49f J
immy reckons that “We’ve kind of made a virtue out of our lack of musical training, our approach is very straight and clear and sim- ple. There are some incredible musicians on the scene at the moment, but with all of that training you have such a huge musical vocabulary that it can tend to focus on where you can go with that, rather than the core of the song. We have very limited vocabulary, and so we focus on what that song is saying.”
The pair have long been involved in sessions, having recently started a monthly song swap in Bristol, and also are no strangers to playing in ceilidh bands and other community-based activities.
“We’re in a ceilidh band that spun out of a friendship group. We’ve known each other for years and everyone has different levels of musical training, but we kind of came together through a shared love of music, and things like politics and sustain- ability and a lifestyle that’s a bit closer to living to the land. We started playing lots of tunes together, and they were English, Scottish, Irish, American tunes, all sorts, a real hodgepodge! It’s got bigger and big- ger, and now, if we put a ceilidh on, there’s two, three hundred people that don’t know the dances, they don’t know the music, but they come along because they’re part of that scene and they want to go for it, and they’re riotous and chaotic, but loads of fun.”
Their main ceilidh band is Fitty
Gomash. “We did a main stage slot at Shambala a few years ago.” [The glorious mayhem ensuing from their take on Mrs McGrath can be unearthed on YouTube.] “There is a bigger scene around this, like the Nest Collective doing their Ceilidh Lib- eration Front; we’ve both played in that at different times. And then the Cut A Shine Barn Dance Collective – they’re not your old traditional English ceilidh, you know. They have these incredibly charismatic front people that really host an evening.”
When there was the big construction boom in folk clubs in the 1960s, it went from a position of hardly any to a thousand clubs in very few years. At the time, with a few exceptions, the audience, the artists and the organisers were mostly the same age. Anybody over the age of thirty was viewed as an old person! There’s a feeling that younger artists need to step up to the mark now and do something again.
Jimmy agrees. “We feel hugely indebted to the folk circuit, because a lot of the clubs took us on at a point in our musical journey where we just had no pro- file at all, and they took a punt and started giving us gigs, and we’ve learnt so much from doing that – not just about perform- ing, but also the knowledge of the tradi- tion that is held within those clubs is incredible. We’ve learnt a huge amount from it and want to keep being part of it and putting back in. But it is true that a lot of these clubs are probably going to go in the next few years. We do need to think, as a scene, as a whole, what the future folk scene looks like, because there are a lot of gigs moving into arts centres and theatres, and they’re concerts, they’re not having floor spots and a raffle.”
“It’s that participatory element of the folk scene that is such a key part of it in terms of passing the tradition on. There’s another side as well, which is that a lot of the clubs formed around political ideas. There was a wider interest in left-wing politics in the ’60s that people were expressing through their music, and clubs bubbled up around that. For me, it’s great, we really enjoy playing arts centres and theatres, but they’re not political spaces at all. What are those political spaces that are going to replace folk clubs, where you can, through your music, express your politics and discuss ideas?”
“The place that we are seeing that model is the house concert scene,” thinks Sid. “And there are some great venues for that now. But still not the floor spot thing,
there’s not so much of that. But it is very DIY, the costs are low, so the artist can gen- erally get a full space and a decent wage without having to get too many people through the door, and they’re likely to be people that they’ve not played to before, because they’re part of a community.”
the new venues won’t be what people who’ve been part of the scene for a long time are going to like. And it’ll be differ- ent for us, as artists; we’re going to have to learn how to perform to different audi- ences. But maybe that’s OK, and that is a natural kind of step that the scene needs to change. We come across a lot of people who love traditional music, and feel that they are able to express themselves in that form of music, but if you put them in a folk club, to be frank, they don’t feel com- fortable. For us, it’s important that there’s diversity as well. So we play some of the traditional clubs that have been going for a long time and run by the same people for a long time, but it’s important that the next week we’re playing in a venue to young people, and I like that mix.”
“T
“It is a very white and mostly old scene at the moment, and to change that is going to mean a lot of shift in terms of the venue, in terms of the people who are at the front of the scene and the music that’s played. A lot of the music that we’re trying to write at the moment in the duo is trying to reflect on modern Britain and saying about some of the big, crunchy problems that are going on. We’re hoping that does bring in a more diverse audience, in terms of age, in terms of ethnicity, but yeah, as I say, it’s going to require some shifting. That might mean it’s not the same music that is put forward in the folk scene as has been.”
jimmyandsidduo.com F
he folk scene is going to change in the next few years,” continues Jimmy, “and it’s going to look different, and a lot of
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