root salad
Yorkston Thorne Khan
A Scotsman, an Englishman and an Indian walk into a bar… Steve Hunt’s buying.
songwriter James Yorkston, bassist Jon Thorne, and singer and sarangi maestro Suhail Yusuf Khan. James Yorkston kindly met me at Celtic Connections for a chat about Yorkston / Thorne / Khan, and this crazy old business we call folk music.
T “Jon’s played with me for a long time –
since about 2009. He’s a very melodic player and a lot of my guitar playing is very thumb-heavy and very rhythmic. My two main guitar playing influences are Missis- sippi John Hurt and D’Gary – the guitarist from Madagascar. I was primarily an electric bass player until I heard Malagasy Guitar, and that inspired me to buy my first acous- tic guitar. Suhail and I first met backstage at a show after I’d done my sound check and I was just idly playing away. He took out his sarangi and started playing along with what I was doing and it just sounded great and really apt, straight away. I said to him, ‘you should just play with me onstage, this evening – is that OK?’ After that we just kept in touch as much as we could and every time he came into the UK he’d come up and play with me.”
“Jon and Suhail are genuine, world- class musicians, and they could play with anyone and not be out of place. I’m a differ- ent guy – I’ve come up from punk and stuff. Jon is hugely influenced by Danny Thomp- son but I’ve never really explored folk-rock, although my first ever show was with Bert Jansch who was extremely generous and lovely. In The Fence Collective you’d play your own songs, your pals’ songs, some tra- ditional songs and and it was all just songs. Then suddenly I’m getting called a ‘folk musician’ and for me ‘folk’ is traditional music – it’s never meant a guy with an acoustic guitar. The reason why I called my 2009 album Folk Songs was to show that these are what folk songs are. The next songwriter album was going to be called Pop Songs, but stuff happened in my life and I kind of grew out of that idea.”
All three contribute memorable and
moving new compositions, including York- ston’s Broken Wave (A Blues For Doogie), Khan’s Sufi Song and Thorne’s haunting title track.
“Jon brought his song in and I played nyckelharpa and Suhail sarangi, and it’s just lovely. There’s something about that take that just has a magical sound – it’s not my song, so I can say that honestly!”
his year of 2016 got off to a truly wondrous start with the arrival of Everything Sacred – the fruits of a collaboration between singer-
The album also includes two striking cover versions in Ivor Cutler’s Little Black Buzzer and Lal Waterson’s Song For Thirza.
“I’m from a tiny village where we had no music except for what came through the radio – mostly via John Peel, Janice Long and Andy Kershaw, so Ivor Cutler was a big part of that. I heard him all my life, and now it’s the same with my kids. Lal Waterson is my favourite-ever songwriter. When her Once In A Blue Moon came out I borrowed it from the record library just because I was an Anne Briggs nut and knew the song Fine Horseman was by her. I remember listening to it and I couldn’t understand why it was so damn good! Her songwriting has stayed with me ever since. Doing an Ivor Cutler song and a Lal Waterson song was just an obvious thing to do – you take the stuff you love and work with it.”
Does that pretty much sum-up the phi- losophy behind Yorkston / Thorne / Khan, I wonder? “There was no thought behind this! As a touring musician you meet a lot of other touring musicians, but to have the
kind of magnetism between people that you want to keep on playing with them even though one’s in Cellardyke, one’s in Delhi, and one’s in the Isle of Wight… that’s a special thing. You couldn’t plan this.”
at this! We’re all really good!’ Some of that stuff is good to watch but it’s like when you go to a session and it’s full of youngsters and they’re playing at a mil- lion-miles-per-hour. That’s nice to hear in the same way that watching a programme about the coast of Ireland is nice to watch, but it doesn’t really suck you in. The Irish music that I love is people like Seamus Ennis, Willie Clancy and Bess Cronin. Her singing is one of those things, like Lal Waterson, that you hear and go: ‘Woah! What is that?!’ That’s what I prefer – the individual and the unique.”
“I
Everything Sacred is out on Domino.
www.yorkstonthornekhan.com
F
’ve seen the kind of acts where you have four names who have been put together and it’s per- haps a bit grinny and ‘Hey! look
21 f
Photo: Linda Jackson
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77 |
Page 78 |
Page 79 |
Page 80 |
Page 81 |
Page 82 |
Page 83 |
Page 84
