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There’s a sense, Sartin explains, “that ‘folk’ music, whatever that is, seems to be gaining a wider acceptance, and the tim- bre of the music, if nothing else, has affected some mainstream commercial music. If that makes audiences more recep- tive to what we do, then it’s great for us and for the tradition. Maybe that’s what’s enabled us to be signed by a major?”
Trumpet player Andy Mellon is not from a folk music background and thinks that the major label interest might be because “Like me, more and more people are becoming interested in folk and are intrigued to explore their heritage. There are some amazing bands and musicians around who enable new audiences to engage with English folk music with their stunning musicianship, exciting arrange- ments, great stagecraft and the desire to share rather than treat it as an academic exercise.”
Bellowhead definitely fit into that cat-
egory. As Boden says, “The passion with the music is the passion of wanting to con- nect with an audience: it becomes tighter in front of an audience. It’s serving its pur- pose, the love of the music is about the love of connecting with the audience.” As Swift says: “They’re great fun to be with, great to dance to – they take such care to pick tunes that can be played at a decent speed to dance to and still work with an eleven-piece band.” That’s what’s sustained their fan base through all of Bellow head’s twists and turns and experiments as they give rein to their naturally left-field musi- cal tendencies which constantly draw in non-folk interest. As Swift adds: “Every band that makes a splash brings a new rel- evance, makes sense where it didn’t make sense before to someone.”
It’s difficult to imagine that signing to Island will make much difference to them musically, given the way they work. They are not likely to lose what Mellon describes as their “joy in performance and desire to entertain, as well as the never-ending fas- cination in learning and getting better”. Though in terms of the gigs, coverage and entourage, the impact is already clear to see. I met up with Boden at the Royal Fes- tival Hall (Bellowhead have long been Southbank Artists in Residence), just after their live performance on the Paul O’Grady show and before a filmed inter- view and their manager was concerned that Boden sign a thousand CDs in between so please would I hurry up. They have tour managers and agents and a proper tour bus too. Though, disappoint- ingly, Spiers points out that when it comes to the rider, rather than stipulating twenty
Pete
band would be going to the nearest pub for a session. He found that he couldn’t announce it from the stage as the pub would be rammed, although tweeting afterwards sometimes meant that just two would turn up.
Benji S
white kittens and 100 white doves in a dressing room strewn with rose-petals, along with champagne and caviar, or even their own Hedonism beer on tap, the band are still apt to nip down the local Co-op.
piers and Boden, like most of the rest of the band, were not shoe- ins for folk scene success. Although Spiers’s dad was a morris dancer and so young John was aware the music existed, his musical background was the sounds pouring out from Radio 1: Dexy’s Midnight Runners, or Buggles’s Video Killed The Radio Star courtesy of the Tony Blackburn show. There was a piano in the house and he learned to play by ear. He saved up £300 to buy a keyboard by doing a paper round (wages: £6 a week) and during his second year studying Natural Sciences at Kings College Cambridge, bought an accordeon to keep up his piano skills. The next year, finding a place to play it at the Mayflower Club in Cambridge, he bought a melodeon on the advice of his fellow musicians, then having finished his degree went back to his parents’ place in Oxford and started earning good money busking. The rest as they say, is history.
Neither of Boden’s parents helped even a little by dancing the morris, nor were they into folk music. His back- ground was more early Dire Straits, though his mum was a Beatles fan and his dad liked classical music – and in 1986 the family acquired a copy of Graceland. Young Boden was introduced to folk music through the Forest School Camps. Boden was playing guitar, and a member of staff (Jody Jenkinson, we salute you), sent him a compilation tape which includ- ed Led Zeppelin and Muddy Waters. Boden was hooked. Through Led Zep- pelin he skipped off down the path to folk music, via Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention. He got into playing Irish pipes and the fiddle whilst still in his mid- teens and into singing whilst at Durham, attending sessions in the Colpitts pub. Back home in Winchester for a year to work on his keyboard skills before taking his Masters in composition, Boden got into the folk scene on the south coast, where fiddler Jock Tildesley inspired him with the idea that he could in fact make a living playing music.
New listening patterns and their social media carriers are issues that Boden and Bellowhead tackle head on. He is well aware of both the false sense of communi- ty that these models can bring and their usefulness in creating a real one. After Bel- lowhead gigs he tweeted that some of the
The folk scene, he says, is a big move- ment, but whilst gigs and concerts are all very well, he wants to strengthen the more fragile side, “the social music side where people sit in a pub and play and sing for fun”. He wants Bellowhead to open people’s eyes to the benefits of social music making, which has been at the core of his musical experiences because “It builds communities. It’s tremendously important in terms of community on a sim- ple level to sit in a pub when someone sings a chorus and 30 people join in. It’s active communal singing, equivalent to conversation: it’s knowing – and a link to others. Having a conversation with 30 oth- ers is tremendously important to the peo- ple who are part of that. Everyone needs to feel part of a community. The folk scene is a big community, or big series of small communities.” Communal singing, he says, implicitly “reminds people that’s how we as human beings relate to each other; we express ourselves through language, music, dance and laughter, four key parts of human relationships. It’s easy now to go months and years on end without experi- encing a fundamental and profound part of being human that was commonplace to our ancestors. To everyone throughout his- tory it was fundamental to people’s lives. It’s only in the last 50 years we’ve lost it.”
Bellowhead’s music might not neces- sarily trigger a sense of Englishness, but it leads to an idea of the experience of real community that participating in folk music can provide. And in creating real opportunities for that to happen (the gigs, the song books, the impromptu ses- sions), Bellowhead makes possible more rewarding connections than that of a hazy nationalistic sense of personal identi- ty. Drawing in non-folk audiences to this feeling of community doesn’t just expand the ‘folk scene’ it reaches beyond it – strengthening interweaving connections in wider society, enabling greater cohe- sion in real-life communities at a time when social media creates illusory com- munities in a virtual world.
Bellowhead tour the new album in the autumn and do festival dates in the summer. Step through that cold virtual world into the warm embrace of the real one and check your Twitter feeds for the post-show singaround.
www.bellowhead.co.uk Ed F
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