The Folk Radio Blog

The BBC has just announced that the new Gaelic TV Channel, BBC ALBA, will be launched on 19th September. The channel is a partnership between BBC Scotland and the government-funded MG ALBA. The first night’s programmes include a live concert from the Isle of Skye featuring some of Scotland’s best musical talent.

The BBC Scotland Controller, Ken McQuarrie, said it was a realisation of a long-held ambition of the Gaelic community and he added:

BBC ALBA will offer a new and enhanced service to the Gaelic audience and will also reach out to the wider Scottish audience by offering a range of attractive and compelling programmes

The service hasn’t been without conflict as the UK Government was accused of trying to impose itself on the service following the appointment of former Labour MSP Alasdair Morrison as chairman of MG Alba, formerly the Gaelic Media Service.

All that aside this must be good news and I’ll certainly be checking the online content for the music.

More information from the Gaelic Media Service

A newly released CD “Dhachaigh!” was launched by An Lanntair and the Heb Celt Festival last month. It celebrates the poetry and songs of the late Lewis Bard, Murdo McFarlane.

The project features some top singers and musicians from across Scotland including Karen Matheson, Alasdair White and sees Alyth team up with LAU.

Tracks

Paul Mounsey - Dhachaigh (Home)
Isobel Ann Martin - ’s Fhada Leam An Oidhche Gheamhraidh.
Alasdair White - The ‘Symmetry’.
Fraser Fyfield & Calum Alex Macmillan - Tobair Tobair Siolaidh.
Christine Primrose - Mhorag, Leat Shiubhlainn.
Alyth McCormack with Lau - Leag Iad Am Bom An Raoir.
Ishbel Macaskill - Naoi Ceud Deug ’s A Ceithir Deug.
Blair Douglas - Canan Nan Gaidheal.
Anna Murray - Thig Mi Gad Iarraidh.
Brian O’headhra & Fiona Mackenzie - Thud Iad A Thung Thu.
Mary Smith - Raoir Reubadh An Iolaire.
Karen Matheson - Mi Le M’ Uilinn Air Mo Ghluin.
Blair Douglas - Chunnaic Mi Uam A’ Bhienn.
Paul Mounsey - Till (Return).

The CD is available through Footstompin

Lark Rise to Candleford is the classic novel by Flora Thompson that recalls rural England of the late 19thCentury. In 1981 the National Theatre produced a play and appointed none other than the father of the English Folk Rock scene, Ashley Hutchings, as Musical Director with his famous Albion Band providing the music.

Fast forward twenty plus years: Ashley Hutchings has formed a Lark Rise band and released a new CD Lark Rise Revisted which features some of the material from the play that did not get recorded the first time around as well as some new songs and tunes. You can also catch them live as they take it on the road:

15th August- Unicorn Theatre, Abingdon
6th September- Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield. Tel  01484-430528
22nd November- Ashover Parish Hall, Derbyshire. Tel  01623-812739

there is a 2009 date (20th Feb) mentioned on Alan Bearman site for The Lights, Andover, but it’s not mentioned on Ashley’s site. Keep check Ashley Hutchings site here for more dates and announcements.

The band are:

Ashley Hutchings - Vocals and Bass
Simon Care - Melodeons, vocals and dancing
Ruth Angell - Fiddle and vocals
Judy Dunlop - Vocals
Mark Hutchinson - Guitar and vocals
Guy Fletcher - Fiddle, guitar, drums and vocals

Tracks

  •  Brighton Camp
  •  Bonny Labouring Boy
  •  Lark Rise
  •  Bonny Labouring Boy
  •  Most OF The Men Sang Or Whistled
  •  Poor Old Soldier
  •  Queenies Bees
  •  Harvest House Harvest Home
  •  Two Morris Dance Tunes
  •  Bad News Is All The Wind Can Carry
  •  Day Came When The Doctor Called In The Relieving Officer
  •  John Barleycorn
  •  Til The Time We Meet Again
  •  Procession Stepped Out Briskly
  •  May Song
  •  Before His Arrival There Had Been No Musical Instrument Of Any Kind
  •  I Have A Bonnet Trimmed With Blue/In And Out The Window
  •  Greatest Thrill Of It All
  •  Lark Rise Theme
  •  White Tails Of Rabbits Bobbed
  •  Laura’s Song

The Store link

The following article appeared in The Times on 28th July 2008. It was written by Chris Wood, yes, that Chris Wood, you can hear his great album Tresspasser on the station.

by Chris Wood:

Whenever anything colossally stupid - such as the invasion of Iraq - happens, I hear voices in my head. They are not the conventional, cinematic disembodied voices, they are the voices of “ordinary” people who lived out “ordinary” lives in England and their message comes in the form of song.

Last week was the third anniversary of the death of the Brazilian electrician, Jean Charles de Menezes, who was shot with seven hollow-point bullets by police officers on Stockwell Tube station. The other day I tried reading the report of the Independent Police Complaints Commission into events surrounding the surveillance and shooting of Mr de Menezes. I could not take it all in one sitting. What was so harrowing was the realisation that the police officers were “’ordinary” people trying to do their best, but that events had overtaken them and that they and Mr de Menezes’ family would have to live with the consequences for the rest of their lives.

In the weeks before the Iraq invasion, I distinctly remember commentators predicting such “collateral” events but their vision was not strident enough to be heard above the bellicose hawks of the White House and Westminster. As we were signed up to a “coalition of the willing” the sting of impotence brought sharply into focus the lyric of a traditional song from the Napoleonic wars. Our Captain Calls All Hands was collected from Pop Maynard at The Cherry Tree in Copthorne, West Sussex, in 1956 and takes the form of a conversation between two lovers.

He: Our Captain calls all hands tomorrow
To leave my true love behind in grief and sorrow
Dry up those briny tears and leave off weeping
How happy we shall be love at our next meeting.

She: How can you go abroad fighting for strangers
Why don’t you stay at home free from all dangers
I will roll you in my arms, my own dear jewel
So stay at home with me, love, and
don’t be cruel. [click to continue...]

Caroline LeVelle is probably best known for her time as a member of the legendary group De Dannan during their golden years (early 80’s to early 90’s, alongside Dolores Keane and Mary Black).

‘A Distant Bell’ (released in 2004) is Caroline Lavelle’s self-produced, thirteen song Chamber Folk reinterpretation of English and Irish traditions.

The same deep well of folk material that inspired Sandy Denny and Fairport Convention is transformed by the lens of Lavelle’s pastoral romanticism as we travel with her from Medieval Sussex to 1960s Liverpool via the social upheavals of the Industrial Revolution, the battle fields of the Napoleonic Wars and of 1915 Armenia.

She has been at the forefront of expanding those traditions into the field of Electonica via her work with Massive Attack (Home Of The Whale) and William Orbit (Moorlough Shore), Jam Nation (She Moved Through The Fair) and the Afro Celt Sound System.

‘A Distant Bell’ brings it all back home with thirteen songs that includes two versions if the Wicker Man soundtrack favourite ‘Gently Johnny’, Pentangle’s ‘The Trees They Do Grow High’ and Fotheringay’s ‘Banks Of The Nile’. Another stand-out is a luminous version of ‘Greenwood Laddie’ underpinned by David Bedford’s gorgeous arrangement for choir and orchestra.

Store link

Artist Site

This is going back a while, as I mentioned on the forum I’ve been listening to tracks that I used to play on the station and re-introducing some. This album from Bohola, their self-titled debut, is one that stood out. The album manages to sound like a session and feels very vibrant. Something that many musicians fail to accomplish as re-creating that feel in a studio setting is hard going.

Bohola are accordion virtuoso Jimmy Keane and the bouzar player and vocalist Pat Broaders. They were hailed by The Irish Herald as Irelands new Supergroup and described their music as

a driving, muscular, and yet very emotive style of Irish music with deep roots in the ‘pure drop’ tradition, infused with the raw and gritty urbanized musical vernacular of the Irish and Irish-American experience. [click to continue...]

Chris Hardy’s album, Health to Your Hands, will slipping into the playlist next week so here’s a bit about the man….

The first guitar music I remember hearing was Buddy Holly and the Everly Brothers. Then a friend played me Big Bill Broonzy, and Bob Dylan’s first album. This convinced me to abandon the violin and try the guitar. The first one I owned was Spanish, quickly ruined by my putting metal strings on it so the neck bent. I adapted it to slide, having by then become obsessed with Robert Johnson, Bukka White, Son House and Fred McDowell. I spent one Summer working as a builder’s labourer, laying concrete to make a crematorium in Sussex. I earned enough to buy, second-hand, the Gibson 1962 SJN I have used ever since. I started playing in clubs in Kent and along the south coast, opening for acts such as Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and Alexis Korner, and doing gigs of my own. Then in London I played on John Peel’s and Pete Drummond’s radio shows and worked with Jackson C. Frank, Gordon Giltrap, Steve Tilston and Dave Morrell and others. Some of the music from that time can heard on the Transatlantic album ‘Guitar Workshop’. I was nearly signed to Virgin but they decided for some reason to go with Mike Oldfield instead. I worked as a session musician, toured and recorded with Colin Blunstone, singer in the Zombies, and played in various duos such as Holy Willie’s Prayer with the Scottish song writer and guitarist Roddie Cameron. [click to continue...]

A recent arrival to the playlist is Old Man Luedecke. So who is he? Read on…

A banjo songster like Old Man Luedecke is a rare type of musician. A songwriting one of such hopeful goodness, rarer still. In the tradition of solo banjo men and women of days gone by like Dock Boggs, Bascom Lunsford and Roscoe Holcomb, Old Man Luedecke sings his songs accompanied only by his loving five string, foot stomps and the occasional yodel. His songs are melodic gems blending old time sensibilities with an unusual vision and poetic sense. His music belies someone more than slightly ill at ease with modern life. This is a bizarre type of music Dock Boggs might have made if he’d studied poetry.

Old Man Luedecke left the big old city of Toronto, met a girl in the Yukon, fell in love, bought a banjo and fell in love again. After a couple of years of love and banjo and the makings of a brilliant performing career in sunny Halifax, he returned to the Yukon with his sweethearts. There he woodshedded. He wrote a tone of songs over the next year and a half. He held regular gigs playing banjo in a gambling hall with can-can girls and in a honky tonk called the Snakepit accompanying piano barnacle Bob. Even made an appearance at the Dawson City Music Festival. After a time, he left again for Halifax to renew musical acquaintances and record his debut CD Mole in the Ground. That CD has become a smash on college radio, was featured on CBC’s Atlantic Airwaves and is a hot item in stores and at shows. He continues to live in Halifax and perform there and around the country to ever-wider acclaims. His stage show blends hokum and inspiration into powerful and fun entertainment that will delight young and old. He’s still sweet on the girl he met up there in Yukon, and the banjo.

Buy it from the Store

Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/oldmanluedecke

Oscar Cainer is a new arrival at the station. I came across Oscar on Myspace and his album, In the Corner, is a great accoustic driven debut. It was Nick Drake who inspired him to put aside his electric guitar for an accoustic one. The following is taken from his biography

Since he was 15 Oscar has played some of the best acoustic clubs London has to offer. He was the youngest person ever to feature solo at the Kashmir Klub, sharing the bill with the likes of Duke Special and Ed Harcourt, and has gone on to delight audiences all over the Capital with songs full of poetic imagery and impassioned sentiment. For two years he ran Oscar’s Academy, his own event that Time Out called ‘one of the most important new acoustic nights in London’ but more recently has been appointed as the head of sound engineering at Camden’s Green Note, the finest vegetarian acoustic venue in London. At Green Note he has had the privilege of sound engineering for the likes of ex-Blur guitar hero Graham Coxon, music legend Barry ‘The Fish’ Melton and nu-folk rising star Scott Matthews as well as many future stars such as Anaïs Mitchell and Diana Jones. During this period he has also began playing in, recording with and co-managing Rosewood Green, a progressive folk group formed by Pete Greenwood and Eugenie Garrett and studying music at the prestigious Westminster University that boasts alumni of the likes of The Feeling and Tom Baxter.

Now aged 22, he has finished work on recordings for a new album of folk/country inspired gems, entitled ‘In The Corner’, an uncompromisingly emotional work of carefully crafted music with a subtle exterior that hints at the passionate core.

Find out more and listen to Oscar by visiting his site: http://oscar2.itsology.net/