The Fenland Gent

These are in order.

1. This Must Be The Place.

“Love you till my heart stops. Love you till I’m dead”

No I’m ok – I’ve just something in my eye.

2. Nothing But Flowers

“If this is paradise I wish I had a lawnmower”

As @judeclarke pointed out on twitter – a brilliant reply to Big Yellow Taxi.

3. The Big Country.

“I wouldn’t live like that if you paid me”.

The best guitar outro ever.

4. Once In A Lifetime

“There is water at the bottom of the ocean”

Eno. Eno collaboration.

5. Life During Wartime

Burn all my notebooks. What good are notebooks? They won’t help me survive”

The Wikipedia entry for the song sucks out all the wit

To get to the house where Clough was born I had to walk a little way out of the centre of town. As I got near the house I crossed a railway bridge. To my right beyond some allotments were, what I think, are gas and chemical plants and beyond that was the Transporter Bridge. To my right, under a slate grey sky, were, the very bleak and brooding looking Cleveland Hills.

Hard. Industrial and Northern. Exactly the sort of place I imagined Clough to come from. Except once I crossed the bridge I could no longer see the hills and the chemical plants. The houses in the streets grew a bit more genteel; some were semi detached, most had front gardens

Clough’s birthplace is a nice sized house in a pleasant side street in what seems a nice part of town.

Near Clough’s house there is the very pleasant park named Albert Park. It’s a typical municipal park, the sort that sprang up in hundreds of Victorian towns.

When he was young and played for Boro’ Clough would cut through this park to Ayersome Park. In the park they’ve built a statue of the young Clough, carrying his boots rushing to the match.

Seeing the statue was a bit spine tingly.

Random fact about the town of Middlesbrough. Number 1.

In the early C19th Middlesbrough didn’t really exist. It was just a hamlet of 4 cottages. Then a local Quaker named Joseph Pease saw that the area could be developed as a port for North Eastern coal so he bought the hamlet.

Nowhere in England grew as fast as Middlesbrough did in the C19th. Out of virtually nothing it became a massive industrial town with it’s own identity and a hell of legacy for making stuff.

It’s a kind of creativity that now seems unimaginable.

I’m not naive about the contradictions. The creativity came at a price and the exploitation was almost as destructive as capital and industry’s creativity.

But still it seems a different world.

You can see traces of that Victorian optimism and confidence in a few of the old buildings that still stand amongst the shopping centres and ring roads. Here’s a few photos. They’re from my iPhone so the quality isn’t all that.

These sort of days are my favourite sort of days.

I’m off to Middlesbrough for the day to go to the Riverside to watch Boro’ play Ipswich.

This is just an excuse for me to go to somewhere I’ve never been before and explore a bit. Like a tourist.

Last night I was out with friends and they sort of understood why I might want to go to Middlesbrough to watch the football but they were incredulous as to why I’d want to go to Middlesbrough as a tourist.

Which is a fair point I suppose. But I’ve done a bit of research and I reckon there’s plenty to see. I’ve only 4 hours (insert your own jokes here) but that should be plenty of time to see the few things I want to see.

There is every likelihood that this will be the only time in my life that I visit Middlesbrough – whatever it has to offer it’ll need to hand it over in the next 4 hours.

Disclaimer.

I have this vague notion that the reason why I blog stuff is because someone, somewhere will find something useful in the information I post, a good hotel to stay in or a nice pub to drink in and so on.

Obviously it never turns out like that. It ends up with me banging on about whatever idle thoughts I’m having.

But I quite like doing it though – I like that I can pretend that I’ve turned something as routine as going to a football march into a tiny, tiny little adventure.

There are loads of things I like about the Cambridge Folk Festival:

I like how it turns my local (charming) municipal park into a weird community of tent dwellers with daft hats.
I like how suddenly, for 4 days, there’s a half decent record shop near my house.
I like it that my friends, family and neighbours all go – which means I can go on my own and pootle about and still be sociable(ish).
I like the food stalls, (I wish some of them were there all year – especially the Northfield Farm Burger Van)
And I quite like some of the music. I usually get very excited about 1 or 2 acts that I see there.

Brilliant Cambridge Folk Festival Buskers Hobo Jones

This year I got really excited about 7 acts which means it was the best of the 5 festivals I’ve been to (3.5 times better I think)

The 7 acts were:

1. The Unthanks

Best thing I’ve seen for a long while.

They have the most beautiful voices and sing the most beautiful harmonies in songs many of which have arrangements that are brooding and melancholic and sparse. Some of these songs are “trad. arr.” but the Unthanks’ music does not find validation in some ossified folk music tradition. If they remind me of anything they remind a tiny bit in some ways of Kate Bush or Syd Barrett or Nick Drake in that they are very English but in an “other worldly” way. But they manage this whilst singing songs, many of which, are explicitly about “worldly” subjects like domestic abuse or working conditions for C19th women miners.

Maybe it’s a bit of a stretch to say they are like a Ken Loach film that somehow ended up being directed by David Lynch but I reckon that’s sort of the area in which they operate.

All the best things have contradictions. This was the best thing. Doubt I’ll see or hear anything better this year

And they clog dance and it makes them smile whilst they do it.

(You can buy The Unthanks’ “CD Here’s The Tender Coming” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here)

2. CW Stoneking

A geniune made up authentic 1920s Australian blues singer.

There are some things about folk music that I’m not overly fond of – the obsession with tradition, the obsession with authenticity and the fretting about identity. The Cambridge Folk Festival is not especially riddled with this stuff (though it’s definitely there – the song “Roots” by the Show of Hands always gets a big cheer).

CW Stoneking is an Australian blues singer who performs as if he really is living in the 1920s or 30s but it’s a particularly contrived view of the 20s and 30s. He does not seem to be worried that much about authenticity and tradition and instead he has made up a brilliantly convincing act. Which I prefer and I wrote a long rambling blog entry here which sort of explains why.

(You can buy CW Stoneking’s CD “Jungle Blues” from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here)

3. Carolina Chocolate Drops

Brilliant fiddle and jug band

The Carolina Chocolate drops are an old style string and jug band who play traditional music from Carolina. They dress up in outfits from 100 years ago (a bit) and they put on a highly entertaining show and most importantly they managed to be serious about what they were doing without being overly precious. Amongst their highly infectious and entertaining interpretations of traditional music they do a cover version of Blu Cantrell’s R&B hit “Hit ‘em Up Style” which was fantastic (You can see them doing it here).

You can buy The Carolina Chocolate Drops CD “Genuine Negro Jig” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

4. Spiro

In a way this is the closest thing you are going to get to Kraftwerk at the Cambridge Volk Festival.

Each year I go to the Folk Festival I wonder if I will see some mad development such as the invention of some form of Post Folk, where the weird scratched out atonal and discordant rhythms of old field recordings are reworked to create a new avant garde that tries to force folk music to look forward and not backwards.

This innovation would cause fist fights in the beer tent.

Never happens.

Never will.

However there are some bands that whilst I’m listening to them do make me think of other non folk bands. So last year in a very good set by Lau there was one bit which, to me, was like a balloon of swelling sound (err.) that reminded me ever so slightly of My Bloody Valentine.

I saw Spiro by accident. I bought an ice cream and only stopped in Stage 2 to eat it and ended up staying because they were so good. In the festival programme they are described as being minimalist and dissonant. I’m not sure I would go that far but there was one bit that made me think of Kraftwerk
But with fiddles.
Sort of.
Ok that is a bit of a push
But there was a song called Binatone.

(You can buy Spiro’s CD ‘Lightbox” from Amazon UK here)

5. The Burns Unit

Awesome Canadian – Scot supergroup named after Notts. Forest hard-man Kenny Burns*.

I loved this lot – they play big grown up songs about broken relationships and drink problems and decay and their songs seem to swell and grow and are laden with gorgeous hooks. Their LP Side Show may well be a contender for my LP of the year.

Also they were also a laugh which is important if you are going to sing about drinking too much and splitting up.

* I’m going to keep pushing the “named after Kenny Burns” line irrespective of what anyone else says.

(You can buy The Burn’s Unit CD “Side Show” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here)

6. Imelda May and Sharon Shannon.

Stop being polite. Be more like Gene Vincent.

Prior to Imelda May and Sharon Shannon taking to the stage there was a band that played an especially polished version of Western Swing. People really liked this other band and they went down well, and I certainly didn’t hate them but I did start a fantasy that the ghost of Gene Vincent would come on stage and limp and stomp all over this bands’ slightly too polite ways.

Anyway a little after this Imelda May and Sharon Shannon took to the stage

I like Sharon Shannon a lot and Imelda May live is fantastic and here together on the main stage I would hazard the claim that they really did rip things up a bit, especially when, quite weirdly, they did a cover version of a Gene Vincent song. The crowd was tending toward being euphoric and thanks to the ghost of Gene Vincent I was ahead of them.

Really Ace.

You can buy Sharon Shannon’s CD “Saints and Scoundrels” (which includes a duet with Imelda May) from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

7. The Wonder Stuff

“I’m 44″ says Miles Hunt. The crowd cheers.

I have comfort music. My comfort music is not particularly mainstream or obvious and others may not find it comforting (It includes the Butthole Surfers, Celtic Frost, Minutemen, Barry Manilow and David Soul). But it is music I loved at some point and still listen to occasionally. Amongst my comfort music is the Wonder Stuff

In the very late 80s and early 90s I really liked the Wonder Stuff and so did most of my friends. We went to see them quite a bit when I was a student. I grew my hair long. I had a laugh at the gigs. I still think first 3 LPs are good – especially Never Loved Elvis (which I think was the first thing I bought in the CD format).

It seemed a bit unreal that this band from 20 years ago were playing in my local park. I’ve lost touch with most of friends from 20 years ago and half of the band’s original line up are dead – but this is still comfort music and I comforted myself during this gig by drunkenly singing along with almost every word of every song and by doing the stupidest jig of joy at the start of Ten Trenches Deep.

You can buy The Wonder Stuff’s CD “If The Beatles Had Read Hunter … The Singles” from Amazon UK here and from Amazon USA here

It was these 7 bands made this a memorable festival for me.

BUT

Also worth mentioning were Stornoway (earnest, young, clear voiced) Coco’s Children (lots of them, infectious) Breabach (folky, swirly) and Mama Rosin (up beat and very infectious). I missed most of Johnny Flynn because of a time table clash though I like what I saw.
By the time Kris Kristofferson took to the stage I think the fact that I done about 35 hours of festival band watching caught up with me. I missed the start and struggled to get into what was clearly a good set. Which was a shame because I doubt he’ll be playing in my local park any time again in the near future.

The Unthanks leaving the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival

(All the pictures are thumbnails. I took the pictures).

At the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival I was quite taken by C W Stoneking.

He got me thinking about how important “faking it” is in music.

C W Stoneking is a unique talent, a blues singer who acts and dresses as if it is the 1930s, but a 1930s that often owes more to Cecil B DeMille and Hollywood than it does to the lives of those Blues singers that lived in the Mississippi Delta. His act conjures up a world of South Seas’ tramp steamers or a world where men in shabby cream suits get stranded in shabby exotic hotels or lost in the jungle with only the rhythm of the drums for company.

In a way it’s barking mad but it is also great stuff.

I think the video for Jungle Blues which is from his second LP gives an indication of what he is up to.

(You can get his LP Jungle Blues from Amazon UK here)
(You can get his LP Jungle Blues from Amazon USA here)

At a folk festival is there are a lot of people who are very concerned with authenticity and tradition and preserving the old,

(...”and this is an old Yorkshire Dead Miner’s Dog Ballad called My Whippet Went A Courting…etc.”)

- but I’m of the opinion that tradition is mostly bunk and that curatorship is usually the enemy of imagination. I’m much more interested in the liars and the fakers – the people who take from the past, or from other people or “cultures” and pretend that that’s what they are. I like this because I reckon that a lot of the best, most inventive, most thrilling music in pop, rock and folk often began with someone pretending to be something they were not.

So whilst I’m at the festival watching, and thoroughly enjoying, CW Stoneking pretending to be something he is not – I began to think about Dylan.

There is footage of young English men and women being interviewed as they leave a Dylan concert during his “Judas” tour in 1966.
With a few exceptions these young men and women are cross at Dylan for playing his amplified electric music, they say that they had paid to hear folk music and this wasn’t what they had got – which is fair enough but there is one young women who is complaining that this electric Dylan is a fake.

Dylan was always a fake and in fact was brilliant because he was a fake.

When he “went electric” at the Newport Folk Festival it was not the first time he’d reinvented – or made up – what he was. Earlier in the sixties he arrived in New York as a Jewish kid from the Midwest who had a fierce will not to be a Jewish kid from the Midwest. He wanted to be known as some sort of hobo ballader. He “made himself up” as a folk singer and did it in such an entertaining way that a large section of the public paid really close attention.

(Scorsese’s film about Dylan “No Direction Home” is about Dylan’s capacity for reinvention. It’s great. You can get it from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here
Todd Haye’s film “I’m Not There” is a creative fiction about the many faces of Dylan. I liked it. You can get it from Amazon UK here and Amazon USA here).

So much of post war C20th pop and rock (and folk) was about pretending to be what you wanted to be which was usually the opposite of what you actually were.
You have to sift through an awful lot of sociological, cultural, historical, political and technological developments to get to the happenstance of why but maybe you can sort of pin it down to having something to do with:

War, America, Race, Invention, Youth, Sex and Electricity.

It was something to do with these things in the early sixties that led young men in this country, with those slightly dull post war names like Eric, Brian and Keith, to pick up guitars and learn to play them because they wanted to be like Delta blues men.

It takes an extraordinary leap of imagination to want to be like a Delta blues man if it’s the very early sixties and you are from Middlesex or Surrey and you’re still in a grammar school blazer. But that’s the point. These young men did make extraordinary leaps of imagination and as such their lives became quite brilliant adventures and they were able to take music and culture, popular or otherwise, in all sorts of new directions.

And it was not just them.

As well as Eric, Keith and Brian (and Dylan, who wanted to be Woody Guthrie), there was Elvis wanting to be either Faron Young or black. Iggy Pop didn’t want to be a nice kid from a decent suburb. Lou Reed didn’t want to be a nice kid from a decent suburb. Bowie wanted to be a mod, then a spokesman for youth, then a frock wearing Pre-Raphaelite beauty, then he wanted to be Iggy, then he wanted to be black, then German and then young. Blokes from council estates wanted to wear make up & dresses on Top of the Pops. Peter Gabriel wanted to be a wardrobe. Some young men in post war Germany wanted to be robots. Oiks wanted to be squires. Squires wanted to be oiks. Damon Alban wanted to be working class. Brett Anderson wanted to be gay and so on and so on.

There really are about a billion examples and most of them are usually about wanting to be a different class, race or sexuality and it has been a process that has produced so much work of real note*

In fact I think that this process of “making yourself up” in public and trying to be what you are not could be one the key strands in making C20th rock and pop what it was.

But what about Folk?

Folk played a huge part in this process, not least because of Dylan. The late 50s and early 60s folk revival was perhaps the template of a process that kept happening in the 60s and 70s and 80s, a process of imitation inspiring innovation; a process of copying leading to reinvention which in turn lead to something original.

Examples I’m especially fond of include original Dylan copyists the Byrds, who under the guidance of (millionaire cowpoke) Gram Parsons went “country” because country was “authentic”. Members of Fairport Convention (all from North London I think) saw the Byrds during this country phase and went off to do the same with trad. English folk and came back having invented Electric Folk. More recently Billy Bragg drew a seemingly absurd line from Woody Guthrie to south Essex and made it work so well and Shane MacGowan managed to place the 100 Club somewhere in Connemara . He was able to this because, like all those that were brilliant at this, his contrivance seemed, or perhaps even was, something natural and instinctive.

Unfortunately a lot of folk isn’t always comfortable with this conspicuous fakery – which is probably why those young folkies got cross with Dylan all those years ago. I think a consequence of this is a tendency for too much folk music that is revered by fans, and is presented in a polished and polite way by the performers and where innovation, when it does appear, stumbles about in a rather clumsy way (ooh look they’ve got a rapper).

Footnote

I just read this though before posting it an have realised that I’m talking almost exclusively about white musicians. I don’t think Billie Holiday, James Brown, Chuckle Berry, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Otis Redding, Miles Davies, Stevie Wonder or Marvin Gaye etc had to fake a single thing to be brilliant.

*People who are from Kingston Upon Thames, or thereabouts, who pretend to be from Kingston Jamaica will always be annoying.

Usually a bit suspicious of how good a band really is if that band’s showstopper is a cover version – but the Carolina Chocolate Drops version of this song is just so so so good and whilst it was a showstopper at the 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival the rest of their stuff was also pretty amazing.

Really great band and really great to watch.

(This clip is not from the festival).
(Obviously).

Various photos of the bands I most enjoyed on the Saturday at the Cambridge Folk Festival – Unthanks, Spiro and the Carolina Chocolate Band (and some Morris Dancers – not a fan but I liked the photo).

The Unthanks were fantastic at The 2010 Cambridge Folk Festival (despite the people chatting away at the back). The highlight was them singing The Testimony Of Patience Kershaw but their dancing was also ace – as you can see here in this quite small picture which I think is a thumbnail for an equally small picture.

I took these photos of Imelda May about an hour ago during her set as a guest with Sharon Shannon. They’re a bit blurry but I hope they’re ok.

It was a fantastic performance. Sharon Shannon is always good (I love her band’s version of “Music For A Found Harmonium”) but with Imelda May they stormed it. I thought Imelda May was brilliant last year here at the festival but this may have been a bit better. I’ll be surprised if that’s not the festival highlight.