As one of Britain’s greatest living film-makers, Mike Leigh launched the careers of British acting royalty, including Gary Oldman, Alison Steadman and Tim Roth. But goodness gracious me, he’s a right old misery guts. To mark the release of his new film Hard Truths, Vulture even wrote a listicle ranking his films by how miserable they are.
Leigh’s Palme d’Or-winning work asks questions about power structures and how they relate to the working classes, in films like 1983’s Meantime and 2002’s All or Nothing. In those and much else, he manages to capture the feelings of the time. But Hard Truths, Leigh’s first feature film since British historical drama Peterloo in 2018, is so comprehensively gloomily and oppressively negative that it often becomes a painful viewing experience. It is the filmic equivalent of spending hours with a family member who just won’t stop moaning and there’s nothing you can do about it.
It’s a shame, because Leigh has spent over half a century showing he clearly truly understands the lives of his subjects. Hard Truths follows one working class black family living in London, particularly matriarch Pansy who is struggling with PTSD and cannot find a single positive thing to say. If it feels slightly uncomfortable that an 81-year-old white man is writing a cohort of young black female characters, Leigh reassures with a funny and moving script that properly fleshes out these people.
Another examination of misery and trauma, but it’s too much
It’s not Pansy actor Marianne Jean-Baptiste’s fault that her performance exasperates. She is an engrossing actor, but for one hour and forty minutes, the character is moaning about absolutely everything. She delivers laboured barbs at her depressive son Moses, commendably realised by Tuwaine Barrett, and her long-suffering sister, given addictively zesty energy by Michele Austin. But there isn’t enough time to enjoy these characters before it returns to Pansy’s criticisms. I suppose Leigh’s writing is true to life; these people do exist, but there are other ways to get at the character’s own mental cage than this literal examination of her hour-to-hour existence.
It’s often funny too, Leigh has a knack for writing a damning insult, although, yep, the comedy is often diffused too quickly by the inevitable moaning that returns every other minute. I actually turned away from the screen at one point, unable to bear the sight nor sound of it anymore.
Leigh brightly captures suburban London, bathing ordinary houses handsomely in shards of morning light. Neighbourhood corner shops look attractive; these people may have small flats but Leigh’s version of the capital isn’t a bad place to be. He is a master at capturing a personality with a close-up; more often than not we feel inches away from Pansy, Leigh’s intimate direction lingering a little longer than you’d think to luxuriate in character.
It’s a gleaming filmic product, but the hard truth is it’s a shame it’s so hard to watch.
Years ago, my Dad was trying to explain to me how it felt to see Lawrence of Arabia in the cinema back in the 1960s. Remembering those vast horizons, the steepled banks of sand and the sunrise turning the whole sky to rust he told me, “It was the biggest thing I’d ever seen.” What appeared on that screen was something completely out of scale with his own existence – not just a strange landscape, but an entirely alien perspective. Nobody anywhere had ever seen a desert the way David Lean and Freddie Young showed it to them in 1962, infinite in width and depth and yet also somehow captured within a screen on a wall in Hull, Wolverhampton or Liverpool.
This was the early days of the television boom. Most households had one, but it was two channels broadcast in bleary monochrome. The cinema was still where you went to get your images, a radical elsewhere that let you in on an experience utterly removed from the texture of your everyday life. Today, of course, the value of images has been subject to explosive hyperinflation. We all gorge on a constant stream of high-def footage. The cinema can still affect us with its scale and volume, but it takes effort to think of it as anything other than a jumbo-sized smartphone screen. When I think about my Dad’s experience of Lawrence of Arabia, I try to imagine living in a society where moving images were so scarce and precious. The only film I’ve ever seen that gives me a sense of what this might have felt like is Terence Davies’The Long Day Closes, which turns 30 this year.
Like Davies’ other early films, The Long Day Closes is a quasi-memoir inspired by the director’s growing up in 1950s Liverpool. The story revolves around Bud, a shy and fragile 12-year-old living on an urban terrace with his mother and three older siblings. This home is a space of tenderness and care, embedded in a close-knit community, although Bud is tortured by his inability to fully participate in the spiritual, romantic and social worlds that revolve around him. As Davies has said of himself, Bud is one of life’s spectators, a daydreamer and a voyeur.
No surprise, then, that Bud is most himself at the movies. In one especially lovely shot, the camera tracks along the front row of a cinema balcony, finally reaching Bud, leaning forward with his chin resting on his hands, a look of pure bliss on his face. But this isn’t so much a film about being at the pictures as wanting to be at the pictures. For most of the film, we follow Bud as he goes (reluctantly) to school and church or kicks around at home, and slowly we see how those couple of hours a week he spends at the cinema are rewiring his brain, reshaping his desires and altering the way he sees the world around him.
This is mostly expressed through exquisite shot composition and camerawork – hallmarks of Davies’ body of work. Sometimes we see through Bud’s eyes, and sometimes we watch him while he watches others, but again and again we’re with him as he stares out windows, through open doors and down empty hallways, searching for frames to organise his everyday experience the way he’s seen it on the screen. Early in the film, as he looks out of an upstairs window, Bud’s eye falls on a shirtless bricklayer, and he feels the first stirring of an urge he doesn’t yet have a name for. There’s something about the spatial logic of the shot that doesn’t quite add up. It feels like the brickie should be at ground level, but he’s filmed head on in the centre of the shot, as he’d appear if Bud were looking straight at him. It’s as if in his mind’s eye Bud is framing the man as he would if he were shooting a movie, transforming him momentarily into a matinee idol. Cinema gives Bud the language he needs to explore desires which every other sphere of his life forces him to repress.
There are dozens of unsung heroes in the annals of country music; some are instrumentalists, like the legendary Georgia fiddler Joe Lee, who introduced the “long bow” style to greats like Clayton McMichen; some are songwriters, like the gospel singer Grady Cole, who wrote Tramp on the Street; others were promoters and radio personalities like the late Eddie Hill, who helped introduce the music of the Louvin Brothers to a wide audience. But one of the most unsung, and one of the most mysterious, was a remarkable blackface comedian and singer named Emmett Miller. He flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, made a handful of records and left an indelible impression on several generations of major country singers.
How major? Try Jimmie Rodgers, Bob Wills and Tommy Duncan, The Callahan Brothers, Hank Williams, Merle Haggard. Hank Williams had Miller’s old 78s in his personal record collection; Merle Haggard dedicated his I Love Dixie Blues album to Miller. What kind of musician could inspire such a wide variety of imitators? Miller’s story is as fascinating as his music.
A brief article and playlist in which British folk singers select their favourite British folk songs and explain what makes them special.
By John Wilks
When we first came to traditional folk music, we stood at the foot of the mountain and wondered at the sheer size of what loomed ahead. There’s just so much of it – we can fully understand why many people might find it daunting and put it much further down their bucket list. As many of our readers will have experienced themselves, however, if you can find an initial foothold then you’ve found your way onto a joyful exploration and adventure that will likely last you a lifetime.
Finding that first chink isn’t easy, though. You might find it by chance – a centuries-old song that grabs you and sticks with you and makes you wonder what else might be out there – or you might find that someone offers you a leg-up.
Over the last few years, we’ve had the great fortune to chat and spend time with some of Britain’s better known folk performers. The thing about folk music and its exponents, of course, is that none of these people are necessarily ‘the best’ at what they do. After all, each have tales about some chap in some pub somewhere who can play the hind legs off all the donkeys, but chose not to make a career out of it, or someone legendary who passed away years ago (but, boy, you shoulda heard them play the spoons).
That said, it’s worth noting that the people who helped us with these articles do make their living by singing traditional folk songs, and probably spend most of their waking hours immersed in some part of that world.
A playlist: Some of the best traditional folk songs
This British Folk Songs Playlist series was intended to be a fortnightly collection of snippets and recommendations from various well-known folk singers living and working in Britain today, each talking about the old ballads and folk songs that inspired them, offering newcomers to the genre a leg-up so that they can find their way forwards. I hope you find it useful.
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“I’m not sure that you can separate the singer from the song at the level that gets under my skin. Part of things being of ‘the oral tradition’ means it deeply matters to me who is singing or playing, and whether they can communicate stuff.
“So my choice would specifically be Nic Jones’ live version of ‘Clyde Water’. He told me that he felt that he missed the mark on the recorded version (recorded as ‘The Drowned Lovers’ onPenguin Eggs) and the arrangement he was playing live just before his accident is one of the greatest pieces of storytelling that I’ve ever heard. It’s available on the Game Set Match compilation, but my favourite recording comes from an Italian bootleg from the ‘Teatro Bonci’ in Cesena.
“Folk singers sometimes have a habit of thinking that singing something slowly makes it more profound (when, actually, it just makes it take longer to get to the important bit). Nic had skills almost comparable with a great Shakespearean actor of knowing which part of a line contains all the weight, and how to pace it so you get caught up in a tidal wave as the story reaches its conclusion. There are other long ballad performances which do that for me (including things by Martin Carthy and June Tabor) but Nic was the master of it and that song is the peak of his ability.
“It’s not a version that you will find in a book in Cecil Sharp House of course – he made it out of parts from different versions and crafted it to fit in his own vocabulary. And that’s what the best people do – they make the song their own truth instead of someone else’s. And thats what traditional music is about for me – finding your own truth in something that other people owned before you came along, and that other people will pick up when you’re done with it.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Clyde Water’?
As a Child ballad, ‘Clyde Water’ also takes the name ‘The Mother’s Malison’. Child noted three places of origin, including a collection of it from “Mrs Brown’s recitation, apparently in 1800”. Reinhard Zierke notes at least five sound recordings of it before Nic Jones’ performance was released on Penguin Eggs in 1980, so it’s not surprising to find that – as Jim Moray says above – what may be the best-known version is an amalgamation of several others.
If anything, this wonderful recording points to the danger of assuming that ‘a folk song’ sung by a performer is an accurate representation of how it may have been in the past. As we’ll see in our forthcoming interview with folk song historian, Steve Roud (check back next week) – and to pick up on Jim Moray’s point – a performance of a folk song in modern times can only ever be a snapshot of something organic and transitory. The chances of it sounding very much like the original are slim indeed.
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“My choice of song is ‘Adieu, Adieu’. It got to me first through The Watersons’ album For Pence and Spicy Ale and also Martin Simpson’s album, Kind Letters, both of which I took out from Huddersfield Library in my mid-teens and both of which are still in my top 10 favourite albums of all time.
“I love the tune so much, and throughout the song’s many versions, interpretations and performances (it’s also known as ‘Newlyn Town’, ‘The Flash Lad’, ‘Wild and Wicked Youth’) I really like the chap’s forthrightness when faced with his oncoming execution. It’s one hell of a cinematic song.”
The sleeve notes to The Watersons’ version describe it as, “The ace and deuce of robber songs”, noting that, “English, Irish and American versions of it abound.” However, it’s Eliza Carthy who sums it up in the most pithy manner, writing in her sleeve notes to Fishes & Fine Yellow Sand, that this is:
“…the story of the tragic Good Time Boy from Newry Town who just robbed a few people who had far too much of everything. Did them a favour really. Less for them to worry their pretty little heads about. And one does what one has to for one’s girl friend who so likes shopping. Sooo likes it…
These songs of terminal regret were literally two a penny in the 17th to 19th centuries. The ballad writers of the time would sell the songs under the gallows just as the unfortunate crime was getting his or her desserts – just or otherwise – right there and right then. Here in its cradle is the modern music industry.”
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“It was so vital sounding – about a place in London. The woman saying, ‘yeah, I’ll take you all on’. It just had a fierceness I could get behind. I first heard Martin Carthy playing it in his garden for the BBC Folk Britannia programme. That is the only version you want.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Georgie’?
‘Georgie’ (also known as ‘Geordie’) has been recorded by a great number of people, with Nicola Kearey’s version (on the Stick In the Wheel From Here field recordings compilation) perhaps being the most recent. As usual, a comprehensive list of recorded performances can be found on the Mainly Norfolk website, but key versions include those sung by Martin Carthy (as mentioned above), Sandy Denny, Shirley Collins, Peter Bellamy, A. L. Lloyd and Ewan MacColl (at least twice).
While Nicola places her version in London (as do many other singers), approximately 360 entries can be found in the Vaughan Williams Library at Cecil Sharp House relating to this song, with versions having turned up everywhere from London Bridge to Aberdeenshire to Nebraska. Cecil Sharp alone seems to have collected over 20 fragments in places as far flung as Cannington, Somerset, to Villamont, Virginia.
While many singers attribute their version to Cecil Sharp’s collecting of it in East Coker, Somerset (sung to him by a chap named Charles Neville on September 3rd, 1908), A. L. Lloyd felt that it owed its existence to, “several different ballad strains. The ballads in question are a traditional Scottish ballad, the earliest known version dating from the end of the 18th century, and two English broadsides, both of which date from the 17th century.”
As great and robust songs go, it doesn’t get much greater than ‘Georgie’. It’s a marvellous example of one of those wonderfully well-travelled folk songs, able to adapt to most surroundings.
‘Cariad Cyntaf’: chosen by Ffion Mair of The Foxglove Trio
What makes this one of the best traditional folk songs?
“The traditional Welsh love song Cariad Cyntaf is a great song. The lyrics are powerful (lots of hyperbole about how wonderful a woman is – the song title translates into English as ‘First Love’) and the tune has a lot of passion. It’s short and has an irregularly-lengthed last line. These two things mean there’s plenty of scope to play around with timings and arrangements.
It has a special place in my heart because it was when I heard Julie Murphy and Dylan Fowler’s arrangement of this song on their CD Ffawd that I realised how much you can play around with folk songs/tunes. It’s also a special song for the band – we all played versions of it before we formed and our current arrangement came about by playing two previous arrangements on top of each other! It’s one of our most played songs to this day.”
Ffion also keeps a blog focusing on traditional Welsh songs, their origins, their meanings and the performances of them. On the subject of ‘Cariad Cyntaf’ she writes:
“In the song we hear someone telling his lover that he loves her and that he wants to marry her. It’s a monologue so we don’t get to hear her response. I always tell audiences that they have to guess what her answer was to the question about getting married but that the sad melody gives us a clue. But perhaps it’s not a simple matter of unrequited love – perhaps the girl does love him back but something, such as meddling parents, is going to keep them apart which is why the boy is lovesick and the tune is so mournful.”
Where can you find out more about ‘Cariad Cyntaf’?
Tough question, unless you can speak Welsh (drop me a line on Twitter if you can and you have any information). However, a lovely anecdote concerning this song and the Welsh folk song collector, Ruth Lewis, appears in Phyllis Kinney’s book, Welsh Traditional Music.
“In 1909, at the National Eisteddfod of Wales held in London, J. Lloyd Williams gave a lecture on collecting Welsh folk songs, which resulted in tremendous enthusiasm for this aspect of Welsh traditional life. Despite this, some highly regarded Welsh musicians still maintained that everything of value had already been published, and any other folk tunes that might be discovered would prove to be worthless…
Wherever possible, Ruth Lewis tried to find someone who knew the area and could locate suitable people willing to sing into the phonograph. Sometimes, to get them started, her daughter Kitty would sing a few Welsh airs and with patience they got songs from farmers and blacksmiths, weavers and housewives, including some country-dwellers who could only speak Welsh. In this way they collected a number of songs, some of which were published, but many more can be found in her unpublished collections in the National Library of Wales, Aberystwyth, and at the Welsh National History Museum in St Fagans…
‘Y-Cariad Cyntaf’, with words and music from an earlier period, was transcribed from her phonograph recording of the singing of an Aberystwyth van driver.”
Since the auspicious singing of said Aberystwyth van driver, several people have recorded ‘Cariad Cyntaf’, including Bryn Terfel (performed on the Last Night of the Proms, 2008), Meredydd Evans (a great, scratchy old recording), 9Bach, Elin Manahan Thomas and Wyn Pearson. The Foxglove Trio’s version of the song can be found on their 2013 EP, Like Diamond Glances.
