British Folk Music

Music Review: The Unthanks “In Winter”

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By Gavin McNamara

Way back in December 2009, BBC4 aired The Christmas Session, a “live” show that featured yuletide favourites from the likes of Bellowhead, Sam Lee, Jim Moray (whose O Come, O Come Emmanuel is the very highest watermark for a folky carol) and Lisa Knapp. It’s a glorious thing. Full of joy and love but reflective and thoughtful too. It is everything that a folk session at Christmas time should be and should, ideally, be watched every Christmas Eve. Right at the centre of it all were The Unthanks, only really a few years into their existence but already a vital part of the folk world.

The only place you’ll hear Bellowhead’s version of The Mistletoe Bough (starts at 16:30); the best and most gristly of the Sheffield carols.

It has taken them the best part of fifteen years but Rachel, Becky, Adrian McNally, Niopha Keegan and Chris Price have finally made the album that they’ve been thinking about since that session. They will say that In Winter is “a winter fantasia”, rather than a straight-up Christmas album, but the same feelings of love and joy, reflection and thoughtfulness are seen across its seventy-minute span. To the surprise of not a single soul, The Unthanks have made the definitive folk album for winter.

This is the sort of winter that you imagine The Unthanks having. Simple, elegant, beautiful and just a tiny but dark around the edges.

In Winter’s Night, a delicate piano piece by McNally, is inspired by, although sounds nothing like, Benjamin Britten’s A Ceremony of Carols and carries the same chilly air. It starts with a howling wind, insistent and bitter and needing to be shut out, McNally’s piano is the lighting of candles, the laying of a fire, the gentle welcome to join the family as the door is closed. At times it skates away – it is so hard not to hear Vincent Guaraldi’s Charlie Brown theme sometimes – but does so in a playful way. Finally, the door is shut altogether and the family can be gathered properly, to enjoy the splendour of a Christmas tree.

As In Winter is a “fantasia”, each track runs into the next, a whole world is built as one song, one tune, transitions seamlessly into the next. As such, as the door is shut, snow can be heard crunching under-foot, sleigh bells ring and a great whoosh of rolling cymbals herald O Tannenbaum. Where the first track is full of restraint, this is lavish, as dense as evergreen. Oboe and percussion mass around the voices of Rachel and Becky, it is incredibly slick and overwhelmingly Christmassy. McNally might suggest that he doesn’t want to “over-egg” this album but this reworking of O Christmas Tree feels like a party that’s too warm, too stuffed with people. There’s jollity here but it’s not undercut with enough of that Unthanks chilliness.

The same can almost be said for Dark December too. It’s a companion piece to Sad February, from 2009’s Here’s the Tender Coming, and starts more slowly, electric guitar and ice-sheet percussion, a clear, crisp spookiness in the voices. This is the sort of winter that you imagine The Unthanks having. Simple, elegant, beautiful and just a tiny but dark around the edges. More Box of Delights than endless Quality Street. Then Faye MacCalman’s saxophone sweeps in, epic and enormous. There’s something so unusual about it that it takes a while to adjust. It’s like an Easter Egg under the tree.

The Unthanks In Winter. Credit: Topher Grills

MacCalman has played with the band as a clarinettist on their 2017 album Diversions, Vol. 4, The Songs and Poems of Molly Drake, but she is given free rein on Carol of the Beasts. Faint shoegaze echoes, the splash of medieval drums and drones are dashed to the floor as MacCalman unleashes a wild sax volley. If Becky Unthank thinks that the saxophone is “dangerous”, then this one sends the best crockery flying.

It’s a conscious decision to expand The Unthanks’ musical palette, to move things away from the darkness and the drones. McNally feels that the players on the album are of such quality that he didn’t want to, or wasn’t able to, bury the music in a “Cocteau Twins-y wash”. It’s undoubtedly brave, the playing is certainly beautiful, but is it just too much? Does it get too close to being “just” a Christmas album?

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Roy Harper: “It was his time but the boat just sailed away”

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In 1971 revolutionary singer-songwriter Roy Harper was about to go deep into the world of concept rock – but his four-track opus got buried by his label. In 2011 Prog found out why.

By Rob Hughes

There are many ways to describe Roy Harper, but ‘conventional’ has never been one of them. He emerged from London’s boho folk circuit of the 60s as a singer-songwriter of alarming intensity, motored by a mistrust of authority and an inalienable belief in everyone’s basic right to individual freedom. While other folkies were protesting the Vietnam War, Harper was railing against deeper societal ills. But then he was never really a folkie in any traditional sense.

Shaped by a traumatic early life – a fanatically religious stepmother, homelessness, prison, a spell in a mental institution – his music avoided the easy route too. Harper’s early albums were hallucinogenic things that skittered between poetry, revox-blues and psychedelia, as much prone to spliffed-up lunacy as they were to chilling autobiography and 17-minute songs about Patrick McGoohan. His underground status as a countercultural hero was finally seeping upwards by 1970, when his friendship with Led Zeppelin led to the touching tribute Hats Off To (Roy) Harper, which appeared on Led Zeppelin III that October.

He was by then managed by Peter Jenner, onetime custodian of Pink Floyd (who themselves would later invite Harper to sing Have A Cigar on the multi-platinum Wish You Were Here). Jenner had produced Harper’s previous opus, 1970’s wonderful Flat Baroque And Berserk, at Abbey Road. With the same studio again available, and a searing new set of compositions, Harper began making Stormcock. For once in his five-year recording career, he was able to fully focus on the job at hand.

The combined studio time of his first three albums – from 1966’s The Sophisticated Beggar to 1969’s Folkjokeopus – had been a week. “Flat Baroque And Berserk was where I was spreading wings and finding out exactly what could be done,” Harper tells Prog. “But then I saw a different light at the end of that record. I felt the time was right for me to do what I really wanted to, which was Stormcock.”

Adds Jenner, who again produced the album: “The Floyd were making things like Atom Heart Mother and Meddle; Zeppelin were making long tracks and The Who were doing Tommy. The spirit of the times was concept rock. Suddenly, in terms of songwriting, you weren’t restricted to three minutes or what was acceptable for radio.”

Stormcock was a masterpiece. Comprising just four songs, most featuring only Harper and his dizzying skill on acoustic and 12-string guitar, it was emotionally fierce and highly inventive. There were savage attacks on war, the judicial system, rock critics and religious dogma – among other things – alongside an anguished plea to save the planet. And, trading as S. Flavius Mercurius, Jimmy Page provided flashing lead guitar on the 12-and-a-half-minute The Same Old Rock. It remains Harper’s own personal highlight of Stormcock.

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Debating about whether we should be debating folk music

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Ewan MacColl

By Jim Carroll | The Ballad Tree: Traditional Folk Ballads and Songs

I put this up earlier on a thread on this debating and listening to folk music forum, debating about whether we should be debating folk music (you work it out – I can’t)

Rather than it get lost in the ever descending debates, I thought it might be debated here as it affects my decision whether to go on debating Ewan MacColl and the Critics group ( a debatable question for some) Somebody suggested that he will stop attacking MacColl if I will stop debating his work (a debatable proposal, if ever there was one) 😈

Ewan McColl Bert Lloyd and Cecil Sharp were the most industrious and important benefactors, folk song has ever had It has always been nigh on impossible to discus MaColl’s work on singing because of attacks on his character.

As you say, “the real point, people need to talk about the songs as songs, traditions as traditions, and techniques as techniques.” MacColl and the Critics Group took that further than anybody on the folk scene has ever done – how can we possibly discuss if is that work is a no-go area ?

I’ve just experienced a somewhat unpleasant interval here because I criticised what I believe to be bad singing – my criticism was deleted – It was rationally laid out in detail and put in polite terms yet it was removed Today’s folk scene wants only praise for its stars – I learned that the hard way, that does not help either the songs we are here to promote nor those who have put in he work to preserve them

Since Dave Harker’s ‘Fakelore’, all Sharp’s work has been changed from England’s introduction to it’s folk culture to “the invention of Victorian Middle Class ladies and gentlemen on bicycles” – this by the academics who are now claiming that “the “Voice of the People” was really the work of bad poets scribbling songs in hurry, not only does this undermine working people as culture makers – it raises the question “Why the hell should we waste our time defending yesterday’s pop songs written by the fore-runners of today’s gutter press?

Recently A L Lloyd has been exhumed in order to prove he was a fake who sold us forged folk songs.

Pretty soon we will have no academic folk history just as Britain no longer has a folk scene worth talking about

The recent raise in membership shows that our problems lie within our own ranks – the potential is obvious and to me, the answer is just as obvious.

We need to discuss it critically and openly. If we don’t this site may as become an “all good fellows and fellowesses backslapping brigade.

Make up your mind time, I think. Discussion, even argument is the way we share ideas – it has been part of my education for as long as I have been on the folk scene; without it, I’d probably have become bored with listening to the same old same old songs and gone and joined my mates in Mathew Street paying homage to The Beatles. I’ve been around folk song for over sixty years now and I’m still learning – a permanent student, you might say.

Can I just add one more thing to this over-long ramble, In the 1970s Pat and I got involved in a rather disturbing discussion regarding the singing of two Traveler brothers – both had their family’s traditional songs, one sang them using a superb traditional style, the other preferred County and Western Americanese – the songs included The Outlandish Knight and The Grey Cock

As so-called ‘experts’ we were asked to judge – we declined,

The argument continued – while we watched – it got more and more heated till we began to think it was time to leave.

It suddenly stopped – arms were thrown around shoulders and pints were consumed amicably – I went home pissed – Pat was driving.

These were the non-literate “Nackers” who are regarded as violent and dishonest sub-humans not fit to live among ‘decent human beings like us”.

Makes you think, doesn’t it, it does me.

I shall go on discussing and arguing as long as I have puff – if not here, somewhere else.

https://ewanmaccoll.bandcamp.com/…/lang-johnny-more…

“I don’t know who I am, I don’t know what I am… but I am” Anne Briggs interviewed

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In a rare and remarkable interview, the elusive folk singer talks frankly about her extraordinary life and her brief but indelible career

One of the wildest talents of her generation, ANNE BRIGGS retired from music in 1973, leaving only a handful of recordings behind her. Now, in a rare and remarkable interview, this most elusive of folk singers talks frankly with Jim Wirth about her extraordinary life, her brief but indelible career – and why it had to end so soon.

Anne Briggs is reading the labels attached to the trees in Kew Gardens. Slight but steely, she veers off the path at every turn, silently trampling across lawns and occasionally clambering up raised beds. If she could drown out the noise of the aeroplanes coming in to land at Heathrow, she might almost be in her element. The most mythologised singer of the 1960s folk revival has lived in rural Argyll for the past few decades, and her animal instincts have been frazzled by a rare visit to London to attend Topic Records’ 80th-birthday celebrations at Cecil Sharp House. Dressed today in jeans, a red zip-up jumper and hiking shoes, she reluctantly comes out of the greenery and folds herself into a seat in Kew’s café. “I find being in the city totally devastating,” she tells Uncut, hands in constant motion. “Bad. I lose my sense of direction. I get lost. All the time, I get lost.”

Briggs was no less disoriented when she first moved to the capital aged 17, drawn south from nottinghamshire by the prospect of independence more than recognition. An instinctively brilliant interpreter of traditional song, Briggs became a subtle, elliptical writer on a par with her on-off boyfriend Bert Jansch, with a dangerous reputation to match. In a 1971 edition of Sounds, folk critic Jerry Gilbert summed the footloose Briggs up as “a female Kerouac”. However, the 74-year-old is adamant that her rambling role model was never On The Road’s Dean Moriarty, but instead the feral child of Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book. “I learned to read when I was about five years old and all I wanted to be was Mowgli,” she says. “Mowgli could do all of the things I wasn’t allowed to do.”

Briggs effectively retired from music in 1973, after deciding that a lone foray into folk rock – released decades later as Sing A Song For You – was not good enough to be released. Pregnant with the second of her two children, she abandoned what was left of her singing career to work in some of Britain’s remotest places with her partner, forester Pat Delap.

“I’ve always been an outside kind of person,” she says, struggling to be heard above the sound of the air conditioning. “I’ve been a professional gardener in one form and another. I’ve spent the past 20 years outdoors; I had a contract with the Forestry Commission and then with the Crown Prosecution Service, helping the guys who are doing community service – keeping their clients occupied.”

In 11 years as a singer, Briggs released an EP and two full-length albums, as well as recording tracks for two Topic Records compilation albums – 1963’s The Iron Muse and 1966’s saucy The Bird In The Bush – and 1963 and 1964’s Edinburgh Folk Festival LPs. Even factoring in Sing A Song For You and “Four Songs” – a more recent EP of pieces scavenged from old radio sessions and a live tape – her entire recorded output amounts to barely three hours of music. However, the extraordinary power of her voice, supernaturally clear and eternally distant, has given Briggs an abiding appeal like few of her contemporaries. “I love the almost dispassionate delivery of Annie, and the starkness,” modern folk polymath Eliza Carthy tells Uncut. “The directness of the delivery and the purity of her voice – it’s like a dagger. It cuts right through you.”

“It’s all there on the albums,” adds Steve Ashley, Briggs’ long-term friend and one-time collaborator. “You can still hear that magic. She was also completely unpredictable.”

On bad nights, Briggs dissolved on stage, forgetting lyrics and abandoning songs as she battled with her profoundly ambivalent attitude to performing. She always sang with her eyes tight shut, making no attempt to reach out to the crowd; her transcendent nights might be the ones when she managed to blank the audience out entirely. “I was always singing to myself,” she says, momentarily cheery. “I hated being in front of an audience. I was nervous. I was just so fucking nervous. I’m so fucking nervous being here with you. I didn’t like being watched. I didn’t like having my photograph taken. Perhaps I felt that I was never empowered to be important.”

Anne Briggs was born in Toton, Nottinghamshire, on September 29, 1944. Now one of Nottingham’s western suburbs, Briggs says it was “a little rural pocket” during her childhood. Her upbringing was no bucolic idyll, though. World War II cost Briggs both her parents; her father – a sapper – contracted tuberculosis while on active duty, and her mother – a nurse – was diagnosed with the same condition at the time that her only daughter was born, dying when Briggs was five.

“She never left hospital,” Briggs says. “I only have one memory of her, which is looking up at this lady who’d been painted. It was a big day for her and the nurses: her daughter’s coming to visit her, and they made her up, bright red. It frightened me. She was like a puppet.”

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