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The Watersons’ Mighty River Of Song

By Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times Posted on Sunday, May 13th, 2007

The siblings Mike, Lal and Norma Waterson, and her husband Martin Carthy, kick-started the 60’s folk revival, and Martin and Norma’s daughter Eliza Carthy is the hidden engine of English Traditional music’s current resurgence. All participated in an augmented line-up of the Waterson clan, minus the late Lal, standing twelve strong along the lip of the Royal Albert Hall Stage in an evening that veered wildly from impossible intimacy to a strange stiff formality. There’s a weight of expectation now around The Watersons, the genre’s standard-bearers, and everyone needs to be seen to bathe in the first family of English Folk’s healing river of song.

Mike Morris of the English Folk Dance And Song Society opened the evening with a proprietory speech, bashing Kim Howells, the Clarkson-brained junior minister for Culture, who desribed folk singers as his idea of hell during a debate on live music. The former Undertone and current Government Live Music Czar Feargal Sharkey arrived to tell the John Peel anecdote he reserves for special occassions. Norma Waterson, however, cleared away all this clutter with an unforced between-song banter and easy attitude, that made the RAH’s cavernous interior feel like the Hull folks clubs she first frequented forty-five years ago.

When the family sing unaccompanied as one, indefinable, instinctive harmonies buzz your inner ear and your internal organs shift position. And when Eliza Carthy’s fiddle soars and scrapes behind her father Martin’s vocal on The Bonny Bows Of London the hall’s often antagonistic acoustics somehow enhance the claustrophobic tension. Two songs from Mike and Lal’s initially derided 1972 masterpiece, Bright Phoebus, show the current crop of Wyrd-folkies how to mainline visionary mysticism. And Martin Carthy’s horn-enhanced quartet Brass Monkey play their party piece, The Maid And The Palmer, forging a fantastic Colliery band-jazz-folk fusion.
Meanwhile that same night, in far away Finland, our nation was represented by four excitable youngsters crowbaring suggestive references to oral sex into a song about an imaginary British air line.
That’s my idea of hell.

Written by Stewart Lee in The Sunday Times on 13th May 2007. Filed Under: Written For Money
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