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about it as an industry. But,” he says “it felt natural. What I was doing with songs and fiddle singing was what John was doing with tunes, using the left hand on the melodeon in a much more involved and interesting way than other people were doing but keeping that English bouncy flavour.”
Jon
Is it actually a swan-maiden myth that’s become justified in more prosaic terms through the folk culture?” He knows that someone would leap onto the internet pointing to a court case to prove the more mundane reading and says: “There may be a factual case of someone shooting his girl- friend but that doesn’t mean there weren’t stories already in existence that have been pulled into the mix. That’s very interesting to me, where the two things link up.”
Boden didn’t step out onto his almost forensic exploration of the English folk canon until after a chance meeting with John Spiers. “I was writing music for a play in Oxford and had a night off from rehearsals, so I went to a session at the Elm Tree and that’s when I bumped into John and that’s how the whole thing started.”
That was in 2000, when he was 23 – the year some consider year zero for the latest ‘folk revival’. Boden remembers “Eliza [Carthy] and Kate [Rusby] were fair- ly high up in the stratosphere by then and there was this strong folk club scene.” Strong enough that having joined forces with Spiers, the pair decided that getting a gig in one might not be a pipe dream. But they needed a USP. At the time, Boden was playing fiddle and singing mostly Irish songs and Spiers was belting out French Canadian tunes along with English folk. Together they reckoned that concentrat- ing on an English repertoire would give them the edge they needed. It was a prag- matic decision.
“Even though we were only looking to get the odd folk club gig we were aware that we were in the music industry. We were playing for fun anyway, but thought if you’re going to play profession- ally then there’s no point unless you think
Sam
Their early business sense paid off. As a duo they cleaned up on the club and fes- tival circuit, chalking up gig after leg- endary gig, both riding and swelling the wave of a new youthful folk-fuelled enthusiasm for traditional dancing. Our editor recalls their first appearance at Sid- mouth Folk Festival “in a tent rammed with a young audience Jon Boden asked: ‘are there any morris dancers in the house?’ and hundreds of arms punched the air.” Laurel Swift was no doubt part of the key to this: wowing the crowds with her lithe and energetic dance side Morris Offspring and throwing herself into crowd-surfing, she jumped and twirled the morris away from the beer-bellied, made it cool with a student audience and – having set up Shooting Roots workshops at Sidmouth and other festivals – enabled them to participate. Then Spiers & Boden with their brilliant musicianship, infec- tious dance sensibility and a sound much greater than the sum of their parts, set the scene alight.
I
As I write they are on the last leg of their final Spiers & Boden tour. Spiers explains: “When trying to source material, there’s a finite amount of English folk and when we find something we give it to Bel- lowhead. There’s not much new material for the duo. And now Bellowhead have signed to a major record label, it’s only fair to go into it wholeheartedly.”
nitially Bellowhead was conceived as “an expanded Spiers & Boden,” aimed at creating an even bigger noise – one capable of barnstorming the festival circuit as a headlining act. Discovering that three more musicians made little difference to their already sur- prisingly large sound, the band became eleven strong, with brass (including a sousaphone), strings, percussion and a drum kit added to the mix. With most new band-members excellent multi-instru- mentalists, the sonic possibilities in the arrangements expanded exponentially.
At first, this posed a problem for Boden. Although already gaining solid experience as a composer and arranger, with a Masters under his belt from the Lon- don College of Music, he felt that “taking Spiers & Boden arrangements and trying to build Bellowhead arrangements on top of them, which is what we did in the begin- ning, was very difficult: it was all about bombarding the sound into one focused lit- tle area. It worked in that it was designed for the festival scene and everyone loved it, but musically I wasn’t convinced.”
The penny dropped when the band started to work together contributing to the arrangements, utilising each of their unique musical talents and influences and Boden realised he could work more the- atrical elements into the mix. As Laurel Swift points out: English folk music is “not as well known a tradition as in other places, so it’s a bit more flexible to do what you want with. England is a country that welcomes everybody – cuisine, bits and pieces from everywhere. Music is a canvas and you can add what’s personal to you and you can say what you want.” Bel- lowhead prove her point as they started to
Rachael
create space musically for one another and this comes through in the arrangements, though Boden points out that with the lack of pop instruments such as keyboards to bulk out a song, the sound can still be thin and the trick is to get a big sound util- ising the line-up which is also full-bodied.
You can hear the swiftly growing cohesion of the band develop from the start: from their Spiers & Boden-esque first release E P Onymous through Burlesque on which only two of the tracks were not arranged by Boden, to Matachin which boasts just four tracks arranged by him and sets the experimental all embracing ethos underpinning their musical output.
Bellowhead’s influences are expan- sive. As well as folk, they take in early music, world, jazz, classical, pop, disco and vaudeville. These can all be heard in the overall mix which, combining such diversi- ty, ought to be a mess but is in fact cohe- sive and exciting. I really like the burlesque influences, the madcap Kurt Weil disso- nances which bring to mind Tom Waits at his exuberant best. It’s no surprise to learn that Boden is a huge Waits fan.
Bellowhead exude fun, but I wonder if the weight of all this instrumentation hampers the dancing sound at the heart of it (the key to its popularity) that Spiers & Boden are rightly famous for.
Boden explains: “It’s a very different impulse dancing to Bellowhead or indeed any band with a drum kit. What me and John do is largely down to John and the ability the melodeon has. What the fiddle has too – or tries to support – is that ability to evoke jumpiness. There’s a very bouncy, very subtle rhythmical thing. You can’t notate it: you can’t even explain it to someone. It’s about being inside the music
Andy
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