root salad Duck Soup
Not your bog standard folk band then. Ian Anderson meets the trio who feed on ‘peculiar things from 78s’
Y
ou know what a folk band’s like, right? The basic rule is that they have fiddles, guitars and accordeons. If they’re ‘Celtic’ they have extra fiddles (and bouzoukis, which is possibly confusing for Greeks) and play very fast. If they’re English they have melodeons, no guitars and play more slowly. If they’re American they have banjos and check shirts. Most of them tend to be startlingly young these days.
So here on stage at Towersey Folk Fes- tival is this trio. In the middle, Dan Quinn – a man of a certain age with a vaguely bewildered look – is playing serpentine tunes on a melodeon, and occasionally bursting into song. To his right, Adam Bushell is playing improbable parts on a huge marimba, occasionally swapping to musical saw or mandolin. To his left, Ian Kearey fills in the textures on dobro, man- dolin or bass guitar. They’re called Duck Soup, come from the Brighton area and have just made (in my book) one of the English folk scene’s most loveably original albums of the year, Open On Sundays.
They have pedigrees, you’ll be unsur- prised to discover. Dan Quinn, originally from Grimsby, “inveigled myself into the Angel Morris Men in 1972 and Flowers & Frolics came out of post-rehearsal ses- sions”. Later he fronted dance band Gas Mark 5 and has a long-running duo with Will Duke. Ian Kearey discovered folk at 17 whilst at college in Canterbury. He was an original Oysterbandsman and has also played in Blue Aeroplanes, with Gerard Langley, Caroline Trettine, and is currently also in the Sussex Pistols and the Ranelagh Renegades (with Oyster associates Alan Prosser, Dil Davies and Al Scott). Adam Bushell took up morris dancing and folk music at about 15 and currently plays with Stocai, a contemporary classical music ensemble, has done projects with English Acoustic Collective, experimental improvis- ing music and ”general strangeness”.
Quinn’s a veteran of the 1970s ‘new wave of English country dance music’. “I’d seen Oak, and then the band called the Cotswold Liberation Front who became The Old Swan Band did a gig at Islington Folk Club, which I thought was an absolute knockout and influenced me to pick up a melodeon. So I’m afraid it probably is all Rod Stradling’s fault!”
The original idea was for the other two to play on a solo album by Quinn, but one thing led to another. “Dan was going to record a solo album and, inspired by the glorious French Canadian accordeon play- er Alfred Montmarquette, was going to have a bit of xylophone and other strange instruments,” recalls Adam. “I thought I’d
make a solo album,” says Dan, “but then got windy about it and decided I wouldn’t, but I had lots of tunes that I couldn’t use anywhere, lots of peculiar tunes from Que- bec, lots of peculiar things from 78s.”
Key influence Alfred Montmarquette, born in 1871, recorded a remarkable lega- cy of more than 110 sides between 1928 and 1932, eventually meeting a suitably legendary musician’s death in an asylum in Montreal in 1944. His recordings aren’t easy to find commercially, though there’s an old Folkways album available to order on CD via the Smithsonian, and more than 60 tracks to be heard online at www. col-
lectionscanada.gc.ca/gramophone He also has a dedicated MySpace page.
But the way Duck Soup play them sounds like a little old English band, albeit a bizarre one. “That’s the idea,” they cho- rus. “To coerce them into sounding like an English country dance band,” says Dan.
“There was a wonderful moment in the first rehearsal when we went ‘melodeon, marimba, dobro, what?! – this sounds great!’ And it was very English,” says Adam, “though I’ve not been con- sciously trying to make stuff sound English. Obviously, for me playing marimba it has been ‘What the hell do I do with this instru- ment?’ So rather than say it’s French Cana- dian with an English slant, I’m just looking for a sound that doesn’t get in the way.”
As Kearey says, “That was one of the nice things because we weren’t intending
S
to form a band, it was something organic that came out of rehearsals. It came out naturally so it was a case of ‘let’s see what works’. After all, Bob Cann’s Pixie Band had a slide guitar, and Jimmie Rodgers’ records were being listened to over here when they came out, it made total sense.”
o are you in essence playing the straight guy, Dan? “I always play the straight guy! I was the straight guy in Gas Mark 5 as well – I just played the tune and let them get on with it. I’m like [Old Swan Band/ Brass Monkey drummer] Martin Brinsford, a strict tempo dance musician, that’s all I can do.”
The notion of Martin Brinsford as a strict tempo musician cracks everybody up! “I can’t play another style, anything that isn’t English. You get a tune you like, it goes through the mill and it comes out that way. And I let the others get on with it, in a sensible fashion!”
As Adam concludes, “Given that we are quite an unusual band, it makes it work if you’ve got a traditional core with other things going on. If all of us were doing weird things then it’d be…”
“Lau?” I volunteer.
And what a great time it is when we have bands as totally different but equally exhilarating as Lau and Duck Soup.
Hear a track on this issue’s FAF Tracks CD, and see them at the Green Note in Camden, London NW1, on 9th January.
www.myspace.com/soupofduck
F 15 f
Photo: Ian Anderson
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