Category Archives: folkie

Going, Staying

24 March 2025 – 15:52

Quick list post: I went through my stock of CD EPs the other day and identified a few that definitely didn’t need to be there. Here’s what I’m chucking and what I’m keeping. I don’t think there’s anything properly valuable in there – CDs very rarely are – but if you like the look of anything in the ‘going’ list I can give you the address of our local Oxfam. (I wouldn’t get your hopes up, though; they’re going for a reason.)

Going

Air, “Playground Love”
A CD of one song, viz. the theme song to The Virgin Suicides. It’s sung by Gordon Tracks – of whom I know nothing, although he’s said to be miserly as an employer; “No Bonus” Tracks, they call him. Thanks, I’m here all week.
All Saints, “Pure Shores”
William Orbit innit.
Richard Ashcroft, “A Song For The Lovers”
Edward Ball, “The Mill Hill Self Hate Club”, “Trailblaze”
Guy from TV Personalities whose solo pop career never quite happened.
The Beach Boys, “Good Vibrations (Mojo Greatest Single Of All Time)”
The Blue Aeroplanes, “Broken & Mended”
I really like the wordiness of Gerard Langley’s work, but the not-actually-singing-ness doesn’t work for me over more than a track or two.
Blur, “Tender”
lan Brown, “My Star”
Embrace, “Come Back To What You Know”
At one point I thought – and told anyone who would listen – that Embrace had gone as far beyond the Verve as they had gone beyond Oasis. Hmm. In retrospect Embrace only really did one thing, although they did do it extraordinarily well. After going through a break-up, men (young men in particular) experience a Kubler-Ross-esque range of emotions: the conviction that the breakup was just a misunderstanding and it would all blow over; acknowledgment that the relationship had ended, and yearning for it to restart; regret at having screwed things up, tinged with retrospective embarrassment at the thought of what they’d put their partner through; finally, a sense of having moved on, having grown as a person, no longer depending on the ex-partner, hardly even thinking about them these days. All of which (being young) they think are vividly new and important, and (being men) want to tell the world all about – no, here’s a better idea, want to tell the ex-partner all about! That’ll be good! Plus combinations and permutations of all the above, some of them knotty and self-undermining (“I was such an idiot, I’ve learnt so much, I’m no longer dependent on our relationship… so how about giving it another go?”). And that’s what Embrace put into their lyrics, over and over again, earnestly, even solemnly, certainly without the slightest self-consciousness; one of the biggest, most sonorous songs on the first album is about drunk-texting the ex (“So, something that I tried to stop made its way to you…”). They meant a lot to me at one time, which I find it hard to explain now – I wasn’t even that young. There are four tracks on this CD; the title track is in the “yes, I know we said it was over, but how about trying again?” genre, the others… I forget. Can’t really listen to this stuff now.
Fatboy Slim, “Halfway Between The Gutter and The Guardian”; “Star 69 / Weapon Of Choice”
The freebie EP is much better than it needed to be; the other one includes the Christopher Walken video for “Weapon of Choice”. Videos on CDs were a big deal in the days of dial-up.
Genelab, “Anorak Lou”
Bigged up in the Guardian Guide singles column. Sank without trace.
Elton John, “West Coast Songs”
Another freebie EP, which I held on to because it had “Tiny Dancer” on.
Oasis, “Roll With It”; “Some Might Say”; “Wonderwall”
Speaking of things that meant a lot to me a long time ago…
The Polyphonic Spree, “Soldier Girl”
Everything about this baffles me, including the designation of the drastically edited and abbreviated single version as the ‘Album Version’ (the CD also includes the original album track, as well as an even shorter ‘Radio Version’).
Super Furry Animals, “God! Show Me Magic”; “Something 4 The Weekend”
These were worth getting for the B sides, but then they brought out Out Spaced.
Transglobal Underground, “Temple Head”
The 1993 re-release; I think this was one of the first CDs I bought, after getting a CD player to play the Pet Shop Boys’ Very. (My TGU 12″s aren’t going anywhere.)

Staying

Apollo 440, “Lost In Space”
Staying a) because it’s a banger and b) er, that’s it.
Beck, “Select Magazine CD”;  “Jack Ass”
Another free EP that’s better than it needed to be, and a terrific selection of alternative versions; “Strange Invitation” is a highlight, as is the mariachi(!) version “Burro”.
Beirut, “Lon Gisland”
“Elephant Gun” – a glorious, joyfully abandoned song of drunken nihilism – and others. If you haven’t got this EP, do get hold of the retrospective collection Artifacts – it’s on there.
Boards Of Canada, “Trans Canada Highway”
If you’re not familiar with the lead track on this one, “Dayvan Cowboy”, do yourself a favour and watch the Kittinger video (speakers on). You may wish to set aside some time, and a reasonably soundproof room.
David Bowie, “Slow Burn”
Julian Cope, “Paranormal In The W. Country”; “Ambulence”; “Planetary Sit-In”
ISTR getting ‘Paranormal’ by mail order. The other two were quote unquote single releases from Interpreter, probably Cope’s last album of pop music. “Planetary Sit-In” is a recorded/staged/collaged “phone-in programme”, and doesn’t really repay repeated listening. “Ambulence” (a.k.a. “I come from another planet, baby”) is something else, in every sense. It’s in large part the work of Thighpaulsandra, and it’s every bit as strange as that alternative title might suggest (“Now, let us drink the reindeer’s piss!”). It’s worth sticking with, though, if only because the places it takes you make the eventual return of the main theme really effective. Never have the words “I come from another planet, baby” sounded so much like the Second Coming.
Cornershop, “Brimful Of Asha”
Darkstar, “Graceadelica”
The band formed when Terry Bickers left Levitation (which he’d formed after leaving the House of Love). Those names take you back, eh? I only got this for the sleeve art, which (like King Crimson’s Starless and Bible Black) is by Tom Phillips.
The Earlies, “EP4”; “Morning Wonder”
I was and remain a huge fan of these guys. Certainly the best two-guitar/five-keyboard/sax/trumpet/trombone/flute/cello/bass/percussion/drums combo I’ve ever seen.
Espers, “The weed tree”
Richard Frisson, “Christmas EP”
A singer-songwriter friend of mine from folk club days; witty and thoughtful, with a trenchant turn of phrase. Not actually folk, but neither were Espers and they did all right.
Robyn Hitchcock & The Egyptians, “So You Think You’re In Love”
Robyn Hitchcock & The Venus 3, “Sex, Food, Death and Tarantulas”
Rather a good mostly-live EP, from 2007 (making it, jointly with a couple of others on the ‘staying’ list, the most recent thing here).
Hood, “The Lost You”
I bought this after reading a positive review – possibly in the Guardian Guide singles column – and wasn’t very impressed; “the year of the lost you” seemed like rather a drippy sixth-form-poetry conceit. I should have listened more closely, I realise now; Hood were a really interesting, experimental band, working similar terrain to Flying Saucer Attack. This EP was part-produced by Choque Hosein of Black Star Liner and featured contributions by Doseone of cLOUDDEAD and a Robert Wyatt sample – I mean, come on, 2004 Phil, we’re not talking Embrace here. I may have some catching up to do.
Hookers Green No. 1, “Three-Track Demo”
Bigged up on the, er, Channel Four Teletext singles review page, and bought by mail order. Much more complex than it had any need to be; the words ‘all over the place’ might also come to mind. Big in Aberdeen.
The Jon Spencer Blues Explosion, “Experimental Remixes”
I have fond memories of listening to this one while playing Duke Nukem with a user-designed ‘ancient Greece’ skin, in breaks from working on my doctorate. Bangers all, but the Beck and Moby remixes are particularly fine.
Kraftwerk, “Expo2000”
Shame about Kraftwerk; shame they hadn’t retired some time before this. Nice lenticular CD case, though.
Laika, “Antenna”
The band formed by Margaret Fiedler after she left Moonshake. I only discovered the other day that Louise Elliott was in Laika – the Louise Elliott, from Laughing Clowns! I saw them live and everything, and I never knew! Anyway, great EP, great sleeve design.
LFO, “Tied Up”
This was, among other things, my introduction to Spiritualized’s “seriously blissed-out” phase, via a remix on this (otherwise very banging) EP.
The Magnetic Fields, “The House Of Tomorrow”
From my retrospective-Magnetic-Fields-completist period; five ‘loop songs’ (i.e. sung over an eight-bar loop for a backing track). Much better than that sounds.
Many Hands, “World In A Room”
A New Zealand mate of mine was in Many Hands, whose instrumentation made the Earlies look tame – think reeds and tablas and djembe and erhu and highland bagpipes and, and… and bass and drums. World music? They had it.
Beth Orton, “Best Bit”
Bought in New Orleans, when I was there for work; not sure it was released over here. (Don’t talk to me about New Orleans; I got a cold from the air conditioning & hated the place, although I did like the beignets.) Features two tracks with Terry Callier, including a sublime reading of Fred Neil’s “Dolphins”.
Pete Royle, “They are helpless”
This is by another mate from folk club days, who got some friends into a studio and recorded a single about the 1999 Sudan famine, in the hope of selling it for charity. Sadly, he couldn’t get it released, and ended up handing out copies to friends and fellow folkies. I was at the folk club one week when another performer came up to Pete and gave him the CD back, seemingly having thought Pete was lending it to him (“it’s not really my sort of thing”). After he’d gone Pete turned to me and said, “There you are – I actually can’t give them away!”
The Soft Boys, “Side Three”
Additional tracks from the Nextdoorland sessions. Like that album, it’s not great, but it’s a lot better than it could have been.
Spiritualized, “The Abbey Road EP”
Spiritualized, orchestrated. Big, very big.
Stereolab, “The Free Design”
I prefer early, mostly-motorik Stereolab, but later, mostly-lounge-jazz Stereolab is still pretty good.
Super Furry Animals, “Ice Hockey Hair”
A fantastic track – seven minutes of psychedelic post-punk neo-prog loveliness. I learned the other day that the band thought of it as a joke song, “ice hockey hair” being what I believe is known as a “diss”. I don’t care, I still love it.
Suzuki K1 >> 7.5 cc, “Satellite Serenade”
From my Orb period.
Uilab, “Fires”
Ui/Stereolab collab consisting mainly of versions of Eno’s “St Elmo’s Fire”. From before my Magnetic Fields period.
The Verve, “The Drugs Don’t Work”
Magnificent as it is, the main song isn’t really the Verve. But the EP also includes rather a good guitar instrumental, as well as a mad James Lavelle remix of “Bittersweet Symphony”.
Wir, “Vien”
Wire mk. 3 (Newman/Lewis/Gilbert) in full “interesting but not necessarily listenable” mode.
Wire, “Read & Burn 03”
First recordings of Wire mk. 5 (Newman/Lewis/Grey). “23 Years Too Late” is a highlight. The band cancelled a Swedish tour when Wire mk. 1 split up in 1980, eventually playing Sweden in 2003 – when they were greeted by ranks of greying Wire fans in punk leathers, to all appearances the same people who had booked to see them twenty-three years earlier.
Robert Wyatt, “A Short Break”
James Yorkston, “Hoopoe”
From my, well, James Yorkston period, which is to say the period before I (a) got more committed to trad folk than he is and (b) noticed that all his own songs seemed to be about J. Yorkston’s sex life (which to be fair sounded quite varied and interesting, but enough is enough). Great version of “Sir Patrick Spens”, though.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, flummery, geekage, just me then, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

I saw a film today, oh boy

26 January 2025 – 16:22

I saw A Complete Unknown a few days ago (to be precise), and it’s stuck in my mind.

First things first: if you’re even vaguely aware of Bob Dylan the film is well worth seeing. Timothée Chalamet is uncannily good, but so are Edward Norton as Pete Seeger and Monica Barbaro as Joan Baez. The director has said that he set out to make a film with a similar central question to Salieri’s question in Amadeus: how can it be this guy who’s producing this? Job done, if so; halfway through the film Baez tells Dylan he’s “kind of an asshole”, and nothing we see from then on makes us think she called him wrong. But the other half of the analogy works too: the film leaves us in no doubt that the work Dylan produced, particularly in the two and a half years(!) from The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan to Highway 61 Revisited, was and is extraordinary.

I loved the film, mainly because there was so much music in it (not guaranteed in a musical biopic!) & they put so much work into getting it right: all the three leads sang well and convincingly, and I was genuinely impressed by Chalamet’s guitar-playing and Norton’s banjo. A lot of the time it was more like spending a few hours watching the young Dylan and Baez (and a youngish Pete Seeger) than watching a film, and that’s high praise.

But I think it was trying to do two other things as well, and I don’t think it did them nearly as satisfyingly. It was a Dylan origin story – specifically an origin story for the Dylan of Highway 61 Revisited and the albums before and after – and was structured accordingly: anything and anyone that isn’t going to put Dylan in a position to make Blonde on Blonde has to be left behind, abandoned or outgrown. There’s an odd parallel with a very different artist, David Bowie. Before he was a glam rock star, Bowie had ‘done’ rhythm & blues, cabaret and acoustic balladry – and when he did make it big, he promptly made a soul album. Dylan was never that much of a stylistic magpie, but the film told a very similar story of someone learning a style, mastering it and moving on. After Bob Dylan he’d done traditional folk; after The Times They Are A-Changin’ he’d done protest song. No need to go back.

This is where the film’s problems start, though; in Dylan’s case I don’t think this is actually what happened, or not nearly so straightforwardly. This is a distorted, retrospective framing, in other words, and one that does no favours to the earlier Dylan or to the scene through which he came up – or anyone who might actually prefer “Masters of War” to “Maggie’s Farm” (or “Corrina, Corrina” to either of them). Pete Seeger seems more like a kindly uncle than the mover and shaker he really was; as for Toshi Seeger, an organiser, film-maker and all-round force of nature shown here as Pete’s loyal (and mostly mute) helpmeet – well, the injustice the film does her would require its own blog post, which fortunately somebody has already written. Alan Lomax dips in and out of the film, getting progressively grumpier and effectively wearing a series of placards round his neck: “THIS IS THE FOLK MUSIC DYLAN IS LEARNING FROM”, then “THIS IS THE FOLK MUSIC DYLAN IS LEAVING BEHIND” and finally “THIS IS THE FOLK MUSIC ESTABLISHMENT THAT IS TRYING TO HOLD DYLAN BACK”.

The film has even less time for all the other denizens of the folk scene, in Greenwich Village and elsewhere. We see Dave Van Ronk holding court a couple of times – clearly a presence on the scene, but all we hear him doing is arguing about whether somebody’s ‘folk’ or not. I’m sure I heard Pete Seeger say “excuse me, Odetta” at one point, but there’s nothing on IMDB to suggest who he was saying it to. Speaking of IMDB, Peter Yarrow gets a credit, Paul Stookey is “(uncredited)” and Mary Travers gets nothing; I have no memory of any of them being in the film (despite Peter, Paul and Mary having a huge hit with “Blowin’ in the Wind”, doing Dylan’s album sales – and composer royalties – no harm at all). There’s no Jackie Washington, meaning that Dylan comes up with “Masters of War” on his own rather than by repurposing the tune of “Nottamun Town”. There’s no British tour and hence no Martin Carthy; Dylan comes up with “Girl from the North Country” on his own, too, rather than by borrowing “Scarborough Fair”. Somebody has to yell “Judas!”, naturally, but it’s now a punter at the Newport Folk Festival.

As these examples suggest, a lot of the time the film is well into “print the legend” territory; I could also mention “Hard Rain” and “Masters of War” pouring out of Dylan as direct responses to the Cuban missile crisis, or a brief scene involving Pete Seeger and an axe. I think some people have misunderstood this film in this respect, thinking that, because it shows Dylan in his personal life as an arrogant, lying, unfaithful, self-seeking, mean-minded little shit, it can’t be a hagiography – it must be showing him “warts and all”. On the contrary, I think it smooths out Dylan’s early years into a very simple and straightforward story: he was touched by genius and he knew it; they wanted something different from him; he satisfied them for a while but then left them behind; he did his thing and was astonishingly successful. (Was he nice to the people around him? No. Did the people around him write “Visions of Johanna”? Also no.)

So that’s two of the three films James Mangold directed. “An Evening With Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, circa 1964” is a great idea, executed brilliantly; “How The Genius Bob Dylan Became What He Was Meant To Be (In Spite Of Everyone Holding Him Back)” is executed well, but not such a great idea. I would much rather watch “How Bob Dylan Put Himself Together (And Who Helped Him), 1963-5”, which would be quite different and a lot less flattering.

As for the third film, let me just say, teaspoons; Pete Seeger’s Parable of the Teaspoons. What was that about? I understand the actual ‘teaspoon brigade’ story, as retold here: change takes time, but there’s strength in numbers; while no one person can make a difference every person’s contribution is vital to the whole; keep doing your bit and one day we’ll balance the scales. But the version presented in the film seems to make two crucial changes: Seeger tells Dylan that his contribution was especially important (“…and then you come along with a goddamn shovel!”); and he suggests, or comes very close to suggesting, that there was a chance to balance the scales right then and there, that night at Newport in 1965. In actual fact Bob was just about to let him down in a big way, by going out with an electric band and playing “Maggie’s Farm” (an eerily prophetic denunciation of the Conservative MP for Finchley). But if he had done what Pete Seeger wanted and played “Blowin’ in the Wind”, what was this version of Seeger suggesting he would actually have achieved – what would have happened as a result? Revolution? Withdrawal from Vietnam? More protest songs in the charts?

The scene falls apart when you think about it – Seeger wouldn’t have said that, not in that way; the ‘teaspoon brigade’ story was all about how everyone could make a small contribution to long-term change, not about one powerful figure coming along and changing things right now. Making the scene even less coherent, Seeger then switched to a passionate evocation of the history of the Newport Folk Festival as a haven for, well, folk songs – traditional American blues and ‘old time’ country music (whose champion in the film is an increasingly reactionary Lomax) – before wrapping up by switching back to themes of peace and justice (which are not at all prominent in traditional songs).

In other words, what that scene encapsulated was that, alongside the first two films, Mangold was also trying to make a film about Bob Dylan’s songs, the protest song scene, American traditional music and song-collecting, and how it all fits together. That film – in contrast to the making-of-Dylan hagiography – is an excellent idea, and I’d love to see it done properly some day. Unfortunately Mangold didn’t really have a clue about how it did all fit together, with the result that this strand of the film fell flat on its face.

So the history presented in this film is to be taken with several grains of salt and the musicology(!) is very poor. There’s only one good reason for seeing it – the performance of the three leads – but that’s a very good reason: Norton and Barbaro are great, and Chalamet’s amazing. As I said above, for quite a lot of the film you’re effectively watching “An Evening With Pete Seeger, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan, circa 1964” – and what a privilege that would be.

By Phil | Also posted in Ameryke, culture, fillum, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day – November and December

3 January 2025 – 15:14

At the beginning of 2024 I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

At the end of the year, the tally of albums stood at a little over 200, so – even allowing for two-, three- and four-disc sets being spread over multiple days – I clearly didn’t quite manage An Album A Day. Still, 200+ albums, many or most of which I wouldn’t have listened to otherwise, isn’t a bad total.

November and December, like October, were dominated by the remains of a stack of second-hand LPs which I’d never got round to ripping; the traces of alphabetical order may be apparent in some of this post’s selections (i.e. there are a lot of Ss and Ws).

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Jean Redpath and friends, Ballad Folk

Courtesy of BBC Scotland, this (from 1977) is a terrific collection of Scottish songs by Jean Redpath and guests including Archie Fisher and Gordeanna McCulloch; some were familiar to me (Willie’s Fatal Visit, the Forfar Sodjer), some very much not (Birnie Bouzle, the Guise o’ Tough).

Derek Sarjeant and Hazel King, Folk Matters

From 1973; a nice collection of mostly familiar songs, some in less familiar versions. If your album’s a collection of folk songs arranged for two voices, acoustic guitar and occasional concertina it’s hard to make it stand out, and this doesn’t always succeed.

Strawhead, Songs from the book of England

No problem making this stand out, but that’s not necessarily a good thing. This album’s certainly ambitious – 21 songs and tunes over two LPs – but both the material and the arrangements are interesting without quite being engaging. The overall shape of the project is hard to make out: the material’s mostly traditional but not entirely, and mostly war-related but not entirely (John Barleycorn and Mad Maudlin both get in there); the album closes with a brief piece about World War I, but the sequencing doesn’t appear to be chronological overall. Arrangements are unusual, with heavy use of electric keyboards and early modern wind instruments. Unfortunately the keyboard sounds have aged badly since 1980, while the cornett – an early, unvalved brass instrument – has a wavery, parping tone, reminiscent of somebody making trumpet noises into their hands. Still, the arrangements are interesting, and a lot of the material was unfamiliar; full marks for effort, if that’s not too condescending.

the Watersons, Frost and fire; Lal and Norma Waterson, A true-hearted girl; Royston Wood and Heather Wood, No relation

Frost and Fire is coming up to its 60th anniversary but hasn’t aged a day: fascinating material, great vocal arrangements and electrifying performances, let down only by a lot of silly nonsense from Bert Lloyd in the sleeve notes. A true-hearted girl (from 1977, and featuring a very young Marry Waterson) is a lot less ambitious – on some songs they even appear to be singing in unison! Fun, though. No relation has some of the same ‘down time between projects’ feel to it, but a much more varied sound: there’s a wide and quirky range of material, including two instrumentals and three appearances by the singers’ former bandmate Peter Bellamy.

The Critics’ Group (and others), Poetry and Song 1

An artifact of a vanished age (although, dating from 1967, it’s not as old as Frost and Fire). It’s an anthology of poems and songs for schools; there are readings by Michael Hordern and Prunella Scales, and songs performed by Peggy Seeger and Ewan MacColl. Lucky schools!

Alan Stivell, A l’Olympia

A live album and a British release, despite the title. Is it Alan Styvul or Alɑ̃ Steevel? I’m never sure, and the track listing here doesn’t help – most of the songs are in Breton, but we also get The Foggy Dew and The Trees They Do Grow High. The sleeve notes don’t reach Bert Lloydian heights, but they are keen to impress on us the antiquity of the material, the Breton stuff especially.

FILE UNDER: FOLK-ROCK

Ashley Hutchings et al, Morris On; Steeleye Span, Hark! the village wait; the John Renbourn group, A maid in Bedlam; Bob Johnson and Pete Knight, The King of Elfland’s Daughter

Morris On is on the cheerfully dance-y, bouncy, Dave Mattacks-y end of things, and as such not really for me (sorry Dave). Sleeve note connoisseurs will note that a couple of songs are handled by someone called Shirley Hutchings – whatever happened to her? Hark! is proto-Steeleye – with Mr Hutchings and the Woodses, rather than Rick Kemp and Peter Knight – but worth a listen; Terry Woods acquits himself well, particularly on The Hills of Greenmore. The John Renbourn group, in this iteration, featured Jacqui McShee on vocals and arrangements for violin, recorder and tabla; it’s a nice selection of material, sensitively performed.

And then there’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter, a 1977 Steeleye Span side-project, supposedly funded by Chrysalis as an incentive to persuade Johnson and Knight not to leave the group – although, as the label’s commitment didn’t extend to promoting it after release, the album sank like a stone, and its creators walked anyway. The book’s amazing (I read it specially). The album? It’s got a lot going for it: vocals by Chris Farlowe, Frankie Miller, P.P. Arnold and Mary Hopkin, narration by Christopher Lee and an extraordinary psychedelic sleeve (designed by a young Jimmy Cauty); also an annoyingly catchy comedy song, with Derek Brimstone backed by a children’s choir. (Perhaps they were thinking of a Christmas single.) But the trouble with folk-rock is that it sounds like rock, which is to say rock of the period: it dates much more quickly than sparser and/or more idiosyncratic arrangements (Dolly Collins’s flute organ, Peter Bellamy’s anglo). This album has that problem in spades, together with a recurring problem for folk musicians doing their own stuff, i.e. that the songs aren’t as good as folk songs.

OLD SONGS…

Barry Black, Barry Black; the Passage, For all and none; Roxy Music, Country Life; Peter Blegvad, Live at Warwick

According to my computer I listened to the Barry Black album in March, but didn’t mention it on here. So I’ve listened to it again. It’s a solo album by a guy from the Archers of Loaf (me neither); it’s mostly instrumental; it’s a bit lounge, a bit klezmer, a bit avant-garde; there’s analogue synthesiser, clarinet, vibraphone and vocals that are variously muttered and shouted from a distance. It’s brilliant. The lyric sheet for the second Passage album, For All and None, completely fills a 24″x 12″ fold-out insert (and the type isn’t large); back in 1981 Dick Witts was a young man with a lot to say. Dark, angular, percussive; very post-punk (as I remember post-punk). Roxy Music’s fourth album, Country Life (the one with that cover) shows some signs of waning creativity – “A Really Good Time” echoes “Just Like You”, which is on the previous album – but it’s still recognisably the same band who made For Your Pleasure (well, mostly). Lastly, there isn’t really a Peter Blegvad live album, but three different live sets recorded between 1998 and 2002 at Warwick University – where he taught creative writing at the time – can be heard on the university’s Web site. Recommended – his is a unique voice.

…NEW SONGS

Broken Bells, Into the blue; Beirut, Hadsel; Robyn Hitchcock, 1967: Vacations in the past

I’ve spent most of 2024 listening to albums that I’d had for several years. In terms of keeping up with new music, that wasn’t much of a change. In the four years from 2020 to 2023 I’d added a total of eight new releases to my iTunes library: two Eurovision compilations, two albums each by Shirley Collins and Robyn Hitchcock, Quickies by the Magnetic Fields and Jim Causley‘s lockdown project Cyprus Well II.

As 2024 and this project drew to a close I acquired, somewhat to my surprise, two or three bona fide new releases. Well, new-ish – the Broken Bells album dates from 2022 and the Beirut’s from 2023 – but it’s still a bit of a departure for me. I guess lockdown is over. (The Hitchcock album is from this year but barely qualifies as a new release – and clearly isn’t a departure.)

Yes, but are they any good? On a couple of plays each, none of them is the respective artist’s finest hour, but they’re all worth a listen. Into the Blue is mostly at or slightly below the level of Broken Bells’ eponymous debut; to put it another way, it mostly sounds like Broken Bells, which is a good thing to sound like (although a couple of tracks dip disconcertingly into the early-80s power pop and 70s high-gloss Philly soul which I guess are James Mercer and Brian Burton’s comfort zones). Hadsel, a solo effort by Zach Condon, has some truly lovely individual tracks, but there isn’t much development or tension – or even variety – across the album. Different sequencing, or the omission of one or two tracks, might have made a big difference; taking the album as it stands, though, I’d rank it somewhere between No No No and The Rip Tide, well below the heights of The Gulag Orkestar and The Flying Club Cup.

Lastly, I wasn’t entirely blown away by Robyn Hitchcock’s memoir 1967: How I got there and why I never left – he writes beautifully, but what he writes about is, almost exclusively, being in the third year at Winchester (not to be confused with Winchester). The accompanying CD of covers doesn’t take us much further: almost all the songs are very familiar (See Emily Play and Candy and a Currant Bun are both referred to in the book, but it’s Emily we get here), and the arrangements are more hommage than reinterpretation. It’s also odd that there isn’t anything by Bob Dylan, despite Dylan’s sixth and seventh albums being (according to the book) the one big influence that led to Robyn being open to all the others. Still, the vocals are good – he clearly does love these songs – and it’s always nice to hear Kimberley.

So, farewell then 2024: a year in which I listened – in full, as the first music I’d heard that day and without having heard the album at any time earlier in the year – to

  • 10 compilations[3][2]
  • 11 albums by the Magnetic Fields[3]
  • 7 by David Bowie[2]
  • 6 by Peter Blegvad[3][*]
  • 5 by Robyn Hitchcock, Scott Walker and Wire
  • 4 by Future Bible Heroes, Robert Wyatt and the Young Tradition
  • 3 by Peter Bellamy, Shirley Collins, the Divine Comedy, Bob Dylan[3], the Shins[*] and Simian[*]
  • 2 by Alistair Anderson, David Byrne, Sheila Chandra, Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, Joy Division, Bob Lewis, the Phantom Band, Radiohead, Roxy Music and Slapp Happy
  • and 1 each by another 109 artists, from Amorphous Androgynous[2] to the Young Knives.

[3] includes at least one triple album
[2] includes at least one double album
[*] includes at least one ‘album’ stitched together from other sources (my blog, my rules)

This had the incidental benefit of clearing two backlogs, of CDs and LPs which had been sitting around waiting to be listened to (for anything up to 20 years in both cases).

I’m certainly not repeating the exercise in 2025. What I will try to do is listen to more music that hasn’t been sitting around waiting to be listened to; new music, even.

 

 

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, everyday life, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day – October

9 December 2024 – 20:24

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

By October I was mostly listening to a stack of second-hand LPs which I’d never got round to ripping, most of which were folk. Not all, but most.

Here’s what I listened to in October.

FILE UNDER: FOLK (until further notice)

the Copper Family, A song for every season
A magnificent four-album collection of unaccompanied songs by the classic 1960s iteration of the Copper Family, individually as well as collectively. Nearly three hours in total, albeit that a good quarter of that is made up of introductions and bits of linking chat and commentary, generally from Bob Copper; interesting enough on first listen, skippable thereafter (and must have reduced the album’s appeal quite quickly when it was released, skipping tracks being a bit more fiddly back then).

Ray Fisher, The Bonny Birdy
“Woe to the day, diddle!”. One of only two solo albums by Ray Fisher; an excellent album of mostly traditional material by the singer and sister of the slightly more famous (and much more prolific) Archie. I don’t know why Ray didn’t record more, but it did strike me that the sleeve note by Ashley Hutchings (for it is he) is devoted entirely to saying how much he fancies her. Hmm.

Mike Harding, Mrs ‘Ardin’s Kid
Harding’s second solo album, recorded live. Not my thing at all, it turns out: all contemporary material and mostly comic, including a long routine about trying to coming in drunk and trying to sneak past the wife, and a (mercifully shorter) bit about how producers at the BBC are a bit “lovey, darling”, you know the sort, drop a pound note on the floor and you’re best off leaving it there, know what I mean. Different times, different times.

Tim Hart and Maddy Prior, Folk Songs of Old England Volume 1, Summer Solstice
A couple of pretty decent collections of mostly traditional songs. The artists were a lot happier with Summer Solstice (1971) than either of the “Old England” collections – which were recorded at speed and without many second thoughts in 1968 and 1969 – but I certainly didn’t notice any wrong notes; also, my copy of the later album is in dreadful condition, so I’d find it hard to judge. (It looks fine; I guess it must have been played to death.)

Alex Hood, Songs while the billy boils
A Music For Pleasure re-release of a workmanlike collection of Australian songs (“Click go the shears”, “The wild colonial boy” and even “Van Diemen’s Land”).

Jolly Jack, A long time travelling
A multi-instrumentalist trio active in the 80s; sleeve notes express gratitude to Peter Bellamy, from whom they’ve borrowed “White”, “Santa Fe Trail” and (perhaps more surprisingly) “Riding on top of the car”. I don’t say this as a criticism; if anything it’s good to see that Bellamy had some discernible influence on artists who were coming up in his time. JJ don’t actually sound like Bellamy, anyway, not least because you can do more with a song with three voices and two concertinas than with one of each.

A.L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl, English and Scottish Folk Ballads
Back to 1964 for this one, and back to Child. Got to admit I don’t actually enjoy either of those singers’ voices, meaning there was something a bit “eat your greens” about this one.

Muckram Wakes, A map of Derbyshire
A weird little delight, featuring versions of Spencer the Rover and the Golden Glove which I hadn’t heard and the original outing for the Pulling-Down Song. Also, lots of free reed (concertina, melodeon and harmonium). More contemporary material than traditional, but I’ll let them off this once.

FILE UNDER: FOLK IS NOT THE ONLY MUSIC

New Fast Automatic Daffodils, Pigeonhole
Hard to decide what I like more about New FADs – the propulsive drive of the songs, the incessant, restless rattle of percussion or the emphatically Mancunian, defiantly cryptic vocals. They peaked with the next album (and the single “It’s not what you know” in particular), but this album (from 1990) comes pretty close.

Simian, Watch it glow, Chemistry is what we are, B-sides
I went back to Simian – which is to say, I went back to early Simian – after happening on this article on Cope’s Head Heritage site. There isn’t actually a ‘B-sides’ album, but there really should have been – there’s some excellent material chucked away on the multiple different formats of the three singles from Chemistry is what we are. (The need to provide different additional tracks for CD1, CD2, the 12″ and the cassette put a terrible burden on some bands; Loz from Kingmaker blamed it for the band stalling, and they may not have been the only one.)

How to describe Simian? As of their actual second album, 2002’s We Are Your Friends, they were a kind of psychedelic electro outfit – not unlike the band’s longer-lived and more commercially successful offshoot Simian Mobile Disco, just with more vocals. Chemistry is what we are and the Watch it glow EP are a much more interesting proposition, combining glitchy electronic beats with burbling analogue synths and woozy, often harmonised vocal lines; the lyrics are simple and straightforward, but often seem to be recounting otherworldly experiences. There’s a distinct ‘folk horror’ vibe, and a sense – as with Boards of Canada – of listening to a battered relic from the future, or from a future that never came to be. Which, given what happened next to the band, in a sense this is.

NB for any passing Simian completists, the imaginary track-listing of my imaginary B-sides album runs as follows:

  1. The tale of Willow Hill
  2. Turn around
  3. What a dream
  4. Over the hills
  5. Reasons
  6. The long road
  7. Something new
  8. Queen May
  9. Into the ground
  10. Song and dance
  11. Societa
  12. Under the cherry moon [yes, that one]

and I recommend seeking out every one of them. Unless you’re really heavily into traditional folksong, of course.

Next: November (and December)

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, popular singing groups, punk | Comments (0)

Partly harmless

17 November 2024 – 16:18

Thanks to WbS for bringing this to my attention:

The 6 Music Dad character – referring to the BBC radio station – is part harmless joke, part slur. Broadly speaking, it’s aimed at people who had their formative musical years somewhere between the late 1970s and early 90s, ducked out of following music passionately while work and family life took over, and now with grownup kids, and some disposable cash to burn, dad is getting back into vinyl, lacing up the Converse and busting out the ergonomic lawn chair for festival season. … It’s the “OK boomer” of the indie music world; a flippant and generalising piss-take that doesn’t possess much weight or sting but carries an undercurrent of ageism, and characterises its target as culturally shallow.

WbS adds:

Read the phrase a few months back and did not like it. Did not like it at all. … Just to be clear. I never stopped following music. Most people I know likewise. … And this vinyl thing. No way no how.

Like him, I’m tempted to itemise the ways in which I absolutely don’t fit the stereotype and never have done. (Converse? I wore high-top trainers – or baseball boots, as they were then known – when I was ten. Never felt any desire to go back.) But instead I’ll make three broader points:

1. On one hand, I think this is just what life’s like (“it’ll happen to you!”). When I was fifteen I was into Steeleye Span and real ale (which I could rarely get but was firmly in favour of), and told anyone who asked that I wanted to be a University Lecturer. Life intervened – not only marriage and parenthood but also punk and post-punk, a career in IT, a collection of single malts – till now I’m a retired university lecturer (still publishing), a folk singer and a member of CAMRA. Somewhere in Lipstick Traces Michèle Bernstein says of a former Lettrist turned Gaullist, “he became what he had been all along, as everyone does”. It moi.

2. On the other hand, everyone’s different; we all may navigate the same kind of life-course, but we each do it in our own way. Until I was in my mid-forties I would have said, like WbS, that I never stopped following music; I might have been spending a bit less on music, but there still were bands whose gigs I’d go to and whose albums I’d buy as soon as they came out. I did, however, have a “year zero”, after my mother died. I gradually discovered that everything I’d been listening to before was depressing, or noisy (and upsetting), or edgy and weird (and alarming). There was only one exception: Shirley Collins. The purity of Shirley Collins’s voice, the plainness of her delivery and the beauty of the songs were a great comfort, at a time when very little was.

It was a bad time, but it didn’t last forever: gradually the distress lifted and thinned out, like fog. After a while I found that Shirley Collins was no longer the only singer I could bear to listen to; I discovered Anne Briggs, Nic Jones, Tony Rose. But the songs still had to be traditional; it was a couple of years before I was able to go back to the contemporary music I’d been listening to before.

“It’ll happen to you”? On one level, yes, inevitably. On another, I sincerely hope it doesn’t: for whatever reason, losing my Mum hit me particularly hard, and I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone. Still, though; for me, making a ‘harmless joke’ out of people getting back into music in middle age carries more than a touch of “he jests at scars who never felt a wound”.

3. To be a bit more blunt, it also occurs to me that putting people into funny little imagined boxes, on the basis of nothing more than a few broad demographic characteristics, is something that’s been frowned upon for most of my adult life, and rightly so. I don’t think this kind of group-based ridicule – this kind of slur – magically becomes legitimate if the targets are older or more socially established than the person making it. (See also “Karens”.)

By Phil | Also posted in big stuff, bitterness and spite, everyday life, idiocy, meeja, popular singing groups, pro-situ | Comments (3)

An album a day – September

17 November 2024 – 13:07

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

This rapidly developed into a slightly different project, namely “listening to a bunch of stuff that I had lying around waiting to be listened to” – first, a stack of CDs which I had bought from a local library for buttons an embarrassing number of years ago, then a stack of second-hand LPs which I’d never got round to ripping. By September I was through the CDs and into the second-hand LPs, most of which were folk – and you can’t be listening to folk every day, so I interpersed those with some old albums I just hadn’t heard for a while. Which is where we came in.

Here, anyway, is what I listened to in September.

David Bowie, Low, “Heroes”, Lodger, Scary monsters (and super creeps)
One of the things that kept me tolerably sane during lockdown was yet another music-related project: to listen to – and where necessary acquire – everything David Bowie ever recorded. This, as you may imagine, took quite some time. I was on the second full run-through (don’t ask) at the start of this year, and in fact had got a bit stuck. Something funny happened to Bowie in the mid-70s, and when I say ‘something’ I think we can narrow it down to something he put up his nose. Diamond Dogs and Young Americans came out of an incredibly fertile period – full of side projects, collaborations and studio outtakes – and we go straight from that to… Station to Station. Which just is Station to Station: half-crazed, funky as you like, more than slightly fascist, and entirely magnificent. (But no out-takes or side projects, unless you count Bowie’s personal project to stay up for 72 hours at a time talking nonsense with the bassist from Deep Purple.) Anyway, the ‘album a day’ thing gave me the opportunity to move beyond it and into the (misnamed) Berlin period. No great revelations; I still think “Heroes” is the best thing he ever did, especially side 2.

David Byrne, Songs from The Catherine Wheel
I love a lot of David Byrne’s solo work, although not so much the singer-songwriter stuff as the ones where he’s given himself the constraint of working in an unfamiliar form: The Forest, Rei Momo, Music for the Knee Plays… and this, a collection of vocal and instrumental pieces written for the Twyla Tharp ballet The Catherine Wheel. Apart from anything else, the playing is terrific. Musicians include Bernie Worrell, Adrian Belew and Yogi Horton on drums, not to mention some rather fine basslines from [checks notes] D. Byrne.

The Shins, Covers and rarities
I cheated here; this isn’t actually an album, just an assemblage of stuff downloaded from Youtube. James Mercer is a really engaging singer, though, and he has good taste in covers – both those I knew (“Panic”, “Andrew in drag”) and those I didn’t (“We Will Become Silhouettes” and, um, “Death Cream”).

Wire, A bell is a cup until it is struck
I’ve listened to a lot of Wire (although nothing more recent than Red Barked Tree – should remedy that), but they’ve never sounded better than they did on this album, their second album after the band’s first hiatus. Sometimes you can be listening to what are actually a whole set of tracks layered on top of one another, and still feel that you’re sitting in on a session and hearing each instrument as it’s played; a quality of separation, of airiness. Not many albums have it – it’s probably quite hard to do – but this one definitely does.

FILE UNDER: WAY BACK IN THE 1960s

Slapp Happy, Slapp Happy, Acnalbasac Noom; Steely Dan, Pretzel Logic; Scott Walker, Scott, Scott 2, Scott 3, Scott 4

Seventies, in some cases, but way back. Acnalbasac Noom is the original version of the album that was released as Slapp Happy. The original version was accompanied by most of Faust, but it’s rather less exciting than that sounds; it’s a fairly straight rock album, recorded for and rejected by Polydor. The band re-recorded most of the songs with session musicians including Henry Lowther on trumpet and Graham Preskett on violin; there are also contributions from people associated with Virgin bands of the time, who presumably were passing through – Henry Cow, Comus, Egg. It doesn’t always work, but it’s not like anything else. Pretzel Logic is the one of Steely Dan’s first three albums which I know least well, but there is some very memorable stuff on it. (Having been a graduate student at Salford University, I know exactly what Barrytown is about.) As for Scott Walker, it’s fascinating to see the steady progression across the first three albums – to the point where Scott 3 consists entirely of  original songs, but for four by Jacques Brel. And then Scott 4, which sounds amazing on the first couple of hearings but ultimately seems like a bit of a wrong turning: the rock instrumentation has dated a lot quicker than the orchestrations of the first three albums; and while the songs are all original, two or three of them are very derivative indeed. I tend to think ‘Til the band comes in is the best of the early solo albums – or at least it would have been if it had only been 26 minutes long.

FILE UNDER: FOLK (ALSO, WAY BACK IN THE 1960s)

Martin Carthy, Martin Carthy; Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick, Prince Heathen; Shirley Collins, The Sweet Primeroses, Adieu to old England; Bob Copper, Sweet rose in June

Here we get into the stack of second-hand LPs. Martin Carthy consists of 14 songs, 12 of them traditional, mostly with sparse but efficient guitar accompaniment; some feature banjo, some fiddle and some no accompaniment at all. There were probably hundreds of LPs released in the 1960s and 1970s on a similar    template; this (from 1965) was one of the first. Prince Heathen takes up the story in the late 1970s, with both Carthy and Swarb putting in really impressive performances, including the seven-minute title ballad and a nine-minute Little Musgrave. The Sweet Primeroses is from 1967, features Shirley’s banjo and Dolly’s portative organ, sounds plaintive and wistful and is (to my ear) quite wonderful. Some of the tracks on Adieu, from 1974, are similar, but the album also features quite a few boisterous dance tunes and quite a lot of rib-diggingly cheerful melodeon and accordion, on which I am less keen. But I confess I was somewhat jaundiced by the condition of the vinyl, which was absolutely fine on a visual inspection but turned out to have an uncredited backing track of frying bacon throughout. This was also the case, sadly, with Sweet rose in June, which I rather bounced off as a result; it’s hard to focus on unaccompanied singing when you’re having to mentally edit out the background noise. I’ll have to go back to it.

Next: October. (At least I’m going forward in time…)

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, popular singing groups, punk | Comments (0)

An album a day: August

30 September 2024 – 12:39

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in August.

the Beatles, Abbey Road
Truth to tell, this is quite a patchy album, but the good tracks are very good – “Something” and “Come Together” on one album! The Long Medley is still very engaging, too: its combination of energy, melodic invention, larky silliness and at least the appearance of profundity, as well as its sheer variety, make it a very appropriate end point to the Beatles’ canon (even if Let it Be was still to come).

Peter Blegvad, Downtime, Just woke up, Hangman’s Hill, King Strut and other stories; Peter Blegvad and Andy Partridge, Orpheus the Lowdown
Bit of a Blegvad kick this month: four albums of songs, one of experimental poetry with electro-acoustic backings provided by Andy Partridge. The ‘smart’ thing to say would be that these two sides of Blegvad’s work aren’t really so far apart, and there’s some truth in it; the pieces on the Orpheus album aren’t nearly as jagged or far out as they appeared on first listen, and there’s some difficult listening on all the ‘song’ albums (the feedback storm that closes “Bee Dream” on Just woke up, or the cacophonous backing that Andy Partridge (for it is he) added to the song “King Strut”). But I value Blegvad most as a songwriter, albeit one who really listens to the sounds he’s making. The spare, clattery backings of the songs on Downtime (dominated by the spare, clattery kit playing of Chris Cutler) are a particular favourite.

the Blue Nile, A walk across the rooftops
Like a number of these albums, I bought this one several years ago. I think I’ve now listened to it twice. It made a bit of an impression on me, but I should probably go back to it. “Like Prefab Sprout, but with less convoluted lyrics and a much better singer” was one thing that came to mind – although I suppose that wouldn’t be much like Prefab Sprout at all.

Graham Coxon, Happiness in Magazines
Oh, Blur. Everyone loves Blur – there’s the speccy one, the Tory farmer, the Labour councillor and the utter twat. The speccy one was always my favourite. He’s been very productive along the way; this was his fifth album, and it does include some really good songs, mostly lurking in dense tangles of grungy guitar. I could have wished quality control was a bit tighter, though. Put it this way, this would have made a stunning EP.

My Computer, Vulnerabilia
Speaking of productivity and quality control, if it ever occurs to you to wonder what else My Computer have come up with, I would advise repressing the thought. This album from 2002 (their/his first outing) is pretty good – I got it on the strength of the opening track “All I Ever Wanted Was A Good Time”, which could have been huge – but there isn’t enough there that’s good enough to make this an album to go back to.

Rodion G.A., The lost tapes
Oh, Record Store Day. Everyone loves Record Store Day. This was a Record Store Day exclusive, and if you think that those are the only conditions under which I would ever buy a double album of unreleased progressive rock synthesiser improvisations from 1980s Communist Romania, well, I’m not sure how I’d answer that.

Various, Miniatures
Ripping this was no more difficult than for any other LP, but splitting it into tracks did my carpal tunnel no favours at all. 51 tracks, would you believe, all under 1 minute 10 seconds and mostly a minute exactly (give or take a second). Morgan Fisher, formerly keyboard player with Mott the Hoople, put this together in 1980, pulling in contributions from Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, Robert Fripp, Lol Coxhill, Ivor Cutler, Ron Geesin, Robert Wyatt, John Otway, Joseph Racaille, Hector Zazou and, inevitably, many more. There is – also inevitably – a “hey, here we are filling up a minute” larkiness about several of the pieces, which wears thin quite quickly; it’s probably best listened to on shuffle (not that that was an option in 1980). It’s different, though.

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Peter Bellamy, Tell it like it was, Second Wind
Two LPs I’ve only just got round to ripping. 1975’s TILIW only contains six traditional songs, as against five of Bellamy’s own compositions and two by other writers. The traditional songs include The Bold Privateer and On board a 98, while the contemporary songs include Al Stewart’s Nostradamus, of which Bellamy was rather fond (having been persuaded, like many people who read Erika Cheetham’s book on Nostradamus, that there might be something in this prophecy lark after all). Dating from ten years later, Second Wind similarly includes equal numbers of contemporary and traditional songs, with two songs from Bellamy’s ballad opera The Transports. The sheer range of Bellamy’s interests is attested by the fact that two of the non-traditional songs are by the Australian writer Henry Lawson, while two of the traditional songs are American (Motherless Child and Maria’s Gone).

FILE UNDER: A BIT BEFORE MY TIME

Family, A song for me; Gentle Giant, Gentle Giant; Roxy Music, Roxy Music

More adventures in ripping secondhand vinyl. Family are a taste I acquired from my older sister; this is their third album, which I never heard at the time. After the first couple of albums they always were a bit patchy on record, and I don’t think this is one of the greats. I was very into Giant into my early teens, although again this is an LP I never heard at the time. Listening to it now, you can hear the band that they became, as well as the self-importance and the maudlin pop balladeer leanings that they mostly left behind. As for Roxy, this isn’t quite the finished article – that would be For Your Pleasure – but it still sounds like music from the future. Which is quite something, considering that it’s half a century old.

FILE UNDER: A VERY GOOD YEAR… OR TWO

Godley and Creme, L; The Only Ones, The Only Ones; The Rezillos, Can’t stand the Rezillos; Wreckless Eric, Wreckless Eric

A long time ago, I picked up a meme or challenge from another blog. The idea was that our musical tastes are formed in our teens: if you talked about what you considered to be the ten best albums released in the year you turned 18, that would encapsulate your musical tastes in ways that might be interesting. I began by identifying my top ten LPs from the relevant period, then got a bit bogged down. At first I thought ten album reviews in a row would tax the reader’s patience, and tried to whittle the list down to five. The more I thought about it, though, the more albums pressed themselves on my attention, and I ended up with a list of 15. Slightly perversely, I thought that what I’d do was write about numbers 11 to 15. I never got round to it, though… until now. (Well, nearly; there are only four albums here, the fifth of the 15 being National Health’s Of Queues and Cures.) I could say a lot about all of these, but won’t, if only to keep this post within bounds.

L is self-evidently the side project of two very successful musicians; of the album’s eight tracks, three are about how horrible it is to be in a successful pop group. Still, sometimes when you let musicians record whatever the hell they want, the results are weird, surprising and generally fun – if sometimes difficult fun. I’ve heard this album likened to Zappa, but never found a Zappa album I liked as much. The Only Ones’ debut album, as is the case for a lot of bands, isn’t their best; there are some great tracks on here, though, notably heroin epic The Beast (not to mention Another Girl, Another Planet). Listening to the Rezillos album again made me realise how unusual, and how innovative, their sound was. The combination of bubblegum pop, raucous guitars and, crucially, a hyperactive bassline (for which I guess we have William Mysterious to thank) was very punk, but – like a lot of things that were very punk – nobody had really done it before; and nobody did it quite like that again. And, speaking of things that were very punk, there are few things more punk than Eric Goulden – a really gifted songwriter – setting out quite deliberately to make himself look and sound offputting, from the subject matter of his songs to the release of his album on brown vinyl. (The ten-inch, eight-track version, that is.) The songs are good, but that particular niche… well, it had its moment.

Athletico Spizz 80, Do a runner; the Spizzles, Spikey Dream Flowers; John Cooper Clarke, Snap crackle and bop; Joy Division, Unknown Pleasures, Closer; Ultravox, Systems of Romance

What does postpunk mean to you? All of these albums were made by survivors of punk, although in a couple of cases they’d been working well before. I’m rather fond of the Spizz albums: when Spizz Oil first appeared in 1977, I’m not sure anyone (even Spizz) thought there was more than a couple of singles in it, but two early 80s albums – on A&M of all labels – suggest otherwise. Probably no one else on this list needs any introduction. John Cooper Clarke’s second album, recorded with Martin Hannett and friends, is as good as, or possibly even slightly better than, his first one; I should probably lay hands on his third. (Shame about what happened after that.) As for Joy Division (speaking of Hannett), these albums are just as monumental as you’ve heard they were, even now – although admittedly some of the electronic drums on the second album sound a bit dated. Lastly, Systems of Romance: Ultravox’s third album, their last with John Foxx, and one of my favourite albums of all time. Produced by Conny Plank, it’s a kind of four-way collision of the rigid electronic rhythms the band would go on to explore, Robin Simon’s lacerating rock guitar lines, Foxx’s gnomic, meditative lyrics and all the opportunities Plank’s studio provided to make it new: the swooping synthesiser line drifting on- and off-key in “When You Walk Through Me”, the dropped-in acoustic piano in “Just for a Moment”, the metronomically regular but constantly shifting pulse in “Dislocation”, the whistling in “Maximum Acceleration” (whistling!)… It was lightning in a bottle: nothing Ultravox mk II did with Slik veteran Midge Ure came close. On his second solo album The Garden, John Foxx was evidently going after the same sound (Robin Simon appears on guitar, and there’s even a track called Systems of Romance), but it’s not the same. There’s something particularly powerful about bands pulling in multiple directions (ask Simian; ask Soft Machine), as difficult an experience as it can be to live through.

Next: September, which will be shorter (or at least contain fewer albums)

 

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, just me then, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: June

30 July 2024 – 12:55

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in June.

FFS, FFS
“FFS” is of course short for… “Franz Ferdinand and Sparks”. If you think about what they sound like, and what they sound like, and take note of the pun in the name, you’ll have a good idea what this album’s like. Songs include “Johnny Delusional”, “Collaborations Don’t Work” (If I ever need a father it won’t be you, old man!) and “Piss Off”.  A lot of fun.

The Phantom Band, Checkmate Savage; The Wants
The opening track on Checkmate Savage is just astonishing; the closest I can come to summing it up is to say that it’s not so much FFS, more BBN – the Beta Band with Neu! for a rhythm section. Nothing else on either of these albums is quite up there with that track, but they come close several times. Lyrically they tend to be dark, though (“Into the corn I fled/Everyone I knew there was dead”). Given my, uh, other musical interests I was interested to read somewhere that the songwriter’s parents were Scottish traditional musicians (and possibly still are). I think it’s fair to say that this sometimes weighs on his mind (“I can’t see for the mountain’s silhouette/I left home for an empty space/Oh God, oblivion, folk song oblivion!”). Dark, as I say. (See, this is why people give up on modern music and concentrate on the trad stuff – people are always getting raped and stabbed and so forth in those songs, but there isn’t all this misery. Young people, I ask you.)

The Magnetic Fields, Holiday; i; Realism
In which I shamelessly exploit the ‘album a day’ exercise so as to listen to some Magnetic Fields. Holiday is their first album with Stephin Merritt as vocalist; it’s good but very synth-heavy and a bit shapeless. i consists of fourteen songs with titles beginning with the letter I, from “I Die” to “It’s Only Time”; it also shares an unamplified (or unamplified-sounding) sound palette with Realism.

The thing with Magnetic Fields and Future Bible Heroes albums is that Stephin Merritt writes great songs, a statement I mean absolutely literally: he writes a lot of songs that are OK, some that are good and some that are flat-out great, up there with “Something” or “Tears of a Clown”. The scorecard for these albums reads something like: Holiday, 5 good, 1 great; Realism, 6 good, 1 great; i, 6 good, 2 great. Which means none of these albums is on a par with The Charm of the Highway Strip (which begins with three ‘great’s in a row), but they’re all pretty damn good.

Various, Jardim Elétrico: a Tribute to Os Mutantes
An oddity: a tribute album to the seminal Brazilian band on an Italian psychedelic/noise label, featuring a lot of Italian psychedelic/noise acts plus some Anglospheric Os Mutantes fans (Sean Lennon, the Wondermints, the Earlies). Would probably make more sense to fans of Os Mutantes than to a fan of the Earlies (like what I am).

FILE UNDER: USUAL STAMPS AND MARKINGS

Madness, The Liberty of Norton Folgate; Outkast, Idlewild

The last couple of CDs bought from the library, time back way back, on the basis that (a) I might like it and (b) they were asking buttons for it, so why not. The first couple of tracks on the Madness album blew me away and got me thinking about Smile and Sergeant Pepper – it’s a big sound they’ve got there – and the ten-minute title track is pretty special. But the rest of the album isn’t on the same level; after a while it’s just an album by Madness about London. I’ll give it another go, though. As for Outkast… I don’t think this album’s really aimed at me.

FILE UNDER: FOLK (or thereabouts)

Birdloom, Birdloom; Kimber’s Men, Don’t take the heroes; Bob Lewis, One morning in May; Various, Big Bend Killing (2xCD); Various, This label is not removable (3xCD)

Some of these albums, on the other hand, might as well have had a gift tag. Perhaps not so much This label is not removable, the mammoth compilation from the Free Reed record label, which specialises (as the name may suggest) in concertina and similar instruments – although their association with Peter Bellamy puts them very much on the side of the angels. I like (and indeed play) folk concertina, but TLINR divides more or less three ways between traditional material, music hall and novelty songs, and contemporary songs; as I’m considerably less interested in the second and third categories than the first, I found it quite a long triple CD. No such problem with Big Bend Killing, which consists of an album of Child ballads recorded (mostly) by American traditional singers and an album of more recent American ballads. Terrific stuff, although from this side of the Atlantic it seemed a shame that they’d bulked out the first CD with some material by British singers. Both Don’t take the heroes and One morning in May consist of traditional songs – shanties in one case, Sussex songs in the others – interspersed with newer material. Bob Lewis’s high tenor and his settings of poems by Bob Copper appeal to me a lot more than Kimber’s Men’s big baritones and their songs about the death of the fishing industry; your mileage may vary (and in both cases the traditional stuff is great).

Lastly, Birdloom. In an earlier post I talked about Natacha Atlas and “that British/Asian/dub/funk/Bollywood/qawwali sound”, the sound of Transglobal Underground and of Nation Records more generally. From where I was sitting at least, there were three important Nation Records acts in the early days (meaning the early 1990s): TGU (centred on Tim Whelan and Hamilton Lee); Fun-Da-Mental (Aki Nawaz), who were at the Public Enemy area of the Nation spectrum; and Loop Guru (Sam Dodson and David Muddyman), in the psychedelic/dance/chillout area. I loved Loop Guru, although in longer forms they did sometimes drift and lose focus; 12″s were their ideal medium. Back to 2024, and enter Birdloom. Birdloom the album is a 2002 collaboration between David Muddyman and Sharron Kraus; they were unable to get the album released at the time, but Kraus has now made it available on Bandcamp. It’s a collection of narrative folk songs, some quite familiar (Rosemary Lane, Come Write Me Down), some less so (Nellie the Milkmaid, Brown Robin), sung by Kraus and with ‘sounds’ by Muddyman. No two song arrangements are the same; the ballad form gives Muddyman a structure that he didn’t always have in Loop Guru, and his work benefits from it. The sound has dated a bit, as contemporary reimaginings of folk songs tend to – the sound of synthesisers isn’t the same as it was twenty years ago – but it’s never less than interesting. Kraus is in good voice, John Spiers and Jon Boden make well-judged guest appearances, and the overall impression is really powerful. Sadly, David Muddyman died in 2022, aged 65; 50% of the proceeds from the Birdloom album go to a hospice. The album is strongly recommended.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, everyday life, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: May

22 July 2024 – 12:31

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here (belatedly) is what I listened to in… in May? Seriously? What happened to this one? I forgot to write it, is what happened; too busy with opinion polls and such. June will follow fairly shortly.

Cornershop, Judy sucks a lemon for breakfast
“Here’s one back for the clap trap/And here’s one back in lieu” – nobody writes them like Tjinder Singh. What it’s all about is seldom clear, but it sounds terrific. As with a couple of these CDs, the question on finding it on the ‘pending’ pile isn’t so much why I got it as why I stopped listening to it. I think it may be because it’s a 40-minute album with a 16 minute final track, very much reminiscent of the early days of CDs. I couldn’t really be doing with that final track but felt like I ought to listen to the whole thing, with the result that I never put the CD back on. Anyway, it’s a banger and a half, and you can skip the final track.

Fanfarlo, Reservoir
I saw this band described as a more upbeat Beirut – which was good enough for me, as a big fan of Beirut. Listening back to it again, it’s… all right. Bit upbeat though.

Orange Juice, The Glasgow School
This is Orange Juice’s real first album – the one that was only released years later, under the title of Ostrich Churchyard – together with some other Postcard-era odds and sods (great to hear Poor Old Soul again). The early material has its own slightly wonky charm, although I was disappointed to realise that there actually was an Intuition Told Me Part Two; they made the right choice in leaving it off the album.

the Soft Boys, Side Three
An EP from 2002, of outtakes from their reunion album Nextdoorland. It’s no Underwater Moonlight, but it has definite flashes; Each Of Her Silver Wands sounds as if it ought to have been on I Often Dream Of Trains.

Robert Wyatt, Different every time
A double CD – 150 minutes total – of highlights from Wyatt’s own recording career and from his contribution to other people’s music, released to support Marcus O’Dair’s eponymous biography. Covers an extraordinary range, from pure pop to the avant-garde fringes of jazz; I would have welcomed more from the pre-fall period, though (he was an extraordinary drummer, let’s not forget).

The Young Knives, Voices of Animals & Men
“I’m the Prince of Wales, I’m the Prince of Wales! And if all else fails, I am the Prince of Wales!” Sparky, shouty, angular, very English and more than a little weird. (Can I still call it ‘post-punk’ if it’s from 2006?)

Various, Baby Driver: Music from the motion picture
From Edgar Wright’s ‘subsequently cancelled’ period. Liked it at the time, though, and there are some fine choons on here.

FILE UNDER: USUAL STAMPS AND MARKINGS

The Cinematic Orchestra, Everyday; Mylo, Destroy Rock & Roll; Pet Shop Boys, Yes; Sigur Rós, Með Suð Í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust; Super Furry Animals, Hey Venus!; The Verve, Forth; Paul Weller, Days of Speed

A bunch of stuff bought from the library on the basis that (a) I might like it and (b) they were asking buttons for it, so why not, and then parked on the shelf waiting for the right moment; a wait which went on for, ooh, quite a few years, but which is over now. As it turned out there was quite a lot of Not Really My Sort Of Thing in this section: the PSBs working with Xenomania (why?); Weller banging out some complex and delicate songs on an amplified acoustic; Sigur Rós sounding exactly like a free period in the music room, with one kid pounding a single chord on the piano and everyone else just, like, doing what they feel, it was amazing, you should have been there.

I’m going to listen to Hey Venus! again, though – snappy psychedelic pop is a good area for SFA. I’ll give Forth (the Verve’s reunion album) another go, too, although I’m not hopeful. It just seems to demonstrate what a flukey crossover Urban Hymns was: on Forth you get the guitar wigouts of the first couple of albums and you get the self-important balladry of Richard Ashcroft’s solo career, but the two don’t gel. I saw the Cinematic Orchestra accompanying Man With A Movie Camera once and that was a blast, so I should probably give this album another try as well; on one listen it didn’t make much of an impression on me. But by far the best of this particular bunch is Mylo’s Destroy Rock & Roll, which is a kind of a threeway crossover between LFO, the KLF and Boards of Canada in a particularly cheerful mood. Sample clearance was obviously a bit of a swine – Mylo’s Wikipedia describes this as his ‘only’ album, which has a ‘once bitten’ ring to it – but the result is terrific. The hook from Bette Davis Eyes has never sounded better.

FILE UNDER: FOLK (or thereabouts)

Maurice Leyden, The tern and the swallow; Lisa Null, Legacies; June Tabor, An echo of hooves; Tractor, Peterloo; Bob Dylan, Bootleg Series volume 3; Various, Drax Tracks 2013

Just as Dylan’s Bootleg Series volume 2 is ‘the one with She’s Your Lover Now’, volume 2 is ‘the one with Blind Willie McTell’. (I tried to learn it for a while but eventually gave up. How he sings it is incomparable.) I’ll be coming back to that album. The Tractor album is an oddity. The band was signed to John Peel’s Dandelion label in the early 70s; apparently this is an unfinished album from back then, which Peel encouraged them to complete and release thirty years later. Peel died in 2004, so he’s not talking, but I do notice that about half the songs here appear as a suite on a 1992 Tractor album. Still, however it’s come about, it’s a well-intentioned & pretty well executed prog-folk-rock album of songs about the Peterloo Massacre, supplemented with some traditional material performed by people like Mark Dowding. Lisa Null’s Legacies – recorded in 2015, when Lisa was 72 and had just come through a period of serious ill-health – devotes one of its two CDs to contemporary songs. (I prefer the first one – although Will You Love Me In The Morning?, written and part-sung by Lisa’s partner Charlie Baum, is a keeper.) Sadly Lisa left us in 2022; I’m grateful to have known her, and her singing of songs like Handsome Mary and Dink’s Song is a blessing.

To finish, a briefer rundown of four CDs’ worth of much the same thing: traditional songs, many of them unaccompanied. Hook it up to my veins. The Tern and the Swallow is an album of songs from Northern Ireland, some widely-collected and some local; Maurice is a fine singer who handles his songs with care, and there are some gems here. Drax Tracks is a double CD-ROM of unaccompanied traditional songs by guests and punters at a singing festival in 2013, including at least one that – unlike Blind Willie McTell – I have managed to learn; for those who like that sort of thing, this is very much the sort of thing we like. Similarly for An Echo of Hooves: I could call it dark and powerful and so forth, but at the end of the day an album of Child ballads by June Tabor isn’t so much good or bad as compulsory.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, everyday life, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: April

28 May 2024 – 17:21

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here (belatedly) is what I listened to in April.

Brian Wilson, Presents SMiLE; the Beach Boys, The SMiLE sessions
I haven’t really got my head round the relationship between these two, one re-recorded and the other (subsequently) reassembled. They’re close enough that the 2011 reassembly essentially makes the 2004 re-recording redundant (unless you’re looking for the pathos of hearing a bruised 60-year-old sing songs that ring with hope and energy). They’re close enough, in fact, to make me puzzle over reports of Brian Wilson having composed small sections for the re-recorded version. Also, while Wilson evidently got the album pretty much how he wanted it, viewed with a cold eye the result is a bit of a mess; most of the sub-two-minute vignettes are pretty dispensable, as indeed is “Vega-Tables”.  But then there’s “Heroes and Villains”/”Roll Plymouth Rock”; and then there’s “Good Vibrations”; and then in the middle of it all there’s a 14-minute sequence – from “Cabin Essence” to “Surf’s Up” – which is as sublimely beautiful as anything I’ve ever heard. For all its flaws and quiddities, this is a monumental piece of work.

David Bowie, Bowie at the Beeb
Bowie’s career was one of those ‘before and after’ things, although different people disagree as to when the ‘during’ was. This set is definitely ‘before’ and ‘after’, though. CDs 1 and 2 follow Bowie from 21 to 25, from psychedelic cockney cabaret to Peel-fave minor cult status and on to Ziggy Stardust, passing through Lou Reed and Jacques Brel on the way. On CD 3 – which, unlike the others, is devoted to a single ‘In Concert’ session – Bowie at 53 shuffles the cards of his career, wandering from Earthling and 1. Outside back to Let’s Dance, Station to Station, Aladdin Sane, The Man Who Sold the World… (No Ziggy, though.)

Sheila Chandra, Quiet, The Struggle
Another couple of those ‘ex-library’ CDs, both dating from the 1980s – an extraordinary productive period for Chandra. The Struggle was a deliberate attempt to mould Chandra’s British-Asian sound to the requirements of the early-1980s pop charts, and has dated rather badly. Quiet – an album of wordless vocal instrumentals – is bolder and much more successful.

The Earlies, The Enemy Chorus
Wonderful, wonderful stuff. If I had a complaint it would be that lyrically it’s a bit dark – several tracks evoke an emotional crisis, and one of the more upbeat numbers documents a man’s decision to commit suicide. But the richness and depth of the music is extraordinary. For those not familiar with them, the Earlies were not a guitar/bass/drums outfit – more of a guitar/keyboards/keyboards/keyboards/keyboards and flute/saxophone, flute and keyboards/guitar and trumpet/percussion and trombone/cello/bass/drums sort of thing. Once seen, never forgotten (and I saw them several times). Probably my favourite band ever.

Radiohead, Kid A, A moon shaped pool
Everything… in its right place… After the first couple of tracks, Kid A never really reaches the same heights, but few albums do. AMSP is Radiohead’s tenth and probably their last album, and it sounds even better now than when it came out; very much a summation of the phase of their career that began with Kid A, combining the scale of OK Computer with the dogged weirdness of Kid A/Amnesiac.

FILE IN THE AREA OF: FOLK

Jon Boden, Songs from the floodplain; Ian Robb, Jiig; The Young Tradition, The Young Tradition, So cheerfully round, Galleries, The Holly Bears the Crown; Various, It was on a market day (1 and 2)

In the 1980s the Veteran label produced a series of cassettes of ‘source singers’, people who sang folk songs in social settings without thinking of themselves as artists; the ‘…market day’ anthologies consisted of extracts from those cassettes. Mostly traditional songs, invariably sung unaccompanied, by singers like Jeff Wesley, George Fradley and the great Bob Lewis; there’s nothing like it. The three singers of the Young Tradition picked up this tradition – the songs and the practice of singing unaccompanied – and took it somewhere a bit different, involving harmonies and some quite complex arrangements. By the time of the larky miscellany of Galleries and the unreleased Christmas album The Holly…, two-thirds of the Young Tradition (Heather Wood and the unrelated Royston Wood) were leaning towards ‘early music’ (both albums feature Adam and Roderick Skeaping); the third member (Peter Bellamy) went on to different things. Ian Robb is a fine singer and a very fine concertina player; Jiig is an eclectic album with a couple of striking traditional song choices. Jon Boden, lastly, probably requires no introduction, although this album may do; it’s the first in a series of three albums of original songs, set in a post-apocalyptic (or maybe just ‘post-fossil-fuel’) future. Albums of original songs by folkies is a thing with which I generally can’t be doing, but Boden’s use of folk-adjacent music to furnish a bleak dystopia is rather effective. Moving but chilling.

All that I can think about is wood smoke in the valley,
Kisses in the fall-out shelter, dancing in the factory
That closed so long ago, and no-one ever goes there now

FILE UNDER: 90s

Natacha Atlas, The Best of Natacha Atlas; The Charlatans, Up at the lake; Basement Jaxx, Kish Kash

I used to love Transglobal Underground – could not get enough of that British/Asian/dub/funk/Bollywood/qawwali sound. I can hear what Natacha Atlas is doing on this 2005 best-of – she’s doing that – but it leaves me a bit cold. In the case of Up at the Lake, I don’t think it’s me – I think it’s just a bit ordinary. Great first track, but after that it’s not so much “the Prisoners, if they weren’t revivalists” as “well, indie, kind of thing”. I did actually like Kish Kash, for what that’s worth – I liked Remedy, back in the day – but probably not enough to put it on again very soon, or often. You can’t go back.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, popular singing groups, you young people | Comments (0)

An album a day: February

2 April 2024 – 14:18

At the beginning of this year I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project.

Here’s what I listened to in February.

The Associates The Affectionate Punch
Apparently Alan Rankine came up with the piano figure for Party Fears Two while punk was still in the ascendant, and had to keep it stashed away until fashions had changed enough to make it acceptable. In the mean time, they channelled his extraordinary musical imagination – and Billy Mackenzie’s even more extraordinary voice – through the urgency and skronky edginess of post-punk. With, well, extraordinary results – this is a truly great album, even if it isn’t what they actually wanted to do.

David Bowie Young Americans, Station to Station
Bowie completism has its rewards: you may have spotted the deep soul influence on Young Americans, but how about the Latin rhythms, or the attempt to ‘do’ Springsteen? (And that’s just the title track.) A much better – and much odder – album than it appears at first. Bowie completism won’t help you get under the surface of Station to Station, though; I’m not sure what would, short of going on a diet of cocaine, sleep deprivation and Aleister Crowley. (But what a surface.)

Cornelius Point
This album is really nothing like Pet Sounds, or Chill Out, or The Faust Tapes. Even apart from being Japanese. It’s just that you feel you’ve wandered into someone’s multi-tracked musical dream, and that it’s rather a nice place to spend 45 minutes.

Eno Another green world
Hmm. A bit of a rag bag – less than the sum of its parts. (I’ll Come Running is wonderful, though.)

The Magnetic Fields Distant plastic trees, The wayward bus, The charm of the highway strip, Get lost, Distortion, Love at the bottom of the sea
Do you have a favourite band? More – much more – from Stephin Merritt. These are, respectively, the first, second, fourth, fifth, eighth and tenth albums by the Magnetic Fields, recorded between 1992 and 2012. Three of them can reasonably be called masterpieces, which is a pretty good hit rate (particularly when you consider that album #6 was 69 Love Songs, which absolutely is one). Different stylistic choices come to the fore on different albums – Phil Spector on TWB, Country and Western on TCOTHS, repeating loops on Get Lost, the Jesus and Mary Chain on Distortion; some feature few synthesisers or none (Get Lost, Distortion), some feature little or nothing else (TWB, LATBOTS – although, as Merritt noted, the synthesisers he used on the latter album hadn’t been invented at the time of TWB). The songwriting throughout is extraordinary: a dry, heartless wit, masking – and failing to mask – sorrow and yearning as deep as a well.

Scott Walker ‘Til the band comes in
If I was feeling cranky I’d say this was Scott Walker’s best collection of songs before Tilt; it’s certainly head and shoulders above Scott Four. It’s just a shame he only had 26 minutes’ worth of songs and had to pad the album out with covers.

Wire Object 47
The album that Read and Burn 03 is better than. It’s fine – there’s a lot to like about it – but it’s not a total return to form (see Red Barked Tree).

FILE UNDER: JAZZ

The Necks Vertigo; Soft Machine Hidden Details
Vertigo (a single 44-minute track) is one of the Necks’ edgier, more unsettling pieces; I should probably invest in a few more for comparison. What they do – extended trio improvisations, basically – is a very distinctive way of making music. As for the Softs, that band and I have history. I got this CD when I saw the Hidden Details band – John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Roy Babbington and John Marshall – playing live in 2019; only the second time I’d seen the band, the first time being with the lineup of Allan Holdsworth, Mike Ratledge, Karl Jenkins, Roy Babbington and John Marshall. They’ve drifted a bit further into jazz than I’m entirely keen on, and I’m not sure I’ll be following them any further – particularly now that the lineup consists of John Etheridge, Theo Travis, Fred Baker and Asaf Sirkis (John Marshall RIP). (The Venn circle for “long-term Soft Machine fans” is included within that of “lovers of Rock Family Trees”.) It’s a decent album, though, with a lovely version of The Man Who Waved At Trains.

FILE UNDER: FOLK

Bob Lewis The painful plough; Various Dark Holler; Brian Peters Songs of trial and triumph
Bob Lewis is an English traditional singer from whom I’ve learnt a great deal – I’ve learnt the extraordinary tunes to some of his traditional songs, and I’ve learnt to emulate his high, clear tenor, or at least to have the nerve to give it a go. (Indeed, it would be difficult to sing some of his tunes without emulating his singing voice.) Dark Holler is a Folkways compilation of unaccompanied singers from North Carolina, recorded in the 1960s: some strong and distinctive voices deliver what to a British folkie is some surprisingly familiar material, albeit in unusual forms: Dillard Chandler’s song Little Farmer Boy, for instance, appears on Brian Peters’ album of Child ballads, under the more familiar title of The Demon Lover. Brian sings The Demon Lover unaccompanied, but accompanies other songs on Anglo concertina, melodeon and guitar – electric guitar in the case of Twa Corbies. It’s a great selection, well delivered; I’ve already borrowed Brian’s versions of All Alone and Lonely (a.k.a. The Cruel Mother), Fause Foodrage and Six Nights Drunk (a.k.a. Our Goodman), although I’m not sure that Brian’s version of the last-mentioned is entirely traditional (“Who owns that crash helmet where my bobble-hat ought to be?”).

FILE UNDERIN THE REGION OF: FOLK

Alistair Anderson Corby Crag, Steel Skies; Jim Causley Cyprus Well II; Ed Kuepper Today Wonder
Two instrumental albums from the multi-instrumentalist (English concertina and Northumbrian pipes) Alistair Anderson, exemplifying the odd fact that ‘tunes’ – instrumental traditional music – can absorb new material in a way that ‘songs’ can’t. Perhaps it’s just that few people are as steeped in traditional song as someone like Anderson is in traditional music. Steel Skies is all original compositions, and it’s terrific. Jim Causley is a folk singer, but this CD – produced at home, in lockdown – is his second collection of settings of poems by his distant relative Charles Causley. It’s good stuff: sensitive arrangements of some memorable and moving poems. Lastly, my favourite Ed Kuepper album; also the (studio) album recorded the quickest and cheapest, and the one containing the most folk or folk-adjacent material (Pretty Mary (a.k.a. The Wagoner’s Lad); a terrific version of Tim Hardin’s If I were a carpenter; and the title track, a medley of the Animals’ White Houses and Donovan’s Hey Gyp – a song which in turn goes back to Taj Mahal’s Chevrolet and ultimately to a 1930 song, Can I do it for you by Memphis Minnie).

(I do like those Rock Family Trees…)

And that’s it for February. Round up of what happened in March coming soonwhen I get round to it.

By Phil | Also posted in just me then, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

An album a day: January

16 February 2024 – 12:50

Around the beginning of the year, it struck me that there had been quite a few days when I hadn’t listened to any music at all – and that, when I did play anything, it was liable to be a dip into one of several gargantuan playlists (not that I’m an obsessive or anything, but my iTunesApple Music apparently library includes approximately 22 hours of music by Radiohead, 29 by Robyn Hitchcock in various guises and a slightly alarming 67 hours (can that possibly be right?) by David Bowie). (OK, five hours of that is Tin Machine, but that still leaves 62 – and it occurs to me now that “I’m No Bowie Obsessive, Says Man Who Owns Five Hours of Tin Machine” lacks a certain something.)

So I set myself a task: I’d listen to an album I owned, from start to finish, in one or at most two sessions, every day. Not only that, but the day’s album would be (as far as I could manage it) the first music I played that day, and the album would not be one that I’d previously listened to as part of the project. (This criterion is already starting to trip me up, and it’s only the middle of February.)

Here’s what I listened to in January. (Not a full month – it was a slow start.)

Peter Blegvad Go Figure; John Greaves, Peter Blegvad, Lisa Herman Kew. Rhone.
Peter Blegvad (13 hours) is a writer, an illustrator, a singer-songwriter; if he has a theme it’s the power of imagination and the limits of language, and/or vice versa. Some of his work is light, witty and whimsical, some forbiddingly surreal and weird, most somewhere in between. Go Figure, his most recent solo album, is a nice, well-executed collection of songs; essential for Blegvad aficionados but probably not the best starting point. Way over at the other extreme, 1977’s Kew. Rhone. [sic] is an album of big-band jazz with lyrics by Blegvad, mostly belted out by a small choir in vaguely Brechtian style. There’s a piece (‘song’ would be pushing it) consisting of words spelt with the letters in the (never explained) phrase ‘Kew. Rhone’; another consists of specially-composed palindromes; “22 Objects and Their Descriptions” offers brief, riddling word-pictures of objects which are then described conventionally, turning out to be weird, surreal assemblages. It’s all very pataphysical.

Shirley Collins Archangel Hill
I’m not going to introduce Shirley Collins (9 hours, not counting some as-yet unripped vynil). This is the third and probably last of her late-life, post-return albums; it includes one track which appeared on the now out-of-print collection Within Sound and re-recordings of three others, along with six traditional songs and three new pieces. If you’re into folk at all you should have this.

Bob Dylan Good as I been to you
An album of traditional songs and (slightly to my surprise) a really good one; although I’ve got the CD, I listened to this one on YouTube on our TV (progress eh?), and by the end of the album found myself just looking at the (static) screen, thinking, how are you doing that? This doesn’t refer to Bob’s guitar work (detailed and fiddly though it is) but his interpretation of the songs, some of which are quite familiar. Recommended.

Future Bible Heroes Memories of love; The Magnetic Fields Quickies; Stephin Merritt Obscurities
Stephin Merritt: 16 hours. Respectively, these are the first of Merritt’s albums of lyrics to Chris Ewen’s synth-pop backings; the most recent album from Merritt’s main band, with 28 songs in 47 minutes backed by a deliberately limited set of instruments; an album of B-sides and out-takes. None of them’s a masterpiece, but they’re all well worth your time. (Almost anywhere is a good place to start with Stephin Merritt.)

Robyn Hitchcock The man downstairs; Shufflemania!; Robyn Hitchcock and Andy Partridge Planet England (EP)
Respectively, an album of demos, live tracks and out-takes; Robyn’s lockdown album, a set of home-studio collaborations with musicians around the world; an endearing and very English set of four songs from 2019. Planet England is a small gem (and would put Robyn at two degrees of separation from Peter Blegvad, if the two of them hadn’t in fact played together). As for the albums, there is some great stuff there, but I’m not the one to judge – I’ve been buying Robyn’s records since 1977, so I’m hardly going to stop now. If you are looking for an entry-point, I’d probably start with 2017’s Robyn Hitchcock (crazy name!).

Kraftwerk Autobahn
Nothing like a 20-minute track to justify a full-album listening session. Although I must admit that, as much as I love the title track, I’ve grown to love “Morgenspaziergang” even more. The road (or footpath) not taken…

Livingstones Kabinet Dead of the Night
Tidying out some old files in preparation for getting a new Mac, I found an old “want list” – very old; 2004 to be precise. Halfway down was a reference to Livingstones Kabinet, with a note underneath saying that the CD was only available by “mail order”. Not long after saving that file I stopped listening to anything except traditional folk songs for a couple of years, and the gap that created in my listening habits meant that I never followed up on most of the list. It turns out not only that Livingstones Kabinet are still out there – albeit they’re now a Danish theatre group rather than a cabaret duo – but that a couple of their albums are available to download on Apple Music, this being one of them. It’s not the album I was after in 2004, but it is rather good, if you like your cabaret music dark and surreal.

Love Forever Changes
I’m not introducing this band either, let alone this album (other than to say that I hadn’t previously realised just how many of the songs are about reincarnation). I mean, what is there to say? “The red telephone” alone is a major cultural landmark.

Wire Read and Burn 03 (EP); Red Barked Tree
Wire: 14 hours. These are, respectively, the last recordings by Wire’s fourth and the first by the (current) sixth incarnation. The first two Read and Burn EPs formed the basis of the Send album, of which I’m very fond, but this third EP is particularly strong – it slightly overshadows the Object 47 album that followed. I’m especially fond of “23 Years Too Late”, a song about touring Denmark 23 years after the band had originally planned to go and being greeted by what looked like the same audience, 23 years older. Red Barked Tree marks a definite break from the heads-down-no-nonsense style of Object 47 and Send, branching out [sic] in several different directions; there’s even a song in 6:8. I’m still a few years behind on Wire, but I look forward to catching up with what they were doing in the 2010s.

And that’s it for January. I’m not going to plough straight on with February, you’ll be glad to hear; I’ve got the Box of Forty Science Fiction Hardbacks to write about. Or I might do something on current affairs, or have a moan about the Labour Party…

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, England, just me then, popular singing groups | Comments (0)

Thousands or more

8 April 2023 – 18:39

(Cross-posted from 52 Folk Songs)

At a traditional singing event I attended recently, there was a discussion of how to “pass on the baton” – i.e. how to recruit enough younger people to keep what we do going beyond the next ten years or so. It’s a real issue, at least if the attendance at that event was anything to go by; there were people there without any grey in their hair, but not very many. At one point someone even addressed me as “young man”; I’m 62 (although, to be fair, I do have a full head of hair, and the light was quite bad).

But what is “what we do” – what is it that we want to keep going, and to share with younger people? A singaround I go to may provide some pointers. In a three-hour afternoon session, in a room above a pub, anywhere from 10 to 20 people sing at least two songs each (usually three), mostly unaccompanied but a few with guitar. Songs often have a chorus or a refrain – and people will join in anywhere that seems appropriate – but an unaccompanied solo will also be warmly received. Judging from the last couple of sessions, around half the songs are traditional, with most of the rest dating back to the Folk Revival of the 1960s and 70s, and between half and two-thirds are songs I know (which says a bit about how much of the repertoire is shared with other singarounds), although often in an unfamiliar version (which says a bit about how much work singers are willing to do to keep it interesting).

Let’s say that’s “what we do”; that’s what we want to preserve. What’s good about it? Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, or preserve, or enact – and if there is, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good? Alternatively, we could start from the position that singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, and then ask what it is about them that makes them good. In other words, if singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?

The singaround repertoire

The repertoire itself is the most obvious candidate for X. How does it shape up?

Traditional songs without singarounds? In terms of literal survival – in terms of not actually being lost to future generations – traditional songs certainly don’t need singarounds; in fact they don’t need any help from anyone, with the possible exception of a few conscientious librarians and database administrators. As someone pointed out in the discussion the other weekend, before the Revival began a lot of them had been lying around unperformed and unrecorded – or else performed only in social settings somewhere down an unnumbered road – for half a century or more. If organised sessions and concerts where you can hear traditional songs stopped tomorrow, the researchers of a future Revival wouldn’t need to do the rounds of the inns and sheep sheds; they wouldn’t even need to go down to the stacks and blow the dust off volumes of Sharp and Child and Bronson. They’d just need to find Walter Pardon and Sheila Stewart and Sam Larner on YouTube and press Play.

Revival singer-songwriter material without singarounds? There are plenty of non-traditional songs that I’ve heard at singarounds but never heard anywhere else – “Icarus”, “Queen of Waters”, “Dust to Dust”, “Rolling Home”… In fact there are songwriters whose songs I’ve only ever heard at singarounds – Graeme Miles, Keith Marsden, Roger Watson, Bill Caddick… I think it’s undeniable that singarounds are keeping some of this material in circulation – but the job could be done just as well by concert performances, YouTube uploads and artist Websites like this one and this one (creaky as that second one is).

So both halves of the singaround repertoire (as I know it) could manage without singarounds. In another sense, though, singarounds are a way of keeping the repertoire alive – at least, if by ‘alive’ we mean something stronger than ‘not extinct yet’. Something about a song is lost if it’s only heard in recordings and concert performances, especially if those recordings and performances are a long way from the sound of an unaccompanied singer. When you take a song and layer on rock guitar, or grime beats, or even a wholly-acoustic Bellowhead-style knees-up, to some extent the song stops being a song in its own right and becomes material, a contributory element of an overall sound. And that in turn means that keeping the song alive becomes a job for the professionals – there’s no way for you, the listener, to be part of the process, except perhaps by forming a band. To really play a part, you’d need to strip the song back to its essentials – the words, the tune, the voice – and keep the song alive by, well, singing it.

Singarounds without traditional songs – or Revival songs? I don’t see why not. Really, there’s no reason why singarounds couldn’t do what they do just as well with – and for – a completely different repertoire. I had a curious illustration of this once in Cornwall. I’d gone to a singaround on the Monday night (there was a lovely “Curraghs of Kildare”, I remember), and assumed the singing part of the holiday was over. In a pub on the Wednesday lunchtime, I noticed a group of men of advancing years in a side room, and realised that they were having a bit of a sing; I think they were celebrating one of the group’s retirement. I drifted over and joined in the odd chorus. After a while I got chatting with one of the singers, who showed me their song list – which was very long and included quite a few songs I knew to listen to (“Wooden Heart”, “My Grandfather’s Clock”, “The Three Bells”), but very few I could sing along to, and none that I could have led. Some things were familiar but different: they did “Lamorna” in stage-Cornish (“‘Er said, I know ‘ee now”) and without any percussion on the “wet”s. (I’d come from Manchester (home of Albert Square and indeed Pomona) but kept my trap shut.) They even sang one song that I’d heard at the Monday night singaround – “Goodnight Irene” – with the same tune and chorus but without any of the same verses.

Conclusion: any singaround needs a repertoire – and once it’s got one, it keeps that repertoire alive in a way that nothing else can do. But there’s no rule that says that the repertoire has to be mostly traditional, or even partly traditional. And it’s possible that, as time goes on, some singarounds will fall silent, taking their specific repertoires with them; I can only really speak about (and for) the singarounds I know as a singer.

The singing (solo)

High-quality singing without singarounds? Not a problem, obviously – although it should be said that there aren’t that many other ways to hear a really good singer sitting in the same room and on the same level as you.

Singarounds without high-quality singing? Would singarounds still be singarounds – would they be worth keeping on with – if there were no really good singers? It all depends what you mean by ‘really good’. A performance can be technically perfect and soulless, sounding more like an audition than a contribution to a social occasion. Equally, there are performances with great communicative power – songs that come across as moving, gripping, horrifying or hilarious; songs where the singer is transported and so are you – despite the odd missed high note or fumbled lyric.

Conclusion: singarounds and ‘good singing’ in a Cardiff Singer Of The World sense don’t necessarily go together. But ‘good singing’ in that second sense – singing seriously, with commitment and passion – is one of the things that singarounds are all about, because they’re all about investment in the repertoire – and that’s how you sing if you’re personally invested in what you’re singing.

The singing (together)

One way of identifying a really good singaround is from the quality of the choruses and harmonies. Not that everyone involved needs to be musically trained; some of the best harmonising comes from people just listening to one another and finding a note that nobody else is singing. What is essential is that people know the songs – or rather, that they know some of the songs and that they’re willing to pick up the ones they don’t know.

Chorus and harmony singing without singarounds? Not really a problem – there are choirs, there are shape note classes – although in those, more structured, settings the material is less likely to be familiar, and I imagine that the “find a gap and jump in” approach will often be frowned on.

Singarounds without choruses and harmonies? Obviously they exist; the online song sessions we’ve all been going to for the last three years are almost all harmony-deprived. Even in person, a session may not feature much or any joining in; low numbers and poor acoustics may militate against it. But a singaround where joining in on choruses and refrains was actually discouraged – as a matter of policy, not practicality – would be a strange thing.

Conclusion: chorus singing is a natural part of a singaround, where by ‘chorus singing’ I mean

  1. knowing what to sing to songs you know
  2. working out what to sing to songs you don’t know, and
  3. doing both of these on the basis of a judgment of what sounds right at the time, rather than having a preconceived melody or harmony line

Again, it’s a way of singing that goes with investment in the repertoire – the kind of investment that makes you want to lend your voice to the collective effort of singing it; and that goes for the parts of the repertoire you don’t know as well as the parts you do.

The singing (by everybody)

At all the singarounds I know, anyone who doesn’t have a song will be welcome to stay and listen. But, at all the singarounds I know, everyone who’s there will be asked if they do have a song – and anyone who sings will be asked to sing again when their turn comes round.

Singing in turn without singarounds?

Now you’re asking. I can’t think of another social setting where everyone present is given the opportunity to sing a song or lead a chorus – perhaps the kind of party where people are literally asked to give their ‘party piece’, but when did you last go to one of those?

Singarounds without singing in turn?

Again, this is hard to imagine. True, there are ‘jump in’ singarounds – where you get the next song by, in effect, taking it – but I haven’t been to one in a long time. Besides, even there the assumption is that everyone will get a chance to sing, or at least that everyone will have the chance to take a chance to sing. A singaround where you know in advance that only some of those present will be singing would be a very different proposition – more like a concert, with performers and an audience.

What makes a singaround?

The essentials seem to be

  • an opportunity for everyone to sing (and be listened to)
  • a repertoire with a familiar core and an open boundary
  • singers who are invested in the repertoire and interested in learning more of it
  • …and (at least) some of whom sing well, (at least) in terms of passion and intensity

So a singaround is an informal social gathering of people who like hearing singing done well and want to do it well; who enjoy listening to one another and singing together; and who like hearing familiar songs and learning new ones. It’s a social grouping which embodies a practice: a practice of singing based on commitment to the songs you’re singing and their delivery, a commitment which in turn is grounded in a substantial but finite repertoire. What the singaround’s repertoire is will vary from one to another, but it will be broadly definable in each case – which is to say, anyone who visits a singaround more than once will be able to tell more or less what they can expect, whether it’s “Sweet Lemany” or “Buddy, Can You Spare A Dime”, “Young Waters” or “A Mon Like Thee”. Each singaround’s repertoire is perpetuated through practice, song by song and session by session – and lines are drawn informally, over time, dictating the kind of thing ‘we’ do and don’t sing.

What do you do? Why do you do it?

Singarounds, then, are a social practice which have a symbiotic relationship with their repertoire, mediated by individual singers’ investment in that repertoire. If you want to keep a repertoire of songs alive – keep the songs in people’s throats and minds – there’s nothing like them.

In terms of the questions I started with –

Is there something valuable that singarounds like this one do, and if so, do we need singarounds to do it? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine X carrying on without singarounds – and would it be as good?

If singarounds are the good thing that should be kept going, what it is about them that makes them good? If singarounds are doing X, can we imagine singarounds carrying on without X – and would they be as good?

this isn’t a very satisfactory conclusion, although it has the merit of simplicity: not only is the valuable X that singarounds are doing not being done anywhere else, it’s the same X as the X that makes singarounds what they are. From “how do we get new people interested in singarounds?” I’ve gone all the way to “how do we get new people interested in a particular kind of social practice, based on equal participation among a group of people committed to a particular repertoire, and currently found mainly in singarounds?”.

But that formulation does at least suggest a possible answer:

  1. The singarounds themselves are what we want to keep going – not ‘social singing’ generally, not ‘folk clubs’ (or ‘folk’ anything, necessarily), not even the traditional-centred repertoire itself, but singarounds as a social practice.
  2. Singarounds have a basic, undeniable value as a meeting-place for people who know and care about their repertoire and as a shared practice ensuring that repertoire stays alive and keeps being sung.
  3. Off nights apart, that value is obvious to anyone who goes to a singaround and already cares about – or is mildly interested in – that singaround’s repertoire.

So what we need is:

  1. Singarounds that are working well and welcoming newcomers
  2. A continuing supply of newcomers, i.e. people who are at least mildly interested in the repertoire[s] of our singarounds and have a chance to experience them

I was a young man…

A lot of people, especially people who got into folk when they were young themselves, tend to assume that the challenge we face is attracting young people. That’s part of the challenge, but only part of it, and probably the most intractable part – how can we get young people to spend time with a lot of old people? how can we get young people to prefer folksong to whatever it is they’re into now? Since it’s rare for anyone to succeed in doing either of those things, answers tend to be speculative; the discussion is liable to drift off into talking about “Wellerman” and TikTok and social media and socialising online and do we all have to be in the same place, maybe that’s just what we’re used to…

But actually we don’t need – wait, let me be careful how I phrase this – we don’t necessarily need young people rather than older people. What we need is (point 2 above) a continuing supply of newcomers. To take a slightly absurd worst-case scenario, if everyone stopped going to singarounds when they turned 75, singarounds could still remain viable indefinitely by recruiting enough people who had just turned 70. The age distribution in singarounds does tend to skew old, of course – that’s where we started; indeed, the fact that the singaround I referred to at the beginning happens on a weekday afternoon tells its own story. There are good reasons for people to be worried about whether the baton is going to get passed; numbers are going to start depleting fairly steeply at the upper end of the age range before too long. But that doesn’t mean that we’ve got to start appealing to young people specifically – it’s a long way down from 70-75 to 18-24; it just means that we should appeal to as wide an age range as possible. I was recently at a singaround where about one in three of the singers were in their twenties (and a really good sing it was too – I was hoarse by halfway through) so I know it’s not impossible to get younger people interested, but it may well not be the easiest age range to pitch to; it may be that, at least in periods when folk isn’t in fashion, there’s an affinity between folk and middle age. (There’s an awful lot of death in those old songs; I lost my parents in my forties, and let’s just say that Lemony Snicket was right.) Perhaps it’s  40-somethings we should be worrying about rather than under-25s. Better, in any case, to keep the door as wide open as we can and not focus on – but also not exclude – any age group, as far as possible. Which certainly means not holding all our singarounds on weekday afternoons, and probably means not holding all of them in pubs. (I don’t think I’ve ever been to a singaround and been stone cold sober at the end of it, but it might be worth a try.)

Whether we need to do any work on the repertoire to avoid repelling newcomers is another question. I tend to think that what’s come down to us is ours to learn and sing, not to edit (at least, not deliberately), and that if we’re offended by elements of a song’s lyrics we should just not sing it. Admittedly sometimes it’s offensive to hear a song, let alone to be surrounded by people happily joining in with it; I sympathise, but rather than draw up a list of Songs To Walk Out On I’d advise patience and not judging singers, or singarounds, too hastily. (I vividly remember the look on a friend of mine’s face when he came into a singaround midway through an enthusiastic performance of The Chinee Bum Boat Man (about which all I’ll say is that it’s not quite as bad as it sounds). But he stayed, and he came back the next time. It was a good session.)

I also think that when it comes to traditional songs potentially offensive material is very hard to avoid. Rape, for example, is treated as a routine plot element in songs as varied as The Bonny Hind (tragedy), Knight William (romantic comedy) and Tam Lin (supernatural weirdness); in John Blunt the prospect of rape is played for laughs. People do draw lines, in point of fact, even with traditional songs. (I was once at a singaround where a singer who usually did the same three or four songs branched out by singing Bonnie Susie Cleland. We clapped, and then someone asked him, Why on earth did you learn that? Harsh but fair.) But even if you confine yourself to learning songs where all the sex is consensual and nobody gets burned at the stake, in most singarounds you’re going to hear songs about people (mainly men) behaving very badly indeed; songs like that are part of the repertoire, and often they’re really good songs. You have to come to your own accommodation: appreciate songs like that as horror stories, or failing that just enjoy the singing – or else take deep breaths and wait till the song’s over. (That was certainly the reaction at one Zoom singaround where I did Andrew Rose. I swallowed spit at one point and had to cough, and somebody said afterwards they’d thought the song was making me gag… too. Sorry about that.) In the nature of the singaround, there’ll be something completely different along in a minute or two.

As for point 2. up there, and the work of ensuring that there is a continuing supply of people (of all age ranges) with at least a vague interest in and awareness of English traditional songs, I guess we should all do what we can – although I’m aware that most of us can’t do a lot. The only thing I’d say is that we should reverse the order of the terms “English traditional songs”: we should focus on the qualities of the songs themselves rather than promoting them on the basis of being traditional, and not focus on the ‘English’ part at all if we can help it (beyond the fact that most of the songs we’re talking about are in English). There’s a way of thinking – expressed forcefully here – to the effect that “the English” have lost something that Celtic and migrant nationalities have hung on to, and that we need to make English folk music popular again in order to get it back (or possibly that we need to get it back again in order to make English folk music popular). I agree that it’s a damn shame that more people aren’t singing the old songs, and that traditional music gets more high-level backing in Ireland (and even in Scotland) than it does in England, but I don’t think we should be tempted to go any further than that. At the end of the day English nationalism is, to all intents and purposes, impossible to disentangle from British nationalism and the British Empire. A ground-up, subaltern English nationalism would have its own cultural forms – and might well embrace a lot of what we do in singarounds – but we’ve no idea what a subaltern English nationalism would look like, and we certainly can’t just make one up. Little bit of politics, my name’s Benedict Anderson, goodnight.

In conclusion, while folkies do a lot of different things (attending concerts, buying albums…), I think singarounds are a particularly pure and focused form of that thing we do; and the best way to hand it on to future generations in good order is to keep doing that thing we do, attracting people who are likely to be attracted and as far as possible not shutting anyone out. Let’s keep the singarounds going and keep them as open to newcomers as possible – and let’s keep the songs out there, pinging the cultural radar from time to time. Good luck to everyone who’s doing anything to extend the reach of traditional songs in English, with all their strangeness and beauty and horror, whether the songs are from England, Scotland, Ireland, America or Australia; whether they’re performing the songs with kids, teaching them to students or just finding some way to put them in front of adults born since the 1970s.

(Most of them won’t like it, of course. Most people never do. Fortunately, we don’t need most people, just enough.)

By Phil | Also posted in awfully deep, pleasant and delightful, you young people | Comments (0)

Burying the Red Wall

12 February 2022 – 13:09

I stumbled on this Tweet the other day.

The chart referred to is a list of the top 60 Tory targets in the 2019 election, ordered by the size of swing required (which effectively means by the size of the incumbent party’s majority over the Tories, but the figures look smaller). 24 are Labour seats, in England, with majorities of less than 5%; in the event the Tories took 19 of them (step forward Battersea, Bedford, Canterbury, Portsmouth South and Warwick & Leamington – good work, lads).

Here are all the gains the Tories made from Labour in England – well, almost all; the map doesn’t extend far enough south to show Ipswich, Stroud and Kensington, so there are 45 seats here instead of 48.

Image

Following Dan’s suggestion, the colour coding on this map based on how many successive elections each constituency had had as a Labour seat when it was taken by the Tories. Pale blue are 2017 Losses, seats that Labour took in 2017, or in two cases in 2015. (Labour made quite a lot of gains in 2017, didn’t they? Wonder if anyone’s drawn any lessons from that.) The deep blue are Ye Olde Laboure Heartelandes, seats that had been Labour since at least 1983; most of them go back to February 1974 (the first general election under the current franchise). Medium blues are Labour going back to 1997 (or in one case 2001); lastly, greys are seats whose Labour election count stood at zero, as they had gone into the 2019 election with an MP who had already left Labour – and who was, in all these cases, actively campaigning against their old party. (I’m referring to John Woodcock, John Mann, Ian Austin, Ivan Lewis and Angela Smith. Any resemblance between this list and a list of “absolute dangers expelled from the Labour Party” is for the reader.) I don’t usually set much store by the Ned Lagg Effect – people tend to vote for a party, not an individual, as individuals ranging from Jim Sillars to Ivan Lewis have discovered to their cost. But 2019 wasn’t a normal election; in a campaign one of whose dominant messages was Are You Going To Hand Britain Over To Terrorist Communist Traitors?, the discovery that your own (formerly) Labour MP was actually endorsing the whole Communist-terrorist thing must have shifted a few votes in those constituencies.

First impression: there’s a lot of pale blue. There’s also a fair bit of deep blue, but it’s scattered all over the map and consists very largely of spread-out, semi-rural constituencies. But we can do better than that. Here’s a map from the previous Red Wall post – now revised and updated, incidentally, and featuring the definitive description of the Red Wall courtesy of its original inventor (tl; dr interesting, but I’m still not impressed). This map has 51 constituencies on it: the (only) 50 Labour constituencies where the Labour vote share went down in 2017 relative to 2015, and Scunthorpe (I’ll explain why Scunthorpe in a minute).

Edit 13/2 Thanks to the reader who pointed out that I’d misidentified Scunthorpe as Hartlepool. No idea how I did that – it’s not even on the coast! Corrected.

Image

The colour-coding here is the version used in the previous post: the deep blues are long-term Labour seats where the 2019 Tory majority was 5% or more and the Labour vote had fallen by 10% or more relative to 2017 and the Labour vote was lower than at any time since (and including) 2001; the mid-blues are other long-term Labour seats that went to the Tories in 2019, while the reds are seats that Labour held in 2019. (Scunthorpe, in purple, is a ‘deep blue’ seat that doesn’t strictly qualify to be on this map, as Labour’s vote share rose between 2015 and 2017 – by half of one percent.)

Now, let’s tidy up and simplify a bit. I said at the top of the post that there were 24 seats where Labour’s margin over the Tories was 5% or less, and that the Tories took 19 of those. Let’s say for the sake of argument that any party having a good election is likely to have successes at that kind of level: if what we want to explain is why the Tories got such a big majority, or why Labour’s seat total fell so low, the sub-2.5% swing seats aren’t the place to look. So we’ll eliminate those 19 seats from the first map, to give 29 gains instead of 48, of which the map shows 29 instead of 45 (the three southern seats omitted from the map are among the 19).

As for the “long-term Labour, vote share down in 2017” map, let’s take out the Labour holds – we’re not interested in those right now – and, again, take out the 19 sub-5%-majority seats. We’re left with a fairly sparse map showing only 20 seats.

And here are those two maps.

Image

Spot the similarity.

As I said, there are 20 seats on the right-hand map and 29 on the left; the set of Tory gains from Labour in England overturning a majority greater than 5% isn’t identical with the set of long-term Labour seats where Labour’s vote share fell in 2017. But it’s close. The left-hand map (Tory gains against a >5% majority) includes all 20 of the seats in the right-hand map (long-term holds, relative vote share down in 2017); of the remaining nine, five are pale blue (only taken by Labour in 2017), three are mid-blue (1997 gains) and the ninth is grey (step forward Ivan Lewis).

My conclusion here is pretty much the same as the conclusion to the previous, big post (have you read the big post, by the way? recently? it’s revised and updated, you know). In five words, Red Wall: real but small.

The phenomenon people refer to as the Red Wall was the unexpected, large-scale loss of Labour votes to the Tories, apparently caused by long-term Labour voters deciding that they’d liked Labour in the old days but they couldn’t be doing with all this here political correctness, and taking place in the North
the North-East and North-West
the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire
the North-East, parts of the North-West and parts of Yorkshire, the East Midlands and some places around Birmingham
the North-East, some of the more rural parts of the North-West and Yorkshire, the East Midlands, some places around Birmingham although not Birmingham itself, and also Stoke
a whole bunch of places which really don’t have much in common other than being south of the border and north of Luton. I’m caricaturing, but I do actually think this is a real phenomenon: look at those two maps. But it’s only one phenomenon, and it wasn’t what won the 2019 election for the Tories – arguably it was only because the Tories were already winning the 2019 election that the Red Wall effect really kicked in.

If we’re interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, we’re interested in something that (a) genuinely happened and (b) happened up and down the country, but (c) only happened in a small number of places. Labour needs to make a lot of gains next time round, but whether it needs to make precisely those gains is more debatable – and whether the kind of Labour campaign that would win back Ashfield and Great Grimsby would win the country is very dubious indeed. Apart from anything else, look at the sub-5%-majority places that Labour did hold in 2019 – Portsmouth South, Bedford, Canterbury; look what happened to Labour’s vote share in 2017 in the south-east (scroll down, and brace yourself). If you were thinking tactically for Labour, which area would you concentrate on – the one where Labour lost vote share despite intensive campaigning and national media attention, or the one where Labour gained vote share with hardly anyone even noticing?

So if we are interested in the Red Wall phenomenon, at this stage we’re interested in it partly for purely historical reasons (something unusual did happen in those seats), and partly on a secondary tactical level. Nobody should be asking “how might learning from the Red Wall be useful for Labour?” – but “what errors might the belief that the Red Wall is useful for Labour lead to?” is an interesting and potentially useful question, as is “what biases and presuppositions are likely to have led people to believe Labour should learn from the Red Wall?”. And I think the answer is going to come from a closer look at those 50 seats. (Or 51 if you count Scunthorpe.)

By Phil | Also posted in England, geekage, pinkoes, politics, Red Wall, the Right | Comments (0)

To you, with regard (9)

27 August 2017 – 17:07

Let’s put the lid on this series, and when I say ‘put the lid’ I mean ‘pull the rug’. (This is the hand, the hand that takes…)

A number of things follow from the thought-experiment I’ve been developing. If, after you die, you are going to be uniquely and recognisably you for eternity, it follows that you should spend whatever life you’ve got becoming the best you that you can – the most fulfilled, the most fully actualized, the version of you that you would want to be if you had the choice. You are, after all, not going to get another chance; once round the circuit and that’s what you’ve got – that’s what you are – for ever and ever and ever. Secondly, if you’re going to be you for eternity along with everyone else, it follows that everyone else is going to count for exactly as much as you do. Moreover, on that immaterial, timeless plane their equal value with you will be inescapably obvious; empathy won’t be optional, over yonder. This rules out pursuing (what may appear to be) self-fulfilment by hurting other people, as doing so will land you with an eternity of apologies – an eternity of genuine pain, really. Thirdly, if everyone’s around forever, it follows that everyone who has ever lived or ever will live is (always already) around forever: when you check in, you’ll be rapidly introduced to your grandparents and great-grandparents, but also to your grandchildren and great-grandchildren, in whatever level of fulfilled self-actualization they (will eventually have) achieved before (they will have eventually) died. And it pretty much follows from this that, if you ever get the feeling that somebody up there likes you, you’re right, and you may well be feeling Somebody’s empathetic vibrations. (Blessed are they that mourn, for they will be comforted.) Only that Somebody isn’t Him, it’s just them; to put it another way, it’s just us.

Put all of that together and it follows fairly directly that – to quote myself – it’s a good idea to be accepting of other people, to live as fulfilled a life as you can, to honour your parents, to have kids, and to harm other people as little as possible, and in particular not to find pleasure or justification in harming other people. It also follows that there is no need to suppose there is a God.

Now, let’s say that none of this is true. Syllogism: animals die, their bodies rot, and no trace of them is ever perceived again; human beings are animals; therefore… Alternatively: everything that exists can be observed in some reliable and predictable way; evidence of survival after death has never been reliably and predictably observed; therefore… Let’s say that death is the end – of everything we know, think of or can imagine. No eternal presence; no timeless, dimensionless tuning-fork note; no reuniting with lost ones, meeting heroes, apologising to enemies; no warm buzz of omnidirectional empathy. Our existence through time isn’t superseded (sublated) into eternity, it comes to a stop and is cancelled in a single terminal moment. Our unique identity isn’t perfected and eternally preserved, it’s lost amid a million others and eventually forgotten, with a million others. What follows from that? Where’s your laundry list of moral precepts now?

One answer – widely attributed to atheists but mainly espoused by depressives, cynics, libertines and revolutionaries – is that if nothing lasts, nothing matters: you’re never going to be held to account for what you do, so why not do whatever you want? What’s interesting about this answer is the bad faith that lurks within its apparent logic. Look at the disjunct between the two groups I mentioned just now – those who are supposed to believe that they can do whatever they like without any comeback, and those who actually hold this belief and act on it. Revolutionaries and suicides believe that there is no future; suicides and cynics believe that nothing they do really matters; cynics and libertines believe that conventional morality is bullshit; libertines and revolutionaries believe that their own goals and desires are the truest morality. Most people in those groups probably do share the two key beliefs that death is the end and that there is no God to sit in judgment on us – but this basic atheist credo clearly doesn’t get us all the way to suicidal depression, revolutionary fervour or libertinism, or even to outright cynicism. On the contrary, one can believe that human life is made all the more precious – and the challenge of living fully together all the more important – by the fact that there is no life beyond this one and no chance of coming back for another try: you get what you get, and that’s it.

Hence the suggestion of bad faith. To spell it out, if we’re saying that if nothing lasts, nothing matters what we’re actually saying is that if nothing we can know lasts longer than human life – and if there is no agency higher than human life – then nothing matters more than my own decisions and impulses. Syllogistically, I would be bound by a higher morality in my dealings with other people if there were a God or an afterlife; there is no God or afterlife; therefore… The problem with this train of thought is that, unless you’re going through a crisis of faith, the belief that there is no eternity and no God doesn’t come as news: if you hold that belief, you already believe that that’s how the world is. But this means that the first half of the syllogism collapses: it’s like saying “if 0=1, morality is true”. (Don’t take my word for it, check it yourself – can’t argue with the maths.) What you’re really saying is, lots of people tell us what to do on the basis that there’s something higher and more permanent than the lives of people in society; there isn’t; therefore we can do as we like. It’s bad logic, apart from anything else: you’re jumping over the step where you establish that the lives of people in society don’t have any intrinsic value.

Which brings us back to our laundry list. If each individual is unique and intrinsically valuable, but each one of us is snuffed out, annihilated, when we die; if each person’s life is a unique journey to self-actualization, but each journey stops, never to be resumed, at the instant of death, however soon it comes; what follows from that? (Apart from a strong urge to put back my head and howl like a dog for my father, for my mother, for Madeleine, for Les, for every friend and relative who’s gone before and been taken too soon.) If my life is this bizarre hybrid of a treasure and a bad joke, and if everyone else is in the same position as I am (and I’ve never met anyone who wasn’t), then surely Eliot Rosewater had it right:

At the outside, babies, you’ve got about a hundred years here. There’s only one rule that I know of, babies: “God damn it, you’ve got to be kind.”

What I’m suggesting is that the whole idea of unique individual souls living on eternally – an idea which I’ve developed in a particular way in these posts, but which in itself is fairly uncontroversial among Christians – is an inverted reflection of the unbearable reality of death: death which ends time and extinguishes the individual. But this cuts both ways. Assume, in a kind of melancholic fantasy, that there is a God and a Heaven but that human life has no access to any of it – that some other beings are up there casting down their crowns around a glassy sea, while we poor homo sapiens die and rot – and certainly our lives would seem to be of little account. If there is nothing but human life (bounded by death), though, the scale we need to be working on is, precisely, the scale of human life bounded by death. And if, while we’re here, we’re each unique and valuable; and if, while it continues, each person’s life is a journey of self-actualization; and if each individual is ridiculously fragile and each life is absurdly unrepeatable; then it seems to follow – with, if anything, even more force – that it’s a good idea to be accepting of other people, to live as fulfilled a life as you can, to honour your parents, to have kids, and to harm other people as little as possible, and in particular not to find pleasure or justification in harming other people.

And when we die?

Tonight we fly
Over the houses
The streets and the trees
Over the dogs down below
They’ll bark at our shadows
As we float by on the breeze

Tonight we fly
Over the chimneytops
Skylights and slates
Looking into all your lives
And wondering why
Happiness is so hard to find

Over the doctor, over the soldier
Over the farmer, over the poacher
Over the preacher, over the gambler
Over the teacher, over the rambler
Over the rambler
Over the lawyer,
Over the dancer, over the voyeur,
Over the builder and the destroyer,
Over the hills and far away

Tonight we fly
Over the mountains
The beach and the sea
Over the friends that we’ve known
And those that we now know
Over their homes
And those who we’ve yet to meet
We’ll fly

Over the fathers
Over the mothers
And when we die
Over the sisters
Over the brothers
Oh, will we be that disappointed or sad
Over the children
Over the lovers
If heaven doesn’t exist?
What will we have missed?
Over the hills and far away
This life is the best we’ve ever had.

If you have been, thanks for reading these posts. I may publish a short round-up with links to earlier posts, but apart from that I’m not intending to continue the series. Normal service – i.e. closely-argued political nitpicking – will resume shortly.

By Phil | Also posted in awfully deep, big stuff, popular singing groups, religion | Comments (0)

To you, with regard (3)

8 July 2017 – 12:11

Not the Victorian poetry – I’ll get to that soon – but a footnote to part 1. In that post I wrote briefly about the Beatitudes, ‘blessed are they that mourn’ in particular :

where the meek inherit the earth and the merciful are shown mercy, what mourners are to be endowed with is ‘comfort’; specifically, the Greek says that they will be visited or called upon

Karl Dallas on Peter Bellamy:

We met for the last time on November 5, 1990. It is surprising to me, in retrospect, that though we had been close for a quarter-century … I’d never done what I could call a “proper” interview with the man I’d always regarded as the primus inter pares of the post-MacColl revival.

We settled down on a Monday afternoon for a trawl through all those 25 years, talking about influences, pursuing that endless and ultimately fruitless search for a definition of folksong. Playing back the tapes today, the man lives again in my head as I transcribe the over two hours of conversation, the chuckles and belly laughs, the way he could bat a question back at me like a Wimbledon champion going for game-set-and-match, the muscular integrity of the man.

He was bitter over some things, and I felt his bitterness was wrongheaded, telling him so. That difference spilled over into the interview as published in Folk Roots, and after it appeared he sent me an annotated copy of it, indicating where he felt I had got it wrong. I was hurt by his criticism (we critics aren’t used to subjects who bite back) and for the first time I felt estranged from him. We never met again, and when he died I wondered (as I am sure must many of us) what part I might have played in his decision to take his own life. Of course, each of us has the right to end our story as we wish; to deny that right is to deny our very humanity, I do feel. But the guilt remains.

Looking back, as I re-play the tapes, I have to admit that the article I wrote was a great missed opportunity. By concentrating upon his strictures upon the folk scene (and some of its leading protagonists), I missed the greatness of the man, his enormous humanity, his wonderful contribution to the joy that this process we miscall a revival has given us all. At the funeral, I was still in shock, burdened by guilt. As I knelt in the chapel, I felt Peter’s very presence. He seemed surrounded by light. And I distinctly heard his words, in that unmistakable blend of Norfolk vowels and English grammar-school education. “It’s all right,” he seemed to be saying. “It’s really all right.”

I felt something similar – although much less intense – after my friend Les died recently. Although he was a huge influence on me musically, we were never at all close, partly because we didn’t agree on the types of music we really valued. I wasted a lot of energy alternately resenting not being in with Les’s musical ‘in crowd’ and reproaching myself for not making more of an effort to join in. Ideally I should have talked about it with Les, but he was never particularly voluble – and how do you talk to someone about the fact that you’ve never been close? Anyway, I was fortunate to be among the musicians at the get-together after Les’s funeral, where there was a small display of pictures of Les through the years, many from long before I’d known him. As I looked at the pictures, all that resentment and self-reproach came churning back up like indigestion. But then I felt… not Les’s presence or anything like that, but I did feel precisely those words: It’s all right. It’s really all right.

I remember, too, the evening of the day I heard my friend Madeleine had died; I had a whisky and a hot bath, and suddenly nothing was wrong, everything was perfectly, blissfully all right. It wasn’t just exhaustion (or alcohol); I remember reflecting on how strange this feeling was, even wondering vaguely if it was a stage of grieving that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross had missed. I went to bed and slept like a contented child. (Then in the morning it all began again, of course.)

Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.

I’m not insisting on the reality of these experiences. To put it another way, I absolutely am insisting on the reality of these experiences – they did really happen – but I’m not insisting there was anybody there but me. I do think there’s something interesting here, though.

By Phil | Also posted in awfully deep, big stuff, everyday life, just me then | Comments (0)

Spitfires

12 January 2017 – 09:04

As you can see, I’ve changed the title of this blog (although not the URL). I’ve got a bad habit of picking titles and catchphrases which are resonant but gloomy – the title of my book is a classic example. “The gaping silence never starts to amaze” is a nice line (it’s from a fairly obscure song by the Nightingales) but I thought we could all do with something a bit more upbeat. “In a few words, explain what this site is about.” says the WordPress rubric; I think the new title and strapline are a bit more informative, too.

The reference is to a song which a friend reminded me of (inadvertently as it turned out).

I first heard this song at a local folk club about a year ago, and it’s grown on me since then. It seems like a good song for where we are now; where we’ve been since the 16th of June 2016, really.

Spitfires (Chris Wood)
Sometimes in our Kentish summer
We still see Spitfires in the sky
It’s the sound.

We run outside to catch a glimpse
As they go growling by
It’s the sound…

There goes another England:
Sacrifice and derring do
And a victory roll or two.

From the drawing board to the hand of the factory girl
Upon the lathe
It’s the sound…

It’s ordinary men and women
With an ordinary part to play.

Theirs was a gritty England:
“Workers’ Playtime” got them through
And an oily rag or two.

But sometimes I hear the story told
In a voice that’s not my own
It’s the sound…

It’s a Land of Hope and Glory voice
An Anglo klaxon overblown
It’s the sound…

Theirs is another England:
It hides behind the red white and blue.
Rule Britannia? No thankyou.

Because when I hear them Merlin engines
In the white days of July
It’s the sound…

They sing the song of how they hung a little Fascist out to dry.

By Phil | Also posted in blogology, England, popular singing groups, the Right | Comments (1)

Mr In Between

14 August 2016 – 23:36

This is interesting:

It’s fair to say that this view of the speaker in question wasn’t universally shared:

Follow the links to Twitter for more – much more.

The responses to Ms Blackman-Woods have generally accused her of misrepresenting the speaker, and by extension the mood of the meeting (As she’s subsequently made clear, she left after the speakers – and was presumably notified of the vote later on – so any misrepresentation of the meeting as a whole is only by omission.) I think this misses a trick. Let’s say that the speaker did indeed ignore Johnny Mercer’s advice and accentuate the negative, perhaps by stressing the reasons not to vote for Owen Smith. Let’s say that he did also say things that could be classed as ‘nasty’ and ‘abusive’ – perhaps because he said things about the visiting MP that she didn’t particularly want to hear. (According to reports from the meeting, the speaker did point out that, although Ms Blackman-Woods was willing to speak for Smith in Carlisle, her own constituency party in Durham wasn’t holding any nomination meetings.)

Let’s say, in other words, that what Roberta Blackman-Woods said in her tweets was simply, literally true – in the sense that the speaker nominating Corbyn did say things that were negative and things that were abusive. Where does that leave us? Is Ms Blackman-Woods now blameless when it comes to misrepresenting the meeting? Why, or why not?

My own view is that telling a story is about a lot more than enumerating events – a meeting took place, somebody spoke, a negative comment was made. The story that you tell fits into the expectations your audience bring to it; the details of the story that you tell don’t need to be plentiful or fine-grained, as long as you’ve gauged your audience’s expectations correctly and evoked them effectively. The story Roberta B-W is telling here, clearly, is the story of Corbynite abuse and intimidation: the story of the know-nothing mob that’s supposedly invaded the Labour Party, whose members bombard their opponents with negative and abusive comments, respond to disagreement with bullying and have nothing to offer but negativity (so that it’s “mystifying!” if a fair vote goes their way). This is why there are so many responses to her tweet from indignant – and I think, in many cases, genuinely surprised – members who feel the meeting as a whole was slurred as uncomradely and abusive. Which it wasn’t – RB-W didn’t even stay for the discussion – but those were the bells that were rung; that’s the story that she invoked, even if she wasn’t overtly telling it herself.

A story about people being aggressive and intimidating can have serious consequences, if it acquires legs; indeed, this story has had serious consequences, both directly (the cancellation of party meetings during the leadership contest and the suspension of three CLPs) and indirectly (in the hardening of attitudes among members, who oddly enough don’t much like being denounced as an ignorant mob). One way of ending this post would be to suggest that Roberta Blackman-Woods and others like her could take a bit more care over what they say; words have consequences, stories have real world effects, and just because people think of themselves as the innocent targets of verbal aggression, that doesn’t mean they aren’t capable of dishing it out – sometimes more effectively than their aggressors.

The more I thought about this, though, the more unlikely it seemed to me that the ‘Corbynite angry mob’ routine was going to be abandoned any time soon, by Roberta B-W or any of its other parliamentary exponents. Because, when you get right down to it, it’s all they’ve got. They can disagree with the mood in their CLPs (and other CLPs entirely), and take issue with the arguments being advanced; they can even argue that their arguments have a special right to be listened to – as MPs, they know a lot about what it takes to get elected, after all. But when it comes to knock-down open-and-shut arguments – the kind of argument that leaves your opponent unable to speak – they’re at a disadvantage. Party members can always appeal to democracy: it would be a brave Appeal Court that ruled that the Labour Party isn’t a democratic organisation – and if it is, the views of the members really can’t be ignored. The only way to trump this – and hence the only recourse of MPs who find themselves at odds with the membership – is to claim that the membership isn’t really the membership. These aren’t party members, they’re entryists and people manipulated by entryists; this isn’t internal party democracy, it’s bullying and intimidation; it’s not the self-assertion of a new social subject, it’s a nihilist wrecking attack; it’s not a crowd, it’s a mob. I’m reminded of nothing so much as Matthew Arnold’s reaction to the “Hyde Park Railings Affair” in 1866, when a crowd of people who had converged on Hyde Park for a rally, and who were being kept out of the park by the police, gained entry by breaking down the railings. Arnold pronounced that we were seeing the emergence of a new social subject, and one which never should have been permitted to emerge:

that vast portion … of the working-class which, raw and half-developed, has long lain half-hidden amidst its poverty and squalor, and is now emerging from its hiding-place to assert an Englishman’s heaven-born privilege of doing as he likes, and is beginning to perplex us by marching where it likes, meeting where it likes, bawling what it likes, breaking what it likes

You’d never guess from this that the rally in question was in favour of universal manhood suffrage – or that the second Reform Act would be passed the following year.

Something is happening in the Labour Party, and it’s happening at the level of the constituency parties and the individual members. When someone is calling it names from the vantage point of a position of power in the party, there’s not much point asking them to engage more constructively; the chances are that they’ve recognised that a thriving ground-level movement is a potential threat to their position. Remember your Dylan:

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don’t stand in the doorway
Don’t block up the hall

Heed the call – and get out of the way.

As for those who are determined not to get out of the way, the rhetoric of the ‘angry mob’ is always likely to be their first choice (although it would be nice if they at least kept the Nazis out of it). There’s not much point explaining patiently – time and time again – that criticism is not necessarily abuse, that raised voices are not necessarily intimidation, that assembling in numbers is not thuggery, and so on and on. What we can do is recognise it, and – perhaps – learn to ignore it, treat it as a form of bullying and rise above it; reasoned rebuttals take time and energy, and it’s not as if most of the people saying these things are likely to listen. “There’s a battle outside and it’s ragin'” – a battle for the Labour Party, anyway. If we lose, the terms of debate will shift; the ‘angry mob’ story will enter the record and all the other stories will be buried, only to be disinterred in thirty years’ time by some curious doctoral student. Best make sure we win.

 

 

By Phil | Also posted in meeja, new labour, pinkoes, up to my eyes | Comments (12)

The times they are hard

1 July 2015 – 00:38

I sing Peter Bellamy’s “Us poor fellows” at singarounds occasionally; if you want, you can hear me singing it here. It usually goes down pretty well; it feels like a song for our times – which is a bit disconcerting when you consider that the character singing it was hanged for burglary shortly afterwards. On one occasion a friend commented that the song was unusually left-wing for Bellamy, which got me thinking: is it a left-wing song? (I’m pretty sure Bellamy didn’t think it was.) Could it be sung by a right-winger? If not, what would a right-wing song sound like?

Here are the lyrics of the song, if you don’t know it. If you do, you may as well skip to the post immediately below. Continue reading →

By Phil | Also posted in pinkoes, the Right | Comments (0)

and the wages are poor

1 July 2015 – 00:38

In many ways this doesn’t look like a particularly left-wing song. Look at the second verse:

If we could find labour we ne’er would complain
We’d work well for a master his favour to gain
We’d be honest and faithful with never a stain

It’s not exactly “Solidarity Forever”, is it? Right Argument 1: Workers Want to Serve. (Or else “workers should want to serve” – or possibly “workers want to serve, deep down“.) Then:

a man with a family, his hands they are tied
He must look to their comfort or lose all his pride

And:

it breaks his poor heart for to see his wife cry
So, poor fellow, he’ll do what he can
… he’ll turn out and rob,
Poor fellow, to prove he’s a man.

Right Arguments 2a and 2b: A Man Needs His Pride and Men Are The Breadwinners. (These weren’t radical or unusual arguments in the 1780s, when the action of the song was set; they were still very much the common sense of the age. But they certainly aren’t left arguments.)

Then some thoughts about crime:

If a good man goes robbing, you know it’s a shame
He brings scorn and misfortune on his honest name

Right Arguments 3a and 3b: Respectability Is Valuable and Crime Is Shameful.

And the big finish:

let’s hope that these hard times will soon pass away
And unto our sweet Saviour we earnestly pray
That this dark cloudy morn brings a glorious day

Opening with a nod to the traditional song Hard Times of Old England, these lines preach religiously-justified passivity. Right Argument 4: The Lord Will Provide (Because We Can’t).

To be fair, there are a few lines in the song which seem to be making ‘left-wing’ arguments. On inspection there are two main arguments, each with two sub-claims. There’s an argument about unemployment:

So how can a good man keep the wolf from the door?
Poor fellows, we all will go down.
When work it is scarce, tell me, how can we eat?
How can we afford to buy shoes for our feet?

Sometimes people are out of work because there is no work, or not enough work. And we can’t assume the existence of some Darwinian struggle guaranteeing that the scarce jobs go to the best people: sometimes good people suffer, through no fault of their own, because the jobs aren’t there. So here’s Left Argument 1a: Unemployment is Real. (Also, in the ‘shoes’ line, another nod to Hard Times of Old England.)

We could plough the good land, we could fish the salt sea
We could work in the woodland a-felling of trees

Anyone who’s ever been unemployed or under-employed – a group which included Peter Bellamy – can identify with this couplet: there’s stuff I could do! (“Gizza job. I could do that.”) Left Argument 1b: Unemployment has Social Costs.

Then there’s an argument about crime:

a man that is desperate and can’t find a job
He will not be contented to sit home and sob:
Be he never so honest, he’ll turn out and rob

Crime isn’t only committed by people dedicated to dishonesty: an honest man may be driven to it. So that’s Left Argument 2a: Crime has Social Causes.

The fourth claim ties the two arguments together:

If a good man goes robbing, you know it’s a shame
He brings scorn and misfortune on his honest name
But in pitiful straits, tell me, who is to blame?

Left Argument 2b: Poverty Reduces Blame.

In short, this is a left-wing song inasmuch as it argues that the economy sometimes denies people a job; that this has bad results for them and for society, including a rise in crime; and that, in the circumstances, some of those responsible for the rise in crime aren’t entirely to blame.

On the other hand, it’s a right-wing song inasmuch as it argues for subservience at work, patriarchal dominance at home, respectability and rejection of crime, and pious fatalism.

Three thoughts come to mind. Firstly, it seems to me that those right-wing values are a lot more fundamental than the supposedly left-wing ones. Whether crime may sometimes be promoted by economic conditions is very much a secondary question compared with the questions of whether workers should “work well for a master, his favour to gain”; whether a man should be seen (and see himself) as the head of the household; whether criminality is always shameful; and whether improvements to collective conditions can be left in the hands of the Almighty. This is not surprising: Peter Bellamy had a long-running disagreement with those folk singers who claimed to have excavated a radical tradition of working-class song, maintaining that the huge majority of traditional songs about work celebrate working conditions and wish the master well. This is, in part, his tribute to that tradition.

Secondly, I think it’s arguable that the left-wing arguments aren’t actually left-wing at all, in two senses. To say that a capitalist economy doesn’t guarantee full employment – and that it is indifferent to the personal worth of the people it periodically throws out of work – is not a left-wing argument, or any sort of argument; from my limited understanding of economics, it’s basically a statement of fact. To say that social conditions temper effective freedom of choice, again, isn’t so much a left-wing argument as common sense. On the other hand to say that, when freedom is reduced, blame for wrongdoing should also be reduced isn’t a left-wing argument but a compassionate one. What this song demonstrates, in other words, is that it’s possible to combine a highly conservative worldview – in which respectable working men serve their masters, provide for their families and have no aspirations to bring about social change – with economic realism and compassion. I think they used to call this combination ‘Toryism’.

But (thirdly) if that’s the case, what are we saying when we say that this sounds like a left-wing song? I think this tells us something about what ‘right-wing’ means these days. It suggests that ‘right-wing’ means looking at unemployment through a stigmatising mythology of the deserving and undeserving poor, instead of from the perspective of economic realism, and looking at law-breakers as criminal types who deserve only punishment, rather than trying to extend compassionate understanding to them. In short, it means allowing the pleasures of class warfare to take precedence over rationality and humanity, to say nothing of the effective reduction of crime and the management of the business cycle.

In conclusion, let’s hope that… well, these hard times are going to be with us for a while, particularly given that the present government plainly regards promoting economic growth as less important than assuring its own survival. But let’s hope that by the end of the year Labour, at least, has a leader who doesn’t believe in dealing with unemployment by attacking the unemployed, or dealing with crime by making convicted criminals suffer – and who, unlike the previous leader, believes in stating his or her beliefs clearly and without equivocation. It wouldn’t make Labour a left-wing party, and it probably wouldn’t take them any nearer to power – but it would represent an act of moral and intellectual hygiene which is long overdue.

By Phil | Also posted in pinkoes, the Right | Comments (0)
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