The map has been redrawn.

When I last wrote, just over two weeks ago, I suppose that I was doing one of those most-British-of-things that is hoping-for-the-best and that everything would work out fine. 

It didn't and it is all our own fault. All of us - not just the 52% that voted leave - for sleepwalking to this point over a period of approximately twenty-five years.

Reading now what I posted then only serves to make me think that, five days before the referendum, I had more grave reservations about the outcome than I was prepared to admit, even to myself. This isn't a blog about politics it is one about music, but conveniently the two are inextricably linked.
A new journey is starting and nobody can tell how it will play out or where it will lead...
The Leave campaign used the slogan...  'I Want My Country Back!' ...whatever that actually means. I just want to share my country with whoever from wherever can see the tolerance, diversity and virtues that it really has.

The UK has long been at the cross-roads of music; absorbing, assimilating, creating and exporting with the whole work-piece on repeat-play. I'm pretty sure that this situation isn't about to change at all. Indeed the sense of fracture and of political upheaval may well spawn new creative directions. Music, whether making or consuming, is a good use of anger and disaffection.
The question right here is what music do I choose to illuminate this and where to start?
It is US Independence Day, which event we didn't much like at the time, so that was one possibility. I'll return to that but have decided to start by looking across an narrower stretch of water to a country that we have screwed-over more times than any other. It's almost certain that, in ignorance, we've just done so once again.
Ireland.
About this time last summer I became aware of a couple of acts from Ireland that prompted me to pay more attention to what has been developing there over the last couple of years. This is where I shall start.

September Girls - Age Of Indignation (Fortuna Pop!, 15 April 2016).

This is the second LP from the Dublin five-piece, and the sequel to 2014 LP 'Cursing The Sea'. Their music combines a range of trends from 1980s guitar and synth rock to 1960s girl bands. It is on this album that they find their own recipe for that cocktail, musically and also in the subject matter of the songs. It concerns a number of the ills that have affected, or in some cases have simply continued to afflict, their home country since the financial meltdown of 2008. It isn't about "Brexit" or what might happen in coming months and years.

It may possibly prove to be something of a template. Either way it is a mighty fine piece of work and this is a band that is currently very near the top of my "need-to-see-live" list.

On the other hand we now have some very stark home-grown divisions within the UK, and not just between its constituent parts. I have wondered for the last ten days or so what new music might be being worked up in response to all of this. Whatever it is I'm looking forward to hearing it...
I am well aware that I am writing from the seat of my pants here, and that I might tweak a few raw nerves in so-doing but, after almost ten years and 1200 published posts, I feel that if I don't let go and air my thoughts right now then I probably never will. I may regret doing so; but the alternative is far worse.
This next LP is one that is about the rather numerous parts of England that are far less beautiful or glamorous than the paeans to cultural tourism such as Stonehenge, Stratford on Avon and York. Some of them are just as interesting, in so far as concerns the wider cultural situation, as well as being a whole lot more authentic and edgy.

Kate Jackson - British Road Movies (Hoo Ha Records, 20 May 2016).

Kate Jackson was once the lead vocalist of The Long Blondes, a Sheffield five-piece whose members had all attended university in that city. She is originally from Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk. This LP has been a very long time in the making - Jackson and Bernard Butler (he plays guitar and co-produces) have been working on this sporadically since late 2008. It's time might be now.

I rather think that I should have started with the next track 'The End Of Reason' instead.

It is the music that matters...

A week away from my blog seems a long time. I have returned from a few days away but, unlike last year, I am back home when I intended and fully functional. This evening a different problem presented; I returned home from work, intent on adding some new blog material, only to discover that my street had no electricity and even vinyl won't play without that!

While my recent meanderings were limited to nowhere exotic, rather the comforting familiarity of North Yorkshire in good company, that doesn't mean that I have spent the last week entirely isolated from the world of new music and, also importantly, music that is merely new to me.
It does possibly mean that such music has no obvious connection, and this is an album and artist that I have never heard before, but it appears to make sense to buy it so it is now on order!

Alternative/indie music from North America is currently on fine form and this is just one album amongst many that holds promise. It is certainly not a new phenomenon but it is also true that music and politics share a lot in common. They know what they are up against - European music - and although this might seem a rather strange comment they are rising, vainglorious, to the challenge and that is exactly what is needed right now.

It is, like politics, a situation far more complicated than it might seem and this is why music has spawned a rash of sub-genres that, while we might disagree about the names we give them, share certain common values. To anyone reading this without some prior knowledge the term "anti-folk" is about as helpful as toothache and, in any case, it is also near impossible to define as it can present as different things in different cases. Given that there are too many sub-genres this is a particularly unhelpful situation that merely hinders communication but it is one quite unsurprising.
While I'm on this topic and, as I forgot to mention that Kira Fontana is from California, I might also mention Carrie Rodriguez.

She is from New York and as well as playing her, rather more folk-influenced, songs she also plays a mean fiddle! This, her second solo album, was released in the US on 5th August 2008 by Manhattan Records but, as of now, seems to have no full release in the UK or Europe.

It is just the music that matters!

I Am Murdered.... Music and Politics

Music and politics have an extremely long and very close association.
When print medium of even the most basic sort was solely the preserve of the rich, and almost all of the populace would have been unable to read it even if it were available to them, songs and the travelling singers that sung them were both a way of spreading political information and also of fomenting dissent. Music was also an ideal medium for disguising, often by allegory, messages that might have been treasonable if spoken in public and many examples survive in the canon of folk music.
In general three circumstances, which often occur together, seem to lead to a rich legacy of songs of a socio-political nature: repression, resentment and hardship. This is why there is such an extensive collection of songs, particularly from Ireland and Wales, dealing with these themes and also a large collection of songs documenting workplace hardship and catastrophe. Not all songs however: Lilli Bulero is probably a good case in point as it seems to have started life as exactly the opposite!

Not that much has changed: forty years ago the Vietnam War spawned a resurgence in the genre - though obviously particularly in the US - and they generally became known as 'Protest Songs' but if George W. Bush (a self-confessed fan of Country music - a penchant to which he is of course quite entitled) leaves a musical legacy of his Presidency then it is the huge upsurge in the depth and breadth of political song writing worldwide.
I'm sure that, for the truly cutting edge music sociologists, there are plenty of folk collections to be made in Afghanistan, Iraq, etc. ...
It is almost enough to make the original London 'punk scene' look quite feeble by comparison but all things need foundations and quoting Sir Isaac Newton, when explaining the basis of his achievements in a letter to Robert Hooke on 5th. February 1676, and not the rather later Oasis lyric:

"... it is by standing on the shoulders of giants."

Modern (UK) folk and traditional music often get slated, rather unfairly I think, for their tendency to focus on bucolic themes to accompany the largely traditional sounds. I happen to like much of this too, but I don't see why the particular sounds and the lyrics should be so closely tied together.

Very occasionally they are not.

Spencer Perceval (1762-1812) is the only British Prime Minister to have been murdered. His assassin was John Bellingham whose grievance was the UK trade policy instigated by the above (Bellingham had lost his fortune in trade with Russia) that he believed was ruining him and which, eventually, drove him to the deed. He did the job himself; on 11th May 1812 in the lobby of the House of Commons, when Perceval was on his way to attend an inquiry into Luddite Riots.
Bellingham was apprehended at the scene, confessed and was hanged within a week. No contemporary account of the incident seems to have survived in song but it is however a very unusual theme for a 2007 single!

Spencer Perceval c/w I Am Murdered is a single at that bears little resemblance to anything ever normally found on the format. The 'A' side is an account of the lead up to and execution of the murder itself from the perspective of the murderer, while the 'B' side is the response of the murdered to the crime. Only one band I can think of at the moment would even attempt it and that, of course, is iLiKETRAiNS.
It is not a topic to take lightly, and certainly not one to try and cram into a four-minute 7" single, so they simply didn't bother with convention and of course one advantage of the CD single format is that this is no problem. So no vinyl then?

Fear not - there is a full-length 10", 45 rpm, heavy-weight vinyl version that could be a murder weapon in its own right. The quality is great, from the music and the pressing right down to the packaging, but as it is all dark a picture would hardly do it justice. The two tracks together run for over fifteen minutes and echo each other - the first being 'angry' the second 'reflective'.
It is brooding and dark but there is nothing folk about it whatsoever. In fact the "accusation" - "reply" format of the two songs even has faint echoes of the hip-hop duelling of a few years ago!

The murdered Perceval reflects on his lot which, even before he was murdered, was not a politically happy one. At the time of his assassination he was, as well as holding the post of Prime Minister:

• First Lord of the Treasury
• Leader of the House of Commons
• Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster
• Chancellor of the Exchequer (he asked six colleagues and they all turned the post down!)

As the song lyric [I Am Murdered] goes:

If truth be told I've had a lot to contend with.
I've kept the French at bay
In Portugal and Spain
As our King went insane.

Not the run of the mill (don't even mention the Luddites) but quite typical of iLiKETRAiNS

Perceval himself was a master of the sound bite and during a debate on electoral corruption he came up with the following memorable rejoinder when asked for his comment on the forgoing speaker:

"I have nothing to say to the nothing that has been said."