Lau played a transcendent set in the Big Club at Towersey last night and also took the opportunity to raise the flag for local journalism, in particular Aidan O'Rourke's local rag in the west highlands.
Martin Green stepped in. "When Aidan won best musician in the folk awards earlier this year The Oban Times ran a story about it. And the article had a headline - I'm not joking - the article had a headline that read 'Hands up for Seil boy'."
Much laughter from a packed audience whose collective imagination had clearly turned to flippers.
"And I've been in show business long enough to know that there's more money in a seal boy than there is in a fiddler," Green deadpanned.
It was the pithy banter, the total absence of mumbling and the way in which there were approximately no notes out of place that rooted me to the spot. I'd always thought of Billy Bragg as politically less subtle than Ben Elton during his standup days and yet - with the flawless stagecraft as a runway - the realisation unfolded last night that, like Peter Tatchell, he is a man with whom history has caught up. My plan to slope off for a dose of Lau evaporated.
Although he should always be thought of first and foremost as the milkman of human kindness(because it's a phrase of genius), he's recently morphed into something of a silver fox - lucky bloke - and in the context of the equal marriage laws, his song Sexuality has finally ceased to be a slightly boastful paean to shagging ("I've had relations, with girls from many nations") and now wears the glamour of a prescient civil rights song. That's the odd thing about progressive politics, I guess: if you hang around long enough there's a distinct possibility that you'll end up in the mainstream eventually.
Tonder flipping loved him anyway. More to the point, he mentioned during his set that he'd recently heard that the English Defence League - best known for its racially inspired violence - has, wait for it, set up an expat branch in Spain.
"This is a party that is fundamentally about hating immigrants," he explained to his Danish audience. "So this latest development was a bit of a surprise."
I caught him later and he explained that he'd heard about the irony-free expat branch on tour to Barcelona a month or so ago.
"It crossed my radar on Twitter, where I follow a few anti-EDL accounts. The thing is that you can tell this story in Barcelona and you can tell it in Sweden and everyone will think it's hilarious. And yet the EDL don't see the inherent lunacy of having an expat branch. It shows them up for the humourless idiots they are."
Still, it gives the rest of us a chuckle.
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I'm in Denmark, for the Tonder festival - which is pronounced "Tonner" apparently - and got here via Hamburg airport and a festival mini bus which, apart from me and my rucksack, also contained Kate Rusby and band, Admiral Fallowand a cool box containing beer. Just the facts.
In between noticing that southern Denmark, against expectations, bears a strong resemblance to Lincolnshire, the time simply flew by.
"I only realised Denmark isn't in the euro a couple of days ago," I admitted. "I need to find a cash point as soon as we get there."
"Yes," said Joe Rattray, bass player for Admiral Fallow. "We've had some issues with that. Our manager sorted out the PDs - per diems - yesterday and he came bouncing in saying 'I've got €750 here.'"
Denmark isn't in the euro.
"There was this awkward silence before someone pointed out his mistake. In fact, if you retell this story can you say it happened to Lau instead? It's OK though: there's a guy backstage who's changing the money for us."
Other news from Tonder includes that the festival's patron - a princess, no less - will be arriving today. Since this is the Danish royal family - which takes a different approach to monarchy to our lot - it's not entirely surprising that one of them should be a folky. Apparently she was French originally and married the younger of the two Danish princes. I've been told that if I run into her I should ask about her brother-in-law, the Crown Prince, who successfully completed an Iron Man competition last weekend. Honestly, I'm not making this up...
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Earlier this week a CD slid on to the mat at The Glamour Cave that soon began a career on my stereo, making end-to-end appearances. It's a debut and when I found the band in question was going to be at the Warwick folk festival I resisted posting about it then and there, thinking that it might be a bit more interesting if I waited until after I'd met them.
Tandem are a three piece - Dave Malkin on guitar (centre), Charlie Pell (right) on fiddle and sampler Ben Corrigan - although they've been presenting at Warwick as an acoustic two-piece: they'll be playing live with Ben later on this summer.
Initially they reminded me of Lau, but with interesting vocals - which identify them as being not from Scotland despite early indications to the contrary - and sudden excursions into a world of digital noise that seem not at all out of place despite the traditional sound it's built around.
It turns out the Lau-ishness is not a coincidence, as they once supported Lau.
However, they're young - in their early twenties - and Dave is finishing at Trinity music school in the old naval hospital in Greenwich imminently. When I saw them on Friday, sweating it out in temperatures that must have been soaring towards the high 80s on the Plaza stage, which is basically a concrete playground, they happened to mention that they should have met each other much earlier than they actually did.
"I had grandparents on my mother's side who were extremely eccentric," said Dave, over a moderate amount of luminous orange hallucinagenic cider. "They amassed a huge collection of mechanical organ instruments. They had two fairground organs, one of which we sampled for the album, a whole load of music boxes and gramophones, and about 7,000 shellac records. When they died I got the lot.
"Charlie's father is the last remaining mechanical organ builder in the country and he'd done some work for my grandad.
"Then my father's side of the family are publicans and their pub, in Whaplode Drove, was three doors up from Charlie's house. But we never met - and it gets weirder.
"We were at school together and still didn't meet: we were both at Spalding grammar school in Lincolnshire and Charlie was a couple of years above me."
A school concert after Charlie had already left eventually provided a catalyst for their musical relationship. These days they're both in London and had the album launch the Cutty Sark pub in Greenwich the other day. However, Charlie's family interest in steam gives him a legacy that could turn out to be useful for music festivals.
"We've got an enormous caravan that the whole family can fit in and we used to go out together to steam fairs and the like: until you've seen the Great Dorset Steam Fairyou haven't lived. On the last night they get all the traction engines in a massive line and they toot their horns at midnight. I believe it's bigger than Glastonbury."
And it may have been the hallucinogenic cider but when I asked Charlie to draw a diagram of the caravan he did...
From Good Stock is a subtle, intriguing and melodic debut. I'd urge you to have a listen.
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I love Twitter. I looked at my phone one day to discover that I was being followed on there by someone who looked slightly familiar and had a dramatic looking profile pic.
David Oakes described himself on his blurb as an "actor who likes folk music". Turned out (a) the reason why he looked familiar was because he'd been in Trinity, a pretty weird and addictive TV show I borrowed from Love Film for reasons that elude me now. And (b) Oakes was starring in something big budget with Jeremy Irons called The Borgiasthat's been showing on Sky Atlantic and is now available on DVD.
That's him, as Juan Borgia.
My thinking was that there's a similarity of intention between folk music and costume drama, so if you like folk there's a strong chance you'll also enjoy a good historical swashbuckling shagathon like The Borgias - and vice versa? - and may be interested to hear there's a folky who's acting in one.
So, I asked Oakes, 29, whether he'd be interested in doing a kind of online Desert Island Discs? He agreed and this is the result. He wrote it, I edited it. And then I discovered that he'd thoughtfully put the songs up on YouTube where I - and you - could find them easily.
Here's David...
"I grew up in Fordingbridge in the New Forest and went to a primary school there that had mandatory country dancing classes. There were only 14 of us in my year and more boys than girls, so there were some much-dreaded weeks when I had to wear a red bib instead of a green one, denoting that I was dancing the ladies' part... This set me up nicely for a career of wearing tights and also instilled a love of music that was accompanied by the musky smell of hay bales and barbecue smoke. Fordingbridge, by the way, is not all that far from the Larmer Tree Gardens, home of the festival. But I heard my first choice of folk tune for this blog in Salisbury.
* Huckleberries Island by The Huckleberries from the album Jigweed
God knows whether they do this for a living but it seemed for several years as if every time I walked around any city in the west of England - Bath, Salisbury, you name it - I'd stumble across this lot. In front of them there'd be toddlers jumping up and down and pensioners swinging each other around. I loved them for their bluegrassy liveliness: there's nothing stoic or dour about them. And they're a perfect accompaniment for drinking farmhouse scrumpy.
* Prickle-eye Bush by Bellowhead from their first EP EPonymous
Driving back into Salisbury one day following an indigestion-inducing pick-your-own raspberry experience, a friend of mine put on a CD of a band she'd just heard at a festival. It was my first taste of Bellowhead - an experience bettered only by seeing them live for the first time. I'd come across Spiers and Boden before but it was their new, big band that really caught my fancy. You see, my mother plays the French horn and as a kid my attempts at television-watching often took second place to her and her friends from the Salisbury Brass Ensemble, who'd proceed to blast through their repertoire in the front room with no small pomp. I've loved brass ever since: a folk group with a brass section could have been designed for me. Prickle-eye Bush plays out in my head across the Wiltshire fields we were driving through on the day I first heard the song. It makes me think of Hardy - Tess or Jude put in imaginary cameo appearances. I also really loved Jon Boden's Folk Song a Day podcasts - they're littered with gems. Outstanding.
* My Young Man by Kate Rusby from Little Lights
More brass. This is one of those perfect songs. I love Kate’s voice, it's so expressive. And the purity of the accompaniment by such a tight knit brass ensemble makes it a beautiful modern folk tale that brings a tear to my eye every time I hear it. Listening today, there's also a sorrow within the sound of colliery brass that speaks of the pain of the mine closures under Thatcher. I think that Kate’s tale of a woman and her love for a changed man links the personal to the political and also reminds me of my time at university in Manchester. I studied English there and became entranced by the music that came from the industrial heart of our country.
* Kit's Tune / When a Knight Won His War by Martin Simpson from Prodigal Son
A few years back, I went to a folk concert hosted by the BBC as part of the proms at the Royal Albert Hall. It was the first time I'd heard either Bella Hardy or Martin Simpson but I came to love both as a result. It proved to me that the tradition will not die - people will always sing great stories. Martin did When a Knight Won His Spurs that evening and thoughI knew the melody from singing it in church - my father is a C of E canon - in Martin’s hands it came vividly back to life. Now I listen to the song regularly; the themes of valour, honour and duty are something I often have to deal in the roles I play and, to be honest, I don’t think audiences really understand these themes anymore. The constancy of Catholic faith throughout Europe during the time of the Borgias, or the hardship of a peasant’s life, which was central to Pillars of the Earth. We far too readily modernise what we see and water down what we imagine to be the truth. Drama can be grittier and much more fun if we present these alien historical landscapes as they really were. It’s hard enough filming in some 'period' locations - God knows how people managed to live in them. One day on Pillars of the Earth there was a huge rainstorm and we were wading through mud up to our knees!
* Uncle Lung by Sheelanagig from the album Uncle Lung
During my second and final year at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School we had the privilege of being the last to perform in the Bristol Old Vic theatre before it went dark for a refurbishment. One of the many excellent things about working there was the pub next door: The Old Duke had live music every night and it was here that I first heard, danced to, and sweated profusely alongside Sheelanagig. It was like discovering the Huckleberries again - but this time I was old enough legally to drink a pint of ale. We were doing an adaption of Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield and I only had one line. But I went on stage as a woman, a yokel, a beer seller, a morris dancer and a bailiff (and probably a few more that I’ve forgotten now). There were only 12 in a year at this drama school and only three women, so it was a return to my country dancing days. But I'll always have Sheelanagig. We poured out of the stage-door and into the Old Duke one particular evening, following the sound of one hell of a party kicking off: a little dancing can lift the soul. I also used their song Skotchne in a video we made at the time.
* She Moved Through the Fair by Elvis Costello and the Brodsky Quartet from The Juliet Letters (You may need to download Spotify to listen to that, if you don't already have it.)
My love for Elvis Costello was planted in 2007 when I was preparing for the Sam Wanamaker festival at the Globe. I was half of a duologue from Twelfth Night and had to walk out on to the most awe-inspiring stage in the UK singing Come Away Death, which is in the play. Trying to find an appropriate melody, I discovered Elvis’s collaboration with the Brodsky Quartet and that it had included a rendition of the song. That said, we didn’t use their arrangement. And when I walked out I was so stunned by the sight of 1,700 people staring back at me that I sang it completely out of tune. But my performance that day, despite the bum beginning, began my professional career. I was asked to join Shakespeare’s Globe company that summer for Love’s Labours Lost and a new play, We the People. The soundtrack to my six weeks' rehearsals was The Juliet Letters.
* Imporsa by Lau vs. Adem from their EP Ghosts
At the moment I'm in Bruges shooting The White Queen for the BBC and those who follow me on Twitter may have noticed a rise in jazz recommendations. In London folk's a good antidote to the modernity that's all around. But Bruges is like a museum and arguably a little frustrating for it, so jazz balances out the tourist-centred cadences of the medieval city. It hosts a rather stunning annual jazz festival and I've found two good jazz clubs so far. In fact, my only folky experience here has been the musical taste of the proprietor of Books & Brunch on Garenmarkt. So Lau and The Imagined Village have stepped in. They've been vying for my Bruges airtime with Wynton Marsalis and John Coltrane.
I think that Lau's Race the Loser is a perfect modern folk album that respects the technology available on a laptop as greatly as it does a fiddle. It'll be a classic, I reckon.
*The Washing Song by The Imagined Village from Bending the Dark
If I was allowed a ninth track on my desert island, it’d be Caw The Yows by Maz O’Connor from On Leaves or on Sand. Now I’m off to listen to someJustice - a French Electro Duo that have bog-all to do with folk music...
Thanks for reading this.
* Follow David Oakes on Twitter @David_Oakes * If you enjoyed this you may also be interested in this about actor and folky Stephen Mangan. * If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like*its Facebook pageand 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
Sometimes you can tell from looking at someone's work - or hearing it - that you would like them if you met them. That's what happened when I saw the promotional work Kings Place had done for Lau's upcoming week there: the pictures of the band on the front of and inside its autumn brochure were so curious, so idiosyncratic and so memorable that when I looked at them I knew they'd been shot by someone who takes enormous pleasure in their own work.
Because that kind of enthusiasm is infectious.
So it was great when Nick White, the photographer in question, agreed to a phone interview in the spirit that he was as keen to find out why the pics had turned out the way they had as I was. "It'll be like therapy," he said.
Among my enthusiasms for the pics is that that they're brilliant marketing: Lau's album launch for Race the Loser at Kings Place sold out weeks ago and it's not for a couple of weeks yet. Moreover it's uplifting to see something practical done so well that it transcends the everyday and becomes art, like applying the abstract ideas of physics to the making of a beautiful bridge. Or listening to Lau.
Everyone who's serious about what they do wants to work with other people who care about their craft - there is a nod of recognition, a respect for another's trade that comes with experience. You might not know how the other person does what they do, but you learn to appreciate high quality work when you see it.
Marketing, PR and the other behind-the-scenes stuff of the music industry are what often makes the difference between commercial success and failure and the carelessness with which the folk scene often deals with these matters is a constant source of frustration to me, media creature that I am. I often feel like a distantly related adult watching a teenage girl who doesn't understand that she's beautiful and as a consequence has low self-esteem, throwing her life away. I like this music and I want everyone else to like it too - it's just that most people will never hear it because, metaphorically, it won't brush its hair and leave the house.
However, Nick White's Lau pictures are the most striking piece of folk music marketing I've seen since this.
So how did the idea of Lau-Land emerge?
"I'd done some work for Kings Place before - for a jazz player called Django Bates (above) and the Brodsky Quartet (below)," he said.
"When they asked me to photograph Lau I have to admit that I knew nothing about them, so I listened to the band's music quite a lot to come up with some ideas. Then I spoke to them. The whole idea was that Lau-Land is a special place that they go off to explore - like Victorian explorers. Darwin and the Beagle were going through my head.
"I went to the Red Sea a while ago, to a place called Paradise Island which had a sign with big lettering. I took a picture.
"I really liked the fact that it was taken from the other side, so it was clear that I was actually in Paradise. I sent this picture to the band and I think they took the initiative and had a big sign made saying 'Lau-Land'. I'd like to take the credit for that, but I'm not entirely sure it was my idea. I'd be really interested to hear how they remember it...
"Anyway, originally the idea was to use the sign the other way around, so that they were in Lau-Land. But that was a bit weird and hard to explain, and it got dispensed with early on." Have a squint at the top of that cliff.
"For the picture for the front of the brochure (above) I said 'Let's get lots of stuff in there', things that they might have brought back from Lau-Land. The accordian hands were Martin's idea: he had a toy accordian and said 'I could just have them as my hands'. But there was only one accordian, so I had to shoot him twice and then stick the prints together later. In fact I shot all three of the guys separately and put together a montage in the studio. That picture is actually five different shots - including some extra cliff on the right.
"And we have these little, mysterious things - things from Lau-Land. So there's the arctic fox and the pheasant - and no, it wasn't a live arctic fox. They were both stuffed. Originally I'd wanted to graft the head of the fox on to the pheasant and vice versa. But it would have been too much work and, anyway, I always put more detail into these pictures than people actually notice..."
I asked him some more about the arctic fox. There was a pause.
"You know what? I think I must have been thinking about Philip Pullman's Northern Lights trilogy when I came up with that. One of the characters - Mrs Coulter - she has an arctic fox or a snow leopard as her daemon, doesn't she? There you go... I said this would be like therapy. But you can attach any symbolism you like to any of this. It didn't mean anything specific - like Paul McCartney not wearing any shoes in that Abbey Road Beatles' cover and a myth springing up that it was supposed to be symbolic that he'd died."
White said that most of the snaps had been taken on the windswept Scottish coast back in spring and that the weather had turned nasty.
"There was a lot of walking around with equipment and then the weather suddenly changed and became grim and miserable with driving rain. It was too far to carry all the bits and pieces and too wintry to put the sign up. They didn't enjoy it much - you can tell from the expressions on their faces.
"The band had different attitudes towards the photos. Martin was up for it. Kris just wanted to get it done. And Aidan wanted the whole thing to look more like an indy band shot."
What does an indy band shot look like?
"It's three blokes of a certain age standing around, trying to look interesting. The photographer has to do the rest. Oh - and they're usually dressed in black."
Here's an out-take that didn't make it into the brochure.
"It's not really what I do best," explained White. "There's a whole school of indy band photography that was done most successfully by Anton Corbin, a photographer who worked for NME in the late 80s and early 90s. He was responsible for U2's image round about the time of The Joshua Tree. He also did a lot of shots of Joy Division. But it's not my thing."
So what is your thing?
"My favourite shot is actually one that the band isn't in. It's the map.
"I asked the band to come with some made-up place names, so all the 'places' on that map mean something to at least one of them." I was beginning to see what he meant about "more detail than most people ever notice".
"And that box is something that I really like because I struggled with it and it took a long time.
"The box came from a car boot sale, the plant picture was cut out of The Observer's Book of Cacti and the idea was to make the three of them - there are tiny little images of them there - look like explorers in a flying machine. Their basket was made out of an air mail envelope and the top part came out of an old boiler at my studio - the shell-like metal object. I was thinking about Jules Verne, I think."
I pointed out that there is also a dirigible in the Northern Lights books, belonging to the American, Lee Scoresby. White was delighted.
He said that early on he'd also had an idea of somehow making the three members of Lau look like standing stones because he'd been thinking about The Wicker Man, but that this had been stomped on, on account of it being a "folk cliche" of which the band would have none.
And he mentioned an enthusiasm for Kit Williams's visually stunning 1970s book Masquerade, in which the reader had to piece together a series of pictorial clues with the aim of discovering where a piece of buried treasure shaped like a rabbit lay, somewhere in England. I had a copy of the book as a child and well remember the day I heard that the treasure had been dug up in a park somewhere.
In this spirit he left me with this: "There's a passport stamp on the left-hand side of that box with a date on it. Can you work out what the significance of the date is?" It's November 24, 1859.
Anyone?
* You could explore Lau-Land at Kings Place from Wednesday October 17 until Saturday October 20th, where there will be a series of Lau-related events, including the album launch, which is already sold out.
* Nick White would like to do more work with bands. Here's his website.
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