Hartlepool as muse

PG Wodehouse memorably reviewed the first Flashman novel in terms of privileged "watcher of the skies" observers being present at the birth of something special.  I suppose, to extend a battered metaphor, that's how I felt at the Whitby Folk Festival in 2011.

A capella folk is not the most obvious genre for young musicians to start out in - risking credibility immediately by coming out somewhere on the spectrum between The Flying Pickets and a poor man's Ladysmith Black Mambazo.  However, that night, high on the headland overlooking the harbour, we made the acquaintance of The Young 'Uns.  Over a 45 minute set they showcased a seemingly effortless ability to marry three part harmony with North Eastern folk.  Obviously, with a new band it's easiest to measure them by their interpretations of standards, and their rendition of John Ball certainly seemed competent enough.  But what really made the difference was the strength of their own material.  It just didn't seem like there was going to be a gap in the market any time soon for 3 twentysomethings and an accordion.

How wrong can you be? The Young 'Uns have a sound quite unlike anyone else out there currently.  Seth Lakeman's a great fiddle player, but his material can seem a bit one note - if he had the courage to slow things down a bit and get rid of the softer folk rock elements he'd be roughly in the same ballpark.  Similarly, if the Unthanks were just a bit more cheerful.....

The Young 'Uns first album, "When Our Grandfathers Said No," hit the streets at the back end of last year, and is about as far away from the North London "I can't get over Laura Marling" banjo feyness of your Mumfords as you can get (and a prudent man would like to go much further).  What you've got here, is love, loss, heavy industry, beautiful harmonies, and the glamourisation of Hartlepool that that town has long unaccountably lacked.

I like Hartlepool personally; it has a certain honesty and stark beauty - especially to the north, where it shades round to Easington and Seaham Harbour.  However, I'd be lying if I said I'd ever seen it as romantic - I once stood above the town and took in the panorama, from the steelworks via Cameron's Brewery to the nuclear power station, and wondered who the town fathers had upset....  The closing track on the album, Jenny Waits for Me, which they performed in Whitby 2 years ago, makes it all much clearer.  This is real folk, it's also real life - from the depressing drudgery of "The Chemical Worker's Song," to the gruff honesty of "Love in a Northern Town," the Young 'Uns take you further into Britain's folk scene than many will be comfortable with, but God they can sing.

Disappointingly, they won't be at Cropredy this year (my one man lobbying mission obviously needs to step up a gear), but they are on the Whitby bill again - go and see them, and, if you can't, buy their album.

Fun in the Sun - Or Cropredy for those who couldn't quite make it this year

Being the fine upstanding folk rock obsessive that I am, I thought I'd take myself off to the Cropredy Festival so that none of you had to go...

Blessed with astonishingly good weather this year, the scene was set for what I hoped was going to be 3 days of top quality folk. Was it? We'll come to Fairport in a bit. Read on....

The Highs:

Bellowhead - I've always been a bit ambivalent about them, but this was the weekend where I finally got the point. An absolutely storming set, and looked like they were enjoying themselves more than anyone else on the bill. Several albums purchased.

Calan - really good Welsh folk; sort of sound like 9/Jewel era Fairport (unsurprising maybe given the involvement of Maart), they even managed to work in a bit of clog dancing. Would have purchased the album, but it had sold out by the time I got to the tent.

Tarras - nice to see them back, after so nearly making it big round the turn of the last decade. Line-up's a bit different, but they make a good big sound!

Richard Thompson - he was a bit naughty really. It was billed as a solo set, second headlining on Friday, but then he brought on Mattacks, Pegg, Nicol, and blew the site away. We had some Bright Lights, a bit of Sandy, and the whole thing was a bit emotional.

The Middling:

Larkin Poe - just about got what they did, but they were probably a bit too "mainstream" for Cropredy.

Ellen and the Escapades - bland, inoffensive, nothing further to say...

Dead Flamingoes - I really wanted to like them, what with Kami Thompson being the singer (and sounding an awful lot like her mother), but even by the standards of folk the lyrics were bleak. If they cheer up a bit, they might be rather wonderful, but they're not there yet.

Big Country - sort of got it, but not my scene, and the new vocalist is a bit too different.

Legend - fun reggae covers band with some impressive session pedigree.

The Lows:

Joan Armatrading - I like her, I really do, but I'm not sure what she was doing at Cropredy. There was a hard core in front of the stage who were obviously enjoying themselves, but also a steady stream for the exits (she was the Friday headline), and lost me after about 20 minutes. In some ways I think it was through poor choice of material, but admittedly she wasn't helped by having to follow Richard Thompson.

Squeeze - why? Just why?

And so to Fairport, who came on at 2030 on Saturday night and played until midnight. Before we go any further, let me just list the personnel involved over the 3.5 hours so you get some idea of why this was one of the strongest Cropredy sets for a while:

Ashley Hutchings, Dave Swarbrick, Dave Mattacks, Dave Pegg, Simon Nicol, Richard Thompson, Judy Dyble, Maartin Allcock, Gerry Conway, Jerry Donahue, Chris Leslie, Ric Sanders, Blair Dunlop, Kami Thompson, the excellent Kristina Donahue, and the two singers from Larkin Poe.

Given the above wouldn't it have been nice if they'd cobbled together the "Full House" era lineup and gone heavy on that? It would? Lucky they did then.

Set list (copied from Andy at talkawhile's post with due attribution as my own notes were illegible thanks to a combination of darkness, alcohol and emotion):

1. Mercy Bay  2. Albert & Ted 3. Fotheringay 4. I'll Keep It With Mine 5. Percy's Song 6. Lark In The Morning 7. Come All Ye 8. The Deserter 9. Walk Awhile 10. Poor Will and the Jolly Hangman 11. Sloth 12. Bring 'Em Down 13. White Dress 14. Night Time Girl 15. One More Chance 16. The Gas Almost Works, Cat On The Mixer, Three Left Feet (instr.) 17. Red Tide (by Rob Beattie) 18. Jewel In The Crown 19. Honor And Praise 20. Dangerous 21. Portmeirion 22. The Hiring Fair 23. The Brilliancy Method & The Cherokee Shuffle (instrumental) 24. The Hexamshire Lass 25. My Love Is In America 26. John Gaudie 27. Danny Jack's Reward 28. Farewell, Farewell 29. Matty Groves

Encore:
30. Meet On The Ledge

Well, where do you start? Swarb was excellent, stood up for most of it, and looked a lot better than he had at the Barbican during the Sandy tour earlier this year. Jerry D has always been one of my favourite guitarists and did little to disappoint here. Kami Thompson did a bit of a Sandy impression, Richard Thompson picked up where he'd left off the night before, and the whole field was singing bethankit (to horribly mangle PG Wodehouse).

Interesting use of the younger generation, which might point the future direction for the Fairport slot (at this rate, they'll have perfected the creation of a perpetual band!) Must stop rambling now, but Fairport alone made the festival one not to have missed - certainly the best set they've done for a decade I'd have said.

Oh, also enjoyed (and bought) the excellent 45th anniversary t-shirt they've produced which helpfully shows a lego character of each of the 25 people who have so far been member of the band!

Hopefully, if I can link the two for a moment, it's the start of an upswing for both Fairport and this blog.....

Like An Old Fashioned Waltzer

The other day the estimable Jonathan Calder over at Liberal England drew attention to the Homage to Sandy Denny that’s currently touring the UK, and posed the question as to whether she really was Britain’s greatest singer songwriter.  Last night, I took myself off to the Barbican to find out…

Sandy has certainly always been difficult to pigeonhole, not that that has ever stopped people.  Her early work with Strawbs and Fairport put her quite neatly into the folk category, but I think that to see her as a purveyor of folk whimsy would be to do her a great disservice.  Nowadays, she is frighteningly forgotten.  I don’t mean by the trad folk denizens of the Whitby or Sidmouth folk festivals, who still recognise her even though she had arguably outgrown them even before she joined Fairport Convention, or even by the attendees of the latter’s annual Cropredy Festival.  Mr Calder is absolutely right when he contrasts Sandy with Nick Drake – once united in their relative obscurity and unacknowledged genius, he has gone on to TV background music ubiquity, while poor old Sandy, outside the cognoscenti, continues to languish.

The current tour is a restaging of a one-off show put together for the 30^th anniversary of her death in 2008, and features a host of Sandy’s contemporaries, along with the best of a new generation of folkies.  Well, I say folkies, but it is still as you would expect drawn largely from the compromised electro-folk end of the scale, rather than the new-trad exponents like say the Young ‘Uns.  A quite extraordinary line-up has been assembled including Joan Wasser (Joan As Policewoman), Lavinia Blackwall from Trembling Bells, Thea Gilmore, and Scritti Politti’s Green Gartside, coupled to PP Arnold, most of Bellowhead and three people who actually knew Sandy well – Maddy Prior, Jerry Donahue and the legend that is Dave Swarbrick. 

Before we get on to the meat of the show, a quick word about Swarb.  He’s announced his retirement in the near future, and to see him now is rather akin to seeing say Barry Cryer performing with I’m Sorry I Haven’t A Clue – worth going a very great distance to be in on it.

The material spans the whole of Sandy’s career from the earliest days, through Fairport to the tragically short-lived Fotheringay, out the other side with the North Star Grassman and the Ravens album which was salvaged from the ruins of that band’s projected second album, and then onto the solo work which saw her increasingly spread her wings and move beyond folk through the course of the seventies.

Inevitably, some of the performances were stronger than others – Lavinia Blackwall stands out as perhaps the most Sandy-like of the cast, and her interpretation of A Sailor’s Life (accompanied by Swarb) was a great intro.  She then moved on to a perfect rendition of the eerily bleak Late November, a song whose lyrics sound traumatic enough before you know what the subject being obliquely treated is….  I did feel though that the evening was weirdly stop-start, and a lot of the enjoyment depended on sympathy or otherwise with the person who happened to be singing at the time.  I thought Green Gartside’s highly distinctive voice just about got through The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, but he murdered Nothing More.  I don’t think there’s anything he could have done differently, and it’s a shame because between songs he came across as possibly the most genuine fan, but it just wasn’t for me.

Thea Gilmore ran through a few numbers from last year’s Don’t Stop Singing, which confirmed Sandy’s status as a lyricist of the first rank I think, but the night seemed on surer ground when it was going through the back issues of the sandy songbook.  Maddy Prior got going with a slightly halting version of Fotheringay which had me fearing she had some sort of throat infection, but as her vocal chords warmed up over the evening she was on her usual transcendent form with a storming rendition of John the Gun – a track crying out for its own horror film.

My personal highlight of the evening was when Maddy, Thea and Lavinia combined with Swarb for a rendition of The Quiet Joys of Brotherhood so perfect that any record label with half a brain will get it released sooner rather than later – it really was joyous.

The male side of things was less satisfactory, I think because you just don’t associate Sandy’s songs with anything much below an alto.  Having said that, the Dennis Hopper Choppers’Ben Nicholls  pulled off a wonderful interpretation of Matty Groves (although I suppose, strictly speaking, that’s “trad. Arr.” In any case).  Blair Dunlop got through a competent take on It’ll Be A Long Time, but other than that, nothing else really stuck in my mind.

Joan Wasser, on the other hand, was a revelation.  She;s another one that really ought to get something from the night released because that woman was born to sing The Lady.  PP Arnold was extremely nervous, and had to start I’m A Dreamer three times before getting beyond the first verse, once she’d got over the hump though she was as good as you would expect.  Incidentally, for all Arnold’s fans namecheck her work with Nick Drake, Roger Waters and Ike and Tina Turner, I bet I was the only one there last night who first saw her onstage with Ocean Colour Scene at the NEC in 1998….

Last night in many ways was an opportunity to sit down and really put Sandy in context across the output of her career.  Consequently, it was possible to see how much she progressed as a writer, and experimented with different genres, whilst all the time managing to pull off the difficult trick of being life affirming whilst being very red wine at three am ( at trait she shares with early Barclay James Harvest in that respect).

I suspect globe spanning fame will continue to elude her for a while yet, although if enough of us keep the flame it can only be a matter of time.  Personally I think it went a long way towards answering the question posed on Liberal England at the beginning of the week:

“Up to a point, Lord Bonkers”

A Post for Folk

I've just staggered to the end of Rob Young's excellent "Electric Eden," which documents the evolution of "Britain's visionary music" over the twentieth century.  To a greater or lesser extent, this means the folk scene. 

Of course, folk has never really gone away, but it does swin in and out of the popular consciousness.  In the past couple of years no one has been able to escape the legions of fey north London types who have leapt aboard the folk bandwagon - think Mumford & Sons, Noah and the Whale, or Laura Marling.  However, away from the headlines and top ten there is a raft of good acts who are doing much more interesting things than what amounts in the most part to the new wave of British bluegrass....

For a window into the bleakness of the North East, The Unthanks stand unchallenged.  Their hauntingly beautiful ballads of lost love and broken hearts have captured hearts far beyond Northumberland.  They're also great live, and probably coming to a venue near you soon.  From a similar part of the world are the excellent Young'uns - who manage to make Hartlepool sound both appealing and poetic:  it's not often you get to say that. I saw them last summer at the Whitby Folk Festival and they deserve to have great things ahead of them (certainly they've just picked up a record deal).  It would be far too obvious to compare them to the Flying Pickets, so I will, but only in so far as they're very talented a capella singers.  They're not as overtly political, and they write some damn good tunes.

Away from the more trad end of the spectrum, I've always been particularly enchanted by the late sixties folk rock explosion, which Electric Eden covers very well. For a few years, if you knew where to look, you could soundtrack your life with Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span's first two albums, and the criminally short lived Fotheringay.  Folk rock is less overt in the modern scene, but one lot who do it very well are Trembling Bells.  If you do nothing else this year, beg borrow or steal whatever you need to get to see them.  They've got a short tour coming up in May with Bonnie Prince Billy, but tickets are already pretty hard to come by.  In Lavinia Blackwall they've got the archetypal late sixties folk rock frontwoman reborn.  I'm not going to fall into the trap of comparing her to anyone in particular, but this does lead me on to Sandy Denny.

For a generation of music fans Sandy, if she's known at all, is the girl who sings on Led Zep's Battle of Evermore.  However, in her short life (she died aged 31) she produced enough material to stake a claim as one of the finest singer songwriters the UK has ever produced.  From her early work with Strawbs, she progressed to Fairport (who famously remarked that it felt like they were auditioning for her, rather than the other way round), and her astonishing, bell clear voice was a key part of the seminal Liege and Lief; which set the template for a generation of folk rock and is regularly voted as one of the greatest albums of all time in any genre.

Her solo work is interesting; the first album, The North Star Grassman and the Ravens, has the atmosphere in places of someone lying dead in the next room, but is utterly compelling. Like an Old Fahioned Waltz is uniformly lovely.  Weirdly though, it's her last album, Rendezvous, which is the most upbeat, even though she was in a complete mess at the time and died shortly afterwards.

Interest in her work has picked up lately, with the release of an early demo album, the beatiful 19 Rupert Street, and last year's interpretation of her urecorded lyrics by Thea Gilmour.  I'm going to come bacck to Sandy when I've got time to do her proper justice, as she is one of those artists that gets inside your head and insists on being thrust to the foreground of your mind at all hours of the day and night.  I've just got tickets to see an homage that is being put on in the Baribcan in May, revisiting works from across her career and featuring Dave Swarbrick, Bellowhead, PP Arnold, Maddy Prior, and the aforementioned Lavinia.  I honestly can't remember the last time I was quite so excited....

Marchout Already

The other day, I realised that I was old - either that or that my friends were too young.  It wasn't just my thirty first birthday, but that I found myself having to explain to two separate people who Ocean Colour Scene are...

If you were anywhere near Birmingham in the mid 90s it would have been inconceivable that anyone would not have known OCS, probably personally.  London had Blur, Manchester had Oasis, Liverpool, God help them, had Cast...., we had Ocean Colour Scene.  And they were visible.  It wasn't just their appearance playing The Day We Caught the Train on Top of the Pops, or The Riverboat Song belting out every time TFI Friday came on, but you had a good chance of running into them down the pub - either the Flapper (behind Symphony Hall), or the Tap & Spile off Broad Street.  OCS had a national profile, but largely only one that involved being attacked by the NME as purveyors of "Dad-rock."  Thank you, Steven Wells...  They sold out arenas though, because away from the press the UK is not short of people with taste - or, at least it wasn't - in the era of the X Factor frankly who knows....

Britpop has been accused of many things, probably most accurately of being a magpie genre; nicking a riff here and a middle 8 there and putting them together to create something less than the sum of its parts.  At least OCS had the intelligence and taste to raid the back catalogues of some minor heroes - where Oasis spent their time listening to the Beatles, Birmingham's finest had immersed themselves in the back catalogue of the Small Faces and supped deep at the well of Northern Soul and the Wigan Casino.

On Friday night I took myself off to the Oxford Academy to see a band I last saw playing at the NEC to a crowd of about 20,000 in 1998.  Timing to a perfection so as to miss the support act, I'd just got my first pint by the time they wandered on stage and struck up the first half of the set, which would see the seminal 1996 album Moseley Shoals played in its entirety.  It was like being 16 again.

Simon Fowler always did have one of the most bell clear and distincttive voices of the 90s, and it hasn't suffered at all over the last decade - demonstrating a note perfect musical sensibility on everything from Robin Hood to Get Blown Away, and a storming, vocal chord tearing, rendition of Day Tripper at the end.

Steve Cradock demonstrated once again his claim to be one of the most technically proficient guitarists working in the UK, although it has to be said that the absence in live performance of the "5th member of the band", 90s producer Brendan Lynch, meant that the sound lacked some of the distinctive tape loops and squelch which typified Moseley Shoals and Marchin' Already.

Oscar Harrison was great on drums, and they really don't miss ex-bassist Damon Minchella.  Great night all round really...

So, Ocean Colour Scene, then, poets of the Birmingham suburbs and small West Midlands towns; champions of the underdog; backing band by appointment to Paul Weller; and still standing.  More importantly, still marching....

And where are the Undertones now then NME?  In fact who even reads the NME these days....?