Rodney Branigan: the high plains drifter who came from LA to Somerset, via Nashville

"The idea in my head was that if I could do this thing it would attract a lot of attention initially and what I did with that attention would be the true test of my entertaining ability."

Maybe I watched too much Aerosmith on MTV in the 1980s but I can’t shake the sensation that there is a kind of one-upmanship involved in playing two guitars simultaneously that goes way beyond the usual. Calling Doctor Freud?

Rodney Branigan, 37, was at the BBC in Portland Place a couple of years ago, taking part in a showcase. He had a blues voice, was passionately involved in what he was doing and could definitely play guitar, plus he had a kind of rude health about him that, combined with the American accent, made me think of something my nana had said about American GIs during the second world war seeming “corn fed”. Then he pulled out a second guitar - whoaaah! - and started playing it alongside the first. One was a kind of rhythm section and he was managing each with one hand.  Nifty… and slightly disconcerting. Certainly memorable. He was already extremely good, you see, when he was only playing the one guitar: why bother?

Poking around on the web I could find very little about him, which seemed odd as he’d clearly been around for a while somewhere and had the serious demeanor of a pro. He reminded me a little of Chris Whitley, minus the drugs, or Lindsey Buckingham, for the guitar energy. But there was something wilfully non-standard about him: perhaps it was just that he seemed to have a rough idea what he was doing at a time when the music industry was in disarray. How?

Fast forward a couple of years and he played the Half Moon in Putney. We had a brief conversation during which he mentioned a sponsorship deal with Yamaha that made me think someone was probably marketing him, and that he'd recently moved to Frome in Somerset. So I tried again with the Googling. This time there was more: I could see evidence of a dalliance with Show of Hands, six records and – eh? -  a DVD of him playing in India, as well as an audio interview with a Parisian who wanted to know an awful lot about guitar tuning. 

“I get a lot of very guitar-orientated stuff,” he said on the phone later.

So tell me about yourself?

“OK. I’m from Amarillo, Texas, originally. I grew up on the high plains and left home when I turned 20. I moved around a lot, playing any place that would let me, and in those days I used to do a lot more folk-orientated stuff. Bob Dylan, that kind of thing…

“So I’ve been playing music professionally for 16 years and in my adult life I haven’t had another job. I lived on the road for years… opened for The Toadies and The Nixons, did several tours. Then I moved to LA in 2005 and had been there for about six months when I met a manager and moved again, to Nashville. I signed with a manager called Eddie Wenrick and he got me a gig writing for EMI.”

So you were like one of those young musicians in the brilliantly bling TV series Nashville? They did that job.

“Yes. That was me, kind of. So I had a day job while I was writing my album and I lived in Nashville for two years, had a couple of song-writing coaches, including a guy called Dave Loggins.”

Like Kenny Loggins? The tune from the opening sequence of Top Gun was suddenly going around my head.

“Yeah. I think he’s his cousin or something. So I was writing country music in Nashville and it was all right. I didn’t get any final cuts on albums and it wasn’t massively lucrative but it was a day job.”

There was a slightly guilty pause.

“I prefer not to write country music if I’m quite honest about it. It’s a very specific type of thing you write about and I don’t like to write songs about drinking beer and failed relationships. Most of it is about failed relationships.”

Suddenly he seemed immensely likeable. So you’ve been right to the heart of the US music industry?

“Yeah. I guess you could say that. But one of the reasons I moved to London in 2007 was that my record label – Little Wooden Boy Music - went bankrupt and my manager got out of the business.”

Oh dear. Was this connected with the rise of the internet in the music industry?

“It all seemed to start slightly before then. When I was in LA in 2002-03 I dealt with a lot of record labels and a lot of the A&R guys lost their jobs around that time. By 2005-06 it was taking a massive downturn.  There’s more money in independent music these days.”

Really?

“I mean as a whole there is. But on an individual level there isn’t.”

OK. So why London?

“There seemed to be a lot of opportunities for me in London. I signed with a record label based out of Paris called Bad Reputation Records and they re-released an album of mine from the States. It was a kind of rebranding. I’m still signed with them: in the UK I can release my own stuff but in France - because I don't speak the language - it's useful to have someone doing my groundwork. There's a booking agent and someone who does PR. But in this country I don't have a record label. I have an agent who does bookings in India and one who does tours in Germany. And I went to China once and did a tour of conservatoires, a lecture series on composing music."

So what's going on with Yamaha?

"Right. Yes. I'm on the Yamaha tour right now."

When I'd first tried his number he was breaking up a bit but I could just about hear that he was in a car on his way to a guitar workshop in Derby with Tim Snider.

"It's for the release of the LL series. That's a type of guitar they make: they just redesigned it and we're going into music shops and performing there."

So when I saw you at the Half Moon that was also part of the Yamaha tour?

"They took the dates we were already playing and filled in the rest, put us in music shops on the dates we weren't playing. I've been working with Yamaha for six years. I do clinical work for the guitar manufacturers and they fly me around the world to demo the guitars. Basically I sell the guitars to the people who sell the guitars."

Suddenly, the pieces fell into place for me. Branigan does a business-to-business thing a lot of the time. Yes, he's a pro but it also accounts for the lack of footage on the web of him giving concerts, which you'd usually expect for someone who was making a good living from music. Eureka.

"Yeah. I get loads of free guitars. I haven't had to pay for a guitar in about 12 years."

And I guess that's just as well, considering your website is called Brokenguitars.com?

"Ha! I started that website in 2001. When I started playing percussive guitar I wasn't sure how hard you could hit them and I broke six in a year. But I've figured out how not to break them now. I pretty much know the exact tensile strength of my guitars."

And do you ever worry that the "two guitars" thing gets in the way of the music? That your gimmick overshadows your reputation as a serious musician?

"Yes. I do feel that it gets in the way. It gets a lot of attention, so I reserve it now for the last track of every set I play. But it's where all the guitar endorsements come from. Initially I did it because I was trying to make as much sound as possible. The idea in my head was that if I could do this thing it would attract a lot of attention initially and what I did with that attention would be the true test of my entertaining ability. I do get some criticism for it - mainly from other guitarists, who say 'What's the point of playing two when you could play one and make more of it.' But I get some pretty rare endorsements. I make a comfortable living."

So you moved to Frome? You said you have a five-year-old daughter now with your partner, whom you met in London? Is she from Somerset?

"No, she's from London. But she was more up for the move than I was: she just wanted to get out of town. I grew up in a bit more a of a country environment myself, where there was more space to run around and I want that for my daughter. We looked at Trowbridge but decided on Frome when we heard that there would be a Steiner school opening there. It's a kind of alternative education where they focus on the creative arts more than they do in the state system. And one of the ways they do that is by slowing up the academic side of things before the age of seven, then they speed it up again. From the age of seven to 16 she will learn Chinese and Spanish and most of the kids that come out of Steiner schools are pretty fluent in both. I met some people on the road who had their kids in Steiner schools and one of them had a 16-year-old who was fluent in French."

Useful stuff.

"Frome has a creative community and a farming community, and I'm fine with both. My family farmed wheat, maize and cane for animal feed, and I can appreciate both mindsets."

And how are you settling in? Have you met the neighbours? I went to the folk festival in Frome a couple of years ago - coincidentally I ended up writing a piece about musicians who had mildly dysfunctional relationships with instruments - and remember that Sam Lakeman and Cara Dillon live there.

"Yes. I've met them in passing. And I met Seth before, through Steve Knightley. He invited me to play one year, to help stand in for Phil Beer when he was away, and it took two of us: me and Seth. In fact I saw Seth two days ago at the Acoustic Festival of Britain: I was trying to see if he'd be at Glastonbury this year. My partner and I are both involved in a project in the kids' field: we take guitars and violins along with us, as well as teachers, and give free lessons to children. My partner is a luthier and she recycles musical instruments from music schools. I'll always be at Glastonbury doing this, even if I'm not on the bill."

He explained that this was how he also met Billy Bragg: he donated some recycled guitars to Bragg's Jail Guitar Doors charity after being invited to play the Left Field stage at Glastonbury one year and even went with him to HMP Wandsworth to play back in 2007.



* 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 at @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

Steve Knightley on Abbotsbury wash-out

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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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

Hello Rodney Branigan, guitar geek

Just a short one. I went to the BBC Club on Tuesday to watch a showcase by Manilla PR and was lucky enough to catch Circus Envy doing their thing.

Before their second set of three songs, Mick (playing - and sitting on - the box) thanked the PR company insincerely for putting Circus Envy on after Rodney Branigan, a young American now living in south London, who had made us all blink by starting his set with a number that involved playing two guitars simultaneously.

As the afternoon progressed it became clear that although the two guitars thing is impressive in a man-with-two-heads kind of a way, Branigan would be a bit of a star even without the geekery.

He's undeniably very talented - doing the best version of Come Together I've ever heard, including by The Beatles - but it was his humour I especially liked. And the fact that he, um, has no trouble clenching a guitar firmly between his knees for many minutes at a time (see slightly underexposed picture below). He mentioned at one point that he'd been in prison in Mexico and then, when there was a bit of tooth-sucking and muttering about how you shouldn't say that from the front row, he introduced his next song as being about spanking children.

Since it was a tune - albeit one played by using the guitar as a percussion instrument as much as a guitar -  the chances of it originally having been about any such thing were pretty remote.

It turned out that the spell in prison was for alleged drug smuggling, but since it was only for three days he clearly wasn't guilty. I hope I haven't buggered up his immigration status by mentioning this as it would be great to see him play a whole set.

I see Show of Hands feels the same way.

Also check out the tunes on this website, including The Plagiarism Song, for which it helps if you have a passing familiarity with American children's entertainment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook newsfeed, you could *like* its Facebook page and then use the drop-down menu to indicate that it's one of your "interests". This will enhance the possibility that you'll get them. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley  

Absinthe and iPhones at the BBC folk awards

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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