13 f Ranting & Reeling
long time ago… actually it was last week, I read a vivid account of how Star Wars dominated the imagination of the book’s author – and almost every child of his and my generation. The only difference between myself and the writer of A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars, Gib van Ert, was his claim to have had no greater obsession between the ages of five and fifteen.
A
I could while away a school holiday in the company of a Kenner Tauntaun but I always had something else, something bigger than that galaxy far far away. Because the first playset I ever built for my Star Wars figures was not a crude cardboard rendering of Mos Eisley’s canti- na. I made them a youth club disco.
For anyone who hasn’t seen Star
Wars, there isn’t a youth club disco scene. But after a long day fighting the Empire or Rebellion (this was a neutral establish- ment – no blasters allowed), Luke, Vader, and Snaggletooth liked to get down to the latest sounds – provided by a small radio in the shape of a record player. I wish I still had it.
And this is the point in the story where the narrator is revealed to be the
young boy in later life and I say in a world-weary voice: “I didn’t know it then but my life would always be this way. Whatever I was doing, there would always be music.”
Only now can I see that my life path began there, on the hallway carpet, making a Jawa dance to Kelly Marie and Ottawan.
Star Wars stayed with me through- out school. When Stuart Hicks failed to return my copy of The Jedi Master’s Quiz- book it nearly cost us our friendship. But I was also never without an issue of Smash Hits, and my exercise books were decorat- ed with biroed approximations of band logos. My teachers, who were mostly ter- rible, failed to respond to my musical pas- sion with relevant career advice.
I suppose it was because they also lived in a town which felt as remote from the music world as Skywalker felt from the embattled Alliance. But if only one of them had said, “Mr and Mrs Chipping, your son is lazy, talks too much, has ridiculous hair and is never where he’s supposed to be. But whatever he chooses to do in life, it has to involve music,” then I wouldn’t have wasted all those years and LEA grant money on an
attempted act- ing career. Though to be fair to my unpleasant Head of House, he firmly dis- couraged that too. I think I went to drama school just to spite him.
But the story has a
happy ending. Every second of my life is not just connected to music; I feel like I live inside it. I never imagined that it would involve so many fiddles, Gaelic puirt-à-beul, and a man called Nic Jones who is mostly made of metal (a bit like C- 3PO). But then, I never imagined my life would turn out like this at all. I thought I’d become a famous actor and be cast as the young Anakin Skywalker in the long- promised Star Wars prequels. Those films turned out to be atrocious so it all worked out for the best.
A Long Time Ago: Growing Up With And Out Of Star Wars is available from places that do books.
Tim Chipping
The Elusive Ethnomusicologist F
rom where I’m sitting it looks like the Elysian fields of folk music are filled with fierce trigger-happy internet trolls – oops, sorry, guardians of the genre – all operating under their own singular definitions of folk music that no-one else can under- stand, let alone agree on. Unlike world music, which welcomes anyone brandish- ing an oud, however inappropriately, these raging armies of one furiously throw up the barricades quicker than an East European brickie.
So folk is only pitching on up at Sid- mouth and not buying a ticket to any of the shows and necking pints in the Anchor for a spot of unaccompanied singing. Or it’s only traditional songs by anon over 150 years old. Or it’s Eliza Carthy or Julie Fowlis working magical new arrangements to traditional tunes. Or it’s rural or it’s industrial or it’s been collected by Cecil Sharp on a bicycle or it hasn’t. There are so many things it only is to some people, that there’s only wider consensus on something it isn’t – newly composed songs.
I was sent Circus Life, the debut CD by a new young duo who describe their music as folk. Listening to it, the pair are clearly talented and very musical: Luke Oldfield, like his father Mike, is a multi-
instrumentalist and Victoria Coghlan plays both guitar and piano. They can both sing and have a classy way with a catchy chorus. But even I, with my ‘hello- welcome-to-the-party’ attitude strug- gled to understand why they would bait the folk patrol and not just jump up on the wagon with the ‘singer/songwriters’. What does ‘folk’ mean to them?
Over Skype, Oldfield and Coghlan who make up Gypsyfingers (named after some lightning-fingered Romany musi- cians Coghlan met in France), talk to me about authenticity and an organic lifestyle: about meaningful narrative stories and acoustic performance in inti- mate spaces: about production and instrumentation that expands from a folk sensibility to create a cinematic modern soundscape. Folk to them is something honest and real – its stars camping with the audience at festivals and popping out in the interval for a chat and a sandwich. Folk eschews the compromised shine of celebrity and overtly sexualised imagery. Not that Old- field and Coghlan espouse beer bellies, or dubious chords but they definitely won’t be found nearly naked and twerk- ing any time soon.
Folk is an ideal for a new genera- tion who don’t like where the baby-
boomers have got us. The GM crops, the globalisation, the greed and the growing divide. They want to experi- ence real com- munities, reach through the veil of the vir- tual on-line. And folk sings to that. It offers a link to a better past and the hope of a brighter future than the one that’s facing them.
Like Pied Pipers, all these ‘That’s not Folk!’ bands lead their fans to the raw beating heart of the music and swell the numbers back at The Anchor, joining my friend whose love of Led Zeppelin even- tually landed him in front of Martin Carthy. Carthy radiated light as he sang Lord Thomas And Fair Eleanor. All the singers down the centuries who’d ever sung the song seemed to surround him on stage. My friend was spellbound. Still is: a true-believer. So if a band comes up using the folk word, don’t shoot to kill. They might be good for you.
Elizabeth Kinder
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