f26 Ten For The First Eleven
Nobody imagined a decade back that an eleven-piece big band playing English folk music could become the mighty success it has. Elizabeth Kinder examines the phenomenon that is Bellowhead. Pics: Judith Burrows
B
ellowhead rip into a rousing encore of New York Girls at their tenth birthday bash at the Albert Hall, with Maddy Prior pitching in on vocals – shortly
after the full-capacity crowd belted out Happy Birthday and just before the fire- works soar from the stage. New York girls. Are they anything like Gosport girls, whom Jon Boden had sung so gratefully about not twenty minutes before?
Gosport girls, or at least one called
Nancy, would definitely be considered key to a lot of my friends’ plans for a top night out: if fun’s to be had those girls will have it, throwing inhibitions and their knickers to the wind. Tonight as Bellowhead romp through their recording career belting out songs off every album from their first – EP Onymous – through to their latest release, there’s fun to be had: dancing and singing in the stalls, bobbing about in the seats and people getting their kit off, though this seems to be confined to the stage and Laurel Swift’s four-woman morris side saucily ripping off their bodices to reveal – pristine morris whites.
Gosport ladies love their gargle, Gosport girls they goes their tot / Rum and brandy, gin and shandy, Gosport girls will drink the lot / All the Gosport ladies, they swigs the flowing can / But for knocking it back with Honest Jack, there's none like Gosport Nan!
New York girls it seems are a different lot altogether.
When I awoke next morning, I had an aching head / And there was I Jack all alone, stark naked in me bed / My gold watch and my money and my lady friend were gone / And there was I Jack all alone, stark naked in the room.
Scruples they may lack, but Bellow- head are thankful as Boden later explains: “New York Girls put us on the radar.” The first single off Hedonism (Navigator, 2010), it was nominated for a BBC Radio 2 Folk Award for Best Tradi- tional Track, the same year the group won best live act (for the fifth time) and best group (for the second time). The album went on to sell over 60,000 copies even in this downturn in the music busi- ness, paving the way for Broadside (2012). This saw three tracks on the Radio 2 playlist and the Folk Awards gong for Best Album. And now their fifth album, Revival, is about to be released on Island following the band’s recent three-album deal with the major label.
So lots to celebrate. And what with a band on stage the size of a small orchestra, and all the musicians playing brilliantly, tonight in the Albert Hall there’s a very jolly Last Night Of The Proms atmosphere – but with better music and lyrics. The Prom crowd hollering Land Of Hope And Glory always drums up a horribly sentimental sense of cod Englishness, and I’m hoping tonight to find an authentic feeling of Englishness – which, despite being born and brought up here, for me has always remained elusive. I wonder if the tradi- tional songs at the heart of Bellowhead’s often fantastically bonkers, uplifting arrangements might inspire some sense of connection with the tradition: might result in a marvellous homecoming, a recognition somehow that this, my musical heritage, is in my blood, because if it’s ever going to happen, tonight’s the night. It’s Bellow- head, for God’s sake, and Maddy Prior.
Whilst sitting in a box drinking wine – birthday party; rude not to – meant feel- ing at home was not a problem, the sense of Englishness I want to experience doesn’t materialise. A wafting memory of dancing around a maypole at primary school and reading the entire works of Thomas Hardy as a teenager is not the hoped-for epiphany. So when I meet up with Jon Boden shortly afterwards, I ask him about the relationship between the English tunes he clearly loves and English identity.
Maybe concerned about a mad UKIP element creeping into the conversation, he responds: “I’m nervous about putting identity into the mix.” And steers us gently to his love of folk saying it springs from “an interest in the murky depths of time” – the same source of his love of mediæval English history, which he studied at Durham University.
“My understanding at first of where folk music came from was naïve. If you’d asked me aged fourteen when these songs originated, I’d probably have said ‘oh they’re as old as the hills, a thousand years old.’ As you get more interested in folk music you become aware it’s a lot more recent.” But that doesn’t mean he holds with the school of thought that insists folk music began in the 17th Century.
“The idea that there would be a year zero in the 1600s is just as preposterous as saying all folk music is pagan. There are fragments of stuff, pre-Christian Norse mythology that was there before in the songs. That’s the stuff that gets me. The Polly Vaughn song: did he really confuse her for a swan or was she actually a swan?
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