Hey folks, not feeling great here-cannot even face listening to music much :((
The Twilight Sad comp is still up and running, see below.
Today is Remembrance Sunday, and that shouldn’t go unmarked…
June Tabor -‘No Man’s Land/Flowers Of The Forest.’ mp3
The Men They Couldn’t Hang -‘The Green Fields Of France.’ mp3
Have a good few days.x
Over the last few weeks, I’ve been kinda taken aback when meeting up with friends I was at school with -and have thus known for decades rather than years – who have told me that they hardly listen to music anymore. Not just ‘Oh, all my CDs are in the attic/sent to a charity shop’ or ‘I haven’t been to a gig/club in ages’ or ‘I don’t really listen to much new stuff’ but just that they seem to have stopped listening to music. This certainly doesn’t make them bad people – but as someone to whom music is just so integral, the thought of not listening to music is hard to understand. I’ll be 35 next month, and the thought of not listening, not going to gigs, not to continue to have that hunger for it is something that’s completely alien.’ John Peel said that for him it was a case of ‘I just want to hear something I haven’t heard before.’ And I still have that.
And one of those things over the last ten years has been investigating ‘folk’* music. I’ve been blown away – twice- by watching Richard Thompson live at Edinburgh’s Queen’s Hall, interviewed Roy Harper (er, did I mention that?!?) and utterly fallen in love with Thompson and Sandy Denny-era Fairport Convention. And I know that’s just the tip of a big iceberg.
Another name is June Tabor. I first heard her thanks to Steve over at Teenage Kicks, with his posts on John Peel’s Festive Fifty and hearing her version of ‘No Man’s Land/Flowers of The Forest’ ( a cover of a song by Eric Bogle**, that was also later covered by The Men They Couldn’t Hang as ‘The Green Fields Of France.’) In the last week I’ve (finally) picked up on the fact that she has released two albums this year. One, Ashore contains a cover of Elvis Costello’s ‘Shipbuilding’ (as first recorded by Robert Wyatt) and the other, Ragged Kingdom, is a collaboration with Oysterband. It contains a cover of PJ Harvey’s ‘That Was My Veil,’ ‘The Dark End Of The Street’ and a fantastic re-working of Joy Division’s Love Will Tear Us Apart.’
So I post here for your enjoyment – but please go and buy them if you like them.
June Tabor -‘Shipbuilding.’ mp3
June Tabor & Oysterband -‘Love Will Tear Us Apart.’ mp3
June Tabor -‘No Man’s Land/Flowers Of the Forest.’ mp3
*yeah, I l know a dissection of that term could be an entire post; it’ll have to wait for another time.
**Amongst Bogle’s other songs are ‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ which was covered by The Pogues and ‘My Youngest Son Came Home Today.’ He deserves a post dedicated to him sometime, too…
This Sunday marks Remembrance Sunday, in remebrance of Armistice Day 1918 ‘The eleventh hour on the eleventh day on the eleventh month.’ We did it in school, like a lot of people. I remember doing it aged about eight, via watching a programme called How We Used To Live, a show that looked at a family in Yorkshire.
A few years later, on a family holiday in France, we drove along passed the roads where the cemeteries are. Even as a twelve year old, it was quite sobering, and the picture at the top gives an idea of what it is like. The graves of thousands of young men, slaughtered for…?
For a long time, I considered myslef to be bordering on being a pacifist. In recent years, I’ve wondered whether I still would be. I would categorically have refused to fight in the Falklands War, or either of the Gulf Wars. These had nothing to do with humanitarian concerns and a lot more to do with muscle-flexing and oil, in the case of the Gulf. I like to think I would have fought against Hitler, and volunteered in the Spanish Civil War against Franco (the latter may have some rather ideological and romantic ideas, based on reading Laurie Lee and George Orwell). As for the First World War…did it achieve anything?
Eric Bogle wrote a song ‘No Man’s Land‘ that made John Peel’s Festive Fifty twice. Once as ‘No Man’s Land/Flowers Of the Forest’ by June Tabor in 1977 and later in 1984 as ‘The Green Fields Of France’ by The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Everytime I hear eiether version of this song I’m deeply moved, and reminded of the futility of war. Especially those that use young people as cannon fodder. I was appalled a few years back when it was revealed that the Army were still heavily recruiting around some of the porrest areas of Glasgow, near where I was working and where many kids were seriously disenfranchised. Oddly enough ‘Officer Class’ wasn’t being mentioned.
Check out Eric Bogle‘s work, and other people’s covers of it. I also was lead to him through The Pogues (‘And The Band Played Waltzing Matilda) and Billy Bragg (‘My Youngest Son Came Home Today.’) Even reading the lyrics is frankly, pretty emotional.
June Tabor -‘No Man’s Land/Flowers Of the Forest.’ mp3
The Men They Couldn’t Hang -‘The Green Fields Of France.’ mp3
Thanks due to Steve at Teenage Kicks for his bringing these to my attention!