English Country Music

All but the longest-bearded folk music veteran will need to be prepared for a very novel experience. The selection of instruments speaks for itself: dulcimer, pipe-and-tabor, guitar-cello, mandolin banjo as well as the more usual fiddle and melodeon. The overall band sound is like a rickety, clanking, thumping, jangling fairground organ being pulled down a cobbled street on a haycart. The musicians, their styles formed long before the mass-media era, have an eccentric and refreshing disregard for musical norms; perhaps their advanced age also makes them a little wayward.

The surprising thing for many people may be to discover how many of the tunes they already know – being from different areas, the players obviously concentrated on well-known common repertoire. Despite the early atrophy of English traditional music, a number of their choices were still to be heard orally or in the media until fairly recently.

There is little virtuosity on display, but the music doesn’t need it. They’re all simple, foot-tapping melodies and, once you get used to the band sound, very enjoyable to hear. It’s also probably the easiest and most fun folk album to play along with, that there’s ever been.

This release is almost double the length of the old LP, mainly through the inclusion of solos by the various contributors. Few of these are anything spectacular, but they’re worth having; the best are Billy Cooper’s dreamy dulcimer tapestries, straddling the divide between traditional music and Edwardian pop. However, they do entail a degree of repetition (with repeat tracks often running consecutively), and the net result is to dissipate the energy of the band pieces. Another thing that detracts from the re-release for me is the realisation that Reg Hall, whose melodeon has a central role in many performances, is not a genuine traditional musician. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with his playing but, as no doubt he would acknowledge, it undermines the ethos of this particular record.

Hall’s booklet, describing the performers’ lives and how the recordings were made, is comically littered with remarks like ‘but unfortunately this performance was taped over before being stolen and finally destroyed in a warehouse fire’. Priceless tapes led a precarious existence in those days! The story is an interesting one but makes it clear that he and fellow ‘folkie’ Mervyn Plunkett were the prime movers; Hall is even honest enough to admit that they may have directed the sessions towards what they then conceived of as ‘authentic’ folk music.

In the end though, whatever spin they introduced we have to be grateful to Hall and Plunkett for their efforts. Without them this record wouldn’t exist, and there is nothing else like it; it captures a heritage most of us never knew we had. For anyone who feels affection for the old, smocks-and-whiskers English countryside, it demands to be heard (…but if you already have the LP, and something to play it on, you don’t really need this as well).