root salad Edward II
An unearthed stash of old Manchester ballads turned into a project, discovers Sophie Parkes.
or two, maybe a live venue; it will have, at least, been the backdrop to a music video or a suite of band promo photos at some point in its recent history.
M
But folk and traditional music is certain- ly tucked away here, too. There’s a lively Irish scene, one or two sessions and sin- garounds that swell and dwindle through- out the year but still manage to survive. The most well-attended gatherings tend to be away from the city centre.
However, Band On The Wall, a small but industrious music venue which pro- grammes an eclectic roster of visiting artists, including folk, has become the wellspring for a sudden surge of interest in the city’s folksong heritage.
“It began with our education officer,
Tim Chatterton,” explains Band On The Wall CEO, Gavin Sharp, “who came in one day, handed me a copy of The Manchester Bal- lads by Harry Boardman and Roy Palmer and asked ‘Have you ever heard of this?’”
Gavin hadn’t, but Tim’s interest had piqued his and one rainy Sunday afternoon, Gavin leafed through, reading the texts and picking out some of the tunes.
“The tune that really caught me and made me think ‘this is really special, this,’ is A New Song On The Great Demonstration Which Is To Be Made On Kersal Moor, September 24th 1838,” he explains. “I used to live right by Kersal Moor, overlooking the bend in the river, so I did a little bit of dig- ging about the story, the gathering, described in the song. It was real, it was all real.”
Almost immediately, Gavin set off in search of the song’s location. The view across the Moor he had once enjoyed had become obscured by numerous blocks of flats so an enthusiastic caretaker, who claimed to know all about the song and its historical impetus, led him up to the top of one of the blocks to take in that view. The song rang in his ears. He knew that the band in which he plays keys and sax, Edward II, only then recently and tentatively reformed, would have to learn of his discovery.
“I read an account of the demonstra- tion coming from the centre of Manchester, up over Victoria Bridge, a march. And it just hit me as a ska tune. We had to try it.”
Thankfully, the band were just as capti- vated as Gavin, especially bassist Tee Carthy.
“Tee essentially became musical direc- tor, driving the project. In the very early
anchester is synonymous with music; it seeps out of every factory wall. Every old mill hosts a band rehearsal room
days, it was me, Tee and Glen, just keys, bass and vocals, arranging the tunes. Most of the ballads are rolling verses so I knew that we would need to make the choruses. I sat at the piano finding the chords but it was Tee who took the tunes and turned them into fully-fledged songs. I came back in later for the string and brass arrangements,” Gavin explains.
By then, the band realised that this would not just be a concept for an album; this would be a project. Gavin, Tee and the rest of the band were determined for a wider public to hear what they had found, to experience what they had discovered. After all, Manchester’s propensity for shout- ing about its heritage, its musical magnitude, its world firsts, had completely failed: here was an entire collection of enigmatic, thought-provoking ballads that just had to become common knowledge!
“I was utterly, utterly amazed,” Gavin says. “Of course, we aren’t the first to dis- cover these songs. In twenty years, someone else will bubble up and say ‘look what we’ve found!’ But I was totally amazed that, working in Manchester and in music for so long, I hadn’t heard these songs; that the guys hadn’t heard these songs. You know, Band On The Wall is just over the road from where one of the main ballad printers, Pear- son Printers, was located.”
A Heritage Lottery Fund grant allowed Edward II to develop their new found pas- sion into a project, entitled Manchester’s Improving Daily, after the ballad of the same title. The band reworked and record- ed, in their inimitable style, the ballads that captivated them most, alongside other
17 f
Manchester-centric songs – Dirty Old Town and New Order’s Love Vigilantes – that they felt would continue to resonate with future audiences as these ballads had with them. A meeting with Jennifer Reid, a self-proclaimed ‘Broadside Balladress’ and former librarian at Chetham’s Library, one of the world’s old- est public libraries, proved fruitful and she shared her knowledge with the band and wider audiences through workshops and performances. Mark Dowding, a lifelong performer of Manchester ballads, also put forward his interpretations of the songs, while David Jennings, a social archaeologist, researched the songs further and developed a booklet to accompany the record.
date, has realised that this is not necessarily a Manchester-only problem.
T
“The music we’ve performed in Edward II in the past has been, by and large, rurally- based folk tunes and songs. So have folk- songs from all urban areas been lost? They haven’t been lost to the academics, but they seem to have been lost to the oral folk tra- dition. It must be a cultural thing; that cities move quicker, things change.”
And it’s this recognition, that other towns and cities may also have a secret repository of fine ballads just waiting to be rediscovered, that motivates Gavin.
“There should be an England’s Improv-
ing Daily, where we go to all the urban cen- tres and find their lost, urban folksongs,” he says. “But, of course, it’s one step at a time.”
edwardthesecond.co.uk F
he music Manchester is famous for may not be the ballads so lovingly reinterpreted here, but Gavin, in reflection upon the project to
Photo: © Judith Burrows
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