News from Nowhere

It's more than a week since we watched a virtual Live to Your Living Room concert with Nancy Kerr and James Fagan. It was a great show, of course: LTYLR seem to have come up with a formula for hybrid events that really works (they organised an in-person concert themselves). And ten days later, it is still with me in more than one way.

In the course of the evening, Nancy talked about the Music Heritage Place project - and specifically that it was the subject of a series of talks on Radio 3. So I've been listening to those: visits to county archives round the country to see what music might have found its way into their collections, and turning up a wide variety of stuff. I haven't yet heard anything that has stayed with me, despite the best efforts of the Melrose Quartet, but I have thought many interesting thoughts about how we define folk music, and who gets to make the definitions, and what gets included and excluded as a result...

This reminded me that there is always something worth bearing in Thank Goodness It's Folk, the show James Fagan co-hosts. How can you not love a programme that sets itself to work in order through the Child ballads? They have just reached 'Geordie', and devoted much of the show to compare and contrast.

But more than either of these, the gig stayed with me because it restocked my inner jukebox - that's an archaic image, and perhaps I should learn to think of it as a playlist set to 'shuffle', but I'm archaic myself, so a jukebox it remains. Anyway. Nancy Kerr's infectious melodies are weapons-grade earworms, liable to start up at any time, let alone in the aftermath of a gig, so it was inevitable (and not on a bad way) that Queen of Waters would be following me around for the next week. More surprisingly, it was accompanied by Now is the time, which I wouldn't have claimed as a particular favourite. And just occasionally, for a change, the algorithm would offer me Robb Johnson's Spirit of Free Enterprise.

All of this makes perfect sense: what really set me thinking about earworms was the Monday morning when I found myself earwormed by The Manchester Rambler. Where had that come from? I may be a wage slave on Monday / But I am a free man on Sunday... Was that it? But though it was Monday, I'm not exactly a wage slave (I was lazing in the bath at the time). Can an earworm be triggered, not by a fragment of tune but by an idea? Certainly the news headlines have had Cops of the World on pretty constant play (and I'm not the only Guardian reader to have that one).

To which you can add: One - two - three / What are we fighting for? / Don't ask me... A whole other sense in which the song has ended, but ...

Last Friday we went to our one and only event in the Books on Tyne Festival: On Sycamore Gap: Words of Music, Loss, Hope & Renewal with poet Kate Fox and musicians Staithe. Here's the listing on the festival website.

The starting point is the book Kate gave us when we saw her on Lindisfarne at midsummer, a collection of poems arising from the felling of the sycamore tree that used to grow on Hadrian's Wall. It's a nice little book: attractive production, abundant simple but pleasing illustrations by printmaker Cat Moore and, yes, I liked the poems too. I'm sceptical about the outpouring of emotion over the felling of the tree: it leaves a gap in our landscape, but how much of its fame comes from its (entirely fake) role in Robin Hood, Prince of Thieves? I always wondered why a tree had been allowed to grow in the stonework of Hadrian's Wall: it couldn't be good for it, surely? But that's sycamores for you, turn your back for a moment and a tiny seedling has become a tree. I was reassured by Kate's explanation that she had been approached by the publisher, it would not have occurred to her to propose a book on the subject; and I enjoyed her appreciation of how important the tree was in how many ways, tempered by just enough distance. I appreciated her take on the tree's unexpected place in heritage marketing (in her poem on John Clayton, the antiquarian who may have planted the tree).

Here's a glowing review (by - oh, goodness, it's by Julie Ward; long story). It conveys much of what is good about the book, but its praise gives away some of my reservations - it's a perfect gift, apparently. (And I admit, it is).

Given the involvement of Staithe, I had expected a poetry reading with songs; and that's how the first half of the evening went (because, said Kate, "we are our own support act.") But the main event was constructed as a whole: Staithe's Nick Pierce, introducing it, told us it might provoke strong emotions, and this was all right (oh, dear!) but also invited us to save our applause until the end (which we mostly did). Staithe are a duo, new to me, but I realised that I had heard Bridie Jackson before with her band Bridie Jackson and the Arbour: not my music of choice, but it worked well as counterpoint to Kate's words (what was that thing that Nick Pierce was playing? The internet tells me he is a viola player: was it an electric viola?).

I enjoyed the performance, but I was not overcome by strong emotions. This may indicate hardness of heart on my part - but I note that the passage that provoked the entire audience to spontaneous applause was Kate's "Alan Bennett monologue" as one of her fellow attenders in the public gallery at the trial.

Of course it is: the clocks don't go back until tonight. But if you are prepared to stretch a point, and can play BBC Sounds, you may be interested to learn that this evenings Loose Ends features Eliza Carthy and Jon Boden singing I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas.

You're welcome.

Hartlepool Folk Festival has not been lucky this year. Two weeks before the Festival was due to start, the council condemned the main hall of their central venue; and the actual weekend of the Festival was been subject to the first named storm of the season. So everything was more complicated than it might have been, and some things did not happen: I started to write this (yes, a week ago) sitting in the bar and drinking coffee, when I had planned to be watching Robb Johnson on the Outdoor Stage. Last year I sat in a deckchair in the sun to watch the outdoor events; this year most of them were cancelled. Sigh. Despite which, there was more to do than I could keep up with.

( Friday: the cure for jazz )

( Saturday: cider for breakfast )

...when you're having fun, which we have been, and also when you're busy, which likewise. Fun was a second consecutive weekend of visitors - Bears this time, my brother the boybear and sister-in-law the GirlBear; busy was mostly clients waking up after the summer and wanting to update their websites (I'm planning a newsletter, to be announced on FaceBook within the next couple of days, can you put a sign-up on my website by then?) but some self-inflicted pub quizzing and book grouping. Also laundry. And plumbers. So this is the condensed version of last weekend.

The Bears arrived on Friday evening. Saturday was cold and rainy, but GirlBear was intrepid and went out and sang Sacred Harp, and returned triumphant and weary with the New!Book! - having been so overwhelmed by the occasion and the weather that she got the wrong bus home, and didn't realise that she was going in the wrong direction until she passed the Angel of the North... The rest of us had a quiet day at home, and felt all the better for it.

On Sunday we lunched at Durham's newest wine bar, Veeno: one of a small chain run by a Sicilian vineyard as a way of marketing their wine, which I think is a great idea. J and J came up from York to lunch with us, which was doubly appropriate since a) they are the perfect companions with whom to explore wine and b) it was J's birthday. Since Veeno had opened only a few days ago, we were greeted with complementary glasses of their own wine, which felt suitably celebratory, though we preferred the bottle of nebbiolo which J selected to accompany our various main courses. It was particularly good with that item on my cheeseboard which I suspect was flavoured with truffle (I have recently come to the conclusion that I don't like truffle, but this cheese was really good). There was marsala for dessert (the vineyard is in Marsala, though this was not their own wine). I suspect that Durham's other wine bar (not open on Sundays) would be grander, but this was a lot of fun, and I'd go back.

I don't now recall at what point in the previous couple of days the boiler had gone on strike, leaving us with no heating and no hot water: not ideal at any time, but especially when there are guests... So it was just as well the Bears had arranged to spend Monday with a friend in Newcastle. We, too, fitted in a long-overdue visit to S, and in the evening, since we were in town, we and the Bears went on to the Bridge Folk Club. The guest was Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne whom durham_rambler and I had seen and enjoyed a couple of years ago at the Hartlepool Folk Festival, and we enjoyed him all over again: the music's good, if not necessarily what I want to listen to around the house, but the performance is great. There were floor spots, of a generally high standard (not just the Bears, although they had a spot too).

The plan was to insert ourselves into J's busy schedule by meeting her for an early lunch on Tuesday at the Dairy Barn, a farm café near Crook. But durham_rambler, ever optimistic, had agreed that that the heating engineer, having shown him how to reset the boiler, should return on Tuesday morning to see why the heat was not reaching the radiators. When it became obvious that this task would not be completed in time, the Bears and I took the bus to Crook, where J collected us, and after a quick look round the market took us to the Dairy Barn: pleasant food (not exclusively dairy) and a spectacular view over the Wear valley. We were just preparing to embark on the return journey when durham_rambler arrived, so J went off to her Italian class and the rest of us settled down for the second sitting.

Then home to recuperate before the Bears caught their southbound train.

What can I say? It's vacuous, it's overblown, it is absolutely not my kind of music, but once a year I enjoy it. In moderation: no doubt I'm missing out on stuff I would enjoy, but I don't watch the semi-finals; I don't stay up for the interval performances and the voting; and I'm ambivalent about the way this year's contest even managed to take over Doctor Who. But then, I'm ambivalent about so much in Doctor Who these days, and this isn't a post about that.

Eurovision,then. It's a mark of how (not) seriously I take it, that when the show started I was a bit surprised to find we were in Switzerland - didn't Sweden win? That must have been the year before, but then came the performance of last year's winning song, and I was certain I'd never heard it before in my life. Had we missed last year, for some reason? How fortunate that I keep a diary in hich I wrote that "The favourite won, which I always find disappointing." Sufficiently so to have blanked it completely, apparently.

No promises that I'll still remember this year's winner in a year's time, but it was at least a surprise. Austria was represented by an operatic counter tenor, wearing what looked like his dressing gown as he sailed a paper boat through a monochrome storm, before finally reaching a lighthouse. "Well, that was brave!" I thought. I didn't particularly like it, but I applauded.

Sweden was represented by three Finns singing about the joys of sauna - in Swedish, which is - it says here - the first Swedish-language entry since 1998. The stage set didn't completely do without flashing lights, but its centrepiece was the construction of a wooden sauna. Top marks, too, for the reference to tango with Arja Saijonmaa (which I only picked up from reading the lyrics, and am so glad I did).

I also the UK's hymn to the morning after more than I expected to: the big choral "What the hell just happened?" seemed to be on a different scale to the jaunty "Someone lost a shoe, / I'm still in last night's makeup,/ I'm waking up like, what's this new tattoo?" Overall, though, it wasn't embarrassing and it made me smile. If I am reading the results correctly, it did respectably with the professional juries, but the televoters do not love us. I wonder why?

By the time we reached Albania, who were on last, I was pretty much exhausted: but the costumes and set were so very red they were unmissable. Once I noticed that, and that they seemed to be combining traditional song (in Albanian, I think) and electronica, I ended the evening thinking kindly of them. Honourable mention.

One more thing. Luxembourg's La Poupée Monte Le Son echoes Poupée de cire, poupée de son, with which France Gall won Eurovision for them in 1965. I could go down a rabbit hole comparing the two songs, just how tongue in cheek are Gainsbourg's lyrics (and Gall's delivery), how plausible is Laura Thorn's rejection of doll-like passivity while dressed in an explosion of candy-pink corsetry (I wondered why her tinfoil seemed to belong to a different outfit, but of course all was revealed when she emerged from her corsets to display a tinfoil swimming costume). But let's not. Even the joy of a shout-out to 1965 was slightly upstaged by, of all things, Doctor Who, which managed a shout-out to 1963 - but as I said, this isn't a post about that.

Pete Atkin was in Middlesbrough last night for the gig deferred from September. He had had to cancel because he had covid, about which he seemed more aggrieved than anything else: I went all through lockdown unscathed, and now... Well, yes: that's how lockdown was supposed to work.

We had been at his previous gig, and there were things last night I thought were different, but looking at what I wrote last time, I see I am misremembering: a handful of unfamiliar songs, a selection of classics, lots of talk, all as before. There's a curious flavour to talking about how the songs were written when it involves telling the story behind a lyric that somebody else wrote, but Pete carried it off with generosity; he said, repeatedly, that he had been lucky to meet Clive James and work with him, but I think Clive was lucky, too. I'd have been interested to hear more about the process of bringing together words and music - but perhaps that would be too technical for a relaxed evening performance.

I wondered whether Pete was talking a lot to spare his singing voice: appatently not, then. And, as last time, I thought his voice was if anything stronger as we neared the end of the evening. A very powerful closer with Thirty Year Man leading straight into - what else? - Master of the Revels. Once again, though, the audience demanded more, and this time we got a very sweet Together at Last.

If my memory is to be trusted - and (see previous post) it just might be - it is five years since we last went to an actual cinema. That seems an impossibly long time - longer than if I had said "not since lockdown", though it means the same thing. Last Monday was certainly our first visit to the no-longer-new Odeon cinema, with the elaborate food and drink menu and the fancy reclining seats...

We were there, of course, to see A Complete Unknown: a movie about Bob Dylan, following him through the period from his arrival in Greenwich Village as - well, yes - a complete unknown, from his immediate adoption of and by the folk scene he found there to his door-slamming departure: and all the while he was writing so many great songs, and we'd enjoy hearing those, too. I wasn't going to miss this.

( But... )

On the other hand, A Complete Unknown brought Dylan's music home for the Guardian's Laura Snapes: that's got to be worth something.

Had things gone according to plan, we would have been in Middlesbrough last night to hear Robb Johnson with the Acoustic Irregulars. Things being what they are, the gig was cancelled, through no fault of the organisers (an earlier gig had fallen through, and the travel was no longer affordable). Of the three recent gigs we had booked at Toft House ("The Home of Unpopular Music"), this was the second to be cancelled: also not their fault that Pete Atkin had covid and has rescheduled for the spring. So last Saturday we were taking nothing for granted, eyeing the weather nervously: there was a thin blanket of snow over Durham, and threats of worse elsewhere...

The good news is that we had a very enjoyable evening with the Coal Porters. Beyond our street, the roads were clear, and once across the river there was no snow to be seen; the band appear to have travelled without incident too, from the village near Peebles where they had played the previous night. The internet informs me that the Coal Porters disbanded in 2018, but it doesn't seem to have cramped their style. If anything, there was the feeling of old friends with other projrcts getting together to have fun without long-term commitment. I liked vocalist Neil Robert Herd's explanation that "we have been described as 'alt-bluegrass'": it doesn't disown a perfectly reasonable description (banjo! mandolin! Bill Monroe song! high speed!) but nor does it actually endorse it. I also appreciated the costumes: three men in suits, bassist in teddy-boy drapes, fiddler Kerenza Peacock in a cotton print dress (but the print was of "some of my favourite feminists") and silver sparkly boots: that's what I'd call making an effort.

I can't find anything on YouTube which conveys the flavour of the performance. But here's what they did for their obligatory encore (Sid Griffin was prepared to hold forth at some length on this topic):



Post-encore, we also had an audience-participation version of Dylan's You ain't going nowhere: and then we came home. I wasn't tempted to buy a CD, but I'd go back for more of the live performance.

I was intrigued by sovay's post about this detective story, even before I registered what an apt coda it made to our recent adventures in Shropshire, Peters being, of course, a deeply Shropshire author. I had liked her Cadfael books well enough when I read them to have worked my way through most, if not all, of the series, but had never ventured into her other novels, and had no idea that she had set a murder mystery at a residential music college which is a hosting a week-end course on folk music.

"[A] residential music college" does not begin to describe Follymead. The opening of the novel is contrived to show it to the reader through the eyes of the astonished Liri. Two major aspects of the book each reveal the other, the singer and her reaction to the extraordinary location: the disproportionate grandeur of the gates, the full set of eighteenth century follies, the Grecian temple, the hermitage, the ruined tower ("No pagoda?" complains Liri, as the car rounds a corner and yes, there is the pagoda), the decoratively arched bridge over a river gleaming innocently like Chekhov's gun, the one element of genuine wildness in this artificial landscape... And then the house itself, a riot of towers and turrets and steeples and vanes - I enjoyed all of this enormously, and half-expected Michael Innes's Appleby to turn up. I cannot quite believe in it as a music college, especially a college in the ownership of the County Council. Peters offers some justification for this - the last of the family, for want of an heir, left it to the county with a handsome endowment fund, it operates under the aegis of a university - and plays up, too, quite how precarious it all is (the threat to Follymead is as urgent a concern of the narrative as any other) but even so... Ellis Peters was, says Carol Westron in an illuminating essay, passionate about education, "very active in the WEA (Workers' Educational Association) and helped to establish the Shropshire Adult Education College at Attringham Park. She also played a great part in setting up an Adult Education music college." In Follymead she gives free rein to a fantasy of a music college valued locally (Detective George Felse and his wife consider attending a forthcoming course on Mozart) and nationally.

If the book alloed the author to indulge in creating a fantasy music college, is the depiction of a folk music weekend similarly self-indulgent? She knows her ballads, and uses one of them for the scaffolding of her plot. (sovay recognised it even before the big reveal, and identifies it as the version sung by Ewan MacColl: I defer to her expertise, and had to refer to the estimable Mainly Norfolk which offers achoice of variants.) But a passion for music and an eye for the potential of a balled do not add up to a love of folk music: maybe Liri is speaking for her author when she refuses the description "folk singer" as being ill-defined. "I'm not even sure I know exactly what a folk-singer is... About a ballad singer you can't be in much doubt, it's somebody who sings ballads. That's what I do ..."

How fortunate, then, that the story is set at a week-end course at which Professor Penrose will help us to examine the nature of folk music, with the promise of much debate, his record collection and some star live performances. I don't suppose Ellis Peters expected her background colour to be appealing enough that I am (at least) halfway to regretting that pesky murder investigation for getting in the way of some interesting music and talk, but there you go, that's what happened. ( The best I can do is to put it under a cut. At inordinate length, then: who's who, and who sings what? )

[Emerges, blinking, from the rabbit hole.]

sovay characterises as misdirection the use of a song - does it qualify as a balled? - to provide the nove's title. Indeed, and not just because Liri's vengeful rewrite invites the reader to anticpate an entirely different narrative to the one which eventually unfolds. It directs the reader's attention to the most obviously romantic pairing in the book, Liri and Lucien, the musical power couple between whom something has gone badly awry: contrast them with the rational observers, Tossa (short for Theodosia) and Dominic (Felse, son of the series detective, which is convenient), treading carefully through their a newly established relationship, and reflect that young couples tend to emerge well from the Cadfael books (this is from memory, but I'm pretty certain of it). Perhaps, then, the black-hearted true love is to be found in the third couple, the one introduced before the others, on the very first page ("only ine woman really existed in his life, and that was his wife.") There's a whole other post which grows from that reading, and considers the novel as it was surely intended to be considered, as a detective story. There's the character of the detrective to be considered, and whether he is a plausible policeman (to be set alongside the question of whether Cadfael is a plausible monk).

There's also a footnote about Ellis Peters' relationship with Czechoslovakia. But somebody stop me, before I launch into either of those...