MIND DE-CODER 103

MIND DE-CODER 103

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“Folk music is the map of singing”

                                               Alan Lomax

 

VAUGHAN WILLIAMS     1. ADAGIO (LOVELY ON THE WATER)

The sublime Lovely On The Water from Vaughan William's pastoral composition SIX STUDIES IN ENGLISH FOLK SONG, written in 1926, and performed here by the Nash Ensemble, one of England's finest chamber music groups, in 2001. Vaughan Williams wrote that his aim in setting the songs was for them to be “treated with love.” ‘Nuff said.

 

THE A.LORDS     FREOHYLL

 This gossamer opening track from The A.Lords self-titled debut album, which saw release in 2011, comes from a session recorded over two nights in a dusty old Dorsetshire barn during harvest festival in which microphones were placed in trees outside and under the floorboards to give an authentic rustic air to the songs. Lovely.

 
ARROWWOOD     GOBLIN MARKET

 

Spooky goings-on of a psychedelically eldritch nature from Chelsea Robb, who releases beautiful albums of atmospheric pagan charm under the name Arrowwood. Goblin Market is taken from a her third album BEAUTIFUL GRAVE, released 2013. Robb only uses acoustic instruments to complement her vocals – the reed organ, flute, various string instruments and even a hurdy gurdy add rich layers to her hauntingly alluring songs. It’s really quite lovely.

 

ORDER OF THE 12     EYE OF A LENS

 Recorded under the castle in Lewes, East Sussex, LORE OF THE LAND is the debut release from the Order Of The 12, a band put together by Richard Norris, the ‘electronic musician’s electronic musician’, and one half of Mind De-Coder favourite Beyond The Wizard’s Sleeve, following his introduction to the acid folk genre during the last lockdown. The music looks to the South Downs and the Sussex folk tradition for inspiration, with echoes of psych folk acts like Trees or Mellow Candle to the fore, although there’s just a touch of your Joker’s Daughter, or Goldfrapp’s own take on pastoral electronica to be found on the haunting Eye Of A Lens, but this an album of lysergic wyrd-folk that is every bit the equal of its influences.

 

BELBURY POLY    THE GREEN GRASS GROWS

 Jim Jupp’s Belbury Poly operate at the more proggy end of the hauntological spectrum – that is to say, less of the disembodied voices and more of the tunes (albeit tunes that sound like they could have been found on an old BBC 2 recording of an early morning Open University science show from 1974). On is 2012 release, THE BELBURY TALES, he’s even got some guest players to play drums, guitar and bass, no less – so it was with some delight I found this track, The Green Grass Grows, with its ever so spooky, off-kilter child sing-a-long, which makes it sound like the soundtrack to a primary school production of cult 1970’s horror film The Wicker Man.

 

MELLOW CANDLE     SHEEP SEASON

 Acid folk doesn't get any more atmospheric or beautiful than this, but the record buying public disagreed and after releasing just one album in 1972, the very fine SWADDLING SONGS, the group split up. These days, of course, it's considered as something of the holy grail of folk rock albums and you can't buy the album for love nor money. That's what a spiraling two way soaring vocal harmony is supposed to sound like, just in case you wondered.

 

THE EIGHTEENTH DAY OF MAY     THE HIGHEST TREE

 I love this track. It's probably my favourite on this evening's show - it never makes me feel less than joyful, and possibly up for a bit of dancing if someone was able to produce a fiddle from behind a convenient hay stack. The Eighteenth Day of May only made one album, THE EIGHTEENTH DAY OF MAY, released in 2007. It sounds like they grew up listening to their parent's early Fairport Convention albums, but try as I might I can't think of anything wrong with that. Don’t be fooled by the song’s jauntiness, by the way - bleak murder, heartbreak and forlorn loss (proper subjects for a folk song) await a cursory listen to the lyrics.

 

THE MEMORY BAND     VOICES

 The Memory Band are, in fact, less of a band and more of a collective, a varied cast of collaborators drawn to the band’s one constant: singer, songwriter, guitarist and producer Stephen Cracknell. Their music is at home to landscape folk and psychedelic jazz, as well as exploring some of folk’s more hauntological hinterlands - Voices, taken from last year’s release, COLOURS, is like stumbling across a secret radio signal that broadcasts arcane messages that exist somewhere between history, memory and the imagination.

 

TUNNG     SOUP 

This is just one of those pieces of music that I love unconditionally. The chiming electro-acoustic refrain from the first half of the track is a thing of rare beauty that the band fail to spoil by yelling SOUP! all over it. This is taken from Tunng’s third album, released in 2007, called GOOD ARROWS, on which they lose much of the awkward (but fairly entertaining) electronica, and become, instead, a delightful, experimental, pastoral pop group whose influences include Icelandic prog rock, choral music and film sountracks.

 

TRADER HORNE     MORNING WAY

 Trader Horne - purportedly named after John peel’s nickname for his nanny - were, like Mellow Candle, one of those magical, short-lived bands that existed as the 60’s crept their way into the 70’s in the hope that no one would notice. It featured the voice of Judy Dybble, who was in the original Fairport Convention but was replaced with Sandy Denny when it was felt that her voice wasn't up to the direction that The Fairport's were pushing in, and guitarist Jackie McAuley, previously with Them, who found himself at a loose end after the curmudgeonly Van Morrison went solo and the band’s final two psychedelically-tinged albums failed to find an audience interested enough to buy them. They only made the one album, the very fey MORNING WAY, which was released in 1970. It was never promoted because Dybble left the band before the record was released, and yet...some bands exist only ever to make one album or one song that makes sense of their existence, even if they only exist for five minutes, and in this case, the wistfully lysergic Morning Way does the job quite nicely.

 

SHELAGH MCDONALD      STARGAZER

 

Shelagh McDonald's story has a touch of the mythic about it. Following the release of her second album, STARGAZER, in 1971, Shelagh McDonald, all set to be the next Sandy Denny, mysteriously disappears for 34 years, only to resurface in 2005 after reading a Scottish Daily Mail story about her musical legacy and unsolved disappearance. It seems her very first acid trip was a life-changing nightmare that lasted for over a month leaving her a scared, paranoid, fragile and mostly broken, emotional wreck - she retreated to Scotland where she slowly mended herself, only to discover she could no longer sing. She married a local bookseller and began a nomadic existence, often living in tents in the Scottish Highlands, never to record again. If that's not the stuff of legend then I don't know what is. In fact, In 2013 she made a low-key return to public performances and released a new album, PARNASSUS REVISITED, that was distributed at gigs - I understand that there might even be a new album on the way - so the legend continues.

 

THE ADVISORY CIRCLE     AND THE CUKOO COMES

            ARIANNE CHURCHMAN     MIDSUMMER LEY LINE HOTLINE

 Hauntological wyrdness from The Advisory Circle (they’re there to help us make the right decisions), the pseudonym by which producer and composer Cate Brooks (no deadnaming, and purely for reference purposes: formerly Jon Brooks) explores the music and sounds from a misremembered 70’s Britain that never happened. The ever so slightly sinister And The Cukoo Comes is taken from her 2005 release, the vaguely unnerving MIND HOW YOU GO.

 Whilst that was going on I was inspired to also play the evocatively titled Midsummer Ley Line Hotline by Arianne Churchman, artist and folk enthusiast from East Anglia whose work investigates British folk traditions, celebrations and customs using the forms of performance, film, sound and sculpture to explore the themes of a common folk consciousness. A perfect fit, then, for the folks at Calendar Customs whose series of tape cassette releases similarly explore this world of symbolism and ritual and whose artistic reinterpretations are no stranger to this show. Midsummer Ley Line Hotline can be found on the release FOLKLORE TAPES CALENDAR CUSTOMS VOL. IV: CROWN OF LIGHT (MIDSUMMER AND FOLKLORE), released in 2016, the fourth instalment in a series that focuses on pre-Christian traditions and observances associated with midsummer, often marking key points in the agricultural year when planting began or harvesting was completed. Clearly, I’m fascinated with this stuff. You can find out more about Folklore Tapes here.

 

ESPERS     DEAD QUEEN

 

This is one of the most exquisitely beautiful songs I've ever heard. Words fail me whenever I hear it so I'll just say that it sounds like a medieval castle revealing itself through the early morning mist, and can found on the album ESPERS 2, released in 2006. This was, in fact, the band's third album, and continues their love of spooky, acoustic folk peppered with flute, cello and even weirder sounds held together with vocalist Meg Baird's voice, which is baroque and amazing. I love this song - it always leaves me feeling spellbound for absolute moments whenever I hear it.

 

LINDA PERHACS    CHIMACUM RAIN

 

Which leads us to the ethereal loveliness of Linda Perhacs with the almost unbearbly lovely, Chimacum Rain, taken from the exquisitely otherworldly album PARALLELOGRAMS, released in 1970 - an album that shimmers with an eerie beauty.

 

MAGNET     GENTLY JOHNNY

 Magnet was a band put together for the purpose of recording songs composed by New York songwriter Paul Giovanni for the soundtrack to the cult film The Wicker Man. Quite why the producers chose a native of New York for the gig I don’t know, but it was an inspired choice - his haunting music provides the perfect accompaniment for this dark fairytale. The soundtrack itself has it’s own mythology, and the sublime Gently Johnny, adapted from a poem by Robert Burns, wasn’t even included in the version of the film that was released in the cinemas in 1973, but was restored to the soundtrack in 2002, using cues from the tape held by the film’s associate music director, Gary Carpenter, mixed with recordings from the semi-legendary Trunk Records release (more of which later).

 

SPIROGYRA     OLD BOOT WINE

 Haunting and eerie, Old Boot Wine provides a hypnotic soundtrack to a vivid dream. The whimsically English Spirogyra were a band which produced patchouli-scented flower folk combined with a bit a bit jarring social commentary, and featured Barbara Gaskin on vocals (she later went on to record It's My Party with a pre-Eurythmics Dave Stewart in 1981, trivia fans). This track is taken from the band’s final album, the luscious BELLS, BOOTS AND SHAMBLES, released in 1973. By all accounts it sold poorly, the world having possibly moved on from flowery psychedelic folk by then, but is, of course, these days considered a lost classic of the acid-folk scene.

 At this point I include the distinguished actor Michael Hordern reading a few paragraphs from the numinous ‘Piper At The Gates Of Dawn’ - pretty much the touchstone and lodestar of all English psychedelia - Chapter 7 in Kenneth Grahame’s Edwardian classic The Wind In The Willows. There are many audio adaptions of this much-loved paean to life, sunshine, running water, woodlands, dusty roads, and winter firesides, but this is the best.

 SPROATLY SMITH     SPRING STRATHSPEY

 Sproatly Smith bring a lysergic ambiance to the esquisitely lovely Spring Strathspey, a pagan celebration of the sabbat, the changing of the seasons and the abandonment of the senses, originally recorded by the Celtic bard Gwydion Pendderwen on his album SONGS OF THE OLD RELIGION which he released in 1972. Sproatly Smith bathe the track in shimmering synths whilst the fragile vocals float and dance as if spellbound. Taken from their 2010 release PIXIELED, you might think that this is the sound of wood-nymphs singing.

 

WOODY GREEN     THE WOODS

Inhabiting a realm somewhere between Donovan and Mark Fry, Ireland's Woody Green's eponymous album, released earlier this month, has psych-folk writ large all over it. The Woods, all acoustic guitar and birdsong, lasts a mere 42 seconds, but is nevertheless quite lovely for all that.

 

MAGNET     CORN RIGS

 

Paul Giovanni was tasked with creating a sound which hinted at England's pre-Christian roots to accompany the pagan imagery of The Wicker Man. Once again turning to a poem by Robert Burns for inspiration, Corn Rigs deftly combines animist imagery with heathen sex magic, and, let's face it, besotted love. By far one of the loveliest songs ever recorded, and available on THE WICKER MAN soundtrack.

 

BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP     INTRO - MAGNETIC TALES

 

Lasting no more than 38 seconds, Intro - Magnetic Tales provides a taste of the sonic palette laid out before you in the collaborative feast that is BROADCAST AND THE FOCUS GROUP INVESTIGATE WITCH CULTS OF THE RADIO AGE, released in 2009. On it, Broadcast’s off-kilter, other-worldly pastoralism (which reached its apotheosis on their MOTHER IS THE MILKY NIGHT, which I've dipped into throughout the show) is filtered through The Focus Group's Julian House's own brand of temporal displacement to produce something that’s both spectral and disorientating.

 

ANNE BRIGGS     BLACKWATERSIDE

 An absolutely gorgeous interpretation of the folk ballad Down By Blackwaterside; a tale of lost love and broken promises, recorded by the brilliant and enigmatic Anne Briggs in 1971 for her album ANNE BRIGGS, though it can also be found on either of her compilation albums CLASSIC ANNE BRIGGS and A COLLECTION. Anne's singing is hypnotic, and despite the sadness of the lyric itself - a suitor breaks his promise of marriage - this remains one of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard. Bert Jansch, her lover at the time, provides the guitar accompaniment based upon an earlier instrumental version that Briggs taught to him herself, having learnt it from that great collector of British folk A.L. Lloyd, and appeared on his 1965 album JACK ORION, which, and everyone knows this, but I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention it, Jimmy Page ripped off for Led Zep’s Black Mountainside.

 

THE PENTANGLE     ONCE I HAD A SWEETHEART

 I’ve no doubt that Jacqui McShee could sing the wording on the back of a cornflakes box and still make make my heart a-quiver, but this take on the traditional folk-melody Once I Had A Sweetheart (possibly some 300 years old) is simply sublime - John Renbourne’s sitar solo is scintillating, and Jacquie McShee’s vocals just soar, despite the song’s melancholy. Taken from The Pentangle’s 1969 release BASKET OF LIGHT, this is the band at their pinnacle, blending traditional folk with jazz and eastern elements to pioneering effect.

 

THE MEMORY BAND     WHERE THE RIVER MEETS THE SEA

 The second track from The Memory Band on this evening’s show, included because this particular track - all brass, strings and vocal samples which build anthemically and sweep images across the mental vision before fading to birdsong and running water - fits the nature of the show too perfectly to ignore. Where The River Meets The Sea is the closing track on their 2013 release ON THE CHALK (OUR NAVIGATION OF THE LINE OF THE DOWNS), a psycho-geographical exploration of The Harrow Way, the western section of an ancient walkway, which is explored in sound, speech and song.

 

TICKAWINDA     ROSEMARY LANE

 This is a particularly ravishing cover of the folk traditional Rosemary Lane by late 70’s folk band Tickawinda, house band for the Rose and Crown folk club and winners of the North West heats of the 'Search for The Stars of the '80's' competition held at the Poynton Folk Centre in a performance described as 'Tickawonderful' in the Manchester Evening News. Sounds unpromising, I know, but their only album, ROSEMARY LANE, released in 1979, despite being neither psychedelic or progressive, is packed full of wonderful tunes, mostly covers by the likes of Pentangle and Steely Dan, that are simply outstanding in their delivery; absolutely gorgeous. The album was limited to 300 copies and for years was considered the holy grail of folk collections. The nice thing is, when it finally got a CD release in 2001 and people got to hear it for the first time, instead of hear about it, nobody was disappointed.

 

WOODY GREEN     MAGIC CHAIR

Formerly the bassist in Brighton’s jazz-psych outfit Wax Machine, Woody Green creates a unique acid-folk ambiance on his eponymous debut, produced by Kikagaku Moyo’s Go Kurusawa. Magic Chair occupies a space between dream and reality, but the whole album is a trip.

 

MAGNET     WILLOW’S SONG

More mellifluous loveliness from Paul Giovanni and Magnet - This is the version of Willow’s Song taken from the semi-legendary Trunk Records issue of the WICKER MAN SOUNDTRACK released in 1998. Until then there had been no official release of the music from this most cult-ish of films, the original tapes thought lost, but a four year search by Jonny Trunk produced a copy of the original music and effects tape which was duly released and that’s why you can hear strange noises in the background - which are essentially Britt Ekland’s body double slapping her arse in a come-hither sort of fashion. Sung by Rachel Vearney, about whom nothing appears to be known, this is perhaps my favourite version of Willow’s Song, its alluring sweetness often leaving me dumbstruck, although over the years I’ve collected over 20 other versions of what remains one of the most gorgeous and sensual songs ever committed to vinyl, or in this case, celluloid. This is a different version from the one which appears on the official soundtrack which accompanied the 2013 director’s cut of the film - that version featured vocals by Leslie Mackie who had a small part in the film as a slightly unhinged schoolgirl called Daisy - this version, however, is the first version I ever heard and holds a special place in my heart.

 

VASHTI BUNYAN     WINTER IS BLUE (ACETATE DEMO)

The first time I heard this fragile recording I fell in love with it, and I haven’t fell out of love with it yet. This was the demo for  for what was to be her first single for Andrew Loog Oldham's Immediate label in 1966. Winter Is Blue, with faux-psychedelic orchestration, was never released as a single but can be found on various compilations of the period (it even turns up on Peter Whitehead's 1967 swinging London documentary Tonite Let's All Make love In London) but despite added flutes and whistles it isn't a patch on this, the original, gossamer version of the song in which Vashti laments the loss of love and the passing of the seasons in what is effectively the most beautiful and evocative song I've ever heard (Willow's Song notwithstanding). Stopped me dead in my tracks first time I ever heard it and it continues to do so even now. You can find both versions of the song on the compilation of Vashti's singles and demos, SOME THINGS JUST STICK IN YOUR MIND, released in 2007.

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