folk music
Kieron Tyler
Heart’s Ease is about more than the music. Through its songs, it also chronicles a life lived. Shirley Collins learnt “Barbara Allen” at school. She first encountered “The Christmas Song” when it was sung by her early influence and inspiration The Copper Family. “Merry Golden Tree” was originally heard in 1959, in Arkansas. One song takes lyrics by her former husband, Austin John Marshall, and sets them to music. “Sweet Blues and Greens” draws from her 1964 collaboration with Davy Graham for the Folk Roots, New Routes album. “Locked in Ice” interprets a composition by her late nephew Buz Read more ...
caspar.gomez
Coronavirus blah blah blah. Glastonbury cancelled. What to do? Didn’t go to the 2010 festival for reasons too tedious to go into. Suffered the worst FOMO of my life. This is different. There is no Glastonbury. But sitting around at home… we’ve all been doing that for months…I call Don Carlton, who has been my fellow adventurer for eight of the last 10 Glastonburys: “Hey Don, we’ve got to do something that weekend, but I don’t know what…”“I have a plan,” he says.It is Thursday 25th June 2020.T-minus two days until Don Carlton’s plan kicks in. I’ve just driven for four-and-a-half hours on the Read more ...
Liz Thomson
It’s 15 years since two schoolfriends with a passion for acoustic music opened Green Note in London’s Camden Town, their goal to create “somewhere friendly, comfortable, intimate, and with the best music on offer every night of the week”. It quickly established itself as the go-to club for talented musicians at the outset of their careers – Amy Winehouse and Ed Sheeran played early gigs, and Diana Jones made her UK debut on the Green Note stage. Leonard Cohen once came by for a private gig – his picture hangs on the wall along with other shape-shifting musical icons. No surprise that Green Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
The lockdown may be loosening but we’re no nearer to gigs and festivals occurring so, for the foreseeable, online is where it’s at. Here, then, is the latest selection of musical happenings that you can wrap your eyes and ears around during the coming week. Dive in!Make Music DayOriginating with France’s Fête de la Musique back in 1982, the idea of Make Music Day is to put as much music in as many public spaces as possible. It has blossomed over the decades, catching on in the UK where, last year, almost 30,000 performed to around 140,000 people. In 2020, of course, the event takes place Read more ...
Barney Harsent
In the series one finale of metal-detecting sitcom Detectorists, Lance fills in a hole he’s dug after unearthing nothing more than a rusted ring-pull. As the camera pans downwards, we see the riches that were hiding beneath. He was looking in the right place, it’s just that the good stuff lay tantalisingly out of reach.And that’s a little bit like Homegrown, Neil Young’s lost album. Scheduled for a 1974 release, it was shelved by the singer/songwriter, who felt the emotion on display was too close to the bone following his split with actress Carrie Snodgress. Finally, some 46 years later, Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Echo in the Canyon is a lamentably thin documentary about the vibrant folk-rock music scene that flourished in the bohemian Los Angeles neighbourhood of Laurel Canyon from 1965 to 1967. Though it features priceless vintage footage of the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and the Mamas and the Papas and interviews with some surviving members, it weirdly comes across as a vehicle for Jakob Dylan.The singer-songwriter was born in 1969, the year in which Jacques Demy’s only American film Model Shop was released. Inspired by the mood of Demy’s semi-documentary love-letter to Los Angeles Read more ...
Liz Thomson
Music, as the sociologist Simon Frith long ago pointed out, is “an experience of placing: in responding to a song we are drawn, haphazardly, into affective emotional alliances with the performer and with the performer’s other fans”. Music makes you feel things, it’s about shared emotional experiences. And while, since the invention of the Walkman, those experiences are possible in the isolation of one’s own headphones, nothing can begin to touch the communal concert experience.Performing alone onstage in a concert space, the audience unseen and unheard, can’t be easy, which is perhaps why Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
For better or worse, the lockdown may be easing in the UK but there’s no sign of any gig action, even on the far distant horizon. So it’s back to our screens for all that, and here’s the latest, liveliest selection of concerts, conversations and virtual festival action for the coming week! Dive in!The Other Songs/Brit School FestivalThe record label and management company The Other Songs, whose speciality is nurturing new talent, combine with the Brit School for a virtual festival this Friday (5th June) at 6.00 PM. It will showcase plenty of fresh-off-the-block artists, as well as dancers, Read more ...
Billy Bragg in support of The Leadmill, Facebook Live review - a fundraising success of a lounge act
Liz Thomson
On Saturday there was a stark choice: BBC TV’s not-the-Eurovision special or Billy Bragg live on Facebook in support of The Leadmill’s campaign to raise vital funds for both the iconic Sheffield venue, 40 years old this year, and the Music Venue Trust Crisis Fund. So no choice at all, the canning of Eurovision being one of the few plus-points of lockdown.As Bragg later observed, his job will be one of the last to come back “so now I’ve worked out how to do this perhaps I’ll do a few more down the line.” He reminded everyone to hang on to their tickets because he’d be back next year for sure. Read more ...
Lisa-Marie Ferla
Like his friend the late John Prine, Jason Isbell is a master storyteller. His skill, like Prine’s, is to inhabit the characters he sings about so fully, and with such empathy, that it can be difficult to tell where the songwriter ends and the story begins.Take “Letting You Go”, the country ballad that closes seventh album Reunions. It’s a song packed with poignant detail that could be drawn from life: a father strapping his newborn baby daughter into a car seat, sleepless nights and first steps. But it ends with Isbell – father to a daughter, yes, but one who is four years old – giving his Read more ...
Tim Cumming
Back in April 2018, English fiddler player and member of BBC Radio 2 Folk Award-nominated folk band Pilgrim’s Way embarked on an 18-month busking tour of England. He walked out of his home in Manchester to explore the country, from Berwick to Braintree, from Deal to Darlington, playing and picking up tunes, and writing his Busking England blog (which is now coming out as a book from Scratching Shed). This set of tunes was recorded high up in the Staffordshire peaks at the 19th-century Danebridge Methodist Chapel, with guest players including Norway’s Marit Falt (from female trio Vamm) on Read more ...
Thomas H. Green
As we unwillingly become used to lockdown, most of us are regularly looking for juicy tidbits to pass the time online, so here's another selection that should be well worth a look. Dive in.Sea Change Goes OnlineSea Change Festival, run from Totnes record shop Drift and usually based in Devon across a weekend in August, will be running a virtual edition this weekend. The five year old event, which has garnered a reputation for imaginative, independent curation, offers two days of live sets from Billy Bragg, Midlake, Metronomy, The Breeders, dame of folk, Shirley Collins, extraordinary Texan Read more ...