f14 Ranting & Reeling
ecently a friend said, “I bet your next column is going to be about how you’ve started a record label called River Lea and the first release by Dublin-based singer Lisa O’Neill has received a five-star review from the Guardian and done very well in the fRoots Critics Poll.”
R And I said, “No, Tony,” because it was
my friend Tony who’d said it. “I won’t be doing that because it would be a blatant abuse of my position.”
And he said, “What are you going to write about, if it’s not your new label that’ll also release albums by Brìghde Chaimbeul and Ye Vagabonds?”
And I said, “I’m going to write about how we can no longer assume there’s a common knowledge between us, and how the internet has inadvertently destroyed the shared cultural touchstones we once took for granted, leading to the widest generation gap since the 1950s.”
There was a time when you could be sure your dad knew the name of your favourite singer (while casting doubt on their gender.) Today I’m unable to tell a YouTube star from a minor witch in the Harry Potter prequels. If I’d had children we’d be alien to one another. The world wide web has ensured we see only what
our algorithms pick for us to see, and ven- turing beyond that finds an indiscernible ball of confusion. The information super- highway is now a rat king.
Take for example the line-up for
2019’s Celtic Connections, where all three of the artists on my new record label will be performing. Despite my vast knowl- edge of traditional Scotch music, many of the names appearing this year are com- pletely unknown to me. And yet I imagine younger fans will be thrilled to see new trad fourpiece Brioscaí, while shrugging their shoulders at the news of a concert by legendary Gaelic singer Briana MacKenzie, or a 35th-anniversary ceilidh night with Sporan Sporan.
I fear the same will happen at Sid-
mouth FolkWeek (newly renamed The Sid- mouth Folk Festival’s Week Of Folk In Sid- mouth). Every generation of festival goer once spoke reverentially of song collector turned singer Janis Pastry, and never missed a show by the legendary Maids & Men (despite only one Maid remaining from the line-up that recorded the classic, if dated, Devon Help Us LP). Recent conversations with twenty-something singers who’ve emerged on the scene with their hair and guitars has revealed most have never even heard Robin Stanner’s game-changing third
record Robin’s Day, even
though earlier releases Robin The Rich and Dis-Robin now command triple figures on inter- net auction sites.
And why
should they care? New music comes so thick and fast out of
their internet phones that they’ve no time to investigate what older fans might ven- ture to call the canon. This week alone has seen new albums by Merkin, Alfonse & the Wolf Ghosts and Davina McCall. I must con- fess to have only heard one of those, and an acquaintance of mine described them as “Talented but lacking any knowledge of the source material; appearing baffled when asked if they’d heard the version of the bal- lad they were singing that was collected by Jim ‘Feathers’ Peacock in the 1940s.”
And when I told Tony this he replied,
“You should probably just talk about your new record label. I’m pretty sure you’ve done this joke before.”
Tim Chipping
The Elusive Ethnomusicologist I
n Sidmouth this summer, whilst danc- ing on a hot sunny day amongst all the Morris sides, musicians, singers, poets, storytellers and fabulous crea- tures, a dark night in early ’80s New York sprang to mind.
I’d been reading about Brian Eno tak- ing a yellow taxi to meet a friend. He thought it was a joke when the driver stopped in a rough ‘no-go’ neighbour- hood. “No sir, this is it.” Eno got out of the cab. He was in a derelict street outside a warehouse with no immediately dis- cernible door. Eventually getting into a lift he found it took him up to an amazing $2 million loft.
Asking his host how she liked it here,
she said “It’s wonderful. Best place I’ve ever lived.” For her, ‘here’ meant “In this loft.” When outside the door is chaos you feel you can’t control, Eno says, you withdraw. “‘Here’ cannot be the whole situation that affects your life.” And “if you don’t care about your neighbourhood, then you won’t create a neighbourhood community.”
Still in New York he noticed that ‘now’ meant this hour. In Woodbridge, Suffolk, where Eno’s from, it can mean this year. For the Hopi Indians it encompasses all your ancestors and all the descendants
you can imagine – so you’re simply a part of the scheme of things. He argues that when we have a concept of ‘now’ that’s very short we become very big in relation to it. Emphasis shifts onto self. It’s given rise to the ‘me generation’. The upshot of a ‘small here’ and a ‘short now’, Eno sug- gests, is a sense of irresponsibility.
In Sidmouth, I felt that all those work-
ing in folk’s traditions are concerned with building community. Their sense of ‘here’ is outward looking, interconnecting with others and the environment. Folk artists tell me how ‘they are bearers of the tradi- tion’. They’re creatively realising it in the moment whilst joining hands with each other through the ages. They dance in line, in a long now.
Well, it would be long if climate-
change wasn’t so likely to put a short end to it. Man-made impact on global warm- ing is causing rising mass mortality events, destroying bio-diversity, crops, timber, fisheries, and wiping out entire eco-sys- tems. Dormant bacteria adapt quickly to new environments and are activated by higher temperatures. These kill animals (200,000, 60% of the worlds Saiga ante- lope population, died on a Kazakhstan steppe in a week). They kill humans and spread disease into new areas.
Climate change
demands long- term thinking and a global sense of com- munity.
If on that
New York night the taxi had stopped mid- town and Eno had taken the express lift in Trump Tower, he might have found the cli- mate change denier – whose ‘now’ is always this second’s Twitter feed and whose ‘here’ is confined to his personal space (though given his new job, the orange madman can wield control over a much wider area). And by explaining the impact of “small here and short now,” Eno may have shed light on Trump’s idiotic, catastrophic egotism, if not his raging insanity.
But wouldn’t it be just as insane for all of us who love dancing in the sunshine, creatively and instinctively engaging in long-term thinking, not to – in any way we can – address the issues that need it?
Elizabeth Kinder
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