British Folk

Johnny Flynn: ‘We’re waking up to uncomfortable truths about ourselves’ 

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The actor and singer on his love of gardening, why audiences need to feel uncomfortable, and his new film, Beast

As well as being a singer-songwriter with folk band the Sussex Wit, Johnny Flynn has had a number of acting roles in theatre, TV and film, including Clouds of Sils Maria. Michael Pearce’s film Beast, in cinemas from 27 April, is about the relationship between Moll (Jessie Buckley) and Pascal (Flynn), an outsider who is considered a suspect in a string of violent crimes.

This is quite a hard film to describe without spoilers, so I’ll let you do it…
I think a good way of framing it is as an adult fairytale, in which dark, subconscious forces in these repressed characters collide with the surface of the real world. This is what happens in a lot of traditional fairytales – they’re a way of understanding our darker nature. The name of the film is quite apt, because you don’t know who or what the beast is, and it asks that question once you start watching.

 

Did you and Michael Pearce make a decision on whether your character was guilty or not?
We played around with it: when we were filming we might emphasise it one way, then do another take where it was more ambiguous. You can watch the film and have a feeling about it one way, then reflect and actually think it was totally different. I’ve seen it once and it felt like a different film to the one I had in my head when we were doing it – in a really good way.

How did you manage to find the right balance between charming and dangerous?
The thing about Pascal is he believes in himself: he’s fought against the system all his life and has hit an equilibrium where he’s established a life for himself. I had a lot of sympathy for him – it’s important when you’re playing a character to believe in your own validity. I wanted him to have the same sense of release in meeting Moll that she has in meeting him. You have to believe they have something special and could potentially save each other somehow.

What do you think attracts Jessie Buckley’s character to someone who is potentially dangerous?
Michael grew up in Jersey and he showed us a side of it that has this small-island mentality – conservative, stuffy, suburban – and Moll is from that environment. Pascal represents a sense of freedom, and when we meet her she’s desperate to get out – even though it seems quite dangerous, it’s thrilling. He’s the only person who really sees her and treats her with respect, without her having to apologise all the time for something she did in her past.

Can making audiences uncomfortable be a healthy thing?
Definitely. I think we’re waking up, as a race, to uncomfortable truths about ourselves. We’ve been kind of rolling along in this bubble, needing soporific entertainment to ease us along, and suddenly we’ve woken up to all these things that have exploded in ourselves: realisations about the lack of equality between men and women, or the way we’ve dealt with difficult decisions in the last two years. We all have these shades in our nature: it’s a spectrum within all of us. So I think that’s a clever form of storytelling at the moment, where you’ve been lulled into a sense of agreeing with something, because we need to have those sides of ourselves questioned.

If you’re playing quite a dark role, is it difficult getting out of character at the end of the day?
I’ve just come back from doing Hangmen, a Martin McDonagh play in New York, and that character is definitely some sort of psychopath. Our job as actors is to invent the things that bridge ourselves with the characters, so you have to build something if it’s not there – you try and learn what makes people behave in a certain way. It’s interesting coming back to neutral and remembering who you are and what your moral standing point is in the world. But I find I miss characters as I leave them behind.

Were you glad when your Channel 4 show Scrotal Recall was renamed Lovesick after moving to Netflix?
I think I was the only one who was weirdly attached to the name. I like really bad puns – proper, red-top, nasty puns – I find them funny. But it did make it easier to tell the headmistress of my son’s nursery what I was doing. Netflix did all these polls in America, and even the people who liked the show wouldn’t tell anyone about it because they didn’t want to have to say the word “scrotal”.

On Twitter you describe yourself as a musician/actor/gardener. How’s your garden coming along?
I was in New York until about two weeks ago, and I’ve come straight down to Wales with the family, so I haven’t really been to the garden in London this year. But I’d stolen a load of wild garlic from a walk somewhere, and I was really excited to see that’s starting to come up, as well as all these tulip and daffodil bulbs I’d put in the ground about two years ago. They were given to me by a cousin who died last year, so it’s lovely that they’ve come back.

Source: Johnny Flynn: ‘We’re waking up to uncomfortable truths about ourselves’ | Film | The Guardian

RICHARD THOMPSON: HE FEELS SO GOOD

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By Mary Wadland / THE ZEBRA

So what does Richard Thompson, one of music’s most unique, gifted and eclectic singer/songwriters — and lest we forget, an astonishingly good guitar player and oh yes, also an Officer of the Order of the British Empire bestowed by the Queen herself — do for thrills as he approaches 70?

I mean, this is a guy who who the L.A. Times said was “the best rock songwriter after Dylan and the best guitarist since Hendrix,” a guy who is still so sharp, vital and dynamic, playing and writing music as powerfully as ever, as evidenced by 2015’s Still as well as his recent Acoustic Classics Vol II + Rarities release, and has a record in the can that’s due out this summer. With a catalog behind him comprised of 14 solo studio and two live albums — in addition to six studio albums credited to Richard and ex-wife Linda Thompson, and five studio albums as a member of folk rock pioneers Fairport Convention —  Thompson can still churn out his one-in-a-billion type of folk-tinged troubadour rock at a time when many musicians are waning.

But at the moment, actually for about the last year, he’s chosen a different type of art that many musicians try —  U2, John Mellencamp, Jimmy Buffett and Matthew Sweet come to mind — to see if their brand of expression will translate seamlessly to the stage. Knowing the brilliant and evocative imagery that Thompson conveys with his songs, it is sure to be something very special indeed.

“I’ve been working on a musical play for a while,” Thompson told me as he prepared for a solo acoustic tour that brings him to the Birchmere on April 4th. “I’m quite excited by the prospect of it. It’s a dream I had, kind of a ‘Greek tragedy’ in the sense that a family is faced with an impossible dilemma, that whichever way they jump, there is pain and disaster. I’m enjoying the music. I think the music’s very strong. I think the story’s very strong, but it is kind of dark.”

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June Tabor is bringing folk to Cork 

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Ed Power talks to folk legend and farmer June Tabor who tops the bill at Triskel in Cork for a weekend of music from the ECM label

JUNE TABOR’S laughter has the quality of a babbling brook — it is loud, sparkling and goes on quite a while. But the biggest surprise is that the 67-year-old icon of contemporary folk music is capable of humour at all. Tabor’s public persona is of a severe matriarch, weighed down by all the sadness in the world.

“Well I AM serious — about my music,” says Tabor, taking a break from tending her farm in the rugged hinterlands between Wales and England. “The songs are about difficult subjects. You should be serious about it. What I don’t like is when people say ‘Ooh, your music is a bit dark isn’t it? ‘Dark’ — what is that supposed to mean? Life is a serious matter — the problems we face are often very serious. That doesn’t mean I walk around with a scowl, my jaw about to hit the floor.”

Tabor is a towering figure in English folk. Her haunting interpretations of venerable dirges such as ‘Bonny May’ and the 17th-century Canadian ballad ‘Plains of Waterloo’ remind us the genre can be as powerful — and relevant — as music written just yesterday. Thus, she has helped demolish the perception in England of folk as historically the preserve of cranks, obscurists and morris dancers, and carved a trail for younger artists such as The Unthanks and Sam Lee.

“I discovered traditional music when I was 15 or 16,” she says. “My family has no musical background at all, except that my mum and dad liked to sing along to anything they’d heard on the radio. To me, singing was a natural expression. I sing even when nobody is listening. I will be on a bike singing and people may perhaps wonder, ‘why is that woman singing to herself?”

Her introduction to folk came via religious programming on the BBC. “I’m extremely old and a long time ago there was this unwritten rule that public broadcasters had to put on religious programmes on a Sunday. That is where I first encountered folk. Then a traditional club opened in the town next door and a friend said, ‘Well you like folk music — let’s go’.”

If singing came naturally, live performance did not. “You have to learn how to do it — and it’s a petrifying experience at the start,” she says. “Goodness, it can be scary. “But I do enjoy it — when you get an audience that is listening. I’ve had audiences where no one is listening and that is a very depressing experience. It doesn’t always happen that things go fantastically — if it did, then it wouldn’t feel so special.”

Tabor was born in Warwick in the English midlands and studied at Oxford. She found work as a librarian after graduation (and later ran a restaurant). But music was the constant running through her life. Having started as accompanist to influential folk singers such as Martin Simpson and Rosie Hardman, in the ’80s she forged a partnership with jazz pianist Huw Warren, later to become her musical director.

After stepping away from music for several years she joined the Oyster Band for the seminal Freedom and Rain LP in 1990 and collaborated with Elvis Costello on the track All This Useless Beauty (which he wrote especially for her). Her most recent solo release, 2011’s Ashore, was a rumination on mankind’s often troubled relationship with the sea.

She travels to Cork this weekend for a Triskel Christchurch performance with Quercus, her jazz-influenced collaboration with Warren and experimental saxophonist Iain Ballamy of Food. It’s part of a three-day celebration of the Munich classical and jazz crossover label ECM, which, along with its support of Quercus, has helped introduce to the world such far-flung avant-gardists as jazz pianist Keith Jarrett, experimental guitarist Pat Metheny and minimalist composer Arvo Pärt [ . . . ]

Source: June Tabor is bringing folk to Cork topping a bill of music from the ECM label

Watch June Tabor concert from 1990 on The Hobbledehoy