Articles
[by Martha Hawley, Haarlem] The Fira Mediterrània was held in October 2023 for the 26th time, in celebration of Catalan traditional and popular culture, accompanied by performance and artistic contributions from around and across the Mediterranean. The pace of the festival is determined by the topography of its base in the hills north of Barcelona, in Manresa, all on an incline, very appealing to this visitor from the Lowlands. Performance venues are spread out all over town, in and around commercial and residential zones, in small theatres, even smaller cafés, and in large tents wherever an empty square allows.
There are many performing dancers on stages, but the music inspires visitors to just spontaneously break into action on the street.
Manresa’s main theatre is the Kursaal, where the opening night spectacle was held, featuring Italian singer Maria Mazzotta, music and production by Catalonia’s well-known musician and producer Raúl Refree, and the female Plèiade Choir. Mazzotta’s voice was a dynamic, penetrating pan-Mediterranean timbre for opening the festival, and Plèiade impressed with their sound.
Catalan music itself is one of the oldest unbroken musical traditions in Europe; musicians and artesans furthering the old arts are present on the stretches of outdoor festival grounds in the center of town.
Among the traditional instruments undergoing revival are the bagpipes, banned, as were all popular sounds, languages and compositions, under the Franco dictatorship. Recovery of local culture began 40 years ago, but the Catalan, Italian and Turkish pipers in the “Mediterranean Bagpipes Company” met just a few months ago. This was clearly a fortuitous meeting, as their exuberant sound drew joyous listeners and dancers out onto the public square.
Fusion from around the Mediterranean is a familiar sound at the Fira, but Catalan sounds hold their own throughout the programming. Vocalists, solo musicians and theatre companies abound, not to mention the Cobla, often played as dance music for the beloved Sardana. This year, the “Cobla Lluisos de Taradell” brought a female teller of legends, backed by traditional Cobla musicians, to enthrall the young crowds, and it seemed a very celebratory way of sharing the old culture with the new generation.
As affirmed by the Fira’s Artistic Director Jordi Fosas, it is one of the festival’s challenges to pass on traditional culture to the youngest listeners, while taking into account the changing demographics in Catalonia. New residents come from all over Spain, Latin America and North Africa, and the concept of “popular culture” must change and expand with the local population.
Mediterranean-rim countries are already there, with, as mentioned above, Italy’s Puglia leading the opening night. France’s “Les Mécanos” explored French and Occitanian traditional song in glorious a capella formation. Turkey was also represented, with the exquisite sounds of the “Ali Dogan Gonultas Trio”. The melodic and emotional delivery left a deep impression on the audience.
Old-style arts get reworked at the Fira. The “Compañia Carmen Muñoz”, uniting Andalucia with Catalonia, gave us modern jazz dance with flamenco postures and more that picked up speed as the electronic accompaniment increased its volume. The dancer narrated as she whirled forcefully, recalling John Cage and philosophies of space, movement and time. This at times overwhelming performance was given in an empty brick factory, up a hill and down a few back alleys, which the city of Manresa makes available on occasions like this. As challenging as it was to listen, this seemed an apt metaphor for certain aspects of cultural change nowadays in Catalonia – the old structure housing the new. I will look forward to what’s there next.
all photos (c) Martha Hawley
17. 10. 2023 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Intensive treatment for cancer prevented me working much on Prince Heathen – The Age of Carthy and England’s Folksong Revival for most of 2022. I resume work on Martin Carthy’s biography in 2023. The upside was spending much of the year thinking about and challenging what I had already written. The downside was that for months I managed to to read or write for 10 to 30 minutes a day before needing to rest.
There were hardly any live concerts and no street music to speak of. In tiny windows of opportunity, I did get to see one photographic exhibition, Gli Isolani (The Islanders) of mainly Sardinian and Sicilian pagan and pre-Christian folklore at Hackelbury Fine Art. I went along with Barry Pitman who specialises in photographing England’s morris and folklore.
New releases aka Playlist
Eliza Carthy And The Restitution / Queen of the Whirl / Hem Hem https://www.eliza-carthy.com
Tom Delany / The Lark’s Call / [Own Label] https://tomdelany.bandcamp.com/
Nick Hart / Sings Ten English Folk Songs / Roebuck Records https://www.nickhartmusic.com
Nancy Kerr / The Poor Shall Wear The Crown / Little Dish Records https://nancykerr.bandcamp.com
Kronos Quartet, Van-Ánh Vanessa Vo and Rinde Eckert / My Lai / Smithsonian Folkways https://folkways.si.edu/
The Legends of Tomorrow / Days Full of Rain /
Calum MacColl / About Time / Red Grape Music
The Magpie Arc / Glamour In The Grey / The Magpie Arc
Angeline Morrison / The Brown Girl and Other Folk Songs / (Own Label) https://angelinemorrisonmusic.bandcamp.com/
Angeline Morrison / The Sorrow Songs: Folk Songs of Black British Experience / Topic Records https://www.topicrecords.co.uk
Emily Portman & Rob Harbron / Time Was Away / [Own Label] https://www.emilyandrob.uk
Rowan : Morrison / In The Sunshine We Rode The Horses / MillerSounds https://rowanmorrison.bandcamp.com/
Sam Sweeney / Escape That / Hudson Records https://hudsonrecords.co.uk
Phil Tyler & Sarah Hill / What We Thought was a Lake was a Field of Flax / https://philtylersarahhill.bandcamp.com/
Ye Vagabonds / Nine Waves / River Lea Records https://www.roughtrade.com
Historic releases, reissues and anthologies
Little Feat / Electrif Lycanthrope – Live At Ultra-Sonic Studios, 1974 / Rhino
Grateful Dead / Dave’s Picks Volume 43, Family Dog At The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA (11/2/69), McFarlin Memorial Auditorium, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX (12/26/69); Family Dog At The Great Highway, San Francisco, CA (11/2/69) / Rhino
Hamish Imlach / Ballads of Booze/Old Rarity/Fine Old English Tory Times/Murdered Ballads /
BGO https://www.bgo-records.com
The Watersons / Frost and Fire / Topic Records https://www.topicrecords.co.uk
Events of 2022
Squeezed in four live concert performances (all reviewed in RnR) and one photographic exhibition. All four concerts stood out musically and planting seeds of thought. As did Gli Isolani (The Islanders) photos of “festivities and celebrations in Sicily, Sardinia and islands of the Venetian lagoon”.
Peggy Seeger & Calum MacColl / The Stables, Waverdon / 2 March 2022
Martin & Eliza Carthy / Kings Place, London / 12 March 2022
Yorkston-Thorne-Ghatak / Kings Place, London / 18 May 2022
One of my two reviews is online at: http://www.pulseconnects.com/yorkston-thorne-ghatak
Alys Tomlinson / Gli Isolani (The Islanders) / Hackelbury Fine Art / 19 October 2022 https://hackelbury.co.uk/alys-tomlinson-gli-isolani-the-islanders/
Angeline Morrison & The Sorrow Songs Ensemble / Cecil Sharp House, London / 20 October 2022
Books reading of 2022
Nature abhors a vacuum and books elbowed out film and television for my time. The ten new, old or returned-to books which left the greatest mark during 2022 were…
Sue Allan / The Cumberland Bard – Robert Anderson of Carlisle 1770-1833 / Bookcase / 2020 https://www.bookcasecarlisle.co.uk
Herbert E. Badham / A Study of Australian Art / Currawong Publishing / 1949 [no website]
Caroline Davison / The Captain’s Apprentice: Ralph Vaughan Williams and the Story of a Folk Song / 2022 https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/444958/the-captains-apprentice-by-davison-caroline/9781784744540
Alan Garner / Treacle Walker / HarperCollins / 2021 https://harpercollins.co.uk/products/treacle-walker-alan-garner
Blair Jackson & David Gans / This Is All a Dream We Dreamed – An Oral History of the Grateful Dead / Flatiron Books / 2015 https://www.flatironbooks.com
Neil Philip / The Watkins Book of English Folktales / Watkins / 2022 https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/719587/the-watkins-book-of-english-folktales-by-neil-philip/
Barry Pitman / Jack in the Green – “Ladies & Gentlemen are you ready for Jack in the Green” / 2022
S. F. Said with Dave McKean (illustrator) / Tyger / David Fickling Books /2022 https://www.davidficklingbooks.com
Paul Thompson and John Watterson / Beware of the Bull: The Enigmatic Genius of Jake Thackray/ Scratching Shed Publishing, 2022
Richard Thompson with Scott Timberg / Beeswing – Fairport, Folk Rock and Finding My Voice 1967-75 / Faber & Faber / rev pbk 2022
Ten past music projects released before 2022. Some are newly discovered. Others ones revisited or returned to inspire or entertain.
The Bonzo Dog Band / Cornology / EMI, 1992
Coope, Boyes & Simpson / In Flanders Fields / No Masters, 2014
Jerry Garcia David Grisman / Shady Grove / Acoustic Disc, 1996
Ranjana Ghatak / The Butterfly Effect / Own Label, 2020
Los Lobos / KIKO Live / Floating World Records / 2012
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band / Will the Circle be Unbroken / Capitol / 2002
Al O’Donnell / Ramble Away Collection: Live & Studio / All Media Entertainment / 2008
Robert Plant & Alison Krauss / Raise The Roof / Warners / 2021
Django Reinhardt / Rétrospective 1934-53 / Saga / 2003
Jean Ritchie / Mountain Hearth & Home / Rhino Handmade / 2004
How the People’s Republic of Hounslow appreciates art is distilled into Hounslow’s one and only Banksy. His much degraded ‘Smile’ graffito is on the wall of what the railway pub. Since 2021 it has covered up by a Dosa advert. Unless otherwise stated, all original photos © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.
25. 12. 2022 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Another strange year spent thinking, living, breathing and writing about Martin Carthy and his approved biography, Prince Heathen. All I shall say on the subject is to say that Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker came out in October 2021. He crams into 150-some pages a lifetime of writing and many years of ideas and imagination. It took Alan a fair few years to write it and it was worth the wait. (A link to my Swing 51 interview Alan Garner: Read more ) A quote of his in the FTWeekend Magazine of 18/19 December 2021 caught my eye and imagination and will be in Prince Heathen and will serve to explain much. I hope. Enough about Prince Heathen.
In part this Best of 2021 reflects reviewing commissions from RnR and Jazzwise. Incidentally, for over ten years I have written a political music column called RPM in RnR; each issue homes in one piece of music ranging from the Plastic People of the Universe, Woody Guthrie and the Kronos Quartet to Robert Burns, Joe Strummer & The Mescaleros and Bonnie Dobson. As I have for over twenty years I have been adding new musical entries to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The Dictionary of National Biography is Britain’s standard work of reference on notable figures who have coloured British history and culture. Its first edition was published in 1885. I joined the team for the Millennium edition and have now added more new folk music-related entries than any individual contributor in its entire history. I’d love to tell you the next ones I’ve written for 2022 but that is the way it works. https://www.oxforddnb.com/
Little of the 2021 assembly may on the face of it look as if it has anything to do with Martin’s biography. Much of it doesn’t: much of it does.
A total highlight of 2021 was seeing Tom Constanten perform with Live Dead ’69. Tom is now the longest postal correspondent of my life. In 2022 we breach our fifth decade of sending postcards, letters and those flimsy blue things, aerogrammes to each other. What with Coronavirus test results coming back and all that jazz, Tom and I only squeezed in 90 minutes sequestered alone to talk. Oh boy! Isn’t mortality amazing!
This Best of… was, as always, written and added to over the course of the year. The final stages of this 2021 appraisal were written to the accompaniment of the Grateful Dead’s Cornell 5/8/77 (2017) and Melody Gardot’s My One And Only Thrill (2009). On the cover of which a sticker says, “The Holy Grail of Dead shows”. Especially, compact disc 3. Still blows me away years after reviewing it in Jazzwise. Play it.
Before you read on, a tip. Boys and girls, do remember when you shower to come out with three good ideas and do remember get them down real quick before they dry.
New releases aka Playlist
Angrusori / Live at Tou / Hudson Records
Bellowhead / Reassembled / Hudson Records ↑
Iva Bittová / Pro Radost // For Joy / Indies
Norman Blake / Day By Day / Smithsonian Folkways
Nora Brown / Sidetrack My Engine / https://jalopyrecords.bandcamp.com/
Peter Case / The Midnight Broadcast / Bandaloop Records
Dose Hermanos [Bob Bralove and Tom Constanten] / Persistence of Memory / Blotter Brothers Publishing
Samantha Ege / Fantasie Negre – The Piano Music of Florence Price / Lorelt
Ian King / Inebriate of Air – Songs for Emily – / http://fledglingrecords.co.uk/
Mec Yek / Taisa / Choux de Bruxelles / https://choux.net/mecyek
Scarlett O’ & Jurgen Ehle / Selbst die Sintflut / Dauert nicht ewig – Helene Weigel und Bertolt Brecht in Buckow / https://www.scarlett-o.de/sinneswandel/electrocadero/
Polly Paulusma / Invisible Music – Folk Songs That Influenced Angela Carter / http://www.olirecords.com
Romanovska, Tichý, Hrubý & Blaziková / Jsem Navždy Jedním Z Nás / I Am One of Us Forever / https://www.hevhetia.com/
Peggy Seeger / First Farewell / https://www.redgrapemusic.com/
Spiers & Boden / Fallow Ground / Hudson ↑
Jon Wilks / Up The Cut / Jon Wilks Bandcamp
Historic releases, reissues and anthologies
Chris Barber / A Trailblazer’s Legacy / https://www.lastmusic.co.uk/
Mimi Farina with Lowell Levinger / Live in Germany / http://www.breadandroses.org /
Various / Hamish Henderson Tribute Vol. 2 – Ballad of the Banffies / https://www.greentrax.com/ /
Ashley Hutchings / An Hour with Cecil Sharp & Ashley Hutchings / Talking Elephant Records
Andy Irvine / Old Dog Long Road Vol. 2 1961–2015 / http://www.andyirvine.com
Ali Akbar Khan / That Which Colors The Mind / Bear’s Sonic Journals https://owsleystanleyfoundation.org/
Christy Moore / The Early Years – 1969-81 / Tara Music https://www.overdraftrecords.co.uk/label/tara-music-division-of-universal-music-ireland/https://www.overdraftrecords.co.uk/label/tara-music-division-of-universal-music-ireland/
Joseph Spence / Encore: Unheard Recordings of Bahamian Guitar and Singing / Smithsonian Folkways ↑
Rod Stradling / Treacle & Bread / http://ghostsfromthebasement.bandcamp.com
Various / Deutschfolk: Soundtrack zum Volksliedrevival in der BR[D]DR / NoEthno
Various / Roy Bailey Remembered / Towersey Festival
Various / The Electric Muse Revisited / https://www.gooddeedsmusic.com/
Various / The Village Out West – The Lost Tapes of Alan Oakes / Smithsonian Folkways ↑
Various / Working River – Songs and Music of the Thames / Folkfree Recordings
Events of 2021
Once again Covid-19 reduced a healthy diet of live music to starvation rations. Squeezed in four concerts stood out musically and/or for planting seeds of thought.
Love Letters, Anoushka Shankar / Royal Festival Hall, London / 30 May 2021
Read more
Eddi Reader / Kings Place, London / 1 October 2021 Read more
Paul Novotný Trio / Ta Kavárna, Na Topolce, Praha 4 / 6 October 2021
Live Dead ’69 / Under The Bridge, London / 12 November 2021
If you’d like to visit a bunch of Ken Hunt’s reviews in Pulse pop along to:
Films of 2021
Nature abhors a vacuum and film and television filled part of stimulus void left by the poverty of live concerts. Nine outstanding films that left the greatest marks during 2021 were… [Sound of envelope being opened]
Wayne Blair / Top End Wedding / 2019
Pippa Ehrlich and James Reed / My Octopus Teacher / 2020
Marleen Gorris / Within the Whirlwind/Stalin – Reign of Terror / 2009/2018
Byron Howard and Jared Bush / Encanto /2021
Mimi Leder / On the Basis of Sex / 2018
Gillies MacKinnon / The Last Bus / 2021
Alan Rickman (director) / A Little Chaos / 2014
Jessica Swale(director) / Summerland / 2020
Chloé Zhao (director) / Nomadland / 2020
A baker’s dozen of past music projects released before 2021 whether newly discovered or revisited ones which returned to inspire over the course of the writing year.
Breghde Chaimbeul / The Reeling / River Lea, 2019
Chieftains / 4 / Claddagh, 1973
Paul & Liz Davenport / Spring Tide Rising / Hallamshire Traditions, 2011
Jerry Garcia / Jerry on Jerry – The Unpublished Jerry Garcia Interviews / Hachette, 2015
Grateful Dead / Cornell 5/8/77 / Rhino, 2017
Jablkoň / Devátá Vlna (‘Ninth Wave’) / Panton 1988, expanded edition Supraphon, 2003
Udo Lindenberg / Live aus der Hotel Atlantic – Unplugged / Warner Music Group, 2011 https://www.udo-lindenberg.de
Mighty Baby / At A Point Between Fate and Destiny – The Complete Recordings / Grapefruit 2019
Paul Novotný, Aliaksandr Yasinski and Petr Tichý /Jazz Gypsy N Tango / 2019 www.paulnovotny.eu
Peggy Seeger / Live Nelson, New Zealand / 2012
Various / The Real Bahamas in Music and Song / Polydor Special, 1969
Various / World Library of Folk and Primitive Music, Volume V: Yugoslavia / Rounder, 1999
The Watersons / Mighty River of Song / Topic, 2003
Hedy West / Serves ‘Em Fine / Fontana, 1967
Small print
The topmost image is of Aliaksandr Yasinski playing a Jupiter bayan (thanks to my occasional song collaborator Jürgen Ehle for transliterating and identifying the model) and Tom Constanten playing the Casio. © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.
How the People’s Republic of Hounslow appreciates art is distilled into Hounslow’s one and only Banksy. This much degraded ‘Smile’ is on the wall of what became a Dosa joint in 2021. It once was a very average railway pub, meaning it was opposite the station and was handy for sheltering in from foul weather got. The very distressed Smile 2021 is from summer 2021. © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.
1. 1. 2022 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] 
Even as she juggles an extensive repertoire and audience expectations, Eddi Reader is the sort of performer who gives one-off performances. The concert tour celebrated four decades as a professional musician. Reeling back the years the concert focused on her time as solo headliner and years as the lead vocalist in the successful Scottish group Fairground Attraction. (Even further back she sang for her supper singing with the Eurythmics (check out the YouTube footage singing ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ on Top of the Pops) with fellow Scot Annie Lennox) and as a session singers in the London studios. What she delivered at Kings Place was bespoke for the occasion and drew on an astoundingly diverse and impressive trove of material, traditional, original and covers.
She hit the London concert on her 40 Years Live tour wearing a silver-glitter Covid mask creation that would set any Frozen fan’s heart aflutter. And then removed it, da-da-dah-dah-ing David Rose’s ‘The Stripper’. A fair proportion of the audience stayed masked. Her set had allusions harkening back to her London days. As she frequently does, she adjusted lyrics from the opening ‘The Right Place’ changed to the predictable improvisation “I’m in the Kings Place now.” Throughout Reader sprinkled anecdotes and banter in her introductions and sometimes partway through the songs. She had not lost the knack. A notable stream of consciousness intro for, it turned out, ‘Baby’s Boat’, began in her busking days in France with Mark Wright. She leapt forward to visiting him at Winchelsea on the East Sussex coast. A boatload of refugees landed on the beach and the authorities were there to ‘receive’ them. Families with small children and cuddly toys stepped onto dry land. The people in the shoreline pub they were in had an impromptu whip-round of twenty pound notes to buy them hot food – chips (pommes frites) and the like – and blankets.
That is my homeland, not the septic isle Britain’s Home Secretary, the diehard Eurosceptic Priti Patel has championed – while conveniently ignoring how her expelled Ugandan-Gujarati family benefited from another kind of British attitude to refugees before she was born. Eddie Reader’s preamble gave no clues that ‘Baby’s Boat’ from her 2013 Vagabond album was coming. Even though, the connection with its introduction was tenuous, it didn’t matter a jot.
Accentuating the one-off-ness of the concert, good-naturedly she poked fun the southern English accents on the ‘Charlie Is My Dahling‘ chorusing. Totting the Fairground Attraction quota up afterwards – remember, Burns’ ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ was anthologised in their bits and bobs collection of the same name before her 2013 career milestone Sings the Songs of Robert Burns – was a surprise. Her dad, a devotee of “St. Elvis of Presley” she quipped, had even done a mass when ‘Perfect’ reached the top of the charts. The concluding Maryhill tenement party routine of the evening – already there before lockdown – came with added zip because her sister Jean the younger was in the audience. Quite the little actress, Reader flicked imaginary Embassy Regal cigarette ash at a Maryhill tenement party, play-acting Jean the senior being coaxed to sing. Father Ted‘s Mrs Doyle’s “Go on, go on, go on.” left my lips. She ended perfectly with a make-believe party flow during which she sang ‘Second-Hand Rose’ and ‘Moon River’. Reader’s mezzo soprano range matched only, in my experience, that of the Czech singer Iva Bittová and Germany’s Scarlett ‘O (Seeboldt). She and her band flew.
Eddi Reader sang and delivered as if her entire life and art belonged on that Kings Place stage, not that she was back in it for the money. Seeing that joy from such an remarkable artist exceeded the inspirational. Seeing her pour her heart out on stage brought tears of happiness.
All photos © Santosh Dass/Swing 51 Archives
Further information: http://eddireader.co.uk/
18. 11. 2021 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London]
What was the last live gig you saw before Covid-19 brought live music in front of audiences juddering to a standstill?
Mine was Yorkston Thorne Khan’s London concert on 11 March 2020. It was the start of their tour promoting their third album, Navarasa: Nine Emotions. YTK are James Yorkston on nyckelharpa (Swedish keyed fiddle), 6-string guitar and vocals, Jon Thorne on double-bass, 6-string guitar and vocals, and Suhail Yusuf Khan on sarangi and vocals.
Watching how they have developed their unique blend of north-western Indian and Anglo-Scottish literary and musical traditions, with a strong jazz bass underpinning, has proved delightful. They appeared on the bill on the Rudolstadt Festival in 2017 confirmed how promising they were. Seeing the stream of new, original material develop since then has been revelatory. Here the Scots traditional ballad ‘Twa (‘two’) Brothers’ and Robert Burns’ ‘Westlin Winds’ were exceptional examples of how to blend, respectively, the Anglo-Scottish ballad tradition and bols (Hindustani rhythm syllables), and Sufi poetry and Burns.
One of the great things about YTK has been seeing repertoire items sown, grown, blossoming and coming to fruition live – and how the concert versions of what they play eclipse studio versions. Their London concert reinforced that many times over. Plus there were the spoken drolleries (Yorkston: “Most people think of me as only a clothes horse” and the like). And the profundities, typified by their 2015 collaborative debut Everything Sacred‘s ‘Broken Wave (A Blues For Doogie)’ and its ‘And I am sleepless/And terrified.‘ which has swelled in resonance and stature.
Post-Covid hindsight screams about the injustice of YTK not really having the chance to have gone out and properly promoted Navarasa: Nine Emotions. Kings Place proved to one of the few and last concerts on their truncated tour. Afterwards, we spoke to them and I talked about having returned from Zürich days before and having read with growing alarm about how day to day the Swiss-German broadsheets had been plotting the spread of Covid from canton to canton. It now feels like an interlude of lightheartedness before something terrible like a war descends.
Postscript
Afterwards Suhail Yusuf Khan spent time in Britain. He interviewed me about Hindustani music. That was an unusual inversion.
All images © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives
Further information: https://www.yorkstonthornekhan.com/
24. 10. 2021 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] 2020 will go down as the first year of Covid-19. It was the strangest year for making music and writing about it many of us have ever experienced. In late February I was working in Gaienhofen on the German bank of Lake Constance on a radio script for my contributions to Ulrike Zöller’s Pandit Ravi Shankar 100th birth anniversary event for BR-Klassik (Bavarian Radio’s classical station): https://www.br-klassik.de/programm/radio/ausstrahlung-2058660.html
I spent time drafting and testing phrases and sentences while gaining insights into what ordinary people who had never listened to Indian music understood made of what I said. I re-drafted my script with ordinary radio listeners in mind who were listening in their kitchen or sitting room or while driving. One aspect of the musician I knew I wished to communicate was his sense of humour. We laughed a lot together.
Afterwards it was the Stein am Rhein train back to Zürich. The hotel was close to, and handy for the city’s main station. One time crossing its concourse – ShopVille-Zürich Hauptbahnhof – on 1 March 2020 there was a white-clad ensemble playing, engaging with passers-by. They were exquisite. They stuck in my mind and I wish I knew who they were. Please let me know if anyone knows. I would love to know more about them.
Reading the Swiss broadsheets, I watched the daily Covid-19 infections springing from canton to canton. I went into lockdown when I got back to London at the very beginning of March. Days later, before the official lockdown had started, we saw our last live music of 2020 in a physical venue. I was commissioned to review the Yorkston Thorne Khan concert at King’s Place in London. Sod’s Law, one magazine pulled out of running a review. Pulse did not. Doubly pleased to have gone because YTS were magnificent and their Navarasa : Nine Emotions is spectacularly good.
That gig ended the year’s usual spate of discoveries through live performances at festivals, in folk clubs and concert halls.
Lockdown gave and took. Martin Carthy and I did a batch of interviews face to face in February for his approved biography, Prince Heathen. My stereo stopped talking to me – and couldn’t be repaired until July – meaning no access to old vinyl releases I needed to listen to. But isolation gave me the chance to get stuck into Prince Heathen while unfortunately without access to libraries and galleries. The stuff we used to take for granted! Much of the year was spent tracking down and buying research materials to continue working on the book.
New releases aka Playlist
Najma Akhtar / Five Rivers / LM Productions
Steffen Basho-Junghans / The Dancer on the Hill / Architects of Harmonic Rooms & Records https://architectsofharmonicroomsrecords.bandcamp.com
Burd Ellen / Says The Never Beyond / [Own label] www.burdellen.com
Katy Carr / Providence / Deluce Recordings
Shirley Collins / Heart’s Ease / Domino www.dominomusic.com/uk
Harp & A Monkey / The Victorians / [Own label] www.harpandamonkey.com
David A. Jaycock / Murder, And The Birds / Triassic Tusk https://www.triassictuskrecords.com/
Peter Knight’s Gigspanner Big Band / Natural Invention / [Own label] www.gigspanner.com
Kronos Quartet & Friends / Long Time Coming / Smithsonian Folkways
Lo’Jo / Transe de Papier / Yotanka https://www.yotanka.net/fr/home/
The Magpie Arc / EP1 / [Own Label] https://themagpiearc.com/
Thomas McCarthy / Comfort / Deafear Productions [no website]
Scarlett O’ / ob Du mich lieb hast? / Electrocadero
Jackie Oates & John Spiers / Needle Pin, Needle Pin / [Own label]
Romanovská Tichý Hrubý / Bylo To Právé / It Was Right At / Hevhetia http://www.hevhetia.sk/Hevhetia/
Anoushka Shankar / Love Letters / MercuryKX
Jack Sharp / Good Times Older / From Here Records https://jacksharp.bandcamp.com/
Martin Simpson / Home Recordings / Topic Records https://www.topicrecords.co.uk/
Trolska Polska / Eufori / GO’ Danish Folk Music https://folkshop.dk/
Yorkston / Thorne / Khan / Navarasa : Nine Emotions / Domino
Historic releases, reissues and anthologies
The Band / The Band – 50th Anniversary Edition / Capitol
Commander Cody & His Lost Planet Airmen / Found In The Ozone / Owsley Stanley Foundations https://owsleystanleyfoundation.org/
The Dubliners / The Dubliners, In Concert, Finnegan Wakes, In Person, Mainly Barney and More of the Dubliners / BGO https://www.bgo-records.com/
Grateful Dead / Workingman’s Dead – 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition / Rhino
Andy Irvine / Old Dog Long Road Vol. 2 1961–2015 / [Own Label] www.andyirvine.com
Joni Mitchell / Joni Mitchell Archives – Vol.1: The Early Years (1963–1967) / Rhino
Richard and Linda Thompson / Hard Luck Stories (1972–1982) / Universal
Trees / Trees (50th Anniversary Edition) / Earth Recordings https://earthrecordlabel.com/
Various / How the River Ganges Flows – Sublime Masterpieces of Indian Violin [1933–1952] / Third Man Records https://thirdmanrecords.com/
Various / Working River – Songs and Music of the Thames / Folktree Recordings https://folktreerecordings.bandcamp.com/album/working-river-songs-and-music-of-the-thames
Events of 2020
Covid-19 reduced a healthy diet of live music to a starvation one by March. Three gigs stood out musically and/or for planting seeds of thought – which is pretty much a prerequisite for me.
Martin Carthy & John Kirkpatrick / Cecil Sharp House / 16 January 2020
Martin Carthy / Kalamazoo Club, London / 14 February / 2020
Yorkston Thorne Khan / Kings Place, London / 11 March 2020
Read more www.pulseconnects.com/yorkston-thorne-khan
A baker’s dozen of past music projects, released before pre-Covid (2020), either newly introduced journeys of exploration or ones which returned to inspire over the course of writing this year.
Martin Carthy / Prince Heathen / Fontana, 1969
Dillard & Clark / The Fantastic Expedition of Dillard & Clark / Through The Morning, Through The Night / A&M / Mobile Fidelety Sound Lab, n/d
Snooks Eaglin / New Orleans Street Singer / Smithsonian Folkways, 2005
Davey Graham / After Hours at Hull University, 4th February 1967 / Roller Coaster, 1997
Los Lobos / Acoustic en vivo / Los Lobos Records, 2005
Lisa O’Neill / The Wren, The Wren / River Lea Recordings, 2019
Carlos Paredes / Concerto en Frankfurt / Polygram, 1993
Jean Ritchie / Mountain Heath & Home / Rhino Handmade, 2004
Paul Simon / Graceland – 25th Anniversary Edition / Sony Legacy, 2012
Sutari / Osty / Unzipped Fly Records, 2017
Various / Songs from ABC Television’s “Hallelujah” / Fontana, 1966
Various / Stick In The Wheel present From Here: English Folk Field Recordings / From Here Records, 2016
Various / The Trallaleri of Genoa / Alan Lomax Collection, Rounder, 1999
The latest installment in the People’s Republic of Hounslow’s very own Banksy. ‘Smile’ is on the wall of what used to be a pub. This is the hugely distressed ‘Smile’ in December 2020. Unless otherwise stated, © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.
31. 12. 2020 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] Another year of writing, though ever fewer outlets didn’t bother me unduly. 2019 still meant masses of musical discoveries, reaffirmations and new historic explorations. The last quarter of the year turned golden with the prospect of concentrating more or less exclusively on the approved Martin Carthy biography Prince Heathen in 2020. I returned to Venice to work on the book in the spring of the year and managed to pick up a little Italian and vèneto in side-moments.
2019 saw me once again writing, reading and researching at U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague. This July’s visits (with the Rudolstadt Festival as the sandwich filler in the middle) coincided with the birth of Franz Kafka (1883-1924) and I went prepared. I was not prepared, however, for the phenomenal bilingual Czech/German Čechy Sasko/Böhmen Sachsen (‘Bohemia Saxony’) art exhibition at the nearby National Gallery Prague, Sternberg Palais across from the castle. I finished Jeremy Adler’s Kafka (Penguin, 2001) there, now pretty familiar with Prague compared to not knowing the city at all when I devoured most of Kafka’s works in German in Schleswig-Holstein in the early 1970s. I had started re-reading Die Verwandlung only for it to be set aside to read the Čechy Sasko/Böhmen Sachsen exhibition book, flipping between its German and Czech text.
When the year began I had no conscious memory of ever hearing – or needing – words like prorogation and prorogue or spaff. No matter the outcome of Brexit and the general election of 2019, I shall remain proudly mongrel European till the end of my days.
Two years now into tweeting mainly about music, the arts and the natural world. Catch up and follow, if you fancy: @KenHunt01
New releases aka Playlist
Jan Kučera/Epoque Quartet / [same] / Radioservis
Laurie Anderson Tenzin Choegyal Jesse Paris Smith / Songs from the Bardo / Smithsonian Folkways Recordings
Iva Bittová Paolo Angell / Sul Filo / ReR MEGACORP/Morphius Records
Kapela Brodów / Polski, Polonez, Chodzony / www.fundacjamemo.pl
Eliza Carthy / Restitute / originally a 1500-copy release on own label www.eliza-carthy.com later Topic
Josienne Clarke / In All Weather / Rough Trade
Rhiannon Giddens with Francesco Turisi / There Is No Other / Nonesuch
Bruce Hornsby / Absolute Zero / Zappo
Kayhan Kalhor Rembrandt Frerichs Tony Overwater Vinsent Planjer / It’s Still Autumn / Kepera Records
Kronos Quartet & Terry Riley /Sun Rings / Nonesuch
Lankum / The Livelong Day / Rough Trade Records
Amira Medunjanin & Trondheimsolistene / Ascending / Croatia Records
Ralph McTell / Hill of Beans / Leola Music
‘Let Nature Sing’ / RSPB
Mozaik with Chrysoula Kechagloglou / The Long and the Short of It / Own Label (www.andyirvine.com)
Novotny Yasinski Tichý / Jazz Gypsy N Tango /
Johnny Óg Connolly / Fear Inis Bearachain / Cló Iar-Chonnacht
Lisa O’Neill / The Wren, The Wren / River Lea
Martin Simpson / Rooted / Topic Records
June Tabor & Oysterband / Fire & Fleet – A Tour Memento / Running Man
Trio Dhoore / August / TRAD Records
Marry Waterson & Emily Barker / A Window to Other Ways / One Little Indian
James Yorkston / The Route to the Harmonium / Domino
Historic releases, reissues and anthologies
Gene Clark / No Other – Limited Deluxe / 4AD
Grateful Dead / Aoxomoxoa 50th Anniversary Deluxe Edition / Rhino
Grateful Dead / Dave’s Picks Vol. 30 Fillmore East 1/2/70 / Grateful Dead Productions
Grateful Dead / Dave’s Picks Vol. 32 The Spectrum, Philadelphia 3/24/73 / Grateful Dead Productions
Andy Irvine / Old Dog Long Road Vol. 1 / Own Label (www.andyirvine.com)
Christy Moore / Magic Nights / Sony Music (Ireland)
June Tabor / Airs and Graces / Topic
John Tams / The Reckoning / Topic
Various / Music from Turkey / Caprice Records
Various / Rudolstadt Festival 2019 / Heideck
Various / Strings That Nimble Leap / Fylde/Fellside
Hedy West / Untitled / Fledg’ling
Events of 2019
A very good year for the roses, golden raspberries and live music. As in years past, these are listed in chronological order. These are the ones that stood out both for the music and also for planting seeds of thought.
Eliza Carthy / Cecil Sharp House, London / 14 February 2019
Live Dead ’69 / Under The Bridge, London / 29 March 2019
Marry Waterson & Emily Barker / Hall One, Kings Place, London / 4 April 2019
Olivia Chaney / Cecil Sharp House, London / 7 March 2019
Plays the Ray Davis Songbook / Ben Crosland Quintet / 606 Club, Chelsea / 23 April 2019
John Kirkpatrick / TwickFolk, The Cabbage Patch / Twickenham / 28 April 2019
Kapela Brodów / Ethno Port Poznań, Castle Courtyard / 14 June 2019
Lankum / Ethno Port Poznań, Castle Courtyard / 16 June 2019
Gaizca Project / Rudolstadt Festival, Heidecksburg / 5 July 2019
A Tribute To Márkos Vamvakáris / Rudolstadt Festival, Heidecksburg / 5 July 2019
Ivan Vilela / Rudolstadt Festival, Neumarkt / 6 July 2019
Spooky Men’s Chorale / Markt, Rudolstadt Festival / 6 July 2019
Café Charbons / Tanzzelt, Heinepark, Rudolstadt Festival / 7 July 2019
Čechy Sasko/Böhmen Sachsen (‘Bohemia Saxony’) art exhibition / National Gallery Prague, Sternberg Palais / July 2019
Sight Machine / Kronos Quartet & Trevor Paglen / Barbican Centre / 11 July 2019
Richard Thompson and Guests / 70th Birthday Concert, Royal Albert Hall / 30 September 2019
Kala Ramnath / Darbar Festival, Minton Hall, Barbican, London / 19 October 2019
Read more → www.pulseconnects.com/tabla-grooves-and-kala-ramnath-darbar-festival
Len Graham / Return To London Town Festival, Musical Traditions Club, The King & Queen, London / 25 October 2019
Bruce Hornsby / O2 Shepherds Bush Empire, London / 3 November 2019
Oysterband and June Tabor / Union Chapel, London / 14 November 2019
Martin Simpson / Cecil Sharp House, London / 30 November 2019
Purcell Sessions / Anoushka Shankar / Purcell Room, Southbank, London / 4 December 2019 Read more → www.pulseconnects.com/purcell-sessions-anoushka-shankar
Ralph McTell / Royal Festival Hall, London / 13 December 2019
A baker’s dozen of past music projects, released before 2019, either newly introduced journeys of exploration or ones which returned to inspire in the course of writing this year.
Why thirteen albums is very simple. A healthy annual musical diet, just like what we stick in our stomachs, should be varied, full of fibre and seasonal
Sara Cleveland / Ballads & Songs of the Upper Hudson Valley / Folk Legacy, 1966
Phil & June Colclough / Players from a Drama / Celtic Music, 1991
Peter J. Conlon / The Genius of Peter Conlon / OldTime Records, 2012
Lowell George / Thanks I’ll Eat It Here / Friday Music, 2014
Len Graham / In Full Flight / 2008 www.storyandsong.com
The Kinks / Something Else By The Kinks /Sanctuary, 2011
Andrew Manze and Royal Philharmonic Orchestra / Vaughan Williams Symphony No. 5 and Symphony No. 6 / Onyx, 2018
Ökrös / Bonchida, Háromszor / Bonchida, Times Three / ABT, 1998
Karine Polwart / Laws of Motion / Hudson Records, 2018
Anoushka Shankar / Land Of Gold / Deutsche Grammophon, 2016
Škampa Quartet / Václav Kaprál, String Quartet in C minor; Vítězslava Kaprálová, String Quartet op.8; Bohuslav Martinů, String Quartet no.5 / Český rozhlas, 2012
Various / East Anglia Sings / Snatch’d From Oblivion Records / undated
James Yorkston / When The Haar Rolls In / Domino, 2008
Martin Simpson image is © Elly Lucus/Topic Records and Gene Clark image courtesy of Rich Walker in 4AD’s press office. Plotting the trials and tribs of the People’s Republic of Hounslow’s very own Banksy ‘Smile’ skipped; here is the 2013 shot in happier times for the much degraded Banksy (plus my granddaughter is now six years old) © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives. Ivan Vilela and the Spookies © Ken Hunt/Swing 51 Archives and Anoushka Shankar image © Santosh Hunt/Swing 51 Archives.
9. 1. 2020 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] The year went very well indeed with masses of musical discoveries and reaffirmations. For decades I have written in U Zavěšenýho Kafe (‘At the Hanging Coffee’) in Prague 1. The image is of me at its previous site when it was on Úvoz with Jakub ‘Kuba’ Krejčí’s mural of Czechoslovak historical and literary figures behind me. Now at Loretánská 13 I still write and hold meetings there.
31. 12. 2018 |
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Jean R. Freedman
University of Illinois Press
978-0-252-04075-7
[by Ken Hunt, London] Peggy Seeger wrote an autobiographical self-portrait in song overnight between Sheffield and London in 1973. In the booklet notes to her CD, The Folkways Years 1955-1982, she clarified: “It was intended to answer those people who come up during the interval or after a concert, those who interview you on radio or want to do write-ups. It is an answer to the question about why a middle-class female from a comfortable background sings about working-class people and revolution.” In one discussion of ours – interviews have evolved into day-long or weekend-long conversations on occasion -, she expanded, “I get sick of it. God, you get sick of it! It’s like they have to hear you say what they have read already. You hear it on the radio in interviews. The interviewer asks a question and then you [did] ‘so and so and so’. The person says, ‘Oh yes, I did that.’ There’s got to be a better way of interviewing people against past events.”
Peggy Seeger: A life of music, love, and politics should help fend off inane lines of question. Jean Freedman “first met Peggy Seeger on an autumn evening in London in 1979” and hers is the first full-length biography of one of the most important, influential and eloquent musicians in folk and politically engaged song to emerge from the American and British folk scenes. A giant of the folk revival, in 1957 Seeger acted both as muse for one of the most popular and successful songs of recent times, The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face. By 1970 she was composing (the chords and major to minor flips merit the term composition) as well as writing one of the most truly enduring feminist anthems in Gonna Be An Engineer in 1970 (“And typing is a skill that every girl is sure to need / To while away the extra time until the time to breed / And then they had the nerve to ask, what would I like to be? / I says, ‘I’m gonna be an engineer!‘”).
Positioned somewhere between authorized and approved biography, it is all the richer and informative for Seeger’s generous yet hands-off assistance. She granted, for example, access to cached private diaries that illuminate what was running through her head as events unfurled. Without implying that this was a kiss-and-tell tale, she surrendered intimate details like losing her virginity, flings, her sometimes fraught relationship with Ewan MacColl (with whom she had three children but did not marry until 1977), and the circumstances of forming her partnership with Irene Pyper-Scott, with whom she celebrated a civil partnership in 2006. She also allowed freedom to quote from revealing contemporaneous correspondence, notably with her father.
Peggy Seeger is a core member of what became North America’s First Family of Folk Music. The first generation were left-leaning liberals – the musicologist, composer and educationalist Charles Seeger (1886-1979) and his second wife, the musicologist and modernist composer Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901-1953), nicknamed Dio. Both found their place and blossomed during the New Deal era. The next included Peggy, her older brother Mike, and her still older brother from her father’s first marriage, Pete Seeger. Of Pete, Freedman quotes Peggy as saying, “Other people correct me: ‘Oh, your half-brother’ . . . yeah, but he’s my brother.”
Margaret Seeger, straightaway called Peggy, was born in June 1935, the first daughter following four sons. She was the second child of Charles’s second marriage. (Charles’s oldest son by first wife, Constance, the poet Alan, author of I Have a Rendezvous with Death (about which I knew nothing), had died fighting at the Battle of the Somme in 1916.) Surprisingly, Peggy’s birthplace – Manhattan – goes unmentioned. Her father emerges as, at times, cringeworthily insensitive. She was named “after Margaret Taylor, a rich and beautiful woman he had loved in his youth”. Peggy quips, “As far as I know, my mother thought it was a hoot.” (In early 1955 this Margaret became Charles Seeger’s third wife after Dio’s death.)
The Seegers were a part of a nexus of influential individuals active on the East Coast folk music scene. Her mother taught the “bookish” Peggy to sight-read and transcribe music, skills that equipped her for later roles including arranging and writing parts for accompanists. During the 1940s into the 1950s the home was abuzz with notables including Hanns Eisler, Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Alan Lomax and the older brother Pete. Even the housekeeper, Elizabeth ‘Libba’ Cotten, was a culture-changing guitarist, the composer of Freight Train, the chart-topping, copyright-contested skiffle mainstay which Peggy also recorded.
Peggy flourished in this milieu, but the political climate soured and a cold front descended. In late 1955 Peggy sailed for Europe where she enrolled at the University of Leiden. The turn of the year found her in a troupe led by a Flemish Catholic priest, Josef Ernst Vloeberghs, in ruin-strewn West Berlin. Alan Lomax, in self-imposed exile in London from McCarthyite blacklisting, made contact and on March 27, 1956 she arrived at Waterloo Station.
Her greatest life adventure was about to begin. Lomax’s plans included auditioning her for an “English Weavers, junior style” – the Weavers, among whose number was Pete Seeger, were the era’s folk music phenomenon. She passed. Already recruited for the Ramblers – a group on the cusp between skiffle and folk – was the playwright-musician known as Ewan MacColl (1915-1989), born James Henry Miller, then appearing as “the Street Singer in Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera at London’s Strand Theatre”.
Their attraction was mutual, and a “clandestine relationship” ensued. He was still married, with a small son Hamish, to his second wife Jean Newlove (the first was Joan Littlewood, the Stockwell-born theatre director, whose Theatre Workshop revolutionized British theatre). Newlove remains a shadowy figure and could have been fleshed out slightly more to the narrative’s advantage. The encounter with McColl proved the most pivotal and shaping meeting of Peggy’s life. Yet in December ;1956 she crossed the Atlantic again. MacColl kept in touch transatlantic telephone calls were prohibitively expensive but when he phoned on one occasion, she asked for “a short, new love song for an upcoming gig”. MacColl had composed Dirty Old Town to cover a scene change (MacColl Journeyman – An Autobiography 1990, revised 2009, 268) for Theatre Workshop’s Landscape with Chimneys (1951). (Dirty Old Town is missed out under songs in the index.) MacColl had the knack.
He wrote The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face for her. This song dared outrageously, for the times, to speak of physical intimacy. It was a song picked up on by the Canadian folksinger Bonnie Dobson. Talking in July 2018, she told me Gordon Lightfoot had admitted to nicking the song from her and teaching it to Harry Belafonte who passed it to Roberta Flack and into history. Many others sang it, including George Michael and Elvis Presley (who copped out, skipping the relationship’s progression to “the first time ever I lay with you” by repeating “the first time ever I kissed your mouth”), and it featured strongly in Clint Eastwood’s film Play Misty for Me (1971). The success it brought transformed their lives and gave them time to get off the treadmill and take time to create in comfort, instead of the standard folk revival approach to making a living by live appearances especially on the nationwide folk club circuit. That one song’s royalties liberated MacColl and Seeger from the grind of touring.
Although their relationship remained tempestuous and trying, their musical bonds tightened, for example, through a series of BBC Home Service radio-ballads of extraordinary vigour broadcast from 1958 through to the 1960s. While stranded on the Continent when the Home Office “refused permission” for her to enter the UK and with a passport only valid for returning to the States, Seeger discovered she was pregnant. In January 1959 she married the Scottish folksinger Alex Campbell in Paris in order to get to London to be with MacColl. It turned out, however, that there would be two new MacColls born in 19599- Neill with Peggy and Kirsty with Newlove, with whom MacColl was still involved.
Three themes – music, love and politics – flow through this book. One facet that this biography also addresses though perhaps not sufficiently, is how Seeger was perceived. The Critics folk collective, co-led by MacColl and Seeger, was composed of MacColl adherents and acolytes, MacCollites for short. They engaged in constructive analysis (and recordings of ;such sessions exist) Marxist-style a former member, Brian Pearson, clarifies that this meant, “In practice, Ewan was more equal than the rest”. It got worse, he continues: “At the time, I felt Peggy to be even more of an ultra-Orthodox MacCollite than Ewan himself. She came across at times as rather severe and dogmatic and was fiercely protective of him and the ‘party line'” The Critics imploded rancorously, with a splinter group driven to “liberating” equipment in 1972.
It has to be said, MacColl and Seeger lived in a bubble of their ;own devising you could say they were blinkered. For many, that perception only really changed with her post-MacColl recordings and concerts. The trilogy of Heading For Home (2003), Love Call Me Home (2005) and Bring Me Home (2008), all covered in fine detail, shine. After MacColl’s death, Freedman quotes an insensitive “agent who seemed unfamiliar with Peggy’s work [.] who referred to her as a “remnant of a dead duo”.” Adversity made her stronger. She wore her erudition more lightly. She wrote a new generation of songs, sometimes with her sons Neill or Calum, often drawing on her life. “Everything Changes’, the last song belonging to that trilogy, lends its name to the biography’s penultimate chapter. She sings,
“That was then
Now it’s now
Everything changes
Somehow.” It takes guts to write something seemingly so simple.
Freedman’s Peggy Seeger – A life of music, love, and politics is an even-handed and exemplary model of thorough research. Faber published Seeger’s autobiography in 2018. While writing it Peggy deadpanned drolly telling me her working title was First Time Ever – Back End of a Horse. She dumped the hind end. For far too long Seeger was perceived as the junior partner in one of the folk revival’s greatest partnerships. Now there are two major accounts of her music, loves and politics.
1. 9. 2018 |
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[by Ken Hunt, London] With any selection of new Richard Thompson songs, there’s no knowing in whose company and in what straits listeners will be plunged. There might be a long-awaited cheap-suited estate agent or the borderline apocalyptic. 13 Rivers opens with the one of his finest recent songs, The Storm Won’t Come. He sings in bible-bashing fashion: “I am longing for a storm to blow through town/Blow these sad old buildings down/Fire to burn what fire may/Rain to wash it all away.”
Things soon curdling and souring splendidly. By the third track, Her Love Was Meant For Me, he jabs a middle finger up at that bugbear of his about lazy journalism banging on about doom-and-gloom. (At the beginning of my writing career, he took me aside and put me straight.) He sings, “Armageddon’s in the mirror/And her love was meant for me.”
Bones of Gilead is Thompsonian-strength cryptic. “What’s my name? Just call me Micah/Micah like the Bible says…” he sings in character to chunky electric guitar. Possibly he watched Margaret Atwood’s hugely popular The Handmaid’s Tale. There Gilead is the dystopian theocracy that succeeds the United States of America. Working out the possibilities of Thompson’s pepper-sprayed allusions is part of the fun, however fanciful they might be. “In my cloud/Of illusion” from My Rock, My Rope could be glancing off the anonymous early Christian mystic’s text The Cloud of Unknowing. (Or not.) Religious allusions abound in any case. In the ninth track You Can’t Reach Me there comes reprise-like: “…The war and Armageddon and shit.”‘ In Shaking the Gates – though Shaking The Gates Of Heaven Of Heaven should be the fuller title, Thompson sings, “I falter at heaven’s gate” – maybe with a wink to Michael Cimino’s 1980 film epic of mixed fortunes.
The track sequencing of 13 Rivers is a taste of perfection. It is an antidote to streaming tracks and moving on to the next thing. As Suzanne Vega said in an interview (with Andrew Williams) in July (Metro, 17 July 2018, 16): “An album is an art form in and of itself. Whenever I release a collection of songs I think of them as an album even though I know hardly anyone consumes them in that way. It’s a narrative. We used to spend a lot of time sequencing them and figuring out the spaces in between the songs. It was fun to plan that into the experience for the listener.” Well, Richard Thompson must have had a whale of a time with 13 Rivers.
As I have said elsewhere, it is criminal how good 13 Rivers. That’s why this thrilling piece of work is destined to be one of the albums of 2018. No place for cheap-suited estate agents, though. Maybe another time.
Richard Thompson 13 Rivers Proper Records
www.proper-records.co.uk
www.richardthompson-music.com
7. 8. 2018 |
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