Bruce Charlton's Notions

*

One Misty Moisty Morning was the first Steeleye Span track that I heard, the first electric folk music, and it led onto the first time in my life that music became very important to me.

At the time I heard it I was, rather unhappily, 'into' underground and progressive rock music - none of which I have since regarded to with enjoyment. So I was listening to a late evening BBC radio programme which played mostly this kind of stuff - hosted by a DJ called John Peel. However, Peel had eclectic tastes and on this occasion played something from a new album by Steeleye Span: this signalled the kind of music that I had been waiting for. 

Because some time earlier I had discovered Tolkien; and that had changed my life - and the implication of Tolkien seemed very much against pop and rock music, whereas Steeleye Span sang epic ballads about elves and the supernatural, earthly songs about ordinary people such as milkmaids and sailors, and played jigs and reels and other Hobbit-like dances.

Of course, they did this with un-Tolkien-like electric instruments such as guitar, bass, violin, dulcimer... but somehow that made it better, because electric folk seemed to represent the infusion of modernity by folk influences, a saving of shallow civilization by ancient thoughts - for me, then, it seemed to be the future.

Staying with Steeleye Span I moved to explore other electric folk, and other folk music of all kinds; also I discovered medieval and renaissance music- and then Bach and Telemann as the first classical composers I engaged with, at least partly because they used the Treble Recorder which I had come to like through early music and folk.

So, this Desert Island Disc of Steeleye Span represents for me that teen period of musical exploration and expansion; during which music came to occupy a more central place in my life than before or since. And although Misty Moisty is a long way from being my favourite Span track, I do still enjoy it.

*

Demon Lover is a little known example of how - in the early 1970s - Steeleye Span were often able to capture the uncanny and supernatural style of Romanticism that was pioneered by Coleridge. The chilling lyrics are derived from an ancient Border Ballad - and seem to refer to a demon who masquerades as a beautiful fairy in order to entice-away a young wife.

The strands of English folk music have included this uncanny element; although not many performers are able to treat it with the seriousness required for it really to hit home. In Steeleye Span's case, it was specifically the lead guitarist and vocalist Robert Johnson who brought this into the band (e.g. King Henry, Alison Gross, Thomas the Rhymer, Long Lankin).

This mood is quite easy to for modern people ruin by any taint of irony or commercialism - and it only lasted for the first four albums of Johnson's membership of Steeleye, being largely spoiled by the producer Mike Batt - after which Johnson left Steeleye to make a 'concept album' of Lord Dunsany's novel The King of Elfland's Daughter.

As I have often remarked, it is a sadness to me that this early 70s Romantic Revival, of which The Watersons, Steeleye Span and The Albion Country Band were a part; and which was quite genuine in terms of its picking-up the impulse from Blake, Coleridge and Wordsworth; failed to kick-on by rejecting and failing to Romanticise Christianity.

(Many of the adherents seem to have had neo-pagan, anything-but-Christian, sympathies - although the Watersons recorded many gospel revival songs, and some Christmas carols were popular.)

Instead, this reborn Romanticism was (yet-again) appropriated (especially by journalists, critics and scholars) and distorted/ diverted into Leftist politics... It is hard to blame musicians for failing to do what people seemingly better equipped also failed to do, and the true direction of which was, and is, novel and far from obvious; nonetheless it is a sadness.

While I have enjoyed plenty of folk music since this time - it always lacks the implied depths and serious intent of those early years.

This begins as a really wonderful bit of un-accommpanied singing by a line-up of Steeleye Span (not the one depicted) containing three of the premier vocalists of the British folk scene - Maddy Prior, Martin Carthy (providing a rock solid bass - sounding rather like a human Crumhorn); and John Kirkpatrick as tenor - not quite of the god-like status of Prior and Carthy, but probably the best-ever anglo-concertina/ melodeon player. 

Plus the excellent Tim Hart and Rick Kemp to make an exceptionally rich sound (I'm guessing the drummer Nigel Pegrum didn't sing).

But Kirkpatrick had a considerable gift for harmonization - and my assumption is that it was he who made the exceptionally varied and evolving vocal arrangement.

Anyway, this is one of those pieces that when I hear it 'the centuries roll back'.

Interestingly, I believe I was at the first public perfomance of this piece by the new Steeleye line-up of 1977 - somewhere (I have forgotten where) in rural mid-Somerset.

*

[For an excellently written essay on what was 'electric folk' music, go to the Wikipedia - accessed today.]

*

In order of release:

1. Steeleye Span - Parcel of Rogues. It in 1973, when this album had just been released, that I heard on the radio "One Misty Moisty Morning" - and was smitten.

2. Ashley Hutchings and others - Morris On, 1972 (but I didn't hear it until a couple of years later). Electric Morris dancing and song! I borrowed an accordeon, so I was John Kirkpatrick; my friend Gareth got a bass guitar, so he was Ashley Hutchings - and that was the totality of our electric folk band...

3. Ashley Hutchings and John Kirkpatrick and others - The Compleat Dancing Master, 1974. A sequence of words and music about dancing from medieval (the time of Chaucer) to 19th century (Thomas Hardy) with a wonderful cast of actors and musicians. The perfect 'concept album'.

4. Steeleye Span - Commoner's Crown, 1975. It is very hard to choose (how can I miss out mentioning "Thomas the Rhymer" from Now we are six?) but I suppose this was the very best of Steeleye's albums, with "Long Lankin" as its summit; and I love "Bach goes to Limerick".

5. The Albion Country Band - Battle of the Field, 1976. A minor miracle of interlocking parts - including Martin Carthy at his uncompromising best in "Gallant Poacher" and the weirdly wonderful oboe of Sue Harris...

Ah, what an era. Short but deliciously sweet.

*

Aide from Steeleye Span, my favourite group of 1974 was certainly Gryphon; a four peice band with recorders, crumhorns and bassoon, guitar and percussion - who performed mostly Medieval and Tudor music with a folky verve and humour;  and some jazzy improvisations



Including 'Mummerset' accents and musical jokes:


In the late spring of 1974 I saw the my Dream Team combination of Gryphon supporting Steeleye Span at the Colston Hall in Bristol - maybe the best concert ever, for me?

Within a year - as seemed to happen a lot in the seventies, Gryphon had brought in electric guitars  'progressed' towards rock music - and were involved in providing music for the Royal Shakespeare Company Tempest production - leading to perhaps their loveliest achievement - the title track from the second album Midnight Mushrumps.



And in less than a year from MM, the 'progression' of Gryphon had essentially left-behind their early selves and they became a pure rock band, at which point I lost interest.

But the first album and about half of the second one, remain firm favourites - and the abiding image or vision of an exceptional group of highly musical young men having fun:

*
Reader's Question: "I've often wondered about the phenomenon of late-60s British folk rock. That is, in the context of the hedonistic excess of the era, were those songs of traditional England a reactionary thread or was this a process of co-option of older motifs into a nihlistic era? The morality expressed in many of those songs was very pre-sexual revolution but the scene was very similar to typical rocker decadence. Thoughts?"

My Answer: I'm never altogether sure what is meant by folk rock - but I will assume you mean the movement of whom Ashleigh Hutchings was instigator - the main thread being Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span and their spin-offs - or what people sometimes call 'electric folk'. 

If so, I think you have encapsulated the reality - and the point that artists and performers lives, and the context of performance, are often at odds (the social environment of The Globe, for instance, often very much at odds with the sublime sentiments of Shakespeare - as was, no doubt, Shakespeare's own life) . 

As 'art' the folk rock movement was largely a relatively healthy neo-paganism backlash, clustering with the interest in Tolkien, DH Laurence, Thomas Hardy, Blake - love of the countryside and old architecture, the revival of Morris dancing, Mummers Plays. 

Politically, the folk rock movement was solidly Old Left, and included a lot of overt pro-union/ anti-boss material - but there was a strain of William Morrisite socialist utopianism. 

Religiously, there was no Christianity beyond the general affection of old churches and old ways; and sexually I would say that the morality was traditional - either a Rabelasian celebration of lust (e.g songs with jokey euphemisms like 'cuckoo's nest) or else celebrating love and marriage and fertility.  

So, as always a mixed picture - and a temporary phase. The movement was certainly not nihilistic; but lacked the courage and strength of a full religious faith... but then so did almost all the movements of that era. 

I still regard the best of it - eg much of mid seventies Steeleye Span, or the Compleat Dancing Master and Morris On albums - as among the best 'popular' music I have ever heard.

*  

From Steeleye Span - electric folk music of the early 1970s at its wonderful best.

The first part is a composite Luddite social history/ protest ballad about the impact of factories on the lives of handloom weavers, and of love among the weavers - and remarkable for its fiddle 'obbligato' and top-notch singing (and word-pointing), also an astonishing and irregular time signature and syncopation using electric guitars, bass and dulcimer.

(There was a vogue for unconventional time signatures in early 70s rock - the most famous is perhaps the 5/4 rhythm used in Jethro Tull's Living in the Past.)

The second part (starting at 4:25) is a lament for the old days, done by Maddy Prior as a multi-track unaccompanied harmonization - And if you can concentrate and listen to this in stereo, without your eyes welling and neck hairs prickling... well, you must have a heart of stone or a tin ear, or both!

This electric folk version of a Robin Hood ballad is something which I always find very cheerful and Christmassy - reminding me in particular of Christmas 1975, just after Steeleye Span released the All Around My Hat (from which this comes) - a time when I was deeply 'into' electric folk music amd avidly learning the accordion - which I played in a duo with my then best friend Gareth Jones (yes, he was Welsh); who could sing well, act out a song, and play electric bass or flute with remarkable verve and facility.

Altogether a period of creativity and anticipation; and one I am pleased to be reminded-of.

It is a good first example of electric folk to play to your young children to get them keen on traditional music. It worked for me! Maybe they could be shown this version?

Two sublimely beautiful songs from Steeleye Span about the horrible practice of coercively 'pressing' men into the Royal Navy; both told from the perspective of the woman left-behind. The first song has an implied happy ending, the second is characterized by tragic resignation. 

Both exhibit the special power I find in my native folk music - melodies as poignant as anything by the great composers; lyrics with that distinctive, ambiguous, nuggety, fascinating quality that comes from oral transmission - resulting in something beyond the powers of even poets of genius 

First, Maddy Prior does an unaccompanied, multi-tracked version of Weary Cutters - a song from my part of England (Tyneside) which suffered the Press Gangs more than most, because of the seafaring and fishing traditions. 

This astonishing arrangement is literally hair-raising; I cannot listen to it without tearing-up. 

(Note, the very last chord is slightly spoiled by a too-rapid segue into the next track.)

 

And now, from Steeleye's first album, All things are quite silent, where Maddy Prior's lead is supplemented by alto harmonies from Gay Woods. This magnificent song was, fortunately for us, collected in Sussex by Ralph Vaughan Williams (in 1904). And I cannot imagine anything better than Steeleye's delicate and strong arrangement.  

This is perhaps the very summit of Steeleye's achievement.

The words are traditional - and utterly chilling, the tune and arrangement are by Steeleye (especially the guitarist and singer Robert Johnson, I think), the lead vocal by Maddy Prior is just...

If this is your first time listening to Long Lankin - wait until you can give it your full attention, and listen to the lyrics: this is too good to waste as background music!

The cuckoo does not have a nest, therefore the name must be code for something else. 

Before Ken Kesey took it to mean a mental hospital (i.e. a 'nest' of people who were 'cuckoo'); the term had a well-understood meaning within smutty traditional English folk songs. 

First, Barry Dransfield singing The Cuckoo's Nest (lyrics here) from the classic album of Morris On, followed by the morris dance tune of the same name. 

(Never mind the non-PC lyrics; just the lecherous way Dransfield sings this song would be enough to get him arrested nowadays.) 

(A visual excerpt of a similar line-up playing the song - and recorded some years later - can be seen here.) 

Christmas is coming! Wassail! 

One of my all time favourite unaccompanied folk-singing groups - The Watersons: a brother, two sisters and a husband. Singing the-opposite-of close-harmony.

Is anything better than this to instil the Christmas spirit? No - equaled, yes; but never bettered...

 

In an earlier incarnation, and another Wassail song; the bass was sung by a cousin:

 

...And a reprise of magical early Steeleye Span - with the same bass singer as in the first Watersons song (i.e. the legend that is Martin Carthy; who I once met on a train, queueing for a cup of coffee). 

This one is about the seasonal practice of hunting, killing and displaying the corpse of a little Jenny Wren, door to door, for money. Ah, the charm of traditional country life...

*

1. The incomparable solo by Ian Bairnson at the end of Kate Bush's Wuthering Heights of 1978. By the end of this one the amplifier was up to 11.

2. Rick Kemp's bass improvisations at the end of Elf Call by Steeleye Span, on their 1975 album Commoner's Crown.

3. (Controversially, no doubt - but I stand by it) Francis Rossi's simple but lyrical solo at the end of Status Quo's 1981 single Rock and Roll.

*

Q: What do these pieces have in common?

A: Both produced by Mike Batt.

Open-fifths, or bare-fifths are the chord made by an octave with just the fifth note in the middle - for example C-G-C. I developed a great liking for this - mainly because it created what I thought of as a 'medieval' sound - and partly because it is disliked by mainstream classical compositional theory yet seems quite natural to amateur/ folk composers.

I first knowingly came across it in a Steeleye Span song - The King - it was pointed out by my school music teacher:


The drones of a bagpipe or hurdy gurdy are (usually) open fifths. They create a space within which the melody moves. 

This led onto a special liking for the use of parallel open-fifths - when two parts move in-parallel a fifth apart; as used in the early parts of the Tallis Fantasia by Vaughan Williams (parallel fifths are usually regarded as incompetent part writing in classical music - and often they are!):


But my favourite was to use a bare fifth as the cadence - the final chord - of some kind of unaccompanied harmony - as with the middle of the chorus from Malpas Wassail by The Watersons - the bit where the tenor slides up onto the high falsetto top note - which I found, and still find, electrifying.

Indeed the practice of sliding ('portamento') between notes, and chords, with all its dissonances-in-passing, is a marvellous aspect of some vocal folk music:

This is my latest craze - a perfect music video with a surreal folkloric visuals and narrative; and that supreme confidence about it which comes from the vitality of clever and witty young men. It splices the world of Gogol with modernity in a crazy fashion that makes poetic sense. The same romantic spirit - transmuted to Russia - as Steeleye Span and the Albion Bands of the 1970s. Enjoy.

Although born in Devon; I spent all my school years living in a village in north Somerset. But, because I was (mostly) a rationalistic atheist, I was almost unaware that during this time, as well as for some time afterwards, Somerset was a centre for some of the best exponents of spiritual (including Christian) thinking - several of whom lay within a bicycle ride of my own house. 

And for even more fun:


I didn't hear this version as a youth - but it was released as a single in 1971. Martin Carthy takes the lead vocal.

Now, why is this so very good? 1. Carthy is a genius. 2. The arrangement and backing singers are superb. 3. Although in a sense it is a parody, being an unaccompanied folk version of a 50s single with exceptionally banal lyrics - it is done with absolute seriousness and performed at the highest standard of polish.

(It is a common but fatal error to imagine that parodies can, or should, be done badly; when in fact the better they are performed, the better they work. I once saw (in a Newcastle Dental Students Revue, 1977) a really amusing take-off of Glenn Miller's In The Mood done with kazoos to replace the brass and saxaphone sections - with the kazoo players thoroughly rehearsed; standing and sitting in groups, and to take improvised solos, just like 'the real thing'.)

Up until a couple of years ago I would honour and (to an extent) celebrate St George's Day. For instance, when I was at school I home-made a St George's flag with paper and a pin, and wore it on my lapel. A few years back, I purchased a small steel badge of the flag to wear on this day. 

But as the nation of England - including all of its institutions - has become more and more corrupt and net-evil; this kind of patriotism became more of a hope than a belief. And as of 2021, it ceased to be even that. 

Now, I do not see any Good in any national thing as-is, here-and-now; nor do I have any optimism for any such. My affection for England and Englishness is directed at the past, not the future. 

I remain devoted to the land itself, the place and its spirit - hills, trees, skies, woodland, rocks, rivers and coasts; and to old buildings, stones, tracks and earthworks... but not to the people. 

The people of England are by now unworthy; merely 'inhabitants': zombies, traitors and aliens. Their attitude to England is a mixture of indifference and hostility. All those organizations that are supposedly 'devoted' to our 'heritage' and 'environment' have embraced its sequestration and shabby subversion, if not obliteration, in the name of whatever Leftist value-inversion is current. 

Furthermore, and especially over the past year; all the once-net-Good national groupings (even of an more informal nature) have been co-opted or suppressed. 

There is no Good England any more, at the societal level; and the evil-England is now - Very Obviously - just a regional office of the totalitarian Anti-Christ-ian World Government. 

And patriotism for England as-is has become just a part of The System - controlled-opposition; a snare for the unawakened. 

Nonetheless the idea of England - England as an Archangelic guardian, perhaps? - retains power in the hearts of Anglo-Saxon Englishmen and Norse descendants of the Northern counties*.

*But not the Celts (who mostly define themselves against the English); nor the Norman tyrants ... but they have no hearts, anyway. And another thing - St George has always suffered from being a Norman imposition - the truly English Patron Saint was Edmund. 

  

Note: St George is a character in the traditional Mummers Play - done here by Steeleye Span as an interlude in their music tour of 1974. I saw this at the Colston Hall, Bristol where they were supported by Gryphon - a dream combination for me. 

Sweep, chimney sweep, is the common cry I keep 

*

I saw this sung in what was, I believe, its first public performance; summer 1977, somewhere in deepest Somerset; and done by the Mark 4 line-up of Maddy Prior, Tim Hart, John Kirkpatrick, Rick Kemp and Martin Carthy. (Nigel Pegrum, drums and woodwinds, was probably not singing here.)

It is a wonderfully poignant tune and harmonization, with words expressive of the craft-pride of a 'skilled working man'. For some unidentified reason, this bittersweet song has always evoked in me tears; mixed from joy with sadness at the transience of youth, optimistic vigour, and sheer confidence. 

The unaccompanied singing is strong and direct, open-throated; with open-chords and sudden unisons - somehow spanning the generations and evoking a lost era. It is full of excellences from all - but notably underpinned by the solid, crumhorn-like, bass and lead of the incomparable Martin Carthy.