New Music 2018 - Part 6 - Orphan Colours - All On Red

I can't quite believe that this is my sixth post of 2018 but while I am in the mood for posting I guess I should just go with it. More forthcoming new music but this time from an all male band based in England. It has to be said that this is still mining the rich seam that is UK Americana.
As a phrase it might appear an oxymoron but those inclined to solipsism please take note; it is flourishing in a time when the UK might have been perceived to be turning in on itself and back to its perceived core values.  If this is the kind of work that is the result then it is just another case of clouds and silver linings.

All On Red - Orphan Colours (At The Helm Records, 26 January 2018).

The genesis of Orphan Colours came out of the accidental wreckage of two bands, ahab and Noah and The Whale, that were forsaken by their respective labels as commercial priorities changed. That is where the independent side of UK Americana plays a vital part. It is a community in the true sense of the word and that shaped this, the band's first LP, as I'm thinking as I listen to it again. All eleven songs on it.

Orphan Colours - All On Red:

• Start of Something
• High Hopes
• Goodnight California
• Loving Kind
• Waiting
• Lonely Lately
• Sun Is Rising
• Renegade
• Sarah
• Inside Out
• Rambling Rose

The first thing that strikes me is this isn't a UK band aping Americana (from America, obvs.) and that is why the whole thing works quite as it does. It is the concept of Americana filtered through the unique perspective of the UK in recent years.
It comes as no surprise to me at all that At The Helm is releasing this record. I'm pondering a post about how labels that can be trusted to release interesting and often challenging new music have slowly risen again.

Here's a little live goodness:

The title of the record 'All On Red' is apparently a reference to table gambling and the putting of all available resources on a single outcome. It is apropos the situation in which the founders of Orphan Colours found themselves after their previous bands folded.

New Music 2017 - Part 38 - Tilly Moses - Alight & Adrift

So why post New Music 2017 in 2018? For exactly the same reason that I posted New Music 2018 in 2017!

Alight & Adrift - Tilly Moses (Ginger Dog Records, 2 June 2017).

It's a continuum, whatever the calendar might imply to the contrary. Increasingly, and this is much to my liking, the release of new music pays little heed to that nowadays. Now twenty years of age and relocated to York, this is not her first release by any means but it is quite a statement of intent.  The only traditional song on it is Hares on the Mountain.

Tilly Moses - Alight & Adrift:

• Definitions
• Water Man
• Paper Conflicts
• Fear With Fire
• Harbour (feat. Sam Kelly)
• One of Them
• Flatlands
• Lonely Birds
• Hares on the Mountain
• Ragdoll
• Footprints
• Whisky

This is certainly not the only album released in 2017 that invokes the east coast of England and has captivated me. Another notable one, at least in my opinion, will follow in a post tomorrow. The great thing about them is that they are actually very different indeed. This first might possibly be the most accessible of the two, it is certainly the more lyrical but neither suffers from comparison with the other.

New Music 2017 - Part 31 - Half Deaf Clatch - CrowSoul

As well as starting my consideration of all the new music that I have had the pleasure of finding or otherwise being introduced to in 2017 there is absolutely no shortage of brand new releases that are coming my way.  This is one of them.

A solo acoustic blues artist from the UK that I have seen live a couple of times --- Half Deaf Clatch is the project of Kingston-upon-Hull based Andrew McClatchie. This is stomp-box and (often slide) guitar accompanied music from the Humber "delta" of  East Yorkshire.  This is his latest release and whilst running for over forty minutes it comprises just two tracks. He is possibly a 'Marmite' thing – love or hate but nothing between.

CrowSoul - Half Deaf Clatch (Speak Up Recordings, 12 October 2017).

He is a determinedly independent artist (Speak Up Recordings is his self-run label) and also an extremely prolific one so if you like this style of music you are in luck. CrowSoul is his second full-length release of 2017. The other, which is of songs inspired by consideration of The Great War, is 'Forever Forward' that came hot on the heels of  'Simple Songs for These Complicated Times' (2016) and 'The Life and Death of A.J Rail (2015).

If you are having a Hallowe'en themed occasion in the coming weeks you could use this as part of the soundtrack.

New Music 2017 - Part 28 - Top Floor Taivers - A Delicate Game

This has nothing directly to do with the festivals I have been to over this summer. It has a great deal to do with the variety of music that garners my attention. It is also a possible pointer towards my change of direction when it comes to festivals that I'm considering visiting in 2018. I'm almost certain that I have never seen any of the four artists that form the core of Top Floor Taivers live in any of their many and various other guises. This is their first album together as such. Their recorded works as individuals or other bands are a however a different matter and I have listened to them.

A Delicate Game, Top Floor Taivers (TFT Records, 28 February 2017).

Recorded it is a slightly different consideration - as a trans-Britain-and-Ireland collective this is quite something. It treats traditional songs with grace and pressure, but also includes versions of modern folk songs such as Richard Thompson's '1952 Vincent Black Lightning'. The best comes with some new compositions such as 'Jeanie and the Spider' that rate alongside anything else here.
If you want my opinion then it is that this album is under-rated. The version of the traditional Scottish song 'Johnnie of Braidieslee' is as good as it could be. The origin, and age, of the song is anyone's guess; possibly 17th century in approximately current form but it might have origins older than that and have been updated and reconstructed to suit the times. It really doesn't matter that much.
For the curious, here is the track-list:

Top Floor Taivers - A Delicate Game:

• Johnnie of Braidieslee
• Princess Rosanna
• The False Bride
• Everybody Knows
• 1952 Vincent Black Lightning
• Jeannie and the Spider
• Campfires
• Ramblin' Rover
• 10 Little Men

I  don't think that I could leave you hanging, with nothing to listen to, so here are a couple of tunes that are not on the album.


'Captain Ward' (traditional) and 'The Porterhead Reel' (Gráinne Brady).

New Music 2017 - Part 24 - Iona Lane - Pockets EP & Solace EP

One principal artist and two releases make up this little pot of gold. I should have mentioned the first months ago but I didn't, which is entirely my fault. With another now available to pre-order the time is right.

This is the forthcoming one (1 September 2017)...  you can order it here.

With Iona on acoustic guitar and vocals and Abi Plowman on violin and backing vocals this release consists of six tracks.

Iona Lane - Pockets EP:

• Weighted Dice
• The Loch Tay Boat Song
• Living Life out of Pockets
• Carved by Another
• Northern Town
• The Leaving Song

This is the first song to be released from it.

Back in February of this year she released the EP Solace. It was recorded with more of a full band sound.

Iona Lane - Solace EP:

• Amsterdam
• Sometimes
• Fly or Fall
• I'll Run Without You

Which of the four songs here is my favourite very much depends on my mood at the time. I'll go with opening song 'Amsterdam' that has an guitar intro that reminds me of many things and also nothing at the same time, which is very appropriate to the lyric.

The same is true of the seven songs on the 2015 'Dry Stone Walls EP'. 

Taken in total this amounts to a considerable body of original work and one that I enjoy listening to very much.
If you have none of the above you can get all 3 EPs (and a cover of Joni Mitchell's 'A Case Of Me') for £12.60 here. If I were you then I would.

Festivals - from 2016 into 2017

It's time to start thinking about festivals again except of course for Glastonbury 2017; that sold out months ago and I had no desire to even consider it!
I have tickets for a few, no secrets there, and now that the first artist announcements are revealed it has reminded me that these things have - as well as so many options to see acts that are new, or just new to me - a rather likeable sense of continuity and even community.
This is Green Man 2017, as currently revealed.

Of course I want to see PJ Harvey and Ryan Adams headline. I must say that Future Islands is unknown by comparison in my experience, but the forthcoming album 'The Far Field' is getting great previews and I guess that, at least from their perspective, Green Man would count as exactly 'A Far Field' to them!
Of extreme interest are those a little lower down in this list.

Angel Olsen was astonishing on The Mountain stage at Green Man 2014.

I have never seen Micheal Kiwanuka live, and I very much want to. There are others that I have seen live and that I very much wish to see again. Here is one that for some reason I haven't mentioned before and I can't imagine why. She opened the Tipi stage, the smallest regular one, on the Saturday of End Of The Road 2016. It isn't that I failed to pay attention, because I did.

Julia Jacklin. Tipi stage, End Of The Road Festival, 3 September 2016.

Another fine artist hailing from Australia. In 2014 Green Man served up Courtney Barnett and in 2015 End Of The Road bought us Tame Impala.  Julia Jacklin isn't much like either of them. She is another one-off; Australia has strength in depth.

Julia Jacklin - Don't Let The Kids Win (Transgressive Records, 24 October 2016).

Her début album passed me by at the time of release. That annoys me. Clearly I had lost the plot here because it was released only a few weeks after I saw her play live. There is no excuse for that.

Note added 8 February 2017:
Julia Jacklin is now confirmed to play End Of The Road Festival 2017.

New Music 2017 - Part 8 - Ags Connolly - Nothin' Unexpected

The second full-length from West Oxfordshire native and resident Ags Connolly has been a while in the making, quite deliberately so it would seem.
The first was 'How About Now' and  it appeared back in 2014. That was around the time that the blossoming of the indigenous UK Americana scene was starting to be noticed as the real change it was, rather than just the preoccupation of die-hard fans and would-be journalists.

Nothin' Unexpected - Ags Connolly (At The Helm Records, 3 February 2017).

The title of this latest is 'Nothin' Unexpected' and might sound almost underwhelming but that is quite deliberate too as the music is no such thing. The point here is that it is not flash or crass in any way at all. It is however very well done indeed - from the ten songs (nine originals and a cover of the Loudon Wainwright III song 'I Suppose'), to the instrumentation that accompanies them and the carefully balanced production values. It ticks boxes.

• I Hope You’re Unhappy
• Do You Realise That Now
• When The Loner Gets Lonely
• Neon Jail
• I Suppose
• Nothin’ Unexpected
• Haunts Like This
• Fifteen Years
• Slow Burner
• I Should’ve Closed The Book

It is certainly often wistful and resolutely stoical, especially about times spent alone and this applies as much to the honky-tonk influenced numbers as to the others; there's both a time and mood for that.  I happen to be listening sat in front of the fire on a dark and wet winter's evening but it would be just as good heard in the early hours around the dying embers of a summer campfire, with the last few burnt BBQ ribs and a beer to go with it.

One thing even better would be to see him play live, preferably in one of the old small-town bars that are mentioned in a couple of songs. Rather like this...

Ags Connolly, Saloon Bar stage, Truck Festival 2015.

New Music 2016 - Part 56 - Will Varley - Kingsdown Sundown

In some ways 2016 has been a long and tiresome year. Will Varley has put words to it far better than most could ever have hoped to do. His name might not be on the tip of your tongue but that is no matter.
Kingsdown Sundown is dense, dark and yet ultimately hopeful. It was recorded in the basement of a pub in Deal, on the coast of Kent, but written on tour in only the way that an itinerant artist can; raw and not compromised by home comforts.

Kingsdown Sundown - Will Varley (xtramile Recordings, 4 November 2016)

Taken from it, this is 'To Build A Wall'.

New Music 2016 - Part 47 - Gitta de Ridder - Feathers

Feathers is the debut LP by Gitter de Ridder - now London-based but hailing from the Netherlands and between which she regularly commutes.

Gitta de Ridder - Feathers (Little Memories Records, 21 September 2016).

Following her earlier live performances and the Come Find Me EP (2015), which largely showcased finger-picked guitar and delicately sung, self-penned songs relating themes close to the artist comes a ten-track full length record that also includes her (almost entirely acoustic) four-piece band. If you have a burning need to file it in some pigeon-hole then modern folk will suffice, at least for now.
I'd rather leave it on a pile of things that are to be played on rotation.

This is a live version of 'Stay A Little Longer', recorded in London in May 2016.

I hesitate to say it but this could easily meet or indeed surpass that which I hoped a few fairly recent albums might have achieved if only (what I imagine to be) interference with the artists' intentions had not intervened at some stage or other. We shall see.

New Music 2016 - Part 16 - Half Deaf Clatch - The Life and Death of A.J Rail

I was sure that I had mentioned this before but it seems not. If I have then I'm simply going to do it again.
Sometimes it takes a really shit and needlessly frustrating day to make one realise just how important music is. And how healing it might prove to be. I had some ideas earlier this week about writing another "virtual trip in music" as the first amused me in the making and I now have several itineraries in mind.

Tonight however is the time for this, and simply this...

Half Deaf Clatch - The Life and Death of A.J Rail (2015, self-released).

I saw Half Deaf Clatch play live in Frome at an intimate gig last year and it rates amongst the best performances I saw all year. Great clawhammer banjo blues and slide guitar, without any ornamentation, combined with his gritty vocals and earthy songs.

I'm too frazzled to write a detailed review just now. On the other hand I'm delighted to see that I wasn't the only one to be so impressed. This (in English) is one such from across the water courtesy of Blues Magazine in the Netherlands.

Here, with archive video from the US Signal Corps that will be familiar in essence to some in the UK during the winter now ending, is the song '1927 Flood' taken from the above-mentioned album.

Half Deaf Clatch is very much on my list of artists to see live again and his other recordings are well worth searching out too. It just so happens that the artist comes from Hull, UK.

Note added 11 May 2016:
The Life and Death of A.J Rail is now one of the British Blues Awards 2016 finalists in the category 'Blues Album'.

New Music 2015 - Part 62 - Joni Fuller - Letters From The West Coast EP

Having heard her song 'The Penny' several times in passing and, given my self-imposed New Year resolution to listen to more new music and music that is new to me, I naturally felt compelled to investigate further. The result only served to confirm why I decided to do this.

It is one of four songs on Joni Fuller's self-released 'Songs From The West Coast' EP.

Simply being called Joni might in some ways be seen as a bit of an albatross for someone planning on making a mark in acoustic music. Not so it seems and indeed the title of the EP, which is actually not her first, plays cleverly on that too. The West Coast in question is not that of the USA but that of England - specifically Lancashire - as she is from St. Annes-on-Sea that is one half of an urban area usually known as Lytham St. Annes and famous for its golf links.

What makes this music stand out from the rest, and the Lancashire coast is producing plenty of good artists (Karima Francis, Rae Morris, Little Boots and Låpsley being four others) just at the moment, is her use of live looping to allow her to play solo but sound like a band. What marks her out from those I mention below is that, whilst she loops all of them, her principal instrument is the violin.
I think its popularity in this milieu, it has long been used in hip hop and such, has benefited from its use by Ed Sheeran and I have also mentioned Bristol-based Daisy Chapman's use of it several times in the past. It makes for compulsive live performance as it is something fascinating to observe, as well as hear, and so Joni Fuller is added to my list of ones to see live as a matter of urgency.

Here is 'The Penny':

Why Sweden really matters...

Sweden won Eurovision Song Contest 2015 - they have Måns Zelmerlöw and 'Heroes' to thank for that and for seeing off the strong competition from Russia;  Polina Gargarina and 'A Million Voices'. Sweden, even more so than the rest of Scandinavia, is astonishingly good at producing writers, artists and producers of pop - and indeed Eurovision success. The UK on the other hand is not, at least in recent Eurovision terms, but is very good indeed at exporting music more generally.
Sweden has given us in recent years the alt-country sounds of First Aid Kit, with which the Söderberg sisters have made themselves a fixture on both sides of the Atlantic.

That their songs sometimes, indeed rather often, have a melancholic bent leads nicely on to this...  If Sweden did snarly, gloomy --- a garage kind of sound --- but still with two female artists at the helm, what might that sound like?

Much like this...

 

Pale Honey is the work of Tuva Lodmark (vocals and guitar) and Nelly Daltrey (drums) from Göteborg. Their music has divided opinion - some say it is one dimensional - and that is an accusation often aimed at guitar/drum duos. Another is that it is melancholy (see above). Well it often is a bit that way, I suppose, but is that a fault? I'd say not - it has made my day better to be honest - and that is why I'm writing this. I'd wager that, seen live, Pale Honey would be astonishing.

Thoughts on music - Introspection versus the bigger picture

Oh how a few weeks can change my perspective.
Only a short time ago I was happily enjoying writing about new music, either recent or soon to be released, without much thought about the wider picture. Then suddenly it changed and I decided that it was time to comment on other issues again whilst set in context  - today's issue just happens to be the various threats to live music venues, of which more later.
I don't really understand why this happens to me from time to time.
I could claim that it is the anticipation of forthcoming festivals but, were I to do that, I know it is not the whole story. It is true that in the last few weeks I have had some very interesting, sometimes surprising, discussions concerning music. I am unsure if this is causal or symptomatic but inclined to the idea that the latter predominates.
While writing this I am listening, in toto, to an album so new that it has no release date and no final artwork as yet. I have however already mentioned it here and Danni Nicholls is an artist who seems blissfully unaware of the affliction known as DSAS (Difficult Second Album Syndrome). The title 'Mockingbird Lane' almost hints at that but I'm almost certain that this was unintentional - or a very dangerous gambit indeed.
That said, the game is now on; the début album by The Shires, already the first UK act ever signed to Universal Music Nashville, yesterday became the first UK country act or artist ever to reach the Top 10 in the UK album chart - 'Brave' is #10 on the week of release. 

Should you want to hear something new, yet old and a train-wreck revisited, I can't think of anything more beautiful than this. Jessica Lea Mayfield and Seth Avett have recorded an album of covers of Elliott Smith songs. It is not yet on general release in the UK or North America and I suspect that the link is time limited, so enjoy this now. It is as good as anything that I have heard this year and that is saying something. There are reasons why I suspected Jessica Lea Mayfield could pull this off and resulted from when I saw her play live at End Of The Road 2010 - she played solo. It was hauntingly beautiful yet painful at the same time and if looks could kill I was in big trouble here.

Jessica Lea Mayfield - Tipi stage - End Of The Road Festival 2010.

The LP is released in the UK on 16 March 2015.

Note added 7 April 2015:

The album has got mixed reviews: some say it is too cautious, reverential. Others quite the opposite, that it should have been more radical in its treatment of the original material or those that say that it should never have been attempted at all.
I think it is just spot-on - they got the balance almost perfect. If I could see Jessica and Seth play the whole thing live then I would travel far. It could quite easily turn out to be quite something for both artists come a year's time.

New Music 2015 - Part 12 - Robert Chaney - Cracked Picture Frames

It is true that I spent much of January in self-imposed hibernation; the only obvious sign of life being that I wrote a fair number of posts here, which is something that I failed to do in January 2014, and have listened to a whole lot more that I have yet to mention.
This is not part of that, because I only became aware of it and only then via the artist Friday last. There are several issues at work here - I like it a great deal and it seems that it fits so well with much that I have been listening to over the last year or so. If there is a better case of musical 'transatlanticism', about which I wrote here last Spring, I can't think of one at the moment. The simple acoustic, sparse tales of assorted misfortune and missteps are applicable and in measure timeless wherever one might be.

Robert Chaney hails from Florida but moved to London a couple of years ago. This is his first LP.
What I do know is that if someone had spun me a false tale that said otherwise then I might very well have believed it. 'Cracked Picture Frames' is released in the UK by Jagged Lines (JL001) as a download on 15 February and on CD on 26 April. I have had the good fortune to be able to listen to all ten tracks on the LP a fair few times now. It is quite the reflective work throughout and final track, The Ballad of Edward and Lisa, is certainly no exception. In fact the tale it tells is horrific. It is not my favourite here, by a margin, but the point is there are absolutely no tracks that I would skip.
This is very definitely an album for listening to from start to end and then only in carefully chosen company; it's too good to waste on those who would not bother to listen attentively.

The playlist is as follows:

• Black Eyed Susan
• The Morning After
• Does Your Love Pay Out In Full?
• Patch It Up
• The Simplest Words
• The Cyclist
• I Didn't Want Her Anyway
• Birds and Bees
• Corazones Amarillos
• The Ballad of Edward and Lisa

I can also imagine that it could be stunning live on a small stage at a festival - indeed I have several such in mind - but for now I'll keep those to myself and wait to see how the situation plays out. It's still a full four months before the UK summer festival season starts to play out for real.
On 15 February 'The Ballad of Edward and Lisa' made its first near show-stopping début, and the artist's first appearance, on UK- based but internet-wide Amazing Radio on Baylen Leonard's weekly show 'The Front Porch'.

New Music - 2015 - Part 6 - Salwa Azar - Black Feather Wooden Chair

I shall maintain the acoustic theme of my last post with LP 'Black Feather Wooden Chair', which is the début full-length from London-based Salwa Azar on which she writes, sings and plays ukulele for the most part.

 Release date: 15 January 2015

Quite a long time ago I mentioned her  'For America EP1', which is available to stream here and will give you an idea of her background. The first track to be released from the album is 'Clouds'.

Why do major labels vacillate?

If you think that a curious title for a post then I shall expound.
It is no secret that The Shires' début album 'Brave', dropping soon, has no known album artwork as of today. Or at least that is the catch-all position that amazon,com and amazon.co.uk is currently displaying. I have to say that, at this stage in the game, that is rather disappointing. The duo is signed to Decca in the UK and Universal Music Group Nashville in all other markets (the first ever UK act to be so). Be that as it may the labels still can't sort the album artwork such that amazon.co.uk or amazon.com can display it. This, in marketing terms alone, is really rather pathetic. No wonder that the independent labels, that can react fast, are running rings.
Be that as it may...

It is still likely an LP that will have an impact. It won't be the only one.

On the other hand apparently small and insignificant labels can insinuate themselves, and thus also their artists, into the consciousness of music fans seemingly without any fanfare at all. Sometimes emerging under the radar, and then staying there for a while, has advantages all of its own.

Particularly when pop - slightly old-style West-coast pop - is concerned.
Any influence and none, its just your ears that decide that in the end.

Frome 2014 - this is the town in which I live.

Wherever my focus of new music listening may currently lie - and actually it is still in the US - this coming weekend is going to focus on those events playing out in my home town of Frome, Somerset, UK.
   
It is raining at the moment but the forecast isn't bad; so let's see how things turn out. I'm planning to take my camera and simply see what comes my way and how it all pans out. It is the start of the festival season, after all, and where better to start than at home? It is also Frome Festival 2014 between 4 and 11 July. There is a great deal more to music and performance arts in Somerset than the admittedly rather famous Glastonbury Festival, not least during the other 362 days of the year, and there will be little, if any, mention of mud.

I don't intend to lose sleep prefiguring the outcome but I least I know the layout, the pitfalls, and the short-cuts. On the other hand, should anyone try to tempt me into opinion on music in 2014 then I've been thinking about that too. It is halfway through so, based on simple logic alone, I should have heard half of my favourites of the year.
It is akin to saying that Frome is a small/medium-sized country market town (pop. ~25,000) where nothing much happens and it probably never has. It doesn't work quite like that.    

Carnival-style. Frome Street Bandits. Live in the audience. This afternoon.

From my point of view at least it was going to be difficult to imagine any other artist to be the highlight of the music stage. It is a running joke that because she hails from Bristol... this however is the third time that I have seen Daisy Chapman play live in Frome. And then the sun came out, at last.

It is fair to say that she was likely to be the highlight of the evening.

She played some, at least to me, new songs. I wonder if a follow up to 'Shameless Winter' is in the works?

Between the two aforementioned acts came the Celtic folk of Frome based eight-piece Milk Street. I had never seen them all playing live together before and (all my own fault) was actually in a poor position to capture all of them in the same picture.

An up-beat selection was just what was required at this point in the proceedings. They served it up admirably.

Behind The Castle Festival 2014 - Part 2 - The Main Stage

The four main stage acts were scheduled that they did not coincide with those on either Stage 2 or the MAS stage, which hosted acts simultaneously. This resulted in two things; it was possible to see all of the main stage acts in entirety without sacrificing anything else and that there was almost no down time in which there was no live music taking place. Another advantage is that never could the sound from the main stage bleed over into the other two stages whilst allowing the site to be compact but never feeling overcrowded.
The first artist on the main stage was one I had never seen live before - Irish acoustic songwright Paul Brady. I must admit I knew shamefully little of his work before Saturday and it was probably an omission, and certainly a mistake on my part, not to check it out before the event once I that I was aware that he was playing.

The early afternoon slot saw most of the crowd sat on the grass, which was a shame.

After another hour interlude on the other stages, about which more in 'Part 3', it was time to head out to the main stage for Newton Faulkner. He again is someone that I had never seen live before but at least I was well aware of his catalogue and so with baited breath I wondered...

In the glorious mid-afternoon sun there would be no danger of the soporific attitude mentioned above. It was some set and I was well impressed by the good-natured fervour of many of his fans - this was less folk festival than many might have thought. 

His set was text-book showmanship without actually showing off. That is a fine line to tread.

After another sojourn it was the time for the prolific Seth Lakeman to take to the stage. It seems that hardly a few months pass during which he does not release something or other in one of his guises and collaborations. I have seen him live on several occasions and you are being lectured by one of the converted - it's my blog and so I can be biased in it! Indeed my bias largely determines all that is covered, including Behind The Castle Festival.

Much fierce fiddle playing included. 'Solomon Browne' saw the tenor guitar bought to bear.

It is a tale of a tragic modern disaster told in the traditional folk idiom.

The festival was finished in style by a band that deserve the epithet legendary - The Levellers. When in 1991 their second LP 'Levelling The Land' was released it did what it said - it changed the map. The Pogues had done this kind of thing, and to some degree so had The Stranglers and others, all with great success but this really album bought it home to roost.

It was hot on that stage.

I'll finish with a quote overheard... "This is absolutely f*****g amazing."
It was. Exactly that. He was quite right to be proud of it.

[Behind The Castle Festival - Part 3 will follow soon.]

New music, old music.

Folk music, roots music and all that is not for high days and holidays. It is for everyday and that is why I have chosen to mention this now. When the great and the good of the BBC decided that Mike Harding was "too long in the tooth" he had other ideas.
I'm currently listening to the 76th edition of the Mike Harding Folk Show and I haven't missed a single one. It is on-line so that is not a problem; you can listen to it anywhere at any time you choose. You can also listen to the shows on Mixcloud here but his own pages also provide a cornucopia of information about the artists played as well as links to forthcoming events such as folk clubs and festivals.
Another thing that I'm enjoying these days is the vital interchange of 'Americana' (home-grown or otherwise) across the Atlantic. This is apparent in the artist lists of all the festivals that I am attending.

The Mike Harding Folk Show Number 76 by Mike Harding on Mixcloud

Hello summer - well sort of...

In the US at least Memorial Day seems to be regarded as the start of the summer season.
In the UK June 1st is the start of the Meteorological Summer and as the Festival Season starts so does the 'European Monsoon', which is not generally drastic but can, and often does, play havoc with festivals and particularly those that take place in June.
There is nothing we can do about it - this is simply the result of living on the windward edge of an ocean that has a vast continent to the east of it.
That said the UK hosts an astonishing number of festivals of all shapes, sizes and influences; the most famous is, of course, Glastonbury. I am not going to that, although it is just over a dozen miles away as the crow flies, and indeed I never even applied for a ticket. On the other hand I completed my festival bookings yesterday by adding one that, although now well established, I have never attended before.
Each year I aim to choose one that is new to me and last year that was Sunrise Festival, which was all of five miles away from home. There is a real frisson to attending a particular festival for the first time and that comes from not knowing the dynamic, be it the layout of the site, the audience or the presentation.
It is most pronounced whilst travelling there or that is how it seems to me. When I was driving to Latitude 2007 I was half-convinced that I would look at it and simply turn round and drive back home again. I guess that the price of the ticket and the length of the drive conspired against that. Once there it seemed exciting. Once I had pitched my tent, and I'm no stranger to camping, it started to seem more like a slightly strange version of normality.

In the meanwhile listen to this - the album streaming in toto - that I mentioned here, whilst you can.

It is available to download, in almost any file format you might wish for from Bandcamp, for £3.50, here.  That might lead you to suspect that this is just an EP or mini-album but, at twelve tracks not including Intro, this is almost 55 minutes long. There is also a very limited CD digipack available.

With the framework of my summer festivals booked I'm now starting to think about the acts at them that are my priorities, especially those that I am well aware of but have never seen live; Stornoway and Blood Red Shoes are two that both come to mind here.
The next task is to try and find out something about all the artists about which I know (next to) nothing. I always try to do this and as sure as hell I will change my plans once at the festival most often by word of mouth recommendations. This does not in itself render the endeavour invalid as it has great value when deciding what to do in the unenviable situation of not being able to be in two places at the same time. Other times I just decide to see something completely on a whim and that has led to some great discoveries too.

Before all that comes the first Behind The Castle Music Festival, a one-day festival that takes place on 14 June at Sherborne Castle, Dorset. Many of the artists on the programme I have seen live before and of those that I haven't I was well aware of. One that fell into neither category, but whom I have been listening to since, was Australian Lizzyspit. Her own songs are really strong but, more than that, she has the confidence to cover a song that is so well known in its original as to be a minefield: