Arts Diary: Sunday

Well, I think I got yesterday about right. Four gigs and space in between to walk along the Esplanade and sample some really very interesting Morris dancers (not an expression you have often heard) and even part of the Hobby Horse competition, which last year was won by a seagull. Baltane Border Morris dress in black, are more than usually violent with the stick clashing, claim that there dances have narratives about land lords and witches, and generally play up the (almost totally fictitious, but who honestly cares) pagan element.

I went to the Ham and heard Cohen from Grannys Attic doing his solo thing, including a song about a jolly highwayman who is presumably much less jolly after he is hung. Interesting.y contained several floating verses from the more well known (to me) one about Alan Tyne of Harrow, who comes to an equally sticky end. A version of Cana De I Oh called Cana DA I Oh: he says that its the sort of song most people stay away from because Nick Jones’s version is so definitive. I am sure he knows that Dylan did it as well. And the musical one the man who knows all the pubs in London. Cohen is teetotal, apparently.

There was also a very good Scottish fiddler but you know I don’t ever have anything useful to say about instrumental performances beyond “it was very fast”.

Thence to the dinky little Sidmouth town theatre to hear a young people’s choir, Stream of Sound doing a show called Spinster of the Parish. Moment of trepidation at the beginning when they all started doing Am Dram at me. (That slightly too earnest style, with slightly too many hand gestures.) But after about eight minuted they had completely won me over. It was based on an oral history project about an old named Ethel Minty who lived through most of the 20th century. Remembered the death of the Good Queen and died in the 1980s. Almost exactly the same age as my Granny, come to think of it. The anecdotage was interesting and the songs were universally well done. Mostly traditional songs of varying relevance to the story. By the end of the second act, when Ethel’s severe Victorian father dies and the cast read out letters about his kindness to former pupils some of us may have had to clear our throat slightly. Ethel did needlework all her life and the show ends with the cast displaying a beautiful table cloth she had embroidered.

Immediately to the Arts Centre for Peter and Barbara Snape’s presentation about the songs of the pit and mining towns of Manchester. I didn’t know that the labour reformers cared much more about the immodest dress of the women colliers than the terrible working conditions, or that the pit girls petitioned parliament to be allowed to continue working underground or that the mill workers wrote to Abraham Lincoln saying they supported to war against the south even though it was putting them out of work. They did a parody of Hard Times called Short Time Come Again No More.

Thence to the Big Tent on the Hill to hear Joshua Burnell, who I heard at the Black Swan in York a few years ago and have wanted to hear again ever since. There is a kind of young people only session in the bar before hand, attended by some of the people who did the Spinster play, which was rather inspirational. The concert was rather sparsely attended, I felt (Garderene were opening). Joshua was majoring on exaggerated freak out hammond organ riffs and claimed at one point to be channelling Bowie. He”s clearly a major folk force but I did wish he’d been doing more of his left field arrangements of traddy numbers and less self written material. His fantasy mythic singalong Song of the Island remains the kind of thing anyone could be proud of.

I have optimistically decided to get up at 9.30 tomorrow to go to a talk.