Seattle Anglophile Dylan Carlson plays Reynardine like you never heard it before

This was a real surprise, and one that may intrigue Fairport Convention.

"Come and see the man who bought the shotgun that Kurt Cobain killed himself with play some rock and roll," was the invitation. Who could resist such a morbid offer? Not me...

Dylan Carlson was best friend of the unhappy Cobain, which puts him if not actually in the rock and roll hall of fame, then lurking somewhere in an anteroom nearby. Rock loves a good tragedy and so, if we are completely honest, do most of us so long as it's happening to someone we don't really know. Carlson carries with him a trace of that mortal glamour and, accordingly, his later show sold out so quickly that The Lexington cannily decided to schedule another at 5pm. This also sold out, if I'm not very much mistaken, despite starting at a time when only freelances and students were really likely to make it.

It was quite a show though. Dirty, fuzzy, grungey guitars played by seated musicians - first Thurston Moore and friend, then Carlson accompanied by a really sympatico drummer - in the Lexington's upstairs room with all the windows blocked up, organised in such a way that it was completely mesmerising: it felt like a cross between a rock and roll show and an extended dope-smoking session. Or something that the Barbican might put on as part of a modernist season.

It was great: a mind-altering musical experience.

And then Carlson pulled a cultural rabbit out of the hat. A young female vocalist came on, the drummer departed temporarily, and they proceeded to do the filthiest, weirdest version of Reynardine that you're ever likely to hear. The grunge curled and twisted around the familiar tune as the singer, who went by the name of Teresa Colmonacco, gave it a kind of haunted-house Sandy Denny without overdoing it. It was perfectly judged and fantastically surprising under the circumstances.

It turns out that Carlson is an Anglophile, in a semi-mystical, imagined Albion, renaissance faire kind of a way. His Twitter handle - @drcarlsonalbion - reflects this and when I asked him about Reynardine he said: "Liege and Lief was one of the first albums I ever had. It was given to me by my uncle, so the songs on it are all part of my personal history."

I wonder whether his curiosity has taken him to Cropredy yet? He may be ripe for a crossover project, clearly loves the material and does something darkly enjoyable to it.

* If you were intrigued by the mention of renaissance faires you may also be interested in this, about the Mediaeval Baebes.

* 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

Dave Swarbrick on Sandy Denny, Australia and unicorns

Dave Swarbrick chases unicorns. Our hour-long conversation was notable for glimpses of a series of  unattainable objects of desire.

But first he wanted to make it clear that he is in good health. "I'm not so bad at all," Fairport Convention's former fiddler said, in a tone that lightly implied that even if he was, he was buggered if he was going to tell me. "The hearing's pretty good these days: I've had the [hearing] aids for a long, long time, which has given me a chance to get used to them. I had the double lung transplant in 2004 but I was asleep so I don't remember much about that... I like to say that I'm mainly 72 years old but parts of me are much younger. Tell them all that I'm ever so good."

(Here he is looking impressively healthy in a snap taken recently by Chris Bates. Our interview was on the telephone, he was verbally on fine form and would never have guessed he was using hearing aids, except to say that there are few people I know in their 70s with hearing that good.)

In fact he's embarking on a world tour, beginning with the Cambridge festival with Martin Carthy this July, a series of gigs in Canada in August, followed by a UK tour with Carthy later this year and then in the new year he's going to South Africa.

"That's not like anything I've tackled before," he said. "There are 53 of us, musicians from all over the world and we're each going over there to stay for a week and spend time with an African musician - could be folk or jazz, anything. You team up as buddies, eat together and what have you. Then you go out and meet some of the up-and-coming artists who live near by. At the end of the week a film is made by a South African TV station and with any luck it should go all round the world."

He's also recently agreed to become patron of Folkstock, a September festival - new this year - being set up by the redoubtable Helen Meissner, whose impressive badgering skills also roped me in to do this interview. As a chartered badgerer myself I can recommend Helen to anyone who wants something folky done. Once named Hertfordshire's businesswoman of the year, she has both Swarb and I on the run, which in this context is a good thing. There is also a solo tour planned for next year under the Folkstock umbrella.

I once heard Dave say in an interview that the reason he loves the fiddle is because it allows him to be "dirty" and after a few minutes consideration came to the conclusion that he meant musically? "Yes. If you have just the one line of melody you can play it however you want. Once you make a fiddle electric you can do nearly anything with it: there are all kinds of gadgets that will really dirty it up. So if there's something enchanting, like Tam Lin, that requires you to be off-the-wall, spooky and mysterious you can really do it with a wah-wah pedal."

He's fond of his gadgets. We'd already established that he uses an iPad and likes a piece of software called Sibelius, which can be used for composing. And then there are the fiddles themselves. "Every violin player is searching for the perfect fiddle. But it doesn't exist." Unicorn number one crashed around in the undergrowth a little way off.

Is that a kind of mirage then?

"The fiddle is a very expensive mirage because it leads you on to try better and better instruments. I was watching a film about Heifetz the other night and there was some footage of him playing in the 1920s. One of the many things that struck me about him was that whichever period of his life the footage was from, he always played the same fiddle."

So not every violinist embarks on this quest?

"Ah... You don't know how many he had at home. They are just wonderful things, fiddles. They're not like any other instrument: a violin is like a living thing. It changes over its life but then you change as well. Even if you have normal hearing, you're not going to have the same hearing on a dry day as on a wet day. Your ears change slightly all the time."

He'd clearly given the matter a great deal of thought, especially as the loudness of his electric fiddle has been partially blamed for his hearing loss. Life can be cruel.

So what was with the three-year trip to Australia in 1994? "I went there because I got married and I came back because I got divorced. I loved Australia."

There was the sound of hooves again...

"I went there a lot. And knew it even before I went there because I used to record with AL Lloyd and he would tell me about it. We made three or four albums of Australian songs together and then I finally went there in 1971 - and about 20 times after that. I met an Australian woman called Paula Crane at a gig one day and we fell in love. And I thought 'That's handy because I like Australia'.

"She was an heiress to a fortune that was made in plugs, tiles and mines, and I'd say the money had something to do with the breakup. It made the arguments a touch more intense. And when we split up I got a place on my own in the Blue mountains in New South Wales. I was being a bit of a hippy but the eighteen months I had there were wonderful - the scenery was just breathtaking. I'd come back to the UK and tour a bit and then go back - the money would go so much further over there. You could buy a whole tray of avocados for three dollars.

"So I lived in the mountains in this house that was built on stilts to keep the snakes out. Australia has the top eight most dangerous snakes in the world, you know? And there were funnelweb spiders. But none of them got into the house the whole time I was there. Then after a while it started to pall and I wanted to come home... they would have made me leave eventually anyway, when my visa ran out."

Apparently being divorced from an Aussie doesn't cut much ice with immigration.

"It was not an amicable split but I saw her again three or four years back and I don't regret marrying her at all. I thought it was worth a try... and I had some wonderful times, saw some fantastic wildlife. You know, once I counted 26 cockatoos in a tree in my garden. I really really love the place."

When he came back to Blighty he lived with Alistair Hulett in Herefordshire for a while and there was revolutionary politics in the air at their house. I asked whether there are any protest songs from that period and what he made of the relative quietness of the folk scene on the subject of our present ills... I can only think of Show of Hands' Arrogance, Ignorance and Greed, though would be happy to stand corrected.

"I must be contented these days," he mused. "I haven't written any protest songs for a while now. They would have to come from the young... There's Billy Bragg, but he's not really young... sorry Billy. I don't know what the young are doing really: they should be writing protest songs. There's a lot to protest about.

"The difference between when I started and now is that back then nobody had really heard of folk music, they didn't really know what it was. It used to be all about Centre 42, which was related to the TUC resolution that the arts should be taken to the masses. The trouble was that the masses didn't want it."

This rang a bell with me because I grew up partly in Norfolk and we read Arnold Wesker's Roots at school, which was about this exact thing.

"But now folk music is so prevalent among the young that it's become cut-throat. Not cut-throat in a nasty way. Everyone seems very nice, they're a lovely bunch of kids. But there are a lot of them all chasing after the same gigs, so they have to be a bit careful not to upset anybody. But someone who really upset everybody... they could still succeed."

Wise words.

"The trouble is that the media is the same now as it was in the old days. If you were a communist you didn't get much airplay."

Well, that was a long time ago - before the end of the cold war changed a lot of things - and a lot of anger with the system has become mainstream since 2008. But Swarb's right. You don't see a lot of anger in the folk scene these days - unless it's of the peevish variety on internet message boards - and it could be fear of upsetting people that holds the youngsters back. That, and the vast amount of debt they have all accumulated as a result of getting a university level education. Now there's something to get angry about: being financially oppressed by your parents' generation.

The conversation turned to Sandy Denny.

"You've got to understand, I have never got over her dying," he said. "It's very hard to listen to her stuff. I did these two Sandy tours and I found it very hard. You know it occurred to me the other day that if she was alive now she would have grandchildren, possibly she'd be a great grandmother... and it was very weird. It seems weird because Sandy was one of those who fell in the war. 'Age shall not weary them as we that are left grow old' and all that. She'll never be any older than she was." Pics below courtesy of the lovely Andrew Batt and  www.sandydenny.org.uk

Were you close?

"Very close."

Were you her boyfriend?

"Yes, I was her boyfriend... Well, I wouldn't call myself a boyfriend. It was more casual than that. She had a fierce upbringing, you know. Her mother was a fierce woman and Sandy herself was very unsure of what she was doing. She didn't have a lot of confidence. She was the kind of person who if you said 'I really liked that, Sandy' she would say 'Why, didn't you like the other?'

"She was very loving and super smart, she saw through people very quickly: she was a real character."

A lot of her lyrics are about loneliness.

"Well yes. But to an extent most touring musicians are lonely and if you are a woman it's worse because probably you're torn between being at home and being on the road. Admittedly Sandy often toured with her  husband... but that brought its own difficulties. I've been in bands with other women and it's always been difficult for them. I mean, what do they do? Do they become one of the boys?"

So what's your idea of a good time these days?

"Probably going out antiquing. I collect English watercolours, from Georgian stuff in 1750 to 1900. It was a glorious time for English watercolours and you'd be surprised how cheaply you can pick them up. I love to go out hunting and then finding a frame for them. One day I'll find a Samuel Palmer. He lived from 1805-81."

A white horsey flash thundered past, very close this time, as he spelled out the painter's name.

No Dave Swarbrick interview is complete without a question about the Telegraph obituary that was wrongly published when he was ill in hospital with emphysema in 1999. I'd heard that he took to selling signed copies of it at his gigs?

"I printed them out and sold autographed copies with RIP on them for one or two pounds. But then my partner got a bit superstitious about it and I got a letter from the Telegraph telling me to stop because it was a breach of their copyright."

Cheek!

"Yes. So I wrote back saying that I loved legal trouble and they should bring it on. A paper in Yorkshire printed a whole big story about it..."

I explained that I used to work at the Telegraph and vaguely remembered being there when the whole thing happened. He asked whether it wasn't a bit odd for someone with my family background to be working at a right-wing paper and I ended up explaining - as I often do - that the division of labour is such on a newspaper that unless you happen to work on the comment desk your personal politics are irrelevant most of the time.

"I've got a copy of the Telegraph in front of me right now," he admitted. "I buy it for the crossword."

I'd been told to ask him about the Dalai Lama story...

"I was in hospital, post-op, and one of the Fairport fellers, Chris Leslie who plays the fiddle, was in Australia with the band at a festival. And one of the events was a bunch of Tibetan monks doing a demo of something or other. At the time there had just been a benefit for me at Birmingham town hall and Chris was wearing a T-shirt saying 'Swarb Aid' and sitting in the front row. After the event one of the monks came up to Chris and asked him 'How is Swarb?' And Chris was absolutely gobsmacked and said 'I think he's OK, recovering in the hospital.' And the monk said 'Please tell him that the Dalai Lama is praying for him'."

Hmmm.

"And Chris comes back and he's all full of it and he tells my partner and somehow - I don't know how - it ended up in the local paper in Coventry. "Dalai Lama prays for Swarb" I had a particular consultant who was always telling me to walk around the ward, so I put that cutting over my bed in an attempt to get him off my back. Walking around the ward was very tiring..."

And I hear you've been inducted into the Coventry Hall of Fame?

"Yes! It's a plaque and it went up about three months ago in the two-tone complex on the Walsgrave Road. There was a little ceremony, there was a group of us. We got the plaque and gave a little speech, then stood around in the rain and had our photo taken. I asked them to only put it 3'6'' up the wall so I can go along and polish it now and again."

And how is the biography coming along? Is your wife still writing it?

"It's all been handed over to Dr Jason Wilson in Canada, who is a published author and a serious writer. Anyone who's got any information they think should be included can still hand it over to us but we'll forward it to him. I didn't want it to just be made up of loads of anecdotes, you see? I wanted something more serious about where the music came from... so it will probably come out after I'm gone."

Why? Are you planning to go any time soon?

"No. But I think he might be a bit of a slow worker. He's an academic."

* 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

Richard Shindell on zen and the art of being lucky

Richard Shindell is in the UK supporting Show of Hands for three weeks. They kicked off on Tuesday in Salisbury and I found myself pushing through the glass doors of the City Hall, where I was greeted in the rather odd-smelling foyer by Shindell, who was concerned about the sound-check.

I first heard his music over ten years ago while staying in the tall, grey stone Edinburgh home of a retired admiral from the British navy and his wife. The admiral played it over breakfast - he was probably the poshest folky I've ever met - and he had great taste in music. "I did a session on a Scottish radio station in 1998. He probably heard that," mused Shindell.

The two things that you always read about this American singer/songwriter are (1) that he lives in Argentina with his family and (2) he spent time living in a Zen Buddhist monastery and then a seminary in Manhattan, making him one of life's questing souls. His songs are illustrious thumbnail sketches, historical snapshots populated by vivid characters with serious internal lives, and wry, sometimes hilarious commentary on relationships - in one case, with a donkey called Clara. His live album, Courier, which I first heard over toast thirteen years ago, remains top of my personal pops: something I tried to avoid embarrassing him by saying but didn't entirely succeed with.

However, I asked him some stuff too. For instance, why Zen Buddhism? Was it just a phase he went through? "I still consider myself to be a Buddhist, though I was brought up Episcopalian," he said, making a conversational excursion to explain the origins of the Episcopalian church in the US when I looked a bit blank.

"I moved away from Christianity and went to the Buddhist monastery in upstate New York after graduating from college. My introduction to it was that I'd been taken there on a weekend trip by a professor of religion and it was a very powerful experience. But because of the way I was raised I still had a soft spot for my original faith - hence the return to the seminary later.

"There'd been many good things about the church. For instance, I learnt to sing there and in particular I learnt to sing harmony: I enjoyed that part of it. But from an intellectual point of view I moved away. We are not raising our children as Christians - we're raising them in an a-religious household.

"Sometimes, though, I wish that my children could have some of the experiences of being in church that were worthwhile. By that I mean the community of people gathering every Sunday, everyone facing in the same direction, praying to something they don't understand."

Very Zen...

He seemed surprised to be asked whether he'd known any other Buddhists at the time he made the change and had to think about it for a while before admitting that, no, he didn't think he had - which seems bold. "But I studied religion in college and before I was 18 I was reading DT Suzuki and Alan Watts. Then I studied philosophy - Thomas Merton, who wrote a book called Zen and the Birds of Appetite - and came to appreciate the practice of meditating, of trying to stop the inner chatter and the ego that comes with it."

The form of Buddhism he gravitated towards was Soto, which he described as "a little bit more fuzzy" than the more regimented Rinzai school "which is where the bad-assed Zen Buddhists go". But what the Zen and Episcopalian parts of his life have shared is a liberality that he described as "ecumenical".

He has a serious way with words.

So how's Argentina doing these days? I read a really good book by an FT journalist called Jimmy Burns about the Falklands War from an Argentine perspective and got an inkling of the battering it's had. Shindell lives there because it's where his wife's from.

"Argentina's better than it was ten years ago," he nodded, "...in as far as the economy's recovered in some ways from the debacle of 2001, when there was a kind of economic landslide.

"It's interesting. What happened was analogous to what's happening in Greece right now, because one of the things that provoked the trouble was that they had an economic system in place in which one peso was worth one dollar and the two currencies didn't float.

"Pegging the peso to the dollar had the effect of making anything you produced in Argentina very expensive to export. The people who had money had incredible purchasing power as a result - it is known now as the era of 'deme dos' or 'give me two' because they had dollars to spend, loads of them. But it had a horrible effect on internal pricing.

"It was unsustainable and when the currencies were finally unpegged the peso went from being worth one dollar to only twenty five cents. Then the mudslide happened.

"Before that everybody was making money in pesos. But every time you bought something big you'd do it in dollars. Then all of a sudden you were making a quarter of what you'd been making before, but the mortgage was still in dollars - everyone was going to lose their houses.

"So what happened was that the government decided to denominate all of these loans in pesos... " which helped home-owning Argentinians. But Shindell makes his living, on the whole, by touring the States - which obviously earns him dollars. "It was incredible for us because in one day our mortgage was cut to a quarter of its previous value and we were able to pay it off!"

It is often said that fortune favours the brave: in this instance, those brave enough to move to a foreign country.

Indeed, an abiding impression of Shindell is that he's a magnet for good fortune - "I've not had to strive very hard" he said at one point, though that probably says more about his attitude to work than anything else - whose luck is generated partly by a talent that draws people to him. For instance, when a week's worth of UK tour was cancelled last year he found himself seeking a bolt hole and was introduced to Steve Knightley, of Show of Hands. Knightley knew his work and invited him to Devon for the week, which is how they became friends.

I was trying to avoid asking him questions about his songs, as it was clear from reading previous interviews that he doesn't much appreciate scrutiny of his motives. I think this is fair enough: what's the point of going to all the trouble of crafting something beautiful only to have some idiot come along, wanting to dismantle it in public? For similar reasons I'm not often moved to try and describe music in words: what's the point when you can insert a clip from YouTube?

However, he wrote a gripping song about a child soldier in the Confederate army - called Arrowhead (below) - that usually makes me cry when I hear it.

"I'm sorry," he said, unnecessarily, before sitting forward in his seat as if something important had occurred to him. "I'm afraid I have some bad news about that song though."

Oh?

"Have you heard of GE Smith? He plays with Bob Dylan's band? He's done a version of it, but he wrote an extra verse for the end. And he has a rather acute sense of military justice."

No! He didn't!

"Yes. I'm afraid he killed the boy. His final verse has my underage Confederate deserter sitting on a white horse with a noose around his neck before someone slaps the horse from behind."

I am oddly devastated by this, as I've spent a great deal of time empathising not only with the child in the song - "for god's sake, someone give that kid a gun!" - but also with his mother, to whom he's speaking in the lyric.

"I'm all in favour of the folk process... It's all fair. But I wrote to GE Smith, and asked him 'What were you thinking?' And he wrote back 'I just thought that boy had to die'." Shindell said this in a deep drawl, as if Smith were speaking through him.

He let this thought percolate for a while.

"So I sang it that way myself just once, to see how it felt. But it felt wrong... I'm happy that Smith liked the song deeply enough to get into the nuts and bolts of it though."

His songs have been covered by Joan Baez, for whom he wrote the heartbreaking Reunion Hill, and this was also recently reworked by Fairport Convention. I asked whether he was thinking of collaborating on anything with Show of Hands while he's here and he explained that he's in the middle of writing a song over the internet with Mary Gauthier, with whom he toured earlier in the year. It has a working title of Black Eyed Susan's Facing Back. "I've always been very insecure about working with other people, in case they come up with loads of ideas and I have nothing. This is my first time."

But the question also provoked a sudden rush of enthusiasm for The Cecil Sharp Project, which Knightley had apparently been playing him in the car on the way to the venue. This may have been by way of a consolation of some kind, as an attempt by Knightley to impress him with an excursion to a Knights Templar-related church went awry when it turned out to be shut.

"I'm not a very committed tourist - especially when I'm supposed to be working. I get into a rut of going from gig to gig and the surroundings become secondary. I had a day off in Florence, Italy, in early January 2009 and the strangest thing happened..." he said, as if he'd learnt his lesson with this taking-the-day-off thing.

"I decided to spend the day walking and as I set off in the morning I got 50 yards up this alley with a steep incline, heading for the hills, and found it barred by police tape. Ahead there was a tarpaulin with something lumpy underneath it and a foot sticking out. Someone had fallen down dead in that alley and I had to go around." That'll teach him.

Although, in fact, he's about to take a year off. "I'll stay in Argentina for most of it, study Spanish and Spanish guitar in a more deliberate way and attempt to challenge myself creatively. The reason, though, is that I have two teenagers and I feel like I need to be more on the case. They're getting older and aren't going to be in the house for that much longer."

And this time it was his kids who seemed lucky.

* If you enjoyed this, you may also enjoy this more recent post about Richard Shindell.

* 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

Why Robert Peston loves folk music

Why does anyone love anything?

On the day it became known that Bert Jansch had died, Robert Peston, the BBC's business editor, mentioned on Radio Four's PM programme that he'd seen Jansch play, that he'd been to the gig with his wife and that he was a bit of a folkie on the quiet.

He said later, by email: "I love folk, especially 70s' folk - Pentangle, Fairport, Jansch - but my tastes are eclectic and also I love lots of other music, especially guitar rock, Purcell, heavy reggae dub. And I certainly wouldn't claim to be an expert on the current folk scene. I have warm feelings towards morris dancing but there's a time and a place for it."

He also explained that his folky leanings could be traced to his relationship with his wife, the social historian and writer Sian Busby.

As I say, why does anyone love anything?

Busby explained: "It was part of the music that was around when I was growing up. My dad was really keen on trad folk and one of my early memories is that he taught me to sing in harmony with him from the Pete Seeger folk book.

"I liked Bob Dylan and Joan Baez and I went to see Bert Jansch and John Martyn with dad. Then in my teens - I'm 51 now - I liked electric folk: Pentangle, Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention.

"Robert and I have known each other since we were teenagers - he was in the year above me at school. Apparently I gave him a folky compilation tape, but at school he was really cool and liked David Bowie and guitar rock. We had an on/off relationship for many years before getting together about 20 years ago now and I think I gave him the tape when we finally got together."

There's more about their life together here.

"He's not a big fan of Bob Dylan or Joan Baez, but he does listen to The Dubliners because I've heard him when I'm not in the room. He likes the stories - we both do - if there's a good tune and a good story, that's all you can ask.

"We used to have family gatherings with musician friends when I was growing up and I still love singing folk music. But it can make you hear a bit flat, I think, because a lot of it's pentatonic so it messes up your tuning. I sing around the house all the time: Rosemary Lane by Bert Jansch, The Lambs on the Green Hill and a version of Ca' the Yowes, which is based on a poem by Robbie Burns."

Didn't her husband say something about once having been to a folk festival? "Hmmm," she pondered. "I don't think Robert would go to a folk festival, though he's taken our younger son to Reading." And what about morris dancing? "It's good fun for a while but I find it gets boring: there's only so many times you can watch men banging sticks on the ground before it pales.

"I remember going around with my stepfather one afternoon - he loved The Corries - and every pub we went into these bloody morris dancers turned up. He kept bundling us up and taking us to the next place, so we basically spent the whole afternoon running away from morris dancers. Then at my younger son's primary school in Muswell Hill some of the fathers used to morris dance and at the summer fairs there used to be a tug of war and some morris dancing. But I don't think I could watch it for a whole afternoon."

Well, that's OK: I can't really think of a circumstance under which you'd have to. There's usually too much beer to be sunk behind the scenes...

What do you listen to in the car? "We don't have a car, we haven't had one for twelve years and rarely travel in them. But we live near Ally Pally and Wood Green tube station, so public transport's easy to come by. Sometimes we hire a car for a break and, yes, when it's there we use the stereo. That's when the old electric folk mix tape comes out."

She says that she's not very up on today's folk scene, although she's seen The Unthanks and liked them very much, prompting me to send her an email with some links on it to things I thought she might like. They were towards the festival headlining end of the folky spectrum, though, and now I'm wondering whether I should have included more female voices.

Busby said she thinks her musical influences and her choice of work are connected. "I'm a trained historian and I'm very interested in these lovely bits of social history that you get in many of the songs. I especially like the ballads that were sung at executions. They're very sentimental and for me that's a rich seam. I like the stories about ordinary people's lives, about the sad and happy things that happen to them. The unrequited loves and the snapshots you might get of the life of an ordinary serving girl, for instance."

At the moment she's working on her second novel. "It's supposed to be delivered at Christmas but I don't think it's going to be. It's set in 1946 and is a sort of detective story, about a murder that's all tied up with the black market and the background is the depleted, bombed-out landscape of London. It's a very modern setting for me because I'm much more at home in the 19th century and I'm thinking that it's going to be called The Commonplace Killing. But the publisher doesn't know that yet so it might turn out not to be..."

* Here's Sian Busby's Amazon page.

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Fairport's line on The FLK hardens, a bit

A while back I wrote about some chancers calling themselves The FLK, who appeared at Cecil Sharp House one evening, pursuing some kind of marketing campaign on their own behalf that involved dressing up in cows' heads and not saying who they were.

Later there was a video on the web of them burning some copies of Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief, a reference to a band called The KLF who claim to have burnt a million quid in the early 90s.

It was annoying because of the nature of the marketing: no one likes to feel as if they're being played. Still, it was mildly intriguing as well as irritating.

Simon Nicol, Fairport's front man, said at the time that he'd been thinking about it but the point was lost on him.

Running into him at Cropredy, his position seems to have shifted slightly. I'd been wondering whether burning copies of someone's musical output was similar to burning books? Someone thoughtful on a message board made a good point when they said that the reason the burning of books is totemic is that for so many years - before printing presses - books were hand made so they represented hundreds of hours of labour, whereas records and CDs can be printed in a moment.

"It's not really in me to get too wound up about it," said Nicol. "Partly because that's clearly what they want, but also because I really don't think that whatever they're up to is going to make any difference to us in the long run."

According to someone who went to the Cambridge folk festival there were CDs for sale there by The FLK, but they didn't appear to be flying off the shelves and there doesn't seem to be any trace of it online. Is it  a slow month in the FLK's marketing department (which I imagine as an office full of people wearing badger and pig masks, listening to slightly downbeat techno)?

"I'll look forward to setting fire to that then," said Nicol. "Though in the interests of fairness I might give it a listen. Then set fire to it."

* 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

Other Cropredy posts

John Tams on Steven Spielberg and Richard Curtis

ahab's Four Weddings and a Funeral moment

The Urban Folk Quartet's secret weapon

John Tams to Bellowhead: what are your politics?

Spoof folkies set fire to Leige and Lief

A video was uploaded onto YouTube earlier today of the FLK, who are spoof folkies, burning some vinyl copies of Fairport Convention's Liege and Lief album, which is regarded as one of the most influential folk albums ever recorded.

I really like the album. But even if I didn't I wouldn't set fire to someone else's work, for the same reason I don't think burning books is a good idea: it's the fruit of other people's creativity, the flowering of something ineffably human. Burning a CD seems provocative and rude at the least and at its worst rather sinister. We know the precedents.

Obviously this is a joke of sorts, intended to create a stir, and I guess I'm rising to the bait somewhat, having previously asked Simon Emmerson for more details about the FLK, only to discover that the idea was intended as a tease. There was a vague suggestion that Bill Drummond of the KLF might be involved, but only a suggestion.

But the question is: is it actually funny?

I previously came across the FLK when it was supporting Walking with Ghosts, an Emmerson project, at a concert in Cecil Sharp House back in May for the Lush spa music.

They appeared on stage wearing cows' heads with two of members of The Belles of London City. Here's a video. The belles in question were having some difficulties seeing each other through their own fake horses' heads, which meant that their usually spirited dancing was rather subdued.

Jackie Oates was also there but not looking very happy. All in all it was a rather interesting occasion: a bit surreal but I enjoyed it.

It also crossed my mind that Steve Knightley might be involved, mainly because he has form with this kind of thing (I'd link to it directly on YouTube but there seems to have been some kind of clearout of Downfall spoofs from there recently, so one via my former blog at the Telegraph will have to do). Also I believe Simon Emmerson has been producing something recently for Show of Hands, so it's conceivable that it's a joint effort. If I hear from either party I'll let you know.

I also put a call in to Stevie Horton of Iconic Media, at Fairport Convention Towers. But a couple of hours later I understand she's been unable to get hold of anyone for a response.

Watch this space.

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Nu-folk and wtf is folk?

Here's some folk-related chaos that trekked across my radar this week. Bear with me, there is a point to this...

 

A lovely young band called Yngve & The Innocent got in touch, describing themselves as "a cross over between folk and Americana and a little bit into Indie - but not much". Being a sucker for a nice bit of punctuation in a band name - hence my enduring admiration for Mawkin:Causley - I fell for the ampersand first, had a bit of a listen and am looking forward to hearing them live when they next get to London.

Then there was this interview in a Welsh newspaper with Adrian McNally, manager of The Unthanks, in which he said: "Folk music is not a genre, it’s a history, a people history that’s been charted with song. In terms of how that sounds, it’s always followed function, so any notion of what it should or shouldn’t sound like is spurious."

I''ve also spent some time this week listening to Folk Radio and exploring a website called For Folk's Sake a bit. By doing these two things I've discovered that there is a  whole raft of musicians out there who are thought of by someone as falling into the "folk" category despite not sounding much like folk to me: more like wispy young things with acoustic guitars from the United States, whose bands have names alluding to the natural world.

Hence there are: Blue Roses, Caitlin Rose, The Eels, Diane Cluck, Emily and the Woods, Curran and the Wolf, Midlake, Mountain Man, Noah and the Whale (OK, I know they're not from the US), Sea of Bees, The Mountain Goats, The Wave Pictures, Tiny Birds, Treetop Flyers, Wild Beasts and Woodpigeons. My research continues but I'm really starting to think that it can only be a question of time before the Natural History Museum takes delivery of a Hairy Mumford for display.

Also, after logging into Twitter last night to find that Mumford & Sons were trending, it emerges that there's a new album on the way. So that's good. It's that punctuation again.

But it made me wonder why I've got no problem with thinking of Mumford & Sons as a folky band, whereas my subconscious is telling me that most of the acoustic guitar-wielding wisps are not. And this is what I've come up with.

I grew up listening to Steeleye Span and for me that was the *best* music, which I also found was defined as "folk". I liked other stuff too - Randy Newman, Queen, Vaughan Williams, Rachmaninov, Big Country - but whenever something a little bit similar turned up I'd compare it to Steeleye and usually find it wanting.

As a result, there are three things my subconscious seems to like in varying proportions in order happily to categorise something as folk: a traditional instrument or two, at least a nod to the song-writing tradition and a strong sense of place.

(1) The traditional instrument thing accounts for the Mumford phenomenon. A banjo qualifies - although my friend Joe Buirski says that the banjo player in the Mumfords doesn't play it properly and I nodded when he said it, not having a clue what he was on about and liking Joe's banjo playing with Kidnap Alice.

(2) By the song-writing tradition I mean new versions of old songs. Bellowhead's version of New York Girls sent a proper shiver down my spine when they started up at the beginning of the folk awards. And another delight this week was the latest plank of that band's increasingly deliberate assault on the mainstream, in the form of a new version of The Archers' theme tune (which has got to be work garnered as a result of their residency at the South Bank Centre and the fact that it's where BBC producers veg out with their children at the weekend. Serious intellectual pretensions, my arse :-).) Bellowhead's continued rise is a real pleasure to behold and they shouldn't worry about the iffy reaction of a few Radio 4 listeners. One of the mainstays of national newspaper news sections is baiting listeners of The Archers and for every one who complained there will be four or five at least who quite liked the arrangement but didn't bother mentioning it to anyone.

But someone can write their own songs and still be folky, in my book. Richard Shindell breaks my heart every time I listen to his album Courier. He sometimes writes songs from the points of view of historical figures, in the case of the link there, from the point of view of a Confederate child soldier in the civil war, and the emotional impact can be devastating. The scouts are fanning out like whippoorwills, he sings. And the sense of time and place is unshiftable. Incidentally, Fairport Convention have just covered one of his songs, Reunion Hill, on Festival Bell.

(3) The sense of place doesn't have to be my place, which is England, north and south. But it's not enough to have a guitar, long hair and sing about relationships. I really think that to qualify as folk a new song has to be about something that ties it to guts-and-grease reality: a time and place with which it will always be identified. A song can become a folk song by enduring, I guess. But I never really thought of Simon and Garfunkel as folk, in large part because they sing with American accents and Scarborough Fair seemed to be an aberration in their reportoire. Great version of a song, but not their song.

On the other side of the coin The Dropkick Murphys might qualify with this one, which was in the Scorsese movie The Departed and conjurs Boston, past and present. I wouldn't listen to that one if you don't like loud music.

A critic at one of the nationals once told me that Mumford & Sons don't move him because they only remind him of St Paul's school in Barnes, which might not have mattered much except he'd gone there himself and didn't seem very happy about it. So now I can't avoid associating them with that school either, but because I don't have any strong feelings about it one way or another, it just means that they've got a sense of place for me now as well as a banjo. And what's not to like about that?

* 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