f48 The Likely Duo
A good folk pairing is more than the sum of the individual parts. Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith are a good example of that, suggests Ian Anderson
somewhere in California coming at us, Hang Ups-style, through a laptop. This time they’re both ensconced in the fRoots dungeon. At the time of that last chat they’d just released their second album Night Hours, and now they’re about to promote their third, Many A Thousand. Once again this skilful duo – Jimmy on banjo and guitar, Sid on guitar and con- certina, both on vocals – seem to have made another great leap forward, both musically and as assured performers. One hesitates to compare, as the music’s quite different, but they could be the Drans- fields or Spiers & Boden of the twenteens.
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“Yeah, Night Hours did feel like a jump up, in terms of musical ambition and the breadth of the material that we were looking at,” says Jimmy. “With the first album, Let The Wind Blow High Or Low, we brought together the music that we’d already been playing for years indi- vidually, got together as a duo and pre- sented it, and that was where we were at. Night Hours felt like a bit of a step up. We were more interested in getting other musicians involved, and so the arrange- ments spread a bit more, and there was a bit more of our own songwriting in there as well. And it seemed like it got out to more people as well.”
“We’ve found ourselves playing in more art centre-y venues,” says Sid. “We make sure that we have a good few folk clubs on the tour, but definitely it’s made us able to draw in more audience and go to bigger places. And we’ve always done well on festivals.”
“It feels like we have been on a sort of apprenticeship in the folk scene for the last few years,” continues Jimmy. “Just doing the folk clubs and doing the folk festivals and slowly working our way up through it, learning how to play the music and perform it for other people. We’ve sort of been learning on the job really, but it does feel like we’re stepping up now.”
hen Jimmy Aldridge & Sid Goldsmith were inter- viewed for a brief intro- ductory Root Salad fea- ture in fR406, Jimmy was
Normally a perfectly self-contained duo, their autumn tour behind the new record will find them taking some of the extra musicians it features on the road.
“We’ve been lucky to have received some Arts Council funding,” explains Sid. “That’s enabling us to bring the band to seven of the gigs on the tour. It’s nice to try something different, but still at the core of it is very much the duo sound.”
“We very much chose the people, not the instruments. We wanted Tom Moore to give it a really good grounding in what we’ve done before with the traditional material. He’s got a really traditional style, fiddle and viola. So knowing that he was holding that side down, which is closer to what we’ve done in the past, it meant that we could get in Fred [Harper], who’s more of a Brazilian-style drummer really. He’s one of these characters that every time you see him you’re smiling so much and we just wanted his energy on it. But he’s very sensitive too.”
“It’s a really interesting one for us at the moment,” explains Jimmy, “because we’re keen to branch out as well as being very much within the folk scene which we enjoy. We’re very keen to take this music elsewhere, because we’re passionate about ensuring that the folk scene rum- bles on for another fifty years in the way that it has since the ’50s and ’60s. So we try to take it out to new venues and alterna- tive festivals and slightly different clubs that you wouldn’t normally see traditional music in. One that we’re really keen on is Fire In The Mountain Festival in mid- Wales. It’s brilliant, and it doesn’t take itself very seriously. But there’s a whole kind of scene around it, an alternative scene that’s bigger than folk music, and that’s one element that sits within it.”
“Generally as you go and gig round at
different folk clubs there will be a core audience there that will turn up every week, regardless of who’s playing, and then we are bringing in our own audience as well – and our audience is mixed, in terms of age and diversity, and that’s really impor- tant to us. We’re trying to think about that in terms of the music that we’re bringing as
well, the stuff we’re writing and the tradi- tional material that we’re finding: there needs to be something in there that is touching on how we view the world, it’s our reflection of that. A lot of our age group are very politicised, and we try to find a music that explores that, and draws them in to traditional music that they might otherwise not be interested in.”
One of the things I like about their choice of songs – their originals and some of the traditional songs that they pick – is that whereas in the early days of the folk revival, the political message was the important thing, the music often wasn’t! It’s good to find intelligent lyrics put with intelligent music that also refers well to the continuing strands of the tradition.
“It’s intentional,” confirms Sid, “but
it’s not really rocket science, you know! What we do is actually at its core pretty simple, they’re not particularly complicat- ed arrangements. I think people do appre- ciate that we don’t try and make it too flashy. Integrity is really important to us, and trying not to make it too modern or showboaty is really important. I think that appeals to both the kind of folk scene that’s already there and younger people that come in and just want to hear some- thing said straight.”
I
say that I’m a huge fan of the Shirley Collins approach, to be as transpar- ent as you can between the song and the audience, not to be concen- trating on the noises you’re making with your mouth and how the next flashy little instrumental line will come up.
“Absolutely,” says Sid. “I think that is so important. We sit just outside the Shirley Collins approach of being transpar- ent; for me, at least, it’s really important to see musicians interacting and hear them move with each other, and I don’t think there’s a lot of space for that if it’s a set arrangement that is super-flashy and about the technicalities. And then the other most important thing is the story, it’s communicating that, and if you’re not feeling that and embodying it, people know, they can pick up on that straight- away and it becomes uninteresting.”
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