Take all your problems and rip 'em apart. Oh, oh, oh, carry them off in a shopping cart.
Jack White. Philosopher and musician.
The year-long absence of folk festivals has deprived us all of concerts, dances, sessions and workshops and the opportunity to travel and gather with our friends. For folk festival traders the loss has been equivalent to the cancellation of Christmas for 'normal' shops. Few of us can resist the compulsion to spend a few quid at a festival - whether it's on a musical instrument, a CD, LP or tune book, a souvenir T-shirt, something crafty in leather or silver, or an item of regrettable headwear.
It is, however, incredibly easy to buy online and have everything delivered to your door. What better way to spend a lockdown than by re-cluttering your home with cool folk stuff? Here's where to find it...
Desirable acoustic instruments of all kinds, and song, tune and tutor books. Everything for musicians - from absolute beginners to advanced players. Long-established folk music specialists and lovely people!
Karen & Colin Cater's emporium of beautiful things related to traditional music, dance and song; folk tales, calendar customs and paganism. Cards, books, jewellery, t-shirts, pottery and much more. SHOP
Established in 1992, this little pink shop in Ennis, Co. Clare, is justly legendary amongst Irish traditional music enthusiasts worldwide. Custy's huge range of independently-released CDs and its exceptional customer service make it well worth an online visit! SHOP
This article was originally published in fRoots magazine No. 424. Spring 2019
Fire In The Mountain is a UK folk festival like no other. Held on an idyllic farm in Wales (the exact location of which is only revealed after you’ve purchased your ticket) the site has no bricks and mortar accommodation, mobile phone reception or flush lavatories. Costa Del Folk it most definitely is not. It has also banned plastic, does all its washing-up, recycles everything that can be and powers everything by just one biodiesel generator and lots of solar energy. Oh, and then there’s the music. The 2018 festival included Sam Amidon, Lankum, Julie Murphy & Ceri Rhys Matthews, Afriquoi, Martin Simpson, Tim Eriksen, Martha Tilston, Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith and Sheelanagig- along with the innumerable fiddle players, banjo pickers, singers and step dancers who occupy every tent and vehicle on site.
Festival Director Joe Buirski told me how this earthly paradise came into being.
“It really started out of an emergent folk scene in London about ten-to-fifteen years ago, that became The Magpies Nest. A few of us started going to the Islington Folk Club, where there was a generation who’d clearly put a lot of work into setting up that scene and we thought maybe it was time for us to put a bit of work into something for our own generation. It’s not that we didn’t enjoy the established scene but that we felt we should have a go ourselves, too.”
“I was in a ceilidh band called Cut A Shine, and our fiddle player, Jerry Bloom, used to live on the old farm in Wales which was then owned by Marianne - an older lady who used to run a horse riding school. We were at Green Man Festival in 2009 and Jerry said we should all go and check out this old farm. We went and hung out with Marianne, and she was great! Through our network of the London folk scene and musicians we knew from Liverpool, we all started going up there at weekends, having a fire and playing tunes. The farm was in a bit of a state, so there was a move towards helping Marianne by getting some more volunteers in to do some work on the place and have a bit of a party. My role was someone who worked professionally at festivals as a licensee, so we got a temporary event notice in 2010, had a big work week at the farm in the April, booked some bands that we knew from our scene, and the rest, as they say, is history…”
“The festival was started both as a fund raiser and as a way of diversifying the farm, which was drastically under-used and falling apart. Since we started, the site has been used quite a bit by the local community for weddings and parties, as well as horse riding events. The objective of the festival is to always leave the farm in a better state. The other, subtler point about the history is to do with the big boom that we had in music festivals. Fire In The Mountain has always been the antithesis to those growth-based festivals. We strive to keep it down-home by combining all the best bits of the bigger events but always keeping it small. There’s a strong love of old-time music, but not exclusively. Our booking policy is to have one big American act, and then representatives of all the various sub-genres of folk music.”
Fire in the Mountain Festival Ltd is a registered Not For Profit Company, the aims and objectives of which are: "to hold a folk music festival on a farm in return for maintenance and repairs to the farm on which it is held.” Financial transparency and participation are central to the event, as Joe explains.
“To us, that’s part of the folk music ethos, and if you’re reliant on volunteers, then you shouldn’t be profiting from their work. That’s one of the criticisms we kept hearing about some other festivals - they rely on cheap labour to make these massive events happen. There’s an old adage - ‘know for whom you toil…’ The participatory element comes very much from the folk tradition, as well. All of the headline acts, regardless of who they are, are asked to participate and do little workshops and sessions.”
Let’s leave the final words to Tim Eriksen, who spent the 2018 weekend performing, running workshops, hanging out at the Slim Jim Banjos stall and jamming with Lankum deep into the night.
“It really is just about my favourite festival in the English-speaking world. It’s lovely to be part of a scene with such open ears, and I’m a little sad that my old band Cordelia’s Dad missed out by a couple of decades!”
This interview was first published in fRoots magazine No. 418. Spring 2018.
Cath and Phil Tyler are hardly what one might call prolific recording artists but, by jove, their stuff is worth waiting for. They first ploughed their particular Anglo-American neo-traditionalist furrow with 2008’s Dumb Supper and followed it up with the following year’s The Hind Wheels of Bad Luck. A sustained period of radio silence was broken by the six-track EP The Song Crowned King in 2015. Three years on, they’ve finally rewarded the patience of the faithful with their third full-length album The Ox and the Ax, released on LP by Thread Recordings and CD via their own Ferric Mordant Records imprint. I met up with the Tylers at Phil’s parent’s home in Devon before they played a mesmerising joint show with the utterly splendid Diamond Family Archive in Totnes.
“Lee Jones (Thread Recordings) is a friend of ours who’s really keen on vinyl releases” Phil begins. “He’s also doing the promotional work, so we just do the CDs and the music. It’s all working OK so far. The album title is just just a phrase that came up in a conversation that I made a note of. I keep a collection of things like tune names and made-up band names that I might want to use at some point. It doesn’t have any specific relevance to this album…” “but it sounds good!” concludes Cath. It looks good too. “David Hand (of Lancashire & Somerset Records) did the artwork for The Ox & The Ax” continues Cath. “and it’s just beautiful. It’s really simple screen-printing but it’s come out stunning.”
In my review of the album (fR417) I burbled-on about how seamlessly Phil’s newly-composed tunes cling perfectly to the texts of ancient songs and ballads, so I seized the opportunity to quiz the man about his process.
“Oh, that isn’t a plan,” he states, with disarming candour. “Nothing’s planned! I make up tunes and we’re not lyricists, so what do you do with your tunes? An easy solution is to just find an old text that matches it, and there you go. If we could write words, we’d have loads of original songs! I don’t have a writing partner to be the Lennon and McCartney of the fake traditional world with, so this is how it comes out. For instance, I had the tune that we use for Song Of The Lower Classes, and the version on Tim Dalling’s album reminded me of the text. It used to be that I always came up with a tune and then found words which would fit it, rather than writing tunes for specific texts - but it can come either way, now. Sometimes a tune will just come out through a particular guitar or banjo tuning…”
“It’s not quite just whether the words are going to fit,” Cath qualifies, “because the way we modify words into a tune is, quite often, very particular. Syllable-by-syllable, sometimes. The word selection process can involve narrowing down your options for the number of syllables, when you start singing existing songs to different tunes. Like with Wallington - there are two lines in it that I almost constantly get wrong because the original version of the text had two too many syllables but was really nicely phrased. The version we came up with is a nice phrase too, but if I start singing the wrong version I can’t then change it back. It’s a juggling process to ensure that the story isn’t lost when you’re modifying an old story.”
The considered detail of Cath’s response seems somehow typical of her. She really isn’t the type to just sing some words because they fit a tune. “What, like heavy metal rhymes?” she laughs. “No, I’m not so keen on that. You have to pick a version that you like the plot of and the way the verses go and then you have to fit it to the tune you’ve written. So there’s various things to be done.” “We like Lady Dysie,” offers Phil, warming to the theme. “I remember hearing Martin Carthy do that song on a John Peel session a long time ago and, to my knowledge, he’s never recorded it. I decided that the song needed an airing but couldn’t just play it in his style. Quite often, when we try and sing something to the same tune that someone else has already recorded, it feels like it’s just not as good as their version. So I actually consciously wanted to make a new tune for that song.” “I’m really comfortable singing that one,” confirms Cath, “and I was, right off the bat. I think that’s part of our teamwork thing - just being aware of what the other can do. We were pretty much in agreement about these recordings before we even started thinking about them as an album. A lot of the take choices were pretty much a case of us both just agreeing that the feel was right.”
Cath originally learned one of the album’s songs - Rainbow, for an extraordinary spoken word, music and visuals performance project called I Made Some Low Enquiries, which I had the good fortune to witness at last year’s Leigh Folk Festival. “Justin Hopper" (like Cath, an American resident in the UK) "is the guy who came up with that," she tells me. He’s got a new book out called The Old Weird Albion - one of those ‘weird and creepy things in the place you live!’ books. He’s a writer who does spoken word performances and he originally created I Made Some Low Enquiries for the SPILL Festival in London in 2015. Justin got in contact after Richard Thompson (the Lost Harbours rather than Fairport Convention one) tagged me into a query Justin posted on Facebook asking ‘does anyone know anyone in England who can sing like Almeda Riddle?’ We made contact and had a Skype conversation and I tried the song out for him and we hit it off pretty well straight away. That first presentation at SPILL Festival was with Susie Honeyman from The Mekons on violin, Jem Finer from the Pogues on prepared banjo and hurdy-gurdy, Richard and Mark Pilkington on electronic things. Those people are all top of their small, specific, detailed, delightful stuff, and we all worked together with almost no rehearsal, other than knowing what you were doing, yourself. I got to sing Rainbow unaccompanied and Wayfaring Stranger with Susie and Jem, which was great. There was also recordings used of Shirley Collins. Shirley was supposed to be there, but it was just after her 80th birthday, and she, err, overdid it at her party, so wasn’t able to come! We’ve got a Cath & Phil duo show coming up in London soon, and Justin’s supposed to be coming and reading at that, but I’d really like to tour the full-whacker at some point.”
Both Tylers seem to be very musically active at present, with several projects outside the core duo.
“It’s nice that it seems like a lot!” laughs Phil. “We both get to play with our respective noisy rock bands. Cath’s in a group called Fret! and I’m in one called Bad Amputee. Then Cath’s also in (all-women maritime group) She Shanties and I’m in (long-running ceilidh band) Fiddler’s Elbow. I’m also still working with Sarah Hill, who sang on my last solo banjo album. We almost finished an album but then she moved away to Brighton. But that record will get finished and come out at some point. That’ll be mainly English songs from Sussex and the North-East - whatever we like, really.” “I’ve just been hired as musical director for a puppet theatre production!” Cath reveals. It’s by Horse & Bamboo Theatre, who are based in Lancashire and it’s about the ju-jitsu-using suffragettes who protected Emmeline Pankhurst and a bunch of those folks. That will be performed in the Autumn, but the work starts now.”
They also have plenty to keep them busy with their continuing commitment to community music making, particularly the Sacred Harp singing that they credit with bringing them together.
“Both of us started singing because somebody told us to try this Sacred Harp stuff” Cath elaborates. “I started singing show tunes at school, but got told off by this one drama teacher who said ‘you’re too loud and too tall and can you just settle down, back there.’ It was Tim Eriksen, Jeff Colby and Kelly House who really encouraged me to ‘just sing!’ - and that’s how I ended-up meeting him!” “I was arranging UK tours for Cordelia’s Dad,” says Phil, “because I was a fan and a DIY booking agent, so that’s how I first got exposed to Sacred Harp singing and gradually drifted into it.”
For all their various musical endeavours, much of Cath and Phil’s time is taken up with being parents to their young son. “I do know some performers who have a kid and then you never hear from them again,” muses Phil. “I can actually think of a few like that, so it’s good that we can still do something.” “Byron first went to Whitby Folk Week when he was nine days old,” Cath recalls, “so he’s used to being places where there’s music and people around. Some of the difficulty with making this record was energy levels - mostly on my part, being a bit poor. We couldn’t really do an all-day recording session, so we’d do a two hour session one week, then three or four weeks later go in for another two hours. A friend of ours recorded us, but it had to be at times when we were free and both he and his recording facility were available. So we just made it slowly, bit-by-bit, ’til it was all done.
Phil also has a full-time job in horticulture. “Yes, it’s a really folkie job,” he laughs. “I’m not one those personnel managers who sing songs about sowing and harvesting. I’m actually doing it!” “I’m the fake one from New Jersey,” Cath deadpans.
So, how the heck do the pair of them ever find the time to keep doing the music? I enquire.
“The music doesn’t stop just because you’re doing something else,” Cath considers. “If I’m learning song lyrics, I’ll be busy doing whatever it is, but also be in Storyland. “I just keep a guitar in the kitchen and any spare minute, I’ll pick it up and twang away for a bit” replies Phil. “I’ll tell you why we have the time - we don’t have a TV. That’s it! The best piece of advice I can give anyone on keeping on doing music is to keep a harmonica in the pocket of every jacket you own.”
This interview was first published in fRoots magazine No. 414. December 2017.
How time flies, eh? It’s now thirty years since great swathes of the UK music and style press became incontinent with excitement over something called ‘Madchester.’ What’s too-often overlooked is the fact that 185 miles south of England’s precipitation capital, something very different was stirring. It’s true. For a few glorious years, the centre of the musical universe was actually located somewhere on the Berkshire section of the M4 Corridor. OK, that’s really my truth, but I do have some documentary evidence on my side. The region’s network of pubs, clubs and Arts Centres, and tribal gatherings like the Bracknell Folk Festival and WOMAD in Reading proved a fertile breeding ground for a generation of post-punk musical adventurers weaned on folk and blues and intoxicated by the new-fangled World Music records that were emerging
One such was Mark Turauskis, who first caught the nation’s ear via the seminal 1988 Cooking Vinyl compilation The Cutting Edge. Latterly he’s recorded solo, as Mark T. & The Brickbats and with various musicians including Tim Hill and Charles Spicer. His latest release, From Blues To Rembetika is an understated beauty that reveals the artist’s engaging personality through some of his enduring influences.
“This album has been a long time coming,” Mark tells me over a mug of tea, the morning after a Cornish folk club gig. Ever since I made From Middle East To Mid-West for Waterfront Records in 1987, in fact! After that, Steve Hooker, who managed my stuff on Waterfront came up and said I should really make a blues album next but I didn’t, until now. I hung around with Mike Cooper an awful lot in the early 80s and he was introducing me to African music, to rembetika, and all sorts of other stuff. I needed to go ahead and get all of these things out of my system, rather than just making a straight blues album then. People are always saying that rembetika is the Greek blues so I thought why not do the two styles together? Everything was done very quickly, just recording two or maybe three takes of each song and choosing the best one. I ended up recording about twenty-five tracks and just edited them down to the ones that worked best together. In the Brickbats days I used to relish being in studios, but now playing live is the main thing for me. In 2009, I saw that Martin Carthy was on at the Lewes folk club so I turned up there and they gave me a floor spot. Martin was in his element and it was amazing - a real ‘road to Damascus' thing that eventually became the Folk Songs & Ballads CD”.
Playing live is something that Mark is now able to do more of, following many years of working in Community Music.
“There was a lot of community funding from the millennium through to the crash in 2009” he explains, “and we were able to do really big, long term music projects. Community music died a death as soon as the Olympics were announced. All the funding was just cut and pasted into that and we just didn’t exist any more. I now work two days a week, which has enabled me to live and raise a family through the leaner gigging times.”
As conversation drifts back to those Thames Valley days of the late 1980s, I ask Mark for his abiding memories and impressions of the scene.
“Those (1987 and ’88) Bracknell Folk Festivals were a real catalyst and gathering point,” he considers. “I think it’s no surprise that people like Blowzabella, Mike Messer and myself were all at the same festival, because we all had a similar musical world view. There were so many of us that came through who were waiting in the wings and wanted to be in the folk scene, but really didn’t have that mentality of trying to do a song exactly like Fred Jordan. We either didn’t have that kind of patience or maybe we were so far down the line it was just accepted as a given that these songs were there - we didn’t need to save them! So we could just go and integrate traditional songs with other stuff that we liked that was becoming available. The big thing about punk that informed all of my generation of players was the idea that if you can’t go and do this in a folk club, just go out and do it anyway. You’ve got a choice. You can either sit around and think about it and grumble that the door’s closed to you or you can just go out and make your own scene. With me it was a bit of both, really. Someone left the door slightly open and I crept in!”
An edited version of this interview was first published in fRoots No. 395 May 2016
This year of 2016 got off to a truly wondrous start with the arrival of Everything Sacred - the fruits of a collaboration between singer-songwriter James Yorkston, bassist Jon Thorne, and singer and sarangi maestro Suhail Yusuf Khan. James Yorkston kindly met me for a chat about Yorkston Thorne Khan, and this crazy old business we call folk music.
‘Jon’s played with me for a long time - since about 2009. He’s a very melodic player and a lot of my guitar playing is very thumb-heavy and very rhythmic. My two main guitar playing influences are Mississippi John Hurt and D’Gary - the Madagascan guitarist. I was primarily an electric bass player until I heard Malagasy Guitar, and that inspired me to buy my first acoustic guitar. Suhail and I first met backstage at a show after I’d done my soundcheck and I was just idly playing away. He took out his sarangi and started playing along with what I was doing and it just sounded great and really apt, straight away. I said to him, “you should just play with me on-stage, this evening - is that ok?!” After that we just kept in touch as much as we could and every time he came into the UK he’d come up and play with me’.
‘Jon and Suhail are genuine, world-class musicians, and they could play with anyone and not be out of place. I’m a different guy - I’ve come up from Punk and stuff. Jon is hugely influenced by Danny Thompson but I’ve never really explored folk-rock, although my first-ever show was with Bert Jansch who was extremely generous and lovely. In The Fence Collective you’d play your own songs, your pals’ songs, some traditional songs and and it was all just songs. Then suddenly I’m getting called a “folk musician” and for me “folk” is traditional music - it’s never meant a guy with an acoustic guitar. The reason why I called my 2009 album Folk Songs was to show that these are what folk songs are. The next songwriter album was going to be called Pop Songs, but stuff happened in my life and I kind of grew out of that idea.’
All three contribute memorable and moving new compositions, including Yorkston’s Broken Wave (a Blues For Doogie), Khan’s Sufi Song and Thorne’s haunting title track.
‘Jon brought his song in and I played nyckelharpa and Suhail sarangi, and it’s just lovely. There’s something about that take that just has a magical sound - it’s not my song, so I can say that honestly!’
The album also includes two striking cover versions in Ivor Cutler’s Little Black Buzzer and Lal Waterson’s Song For Thirza.
‘I’m from a tiny village where we had no music except for what came through the radio - mostly via John Peel, Janice Long and Andy Kershaw, so Ivor Cutler was big part of that. I heard him all my life, and now it’s the same with my kids. Lal Waterson is my favourite-ever song writer. When her Once In A Blue Moon came out I borrowed it from the record library just because I was an Anne Briggs nut and knew the song Fine Horseman was by her. I remember listening to it and I couldn’t understand why it was so damn good! Her songwriting has stayed with me ever since. Doing an Ivor Cutler song and a Lal Waterson song was just an obvious thing to do - you take the stuff you love and work with it’.
Does that pretty much sum-up the the philosophy behind Yorkston Thorne Khan, I wonder?
‘There was no thought behind this! As a touring musician you meet a lot of other touring musicians, but to have the kind of magnetism between people that you want to keep on playing with them even though one’s in Cellardyke, one’s in Delhi, and one’s in the Isle of Wight… that’s a special thing. You couldn’t plan this. I’ve seen the kind of acts where you have four names who have been put together and it’s perhaps a bit grinny and: “Hey! Look at this! We’re all really good!” Some of that stuff is good to watch but it’s like when you go to a session and it’s full of youngsters and they’re playing at a million-miles-per-hour. That’s nice to hear in the same way that watching a programme about the coast of Ireland is nice to watch, but it doesn’t really suck you in. The Irish music that I love is people like Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy and Bess Cronin. Her singing is one of those things, like Lal Waterson, that you hear and go: “Woah! What is that?!” That’s what I prefer - the individual and the unique’.
An edited version of this interview first appeared in fRoots No. 405, March 2017
Brooklyn-based Steve Gunn is a musical renaissance man, equally adept as a solo guitarist, a singer-songwriter, an improvisational and experimental musician or leading his band through a set of killer rock songs - as heard to full effect on his latest release, Eyes On The Lines. He’s also the producer of 50, the new album by Michael Chapman which might just be the best-sounding record of the Yorkshireman’s entire half-century career.
I met up with Steve backstage in London’s 100 Club, where he and his compadres Cian Nugent (guitar) Jason Meagher (bass) and Nathan Bowles (drums) later delivered an exhilarating show that began with a solo banjo set from Bowles and concluded with Gunn on his knees, turning all the guitar pedals all the way up. The venue, with its photograph-festooned walls documenting the entire gamut of rock ’n’ roll, seemed an entirely apt environment for Gunn - a self-confessed music obsessive and record nut, who’s ready and willing to talk music. Being just six days after the U.S. Presidential election, he talked a bit about politics, too. But let’s begin at the beginning.
“I started playing music as a teenager,” Steve tells me. “My parents weren’t musicians per se, but they were very musical. My mother was really steeped in the soul and R&B scenes and she saw all the Motown artists that came through town. My dad was more of a rock ’n’ roller - he was really into Jimi Hendrix, Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin and all that stuff. Music was a huge part of their life and their culture and how they related to the times that they went through.”
“it’s sometimes key for musicians that they have an older sibling to look up to, and I was lucky enough to have a sister who was into lots of the bands that were playing smaller cubs, coming both from the States and from England, and I just soaked all that up. As I got a little bit older and interested in playing, my parents were pretty supportive. By the time I was twelve or thirteen years old I got less interested in playing sports and primarily just wanted to be in a band.”
“My first instrument was the bass, then the following year I got a guitar and took lessons. Through my high school years I discovered local scenes and different bands who were very politicised and DIY - distributing their own records and setting up their own shows. After a while I got interested in bands that were more progressive as I realised a lot of the punk and hardcore groups I’d been listening to were very formulaic, and I really needed to discover things that were new and mysterious to me.”
“When I went to university, this whole world opened up to me through jazz radio programming and going to a lot of record stores. I moved into a house with some guys who were older than me and had extensive record collections. That’s when I discovered pre-war blues and some of the older British folk stuff and some extremely experimental jazz, and also when I started getting really interested in the acoustic guitar. When you’re that age and listening to everything, you connect things that aren’t necessarily on the same timeline, so I discovered the pre-war blues at the same time as John Fahey and Sandy Bull, and those two musicians really affected me in terms of how I wanted to approach the guitar. Discovering those two opened-up the guitar for me in terms of open tunings and fingerpicking and in how much they were influenced by the structures of folk music. Once you get to recognise the signposts you can correlate the ideas of meditative music with Indian Classical, with bluegrass, with Moroccan music…”
“I was in college and really trying to soak all this stuff up when I met a very important person in my life in Jack Rose. Jack, to me, represented someone who was really working hard at his craft and someone who wood-shedded for a long time before he stepped back out and reinvented himself. He was about ten years older than me - such a good guy, very friendly and also very inspiring and supportive to me. He really showed me how to work hard as a guitar player and also to demand respect for it. He was always standing up for others and standing up for himself too, and I feel musicians really need to do that.”
Jack Rose
“When he passed away we were all like: ‘holy shit, now what do we do?’ For me, and for Nathan and some others it was a point where we said: ‘Okay, we really have to do this now.’ Luckily, I got a load of solo shows around that time, and that was a really formative time for me as a performer. I was travelling to Europe, riding on trains by myself, playing to people I didn’t know in cafes and just getting by. I wasn’t really a natural singer so it took me a while to find my voice and get comfortable with it and learn to project, and all that stuff. I found that touring was the way to get better at everything, and in between I’d just work on songs and record stuff at home. Jason owns a studio called Black Dirt Studio, and that’s where I made Time Off, ” in 2013.
It was Rose, via his vinyl collection, who first introduced Steve to the work of Mike Cooper, with whom he recorded Cantos de Lisboa, also in 2013. “Jack pulled out a copy of Trout Steel and then, from that, all that Village Thing stuff by Dave Evans and Ian Anderson opened up to me too. Back then it was pre-internet so you had to come across this stuff in record stores and it was like finding gold! I became a real record fanatic and luckily I lived in a city that had great record stores with very cool owners.”
“The album came about when the RVNG label did a series of collaborative projects where they asked artists who, in their wildest dreams, would they want to make an album with, so when they asked me I said ‘Mike Cooper’. They contacted him and sent him some of my music and I told him about myself. We decided that we should make the record in Lisbon which was great because I had friends there and knew a studio, so we were able to spend a week playing together. I’d love to do more as I feel that was still only really touching the surface of what we could do.”
More regular collaborators are the Appalachian old-time, heroes of drone-folk, the Black Twig Pickers. In 2015 they combined forces for the Seasonal Hire album.
“That was really just the culmination of me and the Black Twigs getting together socially and jamming on some songs. They’re so inspiring too - there’s a really interesting work ethic with those guys. They’re serious about what they do and they’re not caught up in any bullshit. They can really play and they really connect with their audiences. Mike Gangloff is an incredible musician and an inspiring figure to all of us.”
The Black Twig Pickers & Steve Gunn. Seasonal Hire, 2015
There’s a discernible Anglo-Celtic undercurrent in much of Gunn’s work that manifests in the acoustic, DADGAD guitar parts of otherwise all-American rock songs on Time Off, Way Out Weather and Eyes On The Lines.
“I got into The Smiths as a kid and I love the playing of Richard Thompson, Nic Jones, Bert Jansch and Davy Graham. I soaked all that up because I was really interested in Fahey, but also really interested in singing, so when I discovered Bert Jansch and Davy Graham using more jazz voicings within a folk tradition I was like: ‘wow!’ Mike Cooper, Michael Chapman and Bridget St John told me all their stories about Les Cousins which seems like such an interesting time and place. Bridget lives in New York and I see her quite a bit.”
The just-released Michael Chapman album features Steve on guitar and drums and Nathan Bowles on banjo. It sounds like the fruits of an ideal symbiosis between an artist and a producer who really respect and trust in each others talents.
Steve Gunn, Michael Chapman, Nathan Bowles, Jimmy Sei Tang
“I’m so proud of that record! Michael’s such a hard worker… that shit is not easy, especially for someone of his age. He flew to New York and it was a hard couple of weeks but we realised that we had a great batch of songs that were sounding incredible and his voice is still sounding good. Michael was really generous with the songs in letting us do our own take on them. You can hear in his voice that he’s older, but that’s such a real part of the album. I think Michael picked the songs very carefully and the sequence of the record really works. I’m really happy for him - it’s exciting!”
When I ask Steve how the European band tour is going and what his forthcoming plans are, talk turns, inevitably, to ‘the event.’
“We played in Rotterdam the night of the election and we were all really anxious, but sort of jokingly anxious - not really thinking that this would actually happen. We thought it was impossible. Then this slow, shocking realisation that Trump was getting elected started settling in and we were just a mess. It’s so shocking, but it’s been building up for a while, so it was kind of crushing. The one thing I was feeling was such disappointment that people just aren’t aware of what’s happening around the world, and all the racism and sexism that’s really affecting people’s lives in a really big way. There’s such a large part of our population who just aren’t consciously aware of other people’s problems.”
“I’ve lived in a city pretty much all of my life and it’s a different existence - there are separate realities within the United States. The fact that this election slipped through the cracks is a huge deal. People are slowly realising that organising and representing, making your voice heard, being out on the streets and being close to your community are really important things.”
“After this, I’m doing a solo tour with Lee Ranaldo and Meg Baird. We’re going to pack up a mini van with acoustic guitars and hit the road around the States. Lee is extremely political as well, and I’ve spoken to Meg about this election, so we’re having a concert on inauguration day in D.C. We’re all fired up!”
Steve Gunn’s Eyes On The Lines is on Matador Records
Michael Chapman’s 50 is out now on Paradise of Bachelors
An edited version of this interview first appeared in fRoots magazine No. 406, April 2017.
“Raised on porridge and song in a family of eccentric musicians in Reading,” Kate Fletcher first came to our attention as the singer and main songwriter of Epona - a short-lived but influential English folk-rock group whose alumni include her brothers Colin and Jon - latterly of Telling The Bees and Magpie Lane, respectively, and Nancy Kerr. They released a fine album entitled Shine Again in 1997, after which Kate retreated from recording for ten years, returning with her solo CD Fruit (recorded in a caravan by Leveret’s Rob Harbron) in 2007. Ten years later (she’s nothing if not consistent) Kate’s back with Fishe or Fowle - her first album as as a duo with her husband Corwen Broch, and (astonishingly) his debut recording.
“I always wanted to be a musician” Corwen tells me over the phone from Orkney (where Kate works as a music teacher) “but I didn’t really have any musical background or way into it. When I was 21, I bought a truck and started living on the road. I met a bunch of people at Wayland’s Smithy and from them I picked up some drumming and didgeridoo - all the terrible hippie instruments! Then a couple of years later I learned tin whistle and bodhran and joined a band called Senzar Tribal Collective, which was really a rounding-up operation of everyone in Boscombe who was stoned enough to agree to come and play - but not so stoned that they couldn’t come and play! Then I joined a little Irish trad pub band called Celtic Dream - which sounds like a liqueur, and that was a hilarious bunch of people. I was still living on the road and on protest sites in my late twenties when a wealthy Druidess kindly bought me a set of Welsh bagpipes made by John Tose, and that was a turning point.” I first met Kate after being drafted in to deputise for her regular musical partner at a medieval music and storytelling show.”
“We became a couple because we had compatible reed instruments,” Corwen deadpans, but, as they soon discovered, their musical compatibility runs deep.
“We’re both real believers in maintaining traditional customs and the purpose of music as something more than just commercial, consumer entertainment,” says Kate. “It has social and ritual functions for dancing, for remembering, for bringing communities together. We’ve amassed a huge collection of CD and DVD resources to explore traditions. When we found out that Folktrax was folding (in September 2007) we bought everything we thought we’d ever need. That’s where the two samples of the old ladies on Fishe & Fowle come from - they’re Peter Kennedy recordings that now belong to Topic. We made a conscious effort to really honour and credit those source singers, because Kennedy didn’t always do that.”
Fish or Fowle is a double CD release, with eleven traditional songs and four originals on disc one, while the second disc is the first recording for 30 years of The Play o' de Lathie Odivere, an Orcadian ballad, sung in five parts. All of the songs are concerned with themes of transformation, as Corwen elaborates.
“There’s a marvellous book called Folklore In The English and Scottish Ballads (Lowry Charles Wimberly) which is full of fantastic stuff about ghosts, the afterlife, fairies, and all the cosmology that you can work out from the ballad tradition. One of the ideas is of a very permeable barrier between human persons and other-than-human persons. In the ballad tradition, people turn into animals, animals turn into people, animals speak… The album explores liminality between human and other-than-human and the desire for transformation and the fear of transformation. People resist hugely the idea that we might be animals , even though we demonstrably are! We can only be animals, plants, fungi or bacteria… Our animal nature and our kinship with the wild is really something to be embraced, and by distancing ourselves from the natural world we really impoverish ourselves.”
That Fish or Fowle is a unique-sounding record is due in no small part to the instruments used in its creation. “Corwen made the first Shetland gue in over a century!” Kate enthuses. “One of his instruments is in the Shetland museum, and he’s lectured in Scandinavia on the British bowed lyre traditions including the Shetland gue and the Welsh crwth. A lot of the instruments on the album we made ourselves, and we were very selective with the sounds that we used. We limited ourselves to producing a sound that’s very ancient, but not necessarily played in an ancient way. We’re not trying to recreate something - the minute you do that, you’ve made a museum piece and killed it. Almost every song that we sing has had changes made by us. They’re not fossilised pieces - even the oldest, most traditional songs are very personal to us in some way.”
