Spiers and Boden: Songs
Listen to this. You’ll not regret it.
Whee! John Spiers and Jon Boden have finally made an album (Songs) that sounds as good as they do live. Not that Through and Through and Bellow are bad albums, it’s just that their playing has improved somewhat since they were recorded. On stage, Jon and John play with an almost telepathic level of communication. Songs captures that magic.
Songs is the companion piece to Tunes[1] and it fairly fizzes with excitement. The material is almost all Big Ballads, and these are handled with a freshness and authority that is great to hear. The only ballad here that’s familiar to me from other singers is Lucy Wan, which Martin Carthy does so well. Jon and John give the nod to that version as their inspiration, but the result is entirely their own.
There’s one modern piece, Innocent When You Dream by Tom Waits, and it’s fabulous—the sort of song that wouldn’t sound out of place in Peter Bellamy’s repertoire next to the obscure Dylan covers, big ballads and the Kipling. You can hear Bellamy’s influence everywhere. He’s the source for one song (Derry Gaol), but Jon’s singing style has Bellamy written all over it. Like Bellamy, Jon will start a song with a testing range at least three notes higher than seems sensible and then thrill you as he hits all the high note with ease3. And, just like Bellamy, Jon sounds like nobody else4.
Buy this CD. And if you get a chance, go and see them live. Good as this album is, these guys are still improving and in a year or so this is going to sound a little bit disappointing compared to what they’re doing on stage. If they can keep doing that trick, who knows what’s going to happen.
1 Although Tunes was released earlier this year, I’ve not actually listened to it; I’m more of a songs person I guess.
2 A year or so ago I found myself singing a high harmony while Jon sang Bellamy’s setting of The Old Songs at the Cumberland singing session - I was up next and that was the song I was planning to sing so when Jon started in on it I thought “What the hell?” and came in with a harmony line - I didn’t know I could go so high. Those notes are often there if you’ve got the nerve to really go for them; they only disappear if you don’t think you can get them.
3 There’s nothing here like Bellamy’s astonishing Santa Fe Trail where, having sung the whole thing at very high altitude he repeats the last chorus singing a high harmony line that leaves you gasping. But some of the stuff he was singing with Bellowhead a few weeks ago was definitely getting that way.
4 It’s the old problem isn’t it? Bellamy sounded entirely like himself; the best way to follow his lead is to sound entirely like yourself.
Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is Pt. 2
Not content with inflicting my reading of Tamlyn on you all, I’ve recorded a couple more songs
Bill Norrie
First up is Bill Norrie, which I was inspired to learn when I heard Fay Hield of the Witches of Elswick singing it at the Cumberland Arms sessions. It’s a fine example of a ‘big’ ballad, and one of countless tragedies that could have been forestalled if people had simply talked to each other.
Composed in August
Composed in August is a love song by Robert Burns. It’s one of my favourite autumn songs. I got it from Lady of Autumn1 by Beggar’s Velvet. It’s a delight to sing; the tune is gorgeous and the words are lovely.
Licenses and stuff
For the avoidance of doubt: arrangements and recordings are Copyright 2005 by Piers Cawley.
These recordings are released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. In the unlikely event that you do create a derivative work, please let me know about it.
1 A long deleted vinyl album that’s recently been released on CD by Old and New Tradition
Another good night at the Cumberland
On Monday, we watched part of No Direction Home, Scorsese’s documentary about Bob Dylan. The part that struck me most strongly was an anecdote about the night of the Cuban Missile Crisis. One interviewee walked into the Gaslight Coffee Shop and found Dylan playing. They ended up singing You’re Going to Miss Me When I’m Gone together. About half way through the song, he realised that there was a good chance that there’d be nobody around to miss him.
It occurred to me as I watched, and again last night, that I could think of no better way to spend my last night on Earth than singing and playing with friends. And last night I did exactly that.
Last night was the first Tuesday night of the new University term, which means the Newcastle University Folk and Traditional Music students are back in town. So the Cumberland Arms Bimonthly Tuesday Singing Session was invaded by many of the regulars from the Cumberland Arms Bimonthly Tuesday Anything But Irish Session.
We settled into a good song, tune, song, tune vibe and a cracking night was had by all. Often in sessions with a lot of players1, singers hardly get a look in, and when they do the players take the oppportunity to have a chat and get some beer in. Not last night. Singers all got full attention and we didn’t have the ‘half an hour of reels’ which can be so much fun to play. We singers didn’t overindulge ourselves either; no thirty verse ballads laden with doom, death and despair for us.
There’s so much talent on the course that it can be scary. An older singer fluffed his guitar part slightly and excused himself saying he had always sung with people no more than two years younger than him and he found it quite daunting being in a room full of people younger than his children, making the music he loved
Speaking of talented young people
On Saturday night I went to see Bellowhead.
Wow! I’ve been an admirer of Spiers and Boden, and of Jon Boden’s singing in particular for a while now, but the full 11 piece band is a thing of power and beauty. There was lots (and lots) to love, but the stand out performance was their reading of Flash Company with Jon in full on torch singer mode, while the band played a cacophonous free jazz kind of thing, apparently designed to put the singer off by bearing no relation rhythmically to what he was doing, and almost none harmonically either. A triumph. Courting too Slow, The Prickle Eye Bush and the ‘disco sea shanty’ all kicked some serious arse, and those are just the songs. The Rochdale Coconut Dance, now much tighter than the version on E.P.Onymous is still one of the most danceable tunes in the world, and the introduction to English traditional chair dancing was quite splendid.
Whether you think you like English traditional music or not, you should check these guys out. Preferably in a venue that isn’t all seated.
I can’t wait for their ‘proper’ album.
1 The usual distinction is between ‘singers’ and ‘musicians’, which is inaccurate; singers are musicians, dammit.
A Strange and Bitter Crop
There’s a print hanging above the reception desk at the place where I’m temping. It depicts a line of silhouettes of poplars. It bears the title Southern Trees
I’m finding it very hard to resist the urge to add a couple of bodies hanging from one of them. I wonder if the artist and whoever bought this print realised what they were evoking.
Putting my money where my mouth is
One of the great things that the internet allows us all to do with music is to share it. I don’t mean ‘sharing’ copyrighted material that we have ‘liberated’ from the media we purchased it on – I know enough struggling folk musicians to realise how important royalties are to those people.
What I mean by sharing is sharing the music we make ourselves.
So I’m putting my money where my mouth is. I’ve recorded myself singing Tamlyn and made that recording available. Tamlyn’s my favourite ‘big ballad’. My version runs to just over 9 minutes and is completely unaccompanied. If your idea of listenable music involves, well, almost anything you’d hear in the charts, you may well hate this. But if you think you might like to hear a stranger singing a song he loves to the best of his ability, go for it, you might like it.
For the avoidance of doubt, both song and tune are traditional, arranged by me, and the recording is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike licence. In the unlikely event that you do create a derivative work, please let me know about it.
