root salad f20 The Great Malarkey
Folk, punk, gypsy brass, blues, ska… all in a night’s work for these East Londoners, says Jamie Renton.
E
ast London’s Great Malarkey mix folk, punky energy, gypsy brass and a bit of blues and ska. There are lots of bands around at the moment peddling similar sounds (one’s probably coming to a festival near you right now), so what makes GM stand out from the crowd? I suppose it’s down to musical character, a quality that’s hard to define, but you know it when you hear it. That and the fact that (unlike so many of their peers) they’ve got some really strong song-craft behind all the blowing and bashing. Singer, guitarist and principal songwriter Alex Ware is responsible for much of this. Small and feisty, with an accent as broad as Hackney Marshes, she’s a powerful front-person and a gritty but poetic wordsmith.
The band consists of Alex, plus Jason Nash on accordeon, Jake Appleby (bass), Owen Evans who plays banjo, guitar and trombone (as well as adding the odd vocal), drummer Joni Belaruski, fiddler Aidan Banks, Young Oscar (trumpet) and Jules on the French horn. A listen to their debut album Badly Stuffed Animals (Clearcut Records) will give you a very good idea of their appeal, seeing them live even more so.
The Great Malarkey – Alex Ware front right
I’m sitting in the cramped dressing room of the Borderline Club in Central London where the band are gearing up for a rushed soundcheck before the doors open and they jump back on stage to play a support slot (and steal that particular night’s show). Most of the Malarkeys are soon off to plug in and check sound, leav- ing me and Alex with room to breathe and a few precious minutes for an interview.
“Myself and Joni have been friends for a little while and we were whingeing about not being in bands,” she says of the GM’s origins, back in 2010. “It took us about three hours, but we finally came to the conclusion that we should start one ourselves. We had a chat with Aidan, who’s an old flatmate of mine and the rest of the guys come from Gumtree ads. At the time I was starting to discover bands like The Pogues, The Dead Brothers and Fanfare Ciocarlia. Up until that point it had been about plain simple rock music for me. Which I’d kind of got bored of. I like the storytelling element of folk as well, so we thought ‘let’s have a bash at it and see what happens.’”
Since then they’ve played around the UK, travelled over to Scandinavia and worked hard on developing their material.
“All of the songs on the album tell a story,” explains Alex. “They’re about love, life and being skint, all drawn from experi- ence.” The latin-flavoured Bad Man may sound like a call to violence. (“There’s a bad man lurking in the corner… Gonna batter him he’s bang out of order.”), but is actually about night terrors. “Crapping yourself, well not literally but… being scared in the middle of the night!”
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Having listened to the album, her mention of the Pogues and Fanfare Ciocar- lia doesn’t come as a surprise. I can also hear some Brecht & Weill in there, a bit of Tom Waits. “I’m not that well versed with your typical folk,” she says of her influ- ences. “Of course there’s old Billy Boy Bragg, who does what he does. But at the end of the day, I don’t really have massive amounts of influences, apart from the gypsy folk stuff.” Her biggest influence was gained from two years’ of touring, in a pre- vious band, as support act for The Pogues (and living to tell the tale). “Our music just comes from nowhere,” Alex reckons. “It is what it is and it just happens.” That air of spontaneous creativity probably explains their fresh and unique sound.
tell Alex that the album made absolute sense to me on the first listen. “Well you’ve got a fucked-up mind like me then!” is her response. “When you’re writing music, you never know what’s going to happen, unless you’re someone who sets out to write something like someone else. I lot of people I know might hear a tune and go ‘That’s flipping great. I’ll just nick a bit from here and a bit from there’ but for me, that’s not what it’s about. I just pick up the guitar, all of a sudden something will sound good, I’ll throw some words over the top of it and it’s as simple as that. I can write a song in fifteen minutes and then the guys finish it off for me.”
For all their global influences, The Great Malarkey sound very East London. “It must be the accent,” says Alex, with a throaty chuckle. “I’ve always been envious of people who can tell stories that aren’t their own. Because I think that’s a real quality to have and I’ve never been able to do that, as far as whacking lyrics together for a song. So for me, it’s just reality and everyone can relate to that that. To being skint and I suppose that’s what we can do, we can say, yes we’re in the same boat as you.”
The Great Malarky play Jamboree, Courtyard of Cable Street Studios, 566 Cable Street, London, E1W 3HB on 21st September.
http://thegreatmalarkey.com F
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