A trip to Brighton

It's always refreshing to visit Brighton, Britain's pleasure capital by the sea, where the vibe is so funky you can cut it with a knife and have it on toast, and the atmosphere so tolerant that every kind of queer identity can just hang out and be.

All things trashy and kitsch are served up with an ooh la la twinkle in shops that specialize in turning the detritus of yesteryear into the hippest of gold for today. We saw chocolate eggs so big they made the eyes water and vibrators that looked like modernist sculptures (or was it the other way around?).


Where else to feast on a succulent cream tea with homemade scones, proper doilies and a double helping of chinz?


Brighton is made for idling, for sitting in a cafe in the North Laines and watching the people parade by. The carnival is in perpetual motion and everyone is on the look. Trouser-flapping techno spills from the shops and clashes with buskers' skanky bluegrass. Above the din, an almost blackbird: a man selling bird whistles, ersatz like everything else.



We squandered pockets full of two pence pieces on the sliding, grinding slot machines, easily succumbing to a gambler's greed and feeding our occasional winnings straight back in again. We sat on the beach and listened to the sea.



Back in Oxford, calm. The first dead nettles of spring were shaking out their foppish cuffs, a ruddy sun set through the haze, and out on Port Meadow the blackbirds sang so loudly that they almost drowned out the distant burr of traffic.

Spring shamans

This is the view from where I live, a rented flat above a shop, and you can see that the spring is well and truly under way. Oxford is justly famous for its architecture, its dreaming spires, but it has some remarkable green spaces too.




Just a couple of minutes away from where I live is the canal, a green corridor that runs through the north of the city and out through Oxfordshire. Many of my friends live on canal boats (though I need the luxury of central heating to get me through the dank days of winter).




Cross the canal and follow Aristotle Lane and it takes you over a railway bridge, where graffiti and the council's ugly anti-graffiti compete. It's an ever-changing work of art, a modern palimpsest.



This is what you see as you reach the other side.




The path leads down to Port Meadow, a great stretch of grassland bordered by the Thames (the Isis) on one side, and the railway on the other. It has never been ploughed. There is buried archaeological evidence suggesting Bronze Age occupation, and the remains of an old round barrow, called Round Hill. I walk here almost everyday. A place to breathe and think and, if you time it right, be alone.




Every autumn the meadow floods, bringing with it a diverse range of birdlife and waterfowl (lapwing, golden plover, widgeon, pochard, teal, black headed gulls, little egrets and the occasional rarity). It's a good place to spot bird watchers too.



It's one of the great joys of living in Oxford: that in five minutes on my bike I can be in the city centre, but in five minutes walking I can be here, on the meadow.

Elsewhere, I went to Dorchester-on-Thames the other weekend, to visit the abbey, with it's Tolkeinesque doors and medieval frescoes.








I've also been lucky enough to spend a day in the company of Hipolito Peralta Ccama, a Quechuan Paqo (healer/shaman) over for the Conversations with the Earth festival that has been running in Oxford this last week. Gentle, humble and wise, it was a treat to meet him and his translator, Maya, and I learnt a little more about indigenous Peruvian spirituality. He led a small but powerful ceremony for us, down at Celtic Chris's gaff, in honour of the ancestors. He encouraged us to pray to, and with, coca leaves, some of which we chewed, some of which we burned. Here we are at one of our ancestral sites, Wayland's Smithy, where Hipolito was intrigued by my bagpipes.



And here is Chris with his lurcher, Bear, inside the tomb.



And then, to the woods with my beloved, listening to the birds, watching the signs of spring everywhere, and quietly observing the deer nonchalantly browsing through the trees.

Wod

At last I'm able to give you a bit more information about my new musical project, Wod, about which I've been a bit hesitant to say much as I've been waiting for a chance to grab some audio.

We're a trio, made up of Jane Griffiths ( Telling the Bees) on fiddle, Jim Penny (Red Dog Green Dog) on anglo-concertina, and myself on English bagpipes. Wod is an Old English word meaning furious, mad, or possessed by a god. It shares a common Indo-European root with the Latin vatis, from which the modern druidic ovate stems (photos by Kate Raworth).



We play new and traditional music for Breton and French - or what I prefer to call Brythonic - dancing (the 'Brythonic languages' being Cornish, Welsh and Breton). As the old saying goes, love and music need no passports, and though we are playing a style of music that has come to these shores from elsewhere, it has already become something else, played on different instruments and infused with the all the influences that have shaped us as musicians here. Calling it Brythonic rather than Breton acknowledges this: we are not trying to copy or emulate another culture, but to re-find something of our own through the invigorating effect that such musical cross-fertilization provides.



So far, apart from a few pub sessions and a brief appearance at the Wytham Winter Warmer, we've just tucked ourself away on Jim's narrowboat, stoked the fire, and played. Tunes can last for twenty minutes or more as we explore their inner structure and start to get carried by the trancey wodulations that emerge. I tend to pin the tune down, playing with different ornaments and subtle variations; Jane finds soaring lines or mines the deep harmonic under-layers; Jim adds clusters and cascades of notes, often sending the tune in surprising directions, but always keeping the funk. It's an honour to play with such exceptional musicians, and the grins on our faces as we do say it all.

Here's a couple of tunes, recorded during rehearsal this week. The first set consists of a pair of Hanter Dros written by me; the second a trad tune (I think) for a type of Breton dance called a 'tour'. Recorded straight onto my Zoom with only a bit of compression, the pipes are a little high in the mix but, well, you'll get the idea.

The Golden Plover/ The King's Barrows by andyletcher

Tours by andyletcher

We're not actually in a hurry to go out in the world but gigs are starting to come in. We'll be playing in the bar of the Isis pub, Iffley Village, for the Catweazle Equinox bash on March 19th.

Lyric clouds

Having worried in an earlier post about overusing the words sun, moon, silver and gold in my song-writing, I thought it would be interesting to see exactly which words I do use. So last night I pasted the lyrics from both Telling the Bees albums into Wordle, and came up with the following word cloud.



I'm happy to see bees and wood right there in the middle, but oh and cos expose a certain laziness. Die, lurking there at the bottom but still catching the eye, reveals my major lyrical obsession - as if you didn't know. I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions but, given that I am an old hobbit, I must confess to rather liking the preponderance of nature imagery. Scanning across, I find that new lyrics almost start to fall out - I'm wondering about using lyric clouds as a kind of cut-up technique (something that intrigues me but which I've never yet tried). So, for example: 'wonderful raging outside song'. Hmm.

The unstoppable spring is working its strange voodoo upon me. Including Astrolabe, I have now written four new songs - finished one last night while another landed in my head as I watched the room get light this morning. Like the blackbird, winter is dead to me, but now I can't stop singing.

Asclepius

One of the great inventions of the West has to be musical notation. That something as fleeting, abstract and intangible as music can be written down always strikes me as rather incredible. It's just that when it comes to orally-transmitted music - which most of the world's music is - Western notation is a very blunt instrument indeed. There's so much rhythmic and melodic subtlety that falls through its grid. It tries to make music static, fixed, unchanging, to fit it to the norms and conventions of classical music. But folk music is very much alive.

The Romantic-era Master Piper, William Dixon, 'prick'd' his tunes down, an image which suggests a collection of butterflies pinned in a drawer. The analogy is a good one. The art of the folk musician is to bring these dead notes back to life again, to let them take flight.

Over the years I've just about taught myself to read and write folk tunes (I find learning by ear so much easier) and I'll not deny it's very useful. Here's a bagpipe tune of mine, Asclepius (a schottische in G in one of my favourite scales) as I 'prick'd it down' in my tunebook.




But of course, this isn't how I play it. The musicians I most admire, and the ones I try and emulate, are those who seem effortlessly able to weave around a tune, embellishing it with a harmony here, a variation there, extemporising to keep the tune surprising and therefore alive. Tunes don't just stop at the end of the bar - there's a space, an inbreath, where, with a turn or a roll, you can keep dancers' feet off the ground, maintain the suspense, before releasing back into the melody again.

Western notation gives the impression that a tune is like a set of train tracks - you hop on and away you go, the same every time. Nowadays I think of a tune more as a set of cairns or waymarkers on a fell walk. Touching the cairns stops you from sliding off the tune entirely (all too easily done on the pipes), but so long as you do, the way you reach them is entirely up to you.

Over the years you start to build up a repertoire of variations for a particular tune, but new ideas always emerge in the playing, from the chemistry, the push and pull, of what the other players are doing. A good tune will show you the way.

So here's Asclepius (who, incidentally, was the Greek god of healing - the seriously esoteric will also know that the Asclepius is one of the texts of the Corpus Hermeticum), as I played it a couple of summer's ago with Cliff Stapleton on hurdy-gurdy. The very last variation on the A-part just seemed to emerge simultaneously.




And here it is as I played it a couple of days ago in my bedroom, mistakes, squeaks 'n all. Different again. It doesn't stand still.

Asclepius by andyletcher