Ye Vagabonds

Kingsdown Wine Vaults


I am prepared to listen to any amount of New Folk and Alt Folk and Anti Folk and (to be frank) Bad Folk in the hope that I will stumble across a new version of the Raggle Taggle Gypsies.

Ye Vagabonds had a new version of the Raggle Taggle Gypsies, which is to say, a very old version of the Raggle Taggle Gypsies: slower and sexier than it sometimes is, with quite a lot of sympathy for the Lord who has lost the love of his life. (The song is often called the Seven Yellow Gypsies; this one was the Seven Little Gypsies. It's the folk process, innit.)

We are in Kingsdown Wine Vaults, a little pub up a big hill. There is a guitar hanging on the wall and a reproduction poster advertising a Hank William hootenanny from the 1950s. Last time I was here, listening to sea shanties, they ran out of beer. And rum. (This allowed me to say "there is no rum at the inn", an opportunity I have been waiting for my whole life.) Now under new management, or at any rate with a replenished cellar, there is beer, mugs of tea, a few cakes, and generous helpings of nuts served in glasses from big jars.

Last month was the Radio 2 Folk Awards. I had been holding out for Sid and Jimmy, a semi-local duo who I have heard more times than I can count, to win the prize for the best traditional song. The award went to Ye Vagabonds, who I had never heard of. I always manage to jinx my favourite acts. So naturally the pub was full to the brim of Bristol's most committed folkies. Sid was magnanimously in the audience: I found myself sharing a table with a chap who sings in the Great Sea Choir with Heg (she of the Wolf Chorus.)

Ye Vagabonds are two brothers, Brian and Diamurld McGlonn, from the depths of Ireland. On the stage they are diffident, almost shy, but building a quiet rapport with the audience. You entirely believe them when they talk about learning songs in family singarounds; having to ask their Uncle's permission to sing "his" version of William O'Winsbury; learning new verses from elderly drunk folkies in Dublin bars. They do a version of I'm a Rover and particularly ask the audience not to record it, because it is a special family song and they don't want it online until it is perfect. I know it is as a great sing-a-long-a-booze song which is only one step away from going no-nay-never; but they transform in into a sad song; almost a night-visiting ballad, although the seldom-sober Rover seems to still be alive and well at the end of it.

This is a consistent strand through the evening. The award winning "Foggy Dew" isn't the raunchy, slightly rapey song about tricking a lady into spending the night with you; a sad, regretful song about a brief but never-forgotten love affair. "Well it's never I told nobody her name/ and god damn if I ever do / but it's many a time I think of that night / when I kept off the foggy dew." The fella whose Wee Girl has gone and got wed to another stays silent at her wedding because he thinks she'll be better off the rich man. In some versions he ends up whinging about whether or not it is possible to grow strawberries in salt water (look it up) but in this one he merely asks someone to throw primroses into his grave.

Intimate gigs of this kind feel like small chapel services, as opposed to your Show of Hands and your Bellowheads which feel like revivalist meetings.The audience join in without even being asked ("another, another, she's gone and got wed to another...") and we do our best to learn and join in the Gaelic lyrics we are introduced to. "Oh, you lovely people. I wish we could take you to all our gigs..." There is a planned encore and an unplanned encore because the audience won't let them leave the stage. The pub is crowded enough to seem full but not so heaving that you couldn't get a seat.

I probably cannot fairly judge if they deserved the award for the best traditional act. But if there was an award for the most traditional act, they would walk away with it.