Jon Boden and the Remnant Kings

St Georges


Jon Boden was half of Spiers and Boden. Then he went off and became Bellowhead. There were fifteen other people in Bellowhead, but to a great extent Bellowhead was Jon Boden; when he left there was no question of the band continuing to exist without him.

I liked Bellowhead okay. (I particularly liked the Bellowhead after-show sing arounds.) They were fantastic fun and did more than anyone to make folk music cool. Ask anyone of a particular age how they got into folk music and they will say "because of Bellowhead". But I never liked them as much as when they were Spiers and Boden; the singer and the squeeze box guy.; singing ballads with conviction. They probably define my folk taste more than anyone apart from Carthy and Swarbs.

So, Jon has dissolved Bellowhead and formed Jon Boden and the Remnant Kings. San Sweeney, who used to be Bellowhead and is now in Leveret, is mainly on the drums. I didn't know you could swap from fiddle to drums; but to my ear he is doing a good job; and he is very definitely having a good time. (When I was first listening to folk, about 2005, Sam was in a band called Kerfuffle, and there is still a slight temptation to say "ah, bless" even though he is now decidedly a grown-up.) Rob Harbron who was never in Bellowhead but is definitely in Leverett is on various squeeze boxes: it is pretty hard to find a folk band which doesn't have Rob Harbron on the squeezebox because he so good at it. Paul Sartin, who was definitely in Bellowhead and is still in Faustus is rather underused, in my opinion, fiddling and playing the oboe and singing but with little space for his trade-mark maudlin wit.

Folk family trees are complicated.

The Remnant Kings feels quite a lot like a cut down Bellowhead, but then Bellowhead felt like a blown up Spiers and Boden and an inflated Faustus. They still have the same Edwardian - Bohemian aesthetic. Today the band was joined on stage by two genuine live and very impressive Victorian wax-cylinder machine which provided background sound and some scratchy David Bowie while we were waiting for the show to start. Boden is exuberant; expressive and very tall. He fiddles and plays melodian and guitar and sings every number. He loves and understands folk music and a few years ago recorded 365 songs in one year.

But here is the thing.

I liked a lot of the evening very much indeed. I liked the old Bellowhead warhorse Rigs of the Town ("honesty is all out of fashion") dedicated to Boris Johnson.

I liked his version of the Obligatory Gypsy Song: this version is called the seven bonnie gypsies, with a quite different tune and as a refrain in which the broom is bonnie and the broom is fair.

I liked his version Roll the Old Chariot Along, which he claims is a temperance song which was adopted by the drinkers because it has such a good tune. Fishermen's Friends do it as "a drop of Nelson's blood"; I think Jon has come up with his own verse lyrics. Boden believes very strongly in communal singing; and he is very skilled at encouraging the audience to sing; even those of us who can't. He had the audience chanting "and we'll roll... and we'll roll..." with the ambitious ones going "we'll rollllll" in harmony, while the band added the "chariot along part". It was so purty I wished there had been someone there recording the St George's audience for a CD.

And the price of admission would have been justified to hear Rose in June, the title song off the new album, on its own. A fourteen verse song about a ship wreck, incorporating a thumping evangelical audience, performed straight but entirely over-the-top under a glowing red spotlight, with Boden thrusting his arms into the air for the religious bits. ("Sinner give your soul to Jesus, it can never be do soon!") Jon points out that he isn't religious himself, but likes religious songs. This is the Jon Boden from Bellowhead, the Jon Boden who could sit on the side of the stage and sing Port of Amsterdam as if he'd been there. This is why I go to folk gigs. (Some people complained the couldn't follow the words.)

So yeah. I liked a lot of the traditional material a lot. But the self-written songs from Jon's concept album about a boy looking for a girl at a carnival after the climate apocalypse. Er... not qutie so much.