f30 “T
he British Army marched to old folk tunes – The Girl I Left Behind Me and The British Grenadiers, all those
tunes, which are great, tunes I play any- way. But then I found this collection called The Pipes Of War. It’s out of print now, but in it are all these exquisite tunes by pipe majors, most of which probably haven’t been played since they were writ- ten. And then I found some German things because I didn’t want it to be all British. That was really hard. Basically every other European country involved in the war marched to opera. Like Wagner. Obviously I couldn’t put any of that on – it’s not what I do. But I did find some anonymously composed tunes so I put them on and discovered there is actually an amazing resource of music for a record of this sort of thing. I have this romantic idea that if Richard Howard had lived he might have played all these tunes.”
Indeed he might have, though it’s doubtful he’d have played them with such grace or arranged them with as much sen- sitivity as Sam Sweeney has done. Rob Har- bron’s concertina, Jack Rutter’s guitar and Becky Price’s piano assist at strategic moments, but it’s essentially a solo album in the purest terms. A cursory listen, in fact, wouldn’t even offer too many clues to the inspiration behind it or that the tunes relate to war at all. This is deliberate.
“In a way it is a sequel but I didn’t want to make something that reminds people of war, I didn’t want it to be a war record. It sounds like a folk record and you wouldn’t know it was anything to do with the war unless you read the sleeve notes.”
So… read the sleeve notes… which tell us the opening track Highland Soldier was collected by George Butterworth, who was killed at the Battle of the Somme. “Oh we had to have some Butterworth in there,” says Sweeney. “There are elements of the pastoral classical style on there and certainly some chamber music styles – I’ve no idea what the folk world will make of it. It’s gentle and beautiful and there are no songs on it… getting instrumental
Sam takes the finished violin to meet its maker.
music past English folkies is always a chal- lenge anyway. I’d love it to capture the hearts of non-folkies.”
With or without the back stories, it’s an extraordinarily evocative work that cli- maxes with fragile poignancy as Eventide (Abide With Me) segues into the tender piano accompaniment to Lament.
“I was so crazy busy I just had a six-day window to write and demo it. I’ve got a lit- tle recording set-up at home and I was so excited by the tunes I’d found I was getting up at 5 am every day while it was still dark to write and demo. It was so exciting I couldn’t sleep. I’d never done anything like it before. But I think I’ve made something beautiful and I’m extremely proud of it.”
He’s still slightly dazed by the reaction
to the original Made In The Great War touring show…
“It was incredible. I’d only ever done gigs before. Big gigs with Bellowhead and so on, but they were still gigs. At the end of the first show at Cheltenham the lights went down and I was expecting everyone to clap and… there was silence. No-one clapped and I was thinking ‘What’s hap- pened? What’s gone wrong?’ But they were sitting there in stunned silence and respect… and then they all stood up. It was bizarre. It was more or less the same each time we did it after that. There would be this ten-second silence while the pic- ture of the grave was still on the screen.”
So… have you got the theatre bug now then, Sam? Gonna be a luvvie?
“No. NO! I’m in no hurry to do anoth- er theatrical show. It was such a lot of work to get it going…”
Sam had driven to Sidmouth from Bournemouth with Rob Harbron, a jour- ney in which they entertained one another by playing selected highlights from each other’s back catalogue “just for a giggle like.” Well, it beats I-Spy.
And the conclusion?
“It’s extraordinary how much I’ve changed. I certainly used to be a lot coarser and more brash in my playing. My influ- ences are so broad. I didn’t play an English
tune until I was fifteen, whereas I played Irishy music for a long time before that and I did it quite badly. There are little record- ings of me when I was twelve and I had a good point of contact with the fiddle; I could make a good sound, but it wasn’t great music. But then listening to Eliza Carthy & The Ratcatchers and meeting Jon Boden and doing Bellowhead and then meeting Rob (Harbron) and Andy (Cutting) it all changed again. In the space of four years my playing became almost unrecog- nisable and it’s almost unrecognisable from then until now. But that’s kind of cool. If you’re just one thing it gets tedious.”
“I’m still trying to work out how to play fiddle, of course I am. If you stagnate, you’ve lost it, and I’m still trying to work out how to play English music on the fid- dle – that’s the reason for doing what I do at the minute.”
his tune sets with early Fairport were the first time I heard the fiddle playing folk music – my dad was obsessed with it and it was electrifying to me. The first time I saw Swarb was at the Ashby Folk Festival. I remember seeing him at Cropredy with his oxygen mask on – Kev Dempsey said it was like playing with a First World War pilot. He was such an inspiration to me, yet there is none of him in my playing at all. The thing about Swarb was whether you loved or hated his playing, what he achieved was a totally individual style – you can tell it’s Swarb within three seconds of listening to him, which is amazing.”
R
Sam ended up meeting, playing with and buying a fiddle off Swarb – the same fiddle he’d used during his celebrated partnership with Martin Carthy.
“Swarb was very supportive to me in the later years of his life. I did an interview with him for Bright Young Folk and want- ed to ask him how and why he invented the open string vibrato and he said, ‘I just did whatever I wanted to do – nobody ever told me how to play.’ He did say, though, that Beryl Marriott told him how not to play. He was a genuine individual, just doing his own thing.”
“He was lovely, such a sweet fellow. He gave me a box of tune books. It was two in the afternoon and he came to the door in his Wee Willie Winkie nightgown and said, ‘Hi Sam, I’m a bit hungover today’. But I went in and we played together. He was just pissing out tunes – he’d say, ‘do you know this one?’ and off he’d go. He was so deaf he’d play really loudly. And he was really obsessed with baroque music and was playing all these really complicated baroque tunes at the end. And we played some old Fairport tunes together – it was great.”
Sweeney’s primary influence when it came to English music, however, was Chris Wood. He was still largely playing Irish style when he saw Wood playing fiddle with the English Acoustic Collective at the Regal Theatre, Worksop and his whole
aised on the folk records beloved of his parents, he was hooked at a young age on the playing of Dave Swarbrick. “Things like Dirty Linen and
Photo: Elly Lucas
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