blunderer who blunders around until I get something right. If I have a talent it's tenacity - although I'm not tenacious in any other area of my life.
"So I got three bad A' levels - Spanish, geography and social biology, which is what you did if you weren't good enough to do biology - and took a couple of years out. I hadn't been allowed to do a music A' level because I hadn't done a music GCSE. So I tried to start up a band and then went and lived in Los Angeles, where I went to a place called the Musicians' Institute.
"I came back and did an A' level in a year at Goldsmiths and got to degree level. So because of all the struggle, by the time I got there I was so happy that I consequently just worked my arse off and ended up getting a first. Up until then I don't think I'd ever got an A for anything and when that happened, that was the moment I thought 'Maybe I should be doing this'.
"I graduated in 1996 and worked in a record store for a couple of years as a buyer - and got to know a load of people who did physical theatre: I did some physical theatre myself. I also played in a few Algerian bands and spent a lot of time in studios recording house music. My big worry was how to reconcile all these different influences: my stuff was too wide-ranging. And actually Bellowhead, when it came along, was a bit of a godsend. A focus."
So how did that happen?
"I knew the brass players already, I'd worked with them in various guises. But actually it came about because Jon Boden's mum knew my mum - they were working in a charity shop together."
I'm not sure why that's funny, but it is. And how do you describe what you do these days?
"Whenever I have to write a biog I say 'percussionist/composer/teacher'."
We returned to the subject of incidental music.
"When I left Goldsmiths the first thing I did was apply for the film music MA at the Royal College of Music. I was turned down for not having the theory skills. I didn't have perfect pitch or the instant ability to hear a chord and know it was a diminished seventh. Plus the guy who worked in the office had a chip on his shoulder about all the contemporary music at Goldsmiths. I was the third or fourth person with a first from there who he'd turned down for that course.
"But I'm glad I'm doing this now: going out and playing music with people who are clearly having the time of their lives. It couldn't have worked out any better. We'll see how this album's received - it all seems to be going well - and there's another tour in February, including to the Benelux countries.
"I think the whole band would love to go to the States and Japan on tour. But what we found last year is that English traditional music is a difficult sell. If it were Celtic we'd be a lot more easily taken up but people don't tend to think of English traditional music as interesting to listen to."
Sounds like a job for the Arts Council and Visit England. You'd think that a combination of the Mumford effect and all that hard work might combine to create something akin to a Blue Fairy - a la Pinocchio - for Bellowhead. Only, you know, for real.
* Tickets to Pinocchio are selling fast but can be got here. And here's a list of tour datesfor the phenomenal Bellowhead.
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John Tams was fresh from his set with Home Service on Thursday at Cropredy, including a stand-out moment from The Lark Ascending played on the flute. I said that I'd especially liked their brass section.
"Ah yes. We were the only ones doing that when we started out. And now there's Bellowhead..." Suddenly he looked a bit mischievous.
"You know, I'd really like to see them get more political. It seems a shame to be as big and successful as they are and not to use their platform. I'm a great fan - I live just down the road from some of them, I know them pretty well. And I've known Benji's dad for decades.
"But I can't help feeling that it's all a bit of a waste if they don't do the political stuff."
But there's hundreds of them! (See above if you don't believe me.) What are they supposed to do: form their own parliament in order to decide what line they're going to take? All those songs about prostitutes, it's probably not women's rights they're interested in, is it? And anyway, isn't Jon Boden's dad a stockbroker or something?
"You should stir it up between us. The Home Service and Bellowhead. It could be a bit like Blur and Oasis: I always thought that must have been a manufactured grievance. And instead of Britpop we could call it Britfolk.
"Tell Bellowhead I'm calling them out about their politics." Him and his mates.
And with that he belted off for the stage, where he was supposed to be saying goodnight to UB40...
I took this all in the puckish spirit in which it was intended... But a few hours after I originally posted this blog, I got an email from Mark Whyles, Bellowhead's manager, saying: "It's very easy for one man to have political opinions. It's much harder for eleven people to agree entirely about anything so important and as such it's almost impossible for Bellowhead to take a political standpoint."
He included this statement from Jon Boden: "Since you ask (and speaking for myself, not the band) I'm a card carrying member of the Labour party, who prefers traditional music to 'political song writing' (aka preaching to the converted...)"
Bellowhead were also instrumental in organising a Folk Against Fascism gig at the South Bank Centre, where they performed for free.
And breath... At least no one brought up John Tams' involvement with Help for Heroes.
* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page. That's all from Cropredy this year, but there should be something later in the week about the BBC and its music policy.
The sun shone on Sunday afternoon at the Warwick Folk Festival. Paul Sartin had wandered off looking grumpy, Jon Boden was soliciting praise for his first attempt at cutting his son's hair - it was pretty good - and Dr Fay Hield was saying something about how festival crowds were getting better-looking as her gaze played in the general direction of ahab, who were standing near the No Bones Jones food stall.
I'd recently been told that squeeze boxes were what give English music its distinctive sound and thought I'd try that theory out on John Spiers - of headliners Spiers and Boden, also Bellowhead - who was obligingly forthcoming.
"The piano accordian was the first squeeze box I had: I was 18 and I'd only played the piano before. The right hand is like a sideways piano and it's got the dynamic of bellows, which I love because you can swell a note - obviously you can't do that with a piano.
"The swelling of a single note is one of the essences of English dance music, the noise that sounds like some other kind of music going backwards. It makes people spring their legs and jump off the ground. There's a lot of jumping in English dancing," he mused, as my shorthand picked up speed and my beer buzz burned off rapidly. I hadn't been expecting to have this talk. "Only certain instruments encourage that and percussive instruments can't do it at all. I don't have that accordian any more. I sold it to a gypsy."
You're making this up now, aren't you?
"No. Honestly. Whoever sold it to me didn't know what a good instrument it was. I bought it for £40 and sold it for £100. But it was very heavy and when I was 19 someone suggested that because I was mainly playing morris music it was difficult to make it sound right on an accordian and I should get a melodeon instead.
"By this time I'd gone to study genetics at King's in Cambridge, which is a musical college but mainly for its choir. It's a bit snooty. But the head tutor there was a wonderful man called Rob Walloch. I got robbed in the college bar one evening, which was awful. They'd got my coat and my wallet and so many of my things needed replacing anyway.
"But when I'd first started there he'd made a speech about how if there was anything you needed you shouldn't be afraid to ask because the college was so old and there were so many bursaries available for this and that. He said he'd look for loopholes for us. I think there's a bursary for the sweetest smelling boy from Faversham."
It's unclear from my notes whether this is the bursary that John was awarded.
"So I'd been saving up anyway and my jacket was worth about the same as the melodeon I wanted. It was a cheap melodeon.
"I'd been warned about how different they were to play but when I got it back to my room it sounded lovely: much sharper and stronger. I couldn't play it at all because I was used to an instrument whose note stayed the same when you changed the direction of the bellows and the melodeon is diatonic. It's got the action of a harmonica and changes a whole tone: if you're playing a C and you change direction it produces a D.
"It's a very physical instrument: if you want to do a fast run of notes you need to put your back into it. It's the most regular exercise I get but it's nice because you're half dancing while you play. The English melodeon makes you play with a choppy rhythm that's almost impossible to overcome: you have to work within that style.
"The Irish melodeon, on the other hand, has a row of buttons that are the white notes and another that are the black notes - and you don't have to work the bellows in and out so much. When you hear someone like Sharon Shannon playing you get something that is phrased in a very solid and modern way and played to the taste of the musician rather than the action of the instrument."
John also plays the bandoneon (above), which he says was invented to sound a bit like a church organ and exported to Latin America by sailors, where it was taken up by missionaries, then into brothels (not necessarily in that order) eventually becoming the sound of the tango.
And then there's the concertina, which is disconcertingly expensive for such a small instrument. "The average price of a concertina you would hope to get good on is about £2,500. I don't know any young person who can afford one."
I heard later, from someone else, that there's a supply and demand issue: that very few are made these days and there's someone out there who buys them up to drive up the price. I don't know what to make of this.
"I eventually sold that melodeon to my dad - the one Rob Walloch helped me buy. My dad was a morris dancer (with The Ancient Men and the Abingdon Traditional Morris Men) and he'd taken note of the fact that I was playing the squeeze box. I'd been doing lots of busking in the streets of Oxfordshire and playing for ceilidh bands, and I think he'd secretly always wanted to do it. He used to sneak into my bedroom when I wasn't there during university holidays and have a go. Then one day he took it up and I taught him.
"I've also learnt how to fix them. The first time I ever noticed something had gone wrong was when a note just carried on after I'd stopped playing. I was playing all the time and couldn't send it to London to get fixed, so my mending was trial and error. When I found the offending spring I managed to flick another one out of the bay window and into a hedge by accident. I mended the broken spring with a rubber band and a drawing pin and then it took me about an hour and a half of feeling every bit of leaf under the hedge to find the one I'd lost. It was about one and a half inches and made of thin black wire.
"I learnt much more about my craft when I went to work at The Music Room - an instrument shop - after university. I was forced to leave the job in the end because I'd been being playing with Jon (Boden) and we went on tour to Australia for three weeks. In those five years I think I had a go on every single model and sold about 1,000 squeeze boxes to people, many of whom I still see on the folk scene. I also started a website called Melodeon.net which is still going."
I probably should have asked him what he did for a coat if he spent the money on a melodeon...
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Fay Hield has received her doctorate from the University of Sheffield. After five years, including two bits of maternity leave, the folk singer who is the partner of Jon Boden (Spiers and Boden, Bellowhead) has produced an 80,000-word, 256 page thesis called English Folk Singing and the Construction of Community about the folk scene in Sheffield.
"I was very worried about writing about it," she said. "Because if I made enemies, that would be my employment and my social life gone in one. But so far everyone seems chuffed that I've done the work and am speaking up for the area - though I'm not sure anyone's read the whole thing." There's a link in the first paragraph if you feel like rising to the challenge.
"Jon and I celebrated with curry and a bottle of champagne, then the following evening we spent singing in The Royal at Dungworth with a load of people who participated in the study."
The thesis concentrates on social singing, rather than music in which someone is paid to stand on a stage and others pay to listen, so it's not hard to imagine that a lot of people feel a kind of ownership of the subject matter - anyone whose done any social singing at sessions in Sheffield over the past five years, in fact.
"There's some confusion about community folk singing and why people enjoy it so much. I mean, if you took a picture during a session you'd probably find that everyone looked very sombre. But very often you'd also hear those same people saying afterwards that they'd just had one of the most enjoyable experiences they can remember."
Static crackles about dry wit and it being grim oop north are nearly audible on the line. "I'm not saying that all social folk singing is miserable by any means. It's just that everyone who will be doing it understands what's going on and it doesn't make much sense if you come fresh into it."
So you don't need to be grinning like a loon in order to enjoy yourself in Sheffield.
Which is probably just as well, because in a household containing two touring musicians and two small children - Polly and Jacob - it's hard to imagine she'd have the time. "When we first had Polly it was difficult. But we've worked out how to manage now."
So what's the secret? Full-time nanny? Accommodating parents-in-law? Prescription drugs? "Google calendar," she explains. "Everyone's got a copy. Me, Jon, our agents. There are still clashes but having it written down like that means it doesn't become a problem. I mean, we know what we're doing as far ahead as 2013.
"It's good in a way because it's a result of Jon being offered so much work. As a self-employed person it's your goal to reach a point at which you don't have to say yes all the time, to have a day when you can afford to pick and choose."
And what will she choose for herself? Will there be more academia? "I love ideas. I love reading other people's good work and reading things written by people I disagree with. Also making little connections in my head and having an original thought every once in while. I might apply to do a post doc in a year or so. And I thought about trying to incorporate my working life as a musician more closely into my studies. I'm still doing little bits of teaching.
"I think academia is very similar to being self-employed, in the sense that you're constantly creating your own way of doing things. I'm very much an Excel spreadsheet kind of a girl. I like lists and planning and I enjoy keeping my head on who's thinking and saying what in my field, making connections between them."
There's a new album on the blocks, ready to be recorded in September, following Looking Glass, which was out last year. "There's going to be a bigger band - although not quite so large as Bellowhead. My passion is for English trad folk, so that's what to expect."
Does she have a personal theory about what constitutes "folk music" then? And her answer, while probably true, reminds me that I'm talking to someone with academic detachment who is also nervous about making enemies. "I don't really get the label. There is so much that folk could mean that it seems kind of pointless to make those distinctions: lots of people create systems within which some things are allowed to be folk. But I can't be bothered to start thinking about it."
When she's relaxing she listens to Thomas Tallis, medieval music and Dolly Parton. "She came to Sheffield a few years ago but it was Jon's 30th birthday so I couldn't go. It was very inconsiderate of him."
And it would be remiss of me not to ask about her name but I think I can hear a sigh at the other end of the line as I raise it. "My parents didn't really notice [that it's a spoonerism of hay field]. But by the time I was about seven, people were starting to mention it. I've always thought that I should be a gardener really - like Pippa Greenwood, Bunny Guinness or Alan Titchmarsh. And then I've had a few people who assumed it must be a stage name. But no."
Many congratulations, Dr Hield, on a hard-won reward for all your academic endeavours.
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