Frank Moon: now there's a name to conjure with. This alumnus of The Urban Folk Quartet has done loads of good work on the folk scene, having also been integral to The Destroyers. So it was a curious pleasure to see him on stage at the Lilian Baylis studio at Sadler's Wells last night in The Little Match Girl, having broken out, so to speak.
Looking at his CV, I realise now that this a somewhat partial, folk-orientated perspective. But still...
I wasn't quite sure how he got there. So after watching this blissfully realised - but appallingly sad - story, I asked him.
"Why, why does the little match girl have to die?" I pleaded first, my thoughts already halfway to Syria and the refugee crisis. The traces of my new year's hangover might also have had a hand in it.
"I know, it's awful, isn't it?"
However, as he'd been working on the show with its choreographer, Arthur Pita, on and off for more than three years the misery of The Little Match Girl's existence must have long been a secondary concern: you just wouldn't be able to get any work done otherwise.
So how did it happen?
"I met Arthur through The Destroyers at the Birmingham Dance Festival over five years ago. The band was asked to write some music for him and they nominated me to do the composing, which became Utopia.
"Then a little while later I had a call from him, saying that he'd found it very easy working with me and had a commission from the Royal Opera House to do Metamorphosis, based on the Kafka novel. Would I be interested?"
Nice. This what they call "the big time".
"So I said yes! And the Little Match Girl has been our third collaboration: this is the third Christmas in a row that it's been on. It's just that the first year it was on in Ipswich and didn't get reviewed until it came to London."
The show is primarily a dance piece, as you would expect given the venue. So the music is integral to the show: Moon composed and performs it, on stage, surrounded by a panoply of musical instruments, including a fiddle, oud, theramin and ocarina, making layers of sound. The theramin creates the difference between the faintly Dickensian tone of the first half of the show and the dreamlike sequence, set on the moon, that follows the little match girl's unnecessary death from cold, brought on by poverty and having no adults to take care of her. Excuse me while I struggle to compose myself again...
Moon, brilliantly, wears a motorcycle helmet with an aerial on top when he plays the theramin. Because yes.
The scraps of dialogue in the show are in Italian. "Because Arthur - who is Portuguese himself - didn't want the thing to feel exactly like Dickens. I worked on the words with a couple of the cast members, who are from Italy."
Since then Moon and Pita have done something else for the Royal Ballet called Whelan Watson: other stories and on the night I saw him, Moon was recovering from the disappointment of hearing that the show's transfer to New York had been postponed, despite tickets already having been on sale.
As I left the theatre the full extent of what this means came home when I looked at the three production posters on the wall outside the Lilian Baylis studio.
There was The Little Match Girl, with Moon's name on the poster.
There was this one, which we all know, with music by Howard Blake.
And then there was this one.
You might just be able to read who did the music for that one: Tchaikovsky. Moon's in good company.
* If you liked this post you might be moved by the final picture to read an earlier blog called A Gallery of Folk Musicians Lying in Foliage. Or this one about another of the folk scene's successful theatrical composers, John Tams, who wrote the music for War Horse.
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Saturday was one of the final outings for the Moulettes' Bears Revenge album, at a gig in Islington town hall that also had Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker on the bill. And it was an amazing night: I took two friends who hadn't seen Moulettes before and by the end they were both slightly dazed by the sheer volume and energy of the thing, which some might say defies description. However, I am characteristically undeterred...
It's got a folky vibe while consisting only of original songs, but with more energy on one stage than you'd normally get in an entire folk festival: something that Shepley got around nicely by booking them this year. Comparisons with Bellowhead and The Destroyers are apt because at one stage there were 15 of them playing - not even including Arthur Brown, who appeared in full make-up towards the end. But neither Bellowhead nor The Destroyers have a bassoonist in a dirndl, or the majority of their melody lines played by a cello and a fiddle. And it's all about the girls. When they really let rip they have a touch of the Indigo Girls about them, musically speaking, exploding with colour and romance: imagery piles on top of swooping, banging, melodies in such a way that you feel you're being taken on a magical journey to a place they found themselves. As it turns out,this is entirely what they had in mind.
They're also extremely playful, something that got them into hot water in Liverpool, where they have a hard-earned reputation as sexually deviant pagans. But there was a disturbing rumour going around that Ruth Skipper - of the dirndl, the bassoon and, just recently, the Bride-of-Frankenstein-style hairdo - would be leaving the band at the end of this tour, due to commitments to her medical career: she is a qualified doctor.
"But I'm not going," she said.
Yay!
"We did loads of auditions, including several French people who couldn't understand our lyrics. So we were treated to their interpretations of our lyrics instead, which was, um, interesting."
But there was no bassoon-playing, dirndl-wearing Bride-of-Frankenstein-a-like among them?
"Not a one. But I'm not wearing the dirndls any more. Haven't you noticed?"
Sorry. I guess they left a pretty big impression.
"Well, I'm not wearing the dirndls any more because I'm trying to move away from the whole folky thing."
I see.
"But I've got 15 of them. So it's hard to imagine they're gone forever," she added. "We may actually have found a replacement for me of sorts, but she doesn't play the bassoon."
So in what sense is she a replacement?
"She sings."
Excellent. I'd wondered whether the pianist - Matt Gest? - who'd appeared that evening might be up to the job because he had the whole bass range going on. Not that a piano packs quite the same punch as a bassoon at full, buzzing volume.
"No... My replacement would have to be a girl," she grinned.
So the girl in the dirndl with the doom stick and the badger-flashes in her hair is completely irreplaceable: who'd've thunk it? But how she's going to combine touring the forthcoming new album with a full surgery rotation in Brighton next year is anyone's guess
In one other nice piece of news, it turns out that Hannah's mum has something in common with John Spier's dad, in the sense that both took up their offspring's instruments after hearing and appreciating the success that was being made of them. So there are, presumably, now two fabulous cellists in the Miller family.
* Stop press: I understand there are, in fact, three cellists in Hannah's family, as her sister Esther also plays.
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First there was a kerfuffle with food that went on for an abnormally long time. My advice would be that if you go to a gig at the Halfmoon in Putney, eat somewhere else beforehand. Or take sandwiches: it would be the Halfmoon's karmic reward.
Anyway.
Hatful of Rain, who'd motivated my visit to west London on this occasion, turned out to be the support act, most of the audience made it noisily clear that it was there to see the other band and the other band, it turned out, was Police Dog Hogan.
I recognised at least one of them from the outset. Weirdly - though probably only for me - I used to work in an office with the mandolin player, Tim Jepson, and realised as soon as he bounded on stage that this accounted for the large number of my former Telegraph colleagues in the audience, most of whom appeared to be from the travel desk, if memory served.
On reflection, the weirdness was that I started this blog as a way of cheering myself up after leaving that paper, in part reasoning that I was unlikely to run into large crowds of people from it at folk gigs. So the end of that fiction was a bit of a moment for me. Folk is officially taking over the world.
On stage, Police Dog Hogan twanged impressively. There was a fiddle, a banjo and the mandolin, making the kind of noise that I would have travelled to hear. On purpose, I mean. There was also a niggling sensation that I'd heard of them, even if I hadn't seen them before.
Their age was unusual: the youngest of them is 49. But what of it? Digital music means that each of us theoretically has instant access to everything ever recorded, so the exact location of musicians on the space-time continuum isn't as important as it used to be. Word.
There was also an unusual shimmer of affluence about Police Dog Hogan. The rich timbre of the voices, their apparently glowing health, a surprisingly well-to-do audience. Early on, the singer told a story about his housemaster.
Then I noticed Tim Dowling, who was playing a banjo and lurking by the stack - and the penny dropped. I'd read about Police Dog Hogan in the context of his Guardian column. I'd even subbed one or two of them during shifts on the Weekend section earlier this year (I can tell you that he writes to length and spells better than me). I hadn't met him because he doesn't work in the office. But at that moment the work/life implosion was total. Big soggy mess.
When I spoke to him a few days later, he said he didn't think he'd ever mentioned the band by name in the paper.
"The whole idea is that the column is about me. Some people say it's about my wife, but I try not to write about my neighbours or my colleagues, as none of it is really their fault. I have to pay my kids if I write about them, I think the band would probably like it if I included them more often and so would Proper Records," which distributes Police Dog Hogan's stuff. "But it would be very wrong to try to promote the band through the column."
Why?
"The column is about me - that's the schtick - and everyone else in it simply gets in my way. Eddie [the fiddle player, who is also a barrister] once said to me that he could see I was in a bind because the column is about how miserable I am and how things go wrong. So in order to write about the band, something would have to go wrong. I learnt quite early on, though, that I shouldn't refer to us in print as a 'middle-aged man band'. You should have seen the long faces when I turned up to rehearsal after that one. Also, none of us has ever asked our work colleagues to a gig. I don't think I want to know what mine think of Police Dog Hogan..."
I didn't like to mention the Telegraph travel desk. By the way, that's the two Tims there. In person Tim Dowling, right, is hairier and more robust-looking than his byline picture suggests and he has a soft New England accent that comes in and goes away again a bit like a distant signal from a short-wave radio. He's funny, but you probably could have guessed that.
So what's Police Dog Hogan's story?
"It started with four guys - not me. It was the mandolin player, the fiddle player, the guitarist and James Studholme, our lead singer, who works in advertising. The first time I saw them was in a pub called The Metropolitan, in Westbourne Park, and I thought they were really good. I mean, everyone else on at that open mic night was a male singer/songwriter, all James Blunty, and I felt like I was doing the band a favour slightly by going down there. But actually they were good.
"I had a banjo that I'd been given for my birthday. My sister had given her partner one for Christmas and I'd just held it that day." He mimed speculatively holding a banjo. "I learnt to play off the internet. There are people out there whose greatest joy in life it is to teach you, through the internet, how to play the banjo. So I started with a style called frailing banjo, which is when you pluck the string with the back of your finger, and now I can do a bit of Scruggs style as well, though not very well. I do what the song requires."
He confirmed that it is, indeed, possible to learn nearly anything off the internet these days. "I just bought a £30 clarinet and am trying to learn that now. I'm not popular at home - it sounds awful.
"So having liked the band, I quite passive-aggressively inserted myself into it - I don't think it was a very popular idea at the outset. I was a friend of James's but they had this thing they called 'prairie dogma'. There were rules, like the dogme film rules. And bringing me in broke the first rule, which was that there were only supposed to be four members. All the other rules have been broken now as well: I think the last one was 'no electric guitar' and now we're a seven-piece with an electric guitar.
"We decided quite early on that it would be no fun unless we took it way too seriously. I mean, unless you're getting better and trying to get people interested, what's the point?"
Things have gone well in the intervening four years. They've toured, recorded two albums and an EP, done a few festivals and been sufficiently well-received to be invited back. "Festivals are good because you're playing to people who've already paid. But at the time of day when we're on, we're generally playing to an audience holding coffee cups. We'll be at Maverick for the fourth time this year and I think they've moved us half an hour later on each occasion. Our aim is probably to play at dusk - dusk comes very late in summer."
They get a lot of views on YouTube due to their excellent videos. This has a lot to do with James Studholme's advertising business having an international film production wing. "He has an eye for people who are just starting out," explained Dowling.
In between the gig and the interview I was lucky enough to receive a Police Dog Hogan tea towel through the post.
There it is in the kitchen at The Glamour Cave.
"There's a guy called Mik Artistik who's claiming that I got the idea for the tea towels from seeing his stuff at the Grassington festival last year. But James - who knows about these things - says that they're entry-level merchandising."
Are they aimed at women? I wondered about their targeted marketing when I saw this.
"If you go into the record tent at festivals you'll see that it's mainly women buying the merchandising. If I go in I'll buy CDs or nothing - I've usually just gone in just to see if our CD is there. Anyway, everyone has to do the washing-up."
The words on the tea towel are from a wacky religious leaflet that Dowling found on a New York subway. "Wherever it says 'Police Dog Hogan' it originally said 'Sister Catherine'. There's a whole American genre of leaflet with boilerplate writing like that."
So what about the band's name?
"Ah. That story has never yet been told in a way that the listener enjoyed."
Sure enough, it was quite complicated. But the upshot was that Eddie the barrister had once told them what was at the time an excellent story involving a police report. It featured a character called PD Hogan, who first cropped up when he was "retrieved" from a van and was later, mystifyingly, described as "vocalising". Finally it said that PD Hogan had bitten someone, at which point it became apparent that PD was short for police dog. Um. Unfortunately the problem with retelling the story, though, is that you know he's a dog from the outset because that's what the band's called - and if you didn't you wouldn't be asking. It's like an anecdote with a death wish.
Is this the first band you've been in?
"I was in three or four at college. What's weird about it now, though, is being in that dynamic with grown-ups. Being in a band when you're 20 is basically one huge argument: loads of egos and loads of clashing. We spent more time talking about what we were going to call ourselves than we did playing.
"Everyone now has that same male fragility, but everyone is simultaneously very appreciative of that and we hardly ever have arguments."
Hardly ever?
"Well, we take it in turns to throw our toys out of the pram but that's part of the fun. Everyone's afraid of going on stage and looking like a dick and that worry can manifest itself in worrying about whether a song is working or not. Maybe it's working in such a way that the audience wouldn't necessarily know that it's finished. So you and the crowd could be left at the end, in silence, just eyeballing each other over the footlights."
You're talking about the last time you started an argument, aren't you?
"Yes."
So what was the best gig you've done?
"Probably playing the Borderline just before Christmas. It was at the end of our tour with All the Firesand we got the gig by hassling the venue. When we played in Cornwall All the Fires topped the bill because it was their home turf but in London we led, it was a great time of year and there was the dawning realisation that we now have real fans who aren't related to us and who we don't know personally: people who travel quite a long way to hear us play, wear a T-shirt and know the words. Also, the Borderline's a wonderful venue. It makes you think "Where next?'"
And what about the most memorable gig?
"Ah... That's got to be the time we played at Maverick and we thought, since we were all staying the night in Suffolk, we'd do the open mic at The Fleece in Boxford. We thought we'd go there and blow them away because there were so many of us. But it was in the middle of the World Cup and there was a screen with an Ecuador match going on behind us. You look out at the crowd and you think 'I'm sure they're here to see us'.
'Anyway, there was a quiet moment when just the banjo part was playing. And suddenly this massive, drunk crowd leapt to its feet." He mimed an entire crowd leaping to its feet, shouting "YESSSSSS!" simultaneously, faces contorted. It was very convincing.
"There was just a split second of thinking that they liked my banjo."
What do the kids think of the band? He's got three sons, aged 14, 15 and 18.
"They're a little bit mortified. Obviously they're not in a position to think that it's cool. But in a way they do like it - because they've been to festivals as a result. At Cornbury, for instance, they got access-all-areas passes by mistake and basically went off to stalk all the people there who they'd heard of."
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Although the band had previously existed as an instrumental group without him, The Destroyers and Paul Murphy were together six years and the combination was mesmerically entertaining, for anyone who missed it. There was something about a bloke with a microphone who sounds like a pirate, wearing a fez - among other extraordinary headgear - and telling stories with his whole body through the medium of song. That Paul was at least a generation older than most of the band gave a sense of breadth and liberation rarely encountered. He made them unique.
Here is what Paul said on his website. "I want to let you know, if you haven’t received our recent statement to The Destroyers’ mailing list, that I have parted company with the band. This has not been an easy decision, then separation seldom is. Needless to say its been a wonderful journey over the past six years and a privilege that we received such great energy, appreciation and support.
"I’d like to say a personal thank you to audience members everywhere who helped fund our work, by coming to gigs, buying merch, Tshirts and badges, spreading the word and pledging towards our Hole in The Universe album; to the promoters who hosted us, to the reviewers, the radio and TV presenters, and especially for me, those who sang along with such passion. As songwriter that was a wonderful accolade.
"I wish my talented partners well and [would be] happy to see them keep the name alive."
The Destroyers issued a similar statement on March 1 on their Facebook page, which I missed because Facebook seems to be becoming increasingly idiosyncratic.
Since neither side of the split gave a hint about what went wrong, a source close to the band said by way of further explanation: "Basically I think the working relationship between Paul and the others was pretty strained for a while and ended up breaking down bit by bit over a long period and they've reached the point where they don't want to continue like that.
"It's a massive shame of course, as they produced some brilliant work together, but as with all bands the amount of hours put in never add up to the financial return and if it gets to the point where it becomes hard work between personalities then something has to change if anything is going to continue. It's the end of an era for that collaboration but personally I hope that after a period of working separately all the problems will heal themselves and we might see a return to it... but I wouldn't expect anything in the near future."
Like my source there, I hope they work out their differences because Louis Robinson, The Destroyers' tall fiddle player, said that the band isn't looking for another front man - they'll be spreading out Paul's previous duties between existing band members - and they were a winning combo, a rare and exhilarating beauty.
The fact that all concerned are behaving with such consideration towards each other gives me hope that they'll sort it out.
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On Friday night at the Cambridge Folk Festival The Destroyers packed a kind of nuclear punch - appropriately enough - all the energy of a show lasting at least half as long again folded into an hour. It. Was. Amazing.
I'm a pretty big fanbut believe me when I say that although the video's good, it doesn't do their live shows justice. There's a kind of maniacal passion to them that's the result of fifteen individuals leaping around as if they had several thousand volts going through them. Yes, you read that right. Fifteen.
There are tall Destroyers and short ones. Destroyers who like to lie down to play their instruments, some who stand and those who prefer to hang in mid-air. They move differently from any band I've ever seen: a rolling cloud of limbs and musical instruments emitting a cacophony of perfectly orchestrated noise that worked even better in a tent than it does in a room. I think this was because each of them can really play and there were fewer sounds bouncing confusingly off walls. On this occasion their non-conformity seemed to touch the soul of their Cambridge audience: it had taken six years of toiling to get to this festival and they made it count.
At the centre of it all was Paul Murphy (metaphorically speaking anyway - he's on the right there in the picture that I promised I would credit to eFestivals), the piratical, fez-wearing singer who, at 62, is about 30 years older than most of his band mates. On the one hand his presence seems the most natural thing in the world - but at the same time, when you think about it, it poses a few questions. So I thought I'd ask them and see how it went.
Despite all the leaping around he seemed remarkably calm and chipper as he glided out of the static caravan they'd been allocated behind stage two, moving like someone at least 20 years younger: I've been told that this is because he swims to keep fit.
So how did he hook up with this lot then? "It's an interesting scene in Birmingham," he said, sounding not much like a wild-eyed pirate after all and much more like a thoughtful, cultured pirate.
"At the epicentre of it was a house belonging to Astro from UB40: he was the landlord and he let it out to a group of musicians who made it the focus of a lot of experimentation. At that time my nephew Joel was at the (Birmingham) Conservatoire and he was into Balkan ska - there's a lot of sympathy between Balkan music and ska music. Lots of his fellow music students gravitated to the house and that eventually became The Destroyers. It was an instrumental outfit back then but it's always been big.
"Then about seven years ago they asked me to come and improvise with them and I ended up bringing vocals into the band.
"I write songs and play acoustic guitar - though I mainly sing with The Destroyers. Some of the lyrics we're doing now I wrote as long ago as 1967 - which is before everyone in the band except Mick was born. The Glass Coffin, for instance" (which they started the Cambridge show with) "has found a whole new lease of life. It's brought a gothic element that goes with the rest of what they were doing."
He waxed lyrical for a while about the rest of the band's abilities. "Gaz has already written two symphonies. Dan Wilkin has a deep and strong knowledge of African music that he brings to choral work. Max Gittings is all about Chinese music. This band has a wealth of stuff at its disposal. It is," he said in a considered fashion, "a juggernaut. And we're ready to take the whole thing up a notch."
However, a band of 15 is always going to struggle to make a living for its members, as I discovered when I interviewed Pete Flood from Bellowhead a while back - and there's only 12 of Bellowhead. The thought that he might mean they want to play even more loudly nearly made me giggle. But the marvellous thing about interviewing Paul Murphy is that he's been around the block a few times and already knew what I was going to say.
"Well, when you look at the history of art and music it's a fairly 20th century notion that musicians just turn up, go into a studio and record. Musicians traditionally have supplemented what they do by teaching and doing other projects. I mean, Renoir also did people's blinds. There are certainly a lot of challenges for a band like us - especially now the infrastructure of the music industry isn't there any more. I sold my first songs in 1966, very shortly after I moved to this country from Ireland, and the music industry was much more accessible then."
He told me a story about Ocean Colour Scene. "I was running a place at the time called The Songwriters' Cafe and that's how I met them. They'd been signed to a label and then at the start of the 90s they were dropped. But they reconstituted themselves and by the time they did their best known album, Moseley Shoals, they owned all the rights to their own music. So every time The Riverboat Song was played they got the money. I don't want to put off anyone who's interested in managing us," (they currently manage themselves) "but I don't trust big institutions."
So what's he been doing for the last 40 years or so? "I came to England in 1966 when I was 16, as a folk singer. I used to hang out with Lemmy from Motorhead - I'm probably the only folk singer mentioned in his book White Line Fever because we used to live on a farm near Blackpool. Lemmy was a member of a band at the time called The Rocking Vicars and there were two other bands living on this farm at the same time. I've always written, always performed..."
What's it like being with guys who are so much younger than him? "I'm used to being surrounded by a bunch of people who are older and younger than me. When I was a kid I used to be the youngest, hanging out with older people, so not much has changed. It's just the other way around."
Where did he get the fez? "I come with a bag of hats." This made me laugh out loud.
Career highlights?
"I always missed my own career highlights."
He mentions something about Van Morrison that I didn't quite manage to catch before adding that he has five kids. And a wife?
"My wife, Honora, died. That was 13 years ago. I released a solo album in December last year that was a kind of tribute to her. It was called The Glen and it was about the experience of love lost. It's available online." Have a look around that website... it's pretty interesting.
But best of all, before he had to leave and get in a van with the rest of the band, he explained that he's built a treehouse at his place in the King's Norton area of Brum. "It holds an audience of 40 and we do evening concerts there, then broadcast them online. There's a microphone embedded in the ceiling." It sounds as if this is an incarnation of his earlier Songwriters' Cafeand operates on a kind of invitation-only basis, although you can ask to be invited, either as a musician or a member of the audience.
"Musicians come along and have dinner, which I cook myself. I grow the veg in the garden and bake the bread and then we have a concert. Genevieve Tudor's been along and last week we had a couple of BBC producers. It's always good fun."
And with that, he quoted some Blake at me that I was far too mesmerised to write down, a fellow Destroyer came to fetch him and he had to go. Which was a shame.
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Bev Lee Harling's cheeky, cabaret-style show has had me transfixed twice now.
First of all she supported The Destroyers at Wilton's marvellous Music Hall before Christmas, where she wandered into the middle of the auditorium playing a fiddle before clambering on stage to chop vegetables suggestively and treat a number of kitchen implements, a power drill and a typewriter as if they had been designed with percussion in mind. I couldn't help noticing that on stage with her as one of her Kitchen Sink Band was Frank Moon, who's also in one of my favourite outfits, The Urban Folk Quartet.
It turned out that Bev is Frank's missus, loosely speaking, which was interesting in a kind of Do all the good bands know each other? kind of a way. (I'd also discovered that evening that Frank's played with The Destroyers.)
Then, a few days later with a sense of growing disorientation that partly abated when I remembered that I'd been invited to The Mediaeval Baebes' gig at The Destroyers one by a PR, it materialised that Bev was also in The Mediaeval Baebes. She also began that show, walking down the aisle of a beautiful Christmassy church in the City wearing flowers in her hair and playing She Moved Through the Fair on her fiddle.
What these two performances had in common was certain kittenish theatricality.
So when she launched her first album, Barefoot in your Kitchen, slightly over a week ago in a noisy Friday-evening restaurant in Shoreditch I went along, mainly to see what would happen next? Would it turn out that Bev was also the long lost, non-identical twin sister of Josienne Clarke or that her album was being produced by someone from Smooth Operations, in which case I might be able to sell the rights to my blog as a kind of long-running soap opera for daytime TV.
In the event, nothing more improbable than a rather fine gig occurred, although it seemed a minor miracle that the incredibly noisy restaurant simmered down nearly entirely during the course of the set until by the end every head seemed to be turned Bev's way.
For the album is sheer delight.
I mean how could you not fall head over heels for musician who's written a song called Buy Me, to avoid having to point to the table with the CDs on it at gigs?
The songs are light, well-crafted, teasing fun that wouldn't be out of place in a burlesque environment. Bev's fine taste has been turned to producing something highly distinctive, beautifully musical and sexily theatrical. Buy Me is hilariously knowing and I also particularly enjoy Robots and Angels for it "zip boom" chorus, Tired of the City for the cameo of the child's voice and the wonderful stripped down cover of The Police's Every little thing she does (is magic) on which Bev accompanies herself solo and pizzicato on the fiddle.
I can imagine seeing her on the telly and would love to see her festival gig list fill up for this summer because live she's enchanting, something that could only improve in the sunshine with a glass of cider. I hope you get a chance to see what I mean.
Love, love, love this album. It's just so much fun.
Wilton's Music Hall, just off Cable Street in Wapping, is the only venue I've ever known that makes its audience seem cooler and more attractive by association. There's something about the combination of falling-down plasterwork, expensively restored moulding and thousands of twinkling fairy lights that glamour the eye and makes one think it would almost be a shame if the place were ever brought up to surburban standards of rectitude, as various funding bodies have been talking about doing for over a decade now. It's more bohemian than the Czech Republic.
Also there, on Friday, were The Destroyers who emanate from Birmingham - at least half of the fifteen-strong, inter-generational band have a connection with the Birmingham Conservatoire - and the show was sold out.
As the audience milled around, drinking mulled cider, Bev Harling and the Kitchen Sink struck up. They're a four-piece (the line-up has changed since the video above) containing Frank Moon, of The Urban Folk Quartet(another band from the conservatoire) and his missus, Bev, who started by playing the fiddle and singing, mesmerisingly, from the floor among the audience. The whole set had a burlesque-y quality entirely in keeping with the venue: she made the playing of various domestic accoutrements - glasses of water, a wok, an electric drill - seem rather a fruity undertaking, making one think that, all things considered, Frank's a lucky man...
There was a brief pause for theatrical faffing by the sound crew - everything that takes place in that building seems theatrical - before the gradual arrival on stage of various Destroyers, jamming softly away as if they were the background for a piece of Parisian street theatre. As their numbers swelled so did the noise level, until finally...
there were fourteen of them on stage, awaiting only their front man, Paul Murphy, for the full chaotic effect. And what an effect it was...
From the off, the sixty-something's growling vocals created a sense of occasion that matched the venue. You want theatrical? We can give you theatrical...
The energy levels were phenomenal - the only band I've seen to match it are Bellowhead - and the audience seemed to have come along to exploit that, moshing, whooping and crowd-surfing to the balkanised, mariachi folk with its capacious brass section and lyrics full of portent and calamity, as if they had no intention of seeing another dawn.
The Destroyers have been around for eight years, building a following, gathering terrific reviews - especially for their live performances. And yet somehow they've never made a dent on the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards. How can that be when they sound like folk, they call themselves folk and the folk like them?
"I manage the band," said Louis Robinson, the tallest man on the stage, one of two fiddle players: the one wearing the velvet tam-o-shanter and a pair of low-slung Indian trousers. "I suppose that's the difference between being managed and having 'management'. I should really have got in touch with someone involved in that whole scene."
And yet what is the point of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards having upwards of 150 judges if not that they can get around and find stuff for themselves? Perhaps if their names were known they might even receive invitations to gigs from people they didn't know?
The Destroyers come very highly recommended. Just don't expect to be able to remain seated...
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