More than halfway through his set for the Green Note at The Old Queen's Head on Monday night, Richard Shindell said: "I would like to thank Steve Knightley for the loan of his guitar. He was supposed to bring my CDs from his shed to my gig in Wiltshire yesterday: he was supposed to bring them to the festival that I came from this morning.
"And he didn't.
"And he felt so badly about it that I felt bad for him for feeling so bad. We both felt very bad.
"So I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself. I said 'lend me your guitar for two weeks'."
Shindell, you see, lives in Argentina and for some reason or other had not brought an acoustic guitar with him despite it being his instrument of choice.
"And Steve said," with rising intonation, as one pleading for it not to be the case, "'Really?'
"I got a text message from Steve Knightley just before I came on stage. I was afraid it would say something like 'Don't use my guitar tonight'.
"So I didn't read it."
Ha!
* The pictures on this blog were taken by the very talented David Firn, who could be reached here, if you were interested in his work.
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The mind boggled. The project sounded like fun though: most of The Urban Folk Quartet and several hundred kids were going to be making a helluva racket in the Albert Hall. Now I love The UFQ, who deserve a much wider audience than they currently command. And I love the Albert Hall - for that moment when you enter the sonic cathedral and your head involuntarily flicks backwards while your pupils widen; it's a space that produces a physiological reaction. Plus kids in great numbers cease to be kids really and simply become a super-impressionable crowd, something to be bent to one's will. At least, that's what a totalitarian dictator would say and all my favourite teachers had a touch of Stalin about them.
That's Joe Broughton, though, for the sake of clarity.
So it was pretty exciting that this particular group of 650 kids from the Bradford area had been roped in to take part in the Music For Youth Schools' Prom. Not that much corralling had been necessary, judging by the alacrity with which they were throwing themselves into the proceedings, their purple and orange T-shirts a riot of pointillism in secondary colours - and that was before the music even started.
The concept was familiar to me because I'd seen Broughton, Paloma Trigas (above) and Tom Chapman with The Stamp Collective at the Vortex in Dalston about two years ago - although that stage of this idea's evolution there were about 30 music students involved, instead of 650 11 to 21-year-olds.
"Yes," said Broughton. "This is the biggest group we've ever worked with. And lots of them had never played a musical instrument before - that's why we're a bit drum-heavy."
The concept was born back in 1997, when Broughton (above) left the Birmingham Conservatoire to join the Albion Band - but was invited back to the college that autumn to run The Folk Ensemble, a group that performed by ear, its numbers expanding and contracting depending on who was available. The results impressed - try and imagine the level of energy required to organise 30 musicians using only your voice and your body, let alone 650 - and a similar invitation followed from the Barbican; then a series of commissions including The Stamp Collective, Wildfire Folk and Music for Youth. Alumni have included Jim Moray, The Old Dance School and McNeill and Heys.
Here's a short video explaining what was going on in Bradford that also catches, in some small measure, the excitement of Monday's prom, which was the only performance by the Vivendi Sounds Bradford Massed Ensemble.
Though the logistics of getting so many people from one end of the country to the other for a one-off gig were daunting, the result was jaw-dropping.
Around 250 of the kids were also in two of the evening's featured orchestras - the Vivendi Youth Orchestra or the Kirklees Youth Symphony Orchestra - and therefore had cellos to swirl on the spot where they stood or flutes to wave in the air, like a field of silver reeds.
There were also a surprising number of electric guitars, which made me suspect the influence of the Wii game Guitar Hero: I've never seen massed electric guitars before. But there were also a great many young people involved who had never had a musical experience. It was a heady combination of melody, rhythm, dance and atmospherics and I particularly liked the serious-faced young ladies in their saris twirling in unison at the beginning of the show. Those are their shoes (the photographer, David Firn, and I were invited to attend a dress rehearsal, as well as the show).
Broughton explained that the approach had been entirely predicated on the strengths of the kids, that it had taken nine months to pull together - 20 hours rehearsal for each participant, bringing it to a total of 13,000 hours - and that none of the performers had used written-down music. "What a lot of people would do in this situation is say 'Well, you need to get some tabla players and and some English folk players and that'll do the trick. But what you'd end up with would not be fusion, just a lot of things happening simultaneously. We didn't audition anyone and my 'composition' was the result of collaboration and finding tunes that were memorable and simple but which would allow us to build around them."
"It was totally inclusive," explained Paloma. 'We had some people who don't usually get that level of attention or support, including some with concentration issues. But it was all about a burst of positivity." Something she's uniquely suited to. "We saw some people literally switch on and lots of them are talking about what they're going to do next musically."
Tom Chapman - one of the subtlest percussionists I've seen - was highly visible at the front of the stage, on this occasion keeping the hundreds of tabla and other drummers pinned to the rhythm through the use of a cow bell (with Tom, above) and exaggerated arm movements. But, boy, did it work. "I'm now known by Music For Youth as Cowbell Tom," he grinned. "For months they had no idea I did anything else - they thought I was a professional cow bell player. Then the other day some of the organisers came to an Urban Folk Quartet gig and realised that I play other stuff as well... The triangle, for instance."
It's hard to do justice to the scale of what was achieved at the Albert Hall on Monday night. It was in tune, it was in time, it was beautiful and it used the sheer number of people standing on stage to its advantage by combining movement with sound. It was breath-taking in its ambition and awesome in its accomplishment. And that's before you even begin to think what the experience meant for the 650 young people performing on the best stage in the world and how they'll carry it and its ramifications with them for the rest of their lives.
* And here's a blog post about their performance at Cropredy last year.
* If you would like to contact David Firn about any of these photos or other projects you think he may be interested in you can do so here.
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At a time where the young are often jobless and as a result the golden "olden days" telescope backwards from the 1980s, everything retro and handmade has recently grown an undeserved glamour. This has got to be a good thing for the Green Note in Camden, where the same red velvet curtains appear to have been hanging for at least the past thirty years, their folds retaining the flavours of delicious vegetarian meals long eaten and - if you listen carefully - pockets of music from the folk dimension linger, to be emitted in faintly fluorescing puffs as the lights dim.
The place has a kind of magic.
My friend David Firn came along with his camera to try and capture some of it the other night, when Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker supported Sam Sweeney and Hannah James. He previously did the same at The Old Queen's Head for O'Hooley and Tidow and Bella Hardy, with some success, I think.
Ben jumped up early to re-tune his guitars again, producing nods of agreement between Josienne and Michelle, Ben's girlfriend, that this was a symptom of his, um, fastidiousness when it comes to anything with strings.
Josienne (above) and Ben had tailored their set to the idea that they were at a folk club, which on the one hand meant that they gave a reverence to the standards. We got Silver Dagger - beloved of folky fathers everywhere for the line "My daddy is a handsome devil" - Green Grows the Laurel and an encore of Who Knows Were the Time Goes? On the other hand, they've just started doing a version of Dolly Parton's Jolene but left it off the list for being insufficiently trad, which made me droop a little with disappointment.
A good song is a good song, whatever accent it comes wrapped in. You can hear their stunning recorded version here.
That's Josienne doing her thing.
By the way, if you carry on down that Soundcloud playlist, you may well find that the two of them have written a superb country song called Homemade Heartache. It's been covered several times already, despite being only a year old.
Sam Sweeney and Hannah James had driven down from Sheffield for the gig.
These two are only in their late twenties but have a timelessness about them. Sam is the multi-instrumentalist whose wild fiddling kicks off Bellowhead's New York Girlsso that the hairs stand up on the back of your neck(complete there with a ludicrous introduction by Jools Holland, also a classic of its kind). And Hannah, whose stately accordian and unerringly tuneful voice are set off by the precision and muscularity of her clogging.
There is an attractively closed quality to her: she has a stage presence like a tiny fist. It's as if the two of them were reincarnated from somewhere where all the light is sepier and dray horses still rule the cobbles. And I know it's not Sheffield because I was there recently...
Congratulations on your engagement to a long-haired forest ranger, Hannah.
He was at the back, near the bar.
And there's the set list, which saves me the trouble of running through it. Something really unusual about Sam and Hannah's sound is that sometimes it's really hard telling the accordian part from the fiddle as they wrap around each other, which is surprising when you think how unalike the two instruments are.
Things we learned during the course of the evening included that there is a place near Shrewsbury where the bunting is knitted (Woolverhampton?), Hannah has a diary with a picture of Alan Titchmarsh on the front, and that until Sam took part in something called Men on the Fiddle recently, no one had ever referred to him within his hearing as "a man".
Other reminders of his youthfulness included that when he was growing up he believed the term "primadona" referred to anything that had taken place before the advent of Madonna, the singer.
I know.
He also speaks good French and once, we were told, introduced a gig entirely in that language, which seemed to go well, right up to he point at which it turned out that the word for "ring" is easy to confuse with the word for "sheep". Clarification arrived in the form of 600 French-speaking people baa'ing at him.
This gig was wonderful, there was no baa'ing this time and if you missed it the good news is that Sam and Hannah have been invited back to the Green Note early next year. Get in.
* You can check out the Green Note's forthcoming gigs here. Ben and Josienne are playing there again on October 15.
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Mostly this is a photo essay of Sam Lee's Nest Collective gig at The Old Queen's Head in Islington last night, where Bella Hardy & Ewan Macpherson played alongside O'Hooley and Tidow. They'd all driven a long way to get there but it was properly memorable.
And not just for the music...
For early on in the set, which was two mini ones by O'Hooley and Tidow, sandwiching a longer one by Hardy & Macpherson, Belinda O'Hooley became so passionately involved with her piano that the instrument - let's call him Roland - crashed to the floor in a rock'n'roll moment that excited a competitive streak in the others.
"I'm going to wait until the end of our set before smashing my guitar up," volunteered Macpherson indicating the back wall.
"And I'm going to smash my fiddle over my own head," added Hardy in a spirit of one-up-manship that showed the big city had certainly raised her blood. You go girl!
Fortunately there was a spare stand and O'Hooley and Tidow were able to return to their first number, Hidden from the Sun, without causing any further alarm among the more conservative members of the audience.
Or perhaps that was her.
Anyway, David Firn, of the camera, had only just arrived when the piano smashing incident happened and I was afraid he was getting entirely the wrong idea about this folk music stuff, what with all the loud noises and sudden movements. But then he went and took these pictures, which have a kind of loving quality to them, I think.
That's Bella H in the foreground. They are his copyright, although if anyone's looking for a photographer I'll take the credit for having discovered him when he was only a struggling editor at the Financial Times.
I should say that there was also an appearance by Tom Paley,
whose fiddles those are, tuned differently from each other - in case you wondered why he needed two. And that in a weirdly prophetic moment David took this one of Bella's feet
which is both a reflection of his wide-ranging and artistically literate interest in ladies' shoes (honest) and a throw-forward to my next blog post.
They're waiting for it avidly (isn't that a great pic?)
A search was undertaken for a version of Mein Deern on YouTube to insert here because it's my favourite song from their last album, The Fragile, but all I could find was this. And I find myself wondering: is it really possible that there is a Mein Deern ringtone? Really?
So here's Gentleman Jack instead.
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