The Destroyers' Paul Murphy explains some stuff

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 fan but 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' Cafe and 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.

* This is also from this year's Cambridge folk festival. It's about the recent antics of Mr Forbes Legato, who I see about once a year. 

* If you'd like to receive posts from this blog directly into your Facebook news feed, you could *like* its Facebook page. You could also follow me on Twitter @emma1hartley

The London Feis, Finsbury Park

This festival had a split personality. It was called the London Feis when everyone knew it was still the Fleadh. The name had changed because the organiser, Vince Power, sold the rights to the word Fleadh, in what looks now like a slight of hand akin to the apocryphal selling of London Bridge to an American who thought he was getting Tower Bridge.

Then there was the line-up, which was amazing. Bob Dylan, The Waterboys, Christy Moore, Thin Lizzy and Van Morrison all on the same bill. But there was also a lack of consideration for ticket-holders that started with a very long queue to get in (late) on Saturday, continued with an absence of big screens - meaning that I couldn't really tell which one of the two blokes in a hat on stage was Bob Dylan - and ended in a public health disaster that evening. The tiny number of toilets meant that many - including women - gave up the painful attempt to queue and the entire perimeter fence became a giant urinal, something I haven't seen since the 1980s. (When the sun had baked the ground dry the next day some people were sitting propped against the fence, making me want to explain why they probably shouldn't be doing that. But the pervasive smell of vinegar should have been a give-away #pissinginthewind)

The most puzzling thing was that, although I've heard there is a shortage of portable toilets and fencing as a result of there being so many festivals these days, the feis's organisers must have strings they could pull to get the facilities they needed after all these years in the business. This made me think that the outcome was probably a calculated decision to save money: they needed about four times as many toilets as they had on Saturday. It was squalid and made my previous concerns about taking children to festivals seem laughably understated. There was a moment when I saw a female child frolicking in a puddle near a wall where eight men were urinating. Very unpleasant.

And finally - vis a vis split personality - Saturday and the Sunday seemed like two different festivals because birthday boy Bob Dylan's only scheduled UK performance this year drew, I'd estimate, nearly twice as many people on Saturday as there were the following day.

But ah... the music. Saturday's showers meant that the tent drew a grateful crowd and an early assertion of the festival's personality. Irish voices were to be heard all around and when The Fureys sang Sweet Sixteen and The Green Fields of France it seemed that everyone knew the words. The band did indeed play the fife flowly and the pipes played the flowers of the forest *blubs quietly*

Outside, the Waterboys then proceeded to rock. They played a song from the forthcoming album An Appointment with Mr Yeats with the lyric of the Yeats poem September 1913, which we were told "is as well known in Ireland as the Hamlet soliloquy is in the UK". Now there's an idea for a song... However, a more general flavour of the day was provided when a drunk twenty-something girl next to me shouted "Play something we know!" while a stage full of Waterboys played Dylan's You're a Big Girl Now. What came on next was Bang on the Ear, which under the circumstances seemed about right.

Nanci Griffith reminded me how much I like hearing her do From a Distance, right up to the point at which she sang God is watching us, God is watching us, which seemed a little paranoid, even in a tent full of Catholics.

Then Shane MacGowan came on stage and made it clear that this was the gig that he was born to play. Doubtless many were drawn by the same morbid curiosity that had been vocalised a thousand times in the run up to this weekend: "Bob Dylan's playing, he's taken a lot of drugs and just turned 70. This might be my last chance to see him..." But with MacGowan there's an accompanying incredulity that he's been with us for the last ten years at all.

"Ang you erry much," he said to the moshing, crowd-surfing, middle-aged yet copiously tattooed crowd in front of him, many of whom seemed intent on reliving a moment they'd had in Kilburn circa 1986. He's got a laugh like a football rattle, talk-like-a-pirate day could have been invented to acclimatise him to the 21st century and there was a lingering suspicion that when he spoke he was saying something rude about Nanci Griffith. I've never been more grateful for the international language of music because, to be frank, I couldn't understand a word. But a string of Pogues songs - Rainy Night in Soho, London Girl - went down like an ice pack on the ripped a*** of a Soho rentboy and when Dirty Old Town started someone threw their entire plastic pint of lager in the air with joy. Come to think of it, it probably wasn't lager but I'm done writing about that kind of thing for one festival...

Afro Celt Sound System was a revelation, although having heard what Simon Emmerson came up with when he was invited to write some music for a spa I really shouldn't be surprised any more. At one point there was some kind of a fight between a boran, a sikh drum and a bongo, in which I thought the boran came out on top. And one of my favourite sounds in the world, trance bagpipes, also made a guest appearance. "It's great to be at the fleadh!" Emmerson said, putting his finger on it.

Then it was out to the main stage for an encounter with Bob Dylan. My first impression was that the singer in the band sounded like a cross between Bob Dylan and Scooby Doo. Then I got disorientated when I heard a bunch of words that I thought I knew from another Dylan song - blues/shoes/side of the road -  and thought "cuh! The great man's obviously reached the limit of his songwriting genius" before realising that he was actually playing Tangled up in Blue but to an entirely different tune to the one on Blood on the Tracks.

And this was how it went: it was as if he were riffing on the theme of himself. If anyone else had done to those songs what he did to them on Saturday, you'd probably say that they'd massacred them. But, since the emperor had a lovely new outfit to wear and it was his birthday, no one would dream of it. So it must have been my fault that I lost interest. My legs and feet hurt from standing up all day, I couldn't see the stage properly and I'd been upset by, among other things, dark thoughts about contracting trench foot from the rivulets flowing into the tent. I used to care, but things have changed sang Dylan, as if he were his own shadow on the back of the stage. I didn't find it hard to believe: he didn't want to talk to us between songs. I felt properly guilty but I'm afraid I left before the end, feeling uninvolved. If he keeps taking the vitamins I may yet catch him for his 80th.

Right. Sunday was sunnier from the outset, which put a gentler complexion on things. The Hothouse Flowers on the main stage sounded much mellower, jazzier and more like world music than I remember. Then the talent-show-winning Mulkerrin Brothers from Aran, the youngest of whom looked about ten, belted out standards from the third stage and went down a storm.

Little Sean did a dance with a broom, which coupled with the fact that they were the only band to have been scheduled to play three times during the festival, left the door wide open for jokes about the usefulness of youngsters in relation to chimneys. Obviously I'm not going to go there... Let's hope they were being paid properly.

Jimmy Cliff did reggae on the main stage but made a fool of himself, in my opinion, by including Libya, Syria and Jerusalem in his lazy list of places in which he thought it was important to "stop the war". And Teddy Thompson, son of Richard and Linda, did a thoughtful indoor set including a song about looking for a girlfriend who drinks, smokes, takes drugs and enjoys sex. Wikipedia says he lives in New York but I was sure I heard him say Leicester. Either way, it could be time for a move.

Clannad kicked off 20 minutes late, although the string section was on stage at the right time, suggesting that they're on contract. The delay gave an opportunity to reflect that Moya (previously Maire) Brennan's harp looked like a guerilla advert for Guinness, sitting there all golden against the black backdrop: I'd be interested to know whether there was a bump in sales.

They did a medley of songs from their Robin of Sherwood album that didn't do too well in competition with a loud backstage generator but they were a very welcome change of pace and cast a noticeable spell over the mid-afternoon beer buzz. Then - oh joy - Liam O Maonla from the Hothouse Flowers added to the gaiety of the proceedings by turning up to sing the Bono part of In a Lifetime without having learnt the words or the tune and with his flies undone. I know it's kind of wrong to laugh but surely you'd mention it to someone if you knew they were going on stage. Wouldn't you?

Then it was back to the tent to catch the tail-end of Mary Coughlan, who was filling the place with her torch-song sensibility, accompanied by a band who looked frankly delighted to be there. She's got a way with men, she growled, and she's just got away with mine. Then it was Eddi Reader, who could have been the lady from Mary Coughlan's song and whom I'm pretty sure tweeted that she was on her sick bed earlier in the week.

I'm glad she got up, not least for the story about two elderly relatives of hers, Molly and James, to whom she dedicated the song Dragonflies, written by Boo Hewardine on guitar. They wound up in an old folks' home together, only for it to become apparent that Molly had deducted ten years from her age many decades earlier and was therefore 96 when James shuffled off this mortal coil, but with a fantastic collection of shoes. Eddi Reader has a lightness and joy about her that goes with her wonderful voice in such a way that she lifts you up. I could have had an entire evening of that...

Or so I thought, until Van Morrison came on. What a dude, with his gold microphone stand bearing his initials and his collection of unanswerable bluesy hits. As the late afternoon sunshine suffused the crowd with a sense of well-being and a swallow swooped overhead, the two very tall men to my left decided it might be fun to sit on each other's shoulders, which gave them a combined height of around 11 feet and a strong risk of imminent collapse. The temporary distraction of a copy of Private Eye sticking out of the back pocket of the one underneath (best chance of a free copy all week) abated when Moondance started up and Christopher Ecclestone arrived in the crowd nearby during a storm of unrelated applause. He'll always be Dr Woo-Hoo! to me now...

I mainly missed Thin Lizzy because I went to see Camille O'Sullivan do her burlesque/rock mashup and found myself unexpectedly unable to leave. It could have been the thrilling possibility that her clothes might come off completely while she sang The Port of Amsterdam (the little red dress really didn't sit very comfortably on top of what was clearly *important underwear* of a corseted nature), the mugging for the audience, or the kitten and puppy noises that she kept making and encouraging the audience to join in with. A lady behind me said to her partner "I'm finding this a bit annoying" at one stage, but interestingly they didn't leave. Then throughout the second half of the set an enormous green balloon appeared from nowhere, to be batted around between the audience, the stage and its security, almost exactly as if one of the Wicked Witch of the West's breasts had escaped - a la Woody Allan - and was intent on doing a cabaret spot of its own.

By the time Ms O'Sullivan relinquished us there was only time for me to notice that Thin Lizzy had aged quite well and that their audience appeared to be howling like dogs without being prompted from the stage, before the whole thing was over.

I wonder whether Vince Power was actually there?

* If you'd like to receive new posts from this blog directly into your Facebook feed, you could like its Facebook page here.