Jam Jar
I am standing in a bare room with a small bar and a stage up a flight of dark steps with a lot of young people in what can only be described as a backstreet of Bristol waiting for an Irish folk band who I have never heard of who I know nothing about to come on stage. Maybe it's gonna be great; maybe it's gonna be excruciating. One of my favourite local folk singers I notice at the bar. He recognises me; I have a brief chat about the gigs we've been to the gigs that are coming up. No one is wearing a mask but the management has requested that everyone takes and LFT test. (The men’s and lady's loos have be redefined as “loos” with some sensible modesty barriers around the specifically male part of what was the gents.) It feels as if my life is finally coming back on line; that live music is finally happening again and truly I would not want to be anywhere else. Live music is not necessarily the most important thing for me, but it is the thing which I have most been missing; a thing that had formed part of my life before lockdown and left a hole. There are other places to hear music, of course, but for me, its about being in some grotty room and a man with a banjo or a fiddle or shuti box starts to sing about knights or highwaymen or chemical workers and even if it is not very good I have that sense of being a link in the long long chain of the folk tradition even (especially) if that isn’t actually true....
The main band this evening are called the Mary Wallopers. I had not heard of them, but the club is full to bursting of young people who apparently had. Apart from the aforementioned singer there wasn’t anyone in the audience I recognised.
The gig was put on by Sophie [check full name - ed] who was responsible for the open air gigs in the city farm arena last year. She opened the evening, fairly courageously I thought, with a quite hard core folk set; long ballads and murder songs and slow tunes. She did her preferred version of the one about the knight who has drown-ed seven women but the seventh one has drown-ed he. In lots of versions the victim asks the killer to turn his back while she takes her clothes off, and pushes him off the cliff while he is distracted. In this one she asks him to cut down the stinging nettles, with much the same result. She livens things up with a full version of Maggie Mae. Someone in the audience claims to be a Scouser because he has brothers who live in Liverpool. It’s a famous song but truthfully I think I only know the four lines that John mangles on the Let It Be album. I don’t think I had realised that it’s basically another version of Barrack Street, in which a prostitute steals a man’s clothes. That must have been something sailors were very scared off. In this version the judge he guilty finds her and sends her off to Botany Bay. Sophie also sings something I have never heard before about barge men “legging it” -- pushing the canal boat through a tunnel with their feet. It is yet another song to the tune of Ye Diggers All Stand Up (which goes back to My Name It Is Sam Hall, I think.)
I love joining dots between different songs in The Tradition.
I initially thought that the Wallopers were going to be another one of Those Irish Bands which close every festival. (Truthfully, can anyone tell Skinny Lister from Flogging Molly from Fiddlers Green?) They are assuredly very Irish indeed; the main band seeming to consist of three guys (guitar, voice and banjo) with an additional whistle-blower and electric guitar at the back giving them extra oomph. The fella in the middle does that slow, very audible, almost speech-song reading of a first verse in which he’s just come down from Paddy’s land, (a land of high renown), and then the rest of the band comes in very quick and very loud indeed to tell us about an Irish man with brogue and blarney too (with a rolligan, swalligan, hooligan, wolligan.) All very nice but not quite matching the rumours of a Dubliners / Sex Pistols mash up, although they do swear an awful lot.
But while this kind of thing was the crowd pleasing opener and closer (and several times in the middle) they turn out to have a much wider range of styles. Quite a lot of their songs were ballads where you actually needed to hear the words, and half way through they sent the back-up band off stage and each did a solo number. The man on the right did a song about coming to England and getting a job in Camden town, ("there’s no easy gold, only rain and cold, in this god-forsaken land") accompanying himself on a bodhran. The man in the middle did a song about, er, coming to England and getting a job in Camden Town ("when you’re building up and tearing England down.") The man on the end did something I forgot to write down. The audience, who were inclined to pogo dance and clap in the mosh pit to the loud numbers, were positively “shushing” themselves to hear the words of the quiet ones, which I respected the heck out of.
There was a bizarre version of Dives and Lazarus in which the Biblical story had been entirely mangled into a sing-along by the folk tradition; and one I had entirely never heard before about nasty police coming and shutting down a lockdown in an Irish pub. About verse two, I became concerned that I knew the tune but not the words; and was eventually able to place it as Champion At Keeping ‘Em Rolling, as regularly perpetrated by Stick In the Wheel. A brief root around the Google Sphere reveals that Ewan McColl’s song was based on an older ballad called the Limerick Rake. (I suppose I knew that the Radio Ballads were about putting contemporary words to existing folk songs?) Like I say: I love to connect up the folk-dots.
They wound the evening up with a thoroughly crowd pleasing roar through Where Are Me Boots Me Noggin Noggin Boots.
A thoroughly folkie Irish traditional post-lockdown young-persons not-at-all-precious evening. I drank a Bristol stout in the interval, which seemed rather appropriate under the circumstances.
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