shewhomust | Collier Lads for ever more!

By pure fluke I'd picked up a copy of the Informer listings magazine, and read about a show put together by musician Richard Scott under the title 'The Miners' Welfare', which would take a selection of songs from the northeast coalfield and perform them in his own arrangements in Miners Welfare Halls around the region "with the aim of reconnecting people with their coal mining heritage." Neither

durham_rambler nor myself has any claim to a coal mining heritage, but we decided we'd try to gatecrash a performance anyway, and with a little ingenuity found our way to the Hetton Town Trust & Sports Centre, a new building on the site of the old Miners' Welfare, tucked away behind the swimmng pool.

The show was worth the effort, and deserved a bigger audience: a reminder of how great some of those songs are, plus one or two of Richard Scott's own - and usually when a performer says " - and the next song is one I wrote," my heart sinks, but not this time. I particularly liked his Keelman's Song, which views the changes along the banks of the Tyne with a fine ambivalence.

Here's The Sunderland Echo's introduction of the project, and here's the Journal's version. I'm amused by the Journal's assumption that only a folk group would want to engage with this material, because the band had clearly taken great pains not to use traditional (or traditional style) arrangements. Richard SCott plays with the Grand Union Orchestra, of whom I know nothing; what he told Journal was "While arranging the material, I wanted to include some of my experience in folk, jazz, rock and particularly world music."

The result of this approach is slick, upbeat, maybe a touch too easy listening for my taste - but when it works, it works. Here's their version of The Collier's Rant (and click through for their versions of Ed Pickford's I am Coal and a South African township flavoured Down in the Coalmine - but The Collier's Rant, the oldest song in the collection, is the one I'd recommend). When it doesn't work - well, it takes Byker Hill and flattens all the twisted rythms out of it, and where's the point of that? Fun, if disconcerting, was the most cheerful version have ever heard of Merle Travis' Dark as a Dungeon (a song that Scott included, although it was strictly outside his remit, because he had learned it from his grandmother - just as I learned it from my mother).

There was a suitably savage version of Alax Glasgow's Close the Coalhouse Door; but the one genuinely sombre moment was an a cappella arrangement of The Trimdon Grange Disaster. By coincidence, yesterday was National Poetry Day, and I can't think of a better poet to celebrate it with than Tommy Armstrong.

The band were Mick Danby (bass), Graham Raine (guitar and some fine fiddle playing), Eddie Nickson (guitars and mandolin) and Alex Tustin (drums). To which list we should add that everyone at some point sang, but that Richard Scott himself took lead vocals, guitar, flute (shades of Jethro Tull) and whistle. They seem to be using the name 'Appletwig Music Presents', but rather half-heartedly.

Richard Scott talked repeatedly about the research he had done in preparing 'The Miners' Welfare'. He had clearly followed two lines of research, into the music and into his own family history, and I suspect it was the latter which had necessarily taken him into less well-known material. Otherwise, I might have expected to hear at least one song which I couldn't place. I'm not claiming that I knew everything they played - quite apart from the original compositions, I know Ed Pickford by name rather than knowing his songs, and they even had an Alex Glasgow song I didn't recognise. And I'm not complaining: these songs are widely sung for a reason. It's just my argumentative way of thinking which objects to the emphasis on research when, for example, I recognise three of the six tracks of my father's old Topic CD.

This post would have been much quicker to write if the internet were not so full of Stuff: Alex Glasgow has a blue plaque! (And I can hear the strains of Dr Strangely Strange drifting up from downstairs...)