Wednesday night at The Slaughtered Lamb in Clerkenwell felt like folk central.
I went to see The Urban Folk Quartet play their new album and, while standing at the bar trying to order a plate of the fantastic fish and chips they do there - what do they put in that batter? - saw that Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker were the support. At least I assumed Ben would be there - he always is. But for some reason or other, probably connected with someone's modesty, they're always just billed as Josienne Clarke.
There was this poster up behind the bar, you see.
That wasn't it. That's just the best pic I could find of the two of them.
Anyhow, this was great news and rather unexpected. I have loved The UFQ long time, and am coming to love Josienne and Ben too, although in a more piquant and understated fashion. Whereas The UFQ demands jumping up and down and undignified whooping, Ben and Josienne are a delicate, winding and unwinding proposition that requires close attention. Both bands are brilliant and brilliantly musical, but they're very different and I momentarily loved that they knew each other.
"Actually, we don't," said Joe Broughton . "They were asked at the last minute by Pull up the Roots because Dave Delarre dropped out. But they sound good... we heard them at the sound check."
I hung around a bit upstairs, marvelling at the way a couple of pints can go to your head if you drink them before dinner, and heard stories about The UFQ's recent trip to Estonia. Apparently it was minus 20 degrees and their luggage went missing as they passed through Schipol airport, so Joe and Paloma didn't have any warm clothes to wear. Tom did. He'd evidently been to Schipol before and had worn all his.
"We should have known really. We had to run for the connection. Still, we had this Seat Alhambra fertility wagon to drive around in." So if any of them gets pregnant we'll know they've been sitting on the bonnet.
Apart from the loss of the all-important clothing, which was returned in time to make the journey home with them, the trip was also memorable, they swore, for an evening of vodka that involved a Mahavishnu Orchestra tribute band. I nodded as if I believed them and decided that exposure can play tricks on the mind.
Downstairs in the magnificent venue with the red pentangle on the wall - American Werewolf in London stylee - Josienne was singing a song about being awkward. "I'm a strange girl, An adorable fool, Full to the brim with nothing you need. I'm just too much, But somehow not enough," she sang. And I believed her.
She has this voice that's like a precision tool for making golden, ringing shapes in the air and, in my humble opinion, Ben and Josie deserve huge success. Huge. It's as if they pull in all the energy in the room, concentrate it in some kind of musical alchemy and then spin it into shimmering cathedrals of sound. How's this for original songwriting?
I can imagine Emmylou Harris or Nanci Griffiths singing that. Perhaps they will?
Anyhow, shortly afterwards The Urban Folk Quartet rocked as usual and just before they played their final encore - Cajun Bean Curd, for what it's worth - Frank Moon made a rather good and understated joke. "This song has a subtext about arts funding," he said. "Take it away..."
Ta da! :-)
As an aside, I got in touch with Dave Delarre on Twitter when I got home and asked whether he was OK? "Yes thanks. Just got held up at a guitar workshop in Cambridge and couldn't get to London in time," he tweeted back. "They're much better than me anyway!"
Everyone's so modest. It's just as well I'm here to be nice about them really...
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My local DVD rental shop has just pulled down its rattling metal shutters for the last time, which has focused attention inside the Glamour Cave on the subject of paying for culture (or "content" as it's often described these days. I always think that makes it sound as if it comes in a tin). As a side-effect it's also made me feel a bit older, as if I've lost a slightly smelly, close friend to a war of attrition (against new technology): the carpets in there had needed a clean for about five years but I was still exceptionally fond of the place. I liked the owner and I'd had hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of pleasure as a result of borrowing videos and DVDs from him.
Recently I'd also been in the habit of borrowing movies and box sets from Love Film and then, when I ran out of monthly credits or was waiting for the next arrival to land on the doormat, I would go down to the video shop to rent the latest releases, usually several times a month.
When I moved here a decade and a half ago it won't surprise you to hear that the only options were the video shop or the cinema. So my evolving habits - which are, hands up, motivated by the convenience and cheapness of DVDs by post - have been among the reasons for poor old Mohammed's decline in business. Thanks to the adoption of similar habits by thousands of younger people moving into the area in recent years, a reevaluation all around is now unavoidable.
Mohammed, the rental shop owner, should be OK. He owns the freehold and is on the look out for a bright young Australian who, he hopes, will turn it into a trendy wifi cafe like several other successful new ventures nearby. There goes the neighbourhood.
But to keep up with recent releases it looks as if there's now no choice for discerning eastenders but to stream films over the internet. This sounds kind of OK. Except I've got a nasty feeling that my broadband is capped and that on the occasions when I've exceeded my monthly data limit it's been due to an overdose of iPlayer. This means, I think, that streaming is potentially expensive because quite apart from buying the film over the internet for a fixed price - Love Film again? - I'll be running the risk of having to pay extra for the broadband space *sighs the sigh of the resigned* I suppose I'll get the hang of it eventually.
When I've mentioned my concerns to friends I've been told several times now that they know someone a decade or so younger than themselves who's able to download all the latest Hollywood releases completely free - apart from the cost of the broadband, I assume - from some internet site or other. Come to think of it, I know someone who does this and they are an otherwise upstanding member of society. I may even be related to them.
However. Although getting free stuff always sounds good in the abstract, I've realised over recent weeks that I also have some strongly negative feelings about it in practice. I'm not sure how it crept up on me - I may be getting old or it may be that I have finally recognised that I am, basically, a content-provider myself (which probably represents a conflict of interests here). But the same part of me that believes in civic responsibility, not dropping litter and being kind to people also feels increasingly that downloading films, music or books for free from the internet would be, um, wrong.
I think, that with the unthinking part of my brain, I used to believe it was a victimless crime.
I definitely used to think that those adverts at the cinema warning against film piracy were ludicrous. And in some respects they were. I mean, I know this is slightly out of date now but my strongest memory of these ads is of the ones with the hellish dungeon metaphor, which seemed like ridiculous and unnecessary hyperbole. Whatever the punishment for film piracy, I've definitely always known that you're highly unlikely to be kidnapped and taken to the set of Legend, then forced to submit to an eternity of being branded/buggered by blacksmiths. What exactly was the premise of that ad?
The present anti-piracy ad shown at cinemas isn't much better.
You wouldn't steal a handbag, you wouldn't steal a car. No! Obviously you wouldn't! These are crimes against real people who would be rightly angry and probably report you to the police, who might want to put you in prison for it. If you stole a handbag or a car you would be making your victims' lives worse in ways that are obvious and irrefutable. This is such a silly argument that it has spawned this spoof by the makers of The IT Crowd.
The problem is that it isn't immediately obvious to a lot of otherwise kind and thoughtful people that illegally downloading DVDs and CDs isn't a victimless crime either, just a different order of crime in which the victim is removed from the perpetrator by several degrees.
I really think that it's up to the makers of these ads to pull out the stops and make a better case against piracy. The ads should lay it out clearly and distinctly because it's an argument that, I think, is persuasive in its own right.
How about some footage of a busker having his hat containing a few measly coins stolen - which is far better metaphor for illegal music downloads than being buggered by blacksmiths. Or a writer who, due to the loss of income represented by piracy is unable to afford to switch their heating on? How about a struggling film maker with holes in their shoes? These are straitened times and the creative industries are not well paid even when the economy is booming - except for those who've made it to the sunlit uplands. For every success you see on the red carpets at awards times. though, there are thousands who aren't present because they're still working on it.
We all enjoy the fruit of the creative industries' labours when it turns out to be Downton Abbey, The Artist, Bellowhead or that other thing that you like. But to reach the point at which someone creative can make a living from what they do it might take years of honing their skills and failing better often. And anyway: who is to distinguish between the worthy and the unworthy when it comes to something as subjective as culture? Spotting "the man" - should you be interested in doing so - is made harder by the net than ever before and it's worth bearing in mind that even relatively successful musicians and writers have a long history of being ripped off by the middle men they relied on to help them succeed. It's a tradition.
There's also the unavoidable fact of retrospective payment with which to contend. Musicians, writers and film-makers get paid after their "product" has been released because it's only when people buy it that the scale of their success - or otherwise - is apparent. Every deal in the creative industries has a sales component - if it doesn't there is something awry. But it makes them vulnerable to those who believe that their entertainment is a god-given right. Illegal downloads represent a kind of real politik, a force majeure. Of course someone can take it if they want to because once a song is out there the originator relies on the honesty of those who consume it. Indeed, musicians would like people to walk down the street humming their tunes. But people are notoriously dishonest and self-interested and often don't recognise that liking something is different from owning it.
But these kinds of arguments are a slippery slope. Downloading is a discreet issue and you shouldn't steal the fruit of people's labour full stop. This isn't because you should be afraid of getting caught - which everyone knows realistically with music and film piracy is a small risk - and which the silly cinema ad is rather cack-handedly trying to imply with its scary music. The case is much simpler than that. It is that you shouldn't take the fruit of someone's labour for free it because it's wrong and decent people simply don't do it.
Perhaps the rise of the internet and the way in which Soundcloud, Kindle and YouTube have flattened out and democratised the way the culture is consumed, has made it easier to see the truth in this argument. For me at least.
I should say, for clarity's sake, that some free material on the net is marketing. For instance a musician might put up some music to tempt the folk awards judges - should any of them happened to have access to the interweb - to listen to an entire album. Or perhaps to entice music-lovers to a gig (which is, in turn, one of the most successful ways to enthuse people about buying a CD these days). But on the whole you can tell which is marketing and which is "piracy" because the marketing will be done by the band or film-maker themself on their own website, or somewhere else reputable, and what you see is unlikely to represent the entirety of their output. It's one of those "know it when you see it" situations.
Also calling illegal downloading "piracy" is doing it the same favour that pirates have always received: it implies an unearned veneer of something buccaneering or obliquely admirable about the form of theft to which the term is applied.
In truth, believing that the world owes you a living - that you deserve something for nothing - is the flip side of believing that no one else deserves one. What they have in common, I think, is that they are both positions taken on this issue by people who probably haven't given it much thought.
Illegally downloading your favourite music, films or books is a way of killing the thing that you love. It is unethical, unsustainable and unfair.
That's what I wanted to say.
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The first Frome folk festival happened at the weekend and was enlivened by - among many other things - some curious stories about dysfunctional relationships between musicians and their instruments.
First there was Tom Kitching, of Pilgrim's Way and Albireo, who is reputed to own the loudest fiddle in the world. "It was made by a fellow called Colin Cross and has more wood in it to vibrate than usual," he told me. "Mainly he takes commissions from classical musicians but mine is a classical reject because it stood out too much.
"The bloke who had it struggled to keep it in check because if you're an orchestral player you want to be on the same kind of noise levels as everyone else and this is a big, brash beast. Luckily I believe that you should play a fiddle in the same way that you would drive a railway spike." To amplify his meaning he mimed bringing an enormous mallet smashing down on a something with an impressive overarm action.
"Also, I believe you should judge a fiddler in the same way that they score Robot Wars: using style, control, damage and aggression as your criteria. I haven't named the fiddle though. That would be wrong, in the same way that renaming body parts is just wrong. Having said that, my car's called Trebevor. Like 'Trevor' but with an extra BE. The, um, the registration begins TREB." Oddly after the alacrity of the spike-driving mime, he looked a bit embarrassed explaining this.
Then Brendan Powers and Tim Edey played a set in the Cheese and Grain hall on Sunday morning - which looked lovely decked out in bunting. And Edey mentioned that his guitar had once exploded. I wasn't sure whether I'd heard that correctly.
"Yes, really. It exploded,"he confirmed later, unfolding a little morality tale about the dangers of not being kind to the things that you love. "I was in Cape Breton in Nova Scotia and I'd abused the guitar quite badly over the years - it was my old, nylon string job. There was an amazing guitarist called JP Cormier there and I was playing a set of bluegrass reels. Suddenly the area below the bridge burst outwards and part of it embedded itself in my arm. It made me bleed! JP just looked at me and said 'Man. Your guitar exploded'."
And finally, lest one might wrongly come to believe that only men are capable of having abusive relationships with inanimate objects, it turned out that Miranda Sykes - one third of Show of Hands - was once indirectly responsible for a piano keyboard being superglued shut.
"I'd gone home for Christmas and thought I'd have a bit of a play on the piano in the front room," she explained as she launched her new album on Sunday afternoon. "I thought I'd have a go at Walking in the air, since it was that time of year. But the lid wouldn't open. At first I thought it must be locked. So I asked mum and dad if they had the key and they said it wasn't locked. When I had a closer look I realised that someone had gone to all the trouble of supergluing the thing shut. No one would own up at the time, it was all very curious. And then just recently - many years later - the subject came up again and my little sister just said 'Oh yeah. That was me'. It turns out she really doesn't like Walking in the air."
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Belinda O'Hooley and Heidi Tidow's new album, called The Fragile, is a sweet and multi-textured thing. Their roots are in folk but they write (nearly) all their own songs and it's poignant, stirring, sentimental, existential stuff with tumbling fiddles and crystalline harmonies that remind me a little of The Indigo Girls.
I'd meant to write about their previous album, Silent June, which was similarly intriguing, but made the scatterbrained mistake of leaving my copy in the CD player when I went round to someone's house and then didn't see it again for several months, by which time the moment had kind of passed...
I've apologised to them but feel I should do it again... So, um, sorry.
Anyhow, the new album cover's got a distinctive picture of a bird on it with a little old lady clinging to its back. Age, loss and the elderly crop up over and over again as subject matter. "The picture is a representation of Heidi's German grandmother," O'Hooley said over the telephone from Huddersfield, where they live. "There's a song on the album called Mein Deern which is about her final hours on this Earth.
"She had ambitions to be a performer and played the accordian. But she was a war nurse and ended up having a family instead. The bird represents Heidi: she's carried her grandmother on her dreams. Also I think Heidi looks a bit like a bird..."
Tidow was in the room at the Huddersfield end of this conversation and I got the impression that some of what was being said was as much for her benefit as mine.
"The artwork is by a lady called Kate Aughey, who has a blogfor her work. We were on tour with Chumbawumba when we first saw it in Portsmouth - and I think she's entered the work she did for us for the V&A illustration awards. We sent her the lyrics and the themes of the songs and she came up with all these ideas. She's really inspiring but not all that well known - I think we want to keep her for ourselves.
"Being elderly is definitely a theme, though. Heidi and I seem to be obsessed. I work with the elderly so I meet them more than I do any other group of people. I do musical reminiscences and visit lots of homes with my Bontempi organ. It's got a built-in drum machine so it makes everything sound a bit like Latin American dance tunes from the 1940s. South of the border, down Mexico way... Also I was very attached to my grandmother and Heidi was close to all her grandparents."
I asked O'Hooley about a song on the CD called A Daytrip which is about a trip to the coast for a lady called Vera and her husband, Albert, who prefers cheese and pickle sandwiches to ham, because ham involves a financial sacrifice and "he wasn't born to moan". This tickled me.
"That song came from some time we spent with Nic Jones and his wife, Julia. He said that his favourite songs were existentialist things that don't say much but just tell you something. It inspired us to write a song about something which is a bit everyday.
"Then we were talking to Martin Carthy one day and having a joke that I used to live in a place called Slaithwaite - which is pronounced 'Sla-wit' - and he reminded me of something I'd forgotten, which was that some Yorkshire people, when they they've liked something say 'It were real". Heidi's family says it all the time. So that's what Vera says about her daytrip at the end."
There's something considerably more lusty and provocative in the tale of Gentleman Jack, or Jack the Lass, about Anne Lister (1791-1840), diarist, Halifax landowner and lothario, who left detailed lists of her sexual conquests in a code that was subsequently broken, much to the distress of husbands and boyfriends for many miles in every direction.
O'Hooley and Tidow met six years ago on the folk scene. "First of all she stalked me," says O'Hooley, who at 40 is nine years older than Tidow (right)."Then I stalked her back again. She came to one of my gigs and I didn't know she was there. Then she emailed me to let me know that she'd liked the concert and invited me to one of hers. Then we just gripped each other.
"We were civilly partnered a couple of years ago in the registry office at Whitby. It was a quiet affair - we just invited our families - and then we had a reception at the Magpie cafe with fish and chips and champagne. It were brilliant."
Looking around online before I spoke to them I'd found a recent news story describing an attack that O'Hooley suffered in a bar. "Yes," she said, sounding a bit grim. "It's one of many times it's happened to both of us. People generally don't like to talk about homophobic incidents - they just want to forget about them and get on with their evening. But we've both been verbally abused more times than we can remember, usually by groups of men.
"This was the first time I've actually been hit, though, which is why I reported it to the police. They had CCTV in the bar but they didn't catch the incident on it. And even though we were with another couple who witnessed the whole thing - we'd all recognise my attacker if we saw him again - it doesn't look as if it will result in a prosecution.
"I must say, though, it was the first time I'd ever been in a police station and even though you often hear that people have a hard time in them, I was very impressed. The police woman was very sympathetic and actually seemed to get quite upset when I told her what had happened. She said that if we saw the man again we should get in touch."
The story appeared online because the two of them are involved in something called The L Project - "L" for lesbian - which launches a single on Saturday (Feb 11). Here's an explanatory video.
"There's a song being released on Saturday called It does get better, in order to raise money for a charity called Diversity Role Models. The charity goes into schools and discusses some issues surrounding homosexuality and homophobia with teenagers," O'Hooley explained
On a more cheerful note, she said that her favourite song on the the album is Calling Me. "Heidi sings it, Andy Cutting plays on it and it's about Heidi's yearning to have a child. We'd love to do that but there's, er... there's an intrinsic problem. We're considering the options and we talk about it all the time. We're really hoping to sort something out."
She joked that the only thing that could come between them were "if Fay Hield turned out to be gay".
That would be Dr Fay Hield, I think you'll find...
* O'Hooley and Tidow start their 40 date tour, which includes the Cambridge and Warwick festivals, on Saturday in Taunton.
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I've had an email from the Information Commissioner about my request that the names of the judges of the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards be revealed, the request that the BBC's poorly named Freedom of Information office had already denied.
If you recall, the reason why the folk awards was exempt from the Freedom of Information Act, the BBC said, was because obligations under it vanish if the thing under scrutiny can be defined as art, journalism or literature. So the folk awards qualified as either art, journalism or literature. The BBC was a little hazy about which.
On the other hand, there was nothing much that was hazy about the eight page letter from the Information Commissioner, which was full of legal twists and turns: lots of people have challenged the way the FoI Act works in the last five years. But what it boiled down to to in the end was that the law defines the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards as - drum roll - journalism.
Specifically...
... the "second limb of the definition" being journalism.
Just think about that for a moment.
John Leonard's stated reasons for "employing judges anonymously" were that (1) they might get free CDs and (2) too many musicians would try and get in touch with the 150 or so judges (for what else is "lobbying" in the context of the folk awards but playing someone your music? There are no large record companies to offer financial inducements or lavish freebies, whatever Leonard might like to suggest) and that this would place undue pressure on them.
Both of these reasons are ultimately about concealing information. Firstly the names of the judges are concealed so that, secondly, music will be concealed from the judges.
I ask you: what does this have in common with journalism? However hostile one might feel to individual journalists or media outlets, journalism in a democratic society is not about concealment. It is about the opposite.
Something is very wrong here, for the BBC and the Information Commissioner to have arrived at a point where they are defending the concealment of information on the grounds of journalism.
I refer you to the concept of doublethink from George Orwell's novel 1984.
Sorry. Couldn't resist that :-) Some points.
(1) This state of affairs may be partly due to a confusion between journalism and the relatively new concept of "content", which is something else entirely.
(2) Other people will ask the same question of the BBC and the Information Commissioner in the future - in precisely the same way that I have not been the first to take it to them myself. (And thank you, by the way, to the person - let's call you Marjory - who got in touch to say that they'd already trodden this path, and accurately predicted the outcome so far. There may have been others - the data protection act prevents us from knowing.) Anyone reading this blog can pursue the matter in the same way I have and I know that some have considered it. This is because the BBC Radio Two Folk Awards is produced using public money and we have a right to know how it is spent. This money, incidentally, goes into the pockets of John Leonard and all employed by UBC Media Group, lest we forget. Our money.
(3)UBC Media Group is listed on the stock marketand check out the correlation between the stories running about the company on this blog and the drop in share price on this graph. Is that a coincidence? It's unlikely, since the story was picked up by Roy Greenslade, whose media column in The Guardian is read by analysts. It's lost more than 20 per cent of its share price since the beginning of December.
(4) I wonder whether Sony was aware of UBC Media Group's approach to preferment when it chose to bestow the Sony Awards on Smooth Operations? Was its decision "in spite of" or "because of"? I think I may ask.
(5) Unless the process of judging the folk awards ceremony is seen to be honest John Leonard, the BBC, Sony, Uncle Tom Cobbly and all might as well give away the awards within their gift to the musicians, agents and PR people who've made them most tempting offer. Because we don't currently know any different.
And yet despite all this, the Information Commissioner has left a chink of light. I asked why the folk awards are different, as far as the BBC was concerned, to the their Sports Personality of the Year award, which not only publishes the provenance of the judges but for whom they voted. And this was the Information Commissioner's reply
So come on the BBC, John Leonard, Smooth Operations and the board of UBC Media Group. Do us the courtesy.
* If you'd like to read this saga from the beginning you could starthere.
Happy belated new year! Apologies for the slight gap in the service but I've been trying to start some new projects while simultaneously fighting the urge to hibernate. However, today is the 365th day of the Glamour Cave blog and - 50,000 hits in - I've decided to mark the occasion by drawing attention to some music I really like.
First up is an album called Northern Cross by Albireo, which contains two people associated with Pilgrim's Way: fiddle player Tom Kitching and Peter Crowther, who plays bass with them occasionally. Albireo has been around for a decade and is a superior kind of dance band - though Northern Cross appears to be their first album. You can have a listen to some of it here.
Things I like about this album include the names of it and the band, partly because they enhance a theory I'm incubating about geekiness. Originally they met to rehearse at a pub called The Swan with Two Necks, in Stockport, and there is a constellation called Cygnus, or "the swan" - also known as the Northern Cross - which has a bright binary star called Albireo on its beak. This pleases me. (I'm also pretty sure from goings-on on Twitter that there's another band called Albireo in Japan, although Japanese isn't my best language.)
Pure geekery aside, the music is described on the website as being "from three continents and four centuries". It has a gemütlich quality that conjures a better future and specifically one in which I would be playing the album in an environment that has more and better homely qualities than The Glamour Cave. Perhaps it just produces optimism. (I should explain, as well as being the name of this blog, "The Glamour Cave" is also the partly ironic name of my home in Bethnal Green, where I've been since 1997. So although I like to moan about it occasionally I really have no one to blame but myself if it's not up to scratch. In its defence the place has some structural limitations and I rent it. A lot of people love it. My mother, however, really doesn't and wishes I lived somewhere with central heating.)
Northern Cross has a sense of urgency throughout that's to do with the band's ceilidh background and blends traditional instrumentation with a freshness of arrangement that makes me think of one of those houses on Grand Designs with thatch on the roof but a knocked-through interior and modern furniture. Best of both worlds. I can imagine playing it in the car, or in the background eating dinner with friends. It just calms the brainwaves and produces cheerfulness and although I've only been listening to it for a couple of months it feels like I've known Albireo for longer.
It was produced at Talking Cat by Jon Loomes and Forbes Legato. Nuff said :-)
The EP's cover is black and white and looks, rather archly, like something from the 1970s folk revival.
It kicks off with a flourish that belongs in a spaghetti western, followed up by an opening line that goes Twas in the year of 1620 that the first Earl of Berk-shire... Which is to say that it manages in an admirably short span to produce the exposition: we're a folk outfit, mainly. And we've got a sense of humour.
They go on to prove it by doing four tracks that are all quite different from each other, including a stunning version of Teardrop by Massive Attack and a pounding Dashing White Sergeant that suggests serious crowd-pleasing potential at festivals. Greg McDonald has an enjoyably distinctive voice that seems geared for story-telling, Phil Beer and Steve Knightley will be producing their forthcoming album and I hope to see them live in 2012.
The third outfit to which I would like to draw your attention is Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker, who I saw for the first time at the first Bethnal Green folk day last summer. Here's a taste.
Ben had been in touch on Twitter about several other, unrelated things, so it was with a slight sense of disorientation that I realised how flipping good these two are - as well as how young. I took away a copy of their album, which is called One Light is Gone, only to have it swiped by a friend, which tells you everything you need to know about it really.
Josienne has a faithful and growing band of online admirers already. There's a clarity to her voice that might be connected to the fact that she apparently doesn't touch alcohol. But whether it is or not, the two of them have an immense store of talent which is mainly devoted at the moment to reflective original songs and cover versions. Here they are doing a Gillian Welch cover in someone's front room.
I hope that convinces you that they deserve a wider audience.
Anyway... to change the subject slightly. The other thing I've been paying a lot of attention to since the new year is not folk. I now have my own copy of the documentary Some Kind of Monster by Metallica, which has made a big impression on me. OK. It's about a hard rock band and therefore will not be completely to the taste of everyone who reads this blog. But it's also a brilliant documentary about a band attempting to resolve some internal difficulties.
Hands up. I've got a thing for Lars Ulrich: drummer, bi-lingual viking and metal warlord. But if you haven't seen it and you get a chance to, you should. Despite having serious Spinal Tap potential - because superficially what's not funny about the biggest heavy metal band on the planet collectively submitting to psychotherapy - it somehow ends up being the Anti Spinal Tap and you don't even have to like their music for it to work its astonishing charm.
I hate this word when it's not used right. But it's genuinely awesome.
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Standing outside St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City last week, the crowd seemed a bit unusual - or rather there was a greater concentration of unusual-ness in one place than is strictly normal. There was a man with a plait in his beard, another wearing a fur coat. There were Goth girls and girls in corsetry-as-daywear. Some fellas wore one-of-a-kind hats, others had dyed eyebrows. Many of the women had unusually intensely coloured hair. They had a quality that made me imagine a Neil Gaiman book-signing, although it took a while to figure out why. I felt faintly nervous, enjoyed the spectacle, listened to the conversation going on around me. Then I relaxed. This crowd I recognised: the geeks were out and they were out in force for The Mediaeval Baebes.
I reckon that if there had been time to ask, a straw poll of audience members would have revealed an above-average number of smart phones, days spent working with technology or applying it creatively, people with hobbies about which they were passionate and a higher-than-usual collective IQ.
This is a hunch.
For my world is increasingly populated by geeks, which is something welcome. The same dynamic that means that single women acquire gay friends because of the bond of childlessness, leads me as I get older increasingly to enjoy sincere enthusiasts (aka geeks) and to appreciate the side-effects of enthusiasm in any given area of life, which include success and fun. And this is despite having originally been encouraged by a society that celebrates effortless superiority to believe that there was something suspicious about enthusiasm.
These days I see geekdom as a cast of mind involving intelligence and a lack of excitement about the mainstream - but beyond that it takes many forms. (My companion at the Christmas Mediaeval Baebes gig - the last of their 2011 tour - pointed out that a straightforward early music crowd looks very similar, though perhaps a bit less S&M-y.) The unifying characteristics of geekdom might be described as a lack of inhibition about liking the things that one likes - gaming, role-playing, perhaps one's job or musical pursuits, the period of history (or whatever) you like to fantasise about, politics - and a level of concentration on and knowledge about this stuff that can easily tip over into creativity, obsession or both. I've sometimes wondered whether there is an area of the autism spectrum that might account for it - a point at which empathy is mainly restricted to those with whom you share your enthusiasms - but between Christmas and New Year is a bad time to try and get hold of the professionals who'd be able to discuss that theory knowledgeably. Maybe later...
I am also developing a theory that geeks, in fact, rule the world.
Anyway. Here is a picture of the band that brought together that audience and this train of thought.
Although, to be honest this is not exactly the band that I saw last week. I believe someone's joined the group since the pic was taken and since The Mediaeval Baebes started between 15 and 20 years ago there have, according to Wikipedia, been 27 members in total, swapping in and out. What I like about this image, though, is the fact that it's air-brushed, as if the band exists in theory - perhaps inside a fantasy computer game or a novel by Marion Zimmer Bradley - as well as in reality, as six or seven people with independent, relatively normal lives.
The gig started with Bev, decked out as a vestal virgin with flowers in her hair, walking down the aisle of the beautiful church - St Sepulchre is the musicians' church in the City in the same way that St Bride's is the journalists' church - which was decorated for Christmas, carrying her fiddle and singing She Moved Through the Fair. She was eventually joined by six other maidens - though I use the term advisedly - with long hair and costumes fastened under the bust a la popular representations of Morgan Le Fay. And though it never got that folky again the scene was set for a certain level of theatricality.
What followed was a kind of theme park whirl around musical genres - with the emphasis on early music - that was a bit Hammer Horror camp, a bit Robin of Sherwoodand a bit Witches of Eastwick. But retro.Crucially, though, it also managed to pull off the clever trick of becoming its own genre by throwing in a slightly shy wink to soft porn in which every smiling glance between Baebes appeared to be a meaningful glance and every pipe placed between the lips was apparently laden with significance. Tonguing: oh yes. It was knowing entertainment, medieval stylee mediated by Cadfael, Ridley Scott and anyone who ever wrote a song, gave an interview or performed an entertainment about women labelled "witches" for being bewitching (although if witches really existed, as with criminals, surely only those bad at witchcraft would get caught?) It was none the worse for that, just derivative in a highly unusual and therefore enjoyable way.
The American lady in the next seat spent some of the interval expounding on the complexity of the time signatures in which they were singing their songs in Latin and early English - I hadn't recognised any of them, though they were pretty - and telling me how successful The Mediaeval Baebes are at something she described as "RenFair" in the US. This turned out to be a kind of transatlantic battle re-enactment scene ("renaissence fairs") for people who enjoy dressing up and pretending, but don't much like violence. Think Kentwell Hall but with fairies and dodgy accents.
On this occasion, I don't think it was the often a capella music that had packed the church out, although it was delightfully produced and packaged, but the way in which the show appeals to people who like their entertainment reassuringly niche. It made me wonder whether this was the target area at which John Dagnall of Park Records was vaguely aiming when he made Moonshee.
Whereas the first half was all about floaty maidens with circlets, beautiful hair and slender arms picked out attractively by backlighting, the second half briefly became The Middle Eastern Baebes, which reminded me a bit of the incidental music of Gladiator and probably produced a collective belly dancing fantasy in the audience. It then returned to a nice bit of chanting about the circle of life in time to send us out to the pub feeling all winter solstice-y.
I discovered afterwards that there is a Mediaeval Baebes musical all tee'd up and ready to go, which has been put together by a German actor called Micha Bergese, who is probably most famous for playing the dashing werewolf (below, right) in A Company of Wolves.
They're looking for some financial backing, which is proving an uphill struggle at the moment. But there may well be some geeks/enthusiasts out there who'd jump at the opportunity to be involved and I suspect anyway that if the thing were done right it could turn out to be a money-spinner, since musical theatre is - I'm theorising again - geekdom at its broadest.
If you're interested to find out more you could contact the show's producer, Julia Hannan. Otherwise I believe they'll be touring again in the New Year. Get in touch with your inner geek...
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