Trouble at t'Mill

There's a furore in the folk world, there's trouble at t'mill. Veteran presenter of Radio 2's weekly folk show, Mike Harding, is to be replaced at the end of the year by Mark Radcliffe. Folkies, not known for embracing change, are up in arms. The spirit of rebellion is quietly simmering on Facebook and throughout the blogosphere. Ned Ludd is stirring in his grave.

I say replaced but everyone knows Harding's been sacked. He's not going quietly and has made his grievances public. His fifteen years at the helm have seen his audience rise tenfold. He helped institute the BBC Folk Awards. A melodeon player, he has folk music 'in his blood.' Quiet rightly, he feels aggrieved.

His sacking was pretty unceremonious. I'm put in mind of Radio 1's Night of the Long Knives back in the mid 90s, when the Smashie and Nicey generation of DJs were culled at one fell swoop. The reason given by the BBC is that it wants to take the show live (it's currently pre-recorded) and that requires a proven hand upon the tiller. I suspect age has more to do with it - Harding is 68 - and one can't help wondering if it has something to do with his never really being part of the BBC club.

But, however much I sympathise with Harding's treatment and feel he deserved better, I shan't be signing the petitions calling for his return. I never listened to his show. Honestly? I couldn't stand it.

Arguments about taste are pointless and take us nowhere, so all I can say is that the kind of music the two of us like and consider folk differs. Fair play to him and to those who loved the show but my idea of folk is altogether less polished (the name of his production company, Smooth Operations, perhaps says it all). I'm altogether less fond of Kate Rusby.

In fact, I suspect that my idea of folk is so rooted in alterity, resistance, psychedelia, otherness, outsiderliness, trance, that it'll never get played on a mainstream radio show (with perhaps the exception of the never-less-than-wonderful Late Junction, over on Radio 3), and I'd probably complain if it did.

The following quote turned up on Facebook recently, from an interview with the pianist John Tilbury, and it strikes me as relevant here. Asked how he viewed politicised folk music during the 60s, he replied:

Strong folk music is always the music of a repressed country, but we are the oppressors. Irish folk music is about the survival of their identity, but I think of English folk music being a lower middle-class museum music. I don't hear it having a vivid and active presence here, but Irish and Basque folk music identify a whole nation.

I'm not sure I completely agree but there's truth in what he says. An English lower middle-class museum music. Ouch. I can't help but feel that the folk industry of which Harding's show was a part, has less and less to do with the session and the lock-in and the protest-camp and the land, and more and more to do with selling a sanitised idea of the folk to people nostalgic for a past they never had. That seems to me to be something genuinely worth getting up in arms about.

I've always liked Mark Radcliffe. I think he's a brilliant and very witty DJ. But I doubt even he will change much. Perhaps the time for petitions is over. Perhaps it's time for some genuine trouble at t'mill.

Let the revels begin

There's a particular kind of music that appears in films, a genre all of its own but one that has tended to get overlooked. It's characterised by a folky, medieval or Eastern sound; it's expertly played but always too low in the mix to hear what's going on; and it rarely makes it onto the soundtrack album. I'm talking, of course, about revel music.

I think the first time I became aware of it was while watching Jim Henson's puppet masterpiece, The Dark Crystal (designed, of course, by Brian Froud). 'The Pod Dance' features some virtuosic recorder playing by Richard Harvey, former member of 70s medieval prog-rockers Gryphon. I spent years searching for the soundtrack only to find that Nomi had it - one of the many things that sealed our relationship. Now, of course, youtube saves the shoe-leather.




Things went all Oirish for Bilbo's long-expected party in Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings, with a tune called 'Flaming Red Hair' by Howard Shore.




Naturally they went all Oirish again when Kate Winslet got sweaty in steerage on the doomed ship Titanic. For once the band that actually played the revel music, Gaelic Storm, appeared in front of the camera, and I'm told their thirty seconds of fame propelled them to stardom. Good for them. It's the dream gig.



My old friends Paescod (later Nonimus), with whom I spent many fine weekends donning the codpiece, were not so lucky. Listen carefully in the procession scene of the otherwise execrable remake of The Wicker Man, and you'll just hear one of their shawm tracks (I forget which one but I'm sorry, I simply cannot watch that film a second time). They did get paid, but not quite enough for them to hang up the motley.

I was first turned on to medieval music at university when my friend Dave Brown played me some David Munrow. Munrow did go on to write film music but this first piece is surely crying out to be used for a revel scene (bear in mind it's the sixties, OK?). Munrow was undoubtedly a genius and almost certainly bipolar - tragically he killed himself in his early thirties and who knows what he would have gone on to achieve. But he certainly inspired me to take up the bagpipes.




Just last night we watched the Arnie-free remake of Conan the Barbarian. Beyond dreadful, the sole redeeming feature of this steroid-pumped nonsense was the track, 'Efrooh Badwina' by Egyptian percussionist Hossam Ramzy. Without sleeve notes I'm not sure what the reed pipe is but I'm guessing it's a kind of mijwiz, a double-chantered pipe found across the Eastern mediterranean.




And I very nearly forgot 'Romanian Wind' from Guy Ritchie's Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows, which I think is when Watson gets pissed with the gypsies.



Do let me know if you've got any more examples of revel music. Maybe one day someone will release a compilation.

Could do better

On Saturday I got to deliver my paper, What is a Bard?, at the OBOD Mount Haemus Award Lectures, held in the Medieval Hall in Salisbury Cathedral Close. I was lucky enough to receive this award four years ago, and I'm pleased to say my paper seemed to go down well. I won't summarise it here other than to say I was putting the case for craft, but follow the link to read it in full (and indeed, the other papers).

However, I was delighted and surprised to meet someone in the audience who'd taught English to J. K. Rowling back when she was a girl. I was overcome with mischievousness. "Was she any good?" I asked. Well you would, wouldn't you?

It transpires that, though extremely keen, she was an unexceptional student, neither very bad nor very good.

I confessed that I'm not a Harry Potter fan. I've always found the writing unexceptional, the world jarring and unconvincing, the magic just poorly disguised physics with dodgy Latin. Like Terry Pratchett I've never warmed to the idea of muggles. Good luck to her and the rest of the reading world, but Harry Potter is not for me. I gave up halfway through volume three.

No, I'm a fan of the original wizard school on the island of Roke, where Ged or Sparrowhawk goes to learn his trade, in Ursula Le Guin's Earthsea trilogy. Apart from Le Guin's beautifully crafted prose, what I love about the books is that they are so wise. They're taoist texts, meditations on the need to accept the shadow, death, and, through effortless non-doing, to find one's place in the endless unfolding of the world. I know of no other fantasy text in which the hero's teacher, the wizard Ogion the Silent, never uses magic but prefers to wander the forests in silent contemplation. He's Lao Tsu with a staff.

"Ah", said the teacher. "A Wizard of Earthsea was one of the books we studied in class."

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