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protest was simple… binary, but Woody Guthrie would be dismissed as naive now. There is so much to protest about but the landscape is no longer black and white, protest songs need to grow up.”
T It’s a point about which his old partner in crime Martin Carthy
feels strongly. “Straight agitprop is too easy,” he concurred. “I’ve been listening to some of the stuff that was done in the ’50s and ’60s, and yes it is much more complex than that now. We’ve just seen an election where the person who openly lied through his teeth basical- ly won by keeping it simple. It’s horrifying, it turns everything on its head, and we can stand there and say what a liar, but it doesn’t make a bit of difference. It really does complicate the issue. You tell the truth and no body cares. You lie and everybody says yeah!”
Wood’s recently released So Much To Defend meets these mod- ern complexities with the wiles and the bare face of a contemporary folk singer. The songs are a record of what is happening to the peo- ple involved, they state the facts and leave us to ask the questions; to reflect on what he has just told us. We can’t say we didn’t know.
The title track follows the humdrum of a collection of lives, shrewdly highlighting tiny elements that give reason or purpose to each of the characters. The inspiration for the song was very close to home. “I live in the south east of England. As I return from a tour and get closer to London I can feel the driving on the motorway becoming more tense, the stopping distances get shorter, the lane changing gets more frequent and, by the time I hit the M25 it’s like a behavioural sink,” Wood explained. “As my wife once said ‘You know all those people with an over-developed sense of entitle- ment… well, what happens when they all arrive at Waitrose car park at the same time?’”
“But we are not a monoculture, and it is the way the rest of us cope under the aspirational stress imposed by others that I find so cool. It’s the mental, emotional and spiritual resourcefulness that people employ to get through their day that revives my faith in humanity. This ‘mosaic of insularities’ reveals a world of characters and stories that feel both contemporary and timeless. Some days I feel like I’m going to bump into Dickens out on the marsh or Shake- speare in the gents.”
1887 is AE Housman’s poem From Clee To Heaven The Beacon
Burns (A Shropshire Lad 1) put to music, with stark piano by Martin Butler and the voice of Chris Wood. “I’d never read any Housman,” admitted Wood, “and then, one day I had a look at Shropshire Lad and these were the first words I read. I sent [Martin Butler] the Hous- man words and he came back with a beautiful melody which I knocked all the edges off so I could get my larynx around it. Having recorded John Clare’s words and now AE Housman with Martin I find singing the words of these great Englishmen is some of the most emotional music I’ve ever made.”
However with the finger squarely pointed at ‘them’, those in
power, the rich and the untouchable, that doesn’t take away our responsibility. The Shallow End reminds us that we can’t relinquish all the decisions, all the accountability to ‘them.’ “The answer to my problems is spend, spend, spend/All the noise is coming from the shallow end.” “It’s a line I heard a cleric use to describe the level of discussion in the Church of England,” said Wood. “It’s just another line that was too good to let go. John Cooper Clarke say he’s got notebooks full of one-liners waiting to have poems written around them and, now, after a few years at it, I’ve got a few of those note- books too.”
“Increasingly, my songs refuse to judge or preach” said Wood of
his writing. So Much To Defend illustrates that. “I guess I’m writing snapshots of the world I’m living in. Maybe you recognise some of the people in those songs, maybe you recognise yourself.”
With his traditional grounding, and his folk instinct, he has observed, acted as witness, and stated the truth. He has continued a noble custom. A fine heritage. Chris Wood, “the proud raspberry seed in the back tooth of the establishment. Anon.”
chriswoodmusic.co.uk F
his is an important point for Wood, as so much of the subject matter of his writing lays bare the minutiae, the rules, the norms and the attitudes that are keeping everyone in their place in today’s society. “The nature of protest has changed,” he told me. “Once upon a time
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