Karine Polwart: 'I'm more Deadwood than Disney'

Karine Polwart was between sets at the Shrewsbury festival - one on each main stage. She'd dramatically underestimated the number of people who wanted copies of her new CD signed, so she was running late, and the couple who were last in the queue were warming up for a domestic incident. The husband was telling his wife that she was useless in front of the famous singer with whom they'd both like their picture taken, and the wife, unsurprisingly, was getting upset.

She wasn't the only one. It was a bit stressful.

So Polwart was a trouper for picking up two plastic chairs and setting them down behind the signing tent, where fewer people would spot her, for a brief chat.

Her song Sorry (above) really reminds me of something from the American TV series Deadwood (below), I told her.

"That is so weird. I was obsessed with Deadwood." I suddenly had her full attention. "Being a musician I can never watch anything on a weekly basis because I'm always out working. So there's an underground trade in HBO box sets on the Scottish folk scene and that one was on my mind for months. At the moment it's Borgen and The Killing."

And we're off... So it seems that Scottish female singers are having a bit of a Disney moment, what with Julie Fowlis doing all that work on Brave, and Cara Dillon writing a song for Disney World as well as doing the narration for Tinkerbell. With a cast of mind that appreciates the operatic levels of bloodshed, betrayal and alienation in Deadwood, could Polwart ever see herself doing Disney?

"Well, I think it was a bolt from the blue for Julie. It's the kind of phone call we all dream about getting. But both Cara and Julie have bell-like voices. They have the kind of voices that, if you were to think about folk and you didn't have a notion of what was about, you might think of beautiful voices like theirs. Mine is a bit too screechy - it doesn't have the same cut-glass quality. And they come from a different tradition from me. They are both a part of the Gallic or Gaelic song tradition and use their voices in a completely different way.

"Julie Fowlis is a tremendous musician - she has a degree in cultural studies and musicology. And, let's face it, there are only so many ways that a folk singer is likely to be given an opportunity like that. It's a massive opportunity. It's every songwriter's dream to have a song of theirs used in a film or on TV because it puts you before an audience you wouldn't ordinarily have and allows you to transcend your genre.

"One of mine - Cover Your Eyes - was on a television documentary recently called You've Been Trumped, which was about Donald Trump and the golf course, and Sigur Ros were on the soundtrack as well. So that was good.

"But I've written an album of songs about child murder, so I'm probably not the right person for Disney."

Um, why did you do that?

"I have two little kids and it's my worst nightmare. And I write from a place where everything has to matter to me. So I'd probably be a rubbish person to write something to a specification for someone else. I'm not sure I could write in the abstract."

But surely writing something to a specification isn't writing in the abstract?

"I have friends who write songs for Nashville. What I mean is that I can only write music for myself. However... I worked on the Darwin Song Project a while back and the one that I kept was the one that meant the most to me, which was We're All Leaving (below). That's another one about child death."

Yes. I can see a pattern developing here.

"I'd just had one baby and I think I was pregnant again... I write about the risks that are most relevant to me at the time."

So do you ever write political songs?

"Sorry would probably be the closest to a political song that I've written. I've never explained to anyone what that's about, which was an accident to start off with. But then I really liked the responses that I got to it. People would interpret it and the interpretations were more interesting than my original idea..."

She's clearly really enjoyed seeing the song take on a life of its own, so much so that she was pretty reluctant to say where the original thought came from. 'Sorry' won't pay for this loss, the lyric runs.

"It was of a time when there was a lot of George Bush  and Tony Blair and the Iraq War in the air. That may have been what kicked it off. But I like that the song is a bit enigmatic. That's my choice when I write about political issues: I like to make other people do the work.

"I studied philosophy and for a long time I was all about community-based philosophy, which would be going on in schools and pubs. That was what I wanted to do with my life - but no one wanted to fund it. And yet I feel that is what I do with my life, oddly. There's work to be done making these things - the things we habitually talk about - meaningful.

"Don't get me wrong. It's not that I find talking about politics boring. I find it fascinating. I just don't think it's my job to deliver a lecture. I don't like preaching to people."

She's actively involved with the Green Party in Scotland, which she says is in favour of independence at the moment. "And I'm swaying to a yes on it too, though it's about having more power residing locally for me. I'm not a nationalist."

Local for her is Pathhead in Midlothian. "There are sixteen professional musicians in a village of only 900, including Martin Green from Lau. We've got folk, jazz and experimental musicians - Inga," who plays in Polwart's band, wearing the headscarf to cover alopecia, "Inga lives in Pathhead too. There is a session on a Thursday night in the Foresters' Arms on the main street and we have fiddles, box players and a pipemaker who plays in a band with some Indian musicians," which sounds as if it would be worth seeking out if one were touring Scotland by car, for instance.

So does Polwart dance?

"Oh. What a question. Dancing makes me very uncomfortable - unless it's ceilidh dancing of course, in which case it's genetic and everyone does it. But I'm not one for dancing in clubs, no."

And what's she listening to these days?

"If I'm listening and really listening, my favourite at the moment is Anais Mitchell. Her new album is mighty, just mighty. I love it. And then there's Laura Veirs, who trained to be a scientist of some kind - was it meteorology? - before turning to music, and so all of her images are science-based images and they're just absurdly beautiful.

"And, of course, I have two small children - a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter," with her sound engineer partner, "so there are lots of counting songs. And I like Gillian Welch."

This leads to a discussion about Louise Mensch, the former Conservative MP who's husband, Peter Mensch, manages Welch (as well as Metallica). "I liked Louise Mensch. I'm sorry to see her leave parliament," said Polwart. "She's articulate and she didn't mince around with her words. I was enjoying seeing a woman in public life - on the culture committee, wasn't it? - who spoke her mind even if I didn't always agree with her."

Me too. So what's next?

"I really need a project. I like being asked to do things and at the moment I really need a project for when I've finished touring with this album. I'm thinking that it might be time to focus some of my energy much closer to home musically than I have been doing. When I got into music it was through the community in my village - I was in a band as one of about eight singers. And I have a strong sense of obligation. There is a bank of young ladies in Pathhead of 11 or 12 years old who would go for it, if we set something up. It seems only right in a village full of musicians."

And with the admission that I'd come to the end of my line of questioning, Polwart sprang to her feet and, whirling a plastic chair over head, was gone in a trice leaving only a few pages of my notebook blowing in her wake.

* You can buy a copy of Karine Polwart's new album, Traces, here.

* And here are a couple of other posts from Shrewsbury. Firstly, this and this about the webstreaming, which is continuing now the festival's over, on a requests basis. And this about a young band called Blue Horyzon, who were busking there.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed - or at least stand a 15 per cent chance of doing so, according to the new algorithm that manages these things - you could *like* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

Blue Horyzon sow intergenerational confusion at Shrewsbury

Blue Horyzon were busking in between cloud bursts at the Shrewsbury festival yesterday and made quite an impression.

Genevieve Tudor interviewed them about a terrible train journey they made recently, for use on her show today - Sunday - on BBC Radio Shropshire. And I believe Spiral Earth also interviewed them for one of the talky bits on the somewhat amazing Shrewsbury festival webcast.

So not to be left out...

They've got a banjo, which is fine by me. And before too long they had launched into Mumford & Sons' Little Lion Man. The thing that marked it out, though, more than anything else was that they had altered the lyrics, removing the most memorable line - which goes I really fucked it up this time, didn't I my dear? - so that it ran I really messed it up this time... instead.

As you can probably tell, from the picture and also from a close textual analysis of the way they spell their band name, Blue Horyzon are young, both in absolute terms but also by comparison with many people at Shrewsbury this weekend.  I would go as far as to say that they were among the youngest people in sight when they were busking.

So when I asked Lyndon, their drummer, "Why change the lyrics?" and he nodded towards the audience and said, apparently seriously, "the children" I was momentarily bewildered.

Lyndon, I should explain is the old man of the band at the age of 29.

Young people today.

Cuh.

Here's them playing something completely different.

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Get the Shrewsbury festival live webcast here

It's the four-day Shrewsbury festival this bank holiday weekend, which sold out back in April and where KT Tunstall (below) is headlining on Monday night.

But never fear... If you didn't manage to get a ticket you can still get a flavour of it because - glory hallelujah! - it will be webcast live in high definition and available to watch by clicking on

this link

Here's a schedule

Friday
19.35 Session A9
20.50 Madison Violet
22.10 Anxo Lorenzo

Saturday
13.00 Hat Fitz and Cara Robinson
14.15 Jackie Oates Band
15.30 Global Dance Project

19.00 Jim Moray
20.15 Kate Rusby
21.35 Show of Hands

Sunday
12.00 The Wilsons
13.00 Fay Hield and the Hurricane Party
14.10 Baskery
15.30 Jon Boden and the Remnant Kings

19.30 Karine Polwart
20.45 Plainsong
22.00 Richard Thompson

Monday
13.00 Old Man Luedecke
14.05 Caroline Herring and Kathryn Roberts
15.30 The Sweetback Sisters
17.00 KT Tunstall

It's all in British Summer Time, for those reading this outside the UK.

This will be the third year that Shrewsbury has been webcast and I invite you to consider whether there may be a connection between this and the fact that it's sold out. Here's my earlier post on the subject.

For the first time this year the live music webcasting will be augmented by interviews with bands and other bits and pieces, brought to you by the team from Spiral Earth.

Enjoy!

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed, or at least stand a 15 per cent chance of doing so, thanks to Facebook's new algorithm, you could *like* its Facebook page. Or you could follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

British folk music gets its own satellite

Ladies and gentlemen, in the blue corner I give you Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Sky TV, among many other media outlets. And in the red corner we have Charles and Heather Denscombe, a pair of retired teachers who have built their own outside broadcast van and will be streaming the Shrewsbury folk festival over the internet to tens of thousands of people in more than 35 countries later on this summer - if last year was anything to go by - free at the point of use.

This is a story of old media versus new.

Before I elaborate, here's a picture of Britain's first folk music satellite.

OK. Not so much a picture as an artist's impression of Hylas 1, which is owned by Hughes and rents enough capacity to Mr and Mrs Denscombe all year round, via a company called Avanti, for an unlimited number of people to watch their webcast at any given time. And what the Denscombes use it for, 98 per cent of the time, is streaming high definition images of folk music from festivals. It's a folk music satellite.

This big thing had a small beginning. Neil Pearson, one of the three directors of the Shrewsbury festival, explained that the people at the back of the tent couldn't see very well.

"Our main stage is in a big tent that holds about three and a half thousand people and the view at the back is from some distance. So we decided we needed to put up screens either side of the stage. [The Denscombes] supplied footage for those screens with a five camera shoot the first time. That was 2008.

"Everything that was filmed was also recorded, purely for on-site reasons. Then the next year we thought 'Well, we can do this. So what else can we do with this technology?' We'd had some feedback and comments and some people said that they would have loved to have seen the main stage at certain points of the day - especially in the evening - but were back at their tent looking after their kids. So we thought about putting wifi around the site.

"The guy who was doing the filming - Charles Denscombe - is a real technology guy, who's interested in working on the margins of what's possible. So we got a wifi network installed around the site and in 2009 everything that was on the screens at the side of the stage was also available on the Shrewsbury festival wifi network.

"Then we looked at the costs and we had this big satellite dish on site, connecting us with broadband via a satellite. This gave us enough capacity to broadcast out as well.

"We needed the satellite for the free wifi - which allowed people to tweet and Facebook about the festival - but in 2010 we were able to webcast the festival and last year 14,500 people in 35 countries watched it."

I first became aware of live webcasting as a result of the buzz around the American festival Bonnaroo this year, which webcast Radiohead's headlining show among others. The buzz among my friends was unavoidable. I knew it was happening because I read them talking about it on Facebook and Twitter beforehand and then I read about it afterwards on Facebook, eventually tuning in to have a look for myself. I caught a replay.

Charles provided the same service for Shrewsbury last year and believes that he's doing something for the first time. "We think of ourselves as the UK's first micro-broadcaster. No one can compete with us because by comparison with traditional outside broadcasting - involving cameramen, cranes swinging around and hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of equipment - we could almost turn up for free.

"We're two retired teachers and an eight year old transit van. But we run a system that produces broadcast quality, high definition, high volume television, which we can produce with no intrusion to the paying audience."

This is possible because of a network of static cameras placed around the stage, operated remotely and robotically by one person in the transit. This is usually Heather, who does the vision mixing, although they have an enthusiastic crew of around 12.

"Also we're able to give the performers a DVD of their performance 20 minutes after it's over, to take away and use as they wish. What we often find is that they come back to us and ask for a small amount of re-editing and for us to help them put it up on YouTube."

This year's Shrewsbury tickets, which went on sale in December, were sold out by April, and I wonder whether this might be partly because of Shrewsbury's presence on YouTube. From the point of view of this blog, when I'm looking for video footage to embed in a post to illustrate what a musician does - which, when you think about it, is absolutely central to successfully conveying what I'm on about - I have chosen Shrewsbury footage over and over again because it's high definition and professionally edited, making it miles better than nearly everything else. I was a fan of Charles' and Heather's work before I even knew they existed.

When I spoke to someone from the Cambridge festival - broadcast by Sky - a couple of weeks ago they were only 92 per cent sold out and it's hard to see what else the difference could be? Sky Arts - where Cambridge will be shown this year - is only available to those with a Sky subscription and then only when Sky chooses to broadcast it, whereas Shrewsbury is available for free 24 hours a day, all year round. Ask yourself: which is the better marketing proposal?

Webcasting the festival and then making the footage available is, for practical purposes, exactly the same model as hearing music on the radio several times before deciding to buy a CD. Watching footage from Bonnaroo made me want to go there as well as appreciate the musicians. Obviously, a strong web presence also enhances a festival's appeal to advertisers. 

It's as if someone has pulled all the cabling out of the back of the old model of how to market music and festivals, and is rewiring it for the digital age.  

"I've come to see that there are two types of performers," Mr Denscombe said. "One, who is usually American - let's call them the Thompsons - question what we're up to when they see there are cameras and want to know what their cut is. These guys are used to being filmed for television. But then there are the folk singers who haven't two beans to rub together - which is most of them - who are absolutely delighted with our services because if they had to pay for them in totality they probably couldn't afford them."

So the Denscombes' way of doing things works really well for individual performers, raising their profiles, as well as promoting the genre as a whole.

The Denscombes, who began their business filming nativity plays and weddings, are pushing at the limits of what's technologically possible, using their wits and the technical and engineering skills they learnt partly while they were helping people to pass their GCSE technology. Mrs Denscombe describes her husband as "a bit of an inventor".

They have used the money they got when they retired from teaching to build their outside broadcast van and now they're looking for more work.

* If you run a music festival that's looking to shore up its position in the festival calendar, or know a band with a tour planned that wants to build some momentum, you could reach Charles and Heather here.

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed, you could make it so by *liking* its Facebook page. Or follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley