f26 Awards And All


Will Bellowhead trample over everybody in the gong scrabble again, or will June Tabor & Oysterband or the Unthanks pip them to the podium? Colin Irwin reflects on the battlefield for the 2012 BBC Folk Awards.


I


t seems like only yesterday we put on our glad rags and, with an oddly irresistible mixture of cynicism, curiosity and genuine excitement, we giggled off to the Waldorf Hotel for the very first BBC Folk Awards. This wasn’t right, said the dissenters. In whichever strange way you choose to define it, they said, folk music shouldn’t be about judgement and trophies and music industry garlands, it was about real people making real music in an honest, heartfelt fashion with no relevance to prizegiving ceremonies.


In the purest sense they were proba- bly right, but once you start making records to sell, playing music on the radio and earning a living from playing gigs, by definition an industry emerges around it and – like it, hate it, throw bread rolls at Mike Harding during it – the BBC Folk Awards has been a significant catalyst in the explosion of interest in the music in recent years through the raised profile, status and kudos it provides.


Looking back at those first BBC Folk


Awards 12 years ago offers an interesting insight into a vibrant, eclectic, blossoming scene full of diversity. Kate Rusby delayed her holiday to pick up two awards for Best Singer and Best Album; Waterson: Carthy won Best Group; Martin Hayes Best Instru- mentalist; La Bottine Souriante Best Live Act; Maggie Holland’s A Place Called Eng- land Best New Song; Nancy Kerr & James Fagan Best New Act; Special Awards for


The Unthanks


Joan Baez, Topic Records, Youssou N’Dour, Joe Boyd and Lucy Duran… not a bad assortment at all and the celebratory event was deemed a huge success.


But, as someone or other once said, the times they are a-changing and glanc- ing through this year’s nominations is a rather more sobering experience. Indeed, the recurring names on the class of 2011 suggest the parameters of the music have contracted dramatically. It’s almost incon- ceivable that one of the world’s most multi-cultural countries fails to produce a shortlist offering a wider mix of influences and styles, and that the nominations lists since that opening year haven’t strayed far from a determinedly English/Scots template based around the narrowest concept of folk music. The Special Roots Award that went to Youssou N’Dour in 2000 and Taj Mahal in 2001 was discarded when Radio 3 launched its World Music Awards, but you do worry about a scene that hasn’t yet organically evolved its own cross- cultural brand beyond isolated exceptions like e2, Afro Celts and Imag- ined Village. And, though previous nomi- nees have included the likes of Laura Mar- ling, Tunng and Nancy Wallace, artists emerging through parallel alternatives to the established British folk scene are rarely acknowledged.


Is this the fault of the nature of an awards process necessarily geared towards the mainstream, the enclosed minds of the panellists who make their selections and can’t think outside the box or a folk ‘indus- try’ that refuses to entertain the notion of anything but the tried, tested and famil- iar? Or is it down to the musicians them- selves failing to draw on the multitude of roots riches staring them in the face? Are the awards a genuine mirror of the scene they represent and, if so, ought there to be a duty to change entrenched attitudes and pioneer alternative ideas and values?


Questions, questions, questions… and none of them answered by this year’s shortlist, which again doesn’t stray far from the central core of English song that continues to dominate it and faces a fur- ther challenge as the ceremony shifts location from London to Salford. In a cli- mate permeated by endless cutbacks and the axing of the BBC’s awards for World Music and Jazz, it’s gratifying that the BBC has kept faith with the Folk Awards at all and we must fervently hope they continue to do so, but you wonder what effect the move north and the inclusion of the paying public for the first time will have. Maybe it will democratise the event and foster a further change, opening up


the awards to public vote rather than a specialist panel. Or maybe it will narrow it all even further.


None of this, though, diminishes the quality of those who have made it on to this year’s list and who, while 2011 hardly ranks as a vintage year for the music in any respect, fly the flag for the music with an honourable degree of class and pride.


Not for the first time, the name Jon Boden is writ large with four nominations, including two with Bellowhead for Best Group and Best Live Act. He’s also up for Folk Singer of the Year, a title he also won in 2010, but may have to concede this time to one of the great stalwarts of the folk revival, June Tabor.


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Tabor is not an awards type person: her only previous visitation was when she received both Singer Of The Year and the Best Traditional Track award (for Hughie Graeme) in 2004, memorably offering a Thierry Henry impersonation as her accep- tance speech. While we wonder if June might be contemplating a Robin Van Per- sie moment this time, two younger disci- ples also stand in her way: Scots singer Emily Smith (who won many accolades for her Traiveller’s Joy album and has a further nomination for Sweet Lover Of Mine in the Best Traditional Track category) and 2009 Horizon Award winner Jackie Oates, whose The Lark In The Morning won Best Traditional Track the same year.


ut this, surely, is Tabor’s year, which would ordinarily result in a swathe of nominations for her excellent, sea-themed Ashore album if she hadn’t


trumped herself afterwards with her Oys- terband collaboration Ragged Kingdom, magnificently reviving a partnership last explored on record two decades earlier. Ragged Kingdom must surely achieve a double with the fRoots Critics’ Poll and run away with Album Of The Year (it’s up against Martin Simpson’s Purpose + Grace, Oates’ Saturnine and The Unthanks’ Last) and their dramatic, simmering arrange- ment of Bonny Bunch Of Roses ought to win Best Traditional Track, too (though Martin Simpson’s steamy, Cajun Lakes Of Pontchartrain is a storming alternative).


Having been pointedly and rather baf- flingly overlooked by the Folk Awards in the past (their solitary victory was an Hori- zon Award in 2008 when the mainstream industry had already fallen in love with them), it’s a little surprising to find the Unthanks suddenly up for four awards. After ignoring the claims of their previous bravely adventurous albums The Bairns


Photo: Pip April


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