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Awardheads Y
Bellowhead lead the 2011 Folk Awards field with four nominations. But will they go home empty handed like the multi-nominated Unthanks and Jackie Oates did last year? Colin Irwin doubts it…
eah, yeah, yeah… we know… it’s all nonsense. Music isn’t a competitive sport and what do those herberts chosen to nomi- nate for these things know about the price of ptarmigan anyway? But hey, it’s fun. It’s a celebration and on a good day the BBC Folk Awards act as a useful barometer of the health (and safe- ty) of the British folk community.
When you look at this year’s list and see recurring names like Bellowhead, Chris Wood and Eliza Carthy; heritage artists like Norma Waterson, Richard Thompson and Andy Irvine; songs of the quality of Wood’s Hollow Point and Laura Marling’s Ram- bling Man; and a projected future embrac- ing fresher talents like Ewan McLennan, Emily Portman and Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell, all seems fine and dandy.
Yet, in a year that’s seen the deter- mined and welcome emergence of Folk Against Fascism to head off the BNP’s deluded attempts to hijack Brit folk for its own nefarious purposes, a list of around
FOLK SINGER OF THE YEAR Chris Wood Heidi Talbot Jon Boden Kris Drever
BEST DUO
Chris While & Julie Matthews Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson Megson
Nancy Kerr & James Fagan
BEST GROUP Bellowhead Breabach
Coope Boyes & Simpson Fisherman’s Friends
BEST LIVE ACT Bellowhead Fiddlers’ Bid
The Demon Barbers The Unthanks
MUSICIAN OF THE YEAR Andy Cutting Brian Finnegan
60 musicians from the Shetland Islands to Cornwall doesn’t include a single non- white face. Indeed, the awards are now in their 12th year and – unless you include the Special Roots Awards for Youssou N’Dour and Taj Mahal in 2000 and 2001 respectively and a 2008 Best Traditional Track award for Imagined Village for Cold Haily Rainy Night – it has always been thus.
No blame for this rather shocking anomaly can be attached to the awards, of course. That Special Roots Award was discarded when the Radio 3 World Music Awards entered the fray, and the lack of multicultural acts in the nominations over the years since, is a reflection of the folk scene as a wider whole rather than the Folk Awards themselves. But it’s sad, wasteful and rather baffling that one of the world’s most multicultural societies is not reflected in its evolving folk music. Any attempts to repair this anomaly would doubtless – and possibly rightly – be seen as artificial and contrived, yet some sort of award for innovation and advancement might be in order to reward
Michael McGoldrick Richard Thompson
HORIZON AWARD Emily Portman Ewan McLennan Fay Hield Jonny Kearney & Lucy Farrell
BEST ALBUM As If : Coope, Boyes & Simpson Gift : Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson Handmade Life : Chris Wood Hedonism : Bellowhead
BEST ORIGINAL SONG Hollow Point : Chris Wood
Queen Of Waters : Nancy Kerr (performed by Nancy Kerr & James Fagan)
Rambling Man : Laura Marling Stick Stock : Emily Portman
BEST TRADITIONAL TRACK New York Girls : Bellowhead The Demon Lover : Andy Irvine
Poor Wayfaring Stranger : Eliza Carthy & Norma Waterson Willie Taylor : Heidi Talbot
and encourage those actively exploring ways of taking the music forward, cross- fertilising and mining the cultural gold sit- ting neglected on the doorstep.
That said it feels like a solid list. No likely controversies this year over duos who are really trios, or traditional songs written yesterday or best original songs that were old pop hits from decades earli- er. A few eyebrows may be raised, howev- er, over the omissions of high profile previ- ous winners who’ve had new albums out, most notably Seth Lakeman and Jim Moray; while the rumbling grumbles over the mainstream media’s careless use of the folk tag to describe the rise and rise of Mumford & Sons and Laura Marling takes a new twist with the apparently official folk endorsement that accompanies the nomination of Marling’s folkiest track, Rambling Man, as Best Original Song. It’s unlikely to win, however. Not when it’s pitched against a track as powerfully poignant as Chris Wood’s account of the death of Jean Charles De Menezes, Hollow Point (not to mention Nancy Kerr’s farewell to barge life, Queen Of Waters, and Emily Portman’s weird tale of wicked stepmothers, Stick Stock); but Marling’s inclusion does mark a discernible shift in reference points. In the past, Tunng and Nancy Wallace have both unexpectedly arrived on the nominations list having pre- viously occupied territories far beyond the horizon of the long-established folk gene pool, but it’s still an interesting divergence from the norm – and anything that shakes the folk family out of its comfort zone and demonstrates to the wider world it’s per- haps not as precious, entrenched and iso- lated as imagined, has to be a good thing.
Meanwhile Bellowhead – who’ve already done plenty to open up minds and hearts with their stonking big band cele- brations – are again the belles of the ball with four nominations, while lead vocalist Jon Boden has the chance to achieve what nobody else has done before and win the Folk Singer Of The Year award two years running. In fact, no one has ever won this award twice, so it would be a serious and thoroughly deserved accolade to mark a year which has seen Boden not only front Bellowhead to new heights and lead his other band the Remnant Kings into uncharted waters, but set up two folk clubs and develop his extraordinary A Folk Song A Day enterprise on t’internet. The other contenders for Best Singer – Chris Wood, Heidi Talbot and Kris Drever – aren’t to be dismissed lightly either, but this most pres- tigious of awards must surely go to Boden.
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