Folk

Laura Marling: Patterns in Repeat review – a tender love letter to motherhood

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Laura Marling |Photograph: Tamsin Topolski

Domestic contentment radiates through the singer-songwriter’s eighth album celebrating the circle of life

By Lisa Wright

Patterns in Repeat is not the first time Laura Marling has written music for her child, but it is the first time she’s done so as a mother. 2020’s Song for Our Daughter was directed at an idea, and as such rippled with possibility. Its successor is a far more grounded thing, recorded in snatched half hours and imbued with considered, lived experience.

From the opening moments of Child of Mine, which begin with the domestic sounds of the musician setting up as her daughter burbles in the background, Marling invites us into a world that is gentle and nurturing. There are no drums. Most tracks are acoustically plucked, with minimal backing. Everything is centred around the sort of meditative, richly felt sentiment that’s almost physically tangible.

Patterns gazes warmly back at the generations of women before her, towards the next that she herself has borne; Looking Back is a peaceful acceptance of what the end of life might look like; Lullaby, meanwhile, is exactly that – a simple sleep song, sung to her child. Patterns in Repeat considers weighty topics – heritage, lineage and what we pass down – and strips them down to small understandings and wisdoms. It’s an extraordinarily tender accomplishment.

 
Source: Laura Marling: Patterns in Repeat review – a tender love letter to motherhood | Laura Marling | The Guardian

What is Dusking?

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By Lucy Wright

You might not have heard of it, but ‘Dusking’ is the next big morris dancing craze to hit your side-streets, woodlands and waste-grounds. Look to your left, now look to your right: at least one of those people will be going out Dusking this year. Or at least I’d love that to be the case! Let me explain…

It was the evening of May 1st this year, and the morris dancing community online were reflecting on another year’s ‘Maying’. It’s a popular modern custom to ‘dance the sun up’ at dawn on May morning and this year a record 1500 people had reportedly set their alarms for stupid o’clock to go out and greet the summer. I, myself had braved the centre of Stevenage – where I was staying for work – alone, and wearing a hastily thrown together kit, in the first act of what I would go on to call ‘hedge morris dancing’ – or morris for people don’t have, or can’t be with a team of morris siblings, but still feel the call to dance. Solitary, self-initiated morris, endlessly adaptable and open to all, the term ‘hedge’ is borrowed from the unsanctioned hedge schools of 18th/19th century Ireland and Rae Beth’s famous book, Hedge Witch. The subsequent interest I received on social media, predominantly from people who had never morris danced before but were excited to give it a go, set me on a course which I’m still following (and loving), creating art and resources to help people get started with the tradition, while hopefully smashing a few barriers and misconceptions along the way. You can read a full article about ‘hedge morris dancing’ here on Tradfolk.

So, back to this May Day evening. It had been another successful year: the sun had risen, as hoped, and the summer was now assured. A post on the Facebook group, ‘How Many Morris Dancers are on Facebook?’ caught my eye. Peter Austin asked, ‘Does any team invoke the practice of what I’ll refer to as ‘Dusking’… i.e dancing at sunset at the start of winter to balance the yearly cycle’. Several people had replied to note that some morris sides in the southern hemisphere habitually dance the sun down on or around May 1st and a few people referenced novels by Terry Pratchett, but overall, it seemed apparent that marking the start of winter was less commonplace or celebrated than its summertide opposite. 

This is perhaps not totally surprising. The promise of a northern hemisphere summer, with its blue skies, long warm days (at least in theory) and lush, verdant nature, seems a lot more attractive than the dark nights and cold, dreich weather that characterises the winter months. I always sort of dread the second half of the year, hit with a mild seasonal gloom around the same time that my big coat comes out of the wardrobe, which only lifts when I begin to see the rowan buds bursting outside my window again. But I’d like to learn to see the winter differently, to find more things to appreciate about the shorter, darker days – like the gifts of rest, replenishment and reflection that Katherine May speaks about in her book, Wintering. Perhaps a folk tradition could help me to feel more positive – even excited – about the season ahead.

Here’s the thing. I’m an artist (I used to be an academic, but I drifted). And as everyone knows, good artists copy but great artists steal. So I pinched the name ‘Dusking’ (thanks, Peter!) and ran with it, my mind racing. What would it be like to get a whole crowd of dancers out at sunset on October 31st (the date agreed upon to be the appropriate counterpart to May Day)? And what if that crowd included a small army of new and misfit ‘hedge’ morris dancers, like me? What could I do to help make the prospect of taking part as appealing and accessible to as many people as possible? I set about gathering resources – and making new costumes (very important). The Dusking project was born.

But what’s it all about? I’ve been calling it a ‘100% invented tradition’ but that’s not entirely right. There is precedence for dancing the sun down, although I wasn’t that well-acquainted with this when I first got excited about the idea. ‘Dusking’ itself seems to be a new coinage, but the custom has other names: the Dark Morris, the Anti-Morris, ‘Dancing the Sun Down’, and a range of references, from art and popular culture to the ‘annals’ of morris dancing history.

A brief history of Dusking

Perhaps the best-known representation of ‘dancing the sun down’ can be found in the writings of Terry Pratchett. In his 1991 Discworld novel, Reaper Man, we are first introduced to the ‘other morris’, later renamed the ‘Dark Morris’, who are described as a team of six men dressed in black who go out to dance at the cusp of winter – performing in silence, with no bells or music and no spectactors – their ritual the spur for completing the yearly cycle of death and rebirth. 

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Review: Oysterband / June Tabor, Bristol Beacon – ‘A hell of a goodbye”

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photo Matt Congdon

It’s a magical last show from the band that are taking a long, long time to retire

By Gavin McNamara

After 45 years of touring, folk-rockers Oysterband have decided that the time is right to retire. They are, of course, taking a long, long time to say goodbye with a huge tour that spills well into 2025 – and they’re bringing along a special guest too.

The three albums that they have made with June Tabor are absolute cult classics, Tabor adding her depth, her gravitas, her subtleties to a band always best experienced live.

And so it is this evening, on a night of saying goodbye to Oysterband, June Tabor steals the show.

As soon as she steps, haltingly, on to the stage, Tabor is the focal point. On Mississippi Summer the harsh, dust choked fields are evoked with ease, Tabor exuding desperation and defiance as Ian Telfer’s fiddle flickers around her.

That fiddle seems to course through Tabor, sending jolts of energy into her frame: she grows as it plays, becoming an utterly commanding presence. It is, as she says, “one hell of a song”.

There are times when she spits out lyrics, unable to contain the fury that seethes within. On Bonny Bunch of Roses, taken from the classic album Ragged Kingdom, there’s disdain and an almost unspeakable power to her.

She may not move much but when you have a voice that can convey love and hate, joy and dismay in the way that she can, who cares? All the while Oysterband creates a huge storm around her, Sean Randle’s drums the prelude to a deluge.

It speaks volumes that, on their own farewell tour, there are moments when Oysterband leave Tabor on stage to sing solo. Les Baker’s Roseville Fair is entirely unaccompanied, darkly humorous and show-stopping, the story delivered with a wink and a sly grin. Hills of Shiloh, simply performed with Alan Prosser’s acoustic guitar, is heartbreaking, a remembrance of war soaked in emotion.

Perhaps, though, it is when everyone is on stage that the power of these seven brilliant musicians is felt most strongly. Susie Clelland sees the boys in the band massing around Tabor, their voices buoying her up along with some foot-tapping folk-rock.

Trad favourite, John Barleycorn, is muscular, driven by Telfer’s fluid fiddle. Sweet Sixteen is a capella, seven voices swelling, warming, enveloping. It is glorious.

There are contemporary(ish) cover versions too. All Tomorrow’s Parties sees fiddle and cello buzzing and thrumming around Tabor’s skeletal take on the Velvet’s classic. An encore of Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit is suitably psychedelic, as forgotten words fall down a swirling rabbit-hole.

It’s Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart that is nothing short of remarkable though. In the hands of June Tabor and Oysterband’s singer, John Jones, it becomes the ultimate lovegonewrong song. It’s even more creepy, even darker, even more restrained than the original and all the better for it.

Tabor, occasionally, takes a break and when she does Oysterband are left to say goodbye in their own way. Where the World Divides, River Runs and Roll Away are wonderfully solid folk stompers, choral harmonies and a beautiful interplay between fiddle and cello effortlessly inspiring grins and handclaps.

Jones’ voice is strong, only wavering when, every now and again, the emotions of farewell get too much. For All That Way For This, the six range across the stage, shuffling drums and mandolin showing that Oysterband are capable of fun as well as heart-string tugging.

By the time Put Out the Lights rolls ‘round there are people in the packed Beacon with tears streaming down their faces. Not only will this be the last time we get to see Oysterband on a Bristol stage but, between Jones and Tabor, every emotion has been comprehensively wrung from every person in the place.

It was a hell of a way to say goodbye.

 

Source: Review: Oysterband / June Tabor, Bristol Beacon – ‘A hell of a goodbye”

Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne on the ties between British and Caribbean folk music: ‘My ancestors could have heard these songs’

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By Jude Rogers

On a sunny Sunday afternoon late in the festival season, a young musician is alone on stage with an older crowd in the palm of his hand. He plays a sailor’s hornpipe he composed that playfully references Bach, a music hall song once performed by Miss Piggy (“so I’m in fantastic company”), and then talks about being outbid on eBay on a book of folk songs from Barbados. “Then I found out who the bidder was – my mother!”

A tall 28-year-old concertina and melodeon player, Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne is a veteran at Bromyard folk festival, which he first attended when he was 11: he’s from down the road, raised in Worcester and Birmingham. His new album, Play Up the Music!, explores the connections between Caribbean and Black American folk songs and British ones, the latest of a series of fascinating projects he’s been involved in over recent years.

These include a book of Gypsy and travellers’ songs, A Secret Stream, an album with Angeline Morrison and Jon Bickley called Grace Will Lead Me Home (exploring the history of the hymn Amazing Grace, written by the enslaver turned abolitionist John Newton) and performing with folk musician Reg Meuross on Stolen from God, a song cycle about the transatlantic slave trade in south-west England.

His Bajan maternal grandmother bought him his first concertina, he tells me when we meet in the site farmhouse before showtime. “I literally first saw and heard one here at Bromyard,” he says. “I was fascinated. It had such a distinctive, strident sound, and I loved the sense of fairground organ jollity about it.” He laughs, clearly self-aware that it’s an odd choice for a kid. “Plus I loved that it can do a lot. I like being a one-man band.”

Born in 1996, Braithwaite-Kilcoyne doesn’t come from a folk-loving family. His Rotherham-born white dad was an old “not particularly successful” punk: “His closest thing to a claim to fame is that he played in a band with the drummer from T Rex.” His Suffolk-born, Birmingham-raised mum had much more eclectic tastes, but he has now got her into folk too: she’s taken up the bodhrán drum and the whistle, and organises sessions and is forever looking for new songs to learn – hence pipping her son to that eBay sale.

Learning violin at primary school exposed Braithwaite-Kilcoyne to traditional British tunes, but a holiday to visit family in Barbados aged 10 also planted a seed. He heard a band playing traditional Bajan folk music, including a version of well-known English folk tune, The Keel Row, played on the steel pans. “I didn’t know it was traditional music then – it was played around more of the popular stuff known from there, reggae and ska on Trojan Records, all that wonderful stuff – but it stuck in my mind.”

He was reminded of it years later in 2020 when he was commissioned by the English Folk Dance and Song Society (EFDSS) to write a secondary school music resource on the theme of Black music in the Americas, helped in his research by online resources such as the US’s Library of Congress. He kept going with the search after that project ended. He ploughed through British folk that was centuries old but had been adopted by Black singers in countries thousands of miles away after these songs were taken to the Americas by colonists, settlers, and sailors – music that became “infused with the musical language of the singers that adopted them”, he writes in the album’s lucid sleeve notes, “morphing into something quite different to their English antecedents.”

After deciding to make an album of these songs, he was also at pains to include African American and Caribbean tunes that existed entirely separately from the English folk tradition, such as Cocoa Tea, about an elixir a woman gives to her old lover, and the instrumental Miss Bailey, based on a “woman’s banter song” popular in the landlocked parish of St George, Barbados, in the early 1900s. But Caribbean songs were harder to find generally, he tells me; that book his mother won on eBay, edited by Trevor Marshall, Peggy McCreary and Grace Thompson, was only published in 1981, and is one of the first examples of the music being collected.

“I had to turn to travellers-stroke-colonists-stroke-landowners who’d written records or diaries that provide lots of useful contextual background for some of the music making,” he says excitedly. “And in the 19th century there are records of things like English style country dances being held in the Caribbean where the band would often be mixed Black and white players, doing English country dance tunes.”

A book from 1907, Jamaican Song and Story, was also instructive, inspiring the album’s opening track, Tacoma’s Song. Written by a lapsed English clergyman, Walter Jekyll – a family friend of novelist Robert Louis Stevenson, Braithwaite-Kilcoyne points out, and an inspiration for the doctor in his Jekyll and Hyde novels – the book includes stories of the Jamaicans he employed. One of these, Tacoma and the Old-Witch Girl, featured two verses sung as a dialogue between the two main characters, which were similar to those from an English song, The Keys of Canterbury.

Popular British folk songs are also present in unusual versions, such as Outlandish Knight, sung over the decades by the likes of Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson and Kirsty Merryn. “Its melody is much more swung and syncopated than I’m used to, and there’s a couple of intervals in it that makes it feel to me like a calypso,” he says. Braithwaite-Kilcoyne is full of life talking about these connections. “I loved that my ancestors could have heard the same songs when they were young, even though they grew up in very different places and circumstances.”

As a young teenager of mixed heritage in the folk scene, Braithwaite-Kilcoyne was aware for a while of being an outsider, he says, but at 13 he was introduced to guitarist George Sansome and violinist Lewis Wood by a teacher, and they formed the band Granny’s Attic soon after. Now three albums into their career, they played their 15th anniversary concert at Bromyard last night. “We were the only three folkies in the school,” he laughs, “so thank god we met each other.”

Ever since, he’s been driven to show people the range of what his concertina and melodeon can do. His 2021 album Rakes & Misfits was full of tales of outcasts and eccentrics and music hall settings, and he also loves delving into the instruments’ baroque and renaissance music past, some of which he studied reading music at the University of Leeds (“the first squeezebox player to do so,” he says, with a touch of pride).

He’s now off on tour on his own, on trains as he doesn’t drive, with his two melodeons, concertina, amplifier and rucksack. Live, his versatility is clear as he performs a Napoleonic war song, Bold Carter, for his seven-year-old nephew and Broken-down Gentleman, a song that begins with a man reminiscing about being in his prime at 24 – the age Braithwaite-Kilcoyne turned during the Covid pandemic when he couldn’t play live. “Now I’m 28 and it’s all downhill from here,” he hams, as the crowd laugh and applauds. As the bright sound of his reeds fill the air, nothing could feel further from the truth.

Source: Cohen Braithwaite-Kilcoyne on the ties between British and Caribbean folk music: ‘My ancestors could have heard these songs’ | Music | The Guardian