Marry Waterson and Oliver Knight, Royal Oak, Station Street, Lewes, Sussex, 5 May 2011
16. 5. 2011 | Categories: Articles,Live reviews
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Royal Oak is home to one of the finest folk clubs in the south of England. It epitomises so much about the English folk club set-up. It takes place on Thursdays while not far away the Elephant & Castle at White Hill in Lewes hosts the weekend Lewes Saturday Folk Club. The Royal Oak's guests regularly include the cream of established of artists. Between March and May 2011 bills featured Tom Paley, Martin Carthy & Chris Parkinson, Jez Lowe and Tim Laycock as the main guests. Yet it is one of those clubs, like Sheila Miller's Cellar Upstairs folk club in Camden in north London, that balances established and new acts so well. This night the honours fell to Marry Waterson and Oliver Knight.
Interestingly, this sister and brother duo's newly released debut The Days [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Darndest thing happened after drinking some fermented coconut juice. Passed out, woke up and I had been transported back to England and the only music I could hear was stuff with Martin Carthy on it. Still stranger it happened to coincide with his 70th birthday on 21 May 2011. Such a delightful coincidence. Truth is stranger than fiction. No, sorry, Ruth is stranger than Richard. Always get that wrong after a sea of reviving coconut cocktails.
The Rainbow - Martin Carthy
The Rainbow first appeared on disc on Martin Carthy and Dave Swarbrick's 1969 masterpiece Prince Heathen. This is a solo version from 1978 that emerged out of the woodwork in 2010. Travelling over the North Yorkshire Moors on the way to interviewing Martin Carthy - or, in seadog terms, bearding him [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] This concluding section departs from the previous structure. In this coda Shirley Collins compares then and now. She recollects what it was like starting out for her, with the recording of her first two LPs Sweet England (1959) and False True Lovers (1960) back-to-back in 1958. With Alan Lomax and Peter Kennedy presiding, she cut the tracks for those two records over two days in a house in the north London residential district of Belsize Park. She reflects on what is happening now, especially her concerns about fast-tracked success and its disadvantages.
"I think it was quite spontaneous, a lot of it. Those two albums were recorded in two days. Everything was probably just done once, possibly twice if I made a great mistake. I just made up the next song as it came [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] In this second part we pick up the story of the out-of-print classic retrospective Within Sound at a point after the 1970 masterpiece Love, Death & The Lady (1970).
Despite everything in the years from 1955, when Shirley Collins had first appeared on record, to 1970 , there was no grand plan behind the continually shape-shifting projects that she was delivering. "I have to say," she explains. "it 'happened' rather than it was planned in advance that one would do something different the whole time. Things did evolve. It was the discoveries. It was those fortunate meetings. It was my own interests in the sorts of music I liked listening to - Early Music, for example - that led me into these other things. In a way it did just grow. It wasn't planned but it wasn't [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Folksong, English, Czech, Hungarian or any other, is all human life in a nutshell distilled, confined or liberated through song. The Sussex singer Shirley Collins' achievement is unmatched in the annals of twentieth-century folk music anywhere. Blessed with a voice a natural as breathing, she succeeded in bottling and freeing the essence of the songs she sang. When Shirley Collins' Within Sound appeared in 2002, the boxed retrospective treatment was a relatively new development in folk music. It is utterly appropriate that Shirley Collins should have been Britain's first female folk singer to get the long-box treatment. Joan Baez's Rare, Live and Classic (1993) got the US honours in the female folkie category. Shirley Collins got it with the now sold-out Within Sound [...]
[Ken Hunt, London] It can be really beastly to be separated from kith and kin on the treasured island. But then one casts one's eye around and one realises that those waterside plants aren't all hemlock water dropwort, mugworts, figworts etc. There are the mangoes, for example. And the flamingos don't always get away with raiding the mango orchard, though barbecued flamingo can grow fair tiresome. Instead one dons the fiesta clobber and dances like a demented chap to the music of Aruna Sairam, Robb Johnson, Tommy McCarthy, Dresch Quartet, Lily Allen, Bhimsen Joshi, Rendhagyó Prímástalálkozó, Françoise Hardy, Traffic and Robb Johnson again. It keeps the flaming, raiding flamingos out the orchard if nothing else.
Kārthikēya - Aruna Sairam
One of the most consistently coruscating female [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] The Giant Donut Discs® column in Swing 51 brought together a wide range of talent and one of the finest was Dagmar Krause. The bumper double issue 13/14 included a lengthy interview with her, but also her current list of Donuts. In the spirit of her choices back then, this "patchy list" as she called it ("Seems fine to us," was appended in 1989), had next to no additional information; in that spirit there are no subsequent annotations. That feels right because hers is a no-nonsense approach to music.
Industrial Drums - Anthony Moore
Model of Kindness - Peter Blegvad
Crusoe's Landing - Cassiber
Tierra Humeda - Amparo Ochoa
By Julio Solórzano
Strange Fruit - Billie Holiday
Respect - Aretha Franklin
Stitch Goes The Needle - Sally Potter
By Lindsay [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] Journey's Edge is a stepping-stone, a betwixt and between work. It captures Robin Williamson poised in midair or mid-dream skipping from the fading psychedelic sepia of The Incredible String Band and yet to land sure-footedly on the other shore. Though nobody knew that on Journey's Edge's unveiling in 1977. That only became apparent with the Merry Band of American Stonehenge later that year and A Glint At The Kindling in 1978. Journey's Edge was Williamson's début solo release after the splintering of the ISB in late 1974. The ISB's final flurry of creativity - many would have substituted 'death throes' - as evidenced by No Ruinous Feud (1973) and Hard Rope And Silken Twine (1974) and the half-remarkable, rarely remembered swansong films Rehearsal and No Turning Back [...]
[by Ken Hunt, London] British folk music found a top drawer brass player, arranger and composer in Howard Evans. He had an utterly pragmatic, utterly professional attitude to music making and the musician's life and from 1997, when he joined the Musicians Union's London headquarters, as assistant general secretary for media he revealed that over and over again. He was totally pragmatic about his art and the first to drolly prick any bubbles of pretension about making music. He brought a wider knowledge and a greater diversity of musical experiences to bear on making music than any professional musician I ever met but he never got the slightest tan from the musical limelight.
He mixed years of experience playing brass in military music contexts with the Welsh Guards, in pit orchestras, in [...]
