Arts Diary: Friday

Probably cannot maintain my status as s Fishermans Friends skeptic without hypocrisy. Stood behind [the bald one with the moustache and the stripy shirt] in the queue for beef bouginoun (see figure one, check spelling) and told him that it was a great gig, that I love their music, that Cousin Jack is my favourite song and that my Daddy was a Cornish methodist. So: it was a great gig, I love their music, and Cousin Jack is indeed my favourite song. And you couldn’t have s better festival opener, complete with West Country Rivalry. (We were made to rehearse a chorus which went “the cream goes on first”) There were several new songs but no new jokes. No one is going to begrudge them adding Spanish Ladies to their collection, and only a cynic would suggest that a lachrymose first verse leading into a roaring refrain is not quite in the first flush of youth as an arrangement. They are at their best when roaring. The third “encore” of South Australia (after Cousin Jack and one about a sailor with an alcohol problem) was the best thing in the afternoon. They are quite definitely my third favorite shanty band,I have tickets for the musical.

No skepticism at all around the evening concert. Grannys Attic are the best traditional band going at the moment. They take the music seriously, have a strong streak of socially conscious lyrics, and mess around shamelessly between numbers. The story about how their last appearance was abandoned (2019) because the marquee was in danger of falling down grows better with each telling, and they spent a lot of time humiliating a fictional audience member named Steve who had never been to a festival before. Cohen’s long performance of a ballad called the False Lady (boy meet girl, girl stabs boy snd throws him down a well) is pure folkie gold and I even quite liked the instrumental numbers.

It struck me forcibly that Jez Lowe is quite a lot like a Geordie Jake Thackray: the same love of story telling, the same pressing a silly ides to a sillier conclusion. All the London women say “talk to me dirty in Geordie”, the discovery of a new stretch of Hadrian’s wall in Newcastle results in a resuscitated Roman solider learning about modern culture in cod Latin, and the annoying man at the checkout in Aldi peddles increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories. There are members of the flat earth society all round the globe. But he also does Serious: the great Radio Ballads about the decline of the shipping industry, the Pitman Poets and an utterly touching one about an elderly folkie who came out as trans at the end of her life (“Louisa’s choosing”). I think he’s at his very best in the space in between: Wil of the People is both a slightly wry metaphor and a political manifesto. He talks, but not too much, and endearingly tells the audience that he is not quite sure if some of the newer songs are “keepers”.

Not too much beer but slightly too much ice cream. Quite a lot of time spent circling things in programme. There are five concerts I need to go to tomorrow.

fig 1