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ane Griffiths (who is married to Fletcher) started learning piano and violin when she was seven, having seen her great-grandfa- ther’s fiddle in the attic. “I thought it was so beautiful, I wanted to play that. Growing up, she heard a lot of violin con- certos and piano pieces along with country & western and Irish music. “There was a C&W compilation album that came out in the early ’80s, called Friends. It was adver- tised on the telly. I was about eight. We sent away for it for my mum and we got it on a cassette and would play it in the car. We sang lots of harmonies in the car, that’s how I learnt to harmonise.”
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When she was seven, her parents took her to a pub where there was an Irish music session and Griffiths played along. She did a lot of improvising along with playing “seri- ous violin” and says she “endured specialist music schools from the age of eleven to eigh- teen” which put her off classical music com- pletely. After studying history at Wadham College, Oxford, she played music in London for a year, teaming with a singer-songwriter and going with her to tour Australia.
It was when she returned to Oxford from Australia that she pitched up at the Catweazle club and hooked up with Letcher and Webber. Now also working freelance for Oxford University Press, she edited the excel- lent book and CD set Traditional Fiddle (OUP) published this year that explores regional fid- dle styles from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, with contributions from world- renowned fiddlers Kevin Burke, John Dipper, Liz Doherty, Nancy Kerr, Sian Phillips, Aidan O’Rourke, Jenna Reid, and Patsy Reid.
Josie Webber arrived in Oxford with a boyfriend after studying music and psychol- ogy at Roehampton. She’d started playing
piano around the age of five, becoming a relatively late starter on the cello – not pick- ing it up until the age of eight. Her parents favoured classical music but, influenced by her older brother’s taste in music by the time she entered her teens, Webber was a keen fan of Van Morrison and Joni Mitchell.
She stayed in Oxford, drawn by its vibrant music scene, and started playing with Letcher whom she also met in the Catweazle Club. They tentatively played a few gigs and were joined, after a hiatus, by other Catweazle habitués Fletcher and Grif- fiths in 2004.
In 2008 the quartet, by then calling
themselves Telling The Bees, released their eponymous first album. To my ears, Letch- er’s teenage musical preferences are not so far from the surface. “I listened to loads of prog rock, Steve Hillage, Yes, Gong, Tanger- ine Dream, then early Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, John Martyn. And Hawkwind.”
There was, he says “something extraor- dinary going on at that time. You want to say there was something in the water.” He pauses. “There was, it was LSD, but it wasn’t just LSD.” It was a search for transcendence – that which Letcher was inspired to explore through mushrooms and music. “You can find folk tunes and play them over and over again and something happens, there’s a shift and that’s what excites me about folk music. It’s the tunes that inspire me.”
But how does he think music connects with transcendence?
“I think music predates language. I have an eighteen-month daughter. It’s interesting watching her acquire language, she’s singing before she can speak… when she says goodbye it’s dad a doo, dad a doo… [he sings]. Music has this profound
effect of bringing people together because it’s before language, it transcends lan- guage, and then when you add repetitive tunes, there is the possibility [of transcen- dence] if everybody is willing to go with where the music carries you. What I live for is those moments where I’m not playing but the song or the music or the tune is pouring through me and there’s that connection with the audience and the circle is complete.”
“I think that was part of our musical culture here in these islands but it’s so long ago; we’ve had the Romans and 2000 years of Christianity, not renowned in these parts for transcendence. But I found in road protest culture that we were making music round the fire every night, day in day out, playing and playing and playing. Some of the time it didn’t work, but most of the time it was extraordinary. How primal can you get, playing round a fire, a community with a cause, with a common enemy and sudden- ly this remarkable stuff is happening. You get it when you’re playing sessions, you get it when you’re playing for dancing, but it’s not really part of the English folk scene.”
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ocial protest, he says, is absolutely a basic function of folk music, “but playing for transcendence is a different thing. There are so many aspects to folk. There’s the bardic element where somebody is relating a story that is of value to the community in a way that the community can participate in. Then there’s playing for transcendence. They’re on a spectrum, all part of the bardic role. I think the folk music scene has got the bardic thing absolutely nailed in creating new songs that are keeping the tradition alive, part of contemporary experience. Where it’s less comfortable is when they talk about transcendence. If you go to a
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