f28 T
he impact for the band and for June goes beyond the immedi- ate and the obvious. “Ragged Kingdom has thrown a very welcome and very exciting
spanner in the works.” says Ian. Goalposts have moved in terms of touring. Out on the road again with June in the late autumn in the UK, neither June nor the Oysters are going back to being them- selves in their own rights anytime soon.
You sense that rather than feeling weary at the prospect of touring, they are still energised by the process. 2012 is the busiest summer they’ve had for some time and the latter half of the year has some non-stop touring scheduled. Alan explains: “In a sense, when you tour you don’t need so much energy. Life on the road is relative- ly simple. You need the extra energy for the writing and the creating.” John concurs: “If you’re going to feel 30 years of weight, it’s when you’re starting to write again. You don’t feel it on stage with this band, ever.”
But more subtly, coming out of their recent collaboration with June, the band have found that they have re-engaged with ballads. After a career of creating shapely, five-verses-and-chorus format songcraft, they had shied further and fur- ther away from long narrative songs, which Alan would have arranged so beau- tifully in the early days.
John explains: “You need a storyteller like June to carry the narrative, to make it interesting without trying to wring too much emotion out of it. You need a gor- geous tune. And you need the band to dis- cipline itself. Previously, we would peak after three verses and then blast the living hell out of it for the next 12! As the other singer, I saw the band re-engage with the songs. The rhythm section would really make it work. It makes things really unfold in an engaging way.”
Ian goes on: “It would be fair to say that we got a little fed up with trying to do things to traditional songs. The more sophistication you apply musically, the more you step away from any context which the song had in its history. About 80 percent of our albums have traditional material in them somewhere to a greater or lesser extent. We lost interest in trying to be clever with traditional songs but, at the same time, being musos, we did want to be clever! So we thought it was only fair to have our own ideas and try and be clever with them.”
John adds: “There’s a connection that we’ve always had in our heads with tradi- tional song, that soundscape and that his- torical landscape. Once you tap into it, you get that perspective backwards… that wonderful richness of traditional song. Still now, a lot of the language and imagery used in trad song, we use in our own songs. It’s difficult to get away from that and it’s a continuum that exists in my head. We’ve inhabited traditional song again.”
The band’s signature festival, Big Ses- sion re-launches this year at Catton Hall, Walton-on-Trent from 15th to 17th June. “From its inception, the Big Session was always an idea that we should use whatev- er clout that we had and share the stage with emerging performers or our contem- poraries,” says JJ. “It should be a shared thing, partly improvised and spontaneous. It brings something different to the annual round of festivals.”
www.bigsessionfestival.com www.oysterband.co.uk
F
Ceilidh Roots O
ver the past couple of years, the Oyster Band have metamor- phosed from a fine, fun dance band and refuge for the some- what shell-shocked survivors of
Fiddler’s Dram, into a first-class across-the- board English song and dance band. Between their first album (Jack’s Alive, Din- gles DIN309, 1980) and second (English Rock’n’Roll – The Early Years 1800-1850, Pukka YOP 1), they dropped the descrip- tion “Ceilidh” Band from their name, shed several members, and are now equally at home in a concert and in a ballroom.
Apart from the fact that people are obviously aware of the Fiddler’s Dram con- nection there isn’t much known about where you all come from musically. By the time the single of Day Trip To Bangor came out, I gather that Fiddler’s Dram had virtu- ally stopped and you’d put all your eggs in the Oyster basket. What made you go in the Oyster direction?
I.T. “We met a lady who lived locally called Keris Bishop. Dixie Fletcher, who was the local folk magus at that point, wanted a dance band for a charity event – so we got together about 13 people, a rough jamming thing. Keris sorted every- body’s A-sections out from their B-sections and their right and left-hand stars and it was fun. We then discovered that not only was it fun, but it was more fun if you did it better – and indeed that there was work to be had because people like doing that.”
“And that was the way things started to work out. Living in Kent, where there’s
The Oysters’ first cover interview was published in our January 1983 issue, when they’d just emerged from the Kent PTA ceilidh circuit as a song and dance band. Here’s an extract. Words & photos by Ian Anderson.
not exactly a thriving folk song club scene, there turned out to be a huge market for a dance band – virtually no competition. Which cuts both ways of course… we got a lot of work for local organisations, villages and so forth, which we try to still do because, in a sense, if we didn’t do them each year then the gig itself would die.”
It seems to be almost the quote of the year from lots of the other interesting bands that have begun to emerge from this field, that it’s really good for a band to just get out and do the PTA circuit and play a lot, do your experimenting in public.
I.T. “I’d put it even stronger than that. It totally changed my attitude to the act of playing. When you’re learning from scratch, you have to be very careful that you just know the tunes. But you get to be master of your musical repertoire when you’re playing for dancing, so it loosens up. I think it’s historically true that dance music tends towards improvisation, so if you play a lot for dancing it encourages you to do that. Now we can work music over in a creative way.”
“So from playing with the acoustic Dram, which was extremely exact music that you’d only change consciously, by arrangement, it was very good for our souls to go to the opposite thing where you could jam it up to the teeth and devel- op the rapport in the band to the point where you can start changing it while you’re doing it. So now, if we go to play some set of tunes for a long dance, Alan and Ian Kearey can start working through
Bracknell Festival ceilidh, July 1985. Eddie Upton calling, Ashley Hutchings dancing front right.
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