Southern Tenant Folk Union goes a bit Dexter

Watching the Southern Tenant Folk Union launch their fifth album on the Green Note's tiny stage on Thursday brought to mind a world record attempt to fit the most people into a phone booth. Every time I thought I'd finished counting them, another head - or a banjo - would would pop into view from the back so its owner could take their turn at the single microphone.

It could have been a piece of physical theatre: guitar necks were foisted in the air, the better for the sound to reach the mike, vocalists moved nearer or farther away depending on how loud they needed to be and there looked to be an unwavering awareness of where everyone else was, so they could all move around each other. The lack of space made them a single organism and I didn't see anyone bump into anyone else.

They've also got a look. They had three beardy young men wearing suits that made them look like someone's ancestors in the Green Note's sepia light. Proper old-timey. I kept expecting them to break into Man of Constant Sorrow.

They didn't, though, partly because they write all their own material.

The new album, Hello Cold Goodbye Sun, is surprisingly contemporary in its preoccupations. After being described as "sawdust kickers" by an approving Guardian, they've applied their bluegrassy folk sound to a collection of songs described as "modern horror", as if True Blood, Twilight and Dexter had collided with Deadwood, Deliverance and Lars Von Triers' recent film about the end of the world, Melancholy, in such a way that the only thing left to do was sing about it. Sawdust, after all, is often used to soak up blood.

They began with a song preoccupied, according to the band's remaining founder member Pat McGarvey, by the imagery of JG Ballard's Crash, a novel which eroticises car accidents in a way that - as a former nurse - I always thought was odd. I mean, when you're recovering from traumatic injuries the pain will usually kill eroticism and if it doesn't then the opiates will. But hey... it's fiction. More importantly, the song worked.

Most hilarious intro of the evening went to Jed Milroy, owner of an amazing head of curly hair that he likes to shake about, for his explanation about how he came to write a macabre piece about a real Scottish kayacking trip that ended badly. "They all do," chimed in an audience member to much hilarity. And so we were treated to the image of a one-handed man gaffer-taping a paddle to his arm before finding a weird, Deliverance-y family (Duelling Banjos works well with this on several levels) on a causeway, refusing to admit that the tide was lapping their ankles or even that Milroy was there.

I don't know this band very well and stupidly managed to leave without an album. But they were gripping and there were tunes they played that I urgently need to hear again. OK, so the ambitious vocal harmonies were sometimes a little wonky. But I guess that's partly a function of working with new material.

In their greatest hits at the end - after they'd played the new album from end to end - they included a setting of Yeats's powerfully unusual poem An Irish Airman Foresees His Death.

I was struck by it because I know The Waterboys' version from their recent and rather wonderful album, An Appointment with Mr Yeats.

The poem is one of the greats. And Southern Tenant Folk Union really aren't bad either.

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The Waterboys' Steve Wickham does a Jimi Hendrix?

Background: Mad as the Mist and Snow is one of the (many) standout tracks on The Waterboys' new album An Appointment with Mr Yeats, and MickPuck is the Twitter handle of Mike Scott, frontman of the Waterboys.

* If you enjoyed this post you may also like this interview with Mike Scott.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

An appointment with Mr Scott

There's a new Waterboys' album out in a week or so, called An Appointment with Mr Yeats, of music woven around the fantastical, political, love poetry of WB Yeats. I went on an adventure to Dublin, where Mike Scott lives, to talk to him about it, which came about because someone sent him a link to my review of the Wychwood festival, where The Waterboys played back in June. He liked the piece, he tweeted about it, I said hello.

The idea for the interview was that we'd take a stroll around the town, see a few Yeats-related sights and cast an appraising eye over the buskers on Grafton Street, with whom Scott has developed a kind of love/hate relationship. On Monday, however, it was drizzling and only those with a waterproof mindset were about. As I scurried to our meeting I turned my face away from the pavement for long enough to notice that there was a "human statue" standing on the corner of Grafton and Nassau Street, caked in white paint and wearing a long sheet - long enough to cover himself and the milk crate on which he seemed to be standing - waving gaily at passers-by. While this easily made him the least competent human statue I'd ever encountered, I began to get an inkling of what madness it might be that grips Scott in relation to the Grafton Street buskers. Of which more later.

A great deal has been written about Mike Scott and The Waterboys over the last 25 or so years and some of it has involved An Appointment with Mr Yeats because there was a brief tour of the forthcoming album a few months ago. The project seems to have brought out the swot in some of the journalists who wrote about it, possibly a response to the involvement of poetry. But to say it was well-received would be an understatement.

I was sent a copy of the CD a couple of days before I set out and spent most of the train and ferry trip to Dublin plugged in to it. It's a big rock album that is in turns wild, chilling, foot-tapping, intelligent and hormonal, but always accessible. There's a lot there, containing everything that originally drew me to The Waterboys as a teenager and more: it's a multifaceted gem of a record.

In from the drizzle, perched on a banquette amid the art nouveau splendour of Cafe En Seine on Dawson Street, the conversation turned and I asked Scott whether on some level the album is a love letter to Ireland, his adopted homeland?

"I hadn't thought of that," he said after a longish pause. "Yeats is one aspect of Ireland but he's very un-Catholic. He was a privileged Protestant, part of the landed gentry with a big English connection. But he was also an Irish nationalist: he loved Ireland very much.

"No. I don't think the record is a love letter to Ireland. His poetry is a little grain of Ireland. I bought a book of it when I first toured here in 1984 and although I didn't understand a lot of it I had a strong response to it. There was a molten quality to his words and a tactility. If I spoke them in my mind they had an edge. He is aware of the sound and flavour of words and their juxtapositions, and I love his subject set: mystery, love, Ireland, politics, the individual's short time on earth.

"I grew up in Scotland with my mum talking about Yeats as a big figure. Although I don't remember much about it now she took me to the Yeats summer school here in Sligo one year, which involved a trip to his grave and his home. It was impressed upon me at an early age that he was a great man."

So is the adult Scott's collaboration with Yeats about measuring up to this great man in some way? "I'd say the album is more of a homage than an attempt to cut him down to size. To me he is a giant of a bard and I felt that there was some untrodden ground there for me.

"I've never felt intimidated by the man's reputation. When I go to work I'm in a different mode and there's no space in that mode for being woolly minded. With my own lyrics I'm ruthless and I'm the same with Yeats. He must have been ruthless himself to get to where he got to, so I feel entitled to work with his words in the way that I do: that's the degree of rigour that they require. If I wasn't going to go in with that level of intensity I would stop wasting Yeats's time."

Ranged around the cafe was a tumbling horde of art nouveau sylph and fairy sculptures, holding up clocks with shapely arms, tiptoeing around lighting fixtures and generally pixying the place up. By contrast, the first track on the album is The Hosting of the Shee - or "the gathering of the fairies". Yeats wasn't the only literary figure of his era with a strong interest in fairies (Arthur Conan Doyle springs to mind). But far from being the kind of creature you'd want magicking around in your cafe, the wild-haired elves of Yeats and Scott ride straight at you out of the dark, dark night, yowling in a minor key and commanding you, terrifyingly, to "empty your heart of its mortal dream".

"Yes. They're not the dinkily colourful characters that you'd think of as classical fairies. They wouldn't be like that. The characters Yeats wrote about were as much the old gods of Ireland as the fairies. He named Niamh and Caoilte (pronounced 'Quilty') - and these are characters from Irish myth.

"I read a short biography of Yeats that was mostly about his spiritual and mystical beliefs. And I've read passages by scholars who completely don't get his occult interests. But the secret to understanding them is that it's not an intellectual discipline and if you approached it from an intellectual viewpoint it would be completely incomprehensible.

"Yeats was not a spiritualist - although he was married to a woman who was a medium - he was an explorer in old Irish folklore. But, yes, I think he believed in fairies - that they were beings of an older order, who could only be seen under certain circumstances."

And what do you think?

"That there are more things in heaven and earth than can be dreamt of in our philosophy. There are certainly more things than can be detected by our five senses. Our perception system works within certain wavebands. There are sounds that we can't hear that dogs can. And with sight there's infra red, which is invisible to our naked eye. It would be a foolish person who would say that there is nothing beyond what we can comprehend and I am not that foolish person.

"There may be beings that inhabit a different realm to us and, if there were such an order of creatures, fairies might be one of them. I could believe it, though I haven't seen them myself.

"Irish history frequently blends with myth. There were waves of invaders and Yeats believed that some of them were beings from the time before humanity. I'm not saying this is my view. It was his."

In fact far from being a whimsical person, you feel with Scott that there is a hard intelligence working away, calculating the likely impact of his remarks as he goes along. But his creative imagination can also get the better of him. Later on, after a walk through the Georgian architecture of Dublin under an umbrella that made me feel a bit like Lucy walking with Mr Tumnus in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, we sat in middle of a row of seats at the Abbey Theatre, where The Waterboys showcased An Appointment with Mr Yeats five nights in a row in February. The theatre, which was founded by Yeats, also contains the portrait of Yeats that is behind Scott on the album cover.

There was a deep rumbling from beyond the walls of the auditorium. "That's the Metro," Scott explained. I thought about it, prepared to be surprised. "I didn't realise there was a Metro in Dublin." He also thought about it, then conceded. "Ah. No. Perhaps there isn't. Isn't that peculiar? We did five nights here earlier in the year and the whole time I thought the rumbling was coming from underground." A passing stagehand confirmed that the sound shaking the theatre's walls was almost certainly one of Dublin's rather futuristic looking trams.

"You know, I had my own dressing room when we did the shows here. It was the first time I'd ever had my own dressing room."

And what kind of outlandish demands did you make on your rider?

"Sparkling water. Honey and lemon for the voice..."

Rock and roll.

"That's a noun not an adjective," he reproved. "I don't drink and I don't take drugs. All that hedonistic stuff is fun in your 20s when you're still trying to find out who you are. But it doesn't help the music."

But doesn't that get dull? I know he's fought a winning battle with alcohol, but everyone needs a holiday some time, surely? "Maybe normal people have holidays. But I work at doing what I enjoy most in the world." See what he did there? A change of tack almost imperceptible to the human ear. "I do so much travelling that when I stop work the last thing I want to see is an airport." There then followed a short diatribe about Air France and Charles de Gaulle airport that further confirmed my theory that that Charles de Gaulle is the other Bermuda triangle of the aviation world.

"Last time we were travelling from there we were turned back from Brest and had to spend the night in the cheapest hotel I've ever been in. There was a condom machine in the foyer," he grumbled. Nuff said.

Other things that I learnt about Mike Scott included that he doesn't much care for the only book currently on the shelves about him, which is called Strange Boat, by someone called Ian Abrahams. "The little bit of it that I read was full of assumptions read as fact. My wife read more of it and said it was full of banal assertions about why I did stuff. But I've written my own memoir. It's out early next year. Lilliput, my publisher in Ireland, is talking to UK publishers at the moment."

And it seems likely that whatever comes next for him, it's likely to include The Waterboys. "I made two solo albums in the seven years before we reformed the band in 2000. But I missed the size of the audiences, I didn't enjoy working under my own name and it got boring. The Waterboys are somehow more than the sum of its parts: there's something very mysterious and enjoyable about it. And I got fed up with journalists asking me what the difference was between between my personal output and the band's."

What they were probably asking was how collaborative the process of songwriting was with the other members of the band? "I always led the band and set the direction," came the uncompromising answer.

Back out in the drizzling rain the Mike Scott minimalist tour of the Grafton Street buskers took place as scheduled: minimalist because there were only two buskers braving the elements. First was a young man who, with great pathos, was singing Why does it always rain on me? audible from some considerable distance, accompanying himself with a guitar and one-man-bandish pedal drum. When he caught sight of Scott he started giving it some real welly and went into a terrific version of Folsom Prison Blues, for which he received the seal of approval.

There he is. And then I was lucky to catch the man known by Scott as The Worst Busker in the World. As you might have guessed this isn't his real name. He sits on an amplifier putting out traditional Irish music, holding a bodhran as if it were a bag of spuds and tapping it occasionally with one end of the bone.

That's him with the umbrella, talking to some American tourists. "He's better when he's not busking at all," confirmed Scott, who has been known to fantasise elaborate scenarios about the Grafton Street buskers lasting several hours on Twitter. One of them ended up with a big cartoon fight in the middle of Dublin's main pedestrianised precinct with everyone getting their just desserts: the artist's revenge on his tormentors.

And with that he led me in the direction of the Irish Museum of Art, where there's a large exhibition of paintings by Jack Yeats, WB's younger brother.

* On reading this interview Mike Scott sent me the following by email: "Re. the eternal 'what do you do for fun' thing, actually the reason you don't get a reply is it's the wrong question! It contains within it a scepticism, an unspoken 'but' and implied attachment to a set of values - the hedonistic thing - which I don't find fun - and this switches me off and makes the question impossible to answer in that form. But the fact is, I have fun, in the sense of enjoying myself, pretty much everything I do; I've made it that way. If you asked me 'what gives you pleasure' that would be a much easier question to answer. Friendship, good clothes, travel, new experiences, great writing and music, learning, furthering my understanding, good food and fabulous tastes, a sense of momentum and adventure about what I'm doing... all those things, plus the business of making music and working on it, of course."


* If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this about The Waterboys.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

The Wychwood festival at Cheltenham

Approaching the Wychwood music festival for the first time is a slightly bizarre experience. It's in the beautiful grounds of Cheltenham race course, which has a really imposing stand, producing the sensation that one should be wearing a big hat and preparing to shout "move yer blooming arse" at the top of one's voice, rather than trying to figure out which way is upwind from the chemical toilets.

It turns out that the festival is not, after all, named after a beer but after a forest that used to cover much of the area. And what an area it is. When the sun shone - which it did on Friday evening and a little on Saturday - the scenery was breathtaking. The racetrack's on a gentle slope so you can see for many miles in several directions and was set off by hundreds of standards and pennants fluttering briskly over the campsite, like medieval bunting.

The music was, at first glance, rather long on fellas from the 1970s and up-and-coming acts. 3 Daft Monkeys had already been and gone by the time the tent was pitched and Cornershop were pointing out that everybody needs a bosom for a pillow, which under the circumstances sounded like a missed opportunity for a novelty camping device...

After a warm sunset and a cold beer, the conversation revolved around the programming that put Rook & the Ravens on at the same time as their older, more famous fellow Mancunians, The Charlatans; and whether the squaddy who was upsetting everyone with his alleged stand-up comedy in the BBC tent (eventually getting booed off) would ever be any good? Nothing like a good scrap to raise the interest level.

Wedged in a tent later - the car was parked elsewhere so everything we needed had been decanted - it raised a smile when we figured out that the shouting in the style of Bohemian Rhapsody coming from the other end of the site was the silent disco. Then excitingly - sorry about this, but I couldn't not mention it - in the morning we awoke to discover that a crime against camping had been committed.

The down sleeping bag my friend Sheridan had brought, and which had last seen service in the Australian outback, had burst during the night, turning the inside of the already overstuffed tent into a kind of anaphylactic snowdome. A new one was procured for a tenner locally but I was still looking unusually fluffy several hours later.

Brushing distractedly at my clothing, there was just time to appreciate the sunlit view of a nearby wold with a tree on top shaped like a shark's fin, before the weather started to deteriorate. Welcome distractions from this included a terrific young ukelele band called The Ukelles (above) busking on site instead of revising for their GCSE maths at nearby Bournside school on Monday. Good luck to Sarah White, Francesca Fiorentini and Leah Collins with their fun fun fun. Perhaps someone will give them a stage and a microphone next time?

The first amplified treat of the day was the Eliza Carthy Band, during which Ms Carthy swooped and waltzed around the stage with her fiddle in stately fashion, rhymed vicar with knickers in a song called Wings and caused me to dwell on the lyrics of the epic party song Blood on my Boots. At the risk of getting a wickedly aimed swipe from her bow, I was left puzzled by how the blood gets on the boots?  Why would cocaine in your champagne make your nose bleed? Suggestions on an email...**

Then - oh joy! - there was Sarah Savoy, the self-style Cajun queen of white trash, and her Francadians, who appeared to be ruled by her with a rod of iron. She claimed to be six foot two in her floral housecoat and when she sang Folsom Prison Blues it didn't seem entirely implausible that she had once shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die. We set out to validate her height claims (see above) by measuring her against a benchmark (Sheridan, right) but I'm scared to post the results. Far safer to say that I was sorry to have missed the cookery demonstration that sometimes accompanies her gigs. You can catch that in Bristol at the beginning of July and possibly at Cecil Sharp House in London on July 1.

I had to stop watching Robyn Hitchcock because his stylised meanderings about what he described as "all this shamanistic stuff" stirred in me a strong desire to punch him in the face. But I expect he gets that a lot. For my lights, he was right up there with the man who spent the weekend shouting about biscuits on a microphone (selling Oreos) as contender for most annoying feature of the festival. Perhaps if he hadn't spoken between songs?

Interesting tidbits of gossip from an unnamed festival source included that the man operating the bouncy slide had turned up with three of the contraptions instead of the one that had been agreed and attempted to bring a small army of people with him, which hadn't gone down very well with the festival organisers and led to threats involving the application of a stanley knife to rubber. Also, I heard that some of the festival staff were staying in accommodation inside the racing stand but that it's designed for jockeys, making it hard to doze off with one's lower legs hanging over the end of the bunks. I was told later - by a reliable source in the queue for the showers - that jockeys' accommodation usually comes with a sauna for last-minute weight loss, so swings and roundabouts.

Saturday evening drew on and I realised that I like Elfynn more every time I see them, and really didn't understand why they weren't on the main stage. And then there was Urusen, over in the BBC Introducing tent, who I first wrote about a couple of years ago and who have recently been recording an album at Peter Gabriel's Real World Studios. They generated some real excitement and quite right too: their songs sound as if they are perpetually on the cusp of breaking out into Mumford-style stompers but only get there often enough to leave you wanting more. They were transcendent.

Seeing The Waterboys was also a *significant musical experience* for me. I've owned three of their albums over the years, all of which have been nicked. And as a youngster I read a review of The Whole of the Moon in Melody Maker, by a journalist called Chris Roberts, which made such an impression on me that I thought for the first time that writing for a newspaper might be a good way to earn a living. I can't find a copy of that review anywhere, despite having spent quite some time looking.

So forget Robyn Hitchcock: for shamanistic endeavour Steve Wickham would win hands down. The Waterboys' fiddler looks as if he knows stuff about music, an impression that was enhanced by, as far as I can remember, his saying nothing at all. When they played that song a little knot in my gut undid itself and I might as well have floated off into the night sky. Thank you and a very good night to you too.

On Sunday morning the first thing I really noticed was a man dressed as Captain Jack Sparrow buying coffee, closely followed by a woman dressed as a banana holding hands with a child dressed as a child. There was a 24-hour cafe on the campsite called In the Night Garden, which coupled with the "family friendly" nature of Wychwood and the fact that it's not noticeably any different from any other festival I've been to - just more munchkins - made me wonder whether there is something about festivals that addresses the changing position of children in British society?

I mean, I know it's good for adults and children to enjoy things together but is it right to take children camping in an environment where there is so much drinking going on? And aren't parents making a rod for their own backs by taking their kids somewhere with so much potential for pester power? Every child there, although they were a well-behaved lot, appeared to be in some kind of pricey-looking festival outfit. And what will they do as teenagers to distinguish themselves socially if they've already done the festival circuit with their mums and dads? I just ask the questions...

Roddy Woomble was, I think, mistakenly introduced as Roddy Womble (relating to the above). I had to get closer to the stage to realise that Woomble was the one sitting unassumingly to the side and not, as I'd prejudged, in the middle. His bass player had a lovely Aran waistcoat and when they played a song about Scotland they made it rain. I liked them so much I bought a CD.

Segue of the afternoon was from Woombles to Wurzels. But sadly I missed them doing I've got a brand new combine harvester because I was in the big top tent mesmerised by Chapelier Fou, one of two French acts sent on a grant to show us how it's done over there. He sampled his own fiddle playing, mixed it with electronica and topped it off with perfect English grammar. "I am French. But do not worry: I will not be singing. Please may I have fewer lights?" Carla Bruni would have been proud of the ambassadorial qualities that he and Moussu T et les Jovants - the second French act - displayed. Women appeared involuntarily to gravitate, fascinated, toward Chapelier Fou's brand of uninhibited geekiness, until there was a sizeable crescent of them gathered around the front of the stage.

I tore myself away in time to catch The Wurzels' brilliant version of Ruby (originally by The Kaiser Chiefs), which had a chorus that went Ruby Ruby Ruby Ruby, ooh-ah ooh-ah ooh-ah. Laugh? I nearly burst my smocking.

Eddi Reader had told me earlier that she became a musician out of loneliness. "I relied on singing to keep myself company when I was very small. That and the guitar I acquired when I was ten became my lifelong solace and companion through the vagaries of dealing with the human race."

But she's obviously had some practice with people since, for one of her audience was clamouring for her attention so loudly that she told him to take off his fright wig before she did it for him and stuck it up his a*** At that point the wig was tossed on stage, where Reader put it on and then did a passable impression of Susan Boyle singing Memory from Cats. The frightfully drunk owner of the wig was twice seen being escorted form the grounds by security but had clearly dug a tunnel in preparation for this eventuality, as he was back again for the finale.

Transglobal Underground were very exciting. But the last big noise of the weekend for me was ahab, a five-piece country-and-western-style boy band from Hackney and thereabouts - not to be confused with a German "doom metal" outfit of the same name - who were invited to play their first festival at Cropredy last year. Someone had dropped out and a video they'd submitted of themselves busking on Brick Lane was unearthed. Wychwood was only their second festival but they and their plaid shirts stormed the big top and one can very easily imagine a future in which they get taken to the bosom of Nashville. They sing important-sounding songs about girls, do four-part harmony as if they were born to it and come highly recommended by The Glamour Cave.

For them, I should think it was the second of a million festivals.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

** This just in from Eliza Carthy on Twitter: "The blood gets there after the rufie in your drink causes you to fall on your nose. As if my nose needed further squashing."