A gallery of folk musicians lying in foliage

It all started at the Bristol folk festival when a leaflet with this image of Miranda Sykes and Rex Preston was thrust into my hands.

I puzzled over it for a while because it was just so bizarre - are they dead? - before deciding that it looks like the aftermath of a mid-air collision between a double bass and a mandolin with the two musicians as collateral damage.

It also reminded me of something else and it didn't take long to figure out that it was this...

... in which a slightly vampiric Jim Moray - red lips, red lips! - appears to be sleeping in a wood, hoping to be crept up on by the Big Bad Wolf, or having had a spell cast over him by somebody's wicked stepmother.

Or it could have been this one by Jackie Oates

which was probably consciously conceived of as having overtones of Waterhouse's Ophelia

but which was almost certainly taken by someone who had also seen this Eliza Carthy shot (hat-tip Leslie aka @EnglishFolkfan on Twitter).

This bizarre meme has a venerable history. I love this picture of Sandy Denny

in which The Lady clearly has a raging hangover. And this one of Lisa Knapp

which looks to be a haunting study of what happens to you when you're overcome by hayfever (thanks to Alex @FRUK).

I also very much like this of up-and-coming fiddler and photographer Elly Lucas, which makes me wonder whether she took it herself with one extraordinarily spindly, pale and prehensile arm that bends around the back of the shot?

And then there's this prize by the late, lamented Uiscedwr, suggested by @ruth_angell

in which the grass and foliage have been cunningly replaced by rose petals to create an entirely different feel.

Which was probably admired by The Devil's Interval, who'd given the same concept a more orgiastic slant by staring in glassy confrontation at the camera from underneath a pile of fruit and veg a year previously.

And if that qualifies then so does this contribution to the genre from Fay Hield, in which I think she looks, frankly, a bit chilly.

I also wish she'd wiped out that tub a bit before climbing in in her nice frock. I'm thinking frog spawn, cow poo...

One could pontificate about the meaning of it all. What is the symbolism of such passivity in the face of nature? Does it indicate a one-ness with beloved Albion or a languid, come-hither sexuality that invites the viewer even as it somehow implies victimhood? Or perhaps they each had one too many pints of Hobgoblin and didn't make it all the way home from the pub?

I'm pretty sure that's what happened to this lot. They're in there, in the undergrowth if you look. Honest. (Non folkies click here for a clue of what I'm on about.)

Hat-tip Phil Widdows @FolkCast for that. The dog's a genius touch. Apparently the pic was originally taken for this and the pooch's name is Holly :-)

* If you have a contribution to make to this sub-genre of the music snap please send them to me on Twitter @emma1hartley Coming soon... Ten things you never imagined Seth Lakeman could do with a glitterball.

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Jackie Oates on your skin and musicians as third world countries, part two

"Not only are you going to be very well paid for this but you'll spend the next three years being massaged by beautiful women," entrepreneur Mark Constantine told Simon Emmerson, of The Imagined Village and the Afro Celt Sound System, in an attempt to enthuse him about something that sounded, frankly, a bit implausible (see previous blog for fuller details).

They were discussing a project to record some folk music for a chain of spas that Constantine was opening, using products from his cosmetics and bathtime brand, Lush. "But the therapists weren't all beautiful women," mused Emmerson (pic below). "There was Gavin. He wasn't beautiful..."

There will be a gig on May 5 at Cecil Sharp House showcasing the end result, which is called Fresh Handmade Sound and there are four CDs, each for use during a different spa treatment. But, in addition to increasing the amount of seratonin in the world - Lush's owner, Mark Constantine, loves folk music - the project has had several other curious knock-on effects.

First of all, Jackie Oates, who became involved later on as part of a duo with Belinda O'Hooley, has had a face cream (below) named after her. I'm not joking - although I've already been accused of making this whole tale up by the good people at Folkcast. It's a kind of make-up foundation for English rose complexions and it's for sale in branches of Lush all over the country.

The second is that Simon Emmerson managed to get his good friend Chris Wood - this year's folk singer of the year - to have a massage for possibly the first time in his life. "Do you know him? He's a kind of new puritan," said Emmerson.

"And musicians - particularly folk musicians - don't go in for things like that. We're a pretty ascetic bunch and it's not part of the culture, though I really think it should be. Your English, blokey folk musician doesn't go to spas, he goes to the pub and drinks ale.

"So during the development of all this I dragged Chris along to the spa in Leeds - he was very reluctant - but when he re-emerged an hour later he came out with this huge grin on his face, looking totally blissed out and wearing this sort of loungey dressing gown that had been hanging on the back of the door. He's had lots of problems with his back and neck, as many of us do, and said it helped.

"On a more serious note, though, this whole project was a revelation for me - it couldn't have come at a better time in my life. When Mark phoned I'd been about to give up. I couldn't support myself. The industry had collapsed, The Imagined Village album hadn't recouped and I felt totally defeated. I couldn't continue as a record producer or musician: there just didn't seem to be the money there.

"But it wasn't just the fact that it was paid work. It gave me a chance to sit back and assess what I am and who I am as a musician. The quality of your working environment makes a huge difference: if you're having a good time it's extraordinary how creative you can become. It's a myth that you have to be starving in a garrett to write good music.

"It's really difficult being a musician at the moment, especially on the fringes, where folk is." But Emmerson says that the last couple of years have changed his view of how to exist there financially.

"Chris Wood's business model is the best one. He owns everything: from songs to the label, to his music, to the band. Total ownership of your own creativity is the way forwards. It was Chris who said: 'You need to think about setting up your own label and setting up the band as a partnership.'

"What you need to know about me is that I'd signed to Virgin in 1983 and stayed signed to a major label until four years ago. I'd been in some very successful bands: the Afro Celts sold over a million and a half albums. But for the whole period I was living on £16k to £20k a year. That's how musicians live. They generally have a partner who supports them or a private income, if they're lucky. But Chris Woods and Steve Knightley (of Show of Hands) have found a different way of doing things.

"During this period, Mark Constantine became involved with the band. He went away and looked at the industry and said he couldn't believe how stupid musicians have been for all these years. He said he was only going to support us if we got our act together and cut out all the parasites and the middle men who have been feeding off our backs.

"He invested some money in the label, which we called ECC records. It's short for Emmerson, Corncrake and Constantine." Who's Corncrake, I asked? "Well, Corncrake started out as a bit of a joke. We thought it sounded like one of those slightly pompous prog rock bands from the 1970s: Emmerson, Lake and Palmer. Er. Corncrake's just a bird that lives somewhere a long way away.

"The label's got a book-keeper and an accountant, but no label bosses and the profit is split 50/50 between band and label, so that everyone can get paid as quickly and easily as possible. I think this is the only way you can survive.

"I guess that if you're starting out, the idea of running a label is scary and you don't really want to do that: you want to party and have a  good time. But the principle is really just a fair trade principle. If you look at musicians as third world countries and major labels as exploitative, first world countries, how do you set up a fair trade agreement? You cut out all the middle men and strip away everything unnecessary."

* Walking with Ghosts will be playing From Source to Sea, supported by the slightly mysterious FLK band at Cecil Sharp House on May 5. FLK will be performing something called I Know Where the Time Goes. Tickets £5. 7.30pm

* 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  

Captain Pugwash on your back, part one.

On May 5 there'll be a concert at Cecil Sharp House called Fresh Handmade Sound, advertised as including work by the "internationally renowned folk musicians Simon Emmerson and Jackie Oates". My antennae twitched when this dropped into my email inbox because the word "spa" was also on the ad and I *like like like* spas.

So I looked into it and it's this: there are four CDs of folky music that have been produced by Lush, in collaboration with Simon Emmerson and a collective called Walking with Ghosts, for use in their four spas (London, Leeds, Poole and Kingston). Lush, if you recall, are the makers of bath products and cosmetics that look and smell like food, which is very confusing for those of us who never grew past the stage of discerning something's essential nature by putting it in our mouths.

So what we're talking about here, basically, is a massage with folk music, a conceptual break with the whale song and waves crashing on the shore that usually accompany the experience.

Upon closer examination I also discovered that the massage itself is supposed to be themed around Englishness, having indigenous birdsong included on the CDs and a cup of tea made for you afterwards by your masseuse. This, I was told by Lush's PR, was very big in Japan. Of course.

The teasing question, then, is how niche is this product? After all, nearly everyone of sound mind likes spas and therefore even if you're not a huge folk fan I'd think that the music would have to be fairly objectionable to muck the experience up? And if you like folk music and spas, well, a little of what you fancy does you good but a lot of it is obviously preferable...

So I hotfooted it to the King's Road yesterday, met Jen, the comely French therapist, and was led down to a beautiful spa underneath the shop decked out, in keeping with Lush's food/cosmetics confusion, like a kitchen. It was one of those kitchens that's very fashionable at the moment: kind of minimalist, Quaker-Shakerish, painted white with ewers and urns all over the place, as well as a selection of old-fashioned bottles with labels around their necks, Alice in Wonderland-style ("Don't Eat Me"), and wild flowers in a glass jar. "Everything in this kitchen was bought on eBay," Jen said.

I was having a treatment called The Good Hour, which is intended as a deep tissue massage, themed around sea shanties. There was a wonderful moment when Jen did something involving a blue bath bomb, hot water and liquid nitrogen which made the whole floor of the candle-lit treatment room disappear under a layer of smokey, crisp-smelling "water". This was a lovely start.

The massage itself was also great, Jen was charming and the music appealed to me. But looking back on it there was something vaguely amiss, which I struggled for a while to put my finger on. I was never able to drift away completely and here's why.

I like sailing, I like weather and I like sea shanties. But, in my experience, there is something about the kind of people who want to be in charge of their own boats to the point where they are prepared to spend tens of thousands of pounds on it, that can be pretty unsensual. My search for a lovely crew of people to sail with goes on (all offers seriously considered).

Now I realise that sea shanties are mainly about working boats, not pleasure craft. But every time I thought I was on the point of losing myself completely in the massage there was some beardy sounding bloke on the sound track hauling away, dragging me back to reality and reminding me of the last time I sailed with someone "difficult". For me, the soundtrack would have worked better if it were instrumental or only had female voices on it (mermaids?)  I realise this is quite a personal take on the matter, but there you go. If you're intrigued, I guess you'll try the massage for yourself. It costs £75.

Simon Emmerson, of The Imagined Village, said that he thought part of the intention had been to create a spa treatment that would appeal to men as well as women. "The project started at an Imagined Village gig in Poole, where I met Mark Constantine, who owns Lush. I'd invited a load of people from my birdwatching club along and he turned out to be one of them.

"He rang me up afterwards, said how much he'd enjoyed the gig and asked if I'd be interested in writing some music for a chain of spas he was opening, which was intended to have an English aesthetic. Now, I didn't know anything much about spas at the time and assumed he was talking about supermarkets.

"So I was on the phone to Eliza Carthy later and asked her whether we really wanted to do a load of supermarket music for a chain of spas and she went very quiet for a minute and then said 'No, Simon. Wrong kind of spa.' So I googled Mark and the penny dropped.

"When we next spoke he kind of twinkled at me down the telephone and said 'Not only are you going to be very well paid for this but you'll spend the next three years being massaged by beautiful women..." To be continued...

* There will be a second part to this blog, to be posted within five days, in which you will discover what happens when you take Chris Wood to a spa and Simon Emmerson's thoughts on recent changes in the music industry.

* 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  

Folk: love the music, hate the cliché

"Lilly white hands", "pretty fair maids", "milk white steeds"... Please join in when you think you know the chorus. "It was on a [fill in blank] morning, as [fill in blank] was dawning." There are certain phrases in folk that make my toes curl, although the love that I bear the genre as a whole means that I can be sophisticated and mature, and do the psychological equivalent of sticking my fingers in my ears, going "la, la, la" when they come up. I loathe clichés: can't help it. They make me want to say something sarcastic.*

I know, I know. The whole point is that it's traditional music and how will we recognise it without its tropes? And yet it gets recognised. When Bellowhead, Jim Moray, Jackie Oates, The Imagined Village or Show of Hands do something innovative it's identifiable as folk. But just without the dull bits. And I know I'm not alone in feeling this way because Frank Skinner got booed when he started on about beards, sandals and fingers in ears at the folk awards this year.

The trouble with cliché - whether in music or anything else - is that it's just a bad way of expressing oneself. By using phrases that have been used over and over again you reduce the world to a series of stereotypes and make people think that they know what you're going to say before you actually say it. This means that thereafter they don't listen properly and that any time and energy you've devoted to expressing yourself better later on will have been wasted.

Cliché is the opposite of creativity. It closes off neural pathways, reinforces prejudices and blinds us to the innovative. It dulls the senses and makes the potentially fascinating appear prosaic.

True, there is a big old tension there when you consider it in relation to folk music. Very few situations under the sun are new, and writing and performing songs about the truths that ring down the generations is what folk is often about.

But every generation experiences these situations as if for the first time - because, for them, it is the first time - and not to acknowledge this through reinterpretation would be emotionally dishonest. So it's exactly the universality of a song like, say, Hard Times of Old England - but equally songs that speak of having to leave your home for economic reasons, going to war, or failing to marry and settle down when society tells you you should - that demand each generation claim them for their own. The world looks subtly different to each of us and explaining the textures and sensibilities involved in that is the wellspring of humanity.

I like folk because more than any other genre it reminds me of people and places I've loved. But I enjoy it a lot more when I see evidence of other people's original thought processes, creativity and passion embedded there. I like a bucolic mythologising of Albion as much as the next dappy, longhaired girl. But the largest amount of joy is in the telling.

Btw, surely it must be about time someone did an epoch-defining Hard Times of Old England for the 21st century? Something really angry...

* In case it's not obvious, I've been dwelling on last week's post about Dumnonia by Jim Causley and wondering what it was about that album and the old-fashioned nature of it that bothered me. Although, I'm not saying that the album is full of clichés exactly - more that it's possible that Causley hasn't found the right material yet or isn't interpreting the material he's got in a way that suits him -  the above is what I came up with.

Absinthe and iPhones at the BBC folk awards

If there's anything gloomier than a bunch of musicians who've been nominated for an award and not won, or a bunch of musicians who haven't been nominated for an award surrounded by their peers, it's a bunch of musicians who won and then got drunk. At the BBC folk awards on Monday the consensus afterwards seemed to be that if anyone else ever wanted to win an award again then every single member of Bellowhead would have to die...

Here are the results. As you can see Chris Wood and Bellowhead got two apiece: both have recently had new albums out. But the ubiquity of the 11-piece wall-of-sound band was such that when I ventured the opinion that Jon Boden, Bellowhead's main vocalist, was robbed in the Best Singer category after producing 365 solo podcasts this year, what I got three times in reply was a weary shrug and the response that he won it last year. Oh. Right.

In other news: Steve Knightley of Show of Hands had his brand, spanking, uninsured iPhone nicked at the bar afterwards, Mike Harding was hotly anticipating an article in the Manchester Evening News towards the end of this week, Jackie Oates wasn't drinking, Damien Barber's lucky lace - given to him by an old gypsy woman (if you say so, Damien ;-)) - didn't do the trick and a member of Bellowhead who shall remain nameless had a hip flask the size of a hot water bottle containing absinthe. "I've got big hips," he offered by way of an explanation.

Auntie had outdone herself. True, there used to be a sit-down meal attached to the ceremony but with its rotary, rubber chicken overtones those things are often just a cumbersome brake on the main event. So with all the usual caveats about the economic climate, there was pink fizz and canapes beforehand, a very glamorous venue in The Brewery, City of London, and a slew of celebrity prize-givers. Also true, most of them - Tamsin Grieg, Frank Skinner, Mark Radcliffe and Jeremy Vine - are on contract to the Beeb, keeping appearance fees to the minimum. But there was free booze on the tables and repeated warnings that the show would be going out live on TV and radio (parsed as *please don't get drunk and start shouting - you can do that later*).

The whispers around my table during the ceremony were largely about Tamsin Grieg: her off-the-wall speech - hailed by a cry of "we love you Debbie" after her role in The Archers - provoked questions from within and outside the room (by text, it was live) of whether she was mildly inebriated. But you had to pass close to her table to get to the loos and it was reported back that all the wine on her table remained unopened. I guess the trip to Hollywood for Episodes has left its mark and she's just a kooky girl.

Joanna Trollope's cut-glass tones felt a little nannying, with all her talk about the "ethereal" nature of the voices of various people well-known for not being particularly ethereal, her speech seemed slightly off-key. But she was very thorough in her appreciation of the nominees for Album of the Year and intonation is no barrier to liking good music, so the bristling in the audience should probably have been less than it was.

To recap then: Chris Wood and Bellowhead won most things, there was drinking and then there was more drinking afterwards at the Thistle hotel down the road. I managed to leave my jacket in the cloakroom at The Brewery but the nice man running the mini bus service picked it up for me on his next run. So that was OK.

The Levellers had finished off the evening with some wordage about folk being the music of protest. I think the definition of folk is a bit more inclusive than that but I wonder whether the pervasive sense that evening of being under fire was as much about surprise that it hadn't been cancelled completely for money reasons as anything else.

Yet what is the purpose of the BBC if not to do this? The number of folk festivals to be found over the summer is proof that there is money in this kind of music if you know how to tap it. But the Beeb isn't supposed to be about that anyway. There was a hat-tip to Mumford & Sons and there are lots of similar folk-ish bands who could usefully have had a look-in. Personally I would have liked to have seen the Urban Folk Quartet and Urusen there.

And the remit could be wider - not much Scottish stuff going on despite an entire festival full of it in Glasgow only last month.

But it was fun and it went off without a hitch. And you can't ask for much more than that really, can you?

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog into your Facebook news feed you could *like* its Facebook page and then indicate using the drop-down menu next to the *like* button that the blog is one of your "interests" You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley