We launched my fifth album, The dust of time, on November 30th in CB2, Cambridge, and it is now available for order.
The first track, Moelfre Hill, has been played both on Celtic Heartbeat on BBC Radio Wales and on BBC Radio Scotland by Iain Anderson who commented ‘rather nice – we liked that’. There was also an article about the song in the Abergele Post.
Rue Mouffetard has also been played on several occasions. Richard Penguin, of Future Radio, described it as ‘part Parisien, part Leonard Cohen, part Jacques Brel, part Christy Moore, part you’ while Emily Barker described it as ‘really beautiful’.
At the launch event, The camper van song – a tongue-in-cheek look at successive generations’ love of the VW Camper, went down especially well.
The album features Brian Harvey (bass), Dawn Loombe (accordion), Miguel Moreno (flamenco guitar), Cliff Ward (violin), Tara Westover (harmony vocals) and Rhys Wilson (guitar and keyboard). Rhys also co-produced the album with me.
You can listen to, download or order the album here:
Rue Mouffetard is the first single from my fifth album, ‘The dust of time‘. It features Dawn Loombe on accordion, Rhys Wilson on piano and additional guitars, and Brian Harvey on bass. Here is the video for the song; it is also available for listening or download here.
La rue Mouffetard, in the 5ème arrondissement of Paris, is my favourite street in the city. It runs down the hill from the Place de la Contrescarpe to the Place St Médard, lined with cafés, shops and market stalls, and steeped in history. Its course has remained unchanged in 2000 years since the Romans built it as part of the road linking Paris with Rome.
The quarter has not always been as relatively genteel as it is today. As Paris expanded out into the surrounding villages in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Faubourg St Marceau attracted poor workers from other parts of France and beyond. It developed an insalubrious reputation, smelling as it did of the tanneries along the River Bièvre. Hugo set Les Miserables in the neighbourhood and in 1834 Balzac referred to it as ‘the grimmest quarter of Paris’.
As with other working-class areas of Paris, it helped fuel the revolutions of 1789 and 1848. Its steep slope spared it the attention of Baron Haussmann, who destroyed many of the mediaeval streets of the city while constructing les grands boulevards, and during the Paris Commune of 1871 the barricades went up again. However, as the Commune ended in the Semaine Sanglante, troops from Adolphe Thiers’ army stormed up the street to crush the barricades. The customary massacre and mass executions in the gardens of the École Polytechnique followed.
The nearby Butte aux Cailles lasted a day longer and is now home to La Place de la Commune de Paris and a café organised as a workers co-op and named after Le Temps des Cerises. This song, written by Jean-Baptiste Clément five years before the insurrection, has remained associated with the events of 1871 and indeed Clément was later to dedicate it to Louise, a young ambulance worker who joined him on one of the final barricades.
The area continued to attract artists and writers – Verlaine lived nearby in the 1890s and Hemingway, Joyce and Orwell spent time there in the 1920s. Scenes from the films Amélie and Trois couleurs: Bleu were filmed in the street.
The quarter has now become attractive with tourists and students, but retains a distinct, almost village-like, feel – especially when friends meet up again after Paris’s annual August break over breakfast in the Cave la Bourgogne, while purchasing cerises in the marché, or while browsing the shelves of local bookshop l’Arbre à Lettres (recently bought by its employees). At such times you feel far from the frenetic centre of Paris.
Retired policeman: ‘How do you find our country now?’
Zoe: ‘It’s not “our” country, but my country – you were with the Nazis.’
In the days and weeks leading up to the Athens Olympics in 2004 Greece was filled with bands of wandering journalists waiting for the games to start and searching out other stories to fill their time. Daniel Vernet of Le Monde was one of them and he met Zoe Kaltaki, who had fought in the resistance against the nazis in the Kilkis mountains to the north of Thessaloniki. Her story somehow summed up the turbulent twentieth century, and inspired me to write ‘Thesalonika’.
At age 12, Zoe followed her father into the resistance. She refused to lay down her gun after the liberation, and joined the communists who were fighting the right (who were supported by the English and Americans, worried that Greece might follow other Balkan countries into soviet Russia’s influence). She was injured several times and ended up in a hospital in Sofia, Bulgaria. A million people were displaced by the civil war, and 100,000 found exile in Eastern Europe. Zoe herself found a new home in Czechoslovakia, where she made paper flowers for funeral wreaths, married another Greek exile and had four children.
Zoe returned to Greece in 1982 after an official amnesty, to live in Volos with her daughter Olga. Asked whether she regretted her return to her country, she summed up her mixed feelings by saying ‘Wherever I feel at home, that is my country’. Olga added that in Czechoslovakia ‘I didn’t know what stress was. There you just had to work – here you have to fight.’ Zoe had returned several times to the Kilkis mountains, and on one of these visits met an old acquaintance, the retired policeman quoted earlier.
Thessaloniki is a remarkable city. It was home to many of the sephardic jews expelled from Spain in 1492. For several centuries under the Ottoman empire it was one of the great European multicultural cities, home not just to the Jews and Greeks, but also to many Muslims, including the family of one of our friends. As late as 1912 Thessaloniki was 40% Jewish, 30% Greek orthodox and 25% Muslim.
However, following the end of the empire and the population exchange of 1923 when some 1.5 million people in the region were forcibly uprooted, all the Thesalonican Muslims were expelled, and 100,000 refugees arrived in the city from Turkey. Twenty years later the Nazi occupiers deported 95% of the the city’s jews to Auschwitz in 1943 – the majority died in gas chambers within hours of their arrival. By 1945 the population was almost entirely Greek.
We visited Thessaloniki in 2007 and I even managed to borrow a bazouki to play the song in a restaurant in the market. The city never seemed to sleep – the bars along the waterfront were throbbing with music into the small hours. Although a very modern city, it still drips with history – across the bay is Mount Olympus, home of the gods of ancient Greece, and inland is the cave where Aristotle taught the young Alexander the Great.
Thessaloniki is some way from the mass tourist attractions of Greece, and in consequence people seemed delighted, even surprised, that we had made the effort to visit. In the countryside outside the city people stopped and insisted on giving us lifts. The curator of the Aristotle school called us a taxi and ensured that we were given a private tour of a Macedonian tomb on our way to the station. On the bus to the airport on our day of departure we were even given presents by our fellow passengers, who included a retired teacher of French from the university.
‘Thesalonika’ is about home and exile, about how what binds us together as Europeans and as people is more important than what separates us, and two years ago I had the privilege of singing the song with a French choir in a Welsh chapel.
While in Greece we also visited Volos without realising that it was Zoe’s new home. I would have liked to to meet her and play her her song. Above all, I would have liked her to know that her story had touched a chord with people across the continent.
Where can I go?
Where can I call home?
Oh, my Thesalonika
Where are you now?
If anyone reading this blog can share it with her or her family, please do – and thankyou, Zoe, for the inspiration.
I played the song some time ago at Cambridge Folk Club with Tara Westover, and there is a video of it here:
The exchange and the civil war is captured memorably in Theo Angelopoulis’s film The weeping meadow.
A 2010 Europa project Thessaloniki and the European memory explored the memory of the population exchange and the holocaust in Thessaloniki, and you can download their short and highly readable report. The authors are historians Sheer Ganor, Constanze Kolbe, Ozgur Yildrim and Sára Zorándy.
Finally, Victoria Hislop’s novel The thread is set in the city from 1923.
Nightingales – as so many of our best loved birds – have taken a hard hit in recent times. In the last 40 years they have declined by 90% which means that where 10 may have been singing when I was young, only one is singing today. So when a friend told me he had never heard a nightingale, I thought we had better put that right quickly before we lose them altogether.
On Sunday morning we set out for a place near to us that has bucked the trend, and still holds good numbers of of the legendary songsters – Paxton Pits, near to St Neots. We were treated to at least six different nightingales, and at one time could hear four of them carolling together. I managed to make a rough recording of one of them, who is joined towards the end in a duet by a second bird:
I’m not the first poet or lyricist to be stunned by the beauty and intensity of the nightingale’s song, but I’ll probably restrict myself to the one that features briefly, and eight miles from home, in ‘The last bus to Leeds’. But it does give me an excuse to quote a few lines from Keats’ ode, one of my favourite poems:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, But being too happy in thine happiness,— That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees In some melodious plot Of beechen green, and shadows numberless, Singest of summer in full-throated ease.
The corn bunting and the grey partridge may not have the nightingale’s ‘full-throated ease’, but they do most certainly ‘sing of summer’ and they too have declined by 90% since 1970. Later on Sunday evening we wondered around the countryside behind Addenbrookes Hospital listening to them.
Our City Council is keen to build on green belt and threaten the habitat of these quintessential farmland birds and last night I spoke to the council’s ‘Planning and Development Scrutiny Committee’ to encourage them to think again. It was a disappointing meeting – the committee members seemed to regard the occasion as an opportunity to proof-read the local plan and discuss minor points of detail, rather than to debate points of principle and ask the civil servants to find better solutions. The reply to my own statement was ill-informed. It was not a good advert for democracy.
Of course people need places to live – but so does wildlife and we need to do a better, more imaginative job of reconciling our own needs with those of our companions on this planet. It would be criminal if future generations were unable to hear the ‘light-winged Dryad of the trees’ or his arable counterparts.
But I’ll sign off for now with a little more Keats:
O for a beaker full of the warm South,
Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene
With beaded bubbles winking at the brim…
We are just back from a week in Istanbul. It’s a remarkable city with an amazing buzz – we arrived late on a Saturday night and at 2pm the streets were still packed with people. The people we met were most friendly and welcoming. The setting, on the Bosphorous, is special, and the mosques – like the Blue Mosque below – are astonishing.
We went to see our Turkish friend Leo who used to live in Cambridge, who in turn introduced us to his own Istanbul friends and musical parties ensued, firstly in our own flat on the Istiklal Cadesi, and later in the home of Aysem and Bora.
We also visited the workshop of Şeyda Hacızade, who makes the most wonderful classic kemençes (known in Greece as the Constantinople or politiki lyra). The kemençe is a three-stringed instrument, slightly like a violin, but held and bowed differently and, unusually, you change notes by holding a fingernail against the string, rather than by pressing the string down onto a fretboard.
The kemençe produces a very special, melancholic sound that I first encountered in Eleni Karaindrou’s music for the film The Weeping Meadow, by Greek director Theo Angolopoulos. This extract from the soundtrack features the remarkable Greek kemençe player, Socratis Sinopoulos:
Şeyda introduced me to the music of Derya Türkan, who she regards as the best exponent of the instrument, and who demonstrates the kemençe in this video:
It’s that time of year again! I hope 2012 has been good to you.
I’ve just uploaded a new and suitably wintry video of the ‘Ant and the grasshopper’: .
The high point of my musical year was being asked to play ‘Poussière d’étoiles’, the French version of ‘Rocks and stones’, at the vernissage (opening) of an exhibition of our good friend Charly Devarennes’ work in Collioure, in the south of France. I had written the song for Charly about 7 years ago, and the invitation came from his daughters Dominique and Delphine who had organised the exhibition just over two years after he died. It was a most moving experience, and a great privilege. You can see a video of the performance on my homepage and I have written more about Charly here.
One of the great things about music is how it brings you into contact with people. I’ve just received a message from one of the students who occupied Brighton University in December 2010 saying that ‘Pavilion Parade‘ ‘still makes hairs stand up on my neck – there was something very special about that time. I feel the students involved when looking back will remember this.’ I’m very grateful for the feedback.
In much the same way we have been welcomed into the village of Alstonefield in the heart of the Peak District by Dave and Val Littlehales and their friends (including the local vicar, Annie). Dave, who organises concerts in the Village Hall, asked me to play there twice, firstly in July with Flossie Malavialle, and secondly with Martyn Wyndham-Read and Iris Bishop in December. Each concert was followed by an excellent session in the Royal Oak in Wetton on the Sunday lunchtime, notably the December one with Martyn, Iris, Dave and the Bird Scarers, a female trio of three generations who sing powerful harmonies. Again, there’s more in my blog and the new video is from the December concert. And watching the Wimbledon final with Flossie urging on Serena Williams in her French geordie accent was unforgettable!
And looking a little further back, on a weekend in May I had the great pleasure to play at the Cambridge Folk Club on the Friday night, followed by the delightful Debenham Folk Club on the Saturday. The Cambridge club has been a constant source of support to me and I’m most grateful to them. This was the first time I had played in Debenham – the club there is organised by Rob Brown and takes place in a quite stunning room in the Old Red Lion.
I’ve been enjoying other people’e music as well – this year’s five favourites have been:
– Valtari, by Sigur Ros – it’s a slightly mixed bag, but the third track, ‘Varud‘ is one of the finest pieces of music I’ve heard in a while
– Tramp, by Sharon von Etten – I particularly like ‘Leonard‘
– Rise ye sunken ships, by We are Augustines
– The ’59 sound, by The Gaslight Anthem – four years old, but I’ve only just discovered it
– Manequin, a remarkable single from the improbably entitled When saints go machine – it’s worth looking at the video on Youtube as well
And some of our good friends have released material this year. The delightful Bert and Fi, alias Welcome to Peepworld, have a great new EP out, Lester’s new band The Lights have released their first album and The Willows‘ new CD will be released in February!
I’ve started recording my next CD, provisionally called ‘The dust of time’ – it should be ready in the second half of next year, all being well.
Finally, this year I have also redesigned my website – the lovely Tom Ingham had looked after it most competently for 7 years, but I wanted to be able to do more with it, in particular to add a regular blog and more frequent updating. Please do leave a comment on one of the blog entries – it’s always great to get feedback!
Thankyou for your support over the year – and I would like to wish you a happy Christmas and a good 2013.
Last Sunday, we watched the Film 4 première of the film The Rochdale Pioneers, which describes the birth of the co-operative movement in a small store in Toad Lane, Rochdale. It is a highly moving account of a key moment in labour history – and especially moving for me as I spent my formative years just off the Spotland Road in Rochdale and shopped (complete with divi book) in the local co-op which by then had moved a few doors down the lane.
The film focuses on the months leading up to the opening of the store on December 21, 1844, in the face of opposition from local shopkeepers, difficulties in finding a landlord prepared to rent out premises, and the refusal of wholesalers to supply the new store. Eventually, for its opening night three of the pioneers purchased £16 worth of stock from Manchester market and transported it back in a wheelbarrow – no mean feat, given that the opening stock was 28lb of butter, 56lb of sugar, 6cwt of flour, a sack of oatmeal and some candles, and that the market was over 8 miles away, across the Lancashire moors.
The store depended on the hard work of the original 28 pioneers, and the raising of £28 in capital from local weavers and other artisans who were living through the ‘hungry forties’ when unemployment was high, most people lived on just over a shilling a week (or less), 85 local families did not even have blankets, and retailers regularly adulterated flour with chalk, leaving local people prone to hunger and disease. But Rochdale already had a long and proud history of activism, to the point that troops were stationed there throughout the early nineteenth century to put down a series of strikes and uprisings by the local cotton weavers.
1844 was also the year when Mark wrote his seminal Economic and philosophical manuscripts, Engels wrote the History of the working class in England, and parliament passed a Factory Act setting a maximum 6 hour working day work for 6-13 year-old children. Four years later there were revolutions across Europe, most notably in France, Germany, Poland, Italy and the Austrian Empire. All these events were to leave a lasting legacy – but the legacy of the pioneers and their Rochdale Principles is exceptional. Within 10 years there were over 1000 co-operatives in the UK; there are now almost 10 million UK co-op members, while in France 1 million people (3.5% of the working population) work in co-ops (and 2 million in the US). 2012 is the UN’s international year of co-operatives.
When I lived in Rochdale in the second half of the 1950s and the early 1960s, the town was still enduring hard times as cotton mill after cotton mill closed – scenes caught in a haunting series of photos taken by Dr Neil Clinton who kindly gave me permission to use them in a video of the Spotland Road, my song about growing up in the Lancashire mill town. But I remain deeply proud to have known the town, and grateful to the makers of the film for immortalising such a defining moment in our social history.
You can download an excellent brochure about the Rochdale Pioneers from the Toad Lane museum, and visit the website of the film.
On Saturday I was invited to play ‘Poussière d’étoiles’, the French version of ‘Rocks and stones’, at the vernissage (opening) of an exhibition of Charly Devarennes’s work in Collioure. The invitation came from Charly’s daughters, Dominique and Delphine, who had organised the exhibition just over two years after he died.
We first met Charly about 15 years ago on the beach in Collioure. We had taken to going there in the early evening when the tourists had gone home and the light was at its very best, to swim and to talk with friends. Each time that Charly swam he would emerge from the sea with a particularly attractive pebble. One evening he remarked that the stone he was carrying was ‘poussière d’étoiles’ – and after a moment he added ‘just like us’. From there came the song, in which I tried to capture a little of the philosophy of this remarkable man.
Charly was born in 1928 in Chaumont in the Haute-Marne in the champagne region of North-East France, and he began work in the family painting and decorating business. He moved to Collioure in 1968 to devote more time to his art, though he continued to work as a decorator and also looked after a vineyard, earning himself the title of a ‘peintre paysan’.
Charly’s life was tumultuous. As one of five brothers (who he referred to as ‘les frères ennemis’) he felt alone in his love for art and his disdain for material things. His first marriage ended in tragedy – he returned home from work one day to find that his wife had died of a brain haemorrhage. His second marriage, after he had moved to Collioure, ended in heartbreak and divorce. He drank heavily and suffered from depression. He had long contemplated suicide before he eventually jumped from the cliffs near to Collioure on August 30 2010.
But Charly was for me an inspiration. He had a sense of wonder at the natural world, a delight in ideas, a distrust of authority and an openness towards others. Not that he was the easiest man to understand, especially to someone whose first language was not French – he described himself as a ‘windmill of words’ and I eventually learned to ask him to repeat things to make sure I had not lost the sense of his comments. But human contact was easy with him. When I first played him the song I had written for him he was moved to tears, and the following day came to the beach with a beautiful still life which he insisted we took as a thankyou.
The Vernissage was a moving occasion. Playing the song to some 200 people, surrounded by Charly’s paintings and faces charged with emotion, was a challenge. There’s a video of the song here, and a lovely article here about the event from the local paper, l’Independent.
Afterwards, people shared their tales of Charly with me. Charly’s friend Gerard turning up on his first Honda 750 motorbike and offering to tow Charly’s broken-down Citroën Ami 6 into town – ‘It had never travelled so fast before’. Charly rigging his small boat with an old sheet when the motor had broken down yet again, sailing triumphantly to Argelès, only to find that the boat could not tack back against the wind. Charly dancing around his vineyard during the vendanges, or talking to the seagulls. Charly refusing to sell a painting to someone he didn’t like, or refusing money from someone he valued.
And Charly says these rocks and stones have stories they could tell us If only we would take the time to listen. But aren’t we just like rocks and stones, packed so tight, yet so alone We hope someone will watch us glisten.
Thankyou, Charly. And thankyou Dominique and Delphine for having invited us and made us so welcome, and for the beautiful picture you gave us.
We’ve just got back from a lovely weekend in Hopedale, in the heart of the Peak District. I played a couple of short sets on the Saturday night in Alstonefield Village Hall, supporting Flossie Malavialle, and then on Sunday lunchtime we joined the session in the Royal Oak in Wetton. In between times we managed to climb Baley Hill, walk along the River Dove, and get drenched – twice.
We first met Dave Littlehales – who organises the events in the village hall – and his wife Val just over four years ago. We were staying in a local bed and breakfast and had gone to the rather fine Watts Russell Arms for a meal in the evening, when we overheard someone talking about the Cambridge Folk Festival. When we said we were from Cambridge and musicians, instruments appeared as if by magic and an impromptu session ensued.
Dave and Val have since become good friends, and have introduced us to members of Dave’s group, the Festival Ceilidh Band, as well as to numerous inhabitants of Hopedale and Alstonefield. We have been made most welcome in one of the most beautiful corners of England – and will be back very soon!
And the reviews? ‘What could be nicer than supper at the village hall? Well, obviously, supper with entertainments and on Saturday, 7th July, on a balmy if somewhat damp evening, we were treated not just to pie, peas and strawberries but also to an evening of musical delight. Excellently supported by John Meed, Flossie Malavialle, the girl from Nimes who became that woman from Darlington, treated us to an evening that was simultaneously très bien and proper mint like.’ (Rob Handscombe, on the Alstonefield website)
‘Then we come to the music. The support was John Meed, a singer/songwriter from Cambridge who did a short spot in each half. His songs were all quite different from each other, and very entertaining. I especially liked Don’t Blame it on Belper. He was an utterly charming man and I hope to get the opportunity to see him again. The main guest was Flossie Mallaville whom we have seen before, I think we first saw her at Maghull in 2002 when Colum Sands invited her up in his set to do a song and then at the same festival in 2003 when we saw her do a whole set. I remember being amazed by her voice then, I am even more amazed now by both her voice and her humour. I genuinely enjoyed everything she did. Best value night out anywhere at £12 a ticket.’ (Wally and Lorna Davies who edit the local folk newsletter)
my fifth album, The dust of time, on November 30th in CB2, Cambridge, and it is now available for order.
launch event, The camper van song – a tongue-in-cheek look at successive generations’ love of the VW Camper, went down especially well.
