After a perusal of the folk awards nominations pages on the BBC website it's a treat to discover that the corporation has done exactly what it said it was going to do when Fergus Dudley contacted me - and named the panel of judges who will be deciding two of the awards.
I look forward to hearing what manner of expensive inducements Genevieve Tudor and the rest will be (wo)manfully resisting in the name of impartiality. In fact, after all the curmudgeonly talk of how naming the judges will corrupt the process I'd be disappointed if their usually level heads haven't been completely turned by February.
Here's a scene I may have imagined.
ME: (At the folk awards in Glasgow, waving one arm in the air while trying to bat Seth Lakeman away with the other using a programme): "Genevieve! You look well! You're all aglow. Have you been away?"
GENEVIEVE TUDOR (looking around, slightly panicked, for an escape route but seeing only half-pissed folkies in Show of Hands jerkins blocking her way at every turn) "Darling! How lovely to see you! (She's faking) Yes. Er. I've been away."
ME: "Wow. Where've you been? That's a pretty tan."
GENEVIEVE: "Oh, you know. Around...."
Pause.
GENEVIEVE: (Crumpling visibly) "Oh god. I can't bear it. The shame of the thing, I mean." (Tugging at her flaming tresses distractedly.) I thought I'd be OK but... I'm sorry.
ME: (Concerned) Oh dear. What is it? Are you OK?
G: It's those devils from Proper.
ME: (Sharp intake of breath)
G: (Determined to get it out now) I told them I didn't care about any of it but they wouldn't listen... It started simply enough with the limited edition of Broadside, hand-pressed by Rachael McShane and her groupies during the same ouija board session that produced the album. (Genevieve's biting her fist.) Judging from the shimmer I think they made it using polycarbonate scraps left over from from Paul Sartin's wardrobe of Barbarella onesies. But I didn't *mind* that. I don't even mind the music. But then they started in with the unsolicited gifts. First it was an entire Welsh dresser full of diamond-dusted mead tankards and the barrels of oak-aged Hobgoblin from Chris Wood's subterranean vaults on the Riviera. And then...
ME: (Appalled) What? What happened next?
G: (Desolate now) Before I knew it they'd whisked me off to Alan Bearman's faux renaissance castle in Antigua staffed mainly by superannuated members of The Mediaeval Baebes. And I was lying by his infinity pool - you know, the one with the tiny little fishes to nibble off the hard skin on your feet, like at Bristol last year - and being fed these teeny tiny cornish pasties by Sam Lee and an entire phallanx of young men dressed as bare-chested angels.
ME: (Caught between horror and sympathy) Oh God, no!
G: And then I knew...
ME: (Caught up) What? What did you know?
G: It's going to have to be a lifetime achievement award for Roy Harper this year.
ME: Oh Genevieve! How could you?
(Wailing, fade to blackout)
Let's hope they name all of the judges next time, not just a small panel of five.
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After yesterday's post about the all-party folk arts group at the House of Commons, in which it was suggested that English and Welsh folk music might benefit from having its own high-profile international showcase - like Celtic Connections - I was sent this video by an English folk fan.
Have a look and see what you think. It went up on YouTube a couple of days ago and it's for something called Spotlight England, which involves England being the guest foreigners at Celtic Connections music festival in Glasgow this winter. Canada has benefited from the arrangement in the past. Just take a moment to think about that...
There is currently a long list of 24 English folk bands that has been put forward by industry experts, so the final six can be chosen next month by Celtic Connections.
Some points
* It doesn't say anywhere in the video what Spotlight England actually is and there is no mention of Celtic Connections. The video might just about work if it were shown on a screen at Celtic Connections where the context would probably be evident, but why waste public money on something that's fit only for one purpose? Just one mention of Celtic Connections would have been enough for you to get the gist. The first time I watched the video I didn't know what Spotlight England was at the end of it and had to go away and look it up.
* Its point of view appears to be "English folk is not as rubbish as it used to be 10 or 15 years ago, although we don't really know why". The tone of the talking heads is apologetic, not explanatory and you are left with the impression that they are marvelling at England's good fortune at having had Bellowhead and Laura Marling beam down from outer space and that young people have deigned to bestow their favours upon folk bands. No explanation for this is offered. Suggestion: perhaps the music's fabulous? In fact to suggest anything else in a promotional video is beside the point.
* I've often been left breathless with excitement by English folk music. This video makes the entire enterprise seem dull.
* John Tams' name is spelled wrong.
* Where is Show of Hands on the long list of bands being considered to showcase England to the rest of the world? Are they popular enough to fill the Albert Hall several times over but not popular enough for EFDSS to include on its list of England's top 24 folk bands? How has this happened? To hear that they were unaware of the application process - which will inevitably be the case - is silly and poses more questions than it answers. It doesn't take much to pick up the phone.
* Alan Bearman appears on the list of decision makers here and yet many of the bands he represents appear on the longlist. This is a conflict of interests and undermines the integrity of the process since he stands to gain financially. It's not his fault - you would, wouldn't you? It's the fault of the organisers. And no amount of explanation that Alan Bearman was out of the room at the appropriate moment will cut the mustard, I'm afraid. When public money is being used to market an industry - as it is here - there has to be no discernible corruption. It's axiomatic.
* It's bizarre that English music does not have its own international showcase (I'm told that Wales's national Eisteddfod has an international offshoot), organised to the same professional standards as Celtic Connections. Perhaps one day it will and may summon the self-confidence to invite the Scots to participate as foreigners. I wonder how they'd react to that?
By the way, I've also heard a whisper that the folk awards will be held in Glasgow this time around. Interesting, eh?
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There was something about the actor Stephen Mangan that had been bothering me since I saw Green Wing on television. Then when Episodes started on BBC Two, in which he appeared as a Hollywood screenwriter alongside Matt Le Blanc of Friends and Tamsin Greig of The Archers - and which I loved - it started to become seriously problematic.
You see, when I first watched him on TV I thought he was more famous than he was - kind of the opposite of that thing when you see someone from the telly in the street and start to say "hello" before you realise your mistake.
The suspicion crept up on me that we'd met.
There was this weird, fuzzy memory of an afternoon spent in Dublin in January 1995, where I was doing work experience. He was sitting, talking very fast in someone's flat - his own? - and was in the company of two other people, one of whom was on my newspaper course and is now a very well-known journalist. In fact, he's editor of The Times. I told you it was a weird memory.
So when there was a sudden downpour on Sunday at the Cambridge folk festival and I retreated into a tent only to find that the he was in there too, the responsible course of action was to ask, even if it laid me open to the possibility of discovering that I was losing it...
"Yes, that was me," he said, looking quite surprised, before adding that it was nice to see me again, thus demonstrating that he has good manners, since I know perfectly well that if I hadn't seen him on television in the intervening 17 years I probably wouldn't remember him either...
However, it was such a relief to find that my mind hadn't been playing tricks on me that I had to go and sit down for a little while before returning to suggest that since it was clearly going to rain for a long time would it be OK if I interviewed him? And since he was well-mannered (and trapped) he agreed.
It turned out he was there because he made a documentary, along the lines of reclaiming a forgotten love, about playing with Richard Thompson for Sky Arts last year. The marginalised object of desire was folk music. This year the channel, which media sponsors the Cambridge folk festival, had invited him back to be interviewed. He was also doing a guitar workshop with Martin Simpson and babysitting Simpson's daughter, who seemed very sweet.
Mangan swore faithfully that he wouldn't say anything interesting to Sky, leaving the field clear for me.
"I don't know why I like folk music," he said, "because my wife doesn't like it and my friends don't like it and it makes me an outcast in my own circle. But I'm from County Mayo in Ireland and parties at our house involved carpets and rugs being pushed back.
"The process of discovering folk was a lucky one that started in the late 80s and early 90s with John Martyn and Nick Drake, then had me stumbling from one thing to another. I went to America for a year when I was 18 and someone gave me a list of things to listen to. I started with Richard Thompson.
"Then in my early 30s I got into the hard stuff: Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan. But there's this feeling that because I don't have that many mates who are into it I'm like Uri Gagarin, heading out into the void. I'm here to make some friends who like folk music."
He took a bit of a conversational detour enthusiastically to praise Fionn Regan's song Dogwood Blossom, from the soundtrack of This is England.
"For some reason it speaks to me: maybe because I have a strong melancholy streak. I like depressing music but I'm an optimist who also likes storytelling. My wife is the opposite - perhaps we complement each other in this respect. She's a pessimist who likes dance music.
"So for a long time in our house folk was a four letter word that I dare not utter. It was desperately uncool - maybe it still is, but I don't care. Eventually you have to face up to who you are and I'm a folky.
"But I'm a folky with two young children and I'm in a play at the moment that's on nearly every evening," - Birthday at the Royal Court, in which he plays a pregnant man - "so I don't get to see films, plays or gigs apart from the ones I'm actually in. When I was asked, I jumped at the chance to come here again. I love nothing better than to bring myself to the point of vomiting with nerves in the company of Richard Thompson." Not that he'd have to do that this time around...
But standing on stage is what he does for a living. Why would singing with Richard Thompson make him nervous?
"If we were doing Othello it would be fun. In fact, I think Richard should give us his Othello at some point. But there's something very exposing about singing. The music is dictating to you - the song is its own lyric. Whereas with acting you're in control.
"Singing is the most popular art form in the world but it's totally about emotion, so it's very revealing. You're expressing something about what it is to be a human being in a very pure way. Which makes it all the weirder that I'd choose to stand on a stage and sing one of the most famous songs ever written - Who Knows Where the Time Goes - while the audience nudges each other and remarks that I look the donkey out of Shrek.
"But it's good to do things every once in a while that make you want to shit yourself with fear."
Why? Most people go out of their way to avoid that.
"It makes you feel alive - it was an amazing thing. I stood there at the side of the stage and heard Richard Thompson do one of the best sets he'd ever done and then say at the end of it 'And here's Stephen Mangan'."
Despite being from County Mayo, Mangan has one of those Irish accents that doesn't really sound like an Irish accent. Dick Gaughan, on the other hand, has some fairly pungent left-wing views. I wondered whether he was comfortable with that?
"Yes, I'm quite a lefty. it's hard not to be when you're an actor because you're dealing with people. They're your bread and butter, so you have to try and understand them."
I'm pretty sure Adolph Hitler thought he understood people.
"Yes, but I don't think Adolph Hitler thought of people as people. As an actor you are mainly about people and community, and what makes people tick. I always viewed left-wing politics as having a compassion to it: I deal with the fact that kings and dustmen are all on a level, they're all human beings. For my purposes I can't look at them from a status point of view. And once you're looking at everyone in the same way you're coming from an egalitarian point of view."
A bit of probing finds that he doesn't like Mumford & Sons and when I asked about Bellowhead - whom I love - he changed the subject. "Show of Hands. They're good. I just had a tweet from the Shrewsbury festival asking whether I'd like to go along this year because Richard Thompson is going to be there, so maybe I'll get to meet them.
"After the last time, Richard invited me to sing with him again in a general kind of a way. So for a while I toyed with the idea of turning up every time he played and saying brightly 'I'm here to do my song'. Now I'm thinking of faking an emergency appendectomy so I can go to Shrewsbury. We're going to be on a family holiday in Wiltshire at the time, which isn't too far away."
So if you're at Shrewsbury and you see Stephen Mangan, be nice to him. He's there to make some folky friends.
* You can buy tickets to see him in Birthday at the Royal Court here.
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The skies over east Devon and Dorset disgorged an entire month's worth of water on to Abbotsbury and the surrounding area on Friday night, throwing plans for Show of Hands' annual one-day festival at the town's subtropical gardens the next day into chaos. Word went out early on Saturday that the show had been cancelled. Perhaps the Isle of Wight's problems this year had made an impression?
"We'd already invested in the infrastructure - everything was built," said Knightley, Show of Hands' front man. "But we've had a very kind offer from the Wickham festival to let anyone with an Abbotsbury ticket in at no extra cost for Saturday August 4. The show also includes Bellowhead and the Home Service, so it's a good deal. We're hoping that will offset some of our losses.
"The production costs last year came to a bit less than £5,000. That was the crew, the PA and the other stuff we had to put in place - and the crew did their full two days' work for us. But we weren't insured - I don't think there's a company that will cover outdoor music events during the English summer. The extent of the loss depends partly on the musicians. I mean, we wouldn't hit anyone for a fee if we hadn't actually played, but I guess it's up to them if they want to charge us." There's also ticket returns to take into account...
Initially there'd been fighting talk from Knightley, who'd texted over the weekend "Police closed the roads. We were ready to rock!" But as damp reality set in he became more sanguine.
"I was setting off from Exmouth on the Saturday morning and the traffic was extremely difficult. Phil (Beer) was having the same trouble coming in a different direction and we just had to take a view. Then the police shut the Abbotsbury road along the seafront after there was a landslip nearby and reluctantly we had to cancel. It was the right decision, though, because it carried on getting worse.
"It's worrying times because the summer is usually our big earner and all these things have knock-on effects on each other. We're doing a two-day residential workshop at Herstmanceaux castle in east Sussex on July 24/25 with Martyn Joseph guesting. There are 70 spaces but we tend to sell the most tickets for it at Abbotsbury because I mention it on stage and explain about the workshops. There are also sessions but it doesn't have to be participatory." He sounded glum.
"Next weekend we're supposed to be playing at Ely and that's on a floodplain. I just hope it's going to be OK."
So how did he actually spend the weekend? "I sat in the rain and watched the tennis. I also took the kids swimming at the Exeter Golf and Country Club. I should have been on a main stage being a folk god and instead I was being a bedraggled dad."
Here's a song recorded at Herstmonceaux that's (partly) in a major key as a pick-me-up.
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"She lost her heart to the boys in the band" runs the opening line of Show of Hands' Stop Copying Me. On Saturday at Colston Hall in Bristol there were two manifestations of high octane fandom, each of which was charming in its own very special way.
First up, there was a twenty-something at Show of Hands' headlining gig (below, photo courtesy of Ian Wright) who was there for her hen night. You could tell this was the case because she was wearing one of those clip-on bride's veils that can so easily get dipped in your pint of beer if you're not careful.
Also she was carrying a big banner that read: "I'm getting married but I still love Phil and Steve!"
This led to prolonged banter between the stage and her, in which all acquitted themselves splendidly. She was, of course, three sheets to the wind - as is traditional on these occasions - and Beer and Knightley seemed caught somewhere between terror and fascination.
Best of all, she did this thing when the band exited the stage (twice), of shadowing their exit from directly in front of the stage with her banner - which had a stick at each end - arms in the air, and creeping along just slightly behind them, as if she was playing What's the time, Mr Wolf? She pursued them as far as she could go into the wings, then stood, banner still aloft for some time afterwards, and somehow, triumphantly, this seemed to give her the final word.
And while her hangover should clear in time for the wedding, my second super-fan has a more indelible badge of honour.
A young woman called Caroline V***, from Manchester, attended ahab's Songs from the Shed recording session at Bristol and while she was there, Jon Earl - Mr Shed - noticed her tattoo.
According to the arch-propagandist from the Shed, Luke Price (wearing the hat in the video below) had once obliged her by writing some lyrics on her arm and Caroline went out and got them tattooed into permanency before they could wash off.
It's not clear that this is entirely, one hundred per cent accurate. But Caroline told me in an email: "I have a pretty big scar on my arm, so I was looking for some lyrics for aaaaages to cover it up with, when I came across ahab's Songs from the Shed session (above). I checked out a bit more of their stuff and I think it was more the lyrics than their sound that grabbed me initially. As you probably noticed, I chose lines from three difference ahab songs and combined them. I don't know why, it just felt right... and still does obviously."
It's just as well that Luke's got such beautiful handwriting.
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 USwhen 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."
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I was talking to an independent film-maker called Nigel Buck (see his showreel here - warning, it may make you feel you've chosen the wrong career) earlier this week about something else when he drew my attention to this pilot, put together last year, for a documentary that never got made.
The documentary was to have been called Folk the BNP and the pilot features a brief roundup, for television commissioning editors who hadn't followed the story, of what the BNP was attempting to do on the folk scene.
Buck cut the promo for two other film-makers called Andrew Graham-Brown, who owns a production company called AGB Films, and Evie Wright, who was the moving force behind the idea. They showed it around, thinking that it could have been timely for the general election, but as is often the way in the creative industries it failed to find a taker at the time.
"We thought of it for Cutting Edge on Channel Four," said Graham-Brown. "And we heard back from them eventually. But it was one of those stories that had to be done there and then really. And the BBC looked at it but said it was quite like a Storyville they'd made about the goings-on in Barking and Dagenham."
Wright still seems committed to making something in the subject area - describing the project as "dormant but not over" as far as she's concerned. "I've got some footage of Nick Griffin talking about folk immediately after he came off stage after losing the election in Barking and Dagenham," she said.
Graham-Brown mused out loud about the relative merits of attempting to get a three-part series about folk music made, incorporating this story as one of its elements. "Wierdly, the promo went on YouTube and it got 80,000 hits in a really short space of time - I've got no idea who was watching it. We thought that might impress the commissioning editors. But it hasn't yet." Watch this space...
This made me wonder about the song that kicked some of this hoo-hah off. I've seen Show of Hands several times this summer at festivals and a recurring theme was encores during which the audience muttered appreciatively: "They're not finished yet. They haven't done Roots." Only to find at the end that it hadn't been on the play list.
"I suppose I should sing it more," said Steve Knightley. "Everyone expects. It's just hard work committing to it vocally and morally night after night. It was starting to feel slightly charmless. It's like Arrogance Ignorance and Greed and Country Life: it demands conviction and sometimes my energy flags."
It struck me watching the promo that he must have spent a great deal of time talking about that one song, justifying it, explaining it.
"We have been playing it on occasion - we did it at the last gig. But it's been feeling as if one's forcing oneself to emote or convey anger or indignation long after the original energy of the song brought them naturally. Imagine being in a three year West End run of Look Back in Anger.
"It's nothing about the merits of the song, just the demands of the performance."
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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 anAmerican 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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OK. Someone calling themselves The FLK, who wear cow-head masks and generally go to some trouble to hide their identities, set fire to a stack of Fairport Convention's finest Leige and Lief LPs in the name of fun, boredom or crypto-fascist intention. One or the other. Then they put the film on YouTube.
So I was asking around and the first thing I heard, in a can't-reveal-my-source type way, was that The FLK are unlikely to be well-known folkies. Someone who knew someone who was on stage at their Cecil Sharp House gig back in May said that they'd met the two guys in the cows' heads through an extremely well-known artist some years ago.
This will come as a relief to Show of Hands who have had the digit of blame cast in their general direction, partly because they've dabbled in spoof YouTube material before (see earlier blog). Thanks toHarry Broad for the interesting information about "Phil Beer's very distinctive fingers", which he thought he'd spotted in the video. However, the bigger picture suggested otherwise. Wrong wrists, you see?
Emmerson knows exactly who the FLK are because they were at Cecil Sharp House supporting him for his Lush gig and because he's clearly enjoying himself. He's also very keen to defend them, saying that setting fire to Liege and Lief was "nothing to do with having a go at the Fairports".
Not that it matters. Despite my best efforts to rouse the Fairports from their Arthurian slumber - I'm imagining a gigantic all-year-round luxury glamping experience in a field somewhere in Oxfordshire, empty bejewelled tankards scattered about the place - the most coherent response I could get was this: "The point is lost on me." That was Simon Nicol btw. Leave him alone. He's getting on a bit...
In the end it was the practical stuff that identified the LP burners, I think. The first thing on The FLK's Twitter feed is something produced by KLF Communications. Similarly there are retweets on The KLF's Twitter feed of The FLK's stuff. Plus the logos are similar - and frankly it's exactly the sort of thing that a former art-school muso of a certain age would do, isn't it? In the same way that DJs who were once prime time Radio One - Simon Mayo, I'm talking about you - have got in touch with their essential folkiness upon entering their middle years, and a musical comedian - Ade Edmonson, that's you - might start a folk band to do punk covers, setting fire to Liege and Lief would only seem funny to someone who knows what it is. A certain level of music industry knowledge is implied.
So I'm going to stick my neck out and say that I think the folk scene has attracted the attention of Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, aka The KLF. The question is, then, what do they want? It's unlikely to be money, as they nailed their colours to the mast when they set fire to the cash - and, anyway, there isn't any. The Fairports spent it.
However, I'm feeling quite entertained. I've always liked my humour a bit on the dark side and whichever way you look at it setting fire to other people's creative output really is quite dark. Perhaps The FLK will be putting in an appearance at Cropredy? Just a thought...
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There's a thread on Mumsnet, which began posting a week ago, asking if folk music's sexist? Click on the link to have a look. It's produced a thoughtful discussion, full of links to songs in which women have the upper hand as well as fair few in which they don't. The question was raised because of the number of songs in which pretty fair maids are taken advantage of.
IntergalacticHussy, who started the thread, slightly spoilt her post by writing "I know virtually no one listens to this music," which made me want to invite her to one of the 250 or so annual UK folk festivals for a rethink.
However, putting that carefully to one side... Worrying that folk music might be discriminatory is a bit like blaming Elvis Presley because young people have sex with each other, or trying to ban fairy stories because wolves exist. The songs are a medium, used for entertainment, for telling stories, for passing on information. Condemning them, or wondering whether you should, is classic shoot-the-messenger behaviour.
When someone sings a song about a soldier taking advantage of a young girl and then buggering off to a war, the bad behaviour is the fictional soldier's. Obviously such things happen in real life and to a woman who's had a similar experience the song might be a comfort - oh good, I'm not the only idiot who fell for that - or to a girl about to have a similar experience it could be a cautionary tale (though I doubt even the wisdom of Chris Wood, pic above - I'm thinking Cold Haily Rainy Night - could drown out the raging hormones of a teenage girl). But in the same way that you're not responsible for the actions of someone when you overhear their crime discussed in a newsagent's queue, you're not perpetuating callous behaviour by listening to a song about it.
What I find interesting, though, is when bands return to similar material again and again, betraying their preoccupations. I first thought about it when I started blogging about folk and Show of Hands haddiscovered that their songRoots was being used without their permission by the BNP. This was before Folk Against Fascism started up and I love that song.
I love it because it's powerful marketing on behalf of folk music and I believe Steve Knightley knew the controversy he was courting when he wrote it: it was a reaction to something stupid said by a government minister. But I'd contend that Roots was one of many songs by that band that are about the alienation of ordinary people from their own land and the fragile bonds that tie us to our place of origin. They do a lot of emigration, exile and sailing songs.
I guess if a band did a lot of songs about women having a hard time then one might begin to suspect them of not liking women very much because they enjoy the subject matter. But I can't think of any examples.
Why is that?
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Not knowing Bristol, I'd imagined a red brick stately home built by a prosperous slave trader back in the day. In fact Colston Hall is a glass-fronted building with a municipal feel, built high into the air in a part of town full of squats, financial services outlets and fast food joints. But it was easily identifiable as folk central from Friday afternoon to Sunday evening by the morris men and rapper dancers making the most of the sunshine out the front. These included Nonesuch Morris - Best in Class for leaping - and the Silver Flame Rapper girls, who were exciting because of the worried look they habitually wore with their purple sashes, giving the impression - nearly entirely erroneously, as it turned out - that something could go wrong at any minute. Always a concern with jiggling flesh in close proximity to swords.
Being indoors this early in the year had theoretical advantages, although sunshine and light breezes in the end gave the two dark, main venues the feel of places to which you regretfully retreated when compelled indoors by the need to hear some music. The walk through the foyer was brightened by an on-trend novelty pedicure station, involving hundreds of little fish nibbling at your hard skin for a tenner.
There were squeals from it on Friday because it tickled (apparently). But by the end of the three days the poor little fishies had taken to laying low in the bottom of their tanks, bloated, torpid and probably a bit cheesed off with the formerly be-sandalled feet of hundreds of folkies. Definitely rather them than me. Several friends who were indoor camping in a nearby church hall ("but where do you put the tent pegs?") with just a sink for washing were considering treating themselves and the fish to a full body immersion by Sunday though, so perhaps the fishies got off lightly.
Kathryn Roberts and her partner Sean Lakeman played a lovely set of sad tunes early on Friday afternoon. "Do we ever play anything else?" asked Roberts at one point. She later explained their musical choices to me in a way that reminded me that I sometimes used to meet Sean's dad, Geoff, on jobs when I was a cub reporter in Cornwall and he was the Daily Mirror's man in the west country. "So much of folk music is the news of the time when it was written - songs about events with a newsworthy sensation. As a result they are very often sad. I suppose we celebrate the joyous things but don't necessarily write songs about them. And I live such a happy life that it's a kind of therapy to get out and do something else."
But with Lakeman being an ace rhythm guitarist, could there be a missed opportunity for upbeat, rabble-rousing numbers? "Sean does a lot of rhythm guitar with Seth (Lakeman, his brother) but he's primarily an excellent accompanist. It's just a different style for him."
In the innumerate tradition of Fun Boy Three, the first thing you noticed about 3 Daft Monkeys was that there were four of them, or five if you included Athene Roberts' amazing, steam punk corsetry (see above). They almost magically lifted the mood and caused the first sighting of punters galloping up and down the aisles in each others' arms. When Roberts said "You're a lovely audience, yes you are" it was as if a pixie were tickling us under our collective chins.
The evening continued with Ruarri Joseph, who was funny as well as good and had a memorable line about an unlucky man whose dog had been "snagged by a train and was ten miles east". And then Seth Lakeman, who raised the audience to such a pitch that one of my companions was moved to observe that it was almost certainly the excess of female hormones in the air that was making his fiddle strings go out of tune.
However, in the interest of balance I would like to point out that despite the legend that Lakeman is "making folk sexy" I thought I observed an equal reaction to Fay Hield on Sunday afternoon, something that struck me as I failed to see through the forest of burly admirers crowding the front of her auditorium. She got a supportive yet faintly yearning audience response to her suggestion that, since she'd failed to bag Prince William after all, she wouldn't mind if "that Mr Boden" asked for her hand now...
Friday evening was also when I realised that there was behaviour around the bar that was, in my experience, unique to folk gatherings. Never in my life, apart from at Bristol this weekend and the South Bank Centre once for a folk show, have I seen people spontaneously form a number of queues for the bar equal to the number of bar staff. This was instead of the more traditional scrum. While I can see that there is something irritatingly fair about this, it also takes much of the romance out of the situation, which is - let's face it - something that most of us have been in training for all of our lives. It negates the possibility of small acts of kindness, the idea that someone might be thirstier than someone else and takes all of the risk out of a situation that most of us have absolutely no problem with in the first place. It then replaces this tiny risk of unfairness with the kind of irritation more usually experienced in a post office when one queue appears to be moving faster than another. Plus it takes up much more space. Gah... I can feel a backlash coming on.
Saturday morning brought a young, male trio called Wildflowers, who were two fiddles and a Spanish-flavoured guitar with a combined age of about 40. They were very, very good for their ages, putting the wild into wildflower. I was intending to make a series of observations about them, starting with the idea that they would be a perfect match for Joe Broughton's violin masterclasses at the Birmingham Conservatoire or the Guildhall school because of the style in which they play (similar to his with the Urban Folk Quartet but less practised by about 20 years). But I've decided to stop there because someone saw me jotting notes and came over, asking who I was writing for and mentioning that he was father to one of them. And I know when I'm licked.
Jane Taylor was brilliant and gave me my first "got to buy a CD" moment, but I'm going to write about her separately. And she was followed, with a sense of the occasion having picked up some strong momentum, by Pilgrims' Way - "we're the only band who won't try and sell you something this weekend because our first CD's not printed until next week", count me in - and then Jamie Smith's Mabon. While "mabon" produces nothing from my dictionary, wikipedia says that it's the autumnal equinox in the Wiccan tradition, when you can traditionally balance an egg on its end. Not sure what to make of that, but they also got my vote with a CD.
Elfynn reminded me a lot of Little Johnny England with a female singer. Then there was the Fisherman's Friends, who said that they'd landed the "old farts novelty slot" at Glastonbury this year but left me, as usual, with the feeling that I always had after meeting Cornish lifeboat crews (more cub reporter anecdotes): that somehow I'd had the wool pulled over my eyes by someone more canny than me.
One-time Irish Eurovision contenders Dervish were hilarious but made Boots of Spanish Leather sound like incidental music from Titanic. And then Steve Knightley, Phil Beer and Miranda Sykes did their impressive thing, made me blub to Cousin Jack and then sent us off to the silent disco over the way, where we discovered all over again that Jim Moray is a genius. On this occasion it was because he mashed up Billy Jean by Michael Jackson with Seth Lakeman's Kitty Jay in such a way that it was clear they should have met sooner and will undoubtedly spend the rest of their lives together, curled up in some kind of funky Bristolian love nest.
My Sunday got off to a slow start because I was talked into getting up at 5am to go and watch several troupes of suprisingly alert morris dancers dance the sun up by Cabot tower for May Day, and then had to go back to bed again with exhaustion (me - probably not them), grateful that someone had the situation in hand.
However, memorable parts of the day eventually included being asked to judge a poetry folk slam, a role I believe I was born for; seeing a magician rightly called Kieran the Mighty produce pre-marked playing cards from the inside of a mobile phone in the terrace bar and shocked expressions on the faces of his audience; and deciding that there must have been something wrong with Sheelanagig's sound desk because their set was SO LOUD it made me quite scared, to the point at which I broke out in a sweat and had to leave the auditorium. Their flute sounded like nothing except feedback and the amplification meant I couldn't understand a word spoken between songs, which just made me feel old. But they had to contend with a gigantic banner picture of Bellowhead louching around behind them, so perhaps I should cut them some slack.
When Bellowhead finally arrived they were phenomenal. A pleasantly unhinged Jon Boden bashed his tambourine against his chest, giving the impression that he was only a very short trip from banging it on his forehead. There was a song enigmatically introduced by Paul Sartin as being about "wizard copulation"; they did Across the Line, which they don't always play but is my personal favourite; and when Cholera Camp came around complete f****** chaos broke out. Pete Flood was running around the stage apparently looking for his snare drum and either found it just in time, or made it look as if he had. Boden threw his jacket in the air, which after all the songs about whoring gave the impression he might be about to take the rest off it off too, and at the end of the set there were cannons shooting what looked like glitter in the air, at which point even the band looked amazed. There was a short debate afterwards about whether any of us really enjoyed Little Sally Racket as much as Boden clearly enjoyed singing it. But hey, I shouldn't think they care after a performance like that.
Folky Bristolian youngsters carried on singing, playing and dancing in the bar afterwards until the staff threw everyone out. I think it would be fair to say that a good time was had by all, with the possible exception of the nibbling fishes.
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St George's Day falls on a Saturday this year and the piece of my soul that will be forever England takes a certain satisfaction in this. Even Dave "let's move Mayday to October" Cameron couldn't have a problem with us all having a day off in spring if it's on a Saturday, surely?
So with the state of the nation to the fore, here's something by a songwriter called Greg McDonald, who cites The Clash and Show of Hands among his influences. His first solo studio album, called Tomorrow England, has Phil Beer on fiddle and this video is a promo rather than a whole song, but there's enough to get a flavour of what he's up to. The official album launch is April 25, although I got a copy through the post with a press release and a handwritten note showing that he's read the blog. So flattery definitely pays.
There's going to be a single out in time for St George's Day called, um, St George's Day. It's about a British soldier who marries an Afghan woman who is then murdered by racists in Greenwich Park. Whether it's tasteful to invent murders in London parks for lyrical purposes is worth asking but since McDonald is from that neck of the woods it's his psycho-geography and I guess he can do with it as he will.
St George's Day is a bittersweet song that chimes in with the overall theme of the album, which I'd say is a kind of contemporary Englishness that's none too specific about its roots and is also alert to the many charges against said Englishness: racism, xenophobia and historical militarism. The album cover shows McDonald in a cherry red uniform with an accordian, like a toy soldier. This has its charms. But on a day when the main issue is why it's OK to bomb Libya in the name of democracy now but it wasn't OK to send groundtroops to Iraq for the same thing eight years ago ("not in my name" said a million Brits) you could be forgiven for musing that the modern English are more comfortable around toy soldiers than real ones. Perhaps he's on to something.
There are some good lines. Singing the Reds starts "The devil came down to Lewisham..." and, with the borough's three syllables slurred into two, it's a homage to The Devil Went Down to Georgia by the Charlie Daniels Band. Louis Armstrong also gets a look in, with a knowing reference to his assertion that "It's all folk music. I aint never heard no horse sing a song". I also like the title, to say the least, of Fairytale of New Cross. When coupled with the fact that McDonald is playing several times in the coming months at The Trafalgar Tavern, Greenwich (one of my favourite places in the world, for the whitebait suppers and the spring tides lapping against its bay windows) it seems entirely possible that, since The Glamour Cave is in Bethnal Green, this is my psychogeography too and that perhaps I was always going to like the album for that reason.
So it's geographically specific and a bit political without being prescriptive. I liked the title track the best, with its lyric "Tonight these dreaming streets, Tomorrow England" conjuring the glistening cobbles of Greenwich in the rain and a certain kind of incoherent ambition probably brought on by having had a few too many shandies. Allusive and poppy, this is useful folk aimed squarely at the mainstream. I wish him good luck.
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"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.
