Josienne, Ben, Sam and Hannah go vintage at the Green Note

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 Girls so 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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A musical love letter to Dolly and Emmylou

Dear First Ladies of Country,

I grew up listening to you and number you among my hearth goddesses.

For some reason or other, as well as having music from the folk revival in their collection, my mum and dad are very fond of country and bluegrass. It's probably to do with it being acoustic and preoccupied with love and loss - the staples. My mum and dad are both sentimental old things.

As a result you became part of my musical hinterland, irretrievably embedded in my life, and I love you both for it.

Dolly, I remember when I was barely big enough to see out of the windows, sliding around on the leather back seat of my uncle's Jaguar with my sister and cousin as he went round corners at speed to amuse us, while playing Jolene at enormous volume on his stereo. Not something I'd ever do at the wheel myself these days (they've changed the law on seat belts over here for a start) but it was great fun and we were in a part of the world - Norfolk, UK - where there wasn't much traffic.

And Emmylou, I remember seeing your beautiful face on Bob Harris's Old Grey Whistle Test and thinking, childishly, that you looked like the Queen of America. I later went on to study politics at college, so now realise what was wrong with that particular construction. But if there were any justice I still maintain that you would be.

This post is my tribute to you. More impressively, it contains Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker's tribute to you - Homemade Heartache. This summer in the UK has been a bit of a washout, which is British understatement. But before the skies opened there was a brief blaze of brilliance on Clerkenwell Green in central London, when these two played in the sunshine on an early May evening and said that they'd written this delicately wrought thing for you.

I thought I'd pass it along, in the hope that you'd like it, and also because Josienne and Ben are among the best and hardest working musicians I know and could, frankly, do with some luck. It's a country song made in London, which is probably not unique but does make it at least a little bit special.

I hope you like it as much as I do.

All my love
Emma

* If you enjoyed this post you might also enjoy this, which is an interview with The Civil Wars.

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Josienne Clarke, Sam Brookes and Laura J Martin go all Ron Burgundy at The Old Queen's Head

It's traditional for The Old Queen's Head on Essex Road in Islington to hold an all-day music festival on bank holidays for those unwilling to leave the big city and commit to a couple of nights under canvas in the face of meteorological uncertainty.

The essential queeniness of this particular weekend made the pub feel like even more of a destination than usual - the upstairs room is so beautiful that it's a pleasure simply to be there.  But this time, rather than the regular, slightly under-organised folk event, it was publicised using the name of a Radio Six DJ, Tom Ravenscroft, who turned out to be John Peel's son. He hit the decks when the live acts finished at 10.30pm and the day's music was as eclectic as you'd expect it to be when Peel's name is invoked - although to be fair, they hadn't done that. I only realised who Ravenscroft was this morning when I was poking around on the net.

Taking a strong early stand for the folk contingent, Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker were on second at 1.45pm and the opportunity to hear them play while eating a doorstep fish finger sandwich (me, not them) was too good to resist *wipes imaginary breadcrumb from the corner of mouth in happy recollection*

They've nearly finished making an EP of four original songs including Homemade Heartache, which I insert into this blog at the slightest opportunity. In fact I've a good mind to make it my personal mission to get a copy to Emmylou Harris, for whom it could have been written. But they also rolled out a version of Sandy Denny's Who Knows Where the Time Goes? that both nailed the song's source code and lifted it higher than I've ever heard it go, emotionally speaking. It took so much vocal power to produce that Josienne said she's going to have to be a bit careful: they played it live for the first time this weekend and in four different venues on Sunday alone - which was uncomfortably depleting by the sound of it. Ten out of ten for effort though.

There was lots else to see, lots to talk about, including a rather moody and attractive PJ Harvey-a-like called Anna Lena and the Orchids, a stadium-ready synth outfit called Plant Plants, who only needed a light show to rival DeadMau5, and a couple of testosterone-fuelled guitar bands called The Riff Raff (all werewolfy facial hair, biceps and popping veins, though sadly they seem to have the same name as someone else and I can't find them or their biceps on the web) and Glitches, who were great, though their unpromising taste in knitwear made me think that the invasion of the UK by Polish plumbers must have been singlehandedly responsible for the 80s revival.

But the most fun for me was to be found at the acoustic end of the spectrum, where Sam Brookes produced an assured and original set: he simply wasn't trying to be like anyone else and sounded as if making music came as easily to him as breathing. I'm not sure I'd remember any of the songs but would go out of my way to test that theory because the spirit of his playing was so free, as if he were playing the best gig of his life on an empty mountaintop.

The find of the day, however, was Laura J Martin, who plays something akin to jazz flute, uses sampling to reproduce herself during live performances and has a wonderfully kooky stage presence that involves hopping, finger-wagging and emphatic nods of agreement in response to her own music.

"Uh-oh," said one of my companions as she kicked off her set with a loud jazzy toot. "It's Ron Burgundy." But the affection I feel towards Anchorman knows few bounds, so I was much more taken by the novelty of hearing something this unusual and well-put-together and less with the eccentricity of it. She also plays the mandolin, is from Liverpool and made a huge impression on my rather shy second cousin Alick, who talked to her for a little while afterwards before sliding under the table on his way to the loo in a gesture that made it look as if she'd just melted him.

I love The Old Queen's Head as a place to spend bank holiday weekends. If they'd put beer taps upstairs so you could avoid having to make a choice between expensive bottles and climbing the crooked stairs with a tray it would be perfect.

By way of encouragement to the pub's management, here's some ham and eggs coming atcha... Hope you've got your griddles.

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