Special Award

This special award is given to the live performance I went to in 2012 which was most Special.

Nominations

Norma Waterson, Eliza Carthy and the Gift Band
St Georges, Bristol, 5th Dec 

Martin has to help Norma on and off the stage, but otherwise she seems unchanged from when I last saw her two year ago, before the illness. Not a conventionally beautiful singing voice, but songs carried through personality and conviction; from God Loves a Drunk to Buddy Can You Spare A Dime (astonishing!) via Ukulele Lady; to say nothing of one of those long grim rambling narratives that we probably associate more with her husband. ("What would you give to your brother's wife? / A widow's weeds and a peaceful life.") They finish on Grace Darling, with all the daft actions ("and she ROWED away o're the foaming sea, over the ocean blue; HELP HELP she could hear the cries of the shipwrecked crew...") There is a standing ovation, of course and foot stamping. Eliza comes back on to the stage "Mum says thank you, but she's too tired to do any more, after all that rowing."

Nic Jones
Sep 22nd, Cecil Sharp House

Since noticing that I liked this stuff several years ago, I have got to hear live performances by most of the artists I admire including several bona fide legends — Robin Williamson; Martin Carthy; Ashley Hutchings, David Swarbrick and Richard Thompson (though not all at once); and even, at some distance, Bob Dylan. But I never thought that there was any chance that I would get to join in with Nic Jones singing Little Pot Stove.

And now I have.

Leon Rosselson
June 16, Cellar Upstairs Folk Club, London

It may be true that Anon is the greatest writers of all time, but it's well to remember that songs like “In 1649…” and “Palaces of Gold” and “Stand Up For Judas” "Song of the Olive Tree" didn’t just fall out of the sky — they were thought up by a person , a rather unassuming, awkward even, little man who sings complex, clever, funny patter songs with honesty and conviction. And I have been in the same room as him and said thank-you-i-enjoyed-the-gig. I am never going to get to say that to Bob Dylan, am I?

The Copper Family
Nov 1st, Cecil Sharp House

There is a sense in which the Copper Family is English Folk Music. There is another sense in which they are a group of non professional musicians singing acapella songs in pretty much the same style they have been doing for generations. People talk about Coppersongs in the same way they talk about Child Ballads. Hearing them live is something of folk pilgrimage. 

And the winner is

Best Live Gig

Nominations


Robb Johnson,
Bristol Folk House, March 9

Robb isn’t the best song-writer I heard in 2012. He isn't even the best protest singer I heard in 2012. But he doesn't need to be. Sometimes "We hate the Tories! We hate the Tories! We hate the Tories! And Tony Blair! Same difference there!" is all you need to hear. Songs that bind everyone in the bar of the Bristol Folk House together. Songs that say what everyone is feeling. Songs written about yesterday's headlines and doubtless discarded when they’ve done their job. An audience not merely singing along but dancing, clenching its fists, embracing one another. This is what it’s all about.

Don McLean
Colston Hall, October 19 

Yes, DON MCLEAN. Want to make something of it?

Blackbeard’s Tea Party 
Fulford Arms, York,  December 15th

Yeah, I picked them last year and I'll probably pick them next year as well. My Folkbuddies rave about them, my less folkie buddies say "I don't like all that old fashioned stuff,  but you can put that pirate sounding band on again." This was their free Christmas gig, in a squashed sweaty pub on the outskirts of York; the band in Elf costumes; Stu distributing Christmas presents. ("Yes — it’s a Tesco Value chicken and a child’s flotation device…Wait! That reminds me of a song…”) And having done a tour of the first two albums; and a preview of their new album (not only Jake Thackray, but Rudyard Kipling and an extreme Dick Turpin ballad I didn't know) the audience fairly whooped for joy when the encore began “It was Christmas Eve, babe, in the drunk tank, an old man said to me…” and a wonderful folkyear came to as a perfect a folkend as we could have hoped for.

And the winner is...

Biggest Downer of the Year

No, I didn't get a CD from Mrs Thatcher on the morning they broke up; and no, jokes about whether they are going to get up again will not be considered in good taste. I didn't get to their final gig because, rather ironically, I was listening to Wagner at the opera. I did see them at Leeds Varieties earlier in the year. A silly vaudeville skit cocking the snook at David Cameron is hardly the worst thing they could have gone out on.

Oh, it's the same the 'ole world over;
it's the poor wot gets the blame;
it's the rich what gets the pleasure;
ain't it all a bloomin shame

I didn't always agree with everything they said. They probably wouldn't have ever agreed with anything I said.  But who is going to speak truth to power now they've gone?

But of course, Chumbawamba hasn't really ended. It's just that Boff, Lou, Jude and Neil aren't performing together any more.

Best New Song by an Artist Named Bob

Nominations

Tin Angel
On the album "Tempest" by Bob Dylan

Roll on John
On the Album "Tempest" by Bob Dylan

Tempest
On the Album "Tempest" by Bob Dylan


And the winner is...

Special Award: The "Samantha" Prize For Rudest Lyric Heard in 2012

NOMINATIONS

Paul Sartin
at the Bellowhead after-show session in the Colston Yard

"Cock-a-doodle-doo
It's nothing to do with you
It's a very small cock you all know what
It's my cock-a-doodle-doo"

(Also in the running for "I puts down me hand for to cut off the steam / But the chaff had been blown from me thrashing machine" with Faustus at Bristol Folk House.)

Stuart Giddens
at the Folk Weekend in the Black Swan in York

"We're having a bit tonight
We're having a bit tonight
Me Mother says I must be quick
To get a bit of Spotted Dick"

Lucy Ward
at Bristol Folk Festival

"Now he had phalurum, fa-liddle-i-orum
He had phalurum, fa-liddle-i-ay
He had phalrum, and a ding-dorum
Maids when your young never wed an old man..."


And the winner is ...

Special Award: Wettest Weekend of 2012

Nominations


17th - 19th February, Frome

Non-stop drizzle; had to walk briskly between venues, stepped in several puddles and got trousers wet.

Highlights: Jim Moray, Chris Wood, Luke Jackson, Steve Knightley.

8th - 10th June, Black Swan Pub, York.

Non-stop heavy rain. Gaps in marquee periodically poured water onto unsuspecting members of audience. Pub staff had problem lighting barbecue. Drains overflowed and council engineers sent for, mid-gig.

Highlights: Blackbeard's Tea Party, Sail Pattern, Two Black Sheep and a Stallion, Monkeys Paw.

6th - 8th July, Priddy

Non-stop torrential rain. Village green turns into swamp. Musician describes event as "Venice of the west..."

Highlights: Colum Sands, Spiers and Boden, Balshazzars Feast


And the winner is 

Special Award: The "Takes Out an Onion" Prize For Making The Judge Cry

Nominations

Woody Guthrie
For "This Land is Your Land" at Priddy Folk Festival

Chris Rickets
For "The Leaving of Liverpool" at Bristol Folk House

Luke Jackson 
For "The Big Hill", "Bakers Woods", "How Does It Feel", "Wayfarin' Stranger" and, well, everything, basically.

And the winner is...

Special Award: Best Cover of an 90s Hit by a Lady With Turquoise Hair

Lucy Ward
Bristol Folk Festival

Special Award: The "How Long Does It Take To Tune A Banjo" Prize For the Best Extended Solo On A Funny Five Stringed Drum Thing

Dan Walsh
Bristol Folk Festival

Special Award: Best Traditional Song Played on a Kitchen Utensil

Solarference

Favourite New Song of 2012

Nominations

The Big Hill

by Luke Jackson 

on More Than Boys.

Hearing Luke singing this song at Frome was one of the hight points of my folk year; I vividly recall the moment when the meandering verse went into the big clear reflective refrain -- the exact moment at which the entire audience went from thinking "Oh, this act Steve Knightley has picked to support him is really pretty good" to "We are in the presence of the Next. Big. Thing."

It's not really a rite of passage song -- rite of passage songs are about young men whose mothers would rather they didn't take their guns to town, surely? Not even exactly a "growing up" song, either. More a "remembering the exact moment when you realized that something had slipped from the present to the past" song.  Sort of like Proust would have been if he'd had a guitar and been English and been writing about contemporary suburban adolescence.

Lord Douglas

by Jim Moray

on Skulk

Why, yes, I did also nominate this song in 2011, but as that was a for a "work in progress" at a live show and this is for the finished version on Skulk and on the (curiously disappointing, somehow) Cecil Sharp Project . It's open to question whether this is a "new song" or an "old song", anyway. The Radio 2 judges have put it in the "best traditional song" category, but it was sewn together out of multiple traditional versions -- and the tune, of course, is pure Moray.  (You might just as well ask if Prince Heathen is by Trad or by Martin Carthy, and as matter of fact, we have.)

It's a song you need to pay attention to; you seem to come upon a story that's already started and sort of overhear what's going on.  A relatively simple elopement story takes around nine minutes to unravel.  (The last time I heard Jim, perform it live, he took time in his opening spiel to explain the "curse" sub-plot, which made the whole thing a good deal easier to follow.) There is something almost of the pop ballad about the tune but the overall effect is one of massive antiquity, of staring down a long tunnel of time, and seeing mighty figures acting out their doomed love story in the far distance. Hearing this song is like reading La Morte D'Arthur for the first time.

Little Boy Blue 

by O'Hooley and Tidow

on The Fragile

"And you may now cross 'dead children' off your  O’Hooley and Tidow bingo card" tweeted Folkbuddy from the Bristol Folk Festival. There is certainly a morbidity to some of Belinda and Heidi’s music; they are not averse to covering Hill of Little Shoes, quite possibly the grimmest song ever written. On the other hand, if I'd written these awards yesterday or tomorrow I might have said that my favourite new song was their Day Trip -- a lovely life affirming piece about a day by the seaside.

Little Boy Blue is a piece of sentimental Victoriana about the toys which a kiddie leaves behind when he dies. It's been given a contemporary makeover; there's no sense of parody or superiority but it also manages not to cloy. The music is expressing grief in a slightly twenty first century idiom while the words remain those of the nineteenth; but the cumulative effect doesn't so much clash as enmesh, like a fugue, if that's the word I'm looking for.

The crowd-pleasers on the album are the slightly insubstantial Last Polar Bear and the rather too pleased with itself Gentleman Jack -- but Little Boy Blue is the kind of song which crawls along beside you. Two days later you’ll be vaguely humming "what has become of our little boy blue?" and not quite remembering why you feel so terribly, terribly sad.

And the winner is

Favourite New Version of Old Song

Nominations

Thousands or More

by Bellowhead 

Colston Hall, 17 Nov 2012

Perhaps next year I will inaugurate a new category, "Best Band Called Bellowhead". I believe the Radio 2 Folk Awards already have such a category. "Ten Thousand Miles Away" would certainly get my prize for "Bellowhead Song Most Resembling A Song By Bellowhead". However, the Broadside CD missed out being nominated for Favourite Folk Album because a: I prefer to go for the slightly less obvious choices and b: I didn't like it as much as I did their last three albums. 

Thousands or More is the kind of thing that Bellowhead does best: a thoughtful, slightly iconophobic deconstruction of a folk standard, totally sympathetic to the original while gently taking the piss out of it. And the actual tune and the actual words show no sign of disappearing under the jiggery pokery.

Old Man's Tale

by Ewan McLennan 

Bristol Folk Festival, 1 May 2012

Had never heard of Ewan McLennan when I wandered into the small room at Brizzle Folk Festival. Had never heard this song, either, although the Guardian’s obituary of Ian Campbell tells me that it was a standard change of pace protest song in the ‘60s peace movement. To be honest, I could have picked anything from Ewan's set (A Man’s a Man For A That; or The Banks Are Made of Marble) as one of my favourite live songs of the year. It’s maybe a perfect example of folk just being folk with the melody and the unaffected Scots dialect seeming to encode a particular human voice and a particular human story so it will be preserved for all time.

The Lodger

by Blackbeard's Tea Party

at Black Swan Folk Weekend, York - June 9 2013

Both regular readers know about my enthusiasm for Blackbeard's Tea Party: a combination of crazy fun theatre; extremely sophisticated musicianship; an admirable preference for intimate venues; and above all an infallible eye for picking terrific songs to cover. Front man Stuart Giddens has a distinct liking for sophisticated filth, so maybe it wasn't that surprising that they would turn their attention to this extended male fantasy cum shaggy dog story, although its a fairly large jump sideways from Cyril Tawney to Jake Thackray. It works perfectly, with the band rocking out around the fast bit and doing more sexy stripperesque stuff round the slow bits. One of the best things about their Christmas show was the guy in front of me who didn't know any of the songs and was hearing each smutty punchline for the first time. 

And the Winner Is...

Favourite Album of 2012

Nominations

Vice of the People
Albion Band

"It's had a new handle, and perhaps a new head, but it's still the old original axe." I don't know if anyone really thought that the name, access to the back catalogue and the presence Blair Dunlop ("I grew up in quite a folkie atmosphere") made these six young people the continuation of the legendary Albion band by other means. I heard them with a tiny audience in a tiny Bristol pub, and very good they were too, but possibly not being treated as Folk Royalty by the good people of Bristol. However, when they have produced material of this originality and quality — with an authentic folk-rock sound that's both slightly old fashioned and very contemporary -- their relationship to the original band is really neither here nor there. There are at least three stand out original tracks. Thieves Songs is a bitter political nursery rhyme; driven by lyrics and a beat. Wake a Little Wiser is explicitly a modern spin on Ragged Heroes (with maybe a structure that wandered in from the Black Joke?), which has the sense not to outstay its welcome. The remarkable How Many Miles To Babylon is another riff on a nursery rhyme, which turns out to be a ghost story -- why has no-one else tried to do a "night visiting" about a modern war? Blair Dunlop's voice is fresh and modern; Gavin Davenport is richer and older and folkier. On stage, the highlights are the rocked up morris instrumentals; on the CD, maybe the best thing is the fine traditional Adieu to Old England Adieu. But the album stands very successfully on its own two feet as a not-at-all-laboured conceptual argument about fame and wealth and what's going on in the land of Albion right now.

Skulk
Jim Moray

Is "enigmatic" the right word for this album? I didn't write about it when it first came out because, although I liked it I didn't think I'd understood it. As I've listened to it more I've enjoyed it more and more. And possibly understood it less and less.

Lazy critics always use expressions like "bad boy of folk" to describe Jim Moray, which might have been true if he hadn't done anything since 2004, but he has and it isn't. (The Independent talks about his "bleeps and beats" approach to folk, which is plain patronizing.) I do have a sense that since Low Culture (2009) he's done the pyrotechnics and mash-ups just about as well as that kind of thing can be done, and is now moving into a middle-period where he wants to be taken more seriously as a folk singer.

Skulk's actually not that traditional an album. "Hind Ettin" is one of those Tam Lin type stories about a lady who wanders off into a fairy wood and find that time has gone all wibbly; it starts off in full-on traddy mode -- voice, guitar, bit of fiddle, lady named Margaret who spends her time sewing silken seams -- but before long there are drums, reverbs, instrumental breaks, a total folk rock re-envisaging of the song. Very fine it is too. I sometimes say of performers like Martin Carthy and Jon Boden that they are primarily story tellers; Jim is primarily a music-maker. I found some of the ballads quite demanding: on a first listen I kept losing track of what the lady was doing in the woods or who and given which golden glove to whom. On the other hand there is magical sparkle to his singing -- there is a moment where he tells us that the lady's fairy son starts to play a magic flute and I can somehow hear centuries of fairy yarn spinners behind his voice. It segues directly into a piece of traditional banjo Americana which turns out to be a reworking of an electric piece by someone called Fleetwood Mac, and I would so have known that without being told. Hawkstone Grange is so traditional that it's almost parody; the Hog Eye Man, which is I think a sea shanty, is dressed up as rock and role. Some of the material wrong foots me:  a pro-Napoleon lament called "The Eighteenth of June" is almost a piece of conceptual art, all echoes and ambient noise. "Why is he singing this so incredibly slowly?" I asked, but a quick search revealed another version (by the frequently aforementioned Mr Carthy) is taken at roughly the same pace. It's the sort of tune you only notice three days after you listened to it. Haunting.
The best things on the albums are the ones most simply in his own voice; "Seven Long Years" puts his own tune to "Bay of Biscay" (another one of those night visiting songs about a sailor visiting his lover and then revealing that he's dead).

I think his previous albums sometimes felt schizophrenic, as if there was a famous old song over here  and a drum machine, and apple mac and an a hip-hop artist over here but that Skulk is trying to put the the two sides together. He clearly isn't one of those people who says "Oh, it's all just music": folk seems to be a sufficiently privileged, magical concept for it to be worth dusting down and reworking dusty old ballads into a new thing, but I'm not quite sure what that new thing is.

Dear Andrew

You are making things very complicated. Please delete above and replace with:

"This is a nice album, with good stories, pretty tunes, and clever arrangements. I liked it very much indeed."

Andrew

More Than Boys
Luke Jackson

A soldier travels home to break the news to the family of a friend that he's been killed; a man plays footie in the park with his son; a teenager remembers climbing trees when he was little; a young man remembers hanging out with his mates when he was a teenager, moans that his siblings are all having a better time than him; and sees himself for the first time from his parents point of view. A group of youths go fishing without a care in the world. Eleven perfect songs from an artist who is still a teenager himself. I don't know what the young people make of them but from my elderly perspective they seem to have distilled the very essence of a teenager's life.

And the winner is...

Monty Awards 2012

And now, it's the moment you've all been waiting for...the second annual Montpelier Station Music Awards (affectionately know as The Montys) in which a panel of judge chosen from a short list of blogger who live at my house selects his favourite musical moments from 2012.




Favourite Album of 2012

Favourite New Version of Old Song

Favourite New Song

Wettest Weekend of 2012
Biggest Downer Of The Year
Geldof Award For Best New Song By An Artist Named Bob
"Onion" Award for Making the Judge Cry
"Samantha" Award For Rudest Lyrics
Best Traditional Song Played on a Kitchen Utensil
Best Cover Version of 90s Song By Lady With Turquoise Hair
Best Extended Solo On Funny Five Stringed Drum Thing

Favourite Live Gig

Special Award For The Live Performance Which Was, in the 
Opinion Of the Judges, Most Special

Overall Favourite Act of 2012

The Monty Awards

Welcome to this years Montpelier Station Music Awards (affectionately know as The Montys) in which a panel of judge, chosen from a short list of blogger living in big pink houses right near Montpelier Station selects its favourite musical moments of 2011.

And now without further ado: please pass me the plain brown envelope.

That appears to be letter from the gas company, threatening to take the tenant who left in 2005 without leaving a forwarding address to court.

Please pass me the other plain brown envelope...

Playlist

Best New CD With Some Connection to the Sea

THE NOMINATIONS FOR THE NAUTICAL BUT NICE AWARD ARE AS FOLLOWS:

Hold Fast by the Sail Pattern

The Sail Pattern are on the rockier end of folk rock compared with what I usually like, but when your first album is as good as this, you are welcome to be at which ever end of anything you choose.They have attitude They can play. They have their own voice. If they decide to sing Farewell And Adieu To Your Spanish Ladies then by god, you know you're listening to a Sail Pattern version of Farewell And Adie To You Spanish Ladies. There's a convincing machismo to the vocals offset by the merest hint of immaturity. (They look all of about 17.) They show every sign of caring about the folk tradition, and every sign of having grabbed it by the throat and thrown it overboard. Hard to know where their lyrics start and Anon's lyrics end. ("A puppet's on the throne of Spain and Bonaparte's in Cairo / With Nelson's ship we sailed away and fought him on the Nile-oh.") Their signature track, Hold Fast, wot they wrote themselves, oozes naval atmosphere; it isn't a shanty, it isn't a ballad, but it's fundamentally itself.

Port of Escape by Chris Ricketts

Chris Ricketts claims to sing sea shanties with a twist. I am not quite sure what the twist is. I think it may be "good singing". He ooozes authenticity and sincerity. He sings Hanging Johnny (a relatively meaningless work song) with a mixture of melancholy and menace. ("I'd hang the holy family...'cos hanging is so bloody funny.") He sings Bound For South Australia with straightforward honesty and a didgereedoo, which mysteriously causes you to forget that such a band as Fisherman's Friends ever existed. He sings the full dress version of Spanish Ladies with guitars and seagulls and no lyrical concessions to landlubbers ("till we strike the soundings in the channels of old England"). He sings North West Passage, which might actually be a step too far. I heard him open for Martin Simpson, which is something no guitarist should ever have to do. There's something modest and warm and real in his voice; as if a hundred year old sea dog has somehow got stuck in the body of a hobbit.


Tomorrow We'll Be Sober by Blackbeard's Tea Party

Last years EP, Heavens to Betsy blew me away. This year's follow up is even better. The choice of songs is impeccable: you can't not love an album which includes Barret's Privateers, Chicken on a Raft and Landlord Fill the Flowing Glass. The latter may be a rollicking bollocking drinking song with dirty words (which may owe more to the reenactment circuit than to Cecil Sharp) but it bears repeated listenings because of the wit of the arrangements (the musicians finding increasingly silly things to accompany each verse with). The finest, and least subtle moment on this, or perhaps any, album comes at the end of the colliers song I Can Hew. (Sweetly and mournfully): "And when I die, I know full well, I'm not bound for heaven I am bound for..." (rock-out explosion) "HELL!"

WINNER
HOLD FAST

It was a dem close run thing, but the judge awarded the prize to Sail Pattern so he could claim to have liked them before they went mainstream.

Best New Recording of An Old Song

The Nominations for the Finger in the Ear Award (CD) are as follows:

The Bonny Bunch of Roses on Ragged Kingdom by June Tabor and the Oysterband 

I think of June Tabor as "that lady who sings the rather distant, mournful, depressing songs about Scotland and the sea, often without accompaniment", which range from "my favourite songs ever(*)" to "oh, get on with it, for goodness sake!" In case you were wondering, her new album, Ashore failed to get nominated for the Nautical award because while it was undoubtedly brilliant it was also a teensy weensy bit how can I possibly put this boring. But of course, she can also more than hold her own providing the lyrics while the Oysterband are rocking out like it's 1990. There is a productive incongruity between the traditional text and the electric arrangement. Hardly any band can mess this song up: how can you fail with lines like "I'll raise a numerous army/ And through tremendous dangers go /And in spite of all the universe /I'll conquer the bonny Bunch of Roses, O". June Tabor sings it like she's going to personally cross the channel and give Young Napoleon a jolly good talking-to. This song would have been nominated for the BEST TRACK FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T THINK THEY WOULD LIKE FOLK MUSIC award, should such an award exist.


A Pilgrim's Way
on Wayside Courtesies by Pilgrims' Way

Pilgrims' Way are the probably the most exciting new band of 2011. ("New" is here defined as "band I first heard perform in" by which definition, admittedly, Steeleye Span would count as "new" but let's not get bogged down at this stage). They're essentially traditionalists, with the touch of electricity on some songs not nearly as distinct as the jews harp (a.k.a "that thing which goes twang?") on others. Lucy Wright's vocals are forceful but sweet sounding ever-so folkie without ever drifting into nasal cliches.

A Pilgrim's Way is also a pome by Mr Rudyard Kipling which was set to music by Mr Peter Bellamy. If you aren't careful it can go on for ever. (Jon Boden, and indeed Mr Bellamy himself, were not careful.) Pilgrims' Way (the band) give it a light, musical feel, free of trickery or fireworks; and Lucy navigates "Amorites and Erermites and general Avergees" as if she had some idea what it meant.

It has been mentioned before that many of us in the blogsphere could be improved by a judicious application of the precepts of verse 3. (**)


Bold Sir Rylas
on The Works by Spiers and Boden

I have to admit to being slightly disappointed by The Works -- much as I love Spiers and Boden, I wished they could have given us an CD of new material, rather than new takes, however high quality, on material we already know pretty well. That said, any one track on the album is great, and this one is just about my favourite. The story of how Bold Sir Rylas cut an old lady in half is a great Pythonesque yarn with a sing-a-long chorus the singing along on the album is no lessor a person than Maddy Prior. (Martin Carthy contributes to Prickley Bush, but you’d hardly know.) All together now: He split her head down to the chin! You should of heard seen her kick and grin!

WINNER:
Pilgrims Way by a country mile. (BUT NOTE: It’s really “The People, Lord, thy People” not “The people, oh, the people.")

(*) King of Rome, Place Called England, Unicorns, A Proper Sort of Gardener, Hughie Graham, Best Patrick Spens Ever, etc

(**) And if they bore me overmuch, I shall not shake my ears
Recalling many thousands such whom I have bored to tears
And if they labour to impress I shall not laugh or scoff
Since I myself have done no less and sometimes pulled it off.

Best Live Performance of an old song

The Nominations for the Finger in the Ear Award (live) are as follows:

The Two Sisters
The Emily Portman Trio (at the Louisiana, Bristol, Nov 8th)

Oh, there are lot of things to say about this song. That it's a truly beautiful, rounded fairy tale. That the sound the trio created in an upstairs room in a pub was astonishingly close to what is on the CD. That the song runs to something like 20 verses, and the group use that space to create a small epic; full of different musical textures; more a symphony than a ballad. That Emily has made a tiny surgical change to the traditional lyrics (changing "yonder sits my father the king" to "yonder sits my lover the king") which gives the tale a tragic logic and inevitability that it never had before. I found I had eight different versions of this song (Child Ballad 10, I looked it up) on my I-Pod. This is by far my favourite. A person on Youtube says it makes them imagine themselves "in the middle of an elvin forest, morning dew kissing greenery". Well, quite.


Little Sally Racket
Bellowhead (at the Scarborough folk festival, 8 Aug)

Understand this: if you have only heard Bellowhead on CDs, then you haven't heard Bellowhead. They aren't only about music; they're about musical theater. You have to be there. One of my Folkbuddies, who hadn't heard them before, said Jon Boden was like a musical John Cleese. I see him more as a swaggering musical Captain Jack Sparrow. The CDs don't really convey how tall he is. Little Sally Racket is an infinitely long sea-shanty about local prostitutes, with the obligatory "haul away" refrain. Boden turns in a passable impersonation of the Johnny Rotten (or some fella of that kind) producing a sort of folk-punk hybrid with a hymn embedded in the middle. There are better Bellowhead songs. There are better Bellowhead songs about prostitutes. But this is always one of the highlights of their live act. The performance could scarcely be more over the top (and Bellowhead know about over the top) and coming in between two more restrained, or at any rate sane, pieces, it never fails to bring the house down, even when, as in this case, the stage was three quarters of a mile away from the audience.

Lord Douglas
Jim Moray (at Chapel Arts Bath, June 10th)

Jim diffidently presented this astonishing piece as work in progress. (There are more polished versions on the Cecil Sharp Project CD and on his new album, Skunk, to which we are likely to be returning at some point.) It's one of those traditional ballads (Child 7, I looked it up) which exists in dozens of different versions. Man elopes with girl; someone betrays them; they are chased by the girls family; man is killed; girl dies of sorrow; foliage grows out of their respective graves, as is more or less obligatory for lovers in folk songs. I can't imagine how Jim went about combining, and rewriting, the different versions, and apparently incorporating a sub plot from a similar Icelandic saga. It's a complicated story that I've had to listen to several times to get the hang of; one of those sagas which you always seem to be lost in the middle of with feuds and love affairs and curses taken for granted before the story starts. And the tune seems to have drifted in from another world.

WINNER

The Two Sisters, by the merest wisp of thistledown.

Best New Song of 2011

The Nominations for the Chains of the Sea award are as follows:

The Reckoning
by Steve Tilston

There are a limited number of performers who would use the word "misbegotten" in a song. But then there are a limited number of performers who combine a gift for melody, poetry and actual thinking in the way that Steve does. (He is in the category of "you may not have heard of him but you have probably heard some of his songs".) The Reckoning is a deeply reflective piece about the kind of world that we are leaving to the next generation. Refreshingly free from obvious target hunting or jerking knees, it has a melody which manages to be memorable without actually being catchy.

"I offer you this toast should these troubles come to roost / for we ate the golden goose and left the reckoning to you."


Never Buy the Sun
by Billy Bragg

Thank God for Billy Bragg. Literally, thank God for Billy Bragg. I may or may not have mentioned before that Tony Blair became the the godfather of Rupert Murdoch's baby, in a ceremony which took place on the banks of the River Jordan. The nauseating -- literally nauseating -- hypocrisy of both teams -- the "socialist" politician in bed with an empire that is committed to destroying everything he stands for, the empire cultivating the personal friendships of politicians they pretend to "hold to account" -- more of less guarantees that nothing honest or indeed coherent can ever be said in any parliamentary debate, op ed columns or media talk show. So it is left to people like Billy Bragg to use music and plain speach to tell it how it is. Or how they think it is. It hardly matters if you agree with him: it's enough that he uses words to to convey meaning, instead of to obscure it. He eschews triumphalism at the wounding of the Murdoch empire, and instead offers a lament. How did we let it come to this?

"No-one comes out looking good when all is said and done / And the Scousers never buy the Sun."

What If, No Matter
by Tom Paxton

Joe Hill is supposed to have said that a leaflet, however well written, will be read once and thrown away, but a song will sung, and passed on, and repeated, and remembered. Tom Paxton's instant response to the Arizona shootings are a case in point. There were acres of newsprint and hand wringing and speculation, but Tom said all that really needed to be said in five verses.

WINNER

Billy Bragg and Steve Tilston are cleverer and more complicated, but the judge has no hesitation in giving the prize to Tom Paxton. Songs like this are the reason I started to listen to this stuff in the first place. (There is still absolutely no excuse for the Marvellous Toy.)

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. .