root salad Clarke & Walker
Josienne Clarke & Ben Walker are attracting all the right sorts of attention. Colin Irwin joins the queue.
“T
his is our last one and I thought it was only right that we finish with a slightly embittered break-up song.
Death, disaster and misery, that’s what we want, isn’t it? I can’t be doing with all that upbeat claptrap…”
Josienne Clarke’s deadpan, self-dep- recating humour as she sings Done – carefully unwrapping each line like it’s an unexploded hand grenade – is, she insists, vital for the preservation of her own sanity in the face of the remorseless- ly doom-laden songs she feels strangely compelled to sing. Trad songs, Sandy Denny covers, her own original materi- al… and barely a cheery notion between them. In less capable hands this would conceivably bore you rigid but this night she commands the rapt attention of her Hammersmith audience with the pure voice of a natural storyteller, paradoxi- cally both delicately elegant and passion- ately charged.
“Most of my songs are melancholic and reflective in some way,” she elaborates later. “Not because I never experience joy but because I am rarely moved to express it in song. Songwriting is very cathartic and so feelings of loss and reflections are the ones I feel the need to exorcise.”
The charismatic tall thin guy with the hippy hair next to her is Josienne’s perfect foil, his unflashy but sublimely dexterous guitar effortlessly breathing colourful moods, evocative shapes and sympathetic imagery around her voice. His name is Ben Walker and, after a couple of years of hard graft (Ben unfondly recalls one gig at a bar in Shoreditch when their audi- ence consisted solely of the sound guy, the barman and two members of the punk band they were supporting), are one of our most illuminating young pair- ings. They’re not sure exactly how or why but somehow they straddle that elusive middle ground between old school folk music – with a colourful panoply of club floor spots under their belts to prove it – and that mysterious unidentifiable phe- nomenon called nu-folk.
They are not the products of the tradi- tional music degree course, nor are they the children of folk families. Raised in Sus- sex, Josienne remembers hearing a lot of Don McLean, Gordon Lightfoot, James Taylor and Fairground Attraction music around the house as a kid, but otherwise her early musical impetus mainly emerged from the school choir, which fostered an interest in choral singing. “I went to uni- versity to study classical music with the idea of being a classical singer but after a few years of disastrous recitals I realised it
21 f
was too rigid for me and I got more enjoy- ment performing my own material the way I wished to perform it.”
Evesham-born Ben – who names Mark
Knopfler, Hank Marvin, Peter Green, David Gilmour and Gordon Giltrap among his seminal early guitar influences – also fol- lowed a classical path before diversifying into electric guitar with various indie rock bands. “The last one I was in recorded some tracks being mixed by a mutual friend of mine and Josienne’s and one afternoon I went round to collect the files and started messing around on his Martin. He said ‘If you can play acoustic guitar like that, what are you doing in a crap indie band with a bunch of assholes?’ He then introduced me to Josienne, who was look- ing for a guitarist.”
Neither had much previous exposure to folk song. “I was about 18 when I first heard Joan Baez,” says Josienne, “and it was from her I learned my first trad song Lily Of The West. I then began playing folk songs and writing my own. Somebody told me I sounded like Sandy Denny so I went to check her out and found a whole wealth of music that I loved – Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, June Tabor…”
Ben’s folk experience was then mostly confined to Bert Jansch. “After that I got hooked on Nick Drake and then spent hours finding other artists I’d never heard of, focusing mostly on fingerstyle gui- tarists like Nic Jones and Martin Simpson.”
B
en worked with Josienne on the 2010 album One Light Is Gone (which includes the aforementioned Done). Now we’re getting a brand
new album Fire & Fortune, mixing well- known songs like Green Grow The Laurels, My Love Is Like A Red Red Rose and When A Knight Won His Spurs with Josienne’s original material, plus some more expansive arrangements – involving sax, piano, violin and the oversized recorder Josienne jokes about on stage – also in the mix. “I had concerns about combining traditional songs with my own originals on one album,” she says. “I thought they might look frivolous next to the traditionals or alternatively they may look archaic in comparison to contemporary songwriting. But after a lot of soul-searching and deliberation, I came round to the idea and I’m confident we’ve got the balance right.”
Talking about A Pauper & A Poet, one
of the most affecting songs on the new album, she concludes that, whether the material originates from the tradition or the recesses of her own brain, the motiva- tion and intent is the same. “To my mind the function of folk music has always been people making sense of their existence through song. The writers of what have since become traditional songs weren’t the cognoscenti, they were ordinary people – the ‘paupers’ if you like – and yet those songs are incredibly poetic.”
josienneclarke.co.uk F
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84