London
21 September 2013
It is a mild, early autumn Saturday night and Upper Street is the very picture of modern urban revelry. Outside the doorways of fashionable bars and clubs, the pavements are clotted with thick knots of drinkers and smokers, the ‘dun-tsch, dun-tsch, dun-tsch’ beat of anonymous dance music bleeding out from their dimly-lit interiors into the warm evening air.
A doorway. Just to step through it allows the entrant immediately to become a time traveller, hurtling backwards decades in time, centuries even, to an almost vanished world, one that to the majority of the modern metropolitans outside is now almost as remote as that of Watt Tyler leading the Peasants’ Revolt or the sight of the Roman Legio IX Hispana (Ninth Spanish Legion) encampment in Lincoln. Yet for one night only, those of us lucky enough to step inside can lift the lid and look into a strange and wonderful box of delights.
Performing eight “traditional English tunes,” there is nothing revelatory about the material or their presentation of it, yet the austere beauty of the songs, and the passionate devotion of the players more than breach any over-familiarity or cynicism. “Greensleeves,” a Morris tune by Gloucestershire fiddler Stephen Baldwin (said by him in 1950 to be “one of the oldest there is; my father said it was an old tune in his time”) is utterly exquisite, whilst “The Dark Eyed Sailor,” an old East Anglian tune, relates the sorry story of a young lady whose virtue is undone by the allure of a jolly Jack Tar. The highlight though is arguable “Bold William Taylor” (dating back several hundred years and covered by such luminaries as Martin Carthy and June Tabor), which tells the enormously fun tale of a young girl who, when her true love is taken away to go and fight in the navy, dresses up as a man and sets off to find him. A somewhat unfortunate wardrobe malfunction in the heat of battle rather exposes the fact that she’s not quite the sort of fellow that everyone took her to be yet, after having shot the titular Taylor for consorting with another woman, Bold William’s commanding officer (in an unprecedented act of gender equality some 150-odd years before the Sex Discrimination Act 1975), overlooks this and makes her his new field commander.
The only fly in the ointment for the duo – who are clearly and disarmingly cognisant of their place in this special event – is Joynes’ trouble tuning and retuning between songs. With the heat and the light and the audience’s stare of expectation, the sharpest ear can occasionally have trouble working from EADGBE to DADGAD and back again – even Davy Graham himself tripped up on this one from time to time. Joynes might take a tip from an audience member sitting attentively a few rows from the front: Thurston Moore always has a sufficient stock of tuned guitars on hand to keep exactly this kind of technical intrusion to a minimum. That is small beer really, though, for in such a high-pressure situation Hladowski and Joynes have delivered a joyous performance.
Whilst packing up his guitar Joynes calmly tells the audience “In 15 minutes it’ll be Shirley Collins, which is a sentence I never expected to hear myself say,” and it’s difficult to disagree with him. A sense of the audience’s excitement is palpable as they await the entrance of the woman that Billy Bragg once memorably referred to as “without doubt one of England’s greatest cultural treasures.”
Instead, accompanied by Barnes, she presents I’m a Romany Rai, an illustrated lecture about the Gypsy singers and songs of southern England. At first it’s hard to stifle the creeping tendrils of disappointment (like seeing Scott Walker sitting in the control room at his Drifting & Tilting event and having to pretend that you really don’t mind not seeing him sing the songs himself), but it quickly obvious that this is really something really very special and intimate, and that those in the room are privileged to have one of the most important British singers of the last 100 years guide us through a tour of a closed and secret world.
The lecture focuses on the songs collected by Peter Kennedy and Mikes Yates for the BBC in a period from the 1950s through to the 1970s. With Collins narrating and Barnes providing accompanying voices, we move from the old lavender street cries sung by Janet Penfold in Battersea to Louie Fuller’s tales of hard seasonal labour in “Hopping Down in Kent” to Jasper Smith singing “Hartlake Bridge,2 the tragic story of the death of 30 of the aforementioned hop pickers in 1853 when their horse tripped as it was crossing the side of the bridge, their wagon collided with the side, and the bridge collapsed into the river below, already swollen with floodwater and now a malignant whirlpool of strong currents.
The contrast between what we seeing and hearing in here, the lives of hardship, forbearance, longing and hope, and the relentless – and thoughtless – leisure consumption happening only feet from the door of the venue are hard to miss and this, perhaps, is no small part of what Collins is trying to ask the audience to consider. There are lessons to be taught to us by these sepia ghosts of our collective past, if only we are smart enough to listen to them.
Though there remained a twinge of sadness at not hearing Shirley Collins herself sing, I felt profoundly grateful to have witnessed this. And the sight of Thurston Moore, alternative guitar hero of American noise music, listening attentively as six year old Sheila Smith sings the little ditty “Sweet William” is surely one to be treasured forever.
Yet intense was always Comus’ speciality, and as they work through “Diana,” “Out of the Coma” and “The Return” (played in tribute to Henry Cow’s fantastic Lindsay Cooper, who had played with Comus for a year, and who had passed away only three days previously), it is (thankfully) obvious for all to see that the years have done nothing to diminish Comus’ threatening force. True, Roger Wootton’s voice cannot rise to quite the same quivering levels of demented hysteria as in his youth, but this loss has been tempered by the gain of the resonance of age, the songs now acquiring an added layer of growling menace from his lower register.
On stepping back out of the doorway, back into an outside world that seems somewhat cheap and tawdry in relation to what we have just witnessed, there may have been disappointment, yet there is not. I walk home on a complete high.
-David Solomons-
