The debut album, on Swainsthorpe Records, is now available to buy. Go to the “Buy CDs” page to hear samples and order your copy now!

This weekend (18th-20th of May) saw yet another fabulous Swaledale Squeeze, organised as ever by Jane Edwards. It’s a really special weekend, with concertina players from all over the country - and beyond - descending on a youth hostel in Yorkshire to make music together. The evening sessions carry on well into the night, and I achieved what I think is a personal best this year by staying up until a quarter to five on Sunday morning.

As a result of these late night sessions, Steve Bradley and I have been talking vaguely about doing “a project” for the last couple of years, but the logistics, given that I live in Birmingham and he lives in Durham, aren’t ideal. So this time round we took the opportunity to skip a workshop at Swaledale and record a couple of songs.

Needless to say these recordings are the product of almost no rehearsal time, very little equipment set-up time, and an unhealthy amount of sleep deprivation, so they’re far from perfect; but they were fun to make, and there can be few Pink Floyd covers doing the rounds involving English concertina, Maccann duet concertina, and a foot-operated Shruti Box all recorded in a single take (no overdubs!). So there’s some novelty value at least! The songs are from Roger Waters’s great anti-war Pink Floyd LP, The Final Cut, which you should of course buy from Amazon or somewhere equally suitable if you don’t already own it…

Interestingly, our concertinas were both manufactured within a few years of each other by Wheatstone & Co. and have the same kind of ebony ends, and aside from differences in volume in places, the two instruments blend together so well that it’s difficult to tell them apart, especially when Steve is playing chordally.

Download The Gunner’s Dream (3.5 MB)

Steve Bradley - first vocal, English concertina
Stuart Estell - second vocal, Maccann duet concertina

Download Paranoid Eyes (2.8 MB)

Steve Bradley - English concertina, foot-operated Shruti box
Stuart Estell - vocal, Maccann duet concertina (in instrumental break)

This week’s Brumcast podcast includes a new recording of my version of “I Can’t Find Brummagem” which I recorded recently - it’s played on acoustic guitars, acoustic bass, and mandolin.

It’s not available anywhere else yet, so visit their MySpace and get the podcast feed here: http://www.myspace.com/brumcastbirmingham

The words and a bit of blurb about the song are available on this site

And so to another version of The Cruel Mother, this time collected from Elizabeth Wharton, a gypsy, in Shropshire, by C.S. Burne, on the 13th of July, 1885. This is again taken from the “Songs of the Midlands” book edited by Roy Palmer.

Palmer offers the following notes:

The clerk in the ballad was no doubt a cleric, and therefore not marriageable, in addition to the fact that he is the social inferior of the woman. The oak or thorn tree against which the woman leans to bear the children (itself an ancient practice) often occur in a supernatural context. The guilty bloodstains will not wash off, as in Macbeth. The curious metamorphoses of the mother’s spirit (given more fully in [Cecilia Costello's version], together with the other ancient beliefs in the ballad, argue an origin of some antiquity.

But for all the tragic content, this version has rather a jolly tune, which makes it all the more unsettling, I think. I’ve played the accompaniment on my Jeffries Duet concertina.

Download The Cruel Mother (Elizabeth Wharton’s version) - 3.6MB

The text for this version is:

THE CRUEL MOTHER

There was a lady, a lady of York
Ri-fol i diddle i gee wo
She fell a-courting in her own father’s park
Down by the greenwood side-o

She leaned her back against the stile
There she had two pretty babes born

And she had nothing to lap them in
But she had a penknife sharp and keen

………. [line missing]
There she stabbed them right through the heart*

She wiped the penknife in the sludge
The more she wiped it, the more the blood showed

As she was walking in her own father’s park,
She saw two pretty babes playing with a ball

“Pretty babes, pretty babes, if you were mine,
I’d dress you up in silks so fine.”

“Dear mother, dear mother, when we were thine
You dressed us not in silks so fine.”

“Here we go to the heavens so high,
You’ll go to bad when you do die.”

* - omitted from this recording

I thought it might be an interesting exercise to record several completely disparate versions of the same song, and as I played a version of “The Cruel Mother” at the Traditional Song Session at the Midland Arts Centre last Thursday, May 3rd, I decided to go for that one.

It’s an unpleasant little tale, that’s for certain. Child records 13 different versions, but the plot is always broadly the same. A woman has twins (sometimes triplets) out of wedlock and murders them, and then is usually haunted by a vision of them playing ball. They often tell her she’s going to hell.

This first version of the words, and tune, come from the book “Songs of the Midlands”, edited by Roy Palmer, and now out of print. It was collected from Mrs. Cecilia Costello in 1951 by Marie Slocombe and P.S. Shaw, in Birmingham.

This performance is recorded on a 3-string appalachian mountain dulcimer, tuned D-D-c, and with a capo on the first fret, carefully avoiding the F-naturals that that tuning provides on the melody string!

Download The Cruel Mother (4.6 MB)

The text (which I’ve corrupted slightly while singing it) is:

THE CRUEL MOTHER

There was a lady that lived in York
All alone and aloney-o
She proved with child by her own father’s clerk
Down by the greenwood sidey-o

As she was walking down her father’s lawn
She thought three times that her back would be broke

As she was walking down her father’s lawn
She says “Honourable Mary, pity me”

Oh she was walking down her father’s lawn
Where her fine sons they were born

She pulled out her long penknife
And there she took away their three lives

Years went by and one summer’s morn
She saw three boys they were playing bat and ball

“O my fine boys if you were mine,
I’d dress you up in silk so fine.”

“O mother dear when we were yours,
You did not dress us in silk so fine.”

“You pulled out your long penknife
And there you took away our three lives.”

“O my fine boys what will become of me?”
“You’ll be seven long years a bird in a tree.”

“You’ll be seven long years a tongue in a bell,
And you’ll be seven long years a porter in hell.”

Thanks to Dan (again) this site is now equipped to be a handy podcast without any work whatsoever on my part. Which is always nice. If you use iTunes or any other podcast-downloady software, then if you subscribe to this site’s RSS feed it will automatically suss out that it’s a podcast, and you’ll be kept up to date with any posts on here that contain downloadable mp3s. The wonders of modern technology eh?

Who said folk songs had to be quiet, anyway?

This is a song I wrote a couple of years ago, which, now that the Telecaster has been dusted off, I thought I’d revisit with guitars turned up to 11. I normally play this song on concertina, but this version is just electric guitars, a drum loop, and plenty of reverb to make it sound like it was recorded in a cave. I was trying to get it to sound a bit like “Anorak City” by Another Sunny Day. You can take the boy out of 1986, but you can’t take 1986 out of the boy…

But, even though it’s loud, it’s still a folk song. A murder ballad in fact, albeit a very compressed one. There’s a shotgun wedding in the offing, and our none-too-heroic narrator decides he’s having none of it.

My source for some of the lyrics was actually a poem by A.E. Housman, from the collection “A Shropshire Lad” - in particular that’s where the line about “my bloody hands and I” comes from.

Download Head For The Country (about 3.5 MB)

HEAD FOR THE COUNTRY

I have to run
Even after all we planned
Best head for the country
I took her love
But I would not take her hand
Best head for the country
Where the air is clean
And I can wash the stains
From my soul

I took her love
But I would not take a bride
But her father he insisted
And he would not be denied

I must be gone
I have said a sad goodbye
We’ll do no more harm
My bloody hands and I

In an attempt to drag myself kicking and screaming into the modern technological age, thanks to Dan, this site is now set up with a FeedBurner RSS feed. If you’ve got an RSS reader like RSSBandit, FeedDemon or the various web-based readers, you can subscribe to updates and receive them whenever I post something on here.

I’m working on making all posts with mp3 files in them available as a podcast as well.

I’ve fallen in love with my Telecaster all over again - the tele has a crunch to its sound that no other electric guitar possesses, especially when the action is set up for really heavy gauge strings.

And then there’s my equally-lapsed love of drum machines. I used to use electronics quite a lot but fell out of the habit a long while ago, so have resurrected Propellerhead Software’s magnificent ReBirth software emulation of the Roland 808, 909 and 303 machines.

So, as a result of some initial fiddling about with ReBirth, here’s a recording of Cuckoo’s Nest, in my arrangement of the version of the song that appears on the “Morris On” LP. It’s a great song, and not at all filthy. It is, of course, all about how great cuckoos are at building nests. Ahem.

I’ll probably redo this with a slightly more sophisticated percussion part at some point, but just wanted to get this done quickly. I also tuned the guitar very slightly out - not intentionally, but it seems to have left the concertina part sounding a bit like an off-key Augustus Pablo melodica part in a 1970s roots reggae recording… and be warned, it’s not short!

Download Cuckoo’s Nest mp3 (8MB)

As I was a-walking one morning in May
I saw a pretty fair maid and unto her did say
For love I am inclined, and I’ll tell you me mind
That me inclination lies in your cuckoo’s nest

Me darling, says she, I am innocent and young
And I scarcely can believe your false deluding tongue
Yet I see it in your eyes and it fills me with surprise
That your inclination lies in me cuckoo’s nest

Chorus:
Some like a girl who is pretty in the face
And some like a girl who is slender in the waist
But give me a girl that will wriggle and will twist
At the bottom of the belly lies the cuckoo’s nest

Then me darling, says he, if you see it in me eye
Then think of it as fondness and do not be surprised
For I love you, me dear, and I’ll marry you - I swear -
If you’ll let me clap me hands on your cuckoo’s nest

Then me darling, says she, you shall do no such thing
For me mother often told me it was committing sin
Me maidenhead to lose, and me sex to be abused
So have no more to do with me cuckoo’s nest

Then me darling, says he, it is not committing sin
But common sense should tell you it is a pleasing thing
For you were brought into this world to increase and do your best
And to help a man to heaven in your cuckoo’s nest

Then me darling, says she, I cannot you deny
For you’ve surely won me heart by the roving of your eye
Yet I see it in your eyes that your courage is surprised
So gently lift your hand in me cuckoo’s nest

So this couple they got married, and soon they went to bed
And now this pretty fair maid has lost her maidenhead
In a small country cottage they increase and do their best
And he often claps his hand on her cuckoo’s nest

Here’s a really interesting recording - by a member of the EverythingDulcimer.com forum known as “DulcitTones” who had only been playing the instrument (and, indeed, any musical instrument!) for 7 weeks and decided to have a go at playing a Raga on an appalachian mountain dulcimer. The result is pretty impressive and very hypnotic. It’s on DulcitTones’s website here.