cream of the crop 2013

Just ducking under the Twelfth Night finishing tape here with my list of 2013's best music...

I listened to a lot of folk music again last year, thanks once more to my annual August Bank Holiday jolly at Shrewsbury and also to a series of excellent gigs at my newly discovered favourite venue, Cecil Sharp House, HQ of the English Folk Dance and Song Society and in every sense Folk Central.

In contrast, my attempts to seek out new jazz faltered a bit. The Bull's Head, my local venue, was closed for renovation work for most of the year (although it's open again now, thankfully) and there didn't seem to be much else around outside the November uber-binge which is the London Jazz Festival.

As always, wonderful Radio 6Music was an indispensable source of great new music with Mary Anne Hobbs' weekend breakfast show a particularly impressive new addition to the schedules. 

As for my runners and riders, to be honest the much heralded Bowie album only just made the cut with what to my ears was something of a curate's egg with an over-reliance on a heavy metal guitar sound on many of the tracks. Laura Mvula and Disclosure were fellow Mercury Music Prize nominees. It was good to see another welcome reappearance with the Prefab Sprout record justifiably appearing in many best-of-year lists. Such a shame about Paddy McAloon's health issues in recent years: this probably means that more new music from these quarters is pretty unlikely.

All the folk artists in the list (Lady Maisery, Melrose Quartet, Carthy Hardy Farrell Young, Steeleye Span and The Full English) were ones I saw live, Stacey Kent is the lone standard bearer for jazz and Mulatu Astatke album was by some margin the funkiest music I heard all year.

In no particular order then:

• Laura Mvula: Sing to the Moon 
• Disclosure: Settle
• Lady Maisery: Mayday
• Prefab Sprout: Crimson/Red
• Stacey Kent: The Changing Lights
• The Melrose Quartet: Fifty Verses
• Carthy Hardy Farrell Young: Laylam
• David Bowie: The Next Day
• Steeleye Span: Wintersmith
• Arcade Fire: Reflektor
• Low: The Invisible Way
• Owiny Sigoma Band: Power Punch
• Mulatu Astatke: Sketches of Ethiopia
• The Full English: The Full English

Stuff to listen to:

• Spotify playlist of some of the above 
• Other fave tracks of the year (Yes folks, "Get Lucky" sounds as fresh as ever to me...) 

2012 done and dusted

2012 was the year in which the balance of my listening habits rather veered away from Radio 6Music. Which is not to say there's been a lowering of standards there as might be said for other sections of the Beeb (see also below), just that I seem to have been casting my musical net a little more widely. On the one hand I've been soaking up a fair amount of Jazz FM and Radio 3 jazz coverage (hence numbers 8, 10 and 11 in my list below) and on the other I've been a reasonably faithful follower of Mike Harding's Wednesday evening Radio 2 slot (2, 3, 12, 15 and 16), soon to be pulled from the schedules, scandalously.

I also seem to have been to more gigs than ever. There's been a lot of jazz--several visits to Ronnie Scott's and, as ever, the annual ten-day November jazz binge that is the London Jazz Festival--and a fair amount of folk--notably a) a Sandy Denny tribute concert early in the year which opened my ears for the first time to a whole catalogue of music hitherto somehow off my radar and b) another rather pleasing August Bank Holiday at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival particularly in the company of some excellent woman singers (2 and 3).

That said, we did hear from a few of the old staples of my CD collection: Hawley, Fagen, Saint Etienne and Stereolab's Laetitia Sadier striking out on her own. I've also tried not to ignore some of the newer kids on the block: Mala's--possibly adult-oriented?--Latinised dubstep, the interesting fruits of Sam Lee's song collecting work among the Romany community and the impressive new blues/soul songs, piano and--especially--VOICE of Natalie Duncan.

For me it's Richard Russell's collaboration with soul-legend Bobby Womack which pips the others to the post. As with his work with Gil Scott Heron in 2010, Russell has brought the best out of a soul artist who's had a difficult time of it recently and whose best years we might have thought were behind him.

That's what I think anyway.

THE LIST

1. Bobby Womack: The Bravest Man in the Universe
2. Karine Polwart: Traces
3. Caroline Herring: Camilla
4. Richard Hawley: Standing at the Sky’s Edge
5. Beach House: Bloom
6. Donald Fagen: Sunken Combos
7. Natalie Duncan: The Devil in Me
8. Kenny Wheeler: The Long Waiting
9. Snowgoose: Harmony Springs
10. Esperanza Spalding: Radio Music Society
11. Trish Clowes: And in the Night Time She is There
12. Thea Gilmore: Don’t Stop Singing
13. The xx: Coexist
14. Saint Etienne: Words and Music
15. Sam Lee: Ground of Its Own
16. Laetitia Sadier: Silencio
17. Lianne La Havas: Is Your Love Big Enough?
18. Quantic & Alice Russell: Look Around The Corner
19. Mala: Mala in Cuba
20. Spiro: Kaleidophonica

To hear more, fire up your Spotify machine...

• albums of the year (at least most of 'em)
• trax of the year (mainly odds'n'sods which have popped up on the radio)
• songs of the week (courtesy of This Is My Jam Inc.)

And, as ever, please argue...

song of the week 31: cecil sharp project - meadows of dan

Here's a song I heard at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival at the weekend.

I told various friends I was going to the festival and almost all of them asked straight away: "Who's on?" Other than the ubiquitous Bellowhead, who claim to have performed at twenty-two festivals this summer, I couldn't particularly remember any names I was particularly looking forward to. Generally I don't go to festivals just because of the headliners but in the hope that, among the maybe twenty or so artists I'll be seeing in the space of a few days, there'll be the unexpected discovery of new artists who I haven't heard of before.

One such was Caroline Herring whose solo set was one of my highlights of the weekend. There's not a great deal of her own material available on the internet although the Cecil Sharp Project*, to which she contributed and who also performed at Shrewsbury, has received a fair amount of media coverage. Here's a pleasingly tuneful number from the resulting CSP album featuring Caroline Herring on lead voice and guitar:



* The Cecil Sharp Project is a suite of songs and tunes based on the life and work of the famous song collector composed and performed collaboratively by a number of folk musicians. This YouTube clip explains more.

song of the week 9: laura marling - goodbye england (covered in snow)

In other news this week, who would have predicted that top folky Laura Marling would pick up a Brit Award? What, you mean she's really better than Cheryl Cole?

Judge for yourself:



...or, if you've got a sweeter tooth, listen to the fully-orchestrated version.

80s balladeers uncovered!

Stackridge @ 100 Club, 6th November

What we learned tonight:

• Stackridge have been going for ages
  
• In fact, they performed at the first Glastonbury Festival in 1970
• They probably get filed under "folk" in HMV but I can spot elements of prog and guitar pop too...
  
• They've often been compared to the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band
• ...which may or may not be due to their occasional Wurzel-like trombone-based West Country oompah songs (boo!)
  
• But wait, they also do a nice line in BigStaresque jangly guitar songs (hoorah!)
  
• What's more, in another life they were the Korgis:

Double hoorah!!

oktoberfest

Musicport Festival @ The Spa, Bridlington, 24th/25th October

This festival hasn't been on my radar until now--mainly because it's way "oop north" I suppose--but it actually celebrated its tenth anniversary this year. It's now relocated from its early days in Whitby and relaxed the "folk-only" policy of yesteryear to include world music--the African Jazz Allstars and Justin Adams and Juldeh Camara featured on the Sunday evening, and reggae--Misty In Roots and the Mad Professor Ariwa Posse, er, served up a double helping on Saturday night.

It's good to go to festivals like this I think because it reminds you just how many talented gigging musicians there are plying an honest trade with no lucrative album deal to line their coffers and no media exposure or so-called critical acclaim to promote their cause.

Honourable mentions, then, go to the following for brightening up my weekend:

• Martin Stephenson: erstwhile Daintee with a nice line in Woolworth guitars and self-deprecating Geordie stage patter.
  
• Fernhill: Welsh folksters featuring Julie Murphy, billed as "Eliza Carthy's favourite voice in the world" (and who am I to argue?). Sadly their sound was utterly lost in the cavernous main hall: "Last night we played in a bookshop which wasn't even as big as this stage".
  
• Karen Tweed: survived an early hours breathalizer incident in Newcastle city centre to purvey early Saturday morning accordion-based tunes. Very nice too.
  
• Pacific Curls: female Maori/Scots threesome featuring fiddle, ukelele, cajon, body percussion and Natalie Imbruglia's guitarist.
  
• Chumbawamba: steadfastly refuse to play "the hit" and promise an anti-Thatcher tribute album when the old bag croaks.
  
• Delta Maid: she talks like a boy soprano Wayne Rooney but sings like Shelby Lynne. I couldn't decide if these were her own songs; if so, she's a tremendously gifted writer for her age.
  
• Samay: Yorkshire-based jazz/rock/fusion-type thing with sax, guitar and bass alongside sarod and tabla--reminded me a bit of Indian percussionist Trilok Gurtu who I've seen at WOMAD in years gone by.
  

broadstairs revisited

Broadstairs Folk Festival, 8th & 13th August

Some highlights:

- Mississippi Ol' Macdonald: He's not old (late twenties, I'd say) and sounds like he's from nearer the Thames Delta than the Mississippi. His name may be Macdonald though. A great gravelly blues voice and some nifty fret work. Songs by Big Bill Broonzy, Muddy Waters, and other usual suspects. He's chock full of stories too, from his time in Memphis where he's been helping to raise money for a gravestone for O.V. Wright, unsung soul legend who died in 1980. It never occurred to me that steel guitars (he plays a National Steel for some numbers) are apt to go out of tune because they expand and contract dependant on the temperature. Obvious really...

- The Woodshed Session: I came here last year and recognise many of same faces this time. Individually they're called on in turn to sing or play a tune while the others strum, bow, blow and/or sing along with varying degrees of confidence. Some of them are impressively talented: a flautist improvises some interesting flute accompaniment to "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" and an accordionist hurtles through a couple of reels at breakneck speed. Quite interesting that these hidden pockets of amateur music-making exist...

- Cocos Lovers were busking down by the harbour and I shelled out a fiver for a couple of CDs on the strength of their pleasing vocal harmonies and instrumental arrangements. I like their songs but I'm not sure how far that name will get them. Debut album coming soon it seems.

follow the yellow umbrella

Join me if you will for a whistle-stop tour of some groovy old music venues.

(Er, they're in New York, in case you were wondering...)

Day 1: Midtown Manhattan, Broadway, Fifth Avenue, etc etc

Radio City Music Hall

Perversely, like many of the skyscrapers in Manhattan, the Radio City Music Hall sprung up in the Depression Era and opened in 1932. Home to musicals, films, and in latter years, the Grammy and Tony Awards, the lavish annual Christmas spectacular, which has run throughout its history, is a Nativity re-enactment using real animals: sheep, donkeys, even camels. For the duration of the show's run, they're housed in special living quarters behind the stage and can apparently be spotted being given a Christmas Day constitutional around Midtown Manhattan. The theatre has a spectacular Art Deco interior and its "Mighty Wurlitzer" pipe organ is the largest pipe organ built for a movie theatre.

Day 2: Greenwich Village,
a.k.a. "The Village" (1960s vintage),
now West Village.

Cafe Wha?

One of a number of establishments now on the tourist trail by virtue of having hosted early performances by one Robert Zimmerman. The establishment's own website lists Dylan as only one in a string of famous names who've popped in over the years--"Allen Ginsberg regularly sipped his cocktails here. The Café Wha? was the original stomping ground for prodigies Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix. Bruce Springsteen, Peter, Paul & Mary, Kool and the Gang, as well as comedians, Richard Pryor and Bill Cosby..."--but a character called David Barry (??) has some interesting reminiscences.

Day 3: Walking tour of Harlem.

The Apollo Theatre

Originally opened in 1915, in 1934 the Apollo was given over exclusively to Afro-American performers as an opportunity to appear in the weekly "amateur nights" and, if well received, tour the U.S., make a name for themselves nationally, then return to the Apollo as a headlining act in their own right. Ella Fitzgerald was one of the earliest artists to do this, ditto Bessie Smith in 1935, and in 1959 James Brown, who later used the venue for his famous 1963 live album. So close was Brown's relationship with the theatre that when he died in 2006 he lay in state there, typically, "in a blue suit, white gloves and silver shoes." Harlemites queued up round the block to pay their last respects.

and finally, also in Harlem...

Minton's Playhouse

Founded in 1938 and frequented by early jazzers Louis Armstrong, Fats Waller and Earl Hines, it later played a huge part in the development of bebop. Dizzy Gillespie was a main mover, as was Thelonious Monk and, of course, Charlie Parker.

This is what they came up with...

what? no lily allen?

1,000 Years Of Popular Music, starring Richard Thompson @ the Barbican, 3rd February

It's not as if Thompson hasn't recorded over twenty albums of his own songs. We heard none of them tonight though. We got madrigals. We got music hall. Abba. Early Beatles. Gilbert & Sullivan. Cole Porter. Purcell opera. A song composed (maybe) by Richard the Lionheart. Some doo-wop. Some Hank Williams. Some thirteenth-century folk with hurdy-gurdy accompaniment. Nelly Furtado's "Maneater". Songs in Renaissance French and Italian. And "Everyone's Got To Learn Sometime" by the Korgis. In other words, something for all the family...

The Guardian and Independent are both generally effusive and rightly so.

day trip to broadstairs

Broadstairs Folk Week, 15th August

A couple of hours' train journey from London, Broadstairs has got a fair bit to offer: a small but unspoilt town centre, an attractive promenade and beach, a bit of Dickens-related history, and, for the last couple of weeks, more Morris Dancers than you can shake a stick at. You know, those weird jangly ones with bells and ribbons on?

The Broadstairs Folk Week was founded as long ago as 1965 so not surprisingly there are some heavy duty folkies in attendance and fiddles, acoustic guitars and accordions are ten a penny. Even the folk mainliners at Broadstairs though are willing to concede that the "folk music" label spreads its wings more widely in these globalised times than used to be the case. Consequently, as well as British and Irish artists, there are also Eastern Europeans (Warsaw Village Band), Jamaicans (Two Man Ting) and West Africans (N'faly Kouyate and Dunkayan).

There are hundreds of performances during the course of the two weeks. Many of these are outdoors or in pubs where a bucket is passed round for contributions; there are also a couple of medium-sized venues at about £3 a go; then, for the stadium folky, a couple of concert hall-type affairs where you can pay a whopping £12 to see more well-known artists like Cara Dillon and the ubiquitous Eliza Carthy.

High spots of my day are Canadian duo The Wind Whistles and a two-hour long "session"--something I'd never experienced before--at the Wrotham Arms featuring Peter and Barbara Snape (left).

...And it's all very photogenic.

freeloading

Folk Day at the Proms, Royal Albert Hall, 20th July

I sometimes forget what great value the Proms are--you get a concert every night for two months at a fiver a go. I think it's just that these days so-called "classical" music is at the bottom of my pecking order of musical "genres" (I hate that word). Pop/rock, world, jazz and folk take precedence so classical doesn't get much of a look-in anymore.

In recent years the Proms have been casting their net a bit more widely genre-wise, and the (free) gig this afternoon is a case in point: a selection of songs firstly presented in their "folk" setting--courtesy of Bella Hardy and veteran Hungarian-Gypsy foursome Muzsikas--then as orchestral appropriations courtesy of Vaughan Williams, Percy Grainger, Bartok...

It all raises some interesting questions (humour me):

• should composers pass off as their own tunes which have been written and developed over a long period of time by a number of different singers?
• are their arrangements even based on the same tunes, bearing in mind the conventions of "classical" orchestral music with regard to form and harmonic and instrumental embellishment?
• do folk musicians see the virtue of songs being revived by classical composers, given that they present them in such a different way?

Oh I don't know...

P.S. There's a selection of clips on youtube from the evening "Proms Folk Day" concert featuring Bella Hardy (again), Martin Simpson and the fantastic Bellowhead.

blue bleezing blind drunk

Rachel Unthank and the Winterset @ The Shaw Theatre, 12th May

..."Blue Bleezing Blind Drunk" and, indeed, other Northumbrian ditties, beer-related and otherwise. I always find it interesting that as well as performing, folk singers like Rachel Unthank also spend a lot of their time seeking out new songs, not just to widen their repertoires but also to preserve small but important parts of regional musical history. Many of the songs on her award-winning "The Bairns" album, of which all the tracks get an airing tonight, were ones she actually learned from her mother and father who are also folk singers.

The most obvious family connection tonight is with sister Becky with whom Rachel shares the lion's part of the singing duties. Interestingly, the voices of the two siblings are quite different in character: Rachel's is strong and pure and her Geordie accent is as pronounced in her singing as in her speech, Becky's is more fragile but at its best haunting and bell-like, nowhere more so than in her glorious rendition of Robert Wyatt's "Sea Song". I think this is a great song: the words are fantastic, it's got a wonderful soaring melody and the piano and accordion arrangement in the Unthanks' version really does it justice. And that voice...

Hear for yourself:
- "Sea Song" Becky vox

Also...
- "Sea Song" Robert Wyatt's original version
- What wikipedia has to say about Northumbrian music
- Guardian interview with R.U.

save our downstairs pub venues

Lisa Knapp, Gemma Ray, The Straw Bear Band @ The Local, Crouch End, 18th April

In view of Noel Gallagher's recent comments about the "soul destroying" nature of the O2 Arena and news of the forthcoming closure of the London Astoria, this week's Observer Music Monthly blog wonders if the death knell is sounding for smaller venues. Hats off then to the Local, a downstairs room in the King's Head pub in Crouch End. They've been has been putting music on since 2002 and recent guests include Devon Sproule and Natty, both featured in the current series of "Later...with Jools Holland".

Lisa Knapp, headlining tonight, does not disappoint. Check her out on youtube at the Shrewsbury Folk Festival. Even a Radio 1 DJ is impressed with her new album.

france v england

"Sweet Is The Song": Catherine Bott @ The Purcell Room, 30th March

Shirley Collins, an important figure in English folk music over the last fifty years, has been responsible for putting on a series of concerts at the Southbank Centre this week. In this last-but-one in the series fellow-singer and friend Catherine Bott, sang some songs from Collins's repertoire * along with some French medieval love songs from her own album "Sweet Is The Song". The French songs, in their sparse, unaccompanied form were quite difficult to come to terms with on an initial hearing but the English ones, accompanied by David McGuinness's chamber organ, were easier to size up.

Collins herself was on hand to give some interesting historical background: some of the songs were collected by Vaughan Williams in the early 1900s, others were passed down to her by her own grandparents in West Sussex; two of them lamented the young men of the villages of Southern England, taken away by press gangs to fight in the Napoleonic wars.

Quite an enjoyable selection and always good to broaden horizons a bit but this gig was really one for the folk aficionado and no doubt that there were plenty of those in the audience. As with the jazz at the Bulls Head last week, it's interesting to see another example of the many different music communities which exist in the UK. **

* Songs from the repertoire of Shirley Collins, arranged by Dolly Collins:

• The Captain With The Whiskers
• All Things Are Quite Silent
• The Plains of Waterloo
• All Flowers In Broome
• Just As The Tide Was Flowing
• The Bonny Labouring Boy

** See also What Happened to Radio 2?

more than the notes...

Imagined Village @ Royal Festival Hall / Edwyn Collins @ Arts Theatre, 27th and 25th Nov.

Billy Bragg's recent book, "The Progressive Patriot", discusses the idea of English identity in the multicultural 21st century and the Imagined Village are an attempt to draw on several elements to arrive at a shared expression of this identity, notably the "traditional" folk background of Martin and Eliza Carthy, Bragg's own Clash sensibilities and the non-western origins of various "world music" musicians (Sheila Chandra, Johnny Kalsi of the Dhol Foundation, Sheema Mukherjee of Transglobal Underground). In recent press interviews and in the pre-concert talk tonight, Bragg and group leader Simon Emmerson (late of Afro-Celt Sound System) are at pains to deny that they are out to trample over long-established folk traditions with a more electro/beat-based style. The presence of the Carthys--two members of "folk royalty"--as well as young members of the Copper Family offer some reassurance in this regard. Plenty of ideas to take on board, but the music was good too. Highlight for me was Benjamin Zephaniah's video'd take on "Tam Lin".

A couple of nights earlier, Edwyn Collins gave us an impressive run through a mix of Orange Juice classics and numbers from his solo career, impressive particularly since this was about much more than hearing the music. What an achievement for him to have got this far only a couple of years after two brain haemorrhages left him almost completely paralysed. It's difficult for those of us watching and listening to appreciate what it means to him to be back performing again. This Times Review of the gig says it quite eloquently.

I.V. Lynx:
Review of I.V.s in Liverpool earlier in the tour
Guardian review of "The Progressive Patriot"
Wikipedia on "Tam Lin"
Back in the day: Simon Emmerson when he had hair, and a different surname

E.C. Lynx:
allmusic.com waxes lyrical about the OJ's
Edwyn is back / "I was dead -- and I was resurrected"
"The Orange Juice and Postcard Records Website". Yay.
Back in the day: YouTube video vaults

nowt as queer as folk

Circulus + Lisa Knapp + Takao Ito at the Spitz, 7th Sept.

Out of these three acts, to be honest only Lisa Knapp was worth the entrance money. Takao Ito sang earnest songs in an English/American folk style accompanied by an acoustic guitar, in Japanese. Circulus, the headliners, were a sort of novelty act very much from the Land Which Musical Taste Forgot. To be fair, their woodwind player was very adept on an impressive collection of old wind instruments (recorders, crum horns, wooden flutes), but their mix of prog folk tunes, 70s synthesizers, medieval garb and "sing coo-coo"s left me a bit cold. Particularly unnerving was the number of people present not only attempting to dance along to the music but who also knew the words to the songs.

I heard Lisa Knapp on a Kershaw show a few months ago and she didn't disappoint this evening: some great old songs and some original compositions, alternately sung unaccompanied and backed by the excellent band. Looking forward to catching her again at the Magpie's Nest nights at the Old Queen's Head in Islington if I can make it.

Sad to think that this excellent venue, along with what's left of the rest of Spitalfields Market, will soon be bulldozed. Hopefully they can find a new location before long.

Linx:
- Review of "Wild and Undaunted" by Lisa Knapp
- "Save The Spitz" pages
- The Guardian attempts to explain the Circulus Phenomenon.

live stuff: lost ladies of folk at queen elizabeth hall, 23/6/07

One of the last gigs of Jarvis Cocker's "Meltdown" festival was this performance of some little-known women singers given recent exposure on Finders Keepers' "Bearded Ladies" compilation of folk/acoustic music. The first half of the evening featured three U.K.-based artists, Emma Tricca, Cate Le Bon and Jane Weaver, singing to their own acoustic guitar accompaniment. Later, three U.S./Canadian singers sang selections backed by the High Llamas + string quartet, with arrangements by Sean O'Hagan. Most of these songs had not been aired publicly since being recorded on late sixties albums which were either never released or quickly disappeared from view. Consequently all three of the singers--Susan Christie, Wendy Flower (one half of the duo Wendy and Bonnie) and Bonnie Dobson (no relation)--understandably seemed really chuffed to get the opportunity to dust these old songs off and bring them to a new audience nearly forty years after the event. Great credit to Andy Votel and Finders Keepers for uncovering these lost gems.
(Read a blow-by-blow account here: scroll down...)

live stuff: overture weekend at southbank centre, 10/7/07

Some good free music to mark the re-opening of the Royal Festival Hall after a £91 million renovation project: some Gospel choirs, singing from the roof of the Queen Elizabeth Hall (the best of which were the Croydon Seventh-Day Adventist Choir--fantastic), Indigo Moss, purveyors of fine Anglo-Americana and the brilliant folk "supergroup" Bellowhead.

Other links:
- "This is tomorrow" - Saint Etienne's film of the renovation project
- BBC News preview of events and other SBC stories
- Billy Bragg's Big Busk
- Catfunt's photos of the "Overture Weekend"
- A NY perspective: account of the Monday's opening gala concert

live stuff: kris drever et al at the social, 13/5/07

This night at the Social near Oxford Circus, billed as "City Folk", turns out to be neither in the City nor as it happens that much to do with folk music but all four of these singer/guitarists are interesting musicians in their own ways. Really only Orkney Islander Kris Drever panders to the folkies amongst us. He's in the running for a Radio 2 Folk Award and has had some recent exposure on Andy Kershaw's programme. You can see why. He's got some great songs and is a fantastic guitarist. Ned Collette, recent support for Joanna Newsom and Camera Obscura, is nice and tuneful (I like tunes) and paints some interesting harmonic colours with deft use of a loop pedal. Madam--aka Sukie Smith--reminds me a bit of the Howling Bells on one track, no bad thing. Her myspace page claims that this is death metal. Hmmm. Brummie Ben Calvert sings some OK indie songs with an acoustic guitar.

They're all webbed and myspaced up:
Kris Drever: greatweb, spacefantastic
Ned Collette: webtunes, spaceloop
Madam: deathweb, metalspace
Ben Calvert: webstrum, indiespace

live stuff: lou rhodes at the scala, 1/3/06

Following her appearance at the Daughters of Albion gig last month, Simon and I decide to go and check out the last night of Lou Rhodes's solo tour. I'm not familiar with her Lamb material at all (again the mighty Wikipedia site comes up with the goods!) but this new stuff sounds like quite a shift in style, much more folky with only acoustic instruments (guitars, violin, double bass) and drums and percussion muffled behind a transparent screen! For most of the gig she sits accompanying herself on guitar and, according to Simon who's been playing it for the last three weeks, works through her recent "Beloved One" album in full. Some songs are very quiet and she's not afraid of complete silence in breaks between sections (the title track a case in point) but, credit to the audience, you can hear a pin drop. She finally stands for a couple of encores, what from the enthusiastic reaction of a crowd of Lamb aficionados I take to be a couple of older tracks.

Read this Observer article about her and the rest of the "new generation of folk musicians".