Trowbridge Village Pump Festival

"Seed, bud, flower, fruit -- they're never going to grow without their roots...." 

Show of Hands gigs always feel a bit like revivalist meetings. The less kind prefer the word "rallies". On Saturday night, Steve feels even more like a worship-leader than usual. Throughout the weekend there has been a positively Glastonian sense that the star of the Trowbridge folk festival is the Trowbridge folk festival – that bands have only to say the the word "Trowbridge!" to get a big round of applause. Steve, as ever, encapsulates the moment:

"Branch, stem, shoots...we need roots! We need roots....we need The Trowbridge Village Pump Folk Festival!" 

There is a back story. The 2011 Trowbridge festival (not to be confused with the 2011 Trowbridge festival) was cancelled for the first time since it started in the 1970s, so everyone is keen to maintain that the 2012 Trowbridge festival (not to be confused with the 2012 Trowbridge festival, which was cancelled) has full continuity with the old one, despite being run by different people at different locations. 

The weather is on the new organizers' side. By day, there is sun and blue sky. At night, there are stars. A spotlight from the marquee illuminates the White Horse. The drumming workshop comes out of the tent and finds a home under a tree; people in the bar busk Rock Me Mama Like a South Bound Train. The Bloodstone Border Morris interpolate "My friend Billy had a ten-foot willy!" (which I suspect of not being entirely traditional) into one of their blackface routines, and no-one seems to mind or notice. I buy a slice of Victoria Sponge from the cake stall, and a hat from the hat stall. People get out rugs and camp chairs and drink beer and wine and newspapers and kindles. The music becomes the idyllic backdrop to an English summer picnic.

By Sunday, expressions like "triumphant return" and "feels just like the old one" were drifting across the valley. Earlier in the weekend the word "shambles" was being avoided like one of those elephants that hides in peoples rooms. Show of Hands and the sun (and the cake shop and general niceness) had saved the day...

I wasn't entirely convinced by the arrangements in the main marquee. There was no seating; there was an imaginary line in front of the stage; behind the imaginary line, you could sit on your own camp-chair; in front of the line (hereafter "the mosh") it was standing room only. This meant that those of us with long legs could choose to stand all day, get buffeted by dancers, but actually see what was going on. I wasn't quite clear whether the lady behind me was miming intercourse with a: the crash barrier, b: Steve Knightley or c: Me, but it was not an experience I have had a folk gig before, and not one I would care to have again. Another reveller explained to me after the show that I was a fucking tall bastard, without making it entirely clear what he thought I could do about it. I don't think I am noticeably taller, and certainly not noticeably wider, with a hat (did I mention that I bought a hat?) than I was without. Those who thought to bring camp seats would presumably have got through the weekend without cramp but without actually seeing any of the acts. Since a lot of people knew to bring chairs, this may have been the normal set up at Trowbridge (applause!) But I wish -- in all seriousness -- that festival organisers would put you this kind of thing on the website when you buy tickets. "Bring you own chair.  Bacon sandwich kiosk ten minutes walk from camp site." Things you actually need to know.

The programme bore only a coincidental resemblance to the actual running order, which was fine for people like me who plonked themselves in the mosh at lunchtime and stayed there until the security asked us to leave; but less good for the people who turned up to hear Cara Dillon and found that her act had finished 15 minutes ago. I noticed that the very lovely O'Hooley and Tidow were giving out flyers in the beer tent telling punters what time they were coming on. 

And the PA system was very special. I know literally nothing about this sort of thing. I'd been going to concerts for a year before I realized that the blocky things at the front were what the performers listened to themselves on. Running sound may, for all I know, be like twiddling knobs on a wireless, or more like quantum physics. Quite often, you got to concerts where slightly precious musicians seems to be getting annoyed because the sound isn't just so even though we mortals in the audience didn't quite see a problem. But this weekend, we had guitarists who couldn't go near the mic because of feedback and reverb -- see, I do know some technical words. ("Could we do anything about the feedback on this note? This one? It's "C". We use it a lot. One of the white notes...") We had change-overs so long that there was hardly any time left for acts to actually do their set. (Fay Hield, in the company of Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney and Rob Harbron, barely got to do half an hour.) My impression, which is based, as I say, on complete ignorance, was that the amp worked fine for instruments that plugged into the system directly (the very very electric Oysterband went right through a long set without a hitch) but panicked when attaching itself to acoustic instruments. Seth Lakeman appeared to be rewriting his set on the hoof based on which of his instruments were working at any given moment. Things aren't going well when a performer of this calibre calls into the audience mid-song "Can anyone actually hear my fiddle?"

Show of Hands brought their own cables. 


But Technical Problems (no less than Rain) can create an atmosphere which puts the audience and the band on the same side, having a great time in the face of adversity. In the end, it's the Moments that we take away with us. (Poss. title for song if I ever take up song writing?) Here are some moments I will remember (poss. second line?)

John Jones climbing over the barrier and mingling with the punters during Here Comes the Flood.  I've only previous heard the Oysterband with June Tabor, but they work great by themselves, more like small scale 80s stadium rock than folkies. Jones sings with his hands, gesticulating like a politician, drawing the audience in or thumping the air, making a clenched fist and then a single finger for "all things in common/ all people one"  in the obligatory World Turned Upside Down. ("I give you this song" he says at one point "I give you this song", leaving the audience repeating the refrain for several minutes, before, er, taking it back again. Possibly you had to be there.) The Oysterband are now firmly ensconced in my premier division of performers. No-one in the audience knew the words to "Put Out the Lights". It didn't matter.

(By the way, I committed a calumny, a solipsism and also a booboo the other day, implying that I thought most of what the Oysters do are covers of things which mainstream pop groups have done, largely because I know for a fact that the one with June Tabor  was written by the Velvet Underworld. So I should point out that I now fully believe that I Haven't Prayed Since God Knows When My Teeth Are UnAmerican and  Put Out The Lights, Put Out The Lights, Put Out The Lights on London City are Oysterband originals. And bloody good songs of course)

Luke Jackson singing his poignant coming of age song "The Big Hill". (All Luke Jackson's songs are coming of age songs. The song which he called "Oh Me Oh My" when he sang it in Bristol has been renamed "More Than Boys": it's going to be the title track of his album, which is absolutely spot-on.) The Oxford English Dictionary states that "Luke Jackson completely blew me away" is now a single word, like "England Test collapse". It's the ordinary language rising to the surface of the lyric which breaks my heart every time I hear him.



Reg Meuross was entirely new to me. He sang a pleasant enough song with a guitar; and then he sang a pleasant enough song with a guitar; and then he song the best damn song about a highwayman (and there are one or two) I've ever heard, and then followed through with the agonizingly beautiful World War I ballad ...And Jesus Wept. He has a Tilston-esque facility for complex, cerebral lyrics combined with melodies that could almost, but not quite be traditional. ("A nations guilty secret is this generation's debt / the hand of God came down last night and Jesus wept.") Lizzie Loved a Highwayman has something of the rambling quality of Slip Jigs and Reels, come to think of it.

Seth Lakeman is possibly still not quite My Kind of Thing but he did an absolutely storming set, and his new Blacksmiths Prayer, is a strange, powerful, beautiful thing.

Karine Polwart is my new folk hero for keeping going when the first bout of technical hitches threatened to mess up her brutal ballad "The Sun's Coming Over The Hill". ("He said that the loved me and swore he would die for me / then he drove off the road full of whisky and irony"). I associate her with the elliptical, enigmatic and slightly dark songs, but she can run to lovely sentimental gush about talking to her daughter on over skype ("I give a little, take a little wi-fi love / better than nothing but its never enough.)

But it was, as ever, Show of Hands who provided the defining moment of the weekend. Three lines into Cousin Jack, the PA exploded into feedback and Steve, entirely unphased, pointed out at the audience who took up the song until the electrics started working again. Magic. The sort of thing you can't plan for, and the sort of thing you can't get on a CD.

But maybe fix it so it doesn't happen again next year, peoples?

I wear a hat now. Hats are cool.

Bristol Folk Festival

Colston Hall

Bath Ales have ludicrously re-branded “Barnstormer” as “Barnsy”. I would no more order a pint of Barnsy than I would eat a Snickers bar. The organizers of the second Bristol Folk Festival had evidently taken to heart some of the complaints about last year's refreshments: the addition of a “beer tent” on the ground floor and some festival friendly snacks at the caff were a great help, although the Mexican frajita place over the road did very good business.

On Monday evening the compère does the Folks Men joke again. Everything is folk music, he says, because everything is written by and performed by folk, not by, say, plants or animals. So the Anglo Celt Sound System is totally folk.

They play a sort of young people's night club dance music; with that drum rhythm dominating everything, while a front man in a turban does his thang on one of those huge drums and another one plays Irish whistle or Northumbrian Pipes. I could recognise it has as having some connection to instrumental folk – several musicians all doing their own thing on their own instruments in such a way that it all comes together into a single thing that you dance to. In that sense it was quite similar to what the people in the bar were doing with fiddles and squeeze boxes. (Folkbuddy claims that they even went into Cuckoo's Nest -- a Morris tune with filthy words that no-one ever sings -- but I had evidently stopped paying attention by that point.) The band definitely had a following: people were forming a queue an hour before they were due to come on stage. But I couldn't help noticing that other people were also leaving before the end.

Doubtless if you liked this kind of thing this would be the kind of thing that you liked. But it was a bit niche to finish the festival on. Last year we had Bellowhead and glitter coming from the ceiling. Everyone likes Bellowhead. This year we had a very good night club band; and a sense that the actual folk festival finished with Sam Sweeney and Hannah James doing their delicate traditional tunes and clog dancing (how can a form of dance based on having blocks of wood on your feet be so damn graceful?) before we let the Young People do their thing for a couple of hours before bed time.

Did I not once tell you to avoid anything with the words "Celtic" or "Fusion" in the main job description?

There was a big stand on the bridge outside the main hall selling "old fashioned" sweets – white chocolate things with hundreds and thousands on them, rice paper sherbet flying saucers, Hershey bars, multi flavoured pretzels. I liked the Finnish liquorice best; soft like a truffle, sugary on the outside, salted on the inside, a very strong liquorice taste without the chewiness I like the taste of salty licquice, by usually find that much salt is a little nauseous. I think that liquorice like porridge, should taste of itself rather than being used as a sugar delivery mechanism. I think the same thing about Krispy Kreme Donuts, but wouldn't go as far as putting salt on a donut.

When I said that I didn't like “Celtic” music, some people affected to believe that that meant that I didn't like Celtic music. Which would obviously be ridiculous. Sunday's headliner, for example, was the slightly too ethereal for my taste Cara Dillon, backed up with what (I am assured) was a who's who of famous Irish instrumentalists. I am no expert in what is technically known as the diddly-diddly-dee sub-genre (sub-sub-genre “look how fast I can play this damn whistle”) but that doesn't mean that I can't enjoy it. Ms Dillon, of course, didn't use the c-word. She called it “Irish music” or more specifically “this is a tune from County Tyrone.”

Ewan McLennan was by some distance the best thing I heard over the entire weekend. He came on to the stage and practically whispered "A Mans and Man For A'That". And then, in case we'd missed the point, played "Auld Land Syne" on his guitar. You forget that these tunes, belted out at so many drunken parties, have a real proper melodic beauty if you trust them. But the soft, feathery delivery could wrong-foot you: before long he's bringing the same style to protest songs; turning "Banks of Marble" from a rabble rousing soap box thumper into a meditation on injustice and then topping it with an almost too painful to listen to version of Old Man’s Song.

We're living on the Pension now and it doesn't go too far
Not much to show for a life that seems like one long bloody war
When you think of all the wasted lives it makes you want to cry
I don't know how to change things but by Christ we'll have tae try

Oh, and an audacious reworking of Bob Dylan’s Blues from the Radio 2 Freewheelin' project. Take a silly, filler song. Slow it down. Deliver the lines as if they mean something even if you don't have the faintest idea what. Someone said that he sang it better than Bob Dylan's version. I don't think that's true. I think that this sort of cover is always sort of kind of engaging in an inter-textual debate with the original. If we didn’t know how Almighty Bob sung it, we wouldn’t be gasping with amazement at Ewan’s reworking.

Celtic indeed.

I think that I shall become the kind of person who likes liquorice I shall make a big thing of it. It's the sort of thing you might right on a character sheet in an RPG to show that you have an interesting personality.

Luke Jackson was by some distance the best thing I heard over the entire weekend. I wish I hadn't raved about him quite so much after Frome, because the set he did in the more intimate Colston Hall 2 was on a whole different level. Five years from now, he will be the biggest thing in folk, unless they steal him from us an make him into a pop star. The photos on his Facebook page show signs that someone is trying to brand him, which would be a shame. There's an honesty, even a naivety to his performance; telling us that a particular song is the one that been in his act for the longest (he's not yet 18) or introducing a traditional number with “I'm not quite sure who wrote this.” He has a deep, mellow voice which lets him pull off an old spiritual like Poor Wayfarin' Stranger with an intensity that I can hardly believe. There's absolutely no sense that he's mimicking a more experienced singer: you feel he's felt it himself. But its the self-written songs which crystallize his own experience: climbing trees, riding his bike in the park, realising he's going to lose track of his three best friends, hearing people on the bus running down teenagers. They are so perfectly done that listening to them almost seems voyeuristic. He encores with Oakham Poachers ("Steve Knightley asked me to do something traditional”) and while its clearly a cover of the Show of Hands arrangement, it suddenly, startling goes into his own bluesy riff on the final line. Astonishing.

"You may now cross off "dead children" on your O'Hooley and Tidow bingo card" tweeted Folkbuddy. This was immediately retweeted by O'Hooley and Tidow. Twitter is a powerful friend and a dangerous enemy. At one level, live tweeting events like this is great fun; and occasionally helpful, when other twits tell you what is going on somewhere else. At another, it tempts you to spend the event in the twittersphere, not in the moment (which is always a problem for a writer, even without the 140 character limit). And the acts themselves are reading your tweets. Since my Folkbuddies refused to eat the Hershey bars I purchased from the liquorice shop I idly tweeted "I wonder if the band like American chocolate" "Yes please" tweeted back Mawkin "Enjoy the set..."Which is sweet: but it makes one immediately reluctant to tweet “this band sucked”. Actually, my general rule, being one who does not know anything about music but knows what he likes is to only review acts I've enjoyed. When I hear someone I don't think much of, I generally leave well alone.

(Which is not, by the way to be construed as meaning that if I don't review something I thought it was awful. I had a great time listening to Andy Irving at the the Folk House in May. He's one of my favourite singers. Specially liked his straight down the middle version of the It Was Sad When the Great Ship Went Down to mark the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the wassisname, and his very traditional Stewball. I just didn't get around to putting pen to paper. I also failed to say anything about the very wonderful Monty Award Winning Chris Ricketts at the same venue. His version of Leaving of Liverpool reduced the entire audience to tears, and I was impressed as hell that he finished up with What Shall We Do With a Drunken Sailor. Not ironically or post- modernly; he just seemed to trust the song. Neither Andy Irvine nor Chris Rickets were at the folk festival. Now I've confused everybody.)

Instrumental folk is not always my most favourite thing, but Mawkin do it better than anyone I've ever heard. That was precisely 140 characters, that was.

O'Hooley and Tidow were by some distance the best thing I heard over the weekend. The last time I reviewed them, I described them as "depressing" (a fact they apparently remember). Actually, this isn't entirely fair. I would now be more inclined to say "haunting". Some of their songs pass almost unnoticed at the gig and then come back and kick you in the teeth three days later. The musical setting of a sentimental Victorian poem called Little Boy Blue, for example. They hold it, as so many of their lyrics, at arms length; there is something detached, and therefore chilling, about their performance. The verse is pure sentiment; it could almost be an Edwardian parlour ballad. But in the middle of the song, something altogether more contemporary cuts in; with percussive piano and declarative singing, it's an unsettling ultimately very moving shift in direction. (Clever, too: the line "but as he was sleeping an angel song awakened our little boy blue" would have been cloying.) But the tune is deceptive; I suddenly found the melody (“what has become of our little boy blue”) drifting to the top of my consciousness a week later and making me feel sad for no reason at all. There own lyrics love to hold up the ordinary for observation: the astonishing song about the old couple's coach trip to Blackpool piles trivial detail on trivial detail ("and the handbag with the fiddly catch that sometimes nipped her finger / but it matched her coat and sunday shoes so it really didn't matter") with an urgent, driving rhythm. It ends "'Have you enjoyed your day trip?' Vera says 'It were real'." Lancashire people do use "It were real" to mean "I had a good time"; but the line is taken up and repeated over and over until it becomes a sort of Samuel Beckett existential yell at the universe. Or something.

I have also previously raved about Solarferance. All three of my Folkbuddies bought their album, which proves that I was right. They are the ones who stand on the stage with Macbooks, making strange noises with mortars and pestles and musical saws and live looping them, while singing very detailed close harmony versions of traditional songs. I think Folkbuddy is probably correct that they need to work on their stage personae; Nick in particular has a slight tendency to look like someone doing a send up of disc jockey; but it's early days and what they are doing is fantastically difficult. "I never had but one true love" is awfully clever, The multi lingual Cutty Wren is still the best thing they do; the point, at which, I think, they passed beyond being awfully clever to actually making music.

Every folk festival, I assume, involves a young woman singing "I'm Being Followed by a Moon Shadow", "Streets of London" and "Leaving on a Jet Plane." I have no problem with this. I would be sorry if it didn't happen. The sense of being at folk festival is an important part of being at folk festival. I have more than once been in a not very pleasant venue drinking not very nice beer when a not very talented young man with a hat, beard and guitar sits on a chair and sings a not very good song about the banking collapse and how it relates to the young lady who is no longer dating him and thought "this is exactly what I signed on for". I described her on twitter as "charming". Folk-buddy wanted to know if my liquorice had been drugged.

Show of Hands did a fairly restrained set. By their standards. Regular readers will be aware that last year's performances was the best set ever done by anyone anywhere and they made no particular attempt to top it. They are never less than very good. We had a Cousin Jack and an AIG, Phil got to do Jamestown and Innocents Song, Steve Got to Home of a Million Dreams (which I don't think is as good as he obviously does) everyone did Keys of Canterbury, and we wound up with Now You Know Will You Come Back To Me. There was a hen night. A group of young ladies with a big banner that read "Getting married but still in love with Steve and Phil". (There are some folk performers, such as Seth Lakeman for example, who you can easily imagine young ladies adoring for their boyish good looks. Phil Beer and Steve Knightley, not so much.) This rather boosted the party atmosphere. I don't think Steve did as much banter as he usually does, since he spent most of the period between the songs engaging in call and response with the girls. Which was fine. In fact it rather underlines what a showman he is; quite able to fool around with the hen party, and then dedicate his last song to them, and say "good luck for the big day" in a stage whisper before quitting the stage. Wanting to postpone the debate about whether objecting to the common fisheries policy -- or indeed listen to a song about a character who objects to the common fisheries policy -- makes one a Nazi, I hung around in the hall and had a chat with the ladies. They'd were serious Show of Hands fans. They'd been calling out for him to sing Poppy Day, which is an incredibly depressing song about a drug dealer and had been at the Albert Hall concert the previous month. They said Now You Know was their favourite song; I said that Cousin Jack always makes me cry because my Daddy was Cornish. We left feeling that we were the best of friends.

That's the kind of band they are: not necessarily my favourite song writers (1) or my favourite live act (2), but never failing to catch the mood of the hall (angry last year, festive this year) and create a corporate experience. Godlike, in other words.

Lucy Ward is beautiful and lovely and funny and clever and I think I am probably in love. She drew a little heart on my CD and was just as lovely meeting the fans off stage as talking to them on stage. The picture of her on her album makes her look like a fey Monroe-ish starlet In real life she has bright blue hair and says that the best thing about Shrewsbury is that every third shop sells cakes. (She lived on macaroni pie during the folk week, apparently.) She has a sense of humour and comic timing which makes you think that she could probably hack it as a stand up comedienne if she wanted to; but in between the bubbling are some very dark songs. Alice in the Bacon Box is about a lady who ends up in the workhouse because someone takes her cardboard box away. Its based on a true story. She's good at making unexpected turns, as with her “traditional English song by Jarvis Cocker” which she does so well and, er, audibly that it made me go back and listen to the original. The recording which catches her stage act the best is Maids When Your Young, which is sung with an absolutely conspiratorial level of filth which is a joy to behold. She was by some distance the best thing I heard over the weekend.

Many people thought that Lady Maisery was the best thing over the whole weekend. There was a squeeze box, clog dancing and a strange Norwegian thing which may really be called "diddling" in which you sort of sing instrumental numbers. And there was a song about a fairy.

Dan Walsh plays the banjo and Will Pound plays the harmonica. Half way through, Dan did his banjo solo. You know that thing where the music gets so quick that's its obviously the climax, and everyone claps, and then he gets even faster? He did that three or four times. Brilliant (and he was properly playing a tune as well, not just showing off.) It was obviously the best bit of musicianship anyone did over the whole weekend the whole weekend (seriously).

"Hmm...8 out of ten" said Will when he returned to the stage.

Some years ago I was involved in the design of a computer game about pirates. There were different kinds of pirate ships, each with different attributes. (It was, as I may have mentioned before, described by the Daily Telegraph as "adequate".) In several years of writing documents and setting up auto-correct functions, I still discovered new ways of miss-spelling "manoeuvrability".

I feel very much the same way about liquorice.

I didn't get very near the free stage this year because there was so much going on in other place, but would award several points to an Irish student Celidah band, quite possibly called Really Potcheen, who did things like Galway Girl very nicely and honestly. They described New York Girls as a Bellowhead cover, which says something about the nature of the Tradition.

And the Appliejacks who did appallachian clog dancing. At one point, the nature of the venue meant that the music from upstairs and the music from downstairs was in competition. English Morris dancing and American clog dancing. On Sunday, the man with the big Indian drum taught some of the morris dancers how to dance.

Now, that's what I call fusion.

(1) Chris Wood

(2) Chumbawamaba

SPECIAL AWARDS

Special Takes Out an Onion Award for making the judge cry


*Sean Lakeman and Kathryn Roberts
for Joe Peel at Bristol Folk Festival

*Steve Knightley, Fisherman's Friends and the entire company, but this time chiefly yourselves,
for Cousin Jack, also at Bristol Folk Festival

*Chris Wood
for Hard, Jersualem, and Hollow Point (duh!) at Colston Hall, 21 Oct 2011

WINNER
That miserable bastard Chris Wood.

Special Well, He Ought To Be More Careful With His Boats Award for Best Famous Dead Canadian Singer-Songwriter Who Everyone Else Had Heard Of But The Judge Only Started Listening To This Year.


*Chris Ricketts
for Stan Rogers' Northwest Passage (on Port of Escape)

*Blackbeards Tea Party
for Stan Rogers' Barret's Privateers (on Tomorrow We'll Be Sober)

*Jon Boden
for Stan Rogers' Loch Keeper (on a Folksong A Day)

WINNER
Stan Rogers for Stan Rogers' Mary Ellen Carter,

which, in a rare show of unanimity, the readers of this blog voted "single best song ever written by anyone about anything ever".







Special Award for the Judge's Coolest Music Related Moment Of 2011

* Lustily and tuneless singing along with Fishemen's Friends singing Cousin Jack in the mud at the Pyramd Stage at Glastonbury, and noticing that Steve Knightley was standing next to him

* Standing on York station, desperately hoping that the old gentleman with the guitar case to whom he has just said "We really enjoyed your set, sir, such a shame you were so far from the audience" really had been Martin Carthy. (Or if, indeed, he had dreamt the whole incident.)

* Hearing the astonishing Emily Portman singing wonderful mysterious whispy ethereal fairy tale ballads in the upstairs room of the Louisiana Bristol, and realising that the audience consisted of eleven people, including the judge, the judge's Folkbuddy, Peter Lord and Jim Moray.

* The aforemetnioned Martin Carthy singing Bob Dylan's Dream on the Radio 2 tribute programme. (Bob Dylan having originally based the song on Martin Carthy's version of Lord Franklin's Lament.)

* Hearing The Pentangle doing a set consisting entirely of traddy classics at Glastonbury, unaware that this was the last but one performance Bert Jansch would give.

WINNER

No award. You can't give an award for something sad.








Special Judas Award For Best Live Performance of a Bob Dylan Song

*Phil Beer
for Seven Curses at Bristol Folk Festival

*June Tabor and the Oyster Band
for Seven Curses at St Georges Hall Bristol, Nov 1

*Martin Simpson
for North Country Blues at Chapel Arts, Bath, Oct 22

*Ralph McTell
for Girl from the Noth Country at St Georges, Bristol, 29 SepBob Dylan
for Man in the Long Black Coat at Cardiff Arena, Oct 13

WINNER

Martin Simpson.

It's shame Dylan didn't sing Seven Curses, so I could have had an award for "the best live performance of Dylan's Seven Curses."








Special  Geldof Award For the Best Live Performance By An Artist Named Bob

The judge unanimously gave the award to Bob Dylan's show in Cardiff Arena.

The first night of an opera is generally judged a failure unless a sizable proportion of the audience boo; similarly, the Poet Laureate of Rock and Roll wouldn't have done a show unless some people claimed to have walked out of it. It is widely believed that Bob's promoters fill the back rows with an anti-claque who are only there so they can leave after the opening number.

It must be admitted that, in order to understand Dylan's current approach to his muse (a.k.a "whatever the hell it is he thinks he's doing nowadays") you need to

a: have heard at least three albums since MTV Unplugged

b: Be reasonably familiar with his lessor known material (NOTE: Knowing some of the words to Like a Rolling Stone doesn't count)

c: Be sitting or standing in the front five rows.

If you fulfil all those criteria, than you will be treated to a Robert Zimmerman becoming in his autumn years the artist I am convinced he has always wanted to be – the bluesy, rock-a-billy song and dance man, grinning and mincing and riffing and colluding with the audience.

In short: this was the gig I am most likely to tell my non-existent grandchildren about.

"But Andrew, would you have praised this very strange show so highly if you had never heard of Bob Dylan?"

"If I had never heard of Bob Dylan then I would never have heard any of Bob Dylan's songs. Under those circumstances, if this grizzled old man in a sweaty cowboy hat had snarled into a small venue and started growling, I would have said 'What marvellous songs...get me a pen and paper, these may be the greatest lyrics that have ever been written...what fantastic tunes...what a weird-arse way of singing them."

Which is precisely what everyone has been saying about Dylan since approximately 1959

Special Muddy Wellington Boot Award For The Most Idiosyncratic Venue

*The Canteen, Stokes Croft

The Canteen, a sort of perfectly legal squat in a disused open plan office, is allegedly the creative hub of the coolest, most creative street in England, or, if you believe the Bristol Evening Post, the place where crusty hippy commies hang out who ought to get a job and be forced to eat Tescos sandwiches and Banksy ought to be flogged like they did to that kid who painted graffiti on Singapore. I digress. One of the Canteens U.S.Ps, apart from real ale and very decent food at very reasonable prices (you get a free bowl of soup with a meal, which is a really civilised touch) is live music -- I've heard both the aforementioned Pilgrims' Way and the not yet mentioned Hoddamadoddery there.

Well, "heard" is a slight overstatement: it's a bar. People are right up near the stage trying to finish designing their websites on the Macbooks, or with their course work on Brecht spread out in front of them; or else they are drinking and trying to have a conversation with their mates, wondering when the distracting noise at the front is going to stop. This probably works very well with that loud electrical rhythm stuff that the young people allegedly like but which no-one actually wants to listen to in the first place, but it's really not the environment in which to hear Pilgrims' Way telling you about the hand weaver who fell in love with the factory maid. Not sure what the solution is. Shame.


*Scarborough Open Air Theatre

Plastic, football stadium style seating. Numbered seats, although this didn't make much difference, because the arena was about ¼ full. A river, possibly the river Derwent, running through the complex, separating the audience from the stage. The impact of Bellowhead is slightly numbed when they are several miles away from you, and with the best will in the world, its hard to get the nuances of the aforementioned Jim Moray doing the aforementioned Lord Douglas in that environment. During the Demon Barber's set, a man with a guitar ambled through the audience who were, by this time, standing on the tarmac near the rail. He turned out to be Martin Carthy.

*Green Note Cafe, Camden Town

About 100 yards from Cecil Sharp House itself. Fits 50, of whom about 20 can sit down. Admission only granted to people who know a special hand shake (I made that up). If you want to sit, you need to buy a ticket AND book a table and eat. If you want a table near the stage, you have to form a queue at 6, and take you seat at 7, in plenty of time for the music at 9. In return, you get to hear Martin Carthy, Alasdair Roberts, Robin Williamson in surroundings that redefine the word "intimate". I love this place to bits.



WINNER

Parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme. .

Best Live Gig

The nominations for the Eternal Circle Award Are As Follows

Chris Wood at Colston Hall, Bristol, Oct 21



Chris Wood is always amazing, but this is the best I've ever heard him, which is to say, about as good as the "one man with a guitar singing ballads" genre ever gets. He praised the acoustics of the room and the sound engineer, and was more than usually under-stated, nuanced, a conversation between guitar and audience. Assume I'd made all the usual remarks about the English not valuing their national treasures.


Show of Hands at Bristol Folk Festival, April 30

I don't like everything Steve Knightley does. Or perhaps it would be more honest to say that the thing which Steve Knightley does doesn't come off every time I see him do it. This time it did. It was Day 2 of Bristol folk festival and local resentment against the seventeenth or eighteenth branch of Tesco being plonked on Stokes Croft had just boiled over into a full scale riot, about half a mile from the stage, and not one single artist had even mentioned it, or seemed to be aware that Bristol was in the news. So Steve Knightley stepped onto the stage and launched straight into "to the cutthroats, crooks and conmen running this gaol: is there anything left in England that's not for sale?" and "I hope some day we'll all be freed from your arrogance, your ignorance, and greed" and "Agri-barons, C.A.P in hand strip this green and pleasant land...." He is, in a way, a demagogue, a revivalist preacher without any single cause, and on this occasion he judged the mood of the hall, he took it into himself, he channelled it back at us.... And then went to the Silent Disco and danced along with Remember Your A Womble. A bona fide folk-god.

Blackbeards Tea Party at the Croft Bristol, Nov 26

Stuart Giddens (now positively identified as one of the two morrismen who performed what we all now know are traditional Morris double jigs with the Demon Barber Roadshow at Scarborough) has replaced Paul Young as singer in the band, and added a camp wildness, an awful lot of jumping, but probably not that much subtlety to the act, cranking the live show a notch or two above either of the records. It appeared that a lot of people who had really come for the rocky punky music that the Croft is more famous for drifted into the back room for the Tea Party and stayed until the end. There was singing along; there was dancing; there was jumping in the air...and there was a sense that Blackbeard's Tea Party had just gone from being a really very good busking and celidah outfit to being a major musical force.

WINNER

Back in May, the judge said that the Show of Hands show was the best live gig he'd ever seen, and he isn't going to go back on that now. But he's never seen anything quite like Blackbeard Tea Party either. Obviously, one can't blame the apple for not being as orangey as the orange or or the orange for not being as apply as the apple. So for the first time in their history the 2011 Monty will be awarded jointly to Show of Hands and Blackbeards Tea Party. Fortunately, since it is an imaginary award, there is no problem imagining it being in two places at once, like that puzzle involving an imaginary duck in an imaginary bottle.

Glastonbury

I think it's Parkinson's law, isn't it, which tells you that a job always takes longer than you thought it would, and this is true even if you take Parkinson's law into account.

Glastonbury is muddy. Really muddy. You just won't believe how deep and thick and sticky the mud is. You picture it as a music festival in a field, albeit a very big festival in a very big field. You don't realise that on Day 1 (Thursday) when the festival hasn't really started, that you are going to say "I might as well go and listen to Rory McCloud in the Avalon Cafe Tent." Rory is a man who plays the mouth harp and the spoons. And the guitar. And practically everything else. And has a band, consisting of clarinets and harps and what nots and thingamys. The Avalon Cafe Tent is the smaller of two performance areas in the Fields of Avalon; which is one of the smaller areas in the festival. (I don't think the BBC goes there at all.) But I still imagine that, on the night before the festival had even started, there were a thousand people crammed in listening to Rory. Or, rather, not listening to Rory. Everyone remembers that, in the very olden days, Beatles fans used to go to Beatles concerts with the express intention of not listening to the Beatles, of indeed, making so much noise that it was impossible for anyone to listen to the Beatles, even the Beatles. Glastonbury audiences regard acts as convenient breaks in the serious business of tromping through the mud did I mention the mud -- during which they can consult their programmes and talk loudly about which acts they've already seen, and which acts they are hoping to see, and which acts they are sorry to have missed. You might think it's hard to have a conversation over something loud amplified and electric, but it doesn't seem to deter them. They shout. But it occurred to me that this was about ten times the size of the audience which seemed like a pretty good turnout when I heard the redoubtable Mr McCloud singing about divorce and world peace and playing with a Mexican mariachi band in Bath last month. 

I overheard a boy, perhaps fifteen, talking on the phone "U2 take to the stage on Saturday evening" he said. Take to the stage? It isn't clever to sound like a bad tabloid music correspondent even if you are a bad tabloid music correspondent; it's particularly not clever when you are on the phone to your mum.

So: by the time Rory has finished his set (and I repeat that the festival hasn't started yet) you realise that you are talking about, roughly, a 45 minute walk back to your tent. Through mud. Through the kind of mud into which you sink, ankle deep, at every step, more or less guaranteeing that at some point the quicksand is going to grab you and propel you forward so you are crawling though the mud on your knees; more or less guaranteeing that that the swamp is going to hold on to your boots and force you to walk a few steps in your socks. Tromping though unfamiliar areas called "Left Field" and "Green Fields"; finding that which ever way you are walking, there will always be at least 10,000 people walking in the other direction. It is genuinely quite scary to see a sign pointing to the field you believe to be quite near the one you left your tent in and see a vast lemming like migration walking towards you: do you wait 2 hours for it to clear; do you seek another one and get lost; do you force your way through the oncoming human tsunami. And once you get through the quick sand, you discover that "The tent with the orange flag, by the path, near the gate, overlooking the Big Top at the Dance Tent" which seemed easy to find in daylight looks a lot like 100,000 other tents. If you think "It would be fun to come in 2012", you must first contemplate me walking along a muddy path, holding one boot in my hand, at about 3AM, not entirely sure if I am even in the right field, saying over and over again: "This isn't fun. This is scary"

The mechanics of camping don't bother me particularly. I can go for a few days without washing my hair. I can happily sleep on an airbed, or, indeed, on the ground, although this is rather academic because the music goes on 24 hours a day and people coming back from Shangrila or the Hundred Acre wood are going to stand by your tent and shout at 4AM or 5AM no matter what you do. I rather wish I'd dispensed with the wriggling and rolling and just boldly stepped out of my tent and got dressed and undressed in the moonlight and the morning dew and let Nick take all the childish pictures he wanted. Oobviously, if you have a problem with outside toilets you shouldn't even think of going on a camping trip, but in fact the Bishop of Bath and Wells did a pretty good job of keeping the facilities as clean as any public loo is ever going to be.

(And unlike some people I am not offended by the presence, or indeed existence, of bands I don't want to hear. Glastonbury has not lost it's credentials as a music festival because it has appearances by novelty acts like the Wombles. [Blah, blah, blah excellent composer; blah, blah, blah Art Garfunkle; blah blah blah, Steeleye Span.] Mr U2 may be old and unhip but you don't have to listen to them if you don't want to: you can listen to one of the other 150 bands playing at the same time.)



So: granted that the entire lower half of my body is caked in mud; and granted that wellington boots are the least practical garment ever devised by man; and granted that it is either raining, or, worse not raining; I'm now standing in, say, the main Avalon Stage; or the main Acoustic Stage; or the Left Field Stage. And I am listening to Chumbawamba, or Pentangle, or Mr Billy Bragg. I rapidly came to the conclusion that the Avalon area was the best sub-festival: two tents, both of which likely to playing music I was prepared to listen to; a medieval themed real ale tavern; a cafe selling coffee and baguettes and home made muffins, and some toilets less than five minutes walk from the stage which no-one else seemed to know about. At such points, it became very nearly possible to forget the mud, and have a positively Good Time. I certainly heard a lot of bands that I would have travelled a long way to hear; a lot of bands who, since they were playing, I was very happy to listen to; and, of course, one or two bands that I would have been perfectly prepared to walk several miles through a swamp in order to avoid. The sensible approach is clearly to pick a stage on which there is a band that you would quite like to hear, head for that stage, and stay there all day, listening to whatever happens to be happening there. (My only subsequent disasters were when I violated that rule. On Friday night, I somehow found myself on the periphery of a vast crowd listening to Primal Scream on the main stage. The main stage was roughly as far away from me as my bedroom is from Cafe Kino. There were some pretty light shows, and the act seemed to be performing with some enthusiasm, but so far as I could tell, what they were playing was lift muzak. And when it finished, I was part of a crowd of 50,000 all of whom were trying to get away. This. Is. Not. Fun. This. Is. Scary.)



Wonderful moments, then, encased in mud and unpleasantness and generally being quite scared. (Not that I really ever thought I was in any danger. It's astonishing how good natured everyone is. When I found myself both literally and metaphorically stuck in the mud in the medieval themed tavern, four total stranger helped to pull me out. I'm sure if one had actually fallen down in the middle of a crowd, the crowd would have parted and helped one to one's feet. But being in the middle of a swamp in the middle of a crowd is just. not. fun.)

Best Moment 

Chumbawamaba walk onto the main Avalon stage. All five of them are wearing T-Shirts reading "Bono: pay your taxes".

I do not particularly care, or indeed know, about Bono's tax position. In fact, until this weekend, I didn't know he sang in a group called U2, and still am not sure if it's Bow-no or Bonn-oh. But I love, adore and respect this side idolatry the fact that Chumbawamba make every show they perform a political "happening", and somehow manage to do so without seeming preachy. Possibly because the songs are so sweet and fine: I imagine they could charm even a died-in-wool liberal democrat. After the t-shirts, the act was almost redundant, but they ran through a nice greatest recent hits package -- the Last Nazi and Charlie and El Fusilado and an entirely redundant thing about Joe Hill that I've never heard before.(But then, that naivity is part of the package: they give the impression of reading a news item or the story of an historical injustice in the morning and turning it into a bouncy, poignant akapella secular hymn by tea time.) This was their first gig for over a year, and Boff hadn't quite straightened out all the words of all the songs in his head. But that's part of the package as well. I love them to bits.

The world is riddled with maggots
The maggots are getting fat
Their making a tasty meal of all
The bosses and bureaucrats
They're taking over the boardroom
And they're fat and full of pride
And they all came out of the woodwork
On the day the Nazi died.

Best Moment

Shortly after Chumbawammba, did hie myself forth to the Left Field area to hear Billy Bragg doing his thing. Never heard him live before. Hadn't been 100% sure if this was my best choice (I would also have liked to hear Mumford and Sons, who were on at the same time) Billy takes to the...walks onto the stage and immediately goes into the first bars of his thumping version of The World Turned Upside Down, which, if my I-Pod is to be trusted, is my 3rd favourite song [*]. And so on through a mixture of his teenage angst numbers (Milkman of Human Kindness, Walk Away, New England, of course) and his political songs. Which Side are You On introduced with a heartfelt rant about the coalition("It breaks my little heart to hear George Osbourne saying that we're all in this together that's not what his side believes: it's what our side believes"); There Is Power in A Union introduced with an equally heartfelt rant about the need to plan and organize: the anti-cuts demos didn't just happen, did they? Mostly, he didn't even bother with the choruses of his songs: just point the mic into the audience and let us do the work. The rabble is suitably roused. Why is there not one single professional politician who can communicate a political message with this clarity and conviction?

There is power in the factory
Power in the land
Power in the hand of the worker
But it all amounts to nothing if together we don't stand
There is power in a union.

Best Moment

I decided that I ought to at least see something on the Pyramid Stage, that's the big one, the one the BBC refers to as "The Glastonbury Festival". Sunday morning offered a sequence of acts I positively wanted to hear: Fishermen's Friends; Don McLean, Laura Marling and Paul Simon. (Also an American acoustic band called The Low Anthem who I believe I enjoyed but can't remember anything about.) I decided that the Best Plan was to proceed to the stage well before kick off, and take a position right at the front, scarcely more than a hundred yards from the stage.

The atmosphere was most jolly, with people from Westovingland waving St Piran's crosses, and a young lady who used to hear Fishyfriends in St Ives before they were famous. My view of the Friends themselves hasn't changed since I saw them at the Brizzle folkfest: they are a very good choir with lots of personality, but I don't quite see how choruses of What Shall We Do With Drunken Sailor and Sloop John B, however rousing, amount to million dollar commercial success for what is basically still a rather good shantyband. Added to their repertoire since I last heard them is a piece called Cousin Jack, which I may have previously referred to, a not even slightly traditional song of the Cornish diaspora, originally performed by Show of Hands, a west country folk band who I may possibly have mentioned. It worked wonderfully in the context of the sea -- well pool -- of white-on-black crosses in the audience, and those of us who knew the song dutifully raised our hands in air and bellowed along loudly and tunelessly. I was the loudest and tunelessest of all; it never fails to bring a tear to the old Rilstonian eye.

Where there's a mine or a hole in the ground
That's where I'm headed for, that's where I'm bound...
I'm leaving the county behind, and I'm not coming back
So follow me down, cousin Jack.

As the song finishes and they go into the cough-sweet joke ("no, we're not going to talk about sucking on a Fishermen's Friend, that joke always leaves a nasty taste in my mouth") I notice that standing right next to me in the mosh is, er, Steve Knightley (The man who wrote the song. Do try to keep up.) So, of course, I turned round and asked him if he didn't think that the song Roots equivocated slightly over it's definition of the term "English."

Course I bloody didn't. I said "You should be up there, sir" and "It's great to hear them singing your song." He said "We will be...." (I did make it back to Avalon for Show of Hands own set, which was terrifically tight greatest hits sets, with very little chatter so none of the 45 minutes was wasted: the Fishyfriends were in the audience. There's something lovely about that, isn't there?)

Up to and including Mr Don McLean, I was finding the atmosphere in the Pyramid "mosh" quite congenial. It amused me that there were posh-girls who'd come to see Bouncy and were planning on sitting there, with their backs to the stage, through six or seven acts that they weren't interested in, just in order to be at the front for their idols. (They didn't seem to have heard of Don McLean, or even of American Pie.) But they lent us their seats between acts, and were bubbly and friendly. I don't think I could have had that kind of devotion, even if the top of the bill had been someone I really wanted to hear, like Bob Dylan or, well, Bob Dylan, actually. I am male and might have survived 12 hours without a trip to the lavatory, but I don't think that I would have especially enjoyed doing so. If you were watching the BBC coverage, then the man with coloured dots painted over his face who knew all the words to Vincent was standing just in front of me. I heard Don McLean live once before, a billion years ago, in the 90s. He wasn't very good: came across much too much like a man in his 40s still trying to do the songs he used to do when he was a man in his 20s. (The medical term is "Paul McCartney syndrome".) He's now a man in his 60s who is absolutely comfortable being a man in his 60s, dark glasses and face-lifted features, slightly paunchy, coming to the middle of the stage with his guitar and not moving and letting the songs do the work. Obviously one is supposed to be rude about him because he's mainstream: I myself went through a stage of saying that American Pie is really only Desolation Row re-written by someone who didn't understand Desolation Row. But he was terrific. Quite bravely, he stayed away from a "greatest hits" set. There was an impeccable Vincent, of course, and a 13 minute long reading of American Pie which only slightly outstayed its welcome. (Having gone right through the sing it fast sing it slow one more time thing, he decided that what we really wanted was to sing the first verse again.) But I give him a lot of points for not ending the set on his Famous Song, but sending the band off stage and finishing up with a slow sad one (the one about the man who builds a beautiful house on the beach). Not charismatic, perhaps, but a showman. Not Dylan, but still a poet. And when no hope was left in sight on that starry, starry night, you took your life as lovers often do...

But by the time Laura Marling took to the...started to sing, things were getting uncomfortably crowded, the sun was in my eyes, and one felt that two thirds of the crowd weren't listening to her delicately understated but maybe not especially festival friendly set. She's about 17, sings folk-Americana that sounds like Dylan-at-70, and is quite wonderful. There was more air available for Paul Simon, but the general feeling was that his set was too challenging for a festival, and of course, he doesn't sing any of the old ones I know because he stole them from English folksingers. Glad I'd heard him, though.

In my boundless naivety I had imagined that most of the people who wanted to hear Paul Simon and Don McLean would leave in order to avoid Pendulum and Bouncy. Possibly a thousand or so did, but then, three thousand or so were trying to get in at the same time. Rather surprised the organizers allowed that kind of thing to happen: I'd have thought it was dangerous. I don't think that at any point I felt that I was in mortal danger of being crushed to death by rampaging mobs of Bouncy fans, but not a pleasant experience.

So. I've done the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury and never have to do it again... Unless Steve Knightley's really up there next year, of course, obviously

Best Moment

Pentangle on the Acoustic Stage were unquestionably the best bit of music that I heard during the festival. Not as nice as the Avalon stage, on the grounds of being up a hill, but it had a similar feeling of being a self contained festival, with its own bar (sans slough of despond) and it's own eatery, serving the largest pieces of carrot cake ever exhibited in captivity, and run by by a religious group that wants to restore primitive New Testament Christianity...good luck with that.

Heard "Jacqui McShee's Pentangle" in Bath earlier in the year. They were sort of perfectly all right. This was Ms McShee with the complete original 1960s line up John Renbourne (guitar), Bert Jansch (guitar) Danny Thompson (cello/bass) and Terry Cox (percussion.) This was an absolute revelation; expecially, from my point of view, because they stayed very close to their old traditional brief, with readings of blood curdling ballads like Bruton Town, Cruel Sister, Demon Lover and Hunting Song. Jacqui's ethereal voice hovering above the tinkling folk jazz cadences. And then Renbourne, who is no spring chicken, sat on the floor to finish the set with his electric sitar. If anything felt like being in Glastonbury, when it was 1968 and everyone was a flower children, this was it.

Best Moment

On Saturday night I heard a group called Flogging Molly who are like the Pogues only without the subtlety. The atmosphere before hand was lovely. I found myself chatting to the other guy who had heard Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs (a traditional skiffle band) in the morning and thought them brilliant. Since I had also thought them brilliant, there was an immediate connection between us. Unfortunately, I had been at the acoustic tent all day, where the expected reaction to, say, Thea Gilmore singing the whole of John Wesley Harding to go "Jolly good! Jolly good!". I had not realised when, taking my place toward the front that everyone was planning to signal their appreciation of Flogging Molly by jumping up and down. Specifically, jumping up and down on my jacket.

Would I do it again? There is no doubt that it has a special atmosphere: everyone has a sense of being "at Glastonbury". The aforementioned Nick correctly noted that any band could guarantee itself a big cheer by telling the audience that they were at Glastonbury. It's hard to get tickets. The state-controlled media goes on and on about it for a week. So there is a real sense of being special, being important, being privileged because you are one of only a hundred thousand people watching Primal Screen on big TV screams. The sheer amount of music available is exhilarating: there is nowhere else where you find yourself thinking "Let me see: shall I go and listen to Bellowhead, or Suzzanne Vega, or maybe take a punt and hear the Streets." (Oh yes, I have heard of the Streets. Bob once played a track about a young man whose girlfriend had left him, and whose friend was trying, not very successfully, to cheer him up.) On the other hand, you don't enjoy Suzzanne Vega more because you are missing Bellowhead; in fact, because the whole thing is so huge, you perpetually find yourself thinking that somewhere there must be this really terrific gig that no-one told you about. (The rumour that Paul McCartney had helicoptered in, done an unannounced gig in a cafe, and helicoptered out seemed plausible at the time, as did the one about the Prime Ministers aid being found dead in a toilet.) If it hadn't been raining and muddy I would probably have had more fun wandering around the Stone Circle and the Green Field and just stopping and listening to whatever seemed to be playing in bars and tents I seemed to be passing. As it was, I felt reluctant to stop and just listen to the patch of Johnny Cash-ish Americana I heard issuing from the Jack Daniels bar because I was forcefully swimming through the swamp to get to the people I actually wanted to hear in thirty or forty or fifty minutes and was a afraid I might not make it.

So on the whole, yes, I would go again, but I think I would do it differently. Travel by coach to get the perks of being a "green traveller". Arrive first thing on Wednesday, to give me longer to explore the festival before the actual music started. Pitch my tent in Avalon (now, there's a phrase I don't often get to type), near where the acts I want to hear are playing, with no need to venture near John Peel or the Dance Village; and stay away from the big stage even if there are acts I want to hear there. Don McClean was unquestionably very good. A highlight. But if I'd missed him, I could have heard the Wombles.[**]

Did I mention that it was quite muddy?



Punks Not Dad - New Forbidden - Rory McCloud - Coccoon - Stonefield Hobo Jones and the Junkyard Dogs - 3 Daft Monkeys - Katzenjammer - Chumbawamba - Billy Bragg - Primal Scream - Kassidy - Isobel Anderson - Emily and the Woods - The Webb Sisters - Thea Gilmore - Pentangle - Guillemots - Flogging Molly - Fishermen's Friends - The Low Anthems -  Don McLean - Laura Marling - Paul Simon - Show of Hands - Imelda May -- Suzzanne Vega

[*] Since you asked: Word Bomber (Chumbawamba); Roots (you know who); the World Turned Upside Down; Muir and the Master Builder (Dick Gaughan); Brother Gorilla (Jake Thackray); Hollow Point (Chris Wood); Botany Bay (Mawkin:Causely); Albion (Chris Wood); The Devil and Pastor Jack (Dick Gaughan); The Little Pot Stove (Nic Jones.)

[**] I had my reivew all prepared: "I have now met Tom Baker, and seen the Wombles perform live, so coul my ten year old self please fuck off and stop bothering me."

Annotations

OK. Let's knock this thing on the head once and for all.

Here is a clip of a song by Mr Steve Knightley and Mr Phil Beer, collectively "Show of Hands" singing a song called "Roots".

Here are my comments on what I think the lyrics mean.

If anyone says that the lyrics are entirely transparent, and that any annotation is quite unnecessary, then it is quite likely that I will whole-heartedly agree with them.

Now it's been 25 years or more
I've roamed this land from shore to shore
From Tyne to Tamar, Severn to Thames
From moor to vale, from peak to fen
Played in cafes, pubs and bars
I've stood in the street with my own guitar.... 

This is literally true, in the sense that Steve Knightley and Phil Beer served an "apprenticeship" in pubs like the Albert, and still play small venues from time to time. But it's also appealing to the romantic image of the folk-singer as wandering minstrel. Steve's songs often mythologise a relatively mundane "life on the road": fights he almost got into; road accidents he narrowly avoided. Criss-crossing the UK in a touring van is the modern English equivalent to being a "ramblin' boy". The video which goes with the song shows the singer walking into the sunset with an acoustic guitar slung across his back, which isn't something professional musicians do very often in the real world.

Any first-year English student can tell you that the "I" who speaks in a poem is not necessarily identical with that strange but uninteresting person "the author". [*] We should not assume that every line in the song is a simple statement of the writer's private opinion, any more than we should assume that he really has a younger brother who injured his hand in a farming accident: he's giving voice to an everyman English folksinger. (On the other hand, in performance, Steve sometimes changes the line to "stood on the street with my first guitar", which is quite specific.)

But I'd be richer than all the rest
If I had a pound for each request
For 'Duelling Banjos', 'American Pie'
It's enough to make you cry

The Singer complains that audiences would rather listen to artificial, inauthentic music than the English folk-songs which he loves. (This is a fairly clear example of the Singer being a persona, rather than Knightley himself: it is hard to imagine a request for American Pie at a Show of Hands concert.)

It is perhaps not quite fair to use American Pie as a by-word for plastic artificiality. Don McLean intended the song to be a cry for musical authenticity: he felt that John Lennon and Bob Dylan had ruined popular music by pretentiously pretending that it could be Art. But rock n roll isn't meant to be art: rock n roll is meant to be something you dance to.

But perhaps the Singer doesn't object to 'American Pie' as a song, but merely wishes that the the English would sing English songs and leave American songs to the Americans? Ewan MacColl famously set a rule that singers in his folk club could only sing songs in their own accents and from their own backgrounds. However, the song can hardly be a cry for purity in this sense: Show of Hands themselves are perfectly happy doing excellent covers of songs by Springsteen, Dylan or Earle. Eliza Carthy, in reaction to the Guardian's appalling remark about folk music being "arthritically white", said that she regarded English folk as part of "world" music (England arguably being part of the world) in which people from different backgrounds said "You show me yours and I'll show you mine".

Rule Britannia, Swing Low
Are these the only songs the English know?

The Singer complains that the only time you hear English people singing together is at football matches ("Swing Low, Sweet Chariot") and Last Night of the Proms. ("Rule, Britannia!"). This is pretty uncontroversial. (He might have added "church services" to the list. Cynics have suggested that old-time revivalists like Billy Graham met with such success in England because people just kinda enjoyed belting out Blessed Assurance with five thousand other people)

Rule Britannia worked its way into Last Night of the Proms because it formed part of Henry Wood's Fantasia on British Sea Songs. It could therefore be said to be part of the late 19th century notion that Home Sweet Home and the Sailor's Hornpipe weren't quite respectable unless they were dressed up as "classical" music.

Swing Low, Sweet Chariot is a church song (I looked over Jordan and what did I see?), but rugger players used to sing it in the changing rooms for reasons we probably don't need to discuss while there are ladies present.

For the last 300 days, Mr Jon Boden has been engaged in the "A Folk Song A Day" project, so called because each day, he sings a folk song and releases it for free on the interwebs. Some of the performances are very good indeed ("The Mistletoe Bough", "A Chat With Your Mother") some are frankly rather poor (his version of "The King of Rome" was a particular disappointment). Part of the purpose of the project is to encourage social singing. Boden thinks that everyone can, and should, sing, even if they can't do it in tune; and wants to offer a body of songs suitable for singing together. Mr Cecil Sharp, the inventor of folk music, entertained a hope that the Olde Englishe songs which he was "collecting" would one day be taught to school children.

After the speeches, when the cake's been cut
The disco's over and the bar is shut
At christening, birthday, wedding or wake
What can we sing 'til the morning breaks?

The Singer thinks it is a shame that the tradition of social singing has died out in England, and asks rhetorically what songs could fill the hole. The answer, obviously, is going to to be English folk music because he is an English folk singer. This appears to be the primary point behind the song. Knightley has introduced "Roots" as being a plea for the English to rediscover a vast repertoire of songs that they could sing together.

With the Indian, Asian, Afro Celts
It's in their blood, below the belt
They're playing and dancing all night long
So what have they got right that we've got wrong? 

This appears to be the offending verse, which has caused some people to question the Singer's credentials as a card carrying muesli quaffing Guardian-reading liberal. The plain meaning of the verse is that some cultures seem to have a greater tradition of communal singing than we do; and a greater sense of connection to their heritage. The Singer doesn't resent, hate or feel superior to these other communities: he specifically says that he thinks they are better than us in this regard and wishes that we could learn from them. This is a rather small peg on which to hang an accusation of racism.

It seems quite unexceptionable to say that you are more likely to hear singing in an Irish pub than an English one. And it certainly looks to me as if, over the festival weekend, the black British population of St Pauls, Bristol get into a spirit of carnival which I've never seen in Barnet or Coventry or York. They also hang out an awful lot Jamaican flags.

What is the white British equivalent of St Pauls or Notting Hill? A church fete? Last Night of the Proms? Morris dancing? Or having a riot after a football match?

Assumptions, as a very great man once wrote, are things that you don't know you are making. During the World Cup, British football commentators were inclined to describe South Africa as a "vibrant" country. This could (if you really wanted to be touchy) to be seen as betraying unexamined beliefs that Black Chaps aren't very clever but do have a wonderful sense of rhythm. (This doesn't mean that the football commentators were themselves racists: only that racist assumptions swim in the lower reaches of many a liberal subconscious. If you'd pointed out the buried assumption, they'd have been embarrassed and corrected it.) The phrase "in their blood, below the belt" could (if you want to be very touchy indeed) be taken as betraying primitivist assumptions: a belief that minority communities know traditional music because they are in some sense "closer to nature" than the majority culture - and that their music comes from their testicles, rather than their little grey cells. The implication that Celtic people are somehow intrinsically different from Anglo-Saxon people would, if pressed, contradict the main thrust of the song: that the English chose to stop singing for historical and sociological reasons and could choose to start singing again if they wanted to.

It could also be seen as implying that Steve was having difficulties thinking of a rhyme for "Celt". We are drilling awfully deep into four lines of song-lyric in the hope of finding something to be offended by.

Now the minister said his vision of hell
Is three folk singers in a pub near Wells
Well I've got a vision of urban sprawl
Pub's where no-one ever sings at all...

In 2003 Nulab passed legislation which required all institutions to seek licences before music could be performed on their premises (along with with possibly nit-picky fire regulations and other rules about health and safety). When it was pointed out that this would apply just as much to informal folk sessions as to actual concerts, Blair's culture minister, Kim Howells, who had previously described modern art -- all modern art -- as "bullshit" remarked that informal folk sessions were his idea of hell. (Did you get that? The bastard thought that his taste in music and his taste in art were somehow relevant to arts policy; just as Michael Gove thinks that his memories of being a schoolboy have some kind of relevance to education policy. That's why democracy is such a flawed system. You end up with lunatics who think that their opinion counts for something just because people voted for them. Gut feeling is not a good basis for law making. Ever.)

In performance, Steve sometimes changes the line to "some minister said" or even "Kim Howells said". He often states that Kim Howells' remark was the trigger for the song. He seem to want to tie the lyric to the 2003 licencing act very directly.

....and everyone stares at a great big screen
overpaid soccer stars, prancing teens
Australian soap, American rap
Estuary English baseball caps...

The Singer contrasts the vibrancy of live music (even if it is only three folk-singers) with the passivity of going to a pub in order to watch TV. He also contrasts a "bottom up" participatory approach to folk-music with the "top down" world of billionaire footballers and daytime TV stars, who are presented to us as godlike "celebrities". The professional folk-singer very likely started out as a busker or performing open mic nights; and people in the audience can think, without too much absurdity "Maybe I could learn to do that".

Since Pop Idol, it has been clear that anyone with reasonably androgynous good looks can be packaged and presented to the public as a "singer", regardless of talent. Even good looks aren't strictly necessary: a fat lady who could sing a mediocre karaoke version of a song from Les Miserables was briefly the most famous human being on the planet. (Nothing against Les Miserables. Nothing against fat ladies, come to that.)

Boy-bands are therefore a by-word for artificial, inauthentic music. In the rather maudlin song Hard Shoulder, Knightley recalls finding an old school friend he'd lost touch with performing in a pub. "But hearing you play all that boy-band cover trash / Now that's what really hurts me the most." It will be remembered that the full title of Chumbawamba's first folk album was "The Boy Bands Have Won, and All the Copyists and the Tribute Bands and the TV Talent Show Producers Have Won, If We Allow Our Culture to Be Shaped by Mimicry, Whether from Lack of Ideas or From Exaggerated Respect. You Should Never Try to Freeze Culture. What You Can Do Is Recycle That Culture. Take Your Older Brother's Hand-Me-Down Jacket and Re-Style It, Re-Fashion It to the Point Where It Becomes Your Own. But Don't Just Regurgitate Creative History, or Hold Art and Music and Literature as Fixed, Untouchable and Kept Under Glass. The People Who Try to 'Guard' Any Particular Form of Music Are, Like the Copyists and Manufactured Bands, Doing It the Worst Disservice, Because the Only Thing That You Can Do to Music That Will Damage It Is Not Change It, Not Make It Your Own. Because Then It Dies, Then It's Over, Then It's Done, and the Boy Bands Have Won."

I don't think this is entirely fair. I myself have recently come to a place where I value "authenticity" in art above almost any other quality. Not only in music. I will happily work my way through 2,000 pages of 1950s Superman comics printed on blotting paper, but can't quite be doing with the modern graffix novels, with its cinematic construction and decomposed story telling and newfangled good artwork. Jolly clever, of course, but no substitute for the real thing. I have even caught myself using "artless" as a term of approval. But there can be different forms of authenticity. I once had to write a review of a local reggae / hip hop band called "Laid Blak". (The reggae bit was the songs about every little ting turning out to be all right; the hip-hop bit was the performance poetry about teenage pregnancy in Totterdown, I believe.) It was clearly done very well indeed, and I rather enjoyed it, but it didn't speak to me because I'm not a sweary black teenager, and probably never will be. I'm not sure I should dismiss it as artificial because it happens not to be addressed to my condition. Even watching "your" football team play a game in the company of a large group of fellow supporters could be a life-affirming experience.

and we ought to be ashamed before we walk
of the way we look and the way we talk 

Up to this point. The Singer hasn't strayed very far from his stated theme. It's been a song about folk singing, and he's in favour of it. However, in the last stanza the theme broadens out: the English who have decided that mindlessly watching Neighbours is more fun than singing songs become a sort of metaphor for a more general national impoverishment.

This is the only line in the song that I wouldn't be prepared to defend. I agree that the X-Factor and Neighbours are inauthentic; I agree that it's curious to go to a pub in order to watch television; but I don't feel particularly ashamed if young people adopt American fashions or American slang. They always have done. I'm not ashamed that white kids from Brizzle end sentences with "innit", any more than I'm ashamed that a previous generation ended every third sentence with the word "man", or that people used to describe things as fab, groovy, cool, wicked, safe, sound, mint or lush. Introducing American and Asian words into English doesn't destroy the purity of the language, any more than putting a funky beat behind "Keys of Canterbury" destroys the purity of the folk music.

UPDATE: Apparently, I've been hearing this line incorrectly all these years: what Steve sings is not "we ought to be ashamed" but "we're taught to be ashamed...". The printed lyric says "we learn to be ashamed". I understand that the have also killed the Earl of Moray and laid him on the green.

without our stories and our songs
how will we know where we came from?

I began by asking who the "I" was who speaks in the song is? Steve Knightley himself? A fictionalized version of him? An entirely imaginary singer?

This verse raises a much harder question "Without our stories or our songs how will we know where we came from."

Who is "we"? And who is not "we"?

If "we" are yearning for the heather and the bagpipes, and wishing "we" hadn't been cleared off the highlands, then it's pretty clear that "we" excludes everyone living south of Dumfries. But -- it's and old question, and much more interesting than the one about West Lothian -- does "we" also include the young dark skinned man whose grandfather came over from Pakistan in 1950, who goes to Mosque on Fridays, and who makes his living selling deep fried Mars bars in a chip shop in Glasgow? (And who will certainly sound indistinguishable from light skinned people of the same age in the same area. When I first came to Bristol, I swear I caught myself thinking "Freaky! An Indian guy with a West Country accent! I thought Indian guys all had south London accents!" Assumptions are things you don't know you're making, innit?) Is he Scottish, or a British Asian who happens to live in Scotland? Is he part of the "we" that defeated proud Edward's army at Bannockburn? Can he pretend that he is if he happens to like Rugby Union? If not then should White British people living in Scotland suppress any nostalgic or romantic feelings they may entertain towards any great chieftains of pudding races that they may come across in their day-to-day lives, because of the non-inclusiveness of that pesky "we"?

I think that this question of nomenclature has troubled the song since line 12, and is never satisfactorily resolved. If the Indians, Asian and Africans and Celts who celebrate their own traditional culture are people who live in India, Asia, Africa and Celtland as opposed to the people who live in England, then all well and good. If they are British Indians, British Asian, and British Africans as opposed to White British, then also all well and good: only the person most determined to take offence could take exception to "some of Britain's minority cultures sing better than the majority culture". The difficulty is that "Indians, Asians, Afro, Celts" are contrasted throughout the song with "the English" and "the English" are referred to as "we". This opens the Singer up to the accusation that he thinks that Indians and Asians living in England are not "English": that, indeed, English has been conflated with White People.

Actually, I could live with this: I'd be very happy to say that the black kids in St Pauls who fly Jamaican flags once a year are "Black British" or "Jamaican British"; the people north of the border who put salt on their cabers are "Scottish British" or "Celtic British" and I am "English British". But it's a tendentious terminology that shouldn't be allowed to slip under the radar without examination.

Some minister said that he doesn't mind Muslims living in this country, provided they think of themselves as British first and Muslim second. I immediately felt jerking sensations in my knee: "Well I regard myself as Christian first and British second..." And then, on slightly less pious reflection: "I actually regard myself as human first, Christian second, Doctor Who fan third, Wagnerian fourth, folkie fifth, Marvel comics fan sixth, half-Cornish on my father's side seventh (**), adopted Bristolian eighth, European ninth, English tenth and British eleventh."

I was brought up, implicitly, to think that I didn't have a national or regional identity. Middle-class English was just English, which poor people and yokels got told off for pronouncing incorrectly. English food was just food, to which crazy foreigners sometimes added garlic or spice. Foreign children had something called "national dress"; we just had "clothes". I was also brought up, pretty explicitly, to think that I didn't have a religion: the English Church was simply a baseline of acknowledging a deity and doing what was right, without all those annoying holy books, coming of age rites and extra days off that Jewish children insisted on adding. (Muslims had not yet been invented.) Culture is what Johnny Foreigner has: we don't need one.

I was about to type that Nick Griffin and David Cameron and Jack Straw and David Blunkett have succeeded in making nationality a toxic subject: so that if I say "I would quite like to have a nationality, if only to find out what it feels like" you will hear "I am going to march into Native villages, tear down their shrines and force them to wear clothes, go to church, watch Doctor Who and paint their maps pink."

Why pink, by the way?

But that would sound altogether too similar to the paranoid fantasy about "political correctness". "You aren't allowed to fly the Union Jack in case it offends queers. They've banned Christmas, you know." And that isn't what I mean at all. What I mean is really much weaker and less interesting. We've allowed nationality to become an embarrassment. Countries are like bottoms. Everyone's got one, but we don't like to talk about them in public. I am really, really, reluctant to type "I like the stories of King Arthur and Robin Hood (and Doctor Who, and Eric & Ernie, and Middle-earth -- especially Middle-earth) because I feel a kind of ownership in them: a kind of ownership I obviously can't feel about Woody Guthrie or the Ring Cycle." Not because people will think I'm a B.N.P supporter, but because they will think I'm a sentimental twat. They'll probably start whistling "There'll Always Be An England", ironically.

I lost St George in the Union Jack
It's my flag too, and I want it back

The Singer wants the St George Cross back from the Conservative Party, who have declared that England, and Britain and the Monarchy are their personal property. And from the fascist Daily Mail and the hooligan white van soccer supporters. But also, I think, he wants the St George Cross back from the Union Jack: he feels that the country of England has been lost in the corporate branding of Britain.

I find this idea very attractive. I think that "Britain" means, at best, an admirably dull political system, constitutional monarchy, a flag representing a corporate merger, and the dullest national anthem ever devised by man. Nor woman niether. On important matters, we're all equally voters and citizens and consumers: there is no Muslim "they" to steal the Christian Christmas from the British "us". But if you are allowed your haggis and your leaks and your red stripe larger and your shamrocks is there really any harm in me having my fish and chips and my warm beer and my hey nonny no?

Seed, bud, flower, fruit: never going to grow without their roots
Branch, stem, shoot: they need roots

Football, I am told, is like marriage: you have to cleve only to one team, forsaking all others. You have to pretend that Bristol Rovers are always and in all respects better than Bristol City. In extreme cases, you might be expected to try to physically maim City fans.

I don't think that poems and songs and books are like that. I think that you make a contract to believe in a particular story-world while the singer is creating it, but that you are fully empowered to put it away an inhabit a different world when the next singer, or the next song, begins. I believe in Steve Knightley's angry, radicalized England while I'm in it; but I also believe in Martin Carthy's gentle old England and Bellowhead's radical subversion of it. In the right mood, I can lustily join in with both Land of Hope and Glory and Imagine. I find Mr Chris Wood's Come Down Jehovah deeply moving, although I don't agree with it (or at least, I don't think it means what he thinks it means).

But "agreeing" with a song seems like a category mistake, like trying to determine if the jelly in the trifle logically entails the choclate sprinklies.

I also reject the theory that there are only two kinds of art: the perfect and the evil. People embark on Moby Dick expecting it to be a perfect book: when they discover it has ideological flaws (it's about KILLING WHALES for godsakes) or even artistic ones (it sometimes wanders off the main point, a bit like this essay) they thrust their harpoon through the chink in its ideological armour, and never look at it again. If I ever interview Steve Knightley, I may well say "So, what about your definition of English, then?"; but that won't stop me joining in with "haul away!" bit at Glastonbury next month; but then. (I also intend to sing along loudly to Remember Your a Womble.) By all means place Roots alongside, say Dick Guaghan's No Gods and Precious Few Heroes and note that one singer offers a definition of personal identity rooted in a collective past; while the other snarls that we should dump that past altogether -- that it's precisely our stories and our songs which are holding us back:

I ask you, will we never hear the last
Of Prince bloody Charlie at Coludden field again?
Though he ran like a rabbit through the glen
Leaving better folk than him to be slaughtered
Are you sitting in your council house, dreaming of your clan?
Waiting for the Jacobites to come and free the land?
Try going down the dole with your claymore in your hand
And count all the princes in the queue...
And by all means chuck John Lennon into the mix as well

Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too

I can romantically and sentimentally enter into all three world views (Lennon's nihilism takes a bigger leap of faith, I must admit). Songs are funny place to look for final truths.

Haul away boys, let them go; out in the wind and the rain and show
We've lost more than we'll ever know round the rocky shores of England 

It may very well be that our roots don't go quite as deeply as we think that they do: that the songs we fondly believe are "traditional" are actually fairly new. Is there really an English tradition which has been thrown overboard? Or is that a nostalgic fancy? And if The Tradition is only a story, is there any good reason why it shouldn't be one of the stories we choose to tell ourselves about ourselves, like the one about the knight who killed the old lady's spotted pig, which very likely isn't true either?

John Lennon said "imagine there are no countries": that's relatively easy. The difficult thing is imagining that there are. That's why William Blake's poem works so will as an English national anthem: it takes it for granted that England is an imaginary place, and then wonder if we might not make it real. (I'm going to live as much like an Englishman as I can, even if there isn't really any England.)

"Only back United if / It's where your from, or where you live" says Steve Knightley in a different song. That makes some sense to me. I feel some sort of special affection for Bristol (particularly Stokes Croft) because it's where I live; I'm free to arbitrarily decide that Cornwall is where I'm "from" because that's where my father grew up, even though quite clearly I'm actually "from" London.

One last thing is worth mentioning. I have liked the song "Roots" ever since Mick and Lester played it on their St George's Day special (along with King of Rome and Place Called England and a Morris-y thing about St George by someone like Ashley Hutchings) when I was first getting into folk music. The strangeness of the melody; the fact that it's three different songs; the fact that the second chorus is being sung communally; the romantic idea of a past that's been chucked away; the sense of fury and commitment in the singer's voice, the absolute contrast to politician and other professional deceivers who use language only to obscure their true meaning. I can't get behind an idea of Britain based on the Queen and the Conservative Party, or on Fair Play and Being a Good Drone or whatever it was that Gordon Brown thought we were about; I can't get behind an idea of England based on kicking balls into nets or putting three sticks in the ground and defending them with a fourth; but I could, I thought, feel comfortable with this idea of an England based on gentlemen offering ladies the keys of Canterbury and men hunting bonny black hares (fnarr, fnarr) on the fourteenth of May. But I don't really think that any of it actually matters very much.


[*] Maybe the person who says "When I consider how my light is spent..." is John Milton; maybe the person who exclaims "Bright star would I were steadfast as thou art..." is John Keats. Maybe they are imaginary people that the respective poets have invented. Maybe they are imaginary people who happen to be a lot like the authors who invented them. The titles "On His Blindness" and "His Last Sonnet" (it wasn't) were invented after the fact by English teachers who didn't really like poetry and thought that good writing had to be Factually Accurate.


[**] Whatever the hell "Cornish" means. Daddy could point out Rilstone gravestones in Perranporth parish church going back several hundred years, but the family name presumably has something to do with Rylestone in Yorkshire, now famous for middle aged ladies taking their clothes off on calendars. So presumably, at some point in sixteen or seventeen hundred some Yorkshire people must have upped and moved West and there is no more Celtic blood in me than in Barack Obama. It's remains true that my granny made saffron buns and pasties and called people "my handsome" and that "Cousin Jack" is a wonderful song.

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