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SHOUTING ABOUT SPECIALIST MUSIC ISSUE 17 AUG/SEPT 2010

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Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson

Enter our competition to win all of the CDs featured in this issue.

Also in this issue:

Alasdair RobertsRichard Thompson

Dr John Loudon Wainwright III

MegsonLittle Axe

Los LobosElizabeth Cook

The Old Dance SchoolJohn Prine

Jimmie VaughanDavid Rotheray

Reviews, reviews, reviews.

the gift of song…

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Beth Nielsen Chapman

“A joyous collection of skilfully written songs.” Nick Barraclough BBC Radio 2

“A gorgeous return to mainstream rock.” ★ ★ ★ ★ Mojo

“Back To Love is a consummate piece of songwriting and performance.” ★ ★ ★ ★ ★ R2

“Classy songs, classy vocals, in short, a classy album.” ★ ★ ★ ★ I Maverick

“A delightfully chilled out return to Beth Nielsen Chapman’s first commercial-sounding pop album in six years.” The Irish World

“Aided by peerless production and an aching lovelorn voice, Ms Chapman pulls it off in exemplary fashion.” Acoustic Magazine

New UK tour announced. Sept 19 & 20 The Stables Milton Keynes 22 De Montfort Hall Leicester

23 Cheltenham Town Hall 24 Winter Gardens Margate 28 Theatre Severn Shrewsbury 29 Corn Exchange Newbury 30 Fairfield Hall Croydon Oct 1 Corn Exchange Ipswich

3 Liverpool Philharmonic 4 The Sage Gateshead 5 Queen’s Hall Edinburgh 6 Buccleuch Centre Langholm 7 Buxton Opera House 8 Warwick Arts Centre Coventry

New Single how we love available now

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Page

4 Katriona Gilmore & Jamie Roberts Last Shop Standing

5 Megson

7-10 Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson

11 A Folk Song A Day

12 Alasdair Roberts

13 Richard Thompson

15 Nancy Kerr & James Fagan

16-17 The Burns Unit

18 The Old Dance School

19 David Rotheray

20 Loudon Wainwright III

21 Elizabeth Cook

22 Los Lobos

23 Bill Kirchen

24 Michael Weston King

25 John Prine

26 Jimmie Vaughan

27 Dr John & The Lower 911

28-29 Real World Records Little Axe, Afro Celt Sound System, Syriana

30 Larkin’s Jazz

31 Competition page

32-33 Folk Reviews

34 Country/Americana Reviews

35 Blues Reviews

36 Jazz reviews

37 World Reviews

38 Round Up

ContributorsAndy Robson, Brian Showell, Cliff White, Clive Pownceby, Colin Irwin, Colin Somerville, David Kidman, Howard Male, Jon Lusk, Ken Smith, Peter Bacon, Simon Holland, Garth Cartwright, Sid Cowans, David Sinclair, Julian May, Jane Cornwell, Nick Dalton.

Editor Simon Holland

Design and artwork Don Ward at Triple Eight Graphics (contact don.ward.888@btinternet.com)

Printed by The Martstan Press. Princes Street, Bexleyheath, Kent DA7 4BJ 020 8301 5900

HElloWelcome to the summer festival 2010 Properganda, our generation spanning issue with Eliza and Norma as cover stars, revelling in the acclaim that Gift has enjoyed. It’s amazing to discover that this is their first album as a duo, despite much collaboration down the years. Still, it’s a delight and you can read Julian May’s excellent interview starting on page seven and you’ll note Florence keeping the Waterson:Carthy dynasty going strong.

As always The Brits make a very strong showing… Richard Thompson, The Burns Unit, Megson, Alasdair Roberts, Kerr & Fagan and David Rotheray all have fantastic new albums, so read on…

There’s much to celebrate from across the Atlantic in this issue too. Dr John has released his best album in years. Tribal has seen the Night Tripper locking down some solid funk grooves with his Lower 911 combo. Los Lobos have equally impressed with Tin Can Trust, while Elizabeth Cook also has the very impressive Welder, which she has been touring across the UK through July. Meanwhile Bill Kirchen has pulled together a fantastic guest list including Elvis Costello, Nick Lowe, Dan Hicks and Paul Carrack for Word To The Wise, the twangingest album of the year, while Jimmie Vaughan plays loving tribute to his jukebox memories on Blues, Ballads & Favourites. Loudon Wainwright III also wades into the economic crisis with 10 Songs For The New Depression, including 8 new compositions and two rescued from previous crises. Loudon initially intended a new song a month for a year, but fell a little short.

Someone who’s determined not to, however, is Jon Boden currently well into the first leg of delivering A Folk Song A Day. That’s 365 of them, a whole year’s worth and you’ll find the detail on page 11. But on the subject of the web, our new home is almost ready to launch and will be the place to be for daily updates across our broad musical palate. So that’s two websites for daily consumption folks…

www.afolksongaday.com

www.propergandaonline.com

In the mean time happy listening.

Proper Music DistributionThe New Powerhouse Gateway Business Park Kangley Bridge Road SE26 5AN England

Tel Int +44 (0) 20 8676 5100 Fax +44 (0) 20 8676 5169www.properdistribution.com www.myspace.com/propermusic

CONTENTS

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one of the surprise hits in the world of independent music this year has been a book about record retailing. Last Shop Standing by Graham Jones has quietly turned into an industry phenomenon.

Now available in its fourth, revised edition, the book has become a must-read for anyone with an interest in local record shops, whether owner, employee or customer.

A travelling music rep for over 20 years, Jones claims to have visited more record shops in Britain than anybody else, and certainly more than anyone will ever visit in the future. When he began there were about 3,000. Today just 265 survive.

Jones toured the UK to interview the men and women behind the 50 record shops which he predicted would be the last left standing. On his travels he uncovered many fascinating stories and humorous anecdotes as he detailed the hard facts of a much cherished industry’s battle for survival - everything from shocking insights into the way in which records have been hyped into the charts to examples of the most bizarre requests by customers. The tales of the various characters whose love of music has kept these emporiums running in the face of every setback imaginable is both heartwarming and hilarious.

“I still love going into an independent record shop as I always leave with something I never intended to buy,” Jones says. “It’s an experience that you don’t get from shopping online or in a supermarket.”

Jones quickly discovered that his affection for the traditional record shop is still shared by a significant section of the music-buying public and what began as an obituary turned into a celebration. Since the book was first published, 14 new record shops have opened.

“The record shops which have survived have done so by becoming part of the community,” Jones says. “They are places where music fans and musicians can meet up. A lot of them have diversified and are now selling coffee, music books, clothing accessories, musical instruments and memorabilia. But what the record shop does best is support new talent and local music. Spillers in Cardiff, for example, have now sold more than 600 copies of a local compilation CD called Twisted By Design. Only an independent record shop could do that.”

Far from sounding the last rites, Last Shop Standing has helped a vital corner of the independent music world resist the relentless march of supermarket and online consumerism. David Sinclair

Last Shop Standing – Whatever Happened

To Record Shops? by Graham Jones

www.lastshopstanding.co.uk

2010 has seen twoultra-significant

milestones in Katriona and Jamie’s four-year-so-far career: their nomination for BBC Radio 2 Folk’s Horizon Award, and their first-ever nationwide headline tour. Each of them had already proven their impressive musicianship and adaptability when working within established outfits (Katriona first with Tiny Tin Lady and now Rosie Doonan’s Snapdragons, Jamie currently with Kerfuffle), but they’re now focusing their energy on the duo activity they’d embarked on a while back but which, until releasing last year’s stunning Shadows And Half Light CD, hadn’t been adequately showcased.

Kat and Jamie are a unique force on the contemporary folk scene, with a markedly personal approach and a truly distinctive sound. Their act boasts a most unusual “selling-point”, which at gigs causes eyes to open wide in sheer amazement: Jamie’s awesome guitar playing, arguably as entertaining to watch as to hear, employs a highly percussive lap-tapping style (stemming from his days as a rock drummer!), which is capable of great delicacy and intricacy. This, combined with Katriona’s dynamic, florid and full-toned fiddle playing, often causes folks to cast their eyes around the stage in disbelief that there can be only two musicians making the sound they hear. And what’s more, they both sing (enviably well!) and write most of their material, informed by Katriona’s love of American musical heritage and Jamie’s interest in English traditional music.

For another vital asset which Kat and Jamie possess is an uncanny ability to naturally assimilate into their own work a massive array of musical influences, gleaned from an ongoing practice of listening closely to other performers and registering the various choices they make: “Every musician you play with, work with or listen to adds a little bit more to your creative side I think – if you listen hard enough you can always pick out something useful, even if it’s subconsciously”, explains Katriona.

The “I can, therefore I will” dictum can become an unwelcome pretension when it comes to recording, but in Katriona and Jamie’s case it clearly proved a strength on their acclaimed debut album. Now however, for its sequel Up From The Deep, they’ve taken a conscious decision to focus on what the music actually needs, resulting in a cleaner, more stripped-down sound. Even so, there’s judicious use of a select, carefully-chosen pool of guest musos, who include the incomparable P.J. Wright on pedal steel and Nashville-based Cia Cherryholmes (of Grammy-nominated bluegrassers Cherryholmes) on banjo, along with bassist Jack Theedom and percussionist Dom Howell (who’d both played on Shadows…). So, with a fully-fledged album-promotion tour already planned for the autumn (details at www.gilmoreroberts.co.uk), this vibrant young duo really is set to go places.

David Kidman

Katriona Gilmore & Jamie RobertsUp From The DeepGilmore Roberts Records

GRR004 www.gilmoreroberts.co.uk

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Megson don’t let the grass grow under their feet.

In the six years since they burst out of Teesside with colourful backgrounds in classical music (Debbie Hanna), punk bands (husband Stu Hanna) and shared experiences in the Cleveland Youth Choir where they met, the duo have made a startling impact on the UK folk scene. Four albums and one EP in six years – each palpably distinctive from the last – tell their own story, while they’ve also become a top-notch live act, having painstakingly paid their dues the old-fashioned, tough way, playing floor spots at folk clubs. In the meantime they’ve set up their own cottage industry, self-releasing their records and relentlessly pursuing their own instincts which - far from following the big production and crossover path to which a major label would have doubtless steered them - have involved delving deep into unexpected strands of the extended folk tradition.

Their unusually intimate studio sound quality has even resulted in big demand for Stu Hanna’s services as a producer, resulting in much-praised work with Benji Kirkpatrick (on his Boomerang album), Mawkin:Causley’s The Awkward Recruit and Show Of Hands’ award-winning Arrogance Ignorance & Greed, with more on the way. Pundits trip over themselves trying to categorise their highly individual approach, with meaningless definitions like “nu folk”, “new acoustic” and “indie pop with an Americana edge” and they’ve had some bizarre comparisons with everyone from Seth Lakeman to the Beach Boys. But Megson follow no template. They play traditional songs, while also writing their own - usually entrenched in Teesside history and culture – which they perform in an urgently fresh, contemporary fashion while still sounding like a thoroughly modern link in a very rich, very old, very long chain.

Their last album Take Yourself A Wife veered far from its mostly contemporary predecessor Smoke Of Home to collate relatively obscure material from the north east’s vast song tradition, and their outstanding new one, The Longshot mixes their own material with intriguing representations of working class life by the likes of George Ridley (the man who wrote Blaydon Races) and Newcastle publican turned temperance advocate Joe Wilson.

Despite – or maybe because of – living in the south of England for several years, their music remains almost exclusively rooted in Teesside. “That’s where we both grew up and songs from the area obviously affect us deeply,” says Stu Hanna. “We’re inspired by the area and the industrial song tradition and when we write story songs we just naturally put them in that setting. And when we research stuff there’s a bit of us wanting to find songs that others haven’t recorded before. There’s a wealth of material there although a lot of it is heavy dialect stuff and it doesn’t always work, so there’s a lot of trial and error.”

One of their most telling original songs on the album is Working Town which, built on driving mandolin, reflects the decline of many industrial communities, in this case, Stu’s home town, Billingham. “It was a built up by ICI in the 1970s but now a lot of the factories have closed or moved away and it has just been left with no real investment. It has happened a lot in Teesside.”

Not that it’s all doom and depression. There’s plenty of humour in Joe Wilson’s Time To Get Up and George Ridley’s The Cab Man and any footie fan will smile wryly at their depiction of supporters clinging desperately to the hope of a miracle in the title track, The Longshot, a song borne of Stu and Debbie’s years of despair watching their beloved Middlesbrough.

They’re proud of their heritage and even prouder when their names are added to the illustrious list of songwriters noted for writing about the life and struggles of north eastern working class people, from Tommy Armstrong to Joe Wilson, Vin Garbutt and Jez Lowe. “We didn’t know much about them growing up because as teenagers we didn’t listen to folk music.”

Do teenagers listen to your stuff? “Some do! And we get a lot of people of our own age coming to see us as well as older people – there’s such a broad age range at our gigs it can be very perplexing because we don’t know how to market ourselves. We don’t know whether to put an ad in Saga or Smash Hits…”

Colin Irwin

MegsonThe Longshot

EDJ RecordsEDJO16

www.megsonmusic.co.uk

Megson

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Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson

on the front cover of Gift, beneath the names Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson, is a striking image: their linked

hands, Eliza’s smooth young thumb lying gently across the back of Norma’s more mature and craggy hand. Their grip is strong, yet tender. Norma sports a heavy Gyspy bracelet, her daughter, silver bangles, one with a dragonfly that looks as if it has just alighted. There is a connection here, something passing between generations. Open the cover, and there are the smiling faces of the women, and between them, Eliza’s daughter, Florence, one finger resting on her new tooth. You sense, before hearing a note, that Gift will be intimate, a family affair, joyful, but borne out of experience, and not superficial.

“It’s themed around mothers and families,” Eliza tells me when I ask about the title. “I’d just had my daughter. At first the album was going to be called Mothering Sunday, but that wasn’t to everyone’s taste so it became Gift.”

“It’s the gift of a child,” says Norma, “The gift of love. The gift of singing.”

“It’s also the gift of music being passed on,” Eliza continues. “There are songs mum taught me, songs I’ve given her, and songs given us by other people, such as Poor Wayfaring Stranger that mum was given by Almeida Riddle.”

The album opens with this gift from the great American old time singer. There’s an arresting, almost frightening, introduction from Aidan Curran’s guitar and the unmistakeable double bass playing of Danny Thompson, then Norma’s voice, stronger than ever, straightforwardly singing the story of the stranger who is ‘going home to see my mother’, preparing to ‘leave this world of woe’.

A sleeve note remarks how Almeida Riddle “would sing with her hands”. This is a distinguishing aspect of Norma

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Waterson’s style, too. Unlike that school of singers who wrap themselves around the mic. stand and wring the song out of themselves, Norma stands back, open-armed, her hands dancing, sending the song on its way with her fingertips, as if releasing a bird. The song itself is the gift, I suggest, and she delivers this present to her audience by singing it.

“I do feel,” Norma says, and here she grows insistent, “and many singers of traditional music feel, that we aren’t the important thing. The song is, and we are conduits. Almeida Riddle was one of my favourite singers and she got herself into real trouble one time when she said to Joan Baez she should think more about the song, and less about her own voice.”

Poor Wayfaring Stranger sends a shiver down your spine, but at the same time brings a delighted smile to your lips, because it really swings. Eliza chuckles, “That’s part of the plan, definitely.”

Although Eliza has sung with her mother all her life, and worked together with her and her father Martin in Waterson:Carthy, Gift is their first album as a duo. Eliza and Norma are, of course, known as folk musicians, and there are several fine renditions of traditional songs here, such as Bunch of Thyme. Norma was singing this before she understood what a bunch of thyme is (and we’re not simply talking spriggy herbs here). She can’t remember ever not knowing it, so the song is part of who she is. “They do, you know,” Norma whispers, “they get into your bones.” But as well as Thyme, The Nightingale and Bonaparte’s Lament, all traditional songs, Gift includes Ukelele Lady, which certainly isn’t. Eliza and Norma join the august roster covering Gus Kahn and Richard Whiting’s 1925 number that includes Peter Sellers, Bette Midler and Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. Here it features in an unlikely pairing with (If Paradise is) Half as Nice, which was a hit in 1969 for Andy Fairweather-Low and Amen Corner. It’s a swing extravaganza with an irresistible horn arrangement. This did, Eliza concedes, raise some eyebrows when she first suggested it.

“I have a very bad habit of turning everything into swing songs,” she confesses. “At one time I was writing a parallel album to Dreams Of Breathing Underwater (her seventh solo album, released in 2008). I had the same number of songs again, all swing. I really did - Dreams Of Swinging Underwater”

Eliza was concerned by Ukelele Lady which, despite its light-heartedness and daft rhymes - ‘Where the tricky wicky wacky woo…’ - might be considered a tad patronising. This is countered by If Paradise, she argues, because of the strength of feeling the lyric conveys. “She is going to cry when you leave her, because she is a nice girl and she’s fallen in love, thank you very much!”

All of which is probably giving this bit of flam rather more credence than it deserves. Nonetheless, the presence of these songs and Prairie Lullaby, which yodelling Jimmie Rodgers recorded in 1927, is revealing. Eliza resists the folk label, preferring to describe herself as a traditional singer. By which she means she is less concerned with a song’s provenance than its quality, and that she’ll sing whatever takes her fancy.

“All the real traditional singers did that,” she insists. “The shepherds from Northumbria listened to American Forces Radio and played jazz. Traditional singers sang music hall songs and early pop.

It’s about social singing. I don’t believe in ghettoisation.”

It dawns on me that swing has been a distinguishing but overlooked aspect of Norma’s and the other Watersons’ art. Mike and Lal Waterson’s seminal album Bright Phoebus, released in 1972, includes as well as the gloriously uplifting title track, the eccentric Rubber Band song, both of which really swing - and there’s not a single traditional song on the record.

“I blame my grandmother,” says Norma. “She loved all sorts of music: music hall, Marie Lloyd, waltzes, old parlour songs. My Uncle Ronnie played the piano, everything from Noël Coward and Al Bowly to Tchaikovsky and Grieg. And we listened to pop music on the radio. No one ever said, ‘Switch that rubbish off’.”

And they both agree that swing is not a spice that has to be imported; it’s a local ingredient of English traditional music. “There’s this lazy idea that white people, European people can’t swing” Eliza muses. “I don’t think it’s true. I think we have some fabulously dancey music in the English and the northern European traditions.”

The lolloping rhythm of Little Grey Hawk illustrates her point, but Gift also includes some weighty, indeed, monumental work.

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The Rose And The Lily is a great and awful song recounting the slaying of a young woman by a brother for falling in love with an unsuitable man. Traditional songs are sometimes dismissed as ‘irrelevant’, but what this one graphically recounts is an honour killing, and so though ancient it is entirely contemporary.

“Such songs are absolutely timeless,” Norma tells me. “Traditional music is the story of the human condition.”

Such dramas have to be told in a form that can express their depth, power and their ambiguity. It is an ‘honour killing’, but one wonders at the nature of the relationship between the siblings – and might personal jealousy as well as public ‘face’ be a factor in such cases today? Eliza wrote the melody and her arrangement is spare, stark and quite brilliant, her cousin Oliver Knight’s throbbing electric guitar encompassing the extremity of this domestic tragedy.

“It is such a powerful and frightening song. It is something I’m very proud of,” Eliza says. “My father talks about how some things need to be added and others sheared away.” Indeed, traditional songs are sometimes like ancient buildings, beautiful but fragmentary. Eliza has worked on both words and music to create something coherent, complete. “The style of it is like a dream. I directed my parents singing. I wanted us to be like a tragic Bulgarian choir.”

“Blood on her wedding dress, stitched into every seam,” says Norma, quoting the lyric Eliza has shaped. “She’s a clever girl, my little girl.” And she’s right.

Anyone familiar with her singing from albums such as Angels And Cigarettes or Waterson: Carthy’s Fishes And Fine Yellow Sand will be surprised – shocked even – by Eliza’s voice. It has grown husky, developed

a crack and with it a certain vulnerability. She tells me that over the last decade, since she began to focus on her singing, rather than just sing, she found this grew more difficult.

“It just got harder and harder, more and more of a struggle. As soon as I got pregnant I started to lose my voice. About six weeks before Florence was born I lost my voice entirely. I couldn’t speak. I went through labour completely silent. It was a very frightening time. My voice came back six days after the birth.”

She went to Harley Street where the specialist put a camera down her throat and discovered a cyst. She was operated on to remove this last spring.

“My voice is a completely new country to me now,” she says, somewhat bemused. She is pleased with the discoveries she makes as she explores it. “I really enjoy the crack. I like the husky thing. Getting a deeper voice as you get older is a kind of maturing.”

Gift is imbued with that sense of maturing, of the getting of wisdom. Eliza Carthy and Norma Waterson know what they are up to and they execute it with aplomb. The musicians they work with are perfectly cast. It takes real accomplishment to play the banjo as unobtrusively as Martin Simpson does on Little Grey Hawk. As he accompanies his wife singing Boston Burglar the notes that Martin Carthy doesn’t play are as important as those he does. Eliza laughs, “He loves his gaps, does my dad.”

Norma’s nephew, Oliver Knight, plays electric guitar and cello. But the instrument he is a complete master

of is the recording studio itself. Their voices, Danny Thompson’s double

bass, the trombone of Roger Williams, Eliza’s fiddle, the

guitars of Aidan Curran and Martin Carthy, Chris

Parkinson and Saul Rose’s melodeons – all are recorded with astonishing clarity so they sound, as they say in Scotland, “like themselves”. The music is not so much balanced as poised. Norma is vehement, angry that the credits he gets as a recording

engineer don’t

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give him his due. Here though, he shares the production with Eliza, who thinks of him as a musician, a composer she collaborates with, rather than a technician she might employ.

“Working with Olly is wonderful,” she declares. “He makes beautiful spaces.”

The Waterson family, like the Coppers, have their full-on ensemble and harmony singing tradition. It finds expression here in Shallow Brown, which closes the album. This is a beautiful lament for family and home that somehow is underpinned by, if not joy exactly, then the strength of the experience of these things. Seamus Heaney has argued convincingly that the power of Beowulf and all the great laments and tragedies of Europe lies in this, the way that beyond the loss of strength, love, and life itself there remains the knowledge of their glories, and this enables people to continue.

They have another full-throated family sing with Psalm Of Life, a setting of a poem by Longfellow. With its refrain, “Let us then be up and doing /With a heart for any fate/ Still achieving still pursuing/Learn to labour and to wait” his rallying call to creativity it is so earnest it teeters on the point where English people lapse from total engagement to dismissive guffaw. But they sing it with total commitment and total lack of irony, and it is very moving.

“It’s a lesson, that song, a musical statement” Eliza asserts. “That’s what we do as a family. We get up and get on with it.”

There’s no arguing with that: Martin Carthy, at the age of 69, is still toting guitar, mandolin and an overnight bag to gigs on public transport. Eliza, with Florence still very young, still

healing after her operation, and Norma, with painful arthritis in her knees, ankles and wrists, have made this remarkable album. They are all “still achieving, still pursuing”. But what is it that drives them to be “up and doing”?

“When I get on stage and sing,” says Norma, “I forget all about the pain. I think singing is a joyful experience. It revitalises you and even if you are not religious you can almost believe. It gives you, you know, it really does give you joy.”

Julian May

Eliza Carthy & Norma WatersonGift

Topic Records TSCD579

www.watersoncarthy.com

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J on Boden is the man and www.afolksongaday.com is the website, where you will hear a different folk song every day for a year.

This ambitious project was launched on 24th of June, midsummer’s day (well at least according to the Romans and also as it falls exactly 6 months before Christmas), with The Larks They Sang Melodious. You can listen to the songs on the website and also subscribe to a daily podcast from i-tunes. Each month’s song collection builds daily, but is taken down at the end of the first week of the following month (i.e. July 1st to 31st come down on August 9th and so on.) From that point they will be available to buy as a digital download album or as individual songs if you so wish.

Jon Explains his motivation, “The main idea behind afolksongaday.com is to try and do my bit for raising the profile of unaccompanied social singing. Most of the songs on the site are songs that I have sung for years but rarely on stage and never on album.

“I have been very lucky that I have lived in a number of places where social singing is still very strong, and because of this I have been exposed to a great repertoire of ‘singers’ songs’ and to the unbeatable experience of sitting in a pub with between five and a hundred singers, all trying to ‘raise the roof’ - just for the sheer joy of doing it.

“In the 60s and 70s the status of unaccompanied singing was much higher within the folk scene, and most of my favourite albums from the revival are albums where the majority of the material is unaccompanied. This approach has fallen out of fashion and the commercial pressure is for modern day ‘folk artists’ to have, at most, one or two unaccompanied tracks on their albums, if at all. I have always thought of myself as first and foremost an unaccompanied singer so it was quite a shock to me to realise that, although I have now made 10 albums, I have never included a solo unaccompanied track on any of them.

“It seemed high time I rectified that situation and afolksongaday.com is an opportunity for me to record my whole repertoire of songs without worrying about making any of them commercial, stylistically original, or fitting them in to a particular album concept.

“Lastly I have noticed that, since becoming a parent, the rate of my song ‘acquisition’ has slowed significantly - basically because I find it much harder to get out to a pub these days. My current repertoire is something like 240 songs, so to complete the whole year I will have to learn half as many again. This is a tall order but there are so many songs that I’ve been meaning to learn for so long - I’m hoping this project will spur me out of song learning stasis and back into being in the habit of learning.

“‘Knowledge is its own reward’ someone once said, and learning folk songs is one of the most rewarding forms of knowledge out there.”

Since the opener we’ve had the bleakness of Cruel Mother, the seafaring drama of Rose In June, a couple of night visiting songs (and I’m sure there’ll be more), the jolly Chickens In The Garden and the betrayal of Blackwaterside amongst many other notable songs.

Not all of the songs are unaccompanied, but Jon uses subtle concertina, fiddle and guitar rarely and his instrument of choice is never allowed to dominate proceedings. Each song is also annotated with comment and links to issues of provenance and regional variance, with the Mudcat forum proving invaluable. As is the support of the EFDSS, who are taking active steps to link to their library and their support is worth noting.

Inevitably, there have been some lively debate and comments posted by the growing community who are already making a visit to the site a daily affair. So, join in, have a listen, have your say. Have a sing and we’ll even post links to your efforts.

Simon Holland

Jon BodenA Folk Song A Daywww.afolksongaday.com

One man, 365 songs, one website and 12 monthly digital download albums…

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Some people are left totally baffled by Alasdair Roberts. Some are completely turned off by him. Some may not

even have heard of him. But many of us think he walks on water…

That’s the nature of this particular individual, idiosyncratic beast. An artist who skirts the murky hinterland between a myriad of different genres - from folk to rock and various left field alternatives beyond - with such a unique sense of purpose that pundits fall over themselves to invent hazy terms like ‘psych folk’ and ‘alt. folk’ and the like to try and box what is essentially a genre of one.

Born in Germany – where his father, the late Alan Roberts had forged a successful musical partnership with Dougie MacLean – Alasdair was mostly raised in Central Scotland, devoured by the drama and weirdness of traditional song, while embarking on a path of songwriting equally inflected by his interest in adventurous rock… but mostly his own rampant imagination.

Coming to the attention of Bonnie Prince Billy, he was incorporated into Billy’s Drag City stable to release early records under the band name Appendix Out, before using his own name for the first time on his 2003 debut solo album Farewell Sorrow, an extraordinary amalgamation of his own songs with traditional themes. Its successor, the death ballad collection No Earthly Man in 2005 must rank as one of the starkest and scariest albums ever made, Roberts’ hypnotic voice delivering tales to make you shiver and shudder (in a good way, depending on your frame of mind when listening to it!)

In contrast, The Amber Gatherers (2007) sounded almost celebratory, lyrically complex but irrepressibly melodic, even poppy in feel; and last year’s Spoils was remarkable again, full of mordant humour and unworldly themes going where no singer, folk or otherwise, has been before.

His glorious new album Too Long In This Condition again finds him in murder ballad territory, though an accomplished band (including Alastair Caplin on fiddle, Tom Crossley on flute, Robert Hubbert on electric guitar, Ben Reynolds on lap steel, Christine Hanson on cello and Emily Portman on concertina and harmony vocals) ensure that it’s a livelier, more varied and less intimidating collection than No Earthly Man.

“I have a love-hate relationship with traditional songs,” says

Roberts, laughing. “I do seem to keep going back to them, don’t I? I’m really drawn to the grand old ballads, the ones with archetypal, universal themes about mortality.”

You mean the really gory, tragic ones?

“Erm…yeah…well….maybe. It must be something to do with my temperament. But it’s not just me, a lot of people are intrigued by this type of song.”

He’s talking about songs that have been in his repertoire for several years but which he’s never got around to recording before, including classic ballads like The Golden Vanity, The Daemon Lover, Barbara Allen and, perhaps the bloodiest, most brutal murder ballad of them all, Long Lankin, who takes his vicious revenge on someone who’s crossed him by a grisly butchering of his child. Yet Roberts paradoxically tackles Long Lankin in a manner he himself describes as “spritely and playful”, one of several surprising features of the album as a whole.

“It’s just intuitive,” he says. “I don’t really do arrangements. I just play around with the songs on guitar and then bring in other musicians and say ‘This is how I do it’ and they just play whatever they feel is right.”

Someone very learned once said that Barbara Allen is not only the oldest known folk song, it’s the most recorded one – does that make it hackneyed? “I don’t think so. “My version comes from the singing of Joe Heaney from Connemara and I’ve always loved his version. I don’t know of anyone else, apart from Joe Heaney, who uses that melody to tackle the song.”

Even when he’s playing traditional material Roberts fits no conventional “file under…” category and it suits him that way. “I don’t worry about where I fit and I’ve never tried to be commercial or whatever. I’m not interested in making that sort of concession. I know and play with a lot of different musicians in Glasgow from all sorts of backgrounds who play every conceivable style of music and it works fine. To me it’s all pop music...”

Colin Irwin

Alasdair RobertsToo Long In This ConditionNavigator NAVIGATOR040 www.alasdairroberts.com

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It’s already been quite a year for Richard Thompson. Tours, festivals, a Mojo Les Paul

Award for his guitar playing and, when we meet, he’s still gushing with the success of Meltdown, the week-long festival he curated at London’s South Bank. Among string quartets, a Kate McGarrigle tribute, an evening of Vaughan Williams music, a political song showcase and Elvis Costello and Seasick Steve concerts, this involved musical liaisons with various greats from different genres; when you raise the topic he’s instantly enthusing about sharing a stage with guitar icons John Etheridge, Martin Simpson, Dennis Coffey, Nokie Edwards and, one of his ultimate heroes, country rock pioneer and Elvis guitar man James Burton.

“Ah, James Burton,” he sighs. “He’s such a seminal figure. He kinda invented country rock guitar and he’s still comparatively young because at 14 years old he was playing on the Louisiana Hayride and at 15 with Del Hawkins on Susie-Q and he’s still a wonderful player. Watching him with Dennis Coffey and Nokie Edwards and eavesdropping on their conversations about Chet Atkins and playing Hawaii-5-0 with Nokie Edwards was amazing.”

His golden year is about to get a whole lot better, too, with the release of a blistering new album Dream Attic, which is already being hailed as his best for years. He took the unusual approach of writing a whole new

bunch of songs on a beach in Hawaii (yeah, Hawaii!), which he then took out on the road with a vigorous band, which were then recorded on eight gigs between Seattle and San Francisco. The result is new album Dream Attic.

“We decided to cut out the studio process and go straight on the road and I thought I’d save a load of money doing this, but by the time you pay for your mobile recording studio it costs exactly the same and you save nothing at all.”

Yet while it may not be the economic masterstroke he’d fondly imagined, the storm whipped up on stage by the band (Michael Jerome on drums, Taras Prodaniuk on bass, Joel Zifkin on electric violin and Pete Zorn on everything else) is something to behold. “I think it’s a very interesting record because it is so high on energy,” he says. “When you play live the energy levels go up. Perhaps you lose some choices – you can’t fix the bass part or whatever, the vocals are what they are and a few mistakes may creep in, but you’re trading precision for energy and I think that it works really well with this group of songs. It’s a lot to throw at an audience in one go but the reaction was pretty good. At least the audience didn’t leave or throw anything…well, only soft fruit…”

Some virulent songs feature, including a sardonic commentary on bankers (The Money Shuffle); a graphic depiction of an unrepentant murderer (Sidney Wells); colourful images of 1960s East London (Demons In Her Dancing Shoes); a mournful tribute to absent friends (A Brother Slips Away); and Here Comes Geordie, which sounds…well, it sounds like a vitriolic attack on Sting, though Thompson denies it.

“My lips are sealed,” he says, all wide-eyed innocence. “It’s a song about an obnoxious Geordie – you can make up your own mind about who that might or might not be, but I had no-one particularly in mind when I wrote it.”

Hard to imagine anyone building up sufficient agitated frenzy for this sort of song on a beach in Hawaii…

”I really like the idea of writing about very British subjects on a beach halfway round the world. I find it easy doing that. Distance is good. It puts things in focus. I’m now planning another trip to Hawaii to write my next album, so any sponsors out there I’d like to hear from you…”

It will have to compete, however, with numerous other projects currently swimming round his head, including a musical play set in London which he was researching when he discovered the murder story that inspired his song Sidney Wells.

“But that’s two or three projects down the line,” he admits. What are the others, Richard? “Can’t say - things can change,” he says, smiling enigmatically, as he disappears to plot the next chapter of his golden year.

Colin Irwin

Richard ThompsonDream AtticProper Records PRPCDX064 www.richardthompson-music.com

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froots_halfpage_bearman_june2010D.pdf 1 15/06/2010 13:58:08

HEDONISM ALE

The new Bellowhead album, Hedonism, is released on 4th October.

Recorded at Abbey Road. Produced by John Leckie. Deluxe CD, CD , vinyl and Digital Download.

Potbelly Brewery, 25-31, Durban Road, Kettering, Northants. NN16 0JA.

www.bellowhead.co.uk www.potbelly-brewery.co.uk

A collaboration between

Bellowhead and Potbelly Brewery

using the finest Maris Otter malt

and Cascade hops.

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Nancy Kerr and James Fagan are deservedly established favourites on the folk circuit: their trademark intelligent

and sparkling musicianship and unassuming versatility are placed at the service of a uniformly well-balanced – and constantly refreshed – set-list. They’re one of those abundantly charismatic acts from whose live performances you emerge with your faith in music restored and feeling that was one of the best gigs you’ve witnessed, while on record too they thoroughly convince with their well-planned programmes enterprisingly mixing songs and tunes.

Although Nancy and James received the BBC Radio 2 Best Duo Award back in 2003, their individual careers began much earlier. Nancy recorded her first CD in tandem with fellow young-fiddler Eliza Carthy in 1993, going on to work with numerous other musicians including Saul Rose and the bands Epona and Scalene – but it’s her enduring partnership with James that’s been the mainstay of her performing career for more than a dozen years now. Australian-born James, a member of long-serving family combo The Fagans, is a well-respected musician and singer in his own right; his CV now includes membership of Cara Dillon’s band and Faustus.

Nancy and James both possess breathtaking instrumental skills and an exceptional control of dynamics and flow in their singing, virtues which complement their infectious love of live performance and the unrivalled communication and connection it affords. Nancy’s fiddle playing is fluid, expertly contoured and capable both of great lyrical sensitivity and a passionate rhythmic drive, while James’s Sobell guitar-bouzouki distinctively combines forceful onward momentum and intimate intricacy. The duo’s uncanny personal empathy, which both informs and enhances their intense instrumental and vocal togetherness, (perhaps unusually) serves to include rather than exclude their audience from the experience.

Twice Reflected Sun, Nancy and James’ fifth CD as a duo, is a significant departure from its predecessors, for instead of presenting a canny mix of songs and tunes drawn from English and Australian traditional sources and contemporary writing, it consists entirely of self-penned material: nine songs by Nancy and two instrumentals by James.

The latest stage in Nancy’s artistic development takes her from the creative adaptation of purely traditional material to a mode of original composition that’s informed by the sense of tradition which links us all. Nancy believes that in the end it is experience, rather than place or culture, that connects us as people; indeed, she sees the Australian experience in song as a facet of British cultural heritage that’s linked by the shared experiences of ordinary people in constant transition.

Nancy opens this scintillating new collection on home soil with Queen Of Waters, bidding farewell to life on an English canal in music of such a delicious dancing poetry that the mildly challenging time-signature of its chorus trips it onto instant repeat play! The location then shifts to Australia for Jerilderie (a traditional-sounding bushranger ballad persuasively sung by James) and Dolerite Skies (Nancy’s plaintive portrait of Tasmania in a time of drought), before James brings us back home with the distinctively English imagery of the allegorical I Am The Fox. The charming though reflective Flower Picker’s Song then ushers in a sequence of universally affirmational songs: the seafaring anthem Hauling On, the beautifully pensive A Lover’s Hymn (openly examining themes of spirituality, martyrdom and desire) and Sweet Peace, an idiomatically folksy homage to Pete Seeger on his 90th birthday. A further homage, this time to Charles Darwin, forms the album’s closer, the jazzy Rammed Earth, on which Nancy and James waltz the light-fantastic with Rick Foot’s sidestepping double bass.

Nancy and James’ characteristically full and assured duo sound needs little enhancement; therefore, aside from Rick’s firm yet sensitively responsive underpinning, they employ only some selective guitar and concertina from the album’s co-producer Rob Harbron (with whom 2008’s Station House was recorded). Even on the disc’s instrumentals – The Floating Mountains and Night Night, which delectably meld the lilt and ambience of Scandinavian music with Celtic or English traditional modality – they admirably resist overstocking the colour palette. But each track’s simple setting contains just enough internal embellishment to carry and sustain interest while revealing delightful new details on each successive playthrough.

Twice Reflected Sun, while cleverly managing to both enhance and consolidate Nancy & James’ firm reputation on the folk scene, is I’m sure also destined to win them plenty more admirers.

David Kidman

Nancy Kerr & James FaganTwice Reflected SunNavigator NAVIGATOR041 www.kerrfagan.com

Nancy Kerr & James Fagan

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The Burns Unit is a Scots/Canadian folktastic group, the sum of which is impressively greater than its considerable parts.

These are King Creosote, prolific song writer with a vibrant and varied recording career, award winning song writer Karine Polwart, founder member of indie legends The Delgados, Emma Pollock, and Future Pilot AKA, Sushil Dade, who counts The Soup Dragons, BMX Bandits and Telstar Ponies among his past credits.

Not to mention multi instrumentalist Michael Johnston of Canadian roots outfit The Skydiggers, his countryman Mattie Foulds on production and percussion, Scots singer songwriter Kim Edgar and the astounding MC Soom T.

Brought together four years ago in the Burns Song house project, their debut album has been a long time in the gestation, but Kenny Anderson is very proud of what he considers a huge achievement in more ways than one. Eight to be precise.

“The songs sound a lot bigger than us all in the Burns Unit. We have somehow distilled maybe not the very best and ultimate out of each of us. But we’ve come pretty close to getting a really good job out of everyone.”

Without exaggeration it is a superb record, mixing cultures and sounds like second nature, and boasting some of the biggest tunes you will hear anywhere this year.

There are Eastern influences to savour from Europe and Asia, from the accordion driven What Is Life to the brilliantly catchy protest song Send Them Boys To War, both of which sound

like a 21st Century Special A.K.A..

Kenny jokes that their amalgamation could have turned out like the worst compilation album ever, but they evolved a working method which ensured that would never happen.

“The big songs like Helpless To Turn, we all pitched in. Emma started trying to write something with Michael, then Karin got involved, and so did I, and it became a four way attempt to make something classic and simple to get the message over.

I do think that is one of our best songs and you can actually directly pin a part of it on each individual, which contrasts with those where the lyrics definitely came from one person.”

That such an impressive record should emerge from what was as much a social as musical experiment is remarkable.

Initially all concerned were cautious, skirting round one another until they could be sure of being able to coexist with one another never mind composing songs with each other.

“I have to say I went in quite afraid really, because I didn’t know anyone in there, at least not well enough to stay a week with them,” confesses Kenny.

“And I think everyone felt much the same, we were all keyed up and quite nervous, then after a day we were all rolling around the living room with tears of laughter streaming down our faces. So we all got on really well.”

The combinations came thick and fast, with Karin Polwart and Kim Edgar laying down a vocal pattern for Send Them Kids To War, which strangely echoes Boney M’s Rasputin.

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MC Soom T provides a splendidly fluent rap which glides over the top dropping ironic anti-war bombs in an Asian stylee.

The most obvious collaboration is the self explanatory Future Pilot A.K.C., which arrives with a fabulous 70s glam drum and bass intro.

“With Sushil I just wanted to get a song that combined both him and I in a secret double agent sort of thing, and we were joking that the house was like Big Brother. Who was going to be the first one to get kicked out, or escape, that sort of thing. That was the running joke that we had been incarcerated up there on the Solway Firth and went on all week. We were inventing really elaborate means of escaping by phoning up rich friends to bring a helicopter to have us air lifted out of there.”

So why not turn it into a TV programme? Now what sounds like a no brainer, surely the folk who organise Burns Song must have thought of that. The suggestion appeals to Kenny Anderson.

“Televising it? Maybe it was and there were cameras hidden behind every mirror. It was a bizarre week for all concerned, because it was so different to what you would normally do in a musical life.”

It was clearly a very creative environment for all concerned, pushing people out of their comfort zones and taking them to weird and wonderful places.

What makes the record work so well is the willingness of all participants to embrace and support whichever ideas emerged.

How else would a Jacques Brel two step straight off the Russian badlands make such strange but perfect sense?

“You Need Me To Need This - I don’t know where that came from, it is very Eastern European sounding and Michael and Emma were at the helm of that one. It has bizarre chords that I know I would never have come up with,” chortles Kenny, dissolving into a giggle.

He considers the whole exercise to be extremely therapeutic for people who are knee deep in the artistic administration of running their own careers, likening it to an after show party rather than yet another high pressure gig.

Maybe that is the reason the result happens to be one of the year’s best records, full of surprises and superb songs, which is much more than you can expect from a series of Big Brother!

So far from sounding like a bad compilation album Sideshow is one of the very best examples of successful solo artists proving that together they can produce something ever more special.

For Kenny Anderson it is much more simple than that.

“I’m a two chord wonder who sometimes thinks three is just too many, and at the other end of the scale you have Emma, who could not really envisage a song without a middle eight and a chorus and pre emptive chorus. She comes from a different school of thought so you could say I learned to use more chords and Emma less!”

Colin Somerville

The Burns UnitSide Show TBU TBUCD001 www.theburnsunitband.com

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The Betty Fox School of Ballet in Birmingham… The disused Dinorwic Slate Quarry in North Wales… The dramatic

mountainous landscape of Snowdonia… A battered old lighthouse… A renegade 14th Century priest in Kent … A Peruvian cajón box drum… Film scores… Scandinavian folk music… Opera tours… Strings… Brass and woodwind…

These are a few of The Old Dance School’s favourite things, all contributing to a remarkable second album, Forecast, by the young seven-piece band suddenly making a big splash. Such is the wide convergence of influences drawn from their individual backgrounds in jazz, classical music, folk, world music and pop that pigeonholes are impossible, but this is a band on a mission.

“One of our missives is to make folk music accessible to younger people,” says guitarist/singer Robin Beatty. “We’ve always wondered about the age demographic of the folk scene and we definitely want to get more young people involved. There’s loads of young bands around and you see them all at festivals so there’s no reason why not.”

Originally from the Peak District, Beatty has been described by National Geographic magazine (and how many musicians get to quote that in their promotional blurb!) as “the Nick Drake of the mountain world”. No idea what that means, but Beatty did appear at the World Environment Concert at Camden Palace, has composed numerous scores for nature films, listens to a lot of jazz and Scandinavian music and cites Bill Frisell and Ian Carr as his primary guitar heroes.

The rest of the band have similarly disparate tastes and backgrounds. Violinist/viola player Helen Lancaster studied with the great Israeli musician Rivka Golani and has a shelf full of awards from her work with the Nero String Quartet, who play everything from Cole Porter to Coldplay and Bach to Bollywood. Percussionist/singer Tom Chapman – the cajón man – is a big Cuban music fan who’s worked with Violent Femmes and the Urban Folk Quartet; Samantha Norman is also co-principal second violinist with the Young Musicians Symphony Orchestra; Dartmoor-born trumpeter and flugel player Aaron Diaz has played with endless jazz/fusion outfits; singer/whistle player Laura Carter was tutored by William Lyons, director of the Early Music group, The Dufay Collective; and double bass player Adam Jarvis is also a member of Coldplay-esque pop trio Buzzard Lope.

The one thing they have in common is that they were all studying at Birmingham Conservatoire in 2006 when they sat in the garden of the Betty Fox School of Ballet discussing their mutual interest in traditional music forms and decided to form The Old Dance School. They released their debut album Based

On A True Story in 2008, winning enthusiastic reviews and Radio 2 airplay from Bob Harris… and they’ve been having the time of their lives ever since.

The new album Forecast – produced by Calum Malcolm – is likely to take them to a new level. “We’re very excited about it and working with Calum Malcolm was a dream,” says Robin Beatty. “We loved what he did on Aidan O’Rourke’s new record and he’s done a lot of stuff with jazz players in Scotland as well as in the folk field and he knows about sound so it worked brilliantly.“

As might be ascertained from the interest of National Geographic magazine, The Old Dance School’s music is evocative of nature and their primarily self-composed tunes are strongly redolent of landscape in a manner Beatty describes as “vertical writing of the string parts to give space to the instrumental characters”. The vocal tracks are interesting, too, including one cover – Sydney Carter’s inspirational tribute to the colourful priest who figured prominently in the Peasants Revolt, John Ball – imaginatively arranged in 7:8 time.

It’s a tight, but ebullient unit, as you might expect from a group of 20-somethings (they’re mostly 25) who live together, bicker genially, rehearse constantly, mercilessly take the rise out of one other and operate as a genuine democracy. This has its drawbacks, of course – “we’ll spend an hour niggling over one bar” – but all comes together when they get on stage.

“There’s a great scene in Birmingham with all the jazz and world and folk musicians and we found we had a shared interest in traditional music. You don’t expect to find that in a classical music school. So we started playing for ceilidhs and writing our own stuff. Melody is our building block but everyone has their own voice and there are so many amazing rhythmic possibilities with this music. We’re all committed to this band, we’ve had a great response wherever we’ve gone and we’re loving it…”

Colin Irwin

The Old Dance SchoolForecastTransition TRANSCD004 www.theolddanceschool.com

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Former rock stars move in mysterious ways and few would have imagined that David Rotheray – for over two decades

lead guitarist and Paul Heaton’s main co-writer in The Beautiful South – would have launched his solo career with the help of the cream of the new Brit folk scene in a concept album about… birds.

Not that it’s really a concept album. And, while it is titled The Life of Birds, it’s not really about birds either. But to protect the nation from the potential disasters inflicted by his own vocal chords (“I don’t sing really….no, scratch the REALLY”) he has used some of the best modern folk voices around – Jim Causley, Bella Hardy, Eliza Carthy, Alasdair Roberts, Kathryn Williams, Camille O’Sullivan and Julie Murphy among them – to tell his often disquieting stories, using birds as a recurring allegorical presence.

“At the time I was writing the album I was ill with Ménière’s disease, which is an infection of the inner ear and affects your balance. It’s like being drunk without the benefits. I’m not an ornithologist or anything, but there was a guide to garden birds in one of the papers and I spent a few weeks in a chair with this guide looking into the garden spotting birds. I was writing songs at the same time and without me even realizing it all these nature references crept in. In the end I decided to leave a couple of the songs out because there were just too many bird references.”

The opening (and closing) track The Sparrow, The Thrush & The Nightingale – sung by Jim Causley – is a withering commentary on the litigious proclivities of the music industry whenever bands disintegrate. Is it about anybody we know, Dave? Should we be trying to identify the real life characters of the sparrow, the thrush and the nightingale? He confides it was initially inspired by two separate court cases involving members of The Smiths and Spandau Ballet suing one another, but insists it’s non-specific. “It’s about the politics of the music business, not about anybody in particular. And it’s not about me. I’ve been very lucky.”

The most harrowing songs on the album are Sweet Forgetfulness (sung by Camille O’Sullivan) and Almost Beautiful (Eleanor McEvoy) which, in sharply contrasting ways, both address the tragedy of Alzheimer’s disease. Most shocking of all is the heartbreaking line “a pillow over the face/maybe that’s a kind of love too…” on Almost Beautiful. “I did dilly dally over that line because it’s so direct compared to the rest of the song,” he says, “but it wouldn’t have had the same impact without it. Sweet Forgetfulness is almost a celebration of a life and I felt I had to write a song that redresses that balance and puts the other side of it.”

Child of the punk era and Pink Floyd devotee, Dave Rotheray - who also recorded three albums with Homespun (with Sam Brown) in addition to all those Beautiful South years – elected to infiltrate the new British folk scene in search of The Life Of Birds collaborators because that’s the area of music currently ringing his bell. Originating from Hull he’d always been familiar with Hull’s most revered folk singing group, The Watersons and initially wanted Norma Waterson to sing one of the album tracks, The Road To The South. When she proved to be unavailable, he persuaded her daughter Eliza Carthy to take her place.

“I was drawn to using people in that idiom because that’s what I’ve been listening to most. I like the traditional stuff but I particularly like the songwriting side of it. A lot of very exciting folk music has been made over the last four or five years – though it’s getting a bit too popular for my liking.”

Rotheray’s working practice may have come as a shock to his chosen collaborators. He picked the singers he wanted, sent them a selection of lyrics and asked them if they fancied having a crack at any of them. The music wasn’t written in advance and in most cases came together in the studio, an unfamiliar way of working for most of the singers. Kathryn Williams and Alasdair Roberts essentially improvised their tracks (respectively Crows, Ravens & Rooks and Draughty Old Fortress) on the hoof in the studio, although others – notably Julie Murphy - arrived with her designated track Taller Than Me carefully plotted out in advance..

“It was edge of the seat stuff at times,” he laughs. “People like Jim Causley and Bella Hardy have a very different approach to me and just aren’t used to working that way so they were a bit surprised, but I think they got a lot out of it as well. It was a very enjoyable process. Now I’m hoping to go on tour with them.”

Colin Irwin

David RotherayThe Life Of BirdsProper Records PRPCD061

www.davidrotheray.com

DAVID ROTHERAY

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Incorrigible as ever in jaunty straw hat and devilish grin, Loudon Wainwright 111 devours what’s left of his ice

cream and talks about the hard times we all find ourselves living through…“I’m euphoric about the new depression,” he cackles. “I’m hoping to cash in…”

That, at least, is his comedic rationale for his latest album of topical material – 10 Songs For The New Depression – a completely solo effort of eight songs inspired by the current recession, bolstered by two songs, The Panic Is On and On To Victory Mr Roosevelt (written by Hezekiah Jenkins and W. Lee O’Daniel respectively) rescued from a much earlier era of hardship.

“In 2009 when Mr Obama was inaugurated we were in the recession and I thought it might be interesting to track it with songs. Occasionally I dabble in the dark art of topical songs. I did an album called Social Studies in the 90s and even going way back into the 70s I’ve done social commentary so the idea was to write 12 songs for his first year. In the end I managed eight.”

Those eight include the cheerfully nihilistic Times Is Hard as well as House - a rather touching tale of a couple forced to stay together because they can’t afford to move out – and the rather more menacing horror ditty of Halloween 2009. Yet while he reveals some paranoia on Fear Itself and doom on The Krugman Blues (a rare song about a newspaper columnist), this is balanced by a smidgeon of optimism on Middle Of The Night (“it’s not the end of the world, people, it’s the middle of the night”) while voicing the interesting theory that all fears will disappear if we all just learn to play ukes, on the determinedly bushy-tailed Got A Ukulele.

“My topical songs aren’t of the Pete Seeger/Ewan MacColl ilk – they’re kinda depressed unto themselves. But I like writing about what’s going on and it’s a big deal, this recession.”

Not that the recession has wounded him too deeply. “It’s not about me personally – my personal life is going great – and historically they say that in hard times people need to go out to clubs and hear music and see movies. I’ve been playing these songs in America and people seem to like them.”

He’s even happier that - after four decades of sharp, memorable, meaningful, sad, funny, tragic, bitter-sweet songs about life, love, guilt, family, skunks, death and waitresses - he’s still writing fresh and compelling new material.

“I liken writing songs to sex,” he says a little too loudly for comfort. “I don’t do it as much as I used to but when I do, it’s just fine. In the old days I’d write three, four, five songs a week, sometimes twice a night, but now it’s every so often. It’s still a thrill and it’s still happening, thank God, but not as frequently. I wish there was a songwriting Viagra I could take…”

Uncharacteristically there aren’t any songs berating himself or members of his family on 10 Songs For The New Depression but he assures us the next album will include familial subjects. “I’ve got some killer family songs. I recently became a grandfather when Martha had a son. I visited the baby in hospital and wrote a song All In A Family inspired by that blessed event and I have another killer song – if I say so myself – called In C, which is about the family generic and my family in particular. Further quizzing on the matter reveals the song addresses emotions evoked by the death of his former wife Kate McGarrigle earlier this year.

“It’s known and documented by myself and by Kate that we had a very unhappy divorce and extended unhappiness, which is unfortunate. But I was in her house the night she died with Rufus and Martha and other members of the family and as these things go, it was quite peaceful. She died in her own bed but she died way too soon. She was so talented and we had two kids together so there’s a lot there and I’m still processing it. I saw quite a bit of her in the last year of her life.

We were both excited about becoming grandparents and there were lots of phone calls and we both went to the opening of Rufus’s opera in Manchester last summer. In September I did a show in Montreal which she came to and we sang together for the first time for a number of years. Towards the end we stopped squabbling and it was all much more positive. I wanted to be there at the end and I’m glad I made the trip…”

Colin Irwin

Loudon Wainwright III10 Songs For The New

DepressionProper Records

PRPCD069

www.lw3.com

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he beauty of writing, recording, gigging

and the like to me is, when it’s right, it comes together and makes a glow in my soul so

intense it pierces a hot afternoon like a hissing firecracker.”

So scans the crackling prose of Americana singer/songwriter

Elizabeth Cook, ten years and five albums deep into her brilliant career.

Nice work if you can get it, and it appears that she can, having made

her biggest splash to date with Balls (2007), her Rodney Crowell-

produced fourth album.

The name of her latest record Welder is a reference to the trade

her dad learnt while doing a prison sentence for running moonshine.

Cook grew up the youngest of eleven children in Wildwood, Florida.

Her mother sang and played guitar and mandolin as well as singing on

local radio and TV, and Elizabeth began cutting her musical teeth at

the age of four, joining in on gigs by her father’s band after he got out of

the slammer.

Cook’s songs are ballsy, rough-hewn and straight-to-the-point,

and though country is their default setting, they’re a country mile from

focus-grouped MOR Nashville fodder, and obviously gleaned

from documenting real life with an unflinching gaze.

‘Although I didn’t really want to, the fact that I ‘couldn’t help but look’

is what made Welder possible.” she explains. “It’s my damnation and my salvation. And it’s my job. I have

to look.”

For evidence of that, look no further than the steely eyed, close-to-the-

bone observations of Heroin Addict Sister: She pushes a tiny needle/

It’s like the devil’s DNA/ It takes her somewhere she’s just gotta go/ But

can’t afford to stay.

If the troglodyte thump of Rock N Roll Man is to be taken literally, Cook

is no stranger to illicit substances herself (‘We get higher than heaven

we get lower than dirt’), although the rip-roaring Yes To Booty makes it clear in no uncertian terms that she doesn’t like a man drinking before

bed times (‘When you say yes to beer you say no to booty’).

Cook’s far southern accent and tough-little-girl vocal delivery mean

you don’t always hear what she’s got to say the first time around, which adds an engaging layer of mystery

to her songs. She’s also deceptively versatile, almost rapping her way

through the sleazy snapshots of El Camino, and then coming across like Lucinda Williams channelling Loretta

Lynn on Mama’s Funeral,

which is heartfelt without being emotionally manipulative.

The autobiographical theme continues on the tear jerking ballad I’m Beginning To Forget, penned long ago by her own mother about some thwarted love affair. Cook sings it like an elegy to her, with a gutsy backing vocal by Crowell lending extra gravitas.

Urban cowperson Dwight Yoakam makes a similarly unforgettable cameo appearance on ‘I’ll Never Know”, which sounds like an inspired rewrite of his own Heartaches By The Number.

It’s not all tear-in-your-beer fare by any means, though. There’s a wicked sense of humour at work in the opening bluegrass-flavoured romp All The Time, which features Buddy Miller on backing vocals. And there’s the hilarious hoe-down of Snake In The Bed, a song Cook claims to have written after watching a State of the Union address by George Bush Junior. Bet the Dixie Chicks are listening…

Cook’s choice of covers offers a few illuminating pointers about her influences and associations. Apart from furnishing her with handsome but not over-glossy sound, producer Don Was suggested she do a version of Not California by New York indie folk rockers Hem. Tim Carroll (guitar, slide, banjo, harmonica and backing vocals) supplied the spectral Follow You Like Smoke and the bluesy Till Then, in which a percussive effect that sounds like rattling coins subtly suggests the misery of pennilessness. Best of all, though is Blackland Farmer by 50s hayride veteran Frankie Miller. Backed by a rootsy, acoustic arrangement, Cook moans the chorus with absolute conviction, making the song thoroughly her own, and confirming her place among the country greats.

Jon Lusk

Elizabeth CookWelderProper Records PRPCD095 www.elizabeth-cook.com

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Los LobosTin Can TrustProper Records

PRPCD065 www.loslobos.org

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los Angeles natives Los Lobos (the Wolves) have been going for thirty-five years and across that time they’ve constantly

made magnificent music while subtly reshaping the US musical landscape. Originally arising out of East Los Angeles, the band first came together to play backyard parties and union fundraisers. At this time they mainly played Mexican corridos (narrative ballads sung in Spanish) but as they gained confidence they began to blend rock and soul influences with their sound. They weren’t the first Chicanos to do this – LA’s large Mexican populace had seen the likes of Ritchie Valens arise in the 1950s and Thee Midniters in the 1960s score hits beyond their own communities – but Los Lobos were pioneers in developing a large and fluid body of work that suggested how Mexican Americans could make rock music of broad appeal while developing from traditional influences.

Los Lobos reached global fame with their 1987 hit La Bamba, the title track to the hit movie about doomed teenage rocker Ritchie Valens, which topped charts internationally. Rather than simply try and replicate the success of La Bamba, Los Lobos have gone on to stretch themselves so recording consistently brilliant albums. The band’s fearless combination of genres led them to become known as one of the most experimental popular bands. Ironically, they first appeared in the public eye when chosen to support John Lydon’s Public Image Ltd in Los Angeles in 1980. The partisan LA punk crowd threw everything they could at Los Lobos but the band’s bravery and fierce music got them noticed. Over the course of their career they have shared the studio and stage with acts as varied as Bob Dylan, Bobby Womack, Tom Waits, The Clash, Elvis Costello, John Hiatt and U2, winning three Grammy awards along the way, including Best Instrumental Pop Performance for their evocative soundtrack to Robert Rodriguez’s film Desperado.

Tin Can Trust is the band’s 14th studio album and their first since 2006’s magnificent The Town And The City. Tin Can Trust contains 10 original songs and a cover of The Grateful Dead’s West L.A. Freeway that is delivered with a groove Jerry Garcia and co’ never knew existed. Keeping the Dead connection is All My Bridges Burning, one of the album’s most beautiful tracks, that’s co-written by Robert Hunter (once the Dead’s lyricist). As with all Los Lobos albums since 1992’s Kiko, Tin Can Trust is sonically

magnificent. By this I don’t simply mean that the band play and sing well. No, Los Lobos are one of those rare bands who are so confident with their musical interplay that they use the studio as an extended instrument to add layers and texture to their recorded sound. Which makes their albums a great pleasure to listen to.

The variety of music across Tin Can Trust is astonishing. Opening track Burn It Down features contemporary blues singer Susan Tedeshi sharing a duet with David Hidalgo while Do The Murray is the album’s toughest rocker, its dueling guitars not being out of place on the jam band scene. In keeping with both their musical and cultural heritage the album includes two new Spanish language songs, Yo Canto (a Columbian cumbia tune), and Mujer Ingrata (a traditionally Mexican norteño). On these tracks Los Lobos revert to their roots when they were rocking East LA fiestas and break out the accordion, fiddle, bajo sexto (large string bass), guitarrón (a large, deep bodied Mexican guitar) and jarana huasteca (small five-stringed guitar). The excellence of Los Lobos at playing traditional Mexican music should not be doubted with the likes of Bob Dylan regularly employing members to play on his recent recordings.

Tin Can Trust finds Los Lobos at the height of their powers. It’s quite astonishing to think that a band who have existed for such a long time are capable of sounding fresh, dynamic, hungry. That Los Lobos are capable of doing this, writing excellent songs and never falling into repeating themselves or relying on past glories is something to be celebrated. These Californian wolves are a long way from extinct!

Garth Cartwright

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Los LobosTin Can TrustProper Records

PRPCD065 www.loslobos.org

Bill Kirchen is birch-built-tall-and-slender, with bark-silver hair worn long and full. Glasses perched on a face that bears the

lines of living can’t disguise a glint in keen eyes and his amiable good humour is built on a relaxed self confidence. As he explains, “The older I get the less I have to grouch about, I’m enjoying things too much.” Who can blame him: he’s just delivered Word To The Wise, a high water mark in American roots-rock that just has to be one of the albums of the year.

Whilst the guest list is the headline, with Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack, Elvis Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks and Commander Cody in cahoots, the real story is that it’s Bill’s album through and through. The songs, bar two are his and his trademark guitar twang offers many enviably memorable hooks. He meets his collaborators as equals, they have been generous with their time and efforts, reciprocated in full as Bill gives them the framework and space to shine. Familiars amongst you will already appreciate that Bill has a more than decent voice himself and seeing him live, particularly running through his hilarious take on Hot Rod Lincoln, you can really appreciate the Titan Of The Telecaster epithet is neither misplaced or given lightly.

Michigan born and bred and a school mate of Iggy Pop, he was already a veteran of what he refers to as the “60’s folk scare,” when he teamed up with Commander Cody. A young man just ticking over 20, he instigated the bands shift out west, where somehow the Lost Planet Airmen’s odd mix of boogie-woogie, bar room country, rockabilly and Western Swing chimed with the growing country-rock scene. That Western Swing element had

been almost completely wiped off the musical map. Bill recalls getting hold of a Bob Wills album, bought because the Cheshire-cat grin beneath the wide Stetson brim seemed hilarious. But when played, the contents blew minds, “We thought we were pretty far out, but these guys had gone further than we could imagine. When those jazzed up fiddle licks came in, it was just… Wow!”

All of that and his later Dieselbilly period (“I never wanted to be a truck driver, but I guess life on the tour bus gave me a feel for the road,”) has coloured this record, but the songs are the best he’s written. That easy good humour is much in evidence, with the opener Bump Wood a prime example. Its literal joie de vivre, is celebrated each morning by sticking out the elbows and providing their not knocking the coffin sides, its going to be a good day. It’s a great philosophy and tinder-dry funny. With the baritone guitar adding maximum twang factor it’s also a rollicking opener.

So what of these guests and collaborations? Well Elvis Costello is impassioned, in a way that reminds you of his greatness on Man At The Bottom Of The Well. Nick Lowe, whose path has oft crossed with Bill’s introduced Paul Carrack and the pair combine in stunning Everly’s style on Merle Haggard’s Shelly’s Winter Song. It’s something the duo had learned and sung together before, although never recorded and Bill was suitably impressed, generously working an arrangement that lets their voices take star billing.

Dan Hicks was so enthused he committed fully to the title track offering some tasty re-writes. Bill again makes room and the pair deliver a fine duet vocal with a scat section that had me grinning from ear to ear. In the context of this CD it simply adds another peak to the Himalayan highs. I scarely have breathless room for Maria Muldaur, as sassy as ever in another finely judged call and answer duet, or the keyboard ripples and pulses of Commander Cody and Austin de Lone.

Bill just seems to understand what makes a song really tick. He leads where he needs and has the good grace to let others shine, marking this as a real collaboration rather than a series of guest-star-vehicles or sales drivers. This is no marketing ploy, but a meeting on an equal footing of some outstanding talent and if you buy one record on the strength of this issue (although in fairness there are many brilliant choices,) do yourself a favour and make it this one. Satisfaction guaranteed. Just remember – it don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang!!

Simon Holland

Bill KirchenWord To The Wise

Proper Records

PRPCD053 www.billkirchen.com

Bill Kirchen

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Bill Kirchen is birch-built-tall-and-slender, with bark-silver hair worn long and full. Glasses perched on a face that bears the

lines of living can’t disguise a glint in keen eyes and his amiable good humour is built on a relaxed self confidence. As he explains, “The older I get the less I have to grouch about, I’m enjoying things too much.” Who can blame him: he’s just delivered Word To The Wise, a high water mark in American roots-rock that just has to be one of the albums of the year.

Whilst the guest list is the headline, with Nick Lowe, Paul Carrack, Elvis Costello, Maria Muldaur, Dan Hicks and Commander Cody in cahoots, the real story is that it’s Bill’s album through and through. The songs, bar two are his and his trademark guitar twang offers many enviably memorable hooks. He meets his collaborators as equals, they have been generous with their time and efforts, reciprocated in full as Bill gives them the framework and space to shine. Familiars amongst you will already appreciate that Bill has a more than decent voice himself and seeing him live, particularly running through his hilarious take on Hot Rod Lincoln, you can really appreciate the Titan Of The Telecaster epithet is neither misplaced or given lightly.

Michigan born and bred and a school mate of Iggy Pop, he was already a veteran of what he refers to as the “60’s folk scare,” when he teamed up with Commander Cody. A young man just ticking over 20, he instigated the bands shift out west, where somehow the Lost Planet Airmen’s odd mix of boogie-woogie, bar room country, rockabilly and Western Swing chimed with the growing country-rock scene. That Western Swing element had

been almost completely wiped off the musical map. Bill recalls getting hold of a Bob Wills album, bought because the Cheshire-cat grin beneath the wide Stetson brim seemed hilarious. But when played, the contents blew minds, “We thought we were pretty far out, but these guys had gone further than we could imagine. When those jazzed up fiddle licks came in, it was just… Wow!”

All of that and his later Dieselbilly period (“I never wanted to be a truck driver, but I guess life on the tour bus gave me a feel for the road,”) has coloured this record, but the songs are the best he’s written. That easy good humour is much in evidence, with the opener Bump Wood a prime example. Its literal joie de vivre, is celebrated each morning by sticking out the elbows and providing their not knocking the coffin sides, its going to be a good day. It’s a great philosophy and tinder-dry funny. With the baritone guitar adding maximum twang factor it’s also a rollicking opener.

So what of these guests and collaborations? Well Elvis Costello is impassioned, in a way that reminds you of his greatness on Man At The Bottom Of The Well. Nick Lowe, whose path has oft crossed with Bill’s introduced Paul Carrack and the pair combine in stunning Everly’s style on Merle Haggard’s Shelly’s Winter Song. It’s something the duo had learned and sung together before, although never recorded and Bill was suitably impressed, generously working an arrangement that lets their voices take star billing.

Dan Hicks was so enthused he committed fully to the title track offering some tasty re-writes. Bill again makes room and the pair deliver a fine duet vocal with a scat section that had me grinning from ear to ear. In the context of this CD it simply adds another peak to the Himalayan highs. I scarely have breathless room for Maria Muldaur, as sassy as ever in another finely judged call and answer duet, or the keyboard ripples and pulses of Commander Cody and Austin de Lone.

Bill just seems to understand what makes a song really tick. He leads where he needs and has the good grace to let others shine, marking this as a real collaboration rather than a series of guest-star-vehicles or sales drivers. This is no marketing ploy, but a meeting on an equal footing of some outstanding talent and if you buy one record on the strength of this issue (although in fairness there are many brilliant choices,) do yourself a favour and make it this one. Satisfaction guaranteed. Just remember – it don’t mean a thang if it ain’t got that twang!!

Simon Holland

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It’s the perfect time to protest, against wars, bankers, governments, most things really. So, perfect for Michael Weston King, the chameleon of country-roots-rock, to emerge with a protest album. But protesting isn’t what

it was, a guitar, nasal vocals and an attitude. Weston King takes the art form to a new level, still simple but sophisticated. And while I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier protests against most things, it rebels against

the obvious songs which have become a part of our life, and the artists who don’t bother to protest against anything any more.

“I’d started off thinking it was going to be the archetypal one man-one guitar record, and just record covers,” he says. “But listening to such great songs got me thinking, I really studied the style, and then I started writing my own. I also asked for song suggestions from fellow musicians, and a lot were not just from the folkie side of things.

“What also worried me was that in the 60s and 70s big names still found time for social comment, Lennon, Dylan, Young, Costello, Strummer, whoever. But that doesn’t seem to be happening now. It’s still the same people, mainly from that generation, making comment in song, but nothing from mainstream pop or rock acts who have become famous in the past 15 years. Do we get social comment from Coldplay?”

The result is an eclectic collection… a superb soul-folk cover of Jim Ford/Bobby Womack’s Sounds Of Our Time, a pair of protest king Phil Ochs’ songs given a rocked up treatment, the economy angst of Brownie McGhee’s High Price Blues, plus the 1915 title track (“it had a fine old marching tune, but not dark enough for me, so I gave it a new one.”).

Weston King has long written exquisite songs, first for his country-rock band The Good Sons, then for his elegant solo triumph A Decent Man, as well as country songs and pop songs over a clutch of classy albums. His protest songs follow suit. “My songs here seem to focus on mainly on war, and the atrocious situation in Afghanistan and Iraq,” he says. “In Time is written from the perspective of an ordinary Iraqi having to explain to his daughter what on earth is going on. Hey Ma I’m Coming Home is a young soldier’s letter home to his mum, born out of talking to people who have children in their 20s serving in Iraq and who are petrified as to what is going to happen.”

The production is intriguing without being full-on. The result is uplifting, enigmatic and changes constantly. This record makes a very powerful statement, protest songs like you’ve never heard them before.

Nick Dalton

Michael Weston KingI Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A SoldierValve Records VALVE2787

www.michaelwestonking.com

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Michael Weston King

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Broken Hearts & Dirty WindowsVariousOh Boy Records OBR042

John PrineIn Person & On StageOy Boy Records OBR039

Prine hasn’t been all that prolific in recent years. Life got in the way when at the age of 49 he fathered his first two children with

his third wife. And in 1998 he was treated for cancer of the neck and extensive surgery and radiotherapy left him with a gloriously ragged new vocal style. So the imminent appearance of two new albums of Prine material will have fans shouting “Oh boy!” First up is Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows, a collection of fresh and diverse interpretations of classic and not-so-well-known Prine songs by a roster of cutting-edge alt. country and Americana artists.

They call Prine a “songwriter’s songwriter,” and as Bon Iver’s Justin Vernon eloquently puts it in the sleevenotes: “The humble, heartbroke and beautifully played disposition of his songs feel more his nature than his art. And thus we believe everything he sings.” The 1978 album Bruised Orange is considered to be a creative highpoint for Prine, and Vernon’s starkly atmospheric, waltzing take on the title track kicks off the album in style. My Morning Jacket’s Jim James comes across like early 70’s Dylan on All The Best, and Old Crow Medicine Show manage to make the Angel From Montgomery sound like The Band. Sara Watkins impresses with both her fiddle playing and vocals on The Late John Garfield Blues, and among the more stripped down material, Justin

Townes Earle (Far From Me) and Josh Ritter (Mexican Home) both seem perfectly at home. On the more raucous side of things, North Carolina folk rockers The Avett Brothers remould Spanish Pipedream without losing its essence, and Drive-By Truckers rock their way through Daddy’s Little Pumkin.

Later this year, there’ll also be a live album from the man himself: John Prine In Person & On Stage, with expert accompaniment by his

long-term right hand men Dave Jacques (bass) and Jason Wilber (guitar) plus several illustrious guests. These include Watkins and Ritter duetting with Prine on the same songs they tackled on Broken Hearts & Dirty Windows, as well as a startlingly austere version of Angel From Montgomery with Emmylou Harris. There are also two songs with the wonderful Iris DeMent, revisiting her starring role on the hilarious banter of In Spite Of Ourselves and Unwed Fathers. And as anyone who’s had the pleasure of catching one of his shows in person will know, it’s the between-song story telling that really makes Prine such a great performer. Had he not been a songwriter, he would have made a damn fine stand-up comedian.

www.johnprine.net Jon Lusk

Michael Wilson

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Texas guitar maestro and huskily pleasing singer Jimmie Vaughan pays handsome tribute to 14 of the blues/R&B/country

recordings that have enlivened his life, along with one original instrumental romp in the same spirit. A self-produced project of loving care and attention to detail, this is also truly an ensemble affair with a splendid team.

Prominent cohorts Lou Ann Barton (vocals), Greg Picollo (tenor sax) and Bill Willis (Hammond B3, vocal) are supported solidly by Ephraim Owens (trumpet), Kas Kasenoff (baritone sax), Billy Pitman (rhythm guitar), Ronnie James (bass) and George Rains (drums) with extra contributions from Mike Flanigan (organ) and Derek O’Brien (guitar).

Mr Vaughan dedicates the album to Bill Willis, his musical partner of 15 years, and to Texas bluesman Clarence ‘Gatemouth’ Brown, although to my possibly cloudy ear Jimmie’s guitar playing is more immediately reminiscent of Johnny ‘Guitar’ Watson. He has the same clipped and sometimes slyly humorous guitar style as did Mr Watson. Mind you, JGW was another Texas-born player who was influenced by Gatemouth Brown in the first place.

Kick starting with Billy ‘The Kid’ Emerson’s romantic blues shuffle The Pleasure’s All Mine and signing off fittingly with Willie Nelson’s Funny How Time Slips Away (sung by Bill Willis), the track sequencing is as copacetic as the performances.

Jimmie and his friends do not ape the originals. There’s rarely any sense of pastiche or copy-catting, except perhaps for their version of Jimmy Reed’s Come Love, with Lou Ann playing the part of Mama Reed. But then nearly everybody who has ever revived a Reed original has ended up mimicking him (even Tina Turner) because there’s no better way to do them. For the most part here are respectful yet freshly minted reinterpretations, sounding contemporary without any widely or wildly inappropriate makeovers.

A good example is Don & Dewey’s I’m Leaving It Up To You, which Jimmie & Lou Ann duet sort of midway between

D&D’s original and Dale & Grace’s hit cover version. Lou Ann also does a convincing job of turning Wheel Of Fortune (originally by The Cardinals in 1951 and then a pop smash for

Kay Starr in 1952) into a romantic blues, and gives similar emotion to Little Richard’s Send Me Some

Lovin’. Jimmie and Lou Ann bounce off one another well on the phone conversation scenario of Ted Taylor’s I Miss You So.

Elsewhere Jimmie leads his crew to great effect on Johnny Ace‘s perennial male complaint How Can You Be So Mean?; zaps it up for Rosco Gordon‘s buoyant bounce Just A Little Bit (just an eeny weeny bit, just a teeny weeny bit of your love); exchanges views with Lou Ann about Charlie Rich‘s Lonely Weekends; strolls into jazzy mood with Roy Milton‘s RM Blues; gets his rockin‘ boogie boots on for Guitar Junior‘s Roll, Roll, Roll; and readily recalls the Louisiana-Tex/Mex angst of Doug Sahm’s Why, Why, Why. There is also a Leonard Feather oldie (She’s Got The) Blues For Sale, which I believe was first recorded by Billy Eckstine but that was even before my time.

Speaking as a mature reviewer - or old codger, if your prefer - the majority of modern blues albums are a tad too much hard rock and not enough easy roll for my taste. This one, however, is stone to the bone. Jimmie, the pleasure is all ours.

Cliff White

Jimmie VaughanPlays Blues, Ballads & FavoritesProper Records PRPCD062

www.jimmievaughan.co

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New Orleans native Mac Rebennack aka Dr John may just be the hippest musician alive. Across the decades he’s been

celebrated by his peers for his highly individual playing style and his records have been sampled for rap and dance tunes. Now aged 69, Rebennack looks to be one of the great characters (and survivors) of American music. He’s been a professional musician for more than fifty years, starting out in the heyday of New Orleans rhythm and blues playing guitar and piano on many fabulous recordings and slowly developing the character of Dr John – named after a 19th Century voodoo doctor – until he recorded his seminal debut album Gris Gris in 1969 with Harold Battiste producing and arranging what has to be one of the most wonderfully offbeat records ever made. Since then Dr John has never rested on his laurels. As a pianist he is exceptional: he’s lent his skills as a session man to so many great recordings, from Sonny & Cher’s hits through the Stones’ Exile On Main St to efforts by Stones wannabes Spiritualized and Primal Scream albums. Rebennack’s enthusiasm for his home town of New Orleans has seen him act as an ambassador for the rich musical culture of that city - appropriately Dr John appears as himself in an episode of David “The Wire” Simon’s new TV series Treme (the episode is named Right Place, Wrong Time after Dr John’s 1973 US hit single).

That Dr John remains so relentlessly creative – he tours constantly and regularly releases albums of new material – marks him out from so many of his contemporaries who appear happy just to deliver their most famous tunes night after night. And with his new album Tribal, Rebennack shows himself still capable of delivering a seriouslly tasty, swampy gumbo of Louisiana funk.

For Dr John fans Tribal is a real treat as it finds him teamed up once again with the Lower 911 who backed him on 2008’s Grammy winning (for Best Contemporary Blues album) The City That Care Forgot. Tribal is similar if not quite so downbeat in theme – the aforementioned album focusing on Hurricane Katrina’s destructive legacy – with Dr John drawling vocals over fat funk rhythms, heavy horns, wailing backing vocals and some very tasty blues guitar. The Lower 911 – named after a black New Orleans neighbourhood famous for its excellent brass bands – create

a tough sonic brew for Dr John to sing and play piano over. Their youth and ability means they push Rebennack and Tribal reflects this: the Dr sounds like he is prescribing strong medicine!

Tribal features 16 tracks in total and they vary widely. Sleepin’ In My Bed is a paranoid dance tune with a really slick two-step rhythm. Feel Good Music is a powerful testament to the music Rebennack grew up with (and continues to make). Tribal’s title song starts with a Native American chant and drum rhythm which very effectively leads into a song about the human tribe. Them finds Rebennack making witty social comment as the song criticizes the American tendency to always look for someone to blame/sue/invade for both the nation and the individual citizen’s problems.

Only In America finds Rebennack reflecting on the US. Across a fast, swinging blues groove Dr John plays boogie woogie piano and spins a hip critique of the way the USA is being run. Whut’s Wit Dat is Dr John delivering his slick, jazz slang with the usual hip shrug over a pumping piano rhythm.

The richness and variety of music on Tribal finds Dr John operating at the height of his powers. His enthusiasm for music making and desire to sing about the USA in the 21st Century reinforces his status as a major artist and a rare one who comfortably straddles rock-funk-blues-jazz.

Garth Cartwright

Dr John And The Lower 911

TribalProper Records

FTN17803 www.drjohn-tribal.com

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Down in the rural idyll that is Box, Wiltshire, Real World Records have been unearthing musical gems for a few decades now. But with

their current roster, they’ve hit upon a treasure trove. Three releases, three uncategorizable acts: Little Axe. Syriana. Afro Celt Sound System. A triumvirate that underscores the label’s Zeitgeist-lassoing savviness and – both together and individually – comprises some of the finest, most majestic sounds around.

“As far as I’m concerned there are only two types of music,” says Skip McDonald, the legendary guitarist at the helm of Little Axe. “The music you like and the music you don’t like. I only make music that I love.”

The London-based Ohio native especially loves the blues. Having learned his craft at the knee of his father, a steel mill worker who fashioned makeshift guitars from cigar boxes when he was a child, McDonald grew up listening to vinyl by the likes of Howling Wolf and Robert Johnson and taking covert delight in a musical form deemed bad by his family’s churchgoing peers. “If my dad’s mother caught him playing the blues he’d get beaten. His father would say, ‘We’re not having that devil music in the house.’”

Inevitably, McDonald got the blues – and kept them. There have been many blues-related projects since. The loose collective of like-minded souls that is Little Axe has proved one of the most enduring; their current acclaimed album Bought For a Dollar, Sold for a Dime lays down the blues and dresses them up with everything from dub and reggae to gospel, jazz and electronica. “We take the tones and feelings of the old blues and put today’s stamp on it,” McDonald says. “We make music you can feel, taste and touch.”

Bought For A Dollar, Sold For A Dime works on a series of levels. Here is an axeman at the height of his powers, a maestro whose gravelly vocals and moody guitar licks are almost telepathically buoyed by the presence of long time collaborators, bassist Doug Wimbish and drummer Keith LeBlanc. In the early Eighties all three were star members of the Sugar Hill Records house band, contributing to seminal rap recordings by the likes of Grandmaster Flash. Some of that magic is recreated here.

“This time we decided to play as if we were in front of an audience,” says McDonald of a line-up that met up for the first time in 17 years. “It’s old school thinking: when Stax and Atlantic were doing albums everyone would pile into the studio together. That was the Sixties, the boom time for live music. That was my era. It wasn’t enough to look good. You had to know how to play.”

McDonald certainly knows. The proof is there on Take A Stroll, a cover of a tune by his former homeboys Tackhead, itself a cover of a 1930s blues track; there on his bittersweet cover of Son House’s Grinning In Your Face; and on the harmonica-laden Soul Of A Man, a track lent extra gravitas by the powerful soul voice of Bernard Fowler. On tracks that make forays into other forms, all while keeping the blues at their core: “It’s very hard to categorise me,” McDonald says. “I love the blues. But man, I also love everything else as well.”

The project known as Syriana has a similar penchant for bridging gaps and forging links – particularly between East and West. As the EP Al Bidayeh (The Beginning) exemplifies, theirs is more than simply a musical journey. It is a dialogue of hopes and fears, similarities and differences, histories and futures. Of common ground found between alleged opposites; of an imaginary film featuring, say, the great diva Fairuz sitting in a Midwest café with Dick Dale’s Miserlou on the jukebox. It’s where ancient civilisations rub alongside Cold War iconography, and where the American Dream embraces the wisdom of the Middle East. It is, if you like, where Americana meets Syriana.

“Music is a language that appeals to the heart and soul,” says Nick Page, the half-Greek, half-English guitarist/producer who – with Irish double-bassist Bernard O’Neill – is at Syriana’s heart. “You can’t change things directly but you can wake people up to a different reality, to what is going on.”

Which is, well, a lot. The men’s ten-day visit to Damascus, Syria’s mysteriously beautiful capital city, opened doors to a world of possibilities. Instruments such as the qanun (the 81-string Arabic dulcimer) crossed boundaries with the guitar, with the famously versatile double bass acting

REAL WORLD RELEASES: LITTLE AXE, SYRIANA, AFRO CELT SOUND SYSTEM

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Little AxeBought For A Dollar Sold For A DimeReal World Records CDRW178 www.little-axe.com

as a bridge. Percussionists, singers and a string section lent their brilliance to a project that works as well pared down as it does bigged up. A project originally inspired by the so-called war on terror. A project intended to demystify and delight.

“You go somewhere that is 5,000 years old and the last 70 years of [Cold War] history just pales into insignificance,” says O’Neill. “Damascus is this vibrant place with phenomenal art and culture and incredible hospitality. The downside,” he adds, “is that a lot of Syrians are forbidden to travel. That fact helped inform our music and lyrics.”

All four tracks on Al Bidayeh come imbued with an almost tangible sensory power. Each has its own story: Gharibb (Stranger) is a sung, Gotan Project-like meditation on ideas of home. Syriana nods to movie themes and Fifties Arabia. Road To Damascus swells and ebbs as it moves on its way. Sunday/Randall And Hopkirk Deceased/Peter’s Room is an improvisation-come-Sixties TV theme tune that showcases instrumental skills on qanun, piano and guitar.

“This has all evolved and unfurled into something quite phenomenal,” says Page. “The sum really is greater than the parts.”

Ditto, then, for Afro Celt Sound System, that much praised behemoth famous for fusing contemporary electronic beats with African rhythms, Irish traditional music and anything else they feel like. Founded some 15 years ago the band blossomed into a phenomenon that spawned five celebrated studio albums (and a remix album), numerous awards, Grammy nominations and star turns on big film soundtracks. Their music is uplifting, inspiring, eminently danceable; their live shows – which saw the likes of charismatic Indian dhol drummer Johnny Kalsi facing off the furious bodhrán of the equally extroverted James McNally – are the stuff of international legend.

With the original line-up back together after a five-year hiatus, with live festival slots in the offing and a new album down the track, Real World have released a double CD, Capture, to remind us just how damn good Afro Celts are. A CD that cherry picks the best songs and instrumentals from the band’s illustrious career, complete with the sort of high-tech re-mastering that makes the sound the best it can be. The special guests are all here, of course - Peter Gabriel, Sinead O’Connor and Robert Plant. But the real star is undisputedly Afro Celt Sound System itself, whose collaborative desire to cross cultural boundaries while embracing both future and past has long inspired a host of imitators.

“Our music always just tripped out, very loose and clear, on everything from the Irish-tunes-on-acid to the gloriously languid stuff,” says Iarla O’Lionaird, whose glorious Irish vocals continue to send shivers down spines. “You know that magic, unquantifiable, unpredictable thing that sometimes happens between musicians? That always happened with us.”

The proof is captured on Capture, in its deft display of a band that broke down barriers between world music, rock music and black music. A band that sparked musical discussions, that rejoiced in both differences and similarities. “The sound system tag helped us,” says O’Lionaird. “It gave us enormous malleability. It was complex, yes, but that was the beauty of it.”

Three releases, three uncategorizable acts. A wealth of talent. Real World, it seems, are on a roll.

Jane Cornwell

REAL WORLD RELEASES: LITTLE AXE, SYRIANA, AFRO CELT SOUND SYSTEM

Afro Celt Sound SystemCapture 1995-2010

Real World Records CDRW179

www.afrocelts.org

SyrianaAl BidayehReal World Records RWEP15 HTTP://realworldrecords.com

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“Sitting with a friend in his bedroom that overlooked the family tennis-court, I watched leaves drift down through the long Sunday afternoons as we took it in turn to wind the portable HMV, and…

Bubber Miley, Frank Teschemacher, J.C Higginbotham, spoke immediately to our understanding. Their rips, slurs and distortions were something we understood perfectly. This was something we had found for ourselves, that wasn’t taught at school.”

It’s a singularly English image of the English jazz fan. And the boy who would become one of our most respected poets, Philip Larkin, was certainly an ardent fan. This four-disc box set, released to honour the 25th anniversary of his death, is not only a comprehensive collection of Larkin’s favourite music, and the music he would write about later (he was the Telegraph’s jazz reviewer from 1961 to 1971); it is also a

superb history of jazz between its beginnings and the introduction of modern jazz.

Larkin had strong views about jazz, and was as blunt-spoken about the music as he was about life in general. So don’t expect any Miles and Coltrane here, or even any Bird. Larkin was a vocal opponent of modernism across the arts, and the track listing on Larkin’s Jazz reflects this.

The first disc, I Remember, I Remember, brings together those youthful listening sessions with classic Count Basie and Louis Armstrong. Disc two, Oxford, from the poet’s time at Oxford university, features Bix Beiderbecke, Billy Banks and Eddie Condon. All What Jazz, takes its name from the collection of Larkin’s jazz writing published in 1985 and takes in Sidney Bechet, Fats Waller and Duke Ellington, while the final disc, Minority Interest, profiles some of the records Larkin and his friends enjoyed in their informal listening sessions in H`ull in the 70s and 80s, such as Earl Bostic, Jimmy Witherspoon and Ben Webster. Yep, we’re in a time warp now.

It’s all fabulous stuff, rich and generous of spirit, full of lithe swing and the kind of American earthiness that must have sounded so exotic played among the dreaming spires.

A lot of the tracks are solid gold classics you will have heard before – Coleman Hawkins’ peerless Body And Soul, the Count Basie band’s Jumpin’ At The Woodside – but there are also less obvious choices – like

the wonderful Hello Little Girl from the Dave Brubeck Quartet’s 1953 live performance from Oberlin College.

“Our standards were very high in those days,” writes Larkin. “The idea of paying nearly two pounds for an LP containing only three tracks of real interest would have appalled me.” He would therefore be delighted with Proper’s box set, which is most stylishly presented complete with bespoke cover art by Ralph Steadman, and full track notes from Larkin’s writing.

Peter Bacon

Larkin’s JazzVarious ArtistsProper Box PROPERBOX155 www.larkinsjazz.com

MEGSON

www.megsonmusic.co.uk“One of folk’s hottest properties” For bookings contact : info@megsonmusic.co.uk For press enquires contact : john@johncrosby.plus.com

BBC FOLK AWARD NOMINEES 2009 & 2010

michaelwestonking.com & myspace.com/michaelwestonking

TOUR DATESSat 24 Jul TROWBRIDGE Festival 01225 769 132Sun 25 Jul TROWBRIDGE Festival 01225 769 132Wed 4 Aug INVERNESS Hootananny 01463 233 651Fri 6 Aug BEAULY Belladrum Tartan Heart Festival 01463 234234 / 0843 221 0100Sat 21 Aug HOLMEFIRTH Picturedrome 01484 689759Thu 30 Sept GLASGOW SoundsInThe Suburbs 07804 447511 / 0870 2201116Fri 1 Oct YORK The Basement 08444 77 1000 / 0871 902 5726Sat 2 Oct KEIGHLEY The Gassienda 0113 243 6743Sun 3 Oct SHEFFIELD The Boardwalk 0871 230 1101 / 0114 279 9090Wed 6 Oct BRISTOL Louisiana 08704 444400Thu 7 Oct MILTON KEYNES The Stables 01908 280800Sun 10 Oct BIRMINGHAM Kitchen Garden Cafe 0121 443 4725Wed 13 Oct LONDON Dublin Castle 020 7700 0550 / 020 7700 0880 Thu 14 Oct PORTSMOUTH RMA Tavern 08721 077 077Sat 16 Oct BROSELEY Birchmeadow Centre 07890 057832 / 01952 882210Wed 20 Oct BRIGHTON Venue TBCThu 21 Oct FARNCOMBE Farncombe Cavern 01483 416741 Fri 22 Oct PLYMOUTH B-Bar 01752 242021Sun 24 Oct NOTTINGHAM The Maze 0115 947 5650

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Men would rather have their fill of sleep, love and singing and dancing than of war - Homer

BRAND NEW ALBUMOUT 9th AUGUST

13 songs of protest;5 brand new ones, andre-workings of songs by Phil Ochs, Jim Ford, Bobby Womack, Alfred Bryan, Bobby Darin, Sykes Roosevelt,Langston Hughes, and Bob Dylan.

Properganda 17

31

ACID COUNTRY will be available on CD and to DOWNLOAD from SEPTEMBER 13th.

You can also win every CD featured in this issue Visit www.propergandaonline.co.uk

You’ll find daily updated news, features, interviews video, audio streams and exclusives.

August 21 V FESTIVAL, Hylands Park 22 V FESTIVAL, Weston Park September 20 LIVERPOOL, O2 Academy 21 GLASGOW, King Tuts 22 NEWCASTLE, O2 Academy 24 MANCHESTER, O2 Academy 25 BRISTOL, Thekla 26 BIRMINGHAM, Glee Club 28 LONDON, Borderline 29 LONDON, Borderline 30 SHEFFIELD, Leadmill

On tour to promote his new album

Properganda 17

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Suntrap Unravelling Fellside FECD234

DK

This youthful London-based four-piece scores really highly on its fourth release (and Fellside debut), a supremely confident collection of mostly self-penned songs proudly showcasing their trademark rich, full instrumental presence (the partnership of accordionist/whistle player Sara Byers and guitarist Paul Hoad in happy consort with the twin-violin work of Mary Wilson and Debbie Chalmers) boosted by some gorgeously strong, creative vocal harmonies.

Aptly, Suntrap purvey shimmeringly beautiful folk with an occasional psych-tinge and more than a hint of savvy pop; their music is fresh and clean-sounding, with an unfailingly intelligent approach to texture and an uncanny ear for conjuring sparkling arrangements around evocative personal reminiscences (Blue Skin Bay, Beautiful Boy), pertinent reflections on life and love (Don’t Go) or expressions of the mind-challenging contradictions and dizzying highs and lows of romantic infatuation (So Sweet, Unravelling), all tellingly and sensuously voiced.

An assured, intense yet attractively listener-friendly album with thought-provoking content.

www.suntrap.org

Ghosts From The Basement: Lost Songs, Dreams And Folkadelia From The Vaults Of Village Thing, 1970-1974 Various The Weekend Beatnik WEBE 9046

JL

An independent label before punk, a purveyor of acid-folk before it even really had a name and a resolutely artist-centred concern when everyone else had to sign their lives away, Village Thing was truly pioneering. This CD collects the label’s most psychedelic material, most of which has never been reissued before.

The highlights are many. The Sun Also Rises ruminate on suicide via Incredible String Band style hippie folk, while legends like Wizz Jones and Derroll Adams have a down-home, rougher edge. From the soul troubadours like Dave Evans and Chris Thompson will appeal to those fond of Nick Drake or Tim Buckley’s early days.

This wonderful compilation has, at its heart, the acoustic guitar as its star. It’s testament to what virtuoso musicianship and creative visions can achieve when artists are given free reign, and this CD will absolutely delight any 60s and 70s folk aficionados looking to dig deeper than the period’s well-known names.

www.weekendbeatnik.com

Coope, Boyes & Simpson As If… No Masters NMCD35

CI

New young guns come and go but through the simple, subtle power of the human voice, Barry Coope, Jim Boyes and Lester Simpson still set the benchmark for vocal harmonies.

This is classic CBS, creating a characteristically full sound on 12 unaccompanied songs of varying vintage with such a fine touch built on arrangements of such exquisite sophistication you almost wonder why anyone bothers with instruments at all.

A fascinating selection of material includes a long-forgotten Clive James/Pete Atkin gem, A Hill Of Little Shoes, along with enlightened interpretations of Richard Thompson’s Keep Your Distance, Robbie Burns’ The Slave’s Lament and Fi Fraser’s Float In Dreams set to a Flemish tune. Yet none are as powerful as their own, edgy self-written songs , notably Jim Boyes’ deliciously barbed The Emperor’s New Clothes and Under A Stone, while Lester Simpson offers a vigorously apposite postscript to Pete Townshend on We Got Fooled Again. A thoughtful, provocative, clever, wondrous collection.

www.coopeboyesandsimpson.co.uk

The Urban Folk Quartet The Urban Folk Quartet Fellside FECD233

DK

Don’t be fooled by the strait-laced-sounding name – this music is hot, energetic and highly tasty! In the UFQ, which as a performing ensemble was launched barely a year ago, we find that eternally puckish fiddler-extraordinaire Joe Broughton conjoining in glorious synchronicity with three of the most experienced and in-demand young people working in today’s folk-world fusion scene: fellow-fiddler Paloma Trigás, oud-obsessed string-plucker/strummer Frank Moon (a pal of Joe’s from his Birmingham Conservatoire days) and ace percussionist Tom Chapman.

Together they conjure up an ever-inventive, joyously restless, often bewilderingly frantic sequence of original compositions which jump gleefully off the diving-board of traditional folk dance forms into a veritable Seven Seas (and more) of musical adventures that playfully and entirely unashamedly embrace Latin, North African, Eastern European, Pan-Celtic and Middle-Eastern grooves and much else besides.

Sometimes exhilarating to a fault but always great fun, the UFQ expertly entertains through its brilliant musicianship.

www.myspace.com/theurbanfolkquartet

4Square Chronicles Square Roots Music SQR1002

CI

After earning one of the weekend’s most rousing receptions at last year’s Cropredy Festival (when their debut album 20.20 Manchester reputedly became the second biggest-selling CD in the festival’s history) the young Lancashire quartet are clearly fully geared up to knocking down a few more walls with this refreshingly original follow-up.

They are all superb musicians – accordion wiz Jim Molyneux and percussionist/pianist/singer Dan Day are both graduates of Manchester’s famous Chethams School of Music, while banjo/mandolinist James Meadows is a former BBC Young Folk Awards semi-finalist and vocalist/fiddle player/dancer Nicola Lyons was in a duo with James Schofield and toured with Demon Barbers. But there’s nothing dry or academic about their music.

Constantly producing unexpected rhythms and challenging arrangements, their tune-making is particularly inventive as they meld carefree energy with nu-folk sensibility and crisp production values, while neatly sidestepping any suspicion of self-indulgence. They also deliver persuasive vocal tracks on Karine Polwart’s anthemic Follow The Heron and Dan Day’s own thoughtfully evocative Pretoria.

www.myspace.com/raycooperchopper

Tyde Tyde Mrs. Casey Records MCRCD0102

DK

Finalists in this year’s BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Awards, Tyde burst onto the scene last November, so impressing with their playing in the AFO conference lobby that they immediately bagged numerous bookings for this season’s folk festivals. Naturally, their debut CD plays to their strengths: prodigious musical talent harnessed to the execution of dynamic and cleverly-arranged tune-sets sourced from every corner of the British Isles and beyond.

The three young musicians making up Tyde (guitarist Seth Tinsley, fiddler Heather Gessey and piano accordionist Andrew Waite) clearly have everything well under control, and their exhilarating musicianship is irresistible; and, while the bulk of their debut disc comprises fairly uptempo material, moments of comparative repose like The Falls are also very skilfully managed, as are the album’s two songs (both taken by Heather).

Full of promise, this debut disc will prove more than enough to tyde us over till next year.

www.tydefolk.co.uk/site

FOLK reviews

Properganda 17

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Ray Cooper Tales Of Love, War And Death By Hanging Westpark Music 87188

CP

As ‘Chopper,’ he’s Oysterband’s bass player but when the mood takes him, presto! - a singer/writer emerges, taking to the stage armed with guitar and cello. Solo debuts can often mean a huge potential for self-indulgence but Cooper has smartly avoided the musical pitfalls – no dodgy time signatures or tuneless noodlings, just good melodies with accessible lyrics.

A mix of Traditional material including Ye Jacobites By Name, McPherson’s Rant and own-writes conveys a sense of dark imagery. All are indeed tales of mystery and imagination. These widescreen vignettes, whether conveying aching regret (The Border Widow’s Lament) or love’s salvation (Dark Days Are Over) make for a haunting ambience overall. Conjuring a warm “I’ve-found-my-place” glow is My Compass Points To North – referencing Ray’s Swedish home I’ll betcha.

These are distinctive, affecting songs delivered with a quiet assurance, making for a record too well-realised to ignore. File under rewarding!

www.myspace.com/raycooperchopper

Lúnasa Lá Nua Lunasa Records LRCD001

CI

Irish music has had an unusually low profile in recent years with British bands rising to the forefront of the modern folk scene, but Lúnasa – who set a new benchmark when they initially emerged over a decade ago – are back with a bang.

Four years after their last studio recording they gathered in the evocative Cooley Mountains in Co. Louth in the north east of Ireland to see if the magic was still there…and emerged with Lá Nua (New Day) peerlessly delivering a dazzling selection of tunes predominantly written by their uilleann piper Cillian Vallely and flute maestro Kevin Crawford.

Vallely and Crawford, along with fellow founders Seán Smyth (fiddle) and Trevor Hutchinson (bass) and string magician Paul Meehan have an effortless symmetry that gives the music serious drive without them ever appearing to break sweat. Again they set the standards and, once accused of simply being Bothy Band copyists, they’ve defined their own joyous style.

www.lunasa.ie

Alan Kelly After The Morning Black Box Music BBM004

DK

The masterly Roscommon-born piano accordionist delivers his third solo album, a richly relaxed and beautifully varied sequence that seamlessly blends traditional with contemporary in superbly fresh and stylish settings.

The bulk of the disc is instrumental, presenting Alan’s inspired arrangements of traditional tunes emanating from Ireland, Brittany, Asturias, even Louisiana. These are topped up with a selection of Alan’s own compositions ranging from the infectious jig rhythms of the title track and the genially lilting New Year’s Day to the Tuscan-inspired waltz Siena and the gentle, reflective character portrait Eolann.

To complement the drive of his own wonderfully lithe and precise playing, Alan calls on the magnificently supportive musicianship of an intimate galaxy of friends including Tola Custy (fiddle), Ian Carr and Donncha Moynihan (guitars), Jim Higgins (percussion) and Rod McVey (keyboards); finally, Eddi Reader and Kris Drever excel with one vocal cameo apiece. An exuberant and seriously uplifting disc.

www.myspace.com/alankellymusic

The Demon Barbers The Adventures of Captain Ward Demon Barber Sounds DBS003

CI

Deserved winners of the Best Live Act gong at the 2009 BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards, the Demon Barbers have pulled out the stops to convert their extraordinary stage appeal into an equally convincing studio offering. They’ve largely succeeded, too, on a wide-ranging album of mainly traditional material delivered with laudable variety, ferocious energy and uplifting pizzazz.

Techno effects colour the action and clog dancing is even added to an ever challenging and inventive rhythmic mix as Damien Barber and Bryony Griffith ebulliently sing some dramatic ballads like the colourful title track, the dark Three Ravens and the steely Pound A Week Rise, in addition to a blazing take on Grateful Dead’s Friend Of The Devil.

Rise Up and Soul Cake make a couple of irresistible singalongs and while their thumping punky version of Three Drunken Maids may not be everyone’s apple strudel, some witty and buoyant instrumentals help to carry the day.

www.thedemonbarbers.com

Michael Weston King I Didn’t Raise My Boy To Be A Soldier Valve Records VALVE 2787

ND

Michael Weston King is one of Britain’s truly great singer-songwriters, someone always moving, whether eclectic country rocker or powerful solo act, travelling minstrel or master of exquisite country duets (on the still-unreleased album My Darling Clementine).

Here he emerges as a protest singer, with gems old and new. But the 60s have gone: this isn’t just a man, a beard, a guitar. The best-known song, Dylan’s I Pity The Poor Immigrant, gets a snappy backbeat, King’s own anti-war anthem In Time explodes from beneath screaming pedal steel, Phil Ochs’ Is There Anybody Here? becomes a jangling rocker and the title track uses bleak WWI lyrics against a deceptively charming piano melody.

MWK’s pure, soaring vocals, the antithesis of most protest singers, then find a God-given home on Jim Ford & Bobby Womack’s soulful cry Sounds Of Our Time, with Jeb Loy Nichols adding harmonies. Protest music for a new generation, but as heart-felt as anything you’ll ever hear.

www.michaelwestonking.com

Sid Selvidge I Should Be Blue Archer Records ARR31935

CP

It doesn’t get much more authentic, blueswise, than having your birthplace as Greenville MS. but Selvidge is not only Delta, he’s “pretty much everything musically in the whole Southeast” as the NY Times’ John Rockwell says. Country, rock-lite, jazzy/folk – all styles are served here and this 8th release showcases not only elegant covers of proven names, - Fred Neil, Duke Ellington and Donovan (in truth!) all crop up among the writing credits, but a sprinkling of Sid originals of which Fine Hotel is the world-weary gem here.

With a heartful of soul, and appealing freshness, the album’s mood is highly evocative and Selvidge’s high-register, slow-burning vocals conjure an air of hard-won resignation and sensibility with a hangover. The four duets with Amy Speace with whom he often tours, are classy affairs with just-right harmonies evincing an unforced empathy.

Here’s a very human album that for candour alone, takes some beating.

http://sidselvidge.com

reviews FOLK

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Properganda 17

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Willie Nelson and Asleep At The Wheel Willie And The WheelProper PRPCD 066

GC

Teaming legendary Texan country singer Willie Nelson with celebrated Western Swing group Asleep At The Wheel was originally mooted by Atlantic Records head honcho and uber-producer Jerry Wexler thirty years ago. For a multitude of reasons the sessions for the album didn’t begin until after Wexler’s death. Wexler had gifted all his Western Swing albums to Ray Benson, leader of Asleep At The Wheel, and Benson noted there were marks by the songs that Wexler believed Willie should sing.

Finally pairing up, the legendary singer and band have a great time romping through songs popularised in the 1930s and 40s by the likes of Bob Wills and Spade Cooley. Whether roaring through fast dance numbers like Oh You Pretty Woman or going for soulful ballads like Hesitation Blues, Willie and Benson’s band swing like crazy. One listen to this wonderful album will convince what a pleasure the recording sessions must have been.

www.willieandthewheel.com

Jim Lauderdale & Robert Hunter Patchwork RiverThirty Tigers 7060823

SH

It’s only fair to admit to being predisposed to Patchwork River, as the old Deadhead in me rises to the Robert Hunter co-write credits. Having found an online interview about this project, the flames of my interest were further fanned by a sense that these two are prolific when they get together. Music seems to flow through Lauderdale like the mighty Mississippi and Hunter is such a fine wordsmith, you sense his pen could never run dry.

If you are even a passing fan of country or Americana I cannot recommend this highly enough. Hunter is smart enough to have been employed by Dylan on his last album. Here he merges staunch optimism and withering insight with a unique facility to marry the poetic with the prosaic. Lauderdale has a brilliant voice to deliver these pearls of wisdom, while the assembled cast of musicians cooks storms and salve in equal measure.

Good Together is a soul belter in a Nudie suit (as are several other cuts here), Alligator Alley dredges every swamp seeking salvation and El Dorado is at once avaricious and admonitory. What’s not to like? Well, at 13 tracks, it trips my prescribed limit. But what to take off? Hell! Nothing!

http://jimlauderdale.com

Crooked Still Some Strange Country Signature Sounds SIG2029

JL

Sounding not unlike Nickel Creek gone ‘chambergrass’ and fronted by Alison Krauss, Crooked Still are a ‘newgrass’ (progressive bluegrass) five-piece that came together at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, Massachusetts in 2001. Some Strange Country is their fourth album, and was recorded with Grammy award winning producer/engineer Gary Paczosa – a veteran of sessions with Krauss, Dolly Parton and the ubiquitous Tim O’Brien, who contributes backing vocals on two tracks.

Also unmistakeable is Ricky Skaggs, who does a great high ‘n’ lonesome harmony vocal on The Golden Vanity. The album juxtaposes original and traditional songs, the best known of which is probably Henry Lee. Then there’s an unlikely cover of The Rolling Stones’ wistful You Got The Silver. Aside from Aoife O’Donovan’s breathy, Krauss-ish vocals, and Gregory Lizst’s chuckling banjo, their most distinctive asset is Tristan Clarridge’s cello, sparring brilliantly with fiddler Brittany Haas on Sometimes In This Country.

www.crookedstill.com

Eilen Jewell Presents

Butcher Holler (A Tribute To Loretta Lynn)Signature Sounds SIG2030

SC

Having added her voice to The Sacred Shakers’ take on gospel tinged bluegrass, Eilen Jewell once again turns her attention to revival. This time it’s the (mostly) secular world of Loretta Lynn who turned the tables on the hard drinking men of doubtful moral character, populating the honky tonks and the equally dubious Sirens who would lead them astray.

This is another revelation as Lynn’s strength shines through unabashed “In a booth back in a corner, with the lights down low,” with A Man I Hardly Know, or threatening violence to the tramp trying to steal her man in the hilarious opener Fist City. Of course it’s not all a bed of roses, there are tears, shame and regret in Honky Tonk Girl and Whispering Sea is wistful longing, while the somewhat bawdy sentiment of Don’t Come Home A Drinkin’, has a wronged woman at it’s heart. God does get a look in, as Lynn still has faith, but it’s surely for songs like You Ain’t Woman Enough To Take My Man that she deserves to be remembered and Eilen Jewell and her top notch, regular band make a first class case.

www.eilenjewell.com

Kevin Welch Patch Of Blue Sky Music Road Records MRRCD108

SH

Armed with some of the sharpest lyrics this side of the Lauderdale/Hunter collaboration, the title of this set says it all. Picture if you will that Patch Of Blue Sky surrounded by storm clouds. As the thunderheads rumble all around, that break offers a view up to the heights of the heavens and if it’s blowing your way, promises a few minutes bathed in sun.

This CD is surprisingly geographically expansive as the now Texan native pops up south east of the bay of Bengal in Andaman Sea– heartbreak in paradise if you will. Marysville references the devastating Australian bush fires, while The Great Emancipation is set further north in the floods of Melbourne.

Although tragedy abounds, Welch by his own volition cannot help but hang around and look, but this is not a grisly act and nor is the fight done. Rather it’s his empathy for others that reveals a sweet melancholy in life and in the gospel tones of the title track, Kevin is marching on, carrying just a little bit of everyone’s burden for them.

www.kevinwelch.com

Jimmy Lafave Favorites 1992-2001 Musicroads Records MRRCD 009

CP

Over his 22-year recording history, the pride of Wills Point, Texas spent several on Austin’s Bohemia Beat label - those covered by this retrospective, spanning six albums with bonus tracks. Lafave is a no-nonsense grass-roots, rocka-country picker whose yearning, weathered vocals alternately delicate on Never Is A Moment (“that you’re not on my mind”- wish I’d written that) and fiery – Austin After Midnight have a sure value.

Half of the 16 songs are Jimmy’s own but an emotive cover of Dylan’s Sweetheart Like You is played with taste and élan while Walk Away Renee is the best cover that the 1971 version of Rod Stewart never did!

A thoroughly good collection without any gimmicks. All full fat and with no hint of 5-a-day, it roars through a Texas of broken hearts, promises and roadhouse coffee, ending up in some beer joint till morning. Enjoy Jimmy Lafave responsibly!

www.jimmylafave.com

COUNTRY AMERICANA reviews

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Properganda 17

35

Pinetop Perkins & Willie Big Eyes Smith Joined At The Hip Telarc

TEL3185002

KS

Perkins and Smith share a long history - first getting together in the Muddy Waters Blues Band in the seventies when Willie was the drummer and Pinetop took over piano from Otis Spann. Since then, they’ve played in various bands and on many recording sessions but this CD is the first that gives them both top billing.

On this punchy set of hard-hitting, traditional blues numbers, Willie is lead vocalist and plays some mean harmonica while his son, Kenny, takes over as drummer. Pinetop, at the ripe old age of 97, provides tough, two fisted piano as well as sliding in with the occasional vocal; witness his deliciously wheezy way on the bluesy recasting of Take My Hand, Precious Lord.

Guitarists John Primer and Frank Krakowski and bassist Bob Stroger give the whole thing that authentic Chicago feel and the material comes mostly from Willie whose beefy songs nestle neatly alongside items from Sonny Boy Williamson, Lil Son Jackson and Big Bill Broonzy. Big blues from big men.

www.pinetopperkins.com

Chuck Willis The Complete Chuck Willis JSP Records JSPCD2303

CW

A handsome, highly regarded singer/songwriter, providing hits for many others over the years (including Elvis), Chuck Willis was a southern star of the US chitlin circuit just starting to break boundaries when he died aged 30 in 1958.

There’s rockin’ jive in this 3CD set, larks as well as laments. At heart, though, Chuck was a romantic, a master of plaintive persuasion, expressing his inner turmoil with such classics as Don’t Deceive Me, Feel So Bad, It’s Too Late and more, or wringing salty tears out of C.C. Rider and What Am I Living For. His accompanists and producers were among the best in the business, adding substantial authority to these recordings.

78 tracks might seem an overload for beginners. Don’t be daunted. The reward is in the content. A short life with a vital legacy, Chuck’s poetic artistry is timeless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Willis

Charlie Musselwhite The WellAlligator ALCD4939

CW

A real return to roots here, with 13 original compositions that could have come from Chicago back in the1950s and 60s. Tracks such as Rambler’s Blues, Cadillac Women, Clarksdale Getaway and Cook County Blues remind me of smoky nights in old haunts.

If it makes sense to call a blues album warm and charming, this is it. Charlie doesn’t so much sing his songs as talk his way through them melodically with an engagingly weathered voice, still playing the best blues harp you’re likely to hear in 2010. The accompaniment is impeccable, the production by Chris Goldsmith is spot on for the mood.

That mood is intimate, like 3 o’clock in the morning at the best table in the hippest blues club in town. Mavis Staples, who dropped by to guest on Sad And Beautiful World, clearly enjoyed the vibe. Understandably so: although these are studio recordings it’s more like a ticket to the Wang Dang Doodle basement.

www.charliemusselwhite.com

The Baddest Blues Band (Ever!) Driving In The Rain Audio-B ABCD5026

KS

Zoe Schwarz and Rob Koral are in the driving seat here. They wrote most of the songs that Zoe sings in a grainy style that hovers somewhere between Bonnie Raitt and Elkie Brooks while Rob plays the crackling guitar lines that permeate every track.

They are supported by Pete Whittaker and Stephen Darrell Smith, who share swirling seething Hammond duties, and harmonica player Si Genaro, who is just as happy sliding in with wistful moans on the ballads as he is whacking out on the rocking R&B epics. Add the tight rhythm section of drummer Malcolm Creese and bassist Dave Wallace and you’ve got a world class band confident enough to take on The Cream’s We’re Going Wrong and get away with it!

Driving In The Rain isn’t a traditional blues record because the band takes its references from all over the place, mixing jazzy themes with funky beats sliced with Latin Santana-style licks.

www.myspace.com/thebaddestbluesbandever

Otis Taylor Clovis People Vol. 3 Telarc TEL3184902

JL

This Denver-raised bluesman has been remarkably prolific and consistent in the fifteen years since he returned to music. His brooding songs confront the tough realities of everyday African American life with rare grit, sung in a voice that really sounds like it’s lived them. His avoidance of the 12-bar format, multi-instrumental skills (guitar, banjo, mandolin, harmonica) and adventurous arrangements all place him well and truly leftfield, or maybe in a field of his own, as the enigmatic title of his latest album underlines.

Clovis People Vol. 3 kicks off with the pulsing regret of cheating song Rain So Hard, the first of many pieces haunted by Ron Miles’ sly cornet. Chuck Campbell’s oddly muted pedal steel is another ubiquitous presence, and elsewhere there’s cello, violin, djembe even a theremin. On Babies Don’t Lie and Coffee Woman, Taylor returns to his first instrument, the banjo. Inspired, inspiring and utterly unique.

www.otistaylor.com

Smokin’ Joe Kubek & Bnois King Have Blues, Will Travel Alligator ALCD4937

CW

Two Texas-based road veterans who joined forces in 1989 and first recorded together in 1991, Kubek & King bounce off one another with evident camaraderie, their different electric guitar techniques interplaying intuitively to create a solid sender. King’s vocals are strong and there’s a well-oiled rhythm section pumping beneath the hood.

This is not a relaxing ride, more a summons to join their party at the barrel-house. Don’t ignore the songs, though: 12 originals that add new spin to old urges. Tracks such as RU4 Real?, Payday In America, My Space Or Yours? and Sleeping With One Eye Open are in the tradition and yet decidedly 21st Century blues. Whereas Muddy Waters aimed to put a tiger in your tank, Kubek & King might well light a fire in your laptop.

www.smokinjoekubek.com

reviews BLUES

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The Bone Supremacy Introducing Lake LACD 283

BS

For those of us recovering from the ear-shredding onslaught of the World Cup vuvuzelas the exquisitely named Bone Supremacy come on like a balm. There is no Matt Damon type identity crisis here, this is simply a group of boss trombonists at the top of their game. Right from the start with the old favourite King Porter Stomp to the final beautiful Home 65 minutes later, you will be left gasping at the brilliant ensemble playing, wonderful arrangements and superb soloing.

The delights of this debut album, beautifully recorded last year, are many and varied. My favourite track is Michael Brecker’s Delta City Blues featuring Mark Nightingale and Ian Bateman with the excellent rhythm section providing an unexpected New Orleans feel.

Featuring regular ‘bone specialists Andy Flaxman, Adrian Fry, Ian Bateman and Chris Gower augmented by ‘A’ list guests Mark Nightingale, Roy Williams and Alistair White. If you have a son, daughter, niece, nephew or the like starting to play trombone and you want to show them what can be achieved, or you simply love the glorious sound of the trombone played by masters, this album’s for you.

www.bonesupremacy.co.uk

The Stanley Clarke Band The Stanley Clarke Band Heads Up HUCD3161

AR

Fusion-funk hero Clarke continues the comeback heralded by 2007’s rock-tinged The Toys Of Men. It’s no surprise that Clarke revisits the Return To Forever classic No Mystery, but overall this is the bass legend coming at new material with a vigour that will make the hair stand up on the back of your neck.

It helps that this is very much a band project, not one of those portmanteau albums stuffed with guest solo spots. Instead Ruslan and notably the monster drummer Bruner are key members of Clarke’s long standing electric band, while Hiromi is integral to the acoustic trio that has seen Clarke so splendidly return to his jazz roots.

Clarke embraces a number of styles in his inimitable style: there’s a slightly sappy Parliament-style funkier I Want To Play For You, immediately followed by the infectiously danceable Bass Folk Song 10. And it comes to a joyous head with Sonny Rollins, an irrepressible tribute to the master with more than a flavour of Weather Report’s Birdland about it. Clarke’s most enjoyable release in decades.

www.stanleyclarke.cpm

Christine Tobin & Liam Noble Tapestry Unravelled Trail Belle Records TBR01

PB

Apart from a re-ordering of the songs and the addition of one original, this is Carole King’s Tapestry album, sung by the Irish-born, UK-based singer and played by her pianist collaborator. So what’s the point of buying this if you already have the original? It’s not a question you will think remotely relevant by the time you have heard Noble’s piano intro and the first few vocal phrases of Beautiful.

Tobin doesn’t do any of that jazz singer tomfoolery, and Noble keeps his piano playing fairly non-jazzy too. What is clear is the way both have got inside these solid gold songs and found something new and personal to say while staying loyal to the originals.

The album is dedicated to Tobin’s older sister who died last year. It is both a testament to the healing potential of music and also its ability to remind us how wonderful living can be.

www.christine-tobin.com

JAZZ reviews

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Luisa Maita Lero-Lero Cumbancha CMBCD17

HM

The latest sultry songstress from Brazil is the daughter of Amado Maita, a cult singer of the 70s. Such connections can sometimes be a curse on a newcomer trying to forge their own identity, but this debut album is confident and idiosyncratic enough to suggest she has the talent to sustain a long career of her own.

For example, the title track just begins with Luisa’s breathy voice, two acoustic guitars and a lightly tapped woodblock, before gradually spreading its wings with bass, ethereal backing vocals and the subtlest use of dub effects and electronica. Other tunes incorporate all sorts of influences. For example, Fulaninha even has a Jamaican dancehall vibe about it, even if bossa nova is still the main template.

One of my favourite albums of last year came from another relatively new Brazilian singer, Ceu. This cool and sophisticated effort suggests that Luisa could soon be reaching similar heights.

www.luisamaita.com

The Ipanemas Que Beleza Far Out FARO151

JL

The story of how this Rio de Janeiro-based band were reunited in 2001, nearly forty years after their eponymous debut is inspiring and heartwarming, especially when you consider this is the fifth album by The Ipanemas in their second incarnation. Sadly, original member Neco passed away before Que Beleza was recorded, and so it’s dedicated to his memory.

Though tinged with melancholy, their swinging acoustic samba is still ideal undemanding summer listening. Wilson Das Neves contributes a world-weary vocal to about half the tracks, most confidently on the opener Que Beleza De Nega and the wonderfully expectant vibe of Euê Ô. The other most distinctive ‘voice’ is Vitor Santos’ woozy trombone, which either leads or accompanies most tunes. His easygoing and seemingly effortless playing is best heard on A Cara Dele, Espelho D’Agua and Nega E Kota. There are also four guest vocals by veteran singer Andrea Martins.

www.myspace.com/theipanemas

The Birth Of Southall Bhangra Various Keda KEDBOX02

HM

The idea that Bhangra – which originated in the Punjab region of India – used to be described as a folk dance, seems highly unlikely given the bass-heavy form that we are familiar with today, with its strong influence of hip-hop and dance culture generally.

But what you get on this generous four CD box set is something else altogether. The first Punjabi bands in the UK sprung up in the West Midlands in the 1960s, but the scene gradually began to focus on one modest little recording studio in Southall, West London. The place became so synonymous with the genre that stars from India would come to the UK specifically to get involved.

Most of the material here is refreshingly organic with dhol drums, tabla and other percussion nailing that familiar rhythm, while instruments as varied as oud, violin, accordion and sax produce a rich, joyous sound that’s hard to resist.

www.keda.co.uk/keda

Lepisto & Lehti Helsinki

Aito AICD012

HM

Lepisto and Lehti are an intriguing duo who first came across each other in the Finnish folk band Värttinä. They play accordion and double bass respectively and have an almost uncanny musical rapport. Lehti’s bass strolls leisurely round in circles, allowing Lepisto’s accordion to dance and leap around centre-stage. And really that’s all there is.

And yet astonishingly this duo seems to make a big enough sound between them to make the notion of additional musicians redundant. What’s more, it’s just as easy to picture them performing their sophisticated and original blend of modern jazz, tango and folk on the stage at the Royal Festival Hall as it is to imagine them busking the material on the Northern Line of the London Underground.

Vainajalan Tango, with its minor key and faster tempo, has an almost film-noir soundtrack quality about it, conjuring images of dubious characters ducking down ill-lit alleyways. Well worth investigating.

http://lepistolehti.com/

Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars Rise & Shine Cumbancha CMBCD18

JL

Founded in a Guinean refugee camp, where they had fled to escape Sierra Leone’s horrendous eleven year civil war, Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars have taken six years to produce this, their second album. It’s clear from the subject matter of the lyrics and the diverse locations where it was recorded (Sierra Leone, New Orleans, Canada and Japan) that they have moved on from the trauma of their past to become international stars. But happily, their music has lost none of its ragged charm.

Loose-limbed semi-acoustic reggae is still their default setting, but there’s plenty else going on, from the ragga flavour of Gbrr Mani, to the Congolese soukous of Tamagbondorsu and the local roots stylings of Bute Vange and Oruwiebe/Magazine Bobo, which features a rustic kongoma (giant thumb piano). There are also welcome guest appearances by The Bonerama Horns and Chris Velan’s harmonica on the very hummable Bend Down The Corner.

www.refugeeallstars.org

Konono No1 Assume Crash Position Crammed CRAW60

HM

It’s been six years since this Congolese thumb-piano-driven outfit released their first studio album, and if you liked that gloriously cacophonous effort – and even if you didn’t – there’s a good chance Assume Crash Position (the name of the band in English) will win you over.

The sound, while still mainly focusing on the distorted percussive twang of likembes (thumb pianos) fed through amplifiers made from old car parts, has been opened up a bit by producer Vincent Kelis, making for less of an in-your-face effort. There is also more emphasis on melody and vocal harmonies which makes for greater individuality from track to track.

The final tune, Nakobala Lisusu Te, is performed by just one male voice and one unamplified likembe. It’s a welcome calm after the storm, and also a reminder of the humble little construction of metal and wood that all this extraordinary music has stemmed from.

www.myspace.com/konononr1

WORLD reviews

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Properganda 17

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Mark Butcher Songs From The Sun House MB Records MBCD002

KS

Mark Butcher, the recently retired big-time cricketer may have relished the sound of leather against willow but you can’t deny he loves his music. He lists Sam Cooke, Al Green, Aretha, Otis and the Stax artists as his favourites and I imagine he’s spent time with Robert Cray and Little Feat albums too, judging by the sound of this CD.

A chance meeting with blues guitarist Matt Taylor inspired Mark to record this album which is chock-full of soulful vocals and stinging guitar with funky twists and turns that hit the mark every time.

Apart from a stylish version of Paul Weller’s Has My Fire Really Gone Out, Butcher supplied every song ranging from the strutting funk-based Put Some Soul In It and the late nite groove Were You Alone Last Night to the big guitar wrangling and hard attack of Is It You and Nothing is Stronger. Quality stuff.

www.myspace.com/markbutcher1

The Storys Luck Angel Air SJPCD338

SC

The story of The Storys has played out its final chapter as the band played out an emotional, farewell gig in June to a packed and partisan Grand Theatre Swansea. Before bringing down the curtain, the band bequeathed their third album Luck.

A multi talented combo boasting four front line vocalists and with all six members contributing to the writing, the new album is rich with guitars, layered harmonies and sweet tunes with classic rock tones. There’s an easy familiarity from the get go with Everybody Wants You To Make It swelling to epic proportions as the voices twist and meld around each other.

Steve Balsamo is the nominal leader on seven of the 11 songs here, but within the first half of the CD guitarist Rob Thompson, bassist Andy Collins and Rosalie Deighton have all taken the spotlight. The latter’s Please Come Home in particular is a subtle interlude.

Having made many friends in their seven years, notably Elton John, you can bet that it won’t be the last we’ll hear from the component parts. But for their fans, this episode will prove a fitting climax.

www.thestorys.co.uk

The No Good Sinners My Demo Scarlet Records SR023

GC

Edinburgh based The No Good Sinners are the brainchild of former Park Bench Social Club lead vocalist Aidan Curran. Long part of the Northern folk scene, Curran has gathered many of his friends to create The No Good Sinners and boil up a ragged folk-rock brew that reflects how loose and exciting the underground folk scene is today.

Contributing to the album are some of the UK’s foremost folk, roots and rock musicians, including Eliza Carthy, Ross Couper, Dave Donnelly, Willy Molleson and Tom Wright. The No Good Sinners mix roots music with a cheeky verve that sees them even adding black American flavours – something rarely engaged in by British folk (or even rock in these dull days of indie landfill). The eleven original songs reflect the hard times Curran has obviously been through with Born Under A Bad Sign, Dead And Gone and No Good Sinner showing a unique folk blues sensibility taking shape.

www.thenogoodsinners.co.uk

The John Henrys White Linen 9LB Records 270117

SH

This CD is literally packed full of great sounds. Great attention has been paid to the recording and the sound of every instrument is captured with deliberate care. Take the guitars that shimmer across the Tom Petty-ish opener Little One, building layers of hooks with subtle arpeggios. The piano that ripples through Edge Of December has an equal pull while the pedal steel adds further emotional clout. By the time we get to bubbling guitar break in Peace Of Mind, well…

But this is a record of two sides, conceived as if for vinyl (the black stuff is not due until the autumn.) The second side channels forefathers The Band into the title track as we decamp from city to country, banjo and mandolin in tow. Then there’s the quirky (in a good way) tune of Stars Align before a pair of tracks, the desolation of Good Man giving way for the country honk of Empty Pockets, suggest Bleed/Fingers era stones under Gram’s spell.

With all five band members singing and shared writing and production, this is brilliantly conceived and performed, perfectly judged and 43 minutes it will be hard to better this year.

www.thejohnhenrys.com

JJ Grey & Mofro Georgia Warhorse Alligator ALCD4938

CW

JJ Grey is tricky to tag. Sometimes he can be reminiscent of Tony Joe White at his swampiest. On this album his duet with Toots Hibbert, The Sweetest Thing, is in the manner of Sam & Dave. With the gospelly Gotta Know he almost strays into Joe Cocker territory.

None of those asides do true justice to Mr Grey, who is a law unto himself, as proclaimed by the fightin’ talk title track. When he’s not being romantic (King Hummingbird, Beautiful World, Lullaby) JJ generally gets a slow funky groove on the boil, playing hot licks on acoustic, electric & slide guitars and a wailing harmonica, with keyboard, bass and drums accompaniment occasionally punctuated by horns.

Initially I was most smitten by the opening Diyo Dayo (a bayou burner) and the equally choppy tight pulse of Hide & Seek. Now I’m on a roll with the whole album. It’s a smouldering, steamy concoction.

www.mofro.net

Willy Clay Band Blue Blackstone Records BRR004

GC

With Blue country rockers Willy Clay Band release their second album and demonstrate a masterful take on American roots music. Although based in Sweden (and consisting entirely of Swedish musicians) they sing in English and make a very convincing country rock sound.

Blue contains 14 songs – 13 originals and one cover – and was recorded in an old barn close to the band’s home town Kiruna. Sweden is a land of vast open spaces and the relaxed, reflective feel of the Willy Clay songs surely is shaped by this. Songs such as Jailbird and The Miner are world weary vignettes that recall Steve Earle and Chip Taylor. The one thing I don’t know about the Willy Clay Band is who is or was Willy Clay and why did they name the band after him? The album and the band’s website offer no hints as to this. But whoever he may be, he’ll be mighty pleased by this fine CD.

www.willyclayband.se

ROUNDUP reviews

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I’ll Be Seeing You is out now on Cog Communicationsvia Proper Distribution (COGCD223)

Kieran GossL I V E A N D S O L O

Long hailed as one of Ireland’s leading songwriters and performers, Kieran Goss’s music has won him fans across the globe. In February 2010, Kieran’s new studio album, I’ll Be Seeing You, along with his considerable back catalogue, was released for the first time in the U.K. to huge critical acclaim. But while his albums have made him a star, his live shows have made him a legend. Live on stage is where Kieran Goss really shines. In the words of Rodney Crowell, a longtime friend and collaborator: “I’ve toured with Kieran and watched him perform many times. I’ve seen him win the hearts of everyone in the room, not just with his great songs and instinctive musicality, but with his warmth and humour. It’s the performance of an artist at the top of his game, delivered with intelligence and integrity... Kieran Goss is one of Ireland’s national treasures.”

Kieran will be returning to the U.K. for a short tour in October 2010. Don’t miss this chance to see him live in concert.

U.K. TOUR OCTOBER 201001.10.10 OBAN | Skipinnish Ceilidh House02.10.10 PORTSOY | The Salmon Bothy03.10.10 ABERDEEN | Lemon Tree Arts Centre07.10.10 BURY | The Met15.10.10 BRISTOL | Colston Hall16.10.10 BRECON | Theatr Brycheiniog18.10.10 CANTERBURY | Canterbury Festival19.10.10 LIVERPOOL | Philharmonic Hall (Rodewald Suite)

See www.kierangoss.com for further details.

“One man, one guitar and a voice sent express mail from heaven.” TIME OUT MAGAZINE

“The sense of fun is tremendous, the playing first rate and the songs are sheer quality.” THE IRISH TIMES

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Little AxeBought For A Dollar Sold For A Dime

HTTP://realworldrecords.com

SyrianaAl Bidayeh

Afro Celt Sound SystemCapture 1995-2010