Folk

I went to a folk club the other night, meaning I was sat in a room, drinking a pint of Hook Norton Best Bitter, with a variety of musicians and music-lovers, listening to them play songs and playing a few of my own. I worry that I am becoming not just middle-aged but whatever comes next, because I have to say that my evening at the folk club was very agreeable. Pleasant would be a good word. Excuse me if this post doesn't flow too well - I'm listening to In Rainbows for about the fifth time since I got it, and I can't multi-task. Anyway, my point (will that become a catchphrase?). While not all of the music at the folk club was necessarily to my taste, it was certainly emotive. Maybe it's because more tragic things happened back in the days of yore when real folk songs were written, or maybe it's because it's so fashionable to wrap one's lyrics in metaphor upon metaphor out of fear of someone finding out that the meaning really wasn't worth writing a song about in the first place. Either way, I can't think of very much modern music that makes me feel as emotional as 'My Bonnie' or 'Fields Of Athenry'. For pedants, yes, the latter was written in the seventies, but it is a folk song and is set in the nineteenth century so I think it proves my point. My ideal sound for a new album would be to fuse the wonderful production and arrangement ideas of Radiohead with gut-wrenching folk lyrics, but something tells me that I won't be able to move far enough from the insecure metaphor bollocks to write decent folk songs. Still, worth a try. I'll be going to the folk club again next month, and possibly to another different one in between. For the record, my three chosen songs to play on Monday were:
Girl From The North Country by Bob Dylan - went down OK despite me forgetting one or two verses. Warm and friendly applause.
Slide Song by Ekkeko (my band) - a mistake, given that the song's main gimmick is that it is played with a slide (which I didn't have). Stumbled over the lyrics when I attempted to replace a mild swear word that I had just realised was in there. Polite applause.
Cousin Jack by Show Of Hands - as close to a crowd-pleaser as I was going to get. People sung the chorus! I even attempted a breakdown section where I let the chords ring silent and tapped the rhythm on the echoing body of the guitar; if only I hadn't chosen that point to balls up the chords.
For future performances, I think I'll give myself more than 30 minutes' preparation. It's probably not very rock and roll to sit in your room at weekends learning lyrics and chords, but then folk isn't rock and roll. Unless you're Dylan. And I want to be. Arse.