02 Academy Bristol
How did that happen?
There is a queue -- up the road, round the car park, back as far as the former Colston Hall; people in tee-shirts and pirate hats; some grown ups and some little kids and lots and lots of young people. Granted, the Academy is a night club and night clubs have airport level security to prevent people taking in cutlasses and grog, but it's still a lot of people. I remember not too long ago when a Cornish male voice choir were carrying all before them, I was inclined to harumph a bit and say that we have two shantybands in Bristol who are every bit as good and probably a bit better. And now the Longest Johns are on stage in front of a thousand people with dry ice, thumping bass, over priced beer, friendly heckling, a violin playing rap poet to open for them, and an audience who know the words of all the songs, and not only "that one" famous one. (Some friendly hecklers start to call out for "that one song" between every number, until the band start referencing Streets of London.) People are also calling out for Spanish Ladies and greet the self-written Sea Bones off the first album as an old friend. The Spanish Ladies never arrive, but really, twenty-somethings shouting the titles of Peninsula War ballads into their beer? How did that happen?
It's kind of a craze, of course: someone sang "that one song" on the TikTok, and Young People started to look for recordings and propelled the second-best-shanty-band-in-Bristol into the actual mainstream charts; but it wouldn't have turned into a craze if shanties weren't such fun to hear and the Longest Johns weren't such a technically excellent band. They've acquired a double bass and a drummer and a hell of a lot of volume, but they haven't lost touch with that original pub-singer vibe. If Pay Me My Money Down and Bonny Ship The Diamond had turned into club anthems Oak and Ash and Thorn and Hard Times Come Again No More remained relatively acoustical. The mock-tragic song about sinking ships (Down and Drowned) was driven by the deep harmonies of its refrain. Some of the comic songs suffered, slightly, from the increase in format: the Last Bristol Pirate works better as an acoustic joke than as a blaring singalong; although the extremely silly You Can't Sing Shanties If You've Got Not Beard went off very well. Some of the inspired silliness of their video feed came through the stage -- Tik-Tok aside, the Johns "get" YouTube better than almost anyone -- but the size of the room and the buzz of the audience inhibited the stage banter a bit.
Stan Rogers mighty Mary Ellen Carter is given a reverential introduction, but they have fun with the actual singing. What, truthfully, in the world is better than being in a night club full of strangers singing "you to whom adversity had dealt the final blow/with smiling bastards laughing at you everywhere you go".
Possibly the best bits straddle the line between serious and daft, authenticity and big-venue-set-piece. At one point they bring on a metal tray, a drum and and a saucepan to hammer out the rhythm of The Hammer and The Anvil Song. The drummer and the bass player bang along as well. The lighting man gets in on the act, flashing the lights and each thump.
This is folk music reinvented as stadium Wagner yet retaining the salty roots that made them pub-singers and Tik-Tok heroes. A small watershed in folk history, I think.
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