So that was 2011 then…

It’s been a an odd old year for many reasons, personal and professional.  The professional highlight was, of course, the publication of ‘Trust No One’, my first book as my mysterious alter ago, Alex Walters, by those good people at Avon/HarperCollins.  It seems to have done pretty well to date, as far as I can judge, including a slightly heady couple of weeks as the best selling book in the iTunes store.  I finished the sequel just before Christmas.  Delivering a new manuscript is always a rather nerve-wracking process for me, as I’m usually still too close to the book to judge it with any real objectivity.  This time, I was more nervous than usual as I’d tried, with perhaps more ambition than good sense, to write a genuine sequel rather than simply another book in a series.  In other words, while I hope that ‘Trust No One’ is entirely readable on its own, the new book not only continues the story but also casts some new light (or perhaps shadows) on characters and events in the previous book. It was fun to write, but I didn’t feel able to judge properly whether I’d pulled it off, so I was relieved when my editor, the terrific Sammia Rafique, called to say she was delighted with it.  The sequel’s likely to be called ‘Nowhere to Hide’ and is due out in October next year, and I hope it’s as enjoyable to read as it was to write.

At a personal level, it’s been a more uneven year.  Just over a year ago, for reasons that will be evident to anyone who’s read the interview tucked away in the back of ‘Trust No One’, my life changed dramatically (having already been changing fairly quickly for the last couple of years for related reasons).  It’s now slightly back on an even keel, but this year has been one of stepping into what feels like unknown territory.  At the same time, I’ve probably been out more in the last 12 months than for a good few years, in the company of both my sons and some good friends.  There were some memorable evenings of music – the Decemberists at the Manchester Academy and Half Man Half Biscuit at the Ritz, for example.  But the best two evenings were both in London.  The most remarkable was the Nic Jones tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, featuring a short but stunning set from Nic himself, very ably supported by his son Joe.  That was Nic’s first solo performance for around 30 years, and I’m delighted to see that he and Joe are now playing at next year’s Warwick and Towersey Folk Festivals.  I’m keeping my fingers crossed that he and Joe might consider making some recordings as well.

The other very different remarkable evening was the one off performance by Jerry Seinfeld at the O2.  I went partly because No 2 son is a massive ‘Seinfeld’ fan, and partly because I thought it might be my one chance to see arguably the greatest stand-up comedian of his generation (more of that in a minute).  Observational comedy has become a rather tiresome genre these days, but Seinfeld was not only the best live comedy craftsman I’ve seen (with the possible exception of the worlds-apart Frankie Howerd, many years ago) he was also consistently interesting and thought-provoking.  A terrific evening.

My reading experiences have been rather more muted this year, maybe because I’ve spent so much of it writing (I tend to prefer not to read too much crime fiction while I’m trying to write it).  The books that have stuck in my head are a fairly diverse bunch – Greil Marcus’s astonishing collection of writings on Bob Dylan, Michelle Paver’s atmospheric ghost story ‘Dark Matter’, Ted Lewis’s 1970s Northern noir, ‘Jacks’ Return Home’, Allan Brown’s exhaustive and often hilarious account of the making of the film, ‘The Wicker Man’, and – currently – a re-discovering after many years of  Robert Aickman’s short stories.

The new year promises – well, work on the edits of the new book, thoughts about a next book (including possibly getting back to the unfinished Nergui book that’s been languishing while Alex Walters possessed me), and a whole series of interesting domestic and logistical challenges.  Shouldn’t be boring, anyway.  Hope it’s good for the rest of you.

Finding Nic Jones

I blogged a few weeks back about the great Nic Jones, one of the most influential figures in the British folk music world over the last 40 or so years.  Nic’s public involvement in folk music was tragically curtailed nearly 30 years ago by an appalling car accident, but his style of singing and guitar-playing and his reinvention of countless traditional songs have remained a massive influence over younger folk musicians.  Over the last couple of years, he’s made a couple of low-key returns to the recording studio and last year he was involved in a tribute concert, ‘In Search of Nic Jones’ at the Sidmouth Folk Festival.  I wasn’t able to make that, but when the comedian Stewart Lee announced that he’d scheduled a further tribute concert at the Queen Elizabeth Hall in London, I knew I had to be there (even if it meant braving a train full of Manchester United supporters heading down to Wembley for the Champions’ League final).

I simply wanted to chance to see Nic Jones performing in  front of an audience again, in however limited a way.  I suppose, on the basis of reports of the Sidmouth concert, I’d expected an emotional evening – a respectful and high quality tribute from a selection of Nic Jones’s peers and proteges with perhaps a little contribution from Nic himself singing along with his former Bandoggs colleagues, the excellent Pete and Chris Coe.  Nothing startling, perhaps, but a fitting tribute to Nic Jones and his remarkable contribution to the folk world.

Well, we got that, certainly.  The first set was splendid – a series of Nic’s songs performed by a cast ranging from folk luminaries such as Martin Carthy and Ashley Hutchings through established performers such as Damien Barber, Tony Hall (who played on Nic’s seminal Penguin Eggs record) and Jim Moray, through to new talents such as Hutchings’s son, Blair Dunlop.  All terrific stuff – Barber and Hall playing ‘Barrack Street’, Jackie Oates and Belinda O’Hooley performing a stunning version of ‘Annachie Gordon’, the marvellous Anais Mitchell singing ‘The Drowned Lovers’.  And the first half ended with the recreated Bandoggs – Nic, Pete and Chris Coe, and Damien Barber and Johnny Adams standing in for the late Tony Rose – performing a fine set of familiar songs.

So far, so good.  I hadn’t really expected that Nic himself would perform except as part of the Bandoggs ensemble.  But then, remarkably, Nic Jones’s still slightly frail figure made its way forward to the microphone, Belinda O’Hooley sat herself behind the piano, and Nic announced that he was going to sing ‘Thanksgiving’, a strange and moving song by Rick Lee that once formed part of Nic’s live sets.  It was an extraordinary moment.  I’ve had been happy to hear Nic Jones sing anything, anyhow, even if his performance had been unremarkable.  But somehow, despite his frailty, despite everything that had happened to him, his performance surpassed everything else I heard last night.  His voice lacks some of its old power, but he’s still an amazing singer – a beautiful tone, perfect phrasing, and a remarkable ability to inhabit the song as if he’d written it.  I was left breathless.

And that was only the start.  Nic moved centre-stage to perform with his son, Joe, who’s perfected his father’s glorious rhythmic guitar-style.  It was a short but brilliant set.  They began with ‘Rue the day that ever I married’, claimed as supposedly a favourite song of Nic’s wife, Julia, who has clearly been a massive support and inspiration to father and son.  Then, in characteristic Nic Jones style, they subverted the whole evening by performing, quite brilliantly, ‘Fake Plastic Trees’, a song by Nic’s favourite band, Radiohead (he was also sporting a Paranoid Android teeshirt).  And they concluded with a heart-stopping version of one of Nic’s best-known songs, ‘Ten Thousand Miles’.

I’d have happily sat and listened to anything by Nic Jones.  But this was one of the most beautiful and moving live performances I’ve ever witnessed.  Against all the odds, Nic Jones remains a truly remarkable singer, his voice and vocal style perhaps even more moving than in his hey-day.  He’s unlikely to want to face again the travails of regular performance, but perhaps some enterprising producer could at least persuade him and Joe to make some recordings together.  I’d buy it like a shot, and I suspect it would become my CD of whatever year it was released.

The last time I saw Nic Jones perform was more than 30 years ago, a short but superb set at a charity concert in Cambridge, not long before his appalling accident.  For me, last night felt like the closing of a circle – another short set, even more brilliant. We’ve both been through a lot in the meantime in our separate lives, but Nic’s glorious music has been a constant in mine.  I notice that someone’s now posted a clip of his performance of ‘Ten Thousand Miles’ on YouTube, so you can find a flavour of the night here.

Jones the voice

I’ve been a little quiet on here for the last few weeks as I’ve been working on the edits for the new book and a stack of other things.  But the edits are now done, so I’ve got no excuses for not posting more frequently.  And I’m here with what for some of us is remarkable news, even though it happened a couple of months ago and I’ve only recently learned about it.

I’ve written before about my enthusiasm for the music of Nic Jones.  For those who haven’t come across the great Mr Jones, he’s arguably the most influential figure in the world of English folk music even though, until very recently, he hadn’t recorded or performed for some 30 years.  During the 1970s, though, he was a well-known folk performer, with a distinctive voice, a pioneering guitar style and an extraordinary selection of largely traditional songs (I say largely traditional, but Jones also had a genius for adapting and rewriting traditional material to the point where he made it entirely his own).  Sadly, in 1982, on his way back from performing at a folk club in Glossop, just a few miles from where I’m writing this, he was involved in a serious car accident.  The resulting injuries effectively brought an end to his performing career, but, despite his physical absence from the folk scene (and the fact that, for unfathomable legal reasons, most of his 1970s recordings are unavailable), his influence has grown year by year.  There seem to be very few young British folk guitarists or singers who don’t owe a debt to Nic Jones – and many have sought to repay the debt in part by recording their own versions of his most famous songs.  The songwriter John Wesley Harding (who is also the novelist Wesley Stace) even produced a whole CD, ‘Trad Arr Jones’, as a tribute.

I was fortunate enough to see Nic Jones perform once – a short set at a charity concert in Cambridge in the early 1980s in which he performed largely contemporary songs (including one, ‘The jukebox as she turned’, which haunted me for years until Nic Jones finally released it on a CD of live recordings from the time) – but assumed I’d never get another chance.  Then, last year, he made a short appearance at a concert organised in his honour at the Sidmouth Folk Festival.  I wasn’t able to get to that, so thought I might have missed my chance.  But now, as part of a sequence of events organised by the comedian Stewart Lee at the Royal Festival Hall in London, another version of that concert has been organised, with Nic Jones again making an appearance with members of his former band, Bandoggs.  This time, I’ve made sure I’ve secured tickets.  If you’d like to do the same, the details are here.  And if you just want to know more about Nic Jones and his music, his own website is here.

But that’s not the most remarkable news.  It appears that, unheralded, Nic Jones has also made a brief re-visit to the recording studio (Abbey Road, no less).  In putting together the soundtrack for the recent documentary about autism, Wretches and Jabberers, the musician  J Ralph apparently came to the UK and persuaded Nic Jones to record a track for him.  You can hear the recording, with Jones singing  and Ralph playing Jonesesque guitar on his own composition, here, and if you’re so minded you can purchase it from iTunes for a mere 79p.  A bargain, I’d say.  I’m just hoping that, with this recording and his forthcoming performance, Nic Jones gets a taste for performing a little more.

EDIT: Well, it just goes to show.  After posting this, I had another look at Nic Jones’s website and realised that his Mollie Music had released a ‘new’ CD by the Halliard, The Last Goodnight, which turns out to be material drawn from a demo tape recorded by the band in the 1960s (and which, incidentally, is quite excellent).  As well as that material, however, the CD also includes three newly recorded tracks, including one, ‘Rakish Young Fellow’, which features a splendid vocal from one Nic Jones.  So it turns out he has sneaked back into the studio at least once before J Ralph lured him back (the previous Halliard CD release also contained some newly-recorded material, but, as far as I can judge, no new vocals from Nic – but I’d be happy to be proved wrong on that).

As an aside, the credits on the Halliard CDs (and in the accompanying songbook) reveal that the majority of the Halliard’s melodies were actually written by Dave Moran and Nic Jones, although many such as ‘Boys of Bedlam’, ‘Miles Weatherill’, ‘The Calico Printer’s Clerk’ and ‘Ladies Go A-Thieving’ seem now to be widely accepted as entirely traditional.  For a band who released very little material in their prime (if one discounts their record company’s ill-judged idea for the band to emulate the Dubliners with an album of, um, Irish songs), they’ve had quite an impact on the English folk world.

Anthems in Eden

Apologies for the lack of recent posts – been away on holiday to the farthest southern tip of Cornwall and was expecting to have wifi access which didn’t actually materialise.  As a result, I had no choice but simply to be on holiday, so that’s what I did.  That also meant that I read an awful lot of all kinds of stuff, ranging from a revisit of Dorothy L Sayers (of which more probably anon) to various non-fiction.  One book that’s stayed with me, possibly because it felt so apposite for my remote rural idyll, is Rob Young’s extraordinary Electric Eden, subtitled Unearthing Britain’s Visionary Music.  The book has already received widespread media coverage, perhaps surprisingly so given the slightly arcane nature of its core subject matter, but the positive reviews are well-merited.

The focus of the book is the British folk-rock scene of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Young concentrates largely on the short but highly productive period when artists like Fairport Convention, Nick Drake, John Martyn, the Incredible String Band and countless others were redefining what ‘folk music’ was and could do.  He approaches this period by an appropriately discursive route through the Victorian and Edwardian origins of folk song collection, demonstratingthat the concept of ‘folk music’ as we now understand it is a relatively recent one.  This may be music which, in many cases, has its origins in the distant past, but our conception of it and our response to it have been blurred by a modern and evolving sensibility.  By coincidence, another book I read on holiday was Clinton Heylin’s fascinating Dylan’s Daemon Lover, a highly detailed examination of the origins and history of a single folk ballad, generally known as ‘The House Carpenter’ or ‘The Daemon Lover’, which shows that the branches of the folk and popular music family trees have been tangled for centuries.

Young’s approach is less academic and much wider-ranging, but his argument seems to be that the notion of folk music was appropriated in the 1960s and 1970s in part to reflect and articulate a particular sense of Britishness.  Young doesn’t reach any definitive conclusions about why the idea of a rural Eden – the ‘secret garden’ that he discusses in the book’s opening chapters – should have become so resonant, but it does seem to have permeated the culture of the period – not only music, but also books, television and films.  Both here and in his recent excellent article in Sight and Sound magazine, Young references television productions like David Rudkin’s remarkable Penda’s Fen and the television adaptation of Alan Garner’s The Owl Service (now, incidentally, also the name of one of the best of the new wave of folk-rock bands, whose music is very much a homage to the period Young discusses here), as well as films such as The Wicker Man and Witchfinder General, which appeared to tap into a similar mood.

The book’s strength lies in its comprehensiveness and attention to detail.  I thought I knew this period of music reasonably well, but Young constantly introduced me to artists I’d never heard of or information I didn’t know, even about artists I’d consider to be my own quirky specialist subjects, such as the underrated Bob Pegg (though, to be smug, I did spot a couple of minor apparent errors in the details relating to Mr Pegg).  Young is good on the obscure by-ways of the period, justly resurrecting interest in artists who have largely been forgotten, but he’s even better on the major figures – the likes of Davy Graham, Shirley Collins, Richard Thompson, Sandy Denny and the Incredible String Band.  Like Greil Marcus, he has the knack of sending you back to the music, making you want to listen to it again, helping you hear something new.

If you’ve any interest in the music or culture of the period, I’d thoroughly recommend the book.  It’s a massive tome – well over 600 pages – but often gripping and always highly readable.  If I have a criticism, it perhaps stems from the fact that Young, by his own admission, did not approach the subject initially as an enthusiast for traditional folk music, but as someone who was intrigued as to why artists such as Nick Drake or the Incredible String Band should have been designated ‘folk’ in the first place. My sense is that Young rather underplays the influence of the traditional folk scene working in parallel with the music he describes here.  The great Nic Jones, for example – perhaps, with the benefit of hindsight, one of the most influential figures in folk music of the last 40 years – is mentioned only briefly in respect of his performances on the Albion Country Band album, No Roses, and on Peter Bellamy’s ballad-opera, The Transports. Bellamy himself gets more coverage, but more for his early work with The Young Tradition than for his highly influential solo material.  It’s not a major gap, but I was left with a sense of a further footpath left unexplored.  This is most evident in Young’s slightly eccentric conclusion, which he extrapolates his notion of Britain’s visionary music into the more recent past, focusing on the work of Kate Bush, Talk Talk and Julian Cope.  These are all fine artists, who have undoubtedly developed their own Edenic visions of Britain, but it seems perverse to focus on these while largely ignoring folk artists who offer a clearer line of sight back to Cecil Sharp.  But it’s all a matter of taste and even a book as comprehensive as this can’t include everything.

A fascinating book, though – and I should add that Rob Young also has an excellent blog, also called Electric Eden, which is full of equally fascinating nuggets and links that, if you’re minded, will take you even further down this distinctively British garden path.

UPDATE: I was delighted to receive a response from Rob Young thanking me for the above review.  He also (quite rightly) put me on the spot by asking about the couple of minor apparent errors I thought I’d spotted in his account of the great Bob Pegg, so that, if necessary, he could correct them for future editions.  As a matter of record, therefore, I should point out that, in fact, in at least one of the cases, it turned out that my memory was at fault and Rob Young was right all along.  That’ll teach me to try to be clever. Bu that’s characteristic  of the book – not only fascinating but rigorously researched.  I can’t recommend it too highly.