For whatever reason, I am finding it harder and harder to write something for this blog.

Maybe it’s the summer. I have been traveling again - Europe, various parts of America, and unusually for me, Newfoundland. That always gets me thinking. I have also been writing about music for other projects, and talking an awful lot about traditional music. Not playing that much of it, unfortunately, but that’s another matter. Some of this writing is in the process into being transformed into a series of articles and real books. As the impetous to start this blog was the purchase of a 1st generation iPod shuffle, (immediately lost, too, godammit), perhaps the waning days of summer are a good chance to take stock.

It might be me turning into a geezer, but, *** me, I am finding it really hard to find anything new that’s interesting to listen to. The other day I seriously thought about ditching my entire collection of CDs. I never listen to them anymore anyway, and except for a handful of songs, I have all the stuff I like on the iPods I keep accumulating. If I could find one with the patience, I’d pay some kid to transfer everything to the digital realm. There is no way I’ll ever get round to it. To take a random example, there will never be an afternoon where I will have the time or inclination to listen to, say ‘Kiss Alive II’ again. On the other hand, if ‘Shock Me’ were to pop up on my headphones in between a set of concertina jigs by Jock Tamson’s Bairns and ‘Real Child of Hell’ by X, it might be a fine thing indeed. ‘But, Bob, you ungracious twat’, you might say, ‘don’t you make CDs for a living? How can you expect us to keep buying yours when you are busy tossing your own collection out the door?’

A fair question. It is not the music I wish to divest myself of, but the rather the luggage that comes with it. It is the cases the CDs came in, and the cases need to keep those cases in. The more you travel, the more you realize how little stuff you actually need. More than once I have come home with an empty suitcase, while all around me everyone else was struggling to fit it all in. When it comes to music, sometimes I just want to start to hear it all over again, from the beginning, and see if I can find some beauty, some excitement, some energy, some new links to the blurry past - in essence, everything that keeps me listening to and playing music at all. Travel is one way to get this frustration out of your system. There are others.

That’s where these iPods and their cheaper cousins get so handy. I love everything on mine - otherwise I would have not bothered in the first place. And therefore I do not have to dig too deep to have a bit of faith restored. For example, I have no idea what sort of hippie weirdness Yes’s ‘Your Move is on about, but it contains something wonderful. Jon Anderson’s voice has been described as worthy of a castratto, and the arrangement of this song is sheer perfection. When the band comes in with the descant harmonizing behind the final ‘give peace a chance’ movement, you have to stop and wonder, ‘why didn’t we ever try that?”. And the answer is obvious. It has already been done. And it’s already perfect.

A few titles below on the menu sits my one song from U2. A few people have asked me why I never write about U2, a band I loved when I was a kid, and am still rather fond of. I always felt like so much had written about the band that there wasn’t a heck of a lot left worth saying. The only song of theirs I have on current iPod is the ‘Three Sunrises’, which is pretty much just an outlandish and soaring chorus, with a bit of pulsing guitar riff to hold it all together. Bono sings it well, the sort of trumpet blasts of passion he handled brilliantly when he was young, so full of hope the notes literally come bursting out of him. It’s a delight to hear. And it isn’t even on any of their albums. It comes from their ‘Unforgettable Fire’ period, when they had so many good songs, they could afford to cast one this good aside.

Just below that on the menu sits The Undertones ‘It’s Gonna Happen’. I will not ever get tired listening to, writing about or just inhaling this song. This piece of musical brilliance perfectly captures the sense of relief, anticipation, and adventure awaiting that I felt when I opened my eyes on the day I turned 19. And perhaps that is one piece of baggage worth holding onto.

North America doesn’t produce a lot of ‘regional’ success stories anymore, as least as far as the music business is concerned. Most places on the continent are pretty homogenous these days, at least culturally. The fact that just a handful of people program almost all the radio stations on the continent is one factor; the ease of moving around, the loss of local media, and general globalization all contribute.

We are lucky here in Newfoundland. Our general isolation, combined with sheer stubbornness, has allowed us to hold onto our own culture a little bit more than most. Local taste in music still means something here. There are a handful of other exceptions. The thriving music of Cape Breton is one, as is the persistence of a remarkable jazz and Creole music scene around New Orleans. Linguistic minorities also produce their own mini-stars; there are East Indian and Spanish musicians making a comfortable living right under our noses that we will never hear of.

Non-Canadians are always surprised at how separate French Canadian culture is from its English (or ‘Anglo’, as we might say here) equivalents. There are French Canadian acts that sell platinum albums who could not sell out a 200-seat club in Toronto; and many an English Canadian act finds their stardom ends at the edge of Anglo Montreal.

A handful of acts surpass all boundaries; Celine Dion was a major star in French before she broke open worldwide as an English singer. The same is true of Roch Voisine and a few others. Most French Canadian acts, however, pick their language and live within it. French acts that want to broaden their horizons usually do so in Europe, where a hundred million French-speaking fans await their attentions.

It’s too bad. If you spend time at European festivals, you are often surprised to encounter brilliant French acts that you have never heard of going down a storm. They are equally curious to meet us, a big Canadian band that they have never heard of either. One of our first such encounters was with La Boittine Souriante. Although they have made the odd foray into English Canada, ‘the smiling boot’ are way better known to European audiences. Although the membership has undergone endless changes, their music and approach has not changed substantially. In essence, they take Quebecois folk tunes, emphasize the foot percussion, and then add clever backbeats and counter melodies from a jazzy brass section. Many of the songs they sing utilize call and response vocals, which make them accessible even for the heavily language impaired. Their instrumentals often use Irish tunes that have entered the Quebec tradition via fiddlers like Jean Carrignan. The result is something completely unique in folk music, mixing several streams of traditional music into one effervescent whole. I am no dancer, but there is something irresistible about la Boittine.

Vishten are from Canada’s other French speaking people, the Acadians. The Acadians emigrated separately to Canada from the Quebecois, and have their own history, culture and French dialect. They are spread out across Atlantic Canada, and despite being a minority everywhere have managed to maintain a vigorous and vibrant music and literary scene. (They also have strong links with their cousins in Louisiana, the ‘Cajuns’). Vishten come from a couple of streams of these proud people, via the French communities of Prince Edward Island and the Magdalene Islands. Like la Boittine, their music has a pop sensibility all too rare in the folk world, where musicians often take things very seriously. There is no doubt that the band’s twin female singers have some serious novelty value. Still, putting that aside, their arrangements have a freshness and joy many strive for, but few attain. The singing and playing is back seat to none, and they pull it all off without a hint of fromage. Check out Mariez Moi and Monsieur  L’Matou from a recent live album, available on iTunes. If the Corrs had been born in Shediac (and had not been sidetracked into Europopshit) they might have sounded a bit like this.

La Vent Du Nord (a.k.a. the North Wind) have often traded members with la Boittine, but their take on French folk music has found an unusually large English speaking audience of its own. Unlike most such acts, they have managed to break into the mainstream Canadian scene a bit more, having made a serious effort to reach out to English audiences. Their music is a little closer stylistically to your typical Irish/Scottish/Breton folk band, but they bring with them the swing and lift of the Quebec tradition. They are also fine performers, and good singers. Not only that, they have a full time hurdy-gurdy player in the band. One can only imagine that he is one of the few aficionados of this weird instrument enjoying such a position.

A few years ago in St. John’s I saw La Vent pull off the single funniest piece of stagecraft I’ve ever seen. Just before the first intermission, the then-band leader Benoit Bourque cajoled a good chunk of the audience into gathering at the front of the stage to learn a French folk dance. A good hundred or so people joined in, holding hands awkwardly as they learned the simple steps. The rules established, the band struck up a tune, and Bourque led them in a shuffle back and forth across the small orchestra pit. This quickly got annoying, as there was no room to really get the dance going.

“Up the aisle!” shouted Bourque.

Obligingly, the mob of dancers joined him in a big folky conga, up and down the theatre aisles. After a turn or two of this, for some insane reason, Bourque decided to up the ante.

“Through the crowd!” he shouted, laughing manically.

Bourque is a big friendly man, but he has a bear-like presence that brooks no argument. He began clambering over people in a row half way up the theatre, dragging the whole tribe behind him.

A group chorus of “…oof...excuse me…hey!…uhh sorry...*** off, you idiot...watch what you’re doing…” soon followed, as toes were mashed, purses and boots kicked aside, and people fell all over each other, as a general orgy of embarrassment, discomfort and pique filled the room. Bourque and a few others made it across the whole width of the theatre, but the rest of the dance dissolved into a low-key brawl, as the sitters and the dancers wrestled over the same space. Bourque leapt back onstage and bounced back into the tune, leaving the audience in complete turmoil, with a grin on his face that would have lit up the stage on its own. Rarely have I laughed so hard. I have never had the nerve to try it with a crowd myself, but it is high on the list. Reason enough to dig out your college French textbook and have another go.

 During the cruise just past I was waiting with a crowd of other losers, er, tourists, at the Hemmingway House in Key West, (and to quote Sean Cullen, ‘what a fucking rip-off’), when one of the passengers buttonholed me on the street to ask some extremely technical questions about the accordion. Among other things, the aspiring folk musician wanted to know if the tunes we played could be easily transferred to the piano accordion. 

I was at a session in St. John’s the other night when a similar question came up. I had just run through a set of Newfoundland accordion tunes, the brisk ‘singles’ used for step dancing, when another player asked me if I could play them on fiddle. The answer to both questions is a qualified ‘no’. 

There is a reason many traditional players eventually make their way to the violin, no matter where they start. (Or maybe it’s just a Newfoundland thing. As a rule, in Cape Breton, Ireland and other places where traditional music still thrives, you generally pick your instrument, and then stick with it until you are great, or get fed up and take up curling. Thanks to polymaths like Kelly Russell, around here it’s considered childish to only have one instrument at one’s disposal.  The laziest have a handle on two or three, and the best can easily work though a half dozen at a good session). At any rate, the prosaic say that the violin imitates the range of emotions offered by the human voice. There is some truth to that. And compared to limited diatonic instruments like an accordion or a tin whistle, the violin can just do a lot more stuff. You can play notes outside the scale, and if that Celtic mysticism is your thing, hit notes in-between the notes on the scale, and even slip and slide in-between those notes as well.   

Each button on a diatonic button accordion plays one note when you push it in, and one note when you pull it out. The single-key versions I play can only play notes in the key of the instrument. In other words, there are no black keys, if you want to use a piano metaphor. This means they are great for playing driving, fairly simple melodies, where powerful rhythms are more important than complex intervals. Nothing beats the button accordion for muscular punch, at least in the traditional world.  

Most Newfoundland dance music played on accordion is all about economy. The tunes themselves were learned and played as an adjunct to set dances, dances usually performed by a large group of people. The tunes emphasized the beat of the dance first, and whatever melody was necessary to underline the moves of the dance. Anything else was extraneous, particularly in the hands of accordion players who functioned as one-man bands. Even now, these tunes do not work that well on fiddle. Fiddle likes long flowing phrases, double-stops and a fluid change from one note to the next, not a bubbling and popping chop from phrase to phrase.   

That’s not to say that there is no cross-over. It is just that various tunes just flow better on one instrument than the other, and over time your repertoire adjusts accordingly. The elaborate fiddle tunes of Rufus Guinchard and Emile Benoit, (the two patriarchs of Newfoundland instrumental music), sound kind of half-baked on accordion. You can play most of the notes, but the nuances tend to get lost in all the pushing and pulling. On the other hand, driving accordion polkas like ‘The St. John’s Girl’, or the tunes by Minnie White, Vince Collins, Harry Hibbs and many others, sound simplistic and colourless when played on fiddle. They end up being all back and forth sawing, with none of the fiddles lyricism making it through all the bow strokes. 

The piano accordion is another issue entirely. That instrument is essentially a portable keyboard, a substitute piano or pipe organ. Although a few local players use them for instrumental music, (Ray Walsh, Joe Tompkins and Alan’s mom among them), the big boxes never caught on with the public at large. Because piano accordions are fully chromatic, the pushing and pulling which is so much a part of a diatonic accordion’s sound instead functions just as a way of moving air through the instrument. It allows the sound, rather than forcing it. While the piano accordion is infinitely more subtle, and way better at playing a range of notes, like the fiddle it lacks the brawny power of its’ buttoned cousin. It is actually quite easy to transfer button (or even fiddle) repertoire onto this instrument. Will it sound the same? No. Does it matter?  It all depends what you are trying to do. Ask a painter why he doesn’t just take a photograph, and you’ll get all the answers you need. 

And so to answer a couple of the other questions that stem from all this, first, finding examples of all this does require some effort. You can find Harry Hibbs 70s’ style button accordion on Itunes, as well as a pretty representative album by Frank Maher, but after that you’ll need to dig deeper. Emile and Rufus’s music has been well recorded, and their stuff is out there, as are other examples of the two instrumental worlds. Both O’Brien’s Music Store and Fred’s Records both have good websites, if you can’t find anything interesting call the stores. They are both old-school - the people who work in them know the inventory, and have reliable opinions. 

The answer to the second question is obvious, (well, obvious to me, anyway): learn them all.

While aimlessly noodling around on the net the other day, I realized that I had not taken a look at my blog’s comments for some time; almost a year in fact. Where does the time go? November last year, we were polishing the last few notes on Fortune’s Favour, arguing about the cover, wondering whether we should just forge ahead with another one right away, all that stuff. And now, here we are in the throes of the tour itself. Life in a band is a funny thing.

Anyway, on with the cute rejoinders, witty asides and pointed replies:

GBS deconstructed, via Rankin Street - My attempt to explain GBS’s arrangement models, via our days in the pubs, was in retrospect putting too much intellectual weight on a flimsy foundation. Even so, it was a popular entry. Dan’s comment that ‘Turn’ was our first grown-up album is interesting. I could agree, it was the first album where we really played together. On the other hand, the debut album, which we managed to create without the benefit of a (a) real producer, or (b) a clue, remains a bit of a benchmark. It was also amusing to hear from someone who saw the Rankin Street cable access TV shows. Just thinking about those makes me laugh. The results were so bad and embarrassing that at one point we contemplated a collective move to Toronto, in hopes of escaping the constant jibes.

Saddest Songs - A meandering essay about sad songs elicited many responses, most offering their own choice. The whole thing got rather depressing. I shan’t be doing that again!

St. Patrick’s Day - I was quite happy with this entry, I felt I actually managed to say what I actually wanted to say - if you have tried to write something for public view, perhaps you know what I mean. Everyone who replied agreed with me, however, which did not make for the most exciting debate in the comments section. So in the interest of stirring the pot, I have now decided that Planxty suck, the Pogues influenced nobody, and the world would be entirely better off with a few less fiddles. So there.

Supergrass and Morrissey - My return to 80s & 90s music, (again), was not as positively greeted as one might have hoped. It seems there is a great discomfort about one’s musical past. One group is thoroughly embarrassed, while the other wants to put on the hairspray and wallow in the nostalgia. As a member of GBS, one has to take a different view of such things. Having made albums, videos, toured and otherwise remained in the public musical eye for a decade and a half, to a huge chunk of the world we are nostalgia. Many a loogan Canadian college student who is now a respectable adult, with family and mortgage, enjoyed their first beers to a GBS soundtrack sometime in the mid-90s. It is rather hard for us to disavow our past, when we review it every night.

Silly Wizard et al - Not my most popular entry, but it struck a chord with a few people. Perhaps you needed to see Silly Wizard to really get it. The late fiddler Johnny Cunningham really was something else. I saw him play a solo show in Toronto, years after the band, and he was one of the funniest performers I have ever seen, anywhere. He probably played for 20 minutes in the two hours he was onstage, the rest of it was him talking nonsense. It was hilarious and engaging, and no one went away unsatisfied.

My Hardcore Memoir - The responses to this one were interesting - very few commented on the long piece about my hardcore years; instead everyone gravitated to a side anecdote about dressing as Jesus for a school masquerade day. I noticed recently that some kid in the US got into trouble for wearing the same costume. He got kicked out of school, made the national news, and is no doubt about to appear on a reality show for millions of dollars. For him, fame and fortune awaits. People just thought I was weird, and my Mom cried. Once again, I was ahead of my time.

Ireland & St. John’s - My favourite of anything I have ever done on this blog, an honest attempt to be funny, poignant, and still capture the aimlessness of a summer afternoon. And judging by the paucity of comments, I need to either (a) get a grip, or (b) post more often, before my readership departs altogether.

Lift - Obscure corners of folk music are a passion of mine, but do not seem to generate much interest among readers. Ah well, someone has to write about Joe Cooley. Disappointing to note, however, that the wonderful Youtube video I linked to has since disappeared. It can be found on an RTE archival DVD, which features many such clips. It is worth seeking.

New Music - I am both bemused and dismayed to discover that many people do not find the Brazilian Girls as funny as I do. Everyone on the bus thought they were hilarious. Perhaps, like most sports, Hooters, fart jokes, wrestling and Circuit City, it is a bit of a guy thing. I promise, my next entry will demonstrate the hitherto unnoticed influence of the View, Oprah, Fried Green Tomatoes and Margaret Atwood on our music.

Just kidding.

We were rehearsing a few instrumentals the other day, something we have not done for years. We went through a bunch of tunes, exploring various combinations and possibilities. Putting together a decent set of tunes can be challenging for us. Current traditional music ideals emphasize ensemble playing, and that does not really work in an environment where I am really the only instrumentalist. Also, these days, instrumentals have developed their own aesthetic. More often than not, they serve as a means of displaying the player’s skill and dexterity.

There are, however, other approaches.

I was never much a speed demon, anyway, when it comes to tunes. I came to them too late to ever play Irish tunes at the clip favoured right now. And the more stately English approach, which is a big part of Newfoundland music, is closer to my own background anyway. That said, GBS has recorded more instrumentals then people think - even a so-called ‘pop’ effort like Fortune’s Favour has lots of instrumental stuff, if you dig in a bit. Actual stand-alone instrumental sets are another thing. I learned to play unaccompanied, as was the case with most Newfoundland instrumentalists until quite recently. Although I never played much for dancers, I did spend a lot of time with those who did. And lesson one for dancers is the necessity of lift.

I have talked about ‘lift’ before in this blog. Simply put, it is the inclusion of a rhythmic quality in your playing which encourages dancers. With all of its physical pushing and pulling, the button accordion is well made for the task. Unfortunately, while easy to demonstrate, lift is hard to teach and harder to describe. In thinking about it, I went trolling to see if I could find an example which might illuminate just what the *** I am going on about. From the band’s repertoire, there are only a couple of times where I think I really nailed it. The reality is, percussion is bit of a lift killer. As soon as things get crowded instrumentally, one player cannot really change the pulse to suit an imaginary dancer. Nonetheless, check out Dancing With Mrs. White, from Up, or the Buffett Double (the second tune in the Tishialuk Girls set) from the Hard and the Easy. More so than on anything else, those two pieces really sound like there might have been a good step dancer in the room.

If you want some visual evidence of what ‘lift’ looks and sounds like, check out this clip of the late Joe Cooley, playing a set in a pub just weeks before he died. In Irish circles, Cooley is widely considered to have been the greatest accordionist ever. Not so much for his speed and complexity, but for his ability to give the tunes a unique effervescence, a strange and wonderful quality that lifted them onto another plane altogether.  I concur.

I always dream more vividly in the summer. I do not know why. Unlike the winter, when life seems all too practical, there seems to be a little more mental space around here during the brief warm months. Thoughts come and go, and music drifts ever further away…melodies slip in and out of your brain, and it’s too hard to learn anything new. Better to just drift for a while. I was at dinner the other night, and the table violinist played a mazurka, a Polish tune adapted by Chopin. When I got home it stuck with me, 'til I had to get out of bed and play the only mazurka I know. Summer is like that.  

Recently I found myself in Ireland, a place I have not been to for years. While I was there circumstances led me to Kilarney, a town I had been to a few times before, most recently with the band to shoot the ‘Lukey’ video with the Chieftains. That whole period feels a little like a serendipitous vision these days, when such frivolous ideas are miles away. Having decided at the last possible second to do the video, we arrived at the last minute, much the worse for wear, via several airplanes and taxis. After a lengthy piss-up, we spent a languorous day hanging about a restaurant, drinking and kind of acting, and then descended upon a small pub known only to Paddy Maloney for a monster session.

The session remains my most vivid, (although drunken), memory of that strange and magical weekend. The pub was a small and eccentric one, down an anonymous alley, with no real outside markings other than a tiny sign. The lounge appeared to double as a living room, and there seemed to be no bar as such, just a window from which drinks appeared on a semi-regular basis. Several of the Chieftains joined in the session, an unusual occurrence to say the least, and as the news spread, great players from the area appeared one by one until the music was mighty indeed. Closing time came and went, and the songs and tunes continued ‘til dawn. For some reason I remember the publican quite well, a dignified older gentleman named Mr. O’Brien, who calmly orchestrated that amazing party. Given a month in Kilarney, I doubt I would ever find the spot again. It did not appear on any websites, and the pub guides and locals alike were silent on the topic.

As it turned out, the van I rented a few weeks ago for the trip was massive, and driving on narrow Irish roads, (on the left, I might add), was stressful. Kilarney was very busy when we arrived, and after dropping my passengers off, I drove around for a good half-hour looking for a place to park. Up and down narrow roads, one-way streets and driveways, it was a nightmare. Driving in the British Islands requires a lot of attention. You are always conscious that if you lose focus for a second, your instincts will take over and you’ll find yourself on the wrong side of the road. After another half hour of pain, I was thoroughly fed up and about to give up and go home, when I spied a tiny ‘P’ (for parking) sign fixed high up a wall on a street that paralleled the main drag. I scratched both mirrors getting down the invisible laneway, and then spent a good 20 minutes inching my way into a space. It was so tight that I had to climb out the passenger door. Only our old tour manager Tony, a man of legendary driving skills, could possibly appreciate the mental effort I had gone through, so I decided to take a picture of the lane and parking job to send him. While fooling about with camera, trying to get a decent angle to demonstrate that ridiculously small parking lot, I noticed a small sign on the door, which I had now completely blocked with my obnoxious car.

‘O’Brien’s Pub’. I was floored. What were the chances? Instantly I recognized the dusty window, the faded ‘Jameson’s’ sign... In spite of all odds, I had found myself back at that magical place. Instantly I went into a nostalgic reverie, recalling the pints, the conversations, the wonder songs, the incredible cast of characters, the mighty tunes I had experienced there. I abandoned all plans for the night, imagining with pleasure the delights that awaited me inside that secret door. Or might have, perhaps, if only Mr. O’Brien had seen fit to open for business that day.

These summer reveries can easily lead to a certain unrealistic outlook. Like Ireland, St. John’s has a way of suddenly bringing you back to earth, turning reality inside out, as if you had just found your glasses, and brought everything back into focus. A brief experience the other day brought this home to me very vividly.

St. John’s should be a busker’s paradise: lots of pedestrians, a healthy population of jolly drunks, and a universal appreciation for music of any kind. Alas, it is often not the case. On a recent stroll along Water St., I noted three classic examples. The first was one of our regulars, a guy who plays guitar and sings songs of all genres, strumming away outside in all weather. I usually give him a buck, even though despite his wide repertoire, he only knows one tune. When I passed the other day he was bawling out ‘Sweet Child of Mine’ by Guns and Roses, a tune rarely heard from buskers - particularly sung to a melody that sounded like a cross between ‘You’re Cheaten Heart’ and ‘Brown Eyed Girl’.  A half a block later a rather deranged looking chap was playing accordion in a doorway. ‘Playing’ may be a bit generous - with great enthusiasm he was squeezing it in and out like a child, playing the same two notes over and over. The restaurateur next door was lurking in his own doorway, looking at the accordionist venomously. No doubt the novelty of those two notes had quickly worn off.  I gave the player a buck too, but I felt like offering him a few lessons. The winner of this trio was a hundred feet away. A healthy looking youth, (by busker standards), he was sitting cross-legged on the sidewalk, banging away for all he was worth on an upside down Newfoundland salt beef bucket - the kind recycled locally for picking berries and whatnot. I stood and watched for a second - I actually thought it was some kind of Newfoundland satire. A passing tradesman, with whom I am loosely acquainted, smashed my reverie. Like me, he stopped and watched for a second, astonished at the racket. He bent over the kid, and stared at him for a second, as one might when happening upon some strange object on the sidewalk, and then shook his head vigorously.

“Jesus Christ, what the *** are you doing,” he roared at the hapless youngster. “That’s a fucking beef bucket for Christ’s sake.”

His tone was a bit sharp, but it was hard not to agree. I kept the last of my change for the meter.

Thanks to John Wiles and OZ FM’s old ‘Jigs & Reels’ radio show, I heard dozens of great folk bands while I was still in elementary school. The 70s were a bit of dead end for traditional music, at least commercially, but before things fell apart a number of classic bands arose. These acts formed the core of John’s traditional music show, in the days when good Newfoundland albums could still be numbered at less than a dozen. Unfortunately, many of these bands are pretty much forgotten now, at least by the casual North American folk fan.

Silly Wizard were Scots who came out of the 70s revival, when folk music suddenly gained professional legs. They made a series of great albums, but were also known for stirring and unusual live shows. The band was blessed with some unique characters. Lead singer Andy M. Stewart had a slippery voice, all soft edges and emotion, and he was unafraid to sing in his thick dialect. The Cunningham brothers played fiddle and accordion, and were able to do it with a speed and dexterity that still sounds a bit inhuman. All their albums are good, but check out ‘Donald MacGillvary’ from the album So Many Partings, recorded in 1979. Although it sounds a bit thin on your average MP3, the quality of the singing and playing come through. For a band that almost entirely avoided electricity, at least in its hay-day, it’s powerful stuff.

As you go further back into the 70s, and even earlier, folk music tends to separate itself into hippie/non hippie. The hippies certainly embraced the old-fashioned vibe and earthy instruments associated with the genre, but those of a more psychedelic bent often added some serious weirdness to the recipe. The members of Led Zeppelin, among others, often point to the Incredible String Band as a huge inspiration. They were another of the gems John dug up. While the String Band played real traditional music in some of their incarnations, they were more partial to a hippie vision full of fairies, highwaymen and an imagined version of medieval England that any reader of Donaldson, Pratchett et al would readily recognize. Check out ‘Cousin Caterpillar’, and discover what happened when drugs and music studios first came together. I cannot imagine what this sort of thing this sounded like live. Their appearance at the Woodstock concert was apparently so shambolic that their tunes made neither the movie nor the album. On the other hand, in those days the lineup also included a singer named Licorice McKechnie. That alone deserves some bonus points.

I have spoken before about my love of Steeleye Span. They were a staple of John’s shows, though I did not realize it until years later. The Span has gone through so many incarnations that they often sound like a completely different band from record to record. Their most interesting blend of hippie weirdness and genuine traditional chops probably can be found on ‘Below The Salt’. The album has a few sensible moments, but eventually gives in altogether to the patchouli. ‘King Henry’ is a tale of monsters and such that changes tempo a few times, includes a full violin mini-symphony, and generally sets the benchmark for this sort of thing. You just do not hear 8:00 minute songs anymore about kings and witches - or rather, not by bands that are taking the whole thing utterly seriously. Pity.

Over the years, we have tried to walk a bit of a fine line when it comes to the whole ‘are you Celtic?’ thing. It is a question that has died down a bit, but it still comes up, particularly in America. Early on in our career we decided that we were going to focus as much as we could on Newfoundland songs and instrumentals. It made sense - we were already immersed in that tradition, and there was a goldmine of unrecorded material out there. Plus, it made us unique. Most other traditional acts around here (and truth to be told, everywhere) are drawn to the vast body of well-recorded and well-arranged Irish music. Researching older songs that do not already have choruses and hooks is a lot harder, and often a lot riskier - sometimes old songs are obscure for a reason. Irish songs work just as well, or better, and are a lot easier. In Newfoundland these days, most younger artists do not even make the distinction between Irish and Newfoundland material, something that alternately surprises and depresses me.

That said, Irish music is a broad strain in the Newfoundland tradition. It is particularly prevalent in St. John’s, which has seen a continual influx of Irish players over the years. Like a lot of things, the nuances are just part of us. For example, I would consider my accordion playing about as ‘Newfoundland’ as you could get. I hardly own one Irish accordion record, nor do I use Irish ornaments in my playing, nor do I play any identifiable Irish tunes, really. Even so, I once played for Seamus Connolly, a famous fiddler and professor at Boston College, and an expert on Irish music. He was intrigued by my playing, which he felt was a blurry version of a rural Waterford style. And my repertoire includes many tunes originally popularized in Newfoundland by the McNulty family, Boston Irishmen who were stars here in the 1950s. (Much of the rest is sped-up English Morris dances, but that is another essay).

Furthermore, the last decade has not been a golden age for Irish music, which adds to my general ambivalence about our suppressed Celticness. There are lots of good bands, and great players, but the well-arranged song has largely been supplanted by lightening fast jigs and reels. If they sing at all, younger bands often do so unaccompanied: one chap lilting away with his eyes closed, while everyone else looks at the stage, trying to be suitably solemn. That is a bit of an anathema to Great Big Sea - hearty songs and spirited group singing are our meat and drink. Therefore, if I was to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day, (in some fashion other than a gig), than I would listen to some music from the late 60s and early 70s, when the ballad singers spawned by the Clancy brothers met the first generation of modern players. And all sorts of amazing things came forth.

Good luck finding any CDs by the Johnstons in a record store. This is one gem that ITunes rescued from obscurity, and I am grateful for it. The band peaked in the early 1970s, when folk legends-to-be Paul Brady and Mick Maloney joined a band fronted by the two Johnston sisters. They all sang close harmonies, and Brady and Maloney found complex and intriguing hooks, all while maintaining a very light feel, a bit like the Association meets the Clancy’s. The records sound old-fashioned now, from an audio point of view, but there is a freshness and spirit to the singing that is rare in modern Irish music. Check out their version of ‘The Spanish Lady’. This rather enigmatic song has become sadder and sadder over the years, but there is nothing but joy in the Johnstons’ version.

After the Johnstons, Brady himself later joined Planxty, the band every critic agrees was the greatest of the era. The four original members - piper Liam Og Flynn, bouzouki genius Donal Lunny, mandolinist and singer Andy Irvine and guitarist and singer Christy Moore - single-handedly reinvented the way Irish music was arranged, sung and performed. Their blend of songs and instrumentals was unique, years ahead of its time, and in Moore and Irvine they had singers who were capable of anything. Lunny was not the first to play Celtic bouzouki, but he invented the melodic rhythmic style that every one of us uses today. Irvine mostly played mandolin in the band, and he and Lunny created a weaving harmonic style, which with Og Flynn’s virtuoso piping was a killer combination. Later additions like Brady and Johnny Moynihan just added to the mystique. Every pub band in the world owes a debt to Planxty, and their hooks and ideas have become fodder for hundreds of albums. ‘The Raggle Taggle Gypsy’ is the song most critics point to as evidence of their brilliance, but I prefer ‘The Little Drummer’. Moore’s crisp baritone punches every note, while the rest of the players create a melodic setting which would be the envy of any fancy pop band. Case in point - the song itself has no chorus, and repeats itself a half dozen times. In the hand of a lesser bunch it would be dull and repetitive. In Planxty’s version, you do not even notice. Instead you are just sad that the song, and the band, ever has to end.

Luke Kelly has been dead for decades now, but as ballad singer, he has yet to be surpassed. A gnarly looking character, he was one of the leaders of the Dubliners, a band who wrote the book on gnarly. He might have looked like an out of work dustman, but his voice was something else - strong, clear and as rich as a good pint. The Dubliners often played all over each other, but live Kelly was left alone, to sing his songs with little accompaniment. He loved songs about the travails of workingmen, and ‘Tramps and Hawkers’ is one of the best. A superb live version is available everywhere, on a dozen different Dubliners compilations. Go buy it, and revel in the passion the man was capable of bringing to a simple lyric.  Few singers in any genre would have the courage to deliver this song as simply as Kelly, and yet you believe every word. The song ends almost in a whisper, with this poignant traveler lyric:

 And if the weather treats me right, I’m happy every day.

 Whether in Ireland, or across the ocean, words we can all live by.

There was very artistic movie making the rounds a couple of years ago, aptly shot in Winnipeg, about a contest for the saddest music in the world. The movie itself was heavy going, and no matter now worthy, I did not make it to the end. Nonetheless, the concept itself was quite intriguing.

Of course, everyone has an immediate contender - generally some song that they associate with a sad time of their life; i.e. the favourite song of a couple now split, or the hymn played at a friend’s funeral. Fair enough, we all have these, but what really interests me are those songs that stand up for themselves, songs that carry their own heavy bag of ennui along with the verses and chorus. Admittedly, this is a topic I have addressed before, but one to which I am strangely drawn…particularly during the dreary winter weather to which we here at the end of the world have been afflicted.

I heard the Doors’ Riders of the Storm the other day on the radio, a song that I find profoundly depressing. There is something really pathetic about Morrison’s delivery - his booze-ravaged voice barely rises above a whisper as he recites the aimless lyrics. It’s as if he could hardly be bothered to interrupt his headlong plunge into a bottle long enough to actually sing. Even the guitar solo is sad, all drawn out minor chords and dark modes, a lament just waiting for the wake to start.

The Dream Syndicate was another Los Angeles band, albeit from a decade later, one who had a very minor hit with a song called Tell Me When It’s Over. A break-up song, it’s given its true sad weight by the singer. He can barely handle the melody, wobbling all over the place, moaning and heaving and sighing the words out. It ends up sounding like the sort of painful and desperate message you hear the recently dumped leaving on someone’s cell phone, all misplaced rage and cringing self-pity. It is as agonizing as your own adolescent poems, without so much as a shred of hope. The music consists of a grinding, descending riff, distorted in a cheap and unpleasant fashion, played over and over again until you hate it. Genius, really, in a depressing kind of way.

My all-time favourite in the sad & sadder category is a cut from Sweden’s Cardigans. Although they are known in the USA for a handful of cheery singles, in Europe their later catalogue is as gloomy as it gets. Long Gone Before Daylight is the kind of album that you hear once, and then buy a copy for everyone you know. The stand-out song And Then You Kissed Me… is an agonizing cry for help. Nina Persson’s voice is beautiful, but with a fierce edge, as if it could fall apart, (and her with it), any second now. The chords and melody are perfect, so pretty you don’t even realize right away what Perrson is singing:

“…blue, blue, black and blue

red blood sticks like glue

true love is cruel, love,

sweet love, tasty blood…

and then you hit me,

right in the heart…

love makes you wake up sore,

with fists that are ready for more”

And you know she means every word. Her weary tone of resignation about the self-destructing violence, of her relationship, whether physical or emotional, is about as sad as you can get.

Recently, a friend asked me which GBS song is the saddest. It is an interesting question. All the break-up songs (My Apology, Buying Time, How Did We Get From Saying I Love You…, Time Brings, etc.) are kind of sad when you knew the people involved. Fisherman’s Lament is pretty sad too, especially for those who lived through that era in Newfoundland, when for a while it looked like we were pretty much done here. If you want to get into context, then the whole cannon starts to look a bit iffy. Really, when you get right down to it, nothing is particularly cheery about dead horses, tidal waves, and being a simpleton with a shitty little green boat. It just all comes done to how you look at it.

Taking a macro look at this journal, which I have been keeping for well over a year now, a couple of broad themes seem to have emerged, at least if one is judging anything by the number of comments various topics have generated: for example, the more intellectual and argumentative I am, the more people are bored and uninterested. Conversely, the more revealing the anecdote (from a GBS perspective), and the more “in character” I write, the more popular the entry. This is not really a surprise; attempts at taking ourselves seriously have never been to our advantage. To quote my friend Ken, then, “dance with the one who brung ya…”.

Therefore, here are some replies, to those entries that caught my (at best) limited attention:

The Moody Blues - It was interesting that a number of people saw this piece as an attack of hippy values; on the contrary, I was trying to express something many Gen X’rs like myself have commented on - the envy we feel for people who grew up in era of limitless possibility. Seen from the depression that gripped the Newfoundland of my youth, bands like the Blues seemed to have lived in a world as foreign as Robin Hood’s. And I rather envied them for it.

Fly By Night - Fly By Night…Fly At Night….yadda yadda yadda. The urge people have to correct a very minor error never ceases to amaze me. When I ws a TV guide editor, I almost got fired one Monday, after 11 of our faithful readers called, one after another, to hurl abuse at me. Their complaint? Our listings had the People’s Choice Awards ending a half hour earlier then they actually did. All 11 had set their VCRs for the wrong time, and missed the last half hour. I was professionally sympathetic to the first few, but after an hour of that foolishness, I told the last caller to “*** off and get a life”. My boss was sympathetic, and in fact laughed when the irate customer then called him, but felt obligated to suspend me on principal.  Quite frankly, I would do the same now.

Max Webster/Simani - My analysis of the odd career of Simani went over fairly poorly; perhaps it was a bit toooo local? Too bad, I thought about that one a lot. Ah well. The Max Webster piece was a bit more popular, though one thing is clear - no one else has a clue what the song is about either.

All The Small Things - I was delighted to see 41 responses to this rather rambling piece linking Blink 182 to the Voice Squad - until I discovered that my ‘Comments’ had been co-opted by some sort of Spambot. Not necessarily a bad thing - perhaps those seeking cheap Viagra and whatnot will instead benefit from some sharp self-satire and dazzling metaphors?

Steve Miller - The reaction to this one felt a little like the sort of discussion that goes on in Star Trek boards. I definitely touched a nerve with the vinyl fans. A couple even went so far as to go into rather elaborate explanations of why digital music pales in comparison to analog. I found that rather touching, actually. I mean, I know the difference; I am old enough to have listened, and recorded, in both worlds. I just thought it was too boring to go into in any detail. Not so for the defenders of analog.  Burn those CD players, trash your I-Pod! Vinyl rules!

Frank Maher & Folk Festivals - See intro.

The Verve - OK, I get it. More crazy road stories which include madcap incidents, clever capers and harebrained japes involving the band. Well, actually, now that you mention it, there was this time with Murray, a roadie, three lesbian nuns and a blender….

Jethro Tull - I think we can all agree now that high school sucked, (or sucks). I have now firmly got this out of my system, and I promise never to speak of it again. Oh, what’s that? Facebook you say? *** me. Once more into the breech!

Most GBS fans remember when they first heard a particular song. Often it was connected with a particular point in their life; a song came along at just the right time, and caught the extreme emotion of the moment. It is understandable, really. A lot of GBS songs are about the moment, as it were.

I have a similar story, although it is not about one of our songs. A recent afternoon spent waiting around in Hamburg airport reminded us all of our first German tour, a fiasco of major proportions, (even by our European standards). In the middle of a very busy autumn of 1997, we were offered four shows supporting Del Amitri, a Scottish pop band who were attempting a mild comeback. One more show was added at the last minute, a club gig in Hamburg. At the time, our German label was headquartered there, and it was felt that we should make an appearance in their backyard - in theory they would be so excited that it would spur them into actually doing something.

Right off the bat, things did not go well. In those days you still had to fly into and out of the same European gateway (or spend a fortune), so after an all-night trans-Atlantic flight we were forced to fly into Hamburg and then drive like maniacs to our first gig, which was inconveniently located in Berlin. The Del Amitri crew were complete assholes, refusing to move so much as a mic-stand for us. We had to play in the middle of their gear, tripping over and bumping into their numerous mics, amps, etc. With the exception of a handful of fans (some of whom are, to our mutual surprise, still with us), we were greeted with bemused indifference.

Three more demoralizing gigs followed. Our trip to Koln was punctuated by us getting thoroughly lost in the backstreets on the way to soundcheck. At one point we were so tangled up in the medieval section that we had to unload the trailer and walk it back to the main road. Even Alan, ever the optimist, was finding it heavy going. The Del Amitri crew never got any better, and the band completely ignored us. Saturday morning saw us making a long drive from Koln to Frankfurt in a depressing grey mist. About halfway there we were racing down the Autobahn when we heard a suspicious sound from the engine. Within seconds, smoke was pouring out. Our tour manager Tony was driving, and he managed to steer the dying van to an exit. Then it was all hands out the door, and we pushed the very heavy rig the kilometer or so required to get it off the extremely dangerous highway. Tony set off to a distant farm in hopes of help, while we stood there smoking in the rain. Morale was low.

Eventually he returned, and joined us on the side of the road. Tony was not sure if his sign language had actually worked, and we were almost surprised when a guy in a yellow jumpsuit showed up in an 18-wheel flat-bed truck about a half-hour later. He took a 10 second look at the engine and then turned to us. He shrugged.

“Das van ist kaput.”

Everyone understood that. Quickly, he attached his winch, tipped up his bed, and hauled our van & trailer onto his truck.  We all looked at each other, and Tony, who by now was plainly in charge.

“Where are we going to ride?” was the foremost thought.

The repairman was not concerned.

“Gehen zie…” he commanded, waving us back into the van. With few other options, we all obediently climbed up onto the truck bed, and back into our van. He threw a few canvas straps over us, hopped into his own cab, and then off we went. The ride that followed is not one that anyone will ever forget. Almost two stories above the road bed, we careened through the countryside at high speed, tearing through tiny villages, close enough to the second floor balconies that we could snatch flowers from the window boxes. The van lurched and swayed like a carnival ride. At any moment we figured we would be rolling to our deaths, but it never happened. Instead, after a scenic and adventurous ride, we were dropped off at a sparkling new Honda dealership, literally in the middle of nowhere. The owner and his family were celebrating a poorly attended grand opening, or otherwise they would have been closed. In those days, as is the case still in much of Germany, Saturday afternoon is a serious holiday. The dealer and his family watched in amazement as we lounged around his new showroom, eating a cake laid on for the customers, and drinking their punch. We were starving, and it was the only food for miles. We were plainly a nuisance, but we were beyond caring. Morale had sunk to a new low.

After a lengthy conference, again in sign language, my rudimentary German being useless in this situation, someone found us two rental cars located in a village some distance away. Tony and Darrell went off to fetch them, while we waited around with the thoroughly mauled cake. Eventually they returned, and we now had to squeeze a van and trailer’s worth of gear into two hatchbacks, Euro hatchbacks at that. We abandoned the van, thanked the dealer and his family while pressing copies of Up into their hands, and raced back down the Autobahn. Amazingly, we made it to the gig with seconds to spare. The Amitri crew looked at us with distaste. We had not been missed. Again we had to play in the midst of a forest of gear. When we emerged backstage from our indifferently received show, we discovered that the band and crew had taken every single dressing-room available. We had to change and eat standing in the hallway, shoved and pushed around like high school frosh in their first day in the locker room. Morale disappeared altogether.

When we finally got to the hotel, inconveniently placed in the suburbs a confusing half hour drive from the gig, by mutual and unspoken consent, we booked six rooms. In those days a room to yourself was a huge luxury, a major extravagance. After that day we never shared rooms again. We couldn’t - spirits were so low, someone would have been killed over a reading light.

The next day it was back to Hamburg, three abreast in the front seat of for hours in the little hatchback, not even room to cross your arms. The Hamburg show was another debacle, with just 14 punters, a suicidal promoter and the scariest hotel I have ever stayed in. Our record company head turned out to be a strange hippie, who arrived on the sort of bicycle Lucy Pevensie might have ridden, wearing enormous corduroys and pant clips (a detail so absurd everyone later remembered it). He had never heard of us, and his label turned out to be a pamphlet and not much else. In fact, he was just our UK label’s local salesman. He had no budget, office, or even a car, and was thoroughly amused at our obvious disappointment.

That night I left Hotel Bizarre, and found a local beer hall down the street, on the dodgiest fringe of the Reeperbahn. I ordered a gaseous pint, and sat there by myself, trying to figure out what terrible miss-step had led me to this ridiculous point. Now it is all rather funny, but at the time I was ready to chuck the works. Out of the blue on the club stereo came this song - Bittersweet Symphony, by the Verve. It had not been released in North America yet, and it was the first time I had heard it. The hook was instantly killer, but more relevant were the lyrics, “It’s a bittersweet symphony, in my head…”.  Indeed, I thought. And then the refrain “I can change, I can change, I can change…”.

My sad-eyed and silent drinking companions stared at me resentfully, flexing their swollen knuckles, my interloper status obvious to all. Too late, the Verve had already imparted their ounce of magic. For a moment at least, I did not give a *** what they thought of me, nor did I care what new nightmare the next day would bring. Germany could not defeat us that easily. I loved that song then, and I love it now.

When the button accordion came on the scene here some 150 years ago, dance players quickly adopted it wholesale. It had some huge advantages over the fiddles and occasional tin whistles which had provided music for dances in Newfoundland in an earlier era.  For one thing, accordions are way easier to learn at a basic level, and relatively easy to maintain.  Unlike finicky and temperamental violins, accordions were pretty much immune to the punishments of climate. Accordions also had the advantage of volume, something very useful at community dances where drums and guitars, not to mention PA systems, were pretty much unheard of.

I spoke before about the differences between Cape Breton and Newfoundland traditions. If I can digress even further, the Cape Bretoners solved their volume problem by massing fiddles, two or three together with accompaniment from the ubiquitous parish hall piano. They also transferred many tunes from the big pipes, which forced some complex and unusual fingerings and styles. This has led to their complex fiddle repertoire, held in common by all decent players, one in which virtuoso playing is held in wide regard. There is really no equivalent in the Newfoundland tradition. There are lots of fiddle tunes here, but they rarely make it into the repertoire of the accordionist. Conversely, the Cape Bretoners never really took to the button accordion - too many of their Scottish tunes would be unplayable. When I was learning to play the fiddle, I learned dozens of Irish & Scottish tunes. They were easy to find on record, and I found them much easier to play than the choppy and propulsive Newfoundland tunes. Melodies which practically rolled off the buttons on my accordions turned into complex and ugly finger exercises when translated onto the fiddle. Diatonic accordions, (which are pretty much the only ones used in Newfoundland), are very restricted musically. Each row of buttons is fixed to the notes found in the scale of the chosen key. Therefore, all the accidentals and sharps and flats that fall outside that key become unplayable.  On the other hand, the resulting ease of playing up and down the straightforward scale allows one to play with a forceful precision, ideally suited to step dancing, waltzes and set dances. Forget playing fiddle tunes, for the most part - the legato sway of good Irish reels often become clattering and popping bundles of 8th notes, about as melodic as reciting the ABC’s.

That is not too say there are not accordion virtuosos found in abundance in Newfoundland. Two of my favourites are Vince Collins and Frank Maher. I recorded Vince myself a few years back, for an album called Lifting Out The Stove. Vince is an extremely old-fashioned player, with a style that pre-dates most modern influences. His repertoire is a mix of Irish tunes, learned from local players and half-heard Irish radio broadcasts from Boston, and more idiosyncratic local dance numbers. He learned to play first and foremost to accompany dancers, and you can hear the spaces he leaves for them in every note.

One of the best tunes on the album is the Irish jig The Blackthorn Stick. This tune is very popular among uillean pipers In Ireland, and though that weird and wonderful instrument never made the journey to Newfoundland, you can hear echoes of them in Vince’s playing. The notes bubble and pop, as fluid as a waterfall. On a fiddle it would be awkward, a much slower and tortuous expression, but in Vince’s accordion the tune is as light as a daisy.

Frank Maher is the senior hand among Newfoundland accordionists, and much loved for his ebullient character and powerful playing. His repertoire is similar to Vince’s, a mix of Irish and Newfoundland tunes. Unlike Vince, Frank traveled the world with bands like Figgy Duff, and has compared his own technique to many others. He recently released his debut album, Mahervelous, and it has some dandy tunes on it. Most instructive may be his version of the Goat Dance, a Newfoundland set dance that by any standards is an exercise in force. Over the years, the four tunes have been reduced to their simplest form, in order to aid the fast and driving half-time rhythm the set dancers prefer. Frank plays them furiously, as if he was trying to rip the accordion in two. For a man in his seventies, it is an incredible demonstration of the possibilities of the instrument. Although his band accompanies him, their presence is at best superfluous. He squeezes a mighty sound out of his simple instrument. It is easy to imagine that if he was playing alone somewhere in an isolated outport parish hall, with dozens of dancers stomping around him, and nary a drum nor microphone to be seen, you could be sure of one thing: Frank  and his accordion would more than suffice.

 

 

 

One of my original aims here was to illuminate the band’s music by exploring my own influences, and trying to draw metaphors and links between the two. Unfortunately, none of the songs I have been listening to lately have anything to do with Great Big Sea. Of late we have all been busy writing away like maniacs, trying to outdo one and another in the race to the next album. When you have any time for pure listening, it is a good idea to get as far outside the box as possible. Therefore, as it is raining, and my house is unbearably hot, and I do not have the patience to go on and on about some tune no one else even likes, and the last song I finished stunk, I thought I would stick to basics for a change. Or just ramble on. Be warned.

Looking back on all these pieces, it is interesting how many songs I like because they are a bit sad. Perhaps this will give me a new sobriquet in the band - ‘the depressed one’, or better yet, ‘the sad one’. For years fans have accused me of being ‘the quiet one’, because I rarely say anything onstage. In my defense, I saw the White Stripes the other night, and that Gillis fellow hardly said anything either. And his wife or sister or whatever never said a word. No one calls them ‘quiet’. I am also known as the ‘smart one’, mainly because I have an unhealthy ability to recall trivia of little use to anyone, and I rarely watch TV. And unlike everyone else on the Newfoundland music scene, I bothered to figure out how HST worked. It does not take much, sometimes.

 Anyway, here are a couple of really sad songs: ‘No Rain’ by Blind Melon, and ‘All The Small Things’ by Blink 182. Neither song is supposed to be sad, but both are testaments to the vagaries of the rock life style, and both have gained an unhappy tone. Blink 182 broke up in acrimony a couple of years after this song came out. The song’s odd tone of resignation, which always made for an unusual juxtaposition with its Ramones’ groove makes perfect sense now.  I actually feel kind of bad that the band broke up. Their last single, with the unfortunate title ‘I Miss You’, was a massive step forward for the band, and should have been their turning point. Instead, it was their requiem. Blind Melon’s ‘No Rain’ was so good even they could not surpass it. Try to put the silly video out of your mind, and just listen to the explosion of sweet hope in Shannon Hoon’s voice. It could not last, and it didn’t. A heroin o.d. is a particularly pointless way to die, especially since with that one song Hoon proved he had greatness in him.

 In those songs, context puts them into their emotional place. A lot of folk songs are so unhappy context does not even need to come into it. Try and find the Voice Squad’s version of ‘The Brown and the Yellow Ale’. The song is about the discovery of infidelity, and the sort of incomprehension and despair that comes with it. The melody is melancholy without ever becoming a dirge, (which is a fine line to walk), and the lyric pure poetry. My personal favourite from the sad song catalogue is ‘*** of the North’, an obscure Irish song best recorded by Eddie and Finbar Furey. The lyric is a woman’s defense of her love for the town simpleton, and the joy he brings her with his strange, impractical and beauteous vision. Furey sings it as if he was recalling someone he knew all too well, and his voice cracks with emotion in the live version. Whether real or feigned, I have never heard another song like it. In the ‘sad’ department, it is a heads-up winner.

Hmmm. The ‘sad one’. I rather like it. Indeed - I shall grow a drooping moustache, and wear even more black. Instead of trying to think of witty remarks for podcasts, I shall keep a self-indulgent journal full of my musings on diverse and dull topics, and I will paint grayish water-colours of cliffs and dead caplin and abandoned gill nets. I shall write lengthy poems. And drink unpleasant cheap cognacs. I will submit hectoring editorials blaming Canada for all Newfoundland’s problems. The key of ‘Dm’ shall be my default setting.

I am sure it will make for a refreshing change.

 

House-guests are often surprised at how few CDs I own. Little do they know – this is fairly typical for musicians. It must have something to do with the amount of music you end up carrying around in your head. I know several word class players who do not even own a stereo, and never listen to the radio beyond the news. While my collection is not large, it is pretty diverse, and what has ended up on my little Ipod shuffle is fairly representational.

One of my favourite songs is a hymn, the English patriotic song Jerusalem. It stands out in my collection, the highlight of practically the only classical album I have ever purchased. The song is from the ‘Last Night At The Proms’, with the BBC orchestra in London playing the last night of their annual summer concerts, an evening always devoted to British patriotic music. This particular version is nothing amazing, the quality is not great, and with the audience bawling along, not particularly musical. Still, it has that certain something.

I would not say my family were Anglophiles, but older relatives from Britain visited regularly, and even now, familiarity with English mores has a lot of social capital in Newfoundland. In many ways Newfoundland is still a colony, and the sort of outside approval Newfoundlanders seem to crave is especially valued when it comes with an English accent. Our imaginary England was not the England of the Clash and ‘Eastenders’; it was a place full of heather, quaint pubs, chummy boarding schools and heroic Spitfire pilots. Queen Victoria herself would have been quite at home there.

When I went to university here, Oxbridge refugees still largely staffed the English faculty, accents, gowns and the love of Wordsworth transferred intact to their hardship post. The Oxford Book of English Poetry loomed large in any course selection, along with lashings of Shakespeare, Thackery and Milton. It is no wonder the archaic language of folk music comes so easily to myself, Sean and Alan, having each of us having spent four years immersed in the world of 18th century letters.

So it is that even though I am all too aware that the real England bears little resemblance to this bucolic world, I still have a massive soft spot for it, and I am a sucker for songs like Jerusalem. The lyric comes from the poetry of William Blake, an 18th century poet and artist gripped by vivid religious visions.  In his lifetime he was considered to be a madman, but his strange output is very highly regarded now. To him, God and the angels were personal acquaintances, and he conversed with the biblical prophets regularly. While much of his work is heavy going, some of his poems have a child-like simplicity. Jerusalem is perfect in its brevity and conviction:

 Bring me my bow of burning gold!

Bring me my arrows of desire!

Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!

Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,

Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,

Till we have built Jerusalem

In England's green and pleasant land.

 

You can see why it has become the unofficial English anthem, almost as popular as ‘God Save The King’. It is based on the sort of idea that drives ‘The DaVinci Code’ – that the young Jesus visited southern England with his cousin Joseph of Amrimathea, and while doing so, particularly blessed that Island. Flimsy for a historian, but for someone of a spiritual or sentimental bent, very inspiring. Blake the visionary saw his duty clearly: to try and create the mythical Jerusalem of the prophets and the Book of Revelations in his ‘green and pleasant land’.  C. Hubert H. Parry put this stirring melody to the poem in 1916, in an attempt to stir patriotism in the dark days of WW I. It does not matter if you are an anti-anglophile or a raging atheist, only someone with an ear of lead could not appreciate the perfect marriage of form and function that exists in this song.

And even if you are both of the above, it might do well to remember another of Blake’s pearls, a line succinct enough to be any artist’s motto:

 “The imagination is not a State: it is the Human existence itself."

 

 

 

It is funny how Newfoundland music has evolved over the past 20 years. Whether we intended it or not, Great Big Sea has had a vast influence on how the music is presented here. Our evolved pub band format has itself become an archetype. Like young people everywhere, younger musicians see this state of affairs as permanent. They do not realize that the three-and four-piece pub line-up of guitar, bass, bodhran and fiddle/accordion/whistle is a recent phenomena.

When we started doing this 20 years ago, there wasn’t really anyone else taking this approach in our part of the world, apart from our colleagues and competitors, the Irish Descendants. Other bands existed – Stogger Tight, and later the Masterless Men. However, they were casual, part-time outfits, and based themselves largely on the Irish Rovers, a band that for whatever reason we had hardly heard of. Neither of those acts played much, the members were a lot older than us, and had real jobs. Our model was a bit different - the full on approach of shouters like Fergus O’Byrne, married with the in-your-face performance and DIY attitude approach of my punk bands, and later, the  well-rehearsed approach of Alan’s rock bands. The only other serious folk act in Newfoundland at the time were Rawlins Cross, and they were for all intents and purposes a rock band with bagpipes, and had little time for our pub heroics.

Now there are a dozen bands here pursuing our model, (such as it is), with God knows how many out there in Ft. McMurray, Cambridge, Ottawa and other centres of the Newfoundland diaspora. Yet, like everything else in Newfoundland culture, it was all a bit of a fluke. We have often talked about how influential bands like Ryan’s Fancy and the Wonderful Grand Band were, but by the time we were teenagers, no one was really listening to them. By far the most popular and influential Newfoundland band was Simani. If their influence had been maintained, or if they had been a little bit younger or more charismatic, then it all might have been very different indeed.

Simani have faded off the radar in Newfoundland, and they never made it onto the radar anywhere else in the country. For a time, however, their music was by far the most popular of any group in the province, and their distinctive sound created a whole musical movement. The band was a duo, actually, made up of Sim Savoury and Bud Davidge. (‘Sim and I’, in other words, the sort of pun much loved by Newfoundlanders). Davidge sang, and played guitar, while Savoury played accordion, mandolin, and also played bass pedals and ran the PA. Simani also embraced the tick-tock sound of the drum machine, and popularized the device among Newfoundland performers. They started playing in 1977, and made their first album, Salt Water Cowboys, shortly after.

It was an instant hit, and the two went onto record a dozen more albums over the next 15 years or so. They had a very distinctive sound. Unlike the groups that GBS has spawned, Simani seemed either oblivious or just uninterested in pop music, Irish acts like the Clancey Brothers, or anything else that came out of the 60s folk revival. Their model was simple – classic country, a la Hank Williams, Johnny Cash and Ray Price, married with Newfoundland-style button accordion. Davidge was a fine singer, with a rich baritone, and Sim was a great arranger and instrumentalist, with a good ear for a hook. They wrote almost all of their own material, and apart from a few instrumental sets, rarely played anything I would call traditional. The sort of country music they loved had (and has) a huge following in Newfoundland, and Simani was one of the first local bands to get airplay alongside the more easily absorbed mainstream North American acts. They did not tour a lot, but their tapes sold in the tens of thousands, so well in fact that the two set up a very successful recording studio and tape manufacturing factory, both in the tiny fishing villages on the isolated south coast where they lived. Dozens of other bands followed their model, many of whom are still going strong today, still packing them into outport lounges, with their blend of high-twang country and soft, sentimental accordion. They played for a largely older audience, but one that absolutely loved them.

Let me say that I was often doubtful about Simani; they embraced a level of Newfoundland cliché that made me very uncomfortable, and their explicit encouragement of the term ‘newfie’ pissed me off.  Like a lot of older Newfoundlanders, they were fine with it, and seemed oblivious to the negative connotations the term carries. They did not like St. John’s very much, hardly ever toured here, and made no secret for their dislike of  townie folk pretensions.  Their heavy use of drum machines was irritating, made worse by the hundreds of imitators who jumped on their band wagon.

That said, they wrote and recorded a couple of some great songs, songs that deserve a place on any Ipod. Their best is the ‘Mummer’s Song’, a Xmas song that dominates radio stations and house parties around here at the Yuletide. It is very, very good, but it is also a novelty song, and well outside their normal repertoire.

More interesting to me was their song ‘The Wreck of the Marion’. Shipwreck songs are common in Newfoundland archival collections, but they have pretty much evaporated from local songwriting. It was left to Simani to write the last of the great ones. The song is about an incident which took place within living memory, when a small Newfoundland banking schooner and it’s skipper, both from the south coast community of St. Jacques, ran into trouble with an aggressive captain from the nearby French island of St. Pierre. The Marion disappeared after a dockside confrontation in St. Pierre, and local people believed that the two captains had settled their accounts with a battle at sea, a battle which left no trace of the Marion.

The song has clever lyrics, an unusual story, and unlike most others of its genre, an anthemic chorus. It is the only song of Simani’s which continues to be sung and recorded by younger bands. It deserves the tribute. It has also stayed with me for another reason. Around the time GBS was getting rolling, I was visiting with an elderly family member, who came from the same area as both Simani and the Marion. She remembered the disappearance of the Marion very well, and had mourned the crew with others from her community.  For me, it was a surprise, a sudden shift sideways, into someone else’s reality. Up to then, all the lyrics of the traditional songs I knew pretty much existed in a parallel world – I loved them, but all the talk of ‘ships in sail’ and ‘milk-white steeds’ and what-not really had little to do with my life. For Aunt Essie, however, this song was part of her own story. Traditional music sometimes has that ability – it can open a window you didn’t know existed and draw a connection with the past, in a way which just does not happen elsewhere in life. ‘The Wreck of the Marion’ was original, but Simani wrote their song so well it both embraced and became part of the tradition, and in doing so, made the circle whole. We should all be so lucky.

I was never much of hippie, the laconic lifestyle necessary just doesn’t work for me. That may come as a surprise to some people – more than once in my life I have worn my hair in a ponytail, after all. Most would probably convict me on that basis alone.

That said, it must have been nice. As devoted as I always was to punk aesthetics, when I was in university I listened to a lot of 60s music. I suppose everyone does, when they are at college. It just seems to fit. I saw the Woodstock movie for the first time around the same era. It was genuinely hard for me to put myself in that mindset. Everyone in that movie seems so absurdly optimistic, and genuinely delighted with themselves. 

Hippies were a bit thin on the ground in Newfoundland. I was obviously an infant during the era, but judging by my parents and their friends, the whole thing barely touched us in Newfoundland. Judging by their college yearbooks, to all appearances we skipped the whole fun summer of love thing and went right from Grease into the dreary 70s recession. Perhaps as a people we are better suited to hard times then dancing around with flowers in our hair.

On the other hand, the hippies sure had some great tunes. My personal favourite is Ride My See-Saw by the Moody Blues. It is from their breakthrough album, In Search of the Lost Chord. The song is over the top, but then again the whole project reeks of patchouli. The cover features one of those classic comic book style depictions of nirvana, as done by a teenager with new magic markers. Instead of liner notes, the album’s back cover has a useful explanation of the tantric term ‘om’, along with its various uses.

All foolishness aside, See-Saw is a classic, and it easily rises above the era’s nonsense. At first glance the title seems a bit silly, one of those faux nursery-rhyme things favoured by Jethro Tull and the Genesis of that era. When you dig into it a bit, you realize it is the opposite. The band is using a see-saw as a metaphor for the soul-numbing life of boring jobs and pointless education. It is an interesting idea. Children are often disappointed by see-saws – they go up, and then down, and then up again, and then the child is off to find something more exciting. The Moody Blues perfectly captured that idea. They were from the industrial English midlands, not the jolliest place in those days, and you can hear their relief at escape in every joyous note. The band came from the same area that spawned Black Sabbath, yet their sunny demeanor is pure California.

There are other reasons to listen to this piece. Electric guitars were still interesting when this song was recorded in 1967. They use distortion like a cello, booming chords that swing over the song’s tight groove, crackling and bubbling away out of time, as novel as a sitar. The hook itself seems compiled of a dozen 12-string guitars, all furiously strumming away like Django’s Hot Band. My favourite aspect is the massed vocals – the whole band sings together, in a loose choir. Combined with the ubiquitous melotron, it sounds incredibly warm and rich.

In another very real way, the song is a relic. These days, such overt optimism would be considered naïve. And the buttery warmth of the audio is irreplaceable. Not just a huge dose of good vibrations were lost in the 1970’s – in the 1960s, bands were forced to rehearse, to really learn the finicky listening and singing skills that allowed bands like the Moody Blues to sing that well together. They had no choice – the primitive 8-track recorders and monitors of the era required it. There were no elaborate overdubs. All the sounds on See-saw are real, played at the same time. The result is a clarity, and at the same time strength, that even a hundred overdubs cannot achieve.

Maybe that’s the magic of it. You just cannot reproduce anything like this. The skills required to make great records are completely different now, and the technology has moved so far away as to be unrecognizable. Yet, you can still hear their youth and excitement, almost a half century later. We know they are probably elderly men now, and likely as cynical as the rest of us. Thankfully, it doesn’t really matter. For me, they are frozen in 1968, their voices clear, their motives pure, their optimism intact.

Like I said, it must have been nice.

Serious fans, or ‘musos’ as my British friends would call them, often want to know where the ideas come from. How do you get from a lyric sheet to the finished product? How do you start with ‘a pile of notes’ and end up with a slick recording? Where do the arrangements get hashed out? It is one thing to research these old tunes, but just how do they turn into something like ‘Lukey’?

It is often a round-about journey. By way of explanation, and as a half-assed way of plugging my latest outside project, I figured I’d use a song I produced and arranged on the new Shanneyganock album, Fling Out The Flag.  Shanneyganock share some similarities with GBS, but they are also very different. The biggest fundamental difference is that band has neither played nor taken any interest in pop music. Their whole thing has been about making folk based music, just bigger and louder then what would be possible without electricity. Figuring out new ways to create pop music is not part of the picture. They are an accordion driven folk rock band, one of a handful in Newfoundland who tour nationally. And they are very conservative, much like their hardcore audience.

 I didn’t really like any of their previous albums. They always sounded half done to me, as if no one had cared enough to really dig into the material, or as if there had been some economic constraint that forced a one-take maximum on everything. Live, they were a much better band; too much better, really. Only an early live album managed to capture their physical presence. They are big men, and their sound and playing reflects that. Their albums sounded tiny to me, and I wondered why. 

 The world of serious accordion players in Newfoundland is a small one, so I have known Mark Hiscock, the accordion player and co-lead singer for longer than I care to think about. I met the band’s other leader Chris Andrews when he was a teenager, fronting his own pub band. Some time ago, we decided that at some ill-defined point in the future we would work together.  When my booking agency took Shanneyganock on as a client, we all decided that a fresh and innovative album was going to be a very necessary part of a new and improved package. Unfortunately, I was (and am) rather busy, so it took us over a year, with a day here and there, to get the job done.

 My approach for the album was to treat every song as an end in itself. They get a lot of airplay hereabouts – we were going to make the album as if it was a collection of singles. And they were going to sound as eclectic as possible. Offstage, they were listening and enjoying a wide variety of music. This was not reflected in their recordings. I wanted to define their sound as something modern, but also very traditional in its mindset. GBS is constantly striving to reinvent itself; this is not the Shanneyganock approach. They wanted, to quote David Lee Roth ‘more of the same, only different’. And, although no one was saying it, the playing, writing and actual sounds - everything - needed to get a lot, lot better.

 We had most of the album done when Chris came to me with the song ‘The Flag of Newfoundland’. One of Newfoundland’s most explicitly patriotic songs, it was lyrically suited to the band’s strong nationalist sympathies. Unfortunately, it was rather slow. While the song was an anthem, it sounded instead almost funeral hymn. Somewhere along the way Mark and Chris had decided to do it as a duet. This was not helping – their voices are nothing alike, and the contrast between their different approaches to the lyric was not working for me. I took the idea home and thought about it.

 First, we agreed that Chris would sing it. Although the higher parts would be a strain for him, his burly growl was better suited to the songs’ passion. Then I started listening to weird records, trying to find a good idea, something that would pull the song out of its banal hole. Somewhere along the way I dug out a compilation of glam rock from the UK, circa the early 70’s. This is a period close to my heart, and I have often found inspiration there. David Bowie’s early hit, ‘Rebel, Rebel’ almost leapt out of the speakers at me – it was the perfect model.

 Bowie’s song is an anthem, which is where we needed to begin. Obviously, the lyrics and tone have nothing to do with obscure Newfoundland songs. It did have a killer drum hook though, with a slamming downbeat. It was nothing at all like the country shuffle the band favoured, but slowed down a little, it was perfect for the song. I figured out a tempo, and got the band to record a rough demo. Later that night, with just a drummer and the engineer in the studio, I got him to lay down a new back-beat for the song, one based entirely on Bowie’s song. Over the next few days, we re-did all the band’s parts so they would sit better on top of the new back- beat. We added a key change at the end, and I played some low whistle and fiddle to darken the choruses, making them a little moodier and angrier. We then layered some background vocals, several parts each, until the chorus had the male choir effect I thought the piece needed. Now it was a powerful folk rock anthem, a song utterly unlike anything they had ever played before, but one that was a logical extension of their earlier work.

 To say the least, the band was dubious about it at first. The ‘Rebel, Rebel’ groove felt weird to them, slow and sluggish. This is one of the harder things about being a producer – you have to be able to see and hear what the final outcome will be even before a note has been recorded. If you can manage that, it is like putting the pieces into a puzzle. I knew the Bowie model would work for the song, but it was hard for the band to appreciate my vision. When they heard the final product, they understood.  And to the degree that bands like Shanneyganock have hits, ‘The Flag of Newfoundland’ has come to define their new sounds.

 Not many Newfoundland bands have looked to Bowie for inspiration. But if you are going to go ‘forward into the past’, you need to use every trick in the book.

 www.shanneyganock.ca

No one listens to the radio anymore, according to music business conventional wisdom, anyway. Of course, this isn’t true – people are just listening to hundreds of different stations at the same time. The mass audience that existed until relatively recently is pretty much gone forever, at least in North America.

In Europe this hasn’t quite happened; not yet, anyway. There are still radio stations and shows that command massive audiences. A song can still break on the radio and propel a band into the stratosphere overnight.

One of my favourite examples of this from the past few years is the band Franz Ferdinand. Scotts, they hail from the UK art school scene that seems to produce so many good bands. The first time I heard ‘Take Me Out’ I loved it. Dirty guitars, just distorted enough to be cool, a sneering, detached vocal, loose and tight at the same time, it has all my archetypes. Great club lyrics, too:

I say, don’t you know?
You say, you don’t know
I say, take me out.

Somehow they perfectly capture a moment many people have had – an escalating romantic tiff, performed in public, with just enough alcohol involved to make it truly irrational. It has all the ludicrous gravity of such moments. The next day one wonders ‘what in the hell was that all about?’ but neither party is sure any more. All that’s left is the (again, irrational) conviction that one was in the right. Somehow Franz Ferdinand nailed it.

The song also has another feature that endears it to the producer in me. The first half consists of a lengthy intro, which has a different tempo, groove, melody - everything. When they decide it is time to get to the real deal, the band somehow slows down and switches gear, to finally lurch into the songs trademark riff. Every band who has tried to switch gears for a studio bed track knows just how hard it is. Slowing down (and making it sound deliberate) is infinitely harder than speeding up. My hat goes off to them.

I can feel my credibility draining away like bathwater, but the Killers have been on my top ten Ipod shuffle list for a while. I would say that I didn’t really get disco stuff like “Mr. Brightside”, and I thought the whole vibe was a little too retro to be true.

Then I caught this song on the local FM station the other day, and it stuck. ‘When You Were Young’ has something that too few songs enjoy these days – a serious devotion to the art of songwriting. The prevalence of loops and the dominance of the bass hook has boxed in a lot of pop songs. The Killers write a lot of their songs on keyboards, and you can hear the difference. Piano players don’t think in the blues patterns that dominate rock and roll guitarists, and it makes their songwriting more intriguing. There is a good reason Elton John and Freddie Mercury wrote such interesting stuff, at least in their early days.  Brandon Flowers writes big choruses, full of grandiose melodic leaps. The guitars are there, but they are forced by the different musical structure required by a keyboard into more unpredictable places.

Lyrically this song is interesting. Writer Flowers is counseling a girl, maybe his own? – you are never quite sure. He is trying to convince her that her childhood fantasy of love doesn’t exist – there is no one out there who “looks like Jesus”. It is an interesting idea; maybe he is really talking about the complications of his own faith, or that of someone close to him.

Either way, it is pretty heady stuff for a pop song. It’s not easy to be catchy and serious at the same time. If nothing else, I like their audacity. Picking through the contradictions of your own faith in front of millions is the sort of thing only a Bono can pull off. The Killers are to be admired for their nerve.

And it sure sounds good on the radio.

Somehow, without anyone sending us a letter or certificate, we have become one of those bands people refer to a Canadian institution. There are only a handful – Spirit of the West, Blue Rodeo, Trooper, and a few more. Most are pretty much unknown in the States or Europe, but have plugged away for decades in Canada, headlining Lobster Festivals, Firemen’s Days, hockey arena openings and the like. Never enormously successful, no one goes hungry either.

We cross paths with one another in airports and the like, and we all seem to share the same dozen-crew guys. Most of the bands are a fair bit older than us, but they are all universally nice guys, and have been generous and helpful over the years.

Over the years I have become rather fond of 54-40, a band I missed entirely when I still lived on the other side of the monitors. I would have liked them a lot. Songs like ‘I Go Blind’ and ‘Ocean Pearl’ are text book examples of great power pop. Lead singer Neil Osborne is not blessed with a great voice, but he knows every inch of the one he does have, and knows exactly how to push, and when it matters. On ‘Baby Ran’, a fast punky slice of rock, he puts on a sly sneer. The lyric expresses regret for his lost girl, but the tone is opposite – it’s all about the subtext, and the subtext is that there’s another one around the corner, anyway.  ‘Casual Viewing’, from another era, establishes a slow, murky groove, one the band exploits to its limits. It should get dull, but instead it gets suspenseful. You expect it to let go, but it never does. It’s the sound of musicians who are completely at ease with another, but utterly unafraid to hold back, waiting, lurking.

My greater personal appreciation of 54-40, as a fellow traveler on the ‘long, cold road’ as Dave Bidini would have it, is founded on their their punk work ethic. There is a big part of me that wants to be Joe Strummer or Greg Ginn, beating the shit out of an electric guitar, the crowd inches from my face, the amps ripping your nuts off. 54-40 lived in that world during their salad days, and 20 years of criss-crossing Canada still has not completely extinguished that spirit. After a while, just keeping the band together is an accomplishment; doing it with a bit of brio is worth bonus points.

In the late 90s, we joined with Blue Rodeo and a number of other Canadian bands to organize a traveling festival. It wasn’t the best idea we have ever had, but we had some fun times. 54-40 joined the ‘Stardust Picnic’ several times, the most memorable being a Sunday afternoon show in Guelph. The venue was a local park, already damp and humid after a week of rain. Osborne and co. went on in the late afternoon under darkling skies. A few songs into their set, a torrential shower broke out. It was hideous – sheets of rain, a sudden gale – you could hardly see the sound guy from where I was backstage.

The crowd couldn’t move, they were too tightly packed up front, and just suffered under the downpour, instantly up to their knees in muck. The band members of 54-40 just looked at each other, shrugged, and in the face of all logic and good sense, went driving into one of their fastest and most raucous tunes. The audience, who had expected to be abandoned, reacted with surprise, then a huge roar, as they realized the band was going nowhere.  The stage roof blew off, and now the band was soaked. It looked like they were being hit by fire-hoses. The bass player was right next to me, and in seconds he was standing in a sizable puddle. The crew was horrified, but the crowd was delighted, screaming and roaring their approval. It was magic, the best display of showmanship I have ever seen. The drummer was grinning like a teenager, big splashes flying off his kit every time he hit a drum. Osborne didn’t even move, he just kept on singing and playing, his long hair glued over his face.

It all came to an end when the PA crew unhooked the generator, fearing mass electrocution. The band, clothes and instruments ruined, finally left the stage to a mass ovation, one that rang through the storm. I felt like a coward, sitting in the bus, warm and dry while 54-40 showed all and sundry what playing in a band is all about.

For that act of stupidity/brilliance alone, I’ll buy every album they ever put out.

Almost a year ago during the Hard & Easy tour, shortly after the Winnipeg stop, I came down with the worst stomach flu I have ever endured. A tour bus is a poor place for such an affliction, and by the time we got to Saskatoon I was so weak there was some doubt if I could make the show. I do not remember the flow of events very well, but apparently I looked so bad the decision was made to summon a doctor backstage. He thought I was nuts to be doing anything other than lying in a bed, but he was kind enough to stay backstage while I stumbled around in front of the audience, trying to remember what to play through a fog of exhaustion and Gravol (Dramamine for our American fans). We never said anything about it at the time; the show must go on and all that, and it was hardly the first time one of us has gone onstage feeling like a bag of shit. And seeing as how we almost croaked in a bus crash a few days later, it kind of fell off the radar.

Thus it felt a bit ridiculous to find myself onstage in Saskatoon a few weeks ago in even worse shape than the last time. I knew I was sick days before the show, but I was hoping it was a bad cold, and stupidly told everyone I would make the gig.  I felt absolutely horrible on the endless flight out west, and a full daily dose of Tylenol & Advil didn’t even make a dent in the incredible headache that developed. Once again I bumbled around the stage in a daze, while medics waited for me to fall over in a stupor. Our fans in Saskatoon are going to assume that I am always eerily pale, exhausted looking and a very sloppy player.  At any rate, I went from the plane home to the hospital, where I spent the next week pretty much immobilized with meningitis. I was too sick to read, and watching TV was impossible. Even talking hurt. I just stared at the wall, muted conversation from my family and the tunes in my head the only entertainment I could stand.

I have always had the ability to listen to music in my mind. For years I assumed everyone could do this. It makes playing a bunch of instruments easier – all you have to do is find the way to finger the tune that’s already playing in your brain. While I lay there in the ward waiting for the next nurse to arrive, I replayed the piece ‘Puirt A Beul’ by the Scottish band Capercaillie dozens of times. For one thing, it has many layers, and is well suited to that kind of mathematical/meditation exercise. The title means ‘mouth music’, which refers to short little demi-songs, kind of like ‘Billy Peddle’. There are two of these in the piece, combined with some instrumentals.

Capercaillie specializes in elaborate Scottish Gaelic folk songs, with unusually complex instrumentals. Their sound is anchored around lead singer Cathy Makinson’s crystalline voice, and keyboardist Charlie McKerron’s creative settings. Generally, I am not a huge fan of keyboards and folk music. Something as naff as Enya always seems to lurk around the corner if you are not careful. Capercallie flirt with this sort of thing, but somehow it never gets away from them. Each tune in this set exists in its own perfect little musical world, like the parts of a symphony. Each new turn is a delightful surprise, but one that flows completely logically from what came previously.

While I was researching this, I noticed that the album Crosswinds, on which this piece appeared, has evaporated from their catalogue, and the compilation I first heard it on has also gone into record company aether. It doesn’t really matter to me anymore. I am pretty sure I could pick up a fiddle and play the whole piece from start to finish. Anyway, Capercaillie has a huge catalogue, and it is not hard to find their stuff anywhere. It’s all pretty good.

 A lot of the folk music I listen to is about energy, or poignancy. Capercaillie is very different. For lack of a better description, their music is ordered and deliberate, and often quite pretty. As much of it is sung in a language few understand, it demands little other than loose attention. But then unlike so much ‘New Age Celtic’, it stays with you. Years after you have heard it, you find it lurking back there, playing away like an old record left to spin around and around, long after the party finished.

Perfect for hospitals.

It is hard to take songs about the music business very seriously. At the end of the day, it is difficult to feel sorry for rock stars. Too many people want to feel the heat of the spotlight for themselves, and would sacrifice an organ or two for a shot at the big-time.  Watch the masochistic humilio-fest of Canadian/American Idol sometime if you don’t believe me.

I missed the Grapes of Wrath when they had their late 1980s moment. I was listening to intense guys from London and LA scream at me in those years, (or alternately, geriatrics with out-of-tune fiddles), so I never heard them play in their prime. Peace of Mind was their big hit here in Canada, but Lucky Man, their attempt to put music industry frustration into song, is a bit of a lost gem. I stumbled across it while digging through someone’s CD collection, and it has stayed with me ever since.

Like a lot of their better songs, it is an appealing mix of pure pop melody with the sort of chimey electric 12-string guitars briefly popular in the 1980s. At their best they sound a bit like REM in a non-weird phase. What really made them popular was the two lead singers, who sang together almost constantly, weaving plaintive harmonies around their high, clear voices.

Lucky Man is an attempt at cynicism, but the band is utterly incapable of pulling it off. They try and describe their ‘lucky man’, an evil mogul who easily manipulates “small town boys nowhere going”, but the irony never takes hold. Instead, the bright melody and sweet chorus completely belies their attempt at righteous outrage. They end up instead just sounding a little bewildered, unable to believe that the world does not share their optimism. “And with a knowing tone, the famous dreams unfold…” sings Tom Hooper, but his world weary lyric is implausible. All you hear is hope, hope and excitement. The band was from Kelowna, BC, and in the melody you can hear the fresh faced wonder that town habitually wears, and the excitement everyone feels when they first drive over the mountains, and challenge the world.

If there is any pattern to the songs I have written about, it is about how every song needs a context if it is really going to take hold of you. The song and some bit of your own life need to connect - suddenly you see the world through someone else’s eyes, and the whole picture gets brighter and more interesting.

The Grapes broke up in acrimony a couple of years after Lucky Man. Maybe that is why this song sticks with me, and has acquired an air of potent sadness that was not there in the first place. In the soaring chorus of Lucky Man their hope and optimism defied the indifference of a tough business. In real life they were defeated. And if you listen to the song, you can hear the moment when it could have gone either way.

Brimful of Asha is a classic one hit wonder.

Actually, if it had not been for a remix by Norman Cook, aka Fatboy Slim, chances are very few people would have heard of it al all.

Cornershop come from Wolverhampton, England. The band is a partnership between Tjinder Singh and Ben Ayers. They specialize in an unusual fusion of Indian pop music and English dance music.  Their name is a satire on the clichéd image of East Indians in the UK, who are thought to run the majority of the countries’ corner stores. Brimful of Asha, which came out in the summer of 1998, is pretty much their high water mark. While they have released music sporadically since, they have never had anything else that even smelled like a hit.

I love this song for a couple of reasons. A huge portion of my own work with GBS has been about taking defiantly local places, words and ideas, and making them interesting to the rest of the world. Our great question as a band has been ‘how do you take something obscure and insular, and place it into a context that everyone else can get’? The whole idea of placing folk songs in a pop context is part and parcel of this equation.

Cornershop is not a folk band, but it is safe to say that in the early 1990s, when they wrote Asha, Singh’s Anglo-Indian culture was as unknown as its Newfoundland equivalents. Nowadays, everyone has heard of Bollywood, but a decade ago, that was not the case. Asha is a tribute to an Indian singer, Asha Bonsle, who specialized in voice-overs for Bollywood musicals. The fact that many famous stars actually lip-synched to her voice was well known, and seemingly not a problem.

Singh lovingly recites a series of images from his youth, his Punjabi culture seen through the lens of life in the grey British Midlands. Better than anyone else I have ever heard, he evokes the fantasy of a more exciting life that can be spun from nothing more than a voice on the radio, or even better, a cheap 45 rpm record player. The groove is absolute killer, a testament to the skill a good remix guy can bring to an otherwise ordinary arrangement. I do not have a clue about Singh’s world, really, but this song tells me everything I want to know, and makes it sound like a wonderful place to be.

There are two other reasons I love this song:

a) Band co-leader Ben Ayers was born in St. John’s, a fact sneeringly included in every UK interview with the band I have ever read. It is always dropped in as if it was some terrible hardship he had to overcome, like growing up in an orphanage or something. I always react the same way - St. John’s? What’s so bad about St. John’s? I have often been tempted to write him a letter.

b) The chorus of the song:

Everyone needs a bosom for a pillow…

I don’t care who you are, that is brilliant.

www.cornershop.com

About this time last year, I spent a couple of weeks producing a record for a young New Brunswick fiddler named Janelle Dupuis. When I agreed to do the project, I was anticipating plenty of time to plan the project, and even more time to fine tune it after the fact. I had also hoped to help steer and promote the album when it actually came out. Unfortunately, I ended up squeezing it into the middle of an unexpectedly busy round of promotion for The Hard & the Easy. As a result, I hardly talked about it at all. A few weeks ago I listened to it again when I loaded it onto my Ipod, and it made me think a lot about the whole process.

The first time I ever met a real producer was when we met Danny Greenspoon, at the first pre-production sessions for the Up album. At the time it was an eye-opener, and an unpleasant one. Danny demanded that we dissect and then reconstruct every part, every song, every lyric, and every arrangement, and make sure every idea was as good as it could possibly be before we recorded a single note. And then in the studio he expected that we play and sing to a standard we were barely capable of. It was painful and unpleasant, and the more intuitive players in the band bristled under his demands. Despite all the ego blows, we knew it would be worth it, and that we were learning something important. The half million-plus sales of the album confirm that he knew what he was doing.

Since then we have worked with many producers, and both myself and Alan have sat on the other side of the board quite a few times. It can be a fascinating collaboration. A good producer comes to the table with lots of musical ideas, a realistic vision for the album, a bag of sounds, technical knowledge, and the ability to get great performances out of people. Good producers can also add that unexpected outside element, that extra piece of magic that makes a good track great. A couple of examples from our own past might be Steve Berlin's organ on Jack Hinks, or the elaborate loop Michael Philip came up with for John Barbour. While the arrangements for these songs were already well underway when these ideas were added, they are like icing on the cake. Years later, the songs sound wrong without them.

The Janelle album presented some interesting challenges. Her material consisted of a collection of 50 or so instrumentals, a mix of jigs, reels, waltzes, strathspeys and other tunes, plus one song. She had written some of the material, and the rest came from her Acadian tradition. Though she has classical training, Janelle comes from a strong and vibrant French musical world that has its own rules and language, one similar and also quite different from my own Newfoundland tradition. Janelle is also high school student, so I would have to do the tracking in a studio in Moncton, near her home, and I would not have access to all the high end gear GBS owns. With the exception of the two musicians I brought in, the other participants were Francophones, and we would have to communicate as best we could with my limited French, and their English. While my French is up to ordering a meal or renting a car, studio jargon and detailed musical directions are way beyond me.

As it turned out, the experience was wonderful. The musicians were energetic and enthusiastic, and easily overcame any language problems. Very quickly we were able to create the skeletons of arrangements. Her guitarist Nicolas Basques had a great feel for the tradition, without being bound stylistically. Due to the situation, we had to add drums, bass and everything else after we recorded the lead tracks, which is not ideal. However, Janelle and Nicolas played so well it hardly mattered.

My two favourite tracks are, ironically, the two with which I had the least input as a producer. One of the sets Janelle originally wanted to record consisted of a waltz, Laura's. While it was a pretty tune, I did not think it would be interesting enough for three minutes. I suggested she combine it with a French Newfoundland waltz I knew named Le Velours De Lan Vent, and tag on one of her jigs at the end for a change of pace. When we sat down to rehearse it, she surprised me by altering the original keys in a unique way. As a classically trained fiddler, she does not think in terms of the narrow key choices most traditional players stick to. The result was something delicate, full of space and air. Then we added some subtle guitar, and a little percussion. Back in St. John's, I played a little whistle on the end. Finished.

The set Marche Des Orages/Djable/Angus Campbell consists of what I would call a slow march, followed by an Acadian tune from Memramcook and a fast Cape Breton reel. I asked Janelle to slow down the first tune, and then try to speed up on the second, and increase the tempo again for the third tune. This sort of thing is hard for any player. And to do the bed properly, Nicolas the guitarist would have to speed up in lock step with her, pushing the tempo sometimes, and being pulled along at others. Each of the tunes would need to sit in its own rhythmic world, not too fast, not too slow. The increases would have to be completely natural, something you would hardly notice. It was asking a lot of both of them. We could have printed a click track, but all good instrumentals need to contain that elusive quality players call ‘lift'. ‘Lift' is the catchy and organic rhythm that dancers love. It is hard to describe, harder to pull off, and playing to a click track will almost certainly ruin it.

We recorded the supposedly rough bed track early on a weekday morning, as Janelle had to return to school for an exam later on in the day. We ran through it once to make sure both the musicians had the changes, adjusted the mics, and then did it for real. Janelle played the first tune flawlessly, and Nicolas had nailed exactly the blend of space and texture I was looking for. When the first acceleration came, he was in perfect synch with Janelle, even though they were playing in different rooms, only linked by headphones. By the time they got to the third (and hardest) tempo increase, me and the engineer John were grinning at each other in astonishment as they both slid into it like they had been playing it together for years. The tune finishes with an extremely difficult series of 16th notes, the sort of thing that only sounds good if it is played with incredible accuracy. The guitar had to sit in the narrow spaces between those lightening notes, and I could not believe that they played that part flawlessly, and then finished with aplomb. After John and I listened, we both agreed that it would be pointless to take another run at it. Neither of us could find a thing to criticize. In one take, they had both nailed it.

One of the hardest things to do as a producer is to know when to stop. There is always another texture, another instrument, another idea that would somehow make it better. On in the days that followed, the musicians would often ask me when we were going to start adding other tracks to the Marche set. I ran through dozens of ideas, but in the end, they always seemed extraneous. I am glad I resisted the urge to tamper with it. The track consists of one fiddle and one guitar, and to me it sounds as big as Metallica, and just as exciting. Sometimes, to be a good producer you just have to shut up and let the musicians' art shine through.

www.janelledupuis.com

An awful lot of my friends got started in music thanks to the record collection of an older brother. I don't have any older brothers, and most of my cousins, (at least the ones who lived nearby), are younger. My parents' record collection, as far as I can recall, included not one pop or rock record of any kind. Although they were the right age to be hippies, like many Newfoundlanders of their generation, the whole idea would have been absurd to them. Unfortunately for me, my one older sister was never much of a pop fan. She was more serious about actually playing music than me, and spent her time practicing piano (rather than listening to records and pretending to learn guitar). The only record she had that I ever gaffed was her one Bay City Rollers record.

The Rollers were already past their sell date the time they reached us in the colonies. At the time, in those pre-cable days, we could only get one TV channel in my neck of the woods, and that was frequently unwatchable. Popular culture had at best a four or five-year time lag. Still, you would have had to have spent the 70s in a cave not to have encountered the Bay City Rollers. Besides Kiss, they were the great teen sensation of that era. A good looking band from deepest Scotland, they played simple power-pop, and used tartan as their trademark.

By the time the Rock & Roll Love Letter LP fell into my hands, the craze had already been over for several years. However, as my record collection numbered four albums at the time, Love Letter automatically went into steady rotation. At the age of ten, I listened to this record constantly. If nothing else, it firmly convinced me that I was missing out on something. When I stumbled across it on I-Tunes recently, I could not resist downloading it. Unlike most 70's music, this has aged well.

The song Rock & Roll Love Letter was the big hit from this album, but Wouldn't You Like It is way more fun. Straight-forward British glam rock, the song would fit perfectly in the repertoire of Slade, Bowie, or any other UK rock star from that era. It features solid drums, and guitars that are just distorted enough to be cool. The hi-hat cymbal starts at the beginning and never stops. The pop hooks are just perfect, with big choruses, and verses about absolutely nothing. The solo is so simple its funny, and the bass line changes constantly. It sounds like it was played by a kid who just learned the instrument that morning, and was absolutely delighted with himself. Just like in all my bands, everyone is singing away constantly, chorus or not. To top it all off, every so often there is this weird frog-like noise. As a child, I had assumed it was just a result of the numerous scratches that covered the lp - either that, or the ancient needle on my mothers' hi-fi. At the risk of digressing into geezer land, all our records skipped and hopped. You just got used to it. Just like our rolling and snowy one channel TV, it was the way things were back then in the Neanderthal era. I am delighted to say that the I-tunes version includes this same weird belch. One cannot imagine what the point was, and the internet is no hope. My current theory is that it is an attempt to pay tribute to Slade, who included an infamous burp, courtesy of their bass player, on one of their bigger hits. Either way, it's perfect.

Love Letter is written around a flawless ‘rhyming guitar' hook, one I have just realized I have been imitating every since. Like most Roller hits, it is a cover of an earlier UK release, this one by a guy named Tim Moore. The chorus is as big as you could want, and even features shouted ‘Heys!", perfect for audience sing-alongs. The lyrics are a love letter, to rock - the lifestyle. Every eight bars something completely different happens, all of which fits perfectly with everything else. The handclaps are fat and sloppy. The bridge consists of a bunch of ‘oos', followed by a pointless and utterly ridiculous amp crash.

Absolute genius. Make no wonder Kurt Cobain loved this. First chance I get, I am going to buy another copy, and send it to my sister.

Hey mama poppa,
Hey you're boy is doing fine
And the energy you gave him
Keeps on trying to unwind

Cause I see an ancient rhythm
In a man's genetic code
Gonna keep on rock and rollin'
Til my jeans explode

-Rock & Roll Love Letter, Bay City Rollers

Songs stay with you for funny reasons. This one has no real personal meaning, but I will never forget the circumstances under which I first heard it.

Some years a go a couple of friends and I spent a summer wandering around Ireland, searching out musicians and pub sessions. Every day was much the same. It started out with a nasty hangover. After a greasy B&B breakfast, we drove somewhere, and after a bit of desultory site-seeing, found another B&B. Then it was off to whatever pub offered the best hope of a session, and the chance to hear or play some tunes. Sometimes the evening ended there, sometimes it got more elaborate. In Galway someone told us about Doolin. Doolin is a tiny town just below the Cliffs of Moher, where musicians from across Europe were reputed to gather for the best sessions on the island.

To our astonishment, (Irish tourist directions tending to be a bit wobbly), this turned out to be true. Traditional music fans of all ages and nations were gathered there, it was like an informal festival. A tear of monster proportions ensued. On our fourth night there, we discovered that the pub would sell you a few cases of beer out the back after closing. Somehow we gathered a large party, and after a raucous hike through the country, we broke into an abandoned farmhouse down a wooded lane. By now things were getting a little blurry, but I recall stumbling around the barnyard, fetching bits of wood. One of the less inebriated partiers managed to get a fire going in the farmhouses' old hearth, and soon the scene was cozy indeed. Some of the party had instruments, and the session was soon going strong again, 20 or 30 drunks, some locals, but most from elsewhere, all swigging warm beer and shouting at each other, lit by the roaring blaze.

Some time later, I was engrossed in one of those conversations that only happens on evenings like that. I believe I was discussing why I had never become a pilot, but it could have been just about anything. Whoever I was talking too was embarked upon a similar flight of fancy, anyway. In the middle of us spouting nonsense at each other, someone in a thick German accent started shouting that the room was on fire. I took a quick glance at the hearth, where indeed a sheet of flame was shooting up the wall.

Bedlam ensued, as the whole tribe began shouting and running into one another, all trying to escape a fiery death. Rather than just walking out the front door, (which we had earlier removed), for some reason I began kicking planks out of a large window on which I had been leaning. I was about to climb out when I noticed a girl next to me, who was just standing there screaming. In an act of heroism, I picked her up, (she was fairly small, I suppose, it's hard to recall now), climbed up on the sill, and leapt out. I felt a sharp pain in my leg on the landing, but we were in a hay-filled farmyard, and it was pitch black, so it was no time to investigate. The girl said something to me in a language with which I was not familiar, (presumably a thank-you for saving her life), and joined the rest of the crowd, who were booting it down the lane as fast as they could stumble.

Suddenly it was silent in the yard. There was no sign of my friends. I stood there for a second, and then decided to go back in, just in case more heroism was necessary. Once again, rather than using the door, I climbed back in the window. Inside, all was calm and peaceful. My two friends stood there sipping beer, along with a fit looking guy from the North, Portadown if I recall. While the rest of us had been panicking, they extinguished the blaze with the rest of the beer, the Portadown guy assisting with a prodigious pee. They expressed some disappointment that the party had ended badly, and then one of them asked about my leg.

I looked down. One leg of my jeans was shredded, and there was an eight inch gash from my knee to the ankle. With that grim fatalism common to both Newfoundlanders and the Irish, everyone agreed that I had no doubt cut myself on a rusty scythe or something equally dreadful, and that blood poisoning was inevitable. As we were miles from anywhere, and it was the middle of the night, going to a hospital was out of the question. Instead I washed it as best I could with the remains of a flask, and decided to hope for the best.

The next day was grim indeed. We all had monumental hangovers, and I was limping heavily, convinced that any moment a case of tetanus was going to set in. It was foggy and rainy, and only one of the three pubs was open, a depressing, brightly lit room that was more like a hospital café. The merry crowd from the night before was gone forever, and the only other customers were two scruffy Irish hippies, who looked to be in as poor a state as ourselves.

We spent the afternoon there, munching stale cheese sandwiches and pots of tea. There was nowhere else to go. One of the Irish guys produced a battered tin whistle and began to play music like I have never heard before or since. In his hands it was an orchestra, and he barely stopped for breath. Slow airs morphed into bright reels, followed by improvised pieces that wrapped around themselves like Indian ragas. It was utterly unique. Not to be outdone, the other guy took out a guitar, and when his partner took a break, sang a song, Donegal Danny.

Written by Irish songwriter Phil Coulter, the song is a memorable tale of a man who loses his friends when their fishing boat founders. It is long, and absorbing, and the singer sang it with all the pathos and passion it deserved. Sad and melancholy, it was perfectly suited to that misty afternoon. He sang it so well that all three of us, who had never heard the song before, remembered it ever since.

There are many versions out there, but it does not really matter who is singing it for me to be instantly back once again in Doolin, sick & hungover, terrified I had lockjaw, tired and cold, yet utterly transfixed by the power of that ballad.

And often at night, when the sea is high
And the rain is tearing at my skin
I still hear the cries of drowning men
Floating over on the wind

So here's to those who are dead and gone
The friends that I hold dear,
And here's to you, and I'll bid you adieu
Saying Donegal Danny's been here, me boys, Donegal Danny's been here

-Donegal Danny, Phil Coulter

Summer jobs were hard to come by when I was a teenager. The economy was in the toilet, and any jobs that were out there went to people who were older, more qualified, or more desperate. We spent the summers wandering around the streets, getting into trouble, pissing about with various bands, and otherwise not doing much of anything.

Pretty much my only source of income was a small cheque from the government, what was known then as the ‘orphan's benefit'.  Whatever did not get spent on smokes and strings and bus money went to Fred's Records, on Duckworth Street. Fred's had a decent used LP section at the time, and records could be had for a dollar or two on a good day.

One Friday I wandered in, and immediately headed to the back where the small used folk section was. In those days, before everyone and his mother could put out cds, folk records were hard to come by. The entire Newfoundland record collection could still be easily counted in the dozens. Fortunately for me, some aging hippie who had fallen on hard times had come in earlier that day, and peddled his whole collection of 1970s folk albums. I bought the lot for a tenner, including two albums by a band I had never heard of, with the amazing name of Steeleye Span.

Steeleye Span does not sound much like Great Big Sea, or anything else out there these days, but in their time they were quite popular. The band's heyday was in the mid-70s, when their rock and traditional British folk fusion managed to crack the UK top-20. They never did much in North America, but they still have a large following among serious folk-rock fans.

Of the two albums I purchased, one was so scratched as to be unlistenable. The other was called Parcel of Rogues. It became one of my favourites. The album was released when the band was at the peak of their powers. Lead singer Maddy Prior never sounded better, and the arrangements are a perfect blend of British 60's rock and unusual UK folk songs. The album contains Misty, Moisty, Morning, (a song many bands have covered), but I preferred The Weaver & the Factory Maid. The song itself is simple, a ballad from the industrial revolution that speaks about a young farm hands' desire to leave the land and take a job in a factory, following a girl he loves. The song features Prior's voice soaring over the hymn-like melody, often harmonizing with herself, perfectly balanced with a symphonic arrangement of electric guitars and violins.

British folk songs are rarely as romantic as their Irish equivalents, and nowhere near as lush as French songs. While this one isn't very flowery, it has intensity rare in folk songs of any stripe. The narrator knows he is losing something important by going into the mills, but he believes he has found something better instead. His passionate defense relies on nothing except his own conviction, and is immune to criticism.

Many teenagers find themselves defending loves that make no sense to anyone else. The theme is a staple of pop songs. The anonymous writer of The Weaver and the Factory Maid managed it well enough for the song to still speak its sad and triumphant truth 250 years later.

As for your fine girls I don't care
If I could but enjoy my dear,
I'd stand in the factory all the day
And she and I'd keep our shuttles in play.

How can you say it's a pleasant bed,
When now't lies there but a factory maid?
A factory lass although she be,
Blest is the man that enjoys she.

             -The Weaver & the Factory Maid

http://steeleye.freeservers.com

I came late to the IPod thing. In fact, if I had not gotten one for free from the label, I would not own one now. I never had a Walkman, and though I have a brace of portable cd players kicking around, I never actually took them anywhere.

The Ipod shuffle is perfect for me. Most aficionados would sneer at it. It can only take a fraction of the songs a big 60 gig unit holds. Yet for me, it is more than enough. I rarely listen to albums anyway. I always preferred the radio. I like songs, songs that have a beginning, middle, and end. The surprising juxtapositions which a good DJ can manufacture are way more interesting to me than an extended session lying on the floor digging into something like The Wall.

I have about 200 songs on my Shuffle. All of them mean something to me. I have room for another 100 or more, but I am still waiting to hear what they might be. For now, to abuse the cliché, these 200 songs are my personal soundtrack.

Dark Streets of London – The Pogues

Sean and I formed Rankin Street sometime in 1990, after a couple of false starts. The membership stayed fluid for a long time after, as did our repertoire. We were learning to play, but more important, trying to figure out what to play. We started out doing the standard Irish pub band repertoire, mainly Irish classics like Wild Rover and Nancy Whiskey. Very quickly we had to give that up. For one thing, we felt silly pretending to be Irish. Worse, every other band was doing the same thing.

When Darrell joined the band, the repertoire began to expand, and get a lot more interesting. Darrell shared our enthusiasm for Newfoundland songs, and we pushed more and more of them into the show. Surprisingly, with the exception of warhorses like I’se the By, local bands did not play much Newfoundland material in those days. We also started playing weird rock and folk covers, and really thinking about arrangements. All of a sudden our audience started getting a lot younger. The generally conservative pub owners complained that their regulars could not get in when we played, and they did not like our cavalier attitude to their beloved Irish songs. On the other hand, they liked the hundreds of college kids who showed up to see us play, kids who brought an incredible energy to that scene.

Somewhere in those years I heard the Pogues for the first time. Everyone loved their cover of Dirty Old Town, but this was the song that really caught my attention. I had spent my high school years in punk bands, which were all about do-it-yourself attitude, writing about your own life, and self-belief. I was always trying to put some of that ethos into: Rankin Street. To that end, we played harder and faster than everyone else, and our ‘who gives a f*ck’ attitude to performance was pure hardcore. We were always up for an odd idea, and we pushed the envelope as far as we could. That said, musically, however, it was not really happening. Too often our arrangements were bog-standard pub band.

Dark Streets of London was a watershed for me. Here was a song that had everything I loved about 1980s hardcore – pure honesty in the lyrics, a defiantly local subject, a narrator who didn’t give a shit about the tone and quality of his voice, a massive sense of humour, and best of all, a stumbling, driving shuffle riff, a hook which came almost entirely from the accordion. You could not even hear the guitar, and anyway, it wasn’t important. The piano accordion riff was both the train driver and the engine.

I remember getting a tape of this song, and playing it over and over again on the crap boom-box that had followed me from high school. Up till then, astonishingly, I rarely played the accordion with the band, just using it for the odd instrumental. I didn’t really like the way the accordion was played in songs by Newfoundland bands of the time. Figgy Duff aside, most of them used it like right-handed piano, playing simple melody along with the singer. Now I knew exactly what to do with the accordion. It would function like the left hand parts of a rockabilly piano, or maybe a blues harmonica – play the riffs, push the rhythm, and provide a powerful new sound to the songs we were working on.

It seems obvious now, but when we started Great Big Sea shortly after, the distinctive accordion parts of songs like What Are You At and Great Big Sea came directly from that idea.

The Pogues have dozens of amazing songs, but this one is a really special. For me, it was a template.

And now the winter comes down
I can’t stand the chill
That comes to the streets round Christmastime
And I’m buggered to damnation
And I haven’t got a penny
To wander the dark streets of London

-"Dark Streets of London", from the album Red Roses For Me

www.pogues.com