15 f Ranting & Reeling

ome people go on holiday to experience weather they don’t get at home. Others to see old build- ings they don’t have at home. And some just to be somewhere that isn’t home. All valid reasons for a holiday. But they each have the same goal: happiness. We go on holiday to be happier than we are when we’re not on holiday.

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Me, I go on holiday to sit in a familiar pub and listen to Tim Eriksen and Nell Ní Chróinín singing unaccompanied songs into the early hours. I couldn’t be happier in that moment.

Not just those two people, you under- stand. That would be a highly specific holi- day and somewhat creepy for the afore- mentioned individuals. I’m happy with any informal singing from anyone, under the right circumstances. But on my most recent holiday it just so happened that it was Nell and Tim who were singing, and they’re my two favourite late-night voices.

I also sang a song I could almost

remember. My friend James sang too. And a Slovakian dancer sang a song that was apparently so sad her friend started cry- ing. But I imagine it was the happy sort of crying since they, like us, were on holiday.

This particular holiday was at Sid-

mouth FolkWeek, of which a proper review will appear in the next issue (by “proper review” I mean it will be more of this nonsense only with pictures of things I probably didn’t see). But I went to Sidmouth in pursuit of exactly the level of happiness I experienced during that first night of impromptu song, so there was a danger I’d peaked too soon. The rest of the week could’ve been spent in despair watching Molly dancers in the rain. But it wasn’t.

Some days later, part way through a concert by Maz O’Connor total happiness returned. It wasn’t the song she was singing, which was most likely miserable, but the awareness that in that precise moment all was well with my world, if only briefly. I was quite literally in my happy place. All five glee indicators lit up during the next act too. Dublin band Lynched have been written about in these pages but that night they were approxi- mately seven times better than we’ve pre- viously said they were. Each song made me cry and I knew I couldn’t be happier.

Contrary to the sickening memes some of your friends post on Facebook, most neuroscientists will argue that there

is a limit to human happi- ness. When I mentioned this to a couple of people they responded with the kind of face normally reserved for someone telling you they’ll be dead soon. But I find it gratify- ing information. It’s the reason why the old adage that money can’t buy happiness is true – and that’s got to be a comfort to those of us working in folk music.

The pleasure we feel from content-

ment doesn’t grow exponentially with each successive nice occurrence until joy juice jets from our ears like a spouting whale. There’s a ceiling to it; a point where we have all the happiness our con- sciousness can appreciate. And when it happens, whether you’re on a beach, at an ancient ruin, in a caravan or the side room of The Bedford Hotel at 2am, remember it was what you came for.

Tim Chipping

The Elusive Ethnomusicologist C

hef: “I just want to tell you that drugs are bad.” Stan: “We know, we know, that’s what everybody says.” Chef: “Right, but do you know why they’re bad?” Kyle (like a robot): “Because they’re an addictive solu- tion to a greater problem causing disease of both body and mind with consequences far outweighing their supposed benefits.” Chef: “And do you have any idea what that means?” Kyle: “No.” Cartman: “I know. Drugs are bad because if you do drugs you’re a hippy, and hippies suck.

I hadn’t imagined that a trip to Priddy Folk Festival would make me think of South Park. But even without taking the psychotropic mushrooms that on good authority (Andy Letcher) were apparently popping up all around us in the Mendips, it was difficult not to be reminded of at least one of the consequences of drug use, namely that it seeps into the zeitgeist through music, mainly.

My mate Nick wrote his thesis on drugs and creativity when we were both studying music, undertaking impressively thorough investigation which went basi- cally from jazz (heroin) through late ’60s pop (pot), ’70s prog rock (LSD), punk rock (speed), ’80s power pop (cocaine), ’90s rave (ecstasy) and indie pop (heroin) to 21st

Century manufactured pop (designer drugs). Obviously this is just a rough out- line and there are pockets of the popula- tion busy taking all the drugs all the time regardless of their musical taste and/or output. And obviously there are musicians who come up with stuff completely suc- cessfully without the assistance of narcotics.

And there are those who, like one of the members of a band I saw in New York, are inspired to brilliance which is always short-lived due to entirely misjudging the intake/performance/composition ratio. In his case it was a combination of coke/ alcohol/MDMA and tight leather trousers that did for him. Having bent over back- wards and onto the floor during a partic- ularly wild improvised guitar solo he was unable to get up again until a roadie came to his assistance. Which rather spoilt the effect. But thinking about it, coke and leather trousers seem to go together, like LSD and floaty Merlin coats, peasant blouses and bell-bottoms. And very skinny ripped jeans and heroin.

And now with Spotify and there being all kinds of music through all time immediately accessible we find all kinds of fashions in favour whether for drugs or clothes – even peasant blouses, Merlin coats and bell bottoms. We’ve lost the

irony. Irony is so post-modern. We’ve arrived in a post post- modern melt- ing pot. In this age of global monolithic cor- porations and instant accessi- bility, anything goes.

Priddy was a reminder of a

time when life was dictated by crops and the seasons, a time when people were connected to the land. But the ancient folk songs chimed with the current zeit- geist, informed by growing environmental concern and increased ecological under- standing and the need to stand up to The Man. Priddy’s talk of mushrooms and a wafting scent of marijuana seemed fitting, the clothes (which generally weren’t) seemed freeing.

Cartman was wrong. Hippies don’t suck. They’ve always banged on about the interconnectedness of everything, whether on drugs or not. And they will inherit the Earth. What’s left of it.

Elizabeth Kinder