Bridget Marsden and Leif Ottosson on gold bars, embarrassment and review etiquette

Something new happened at my house - The Glamour Cave - in east London, the other evening: it hosted a folk gig. Yes: the Glamour Cave has finally done what it was born to do - at least it felt that way at the time. I met the musicians - Bridget Marsden and Leif Ottoson - when I was away on a work trip recently at the Stockholm folk festival, where I heard Bridget play and had my personal bacon saved by the two of them, when they gave me a lift very, very late one night.

I had to be a bit careful while the event was being organised and not mention it on social media as they said they weren't sure about the small print in one of the contracts they'd signed for their UK tour, which made it look initially as if a - possibly megalomaniac? - promoter had sole rights over their playing in London.

However, that turned out to be not the case, even in the mind of the promoter, and now the house concert is over I would love to sing their praises, mainly because they are magical. In fact I would have liked to have done it sooner and helpfully have promoted their tour but I've been ill and can only apologise for any difference it might have made, mainly to them, obviously.

I don't want to gush too much, though, because while they were here they said something that made me think about the ways in which gushing can be bad.

This is the thing. As the evening was starting up I put someone else's CD on the stereo: Richard Shindell, an American musician and friend of Show of Hands, who lives in Argentina. It was Courier, his live album, because it's one of my favourites. And found myself explaining, probably partly due to nervousness that no one would turn up to the house concert, that I'd managed to get myself in an awkward situation with Shindell by, I think, writing something overly empathetic. Read it and feel my girlish naivety.

So this is my embarrassing story. Shindell had played in Islington at The Old Queen's Head - the venue where Leif and Bridget were due to be the next night - and I'd gone along with a photographer  because, frankly, Shindell is fab and if you've never seen him and folk music is your thing, you really should. I'm doing it again. Anyway...

The last time he'd been in the UK I'd interviewed him and the result had been fulsome. In fact, it occurred to me when I saw him in the upstairs room at The Old Queens Head that he looked a bit embarrassed, especially for an American. Let's face it, telling an American you admire their work is not usually a problem.

We hung around: the photographer, David Firn, liked the music nearly as much as I did as it turned out, and managed to get one truly great shot of Shindell, above. We all left the pub at the same time.

"So where do you have to get to?" I asked Shindell.

He mentioned a hotel that we'd never heard of and said he had no idea how to get there but thought it was quite a long way, so we recommended a black cab. And then, in all innocence as one was passing with a yellow light on, hailed it. He climbed in, perhaps somewhat dutifully, looking back on it.

The next morning I looked up the hotel and realised that it was approximately 50 yards from The Old Queens Head and that there was *no way* he would not have known where it was as it had clearly been chosen for its proximity to the venue and that he must have left his bag there earlier. This filled me with a mixture of embarrassment and titillation.

Anyway. I told this tale to Bridget and Leif. "Aha," said Leif. "He suspected you of stalkerish behaviour." Apparently so, I admitted, slightly shamefaced. But not so much that I wouldn't write about it, obviously.

"Yes,"said Leif. "We once had a review that was so good that we didn't know what to do with it. I guess this is kind of the same thing."

Leif was being amazingly socially adept and trying to make me feel less awkward that I'd told the story. As an English person I have the ability to recognise this quality of emotional intelligence in others, even if not actually to reproduce it myself.

"This review. It contained so much praise that it was like a gold bar. We felt we couldn't show it to anyone because it would have been showing off. And we couldn't exchange it for anything because it was too much. 'Please can I exchange my gold bar for everything you have in your cash till?'"

Suddenly I saw the situation from the perspective of an unusually shy American or an average Scandinavian for the first time. You see? That's what folk's all about: learning about other cultures :-)

In the mean time please listen to Bridget and Leif because they are enchanting. Bridget is English and studied at Cambridge University and then music school in Stockholm, where she met Leif. And as a result their instrumental music has a really interesting quality that is something like listening to English being spoken as a foreign language by a Swede. Or vice versa. Some of the rhythms and cadences are familiar but many are not, so to an English folky it is both exotic and familiar.

 Love them. Love their emotional intelligence.

* If you'd like to do a house concert at The Glamour Cave you can contact me here. It could be fun. Also, if you would be interested in helping me livestream or record future events, same thing.

* Here's a story called This Nyckelharpa Kills Fascists about Swedish folk musicians taking on racism. 

* Here's a weird story about Richard Shindell and Doctor Who.

* 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

American bloke runs off with Steve Knightley's guitar

More than halfway through his set for the Green Note at The Old Queen's Head on Monday night, Richard Shindell said: "I would like to thank Steve Knightley for the loan of his guitar. He was supposed to bring my CDs from his shed to my gig in Wiltshire yesterday: he was supposed to bring them to the festival that I came from this morning.

"And he didn't.

"And he felt so badly about it that I felt bad for him for feeling so bad. We both felt very bad.

"So I gave him the opportunity to redeem himself. I said 'lend me your guitar for two weeks'."

Shindell, you see, lives in Argentina and for some reason or other had not brought an acoustic guitar with him despite it being his instrument of choice.

"And Steve said," with rising intonation, as one pleading for it not to be the case, "'Really?'

"I got a text message from Steve Knightley just before I came on stage. I was afraid it would say something like 'Don't use my guitar tonight'.

"So I didn't read it."

Ha!

* The pictures on this blog were taken by the very talented David Firn, who could be reached here, if you were interested in his work.

* Richard Shindell pays for Tardis to orbit the Earth

* If you thought these posts were good you might also enjoy this interview with Shindell I made earlier.

* 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 pays for Doctor Who's Tardis to orbit the Earth

It's the time of year when this blog likes to do a story about a satellite. Fortunately Richard Shindell has stepped into the breach.

At The Old Queen's Head in Islington, where he was doing a Green Note gig last night, he asked whether there were any Doctor Who fans in the house and, after receiving a slightly muted response from an audience of folkies wary of being hailed as geeks, explained that he was one himself, as is his daughter.

"Did you know that there's a project on Kickstarter to send an actual functioning satellite into space in the shape of the Tardis?" he asked.

"I've donated $300 because that's the threshold above which you get all kinds of loot: T-shirts, a blueprint of the satellite and - best of all - five megabytes of space on the Tardis's hard drive. I'm going to upload this song of mine about satellites. I'm going to do this because it's an excellent use of $300."

It's hard to disagree.

* American bloke runs off with Steve Knightley's guitar

* If you thought this post was good you might also enjoy this interview with Shindell I made earlier.

* This story regenerated and landed on the surface of the Guardian newspaper.

* 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

Folk by the Oak drink all the beer

Hatfield House is half an hour from King's Cross by rail and it was a beautiful Sunday, so a one-day folk festival - the fourth of its name - surrounded by classic English landscaping should have been quite a lure. Around 4,500 were there, though surprisingly few - around 100 - bought tickets on the gate.  I wonder how many Londoners knew how close it was? It's called

(love the art nouveau logo, by the way) because Hatfield House is where Elizabeth Tudor spent much of her childhood and heard of her half-sister Mary's death under one of its vast oaks, meaning that she'd be queen. For the literal-minded there were a bewildering number of candidates for *the* oak about.

That one was rather lovely, to the right of the arena entrance, though this one

was closer to the stage. I made a few inquiries, however, and understand that the tree in question is far more likely to have been this one

because it all happened in 1558, the tree must have been mature back then and the lifespan of an oak is 600 years at the outside. Still, Ade Edmondson and the Bad Shepherds have been playing the same set for nearly that long, so it's in good company.

Scoping out the stalls, I overheard Sean Lakeman having a conversation with the lady behind the main CD counter that went something like: "So would it be OK if you sold it for a tenner and took two off the top?" which seemed like an insight into how these things are run, especially when, if I continued around the arena I soon discovered that Show of Hands, ever well-organised, had their own tent and two dedicated CD sellers.

First up, Tyde were nice - and I use the term advisedly, having been told the same thing about that word by my primary school teacher as everyone else - as I have to admit I was still feeling delighted to have hooked up with some friends and we talked most of the way through the set. Kathryn Roberts' voice, when she appeared with the aforementioned Sean Lakeman, was rather lovely but nearly entirely in the service of downbeat songs. Every once in a while there would be an exciting guitar lick that caused a meer cat-style diversion of our attention and I really like Cassie Love, which is a domestic take on the miners' strike. But it would have been good to have lifted the mood a bit, not least because then I could stop repressing the delinquent desire to shout "Cheer up, love" like an idiot.

By the time The Bad Shepherds appeared we'd discussed all the good jokes they'd done on previous occasions. My favourites are the one about how bad they are - "no sheep" - and their punk version of All Around My Hat, which is a song with a great punchline. However, they didn't do that one - complaint from Steeleye Span? - there wasn't much talking between songs - which you would have thought would be one of the advantages of having a comedian as a front man - and I'm pretty sure there was no new material since the last time I saw them, two years ago. They're musically accomplished but I'd love to see them with a rhythm section, allowing them to really rock out every once in a while. It might make them more than a novelty cover band.

Bella Hardy dedicated a song about herring girls to me, on account of having asked whether there was anyone in from Great Yarmouth and me being from somewhere about those parts, as conveyed by waving my arms in the air. But hers was another downbeat set and by this time I was realising that the landscape, the weather and the company were mainly why Oaky Folk had been fun so far.

Then, rather brilliantly, Show of Hands came on and did one of the most relaxed turns I've seen from them. Phil Beer looked fabulously happy, Steve Knightley had a tan and Miranda Sykes shimmered enigmatically. The show included a snort-inducing joke with an extended set-up involving Phil Beer's family having a beach hut called The Ponderosa that went up in flames, and a 100-year-old lady observing that they'd "never had so much violence during the war". They play music, they tell jokes. What more could you want?

In particular they did two covers - Don Henley's Boys of Summer and Springsteen's Youngstown - that made me wonder whether there's something transatlantic afoot for them. I heard that they're having Richard Shindell to support them on a tour starting in October (he made what has, for some years now, been my favourite album, Courier). He's an American guitarist who lives in Argentina, he has a similar approach to song-writing to Steve Knightley and plays some pretty large venues in the States, judging by his live recordings. So he's akin to Show of Hands with their Albert Hall adventures. I guess that if the British tour goes well there's a possibility he'd return the favour... which would be one answer to the question of what to do next when you don't fit the Jools Holland mould.

However, light hearted stuff aside, at some point during Show of Hands' set the real ale tent ran out of beer and shut its tent flaps, which was an epic folky fail: the kind of acoustic-music-related trauma that could easily drive one to, you know, drink lager. Obviously it was a hot day and people were thirsty, but this really threw down the gauntlet to other festivals. It was all gone by 6pm.

Heidi Talbot, John McCusker, Roddy Woomble and Kris Drever did something fine, if slightly disjointed, in the sense that everything went well but it felt like they were getting together to play songs they'd ordinarily do separately. Kris Drever's Shady Grove went down a storm, John McCusker can really play the whistle and Roddy Woomble has some memorable tunes, even if My secret is my silence prompted the thought that it was a bit of a crap secret really, especially now he'd told us all about it quite loudly.

Seth Lakeman was headlining, which had my friend Rosie racing to the front of the stage and her partner, Doug, lying down, the better to feign nonchalance. There was a kind of squealing noise when Lakeman was introduced, to which he responded "thanks, guys", in a bizarre moment that reminded me of the bit in Life of Brian when the women put on moustaches so they can throw rocks.

By song three, King and Country, Doug was on his feet looking pleasantly surprised (he hadn't heard Lakeman before), and we all found our eyes torn from the stage momentarily when something that appeared from our perspective as a near-miss between two medium-sized aircraft happened directly overhead.

That weirdness past... With phenomenal energy Lakeman did the one about the man who shoots his girlfriend under the mistaken impression that she's a swan, which can happen to anyone. During The Riflemen of War a woman started twirling fluorescent ropes with lights on them in the gloom to one side of the stage, which seemed a more appropriately grandiose response than the usual clapping and whooping. And the almost unbearably tense Kitty Jay cast a powerful spell as a finale, transfixing one between an urge to dance wildly and to stop completely still, in the forlorn hope that if you stare hard enough at him you may understand how he does it.

And to finish, there were fireworks. Really big ones.

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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