Homeward Bound

>>> After I post today’s blog I’ve got to jump on the tube to Victoria before hoping on a coach to Leeds. I’m going ‘home’ for the weekend. In the past four years I have lived in Winchester, Southampton, Uganda and London and even though my parents and sister have long left the area, I guess I will always refer to Huddersfield as home. Having spent the first nineteen years of my life in the town I feel an intrinsic link to the area. The places, the people, the cold Northern wind, it all adds up to an extremely personal fixation. In her home-coming tune ‘California’ Joni Mitchell excitedly sings “I’m going to see the folks I dig” and I feel the same when I think of this weekend. Not that we can easily compare Huddersfield with California but you get my point!

There is a great tradition across all musical genres of singing songs about coming home. From Sweet Home Alabama to Take Me Home, Country Road some of the most memorable songs written have been based on this simple theme. Whether it’s because of a sense of identity associated with home or just a real longing for consistency and the familiar after months on tour, it’s a topic that crops up time and time again in music. And it’s not just those musicians who have been on the road for years and years, even young folk and acoustic singers are crooning about the joys of home. Scottish wonder-kids Amy MacDonald and Paulo Nutini have written remarkably similar songs of passion for their homelands in ‘The Road to Home’ and ‘Caledonia’ respectively. Rachel Unthank and the Winterset’s adoration for her Northumberland home of Hexhamshire is turned in to the gorgeously haunting ‘Farewell Regality’ on their Mercury nominated album ‘The Bairns’.

A singer I was hoping to catch whilst in town is one who doesn’t so much sing about going home but simply sings about being home. Making reference to numerous towns of West Yorkshire, local landmarks, pubs and nightclubs in his simple and friendly folk songs, Roger Davis has captured the imaginations of local fans with a witty album, cheekily named ‘Northern Trash’. Citing the film ‘Brassed Off’, poet Simon Armitage and the Brighouse & Rastrick Brassband amongst his influences, Davies’ songs can’t fail to make me feel homesick.


>>> What’s all this nonsense about ‘Anti-Folk’? I can’t understand why some of the music press are using this term when referring to Laura Marling and the likes. If a band’s musically style has clearly been influenced by a specific genre but adds a modern twist to said genre, does that really make it ‘anti’? When Blues influenced Rock and Roll they didn’t call it the Anti-Blues. Emo clearly borrows heavily from punk music but it isn’t the Anti-Punk. The necessity to fit a band into a certain genre has meant that some of the music press use this term ‘anti-folk’ to describe any young acoustic guitar wielding band these days. In my mind, if the genre needs a name it is simply ‘modern’ folk music. In the same way that Modern Art subverted the ideals of the traditional establishment yet used the same old paint and canvas, modern folk takes acoustic guitars, banjos and strings and adds a mainstream twist. But surely this isn’t anti-folk. Or is it? If anyone disagrees on this point, I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below...

Until next week.

Searching for some doom and gloom!

>>> It’s been just a few short months since I made the move to the ‘big smoke’ and set up home in a rather trendy area of South London. On first look it seemed like a great place to live with plenty of good bars and restaurants, a large green space and many of my friends close-by. And indeed I have found myself a nice lifestyle in this pleasant area but there is one significant problem. Try as I might, I’m struggling to find any decent regular live music within walking distance of my flat.

I work in a somewhat run down area of North London and in contrast, each week I see a plethora of guitar wielding musicians walking down the High Road and have noted a fine choice of bars with regular music evenings advertised on their windows and sandwich boards. From Camden to Brixton, throughout the decades, it has been the economically weaker areas of the city which have often produced the greatest creativity.

Ted Hughes once said that “Every work of art stems from a wound in the soul of the artist.” If this is true then perhaps I have moved to the wrong area of town for hard-knocks. Looking into the history of an array of greats and lates of the folk and acoustic music scene it would appear that Hughes’ analysis is on the mark. Woody Guthrie’s childhood was plagued with tragedy with his sister and father dying in fires and his mentally-ill mother committed to an asylum. Joni Mitchell dropped out of college pregnant at the tender age of twenty before heart wrenchingly giving up the baby for adoption and Bob Dylan had a humble childhood in a Minnesota mining town with his immigrant parents, leaving home abruptly at eighteen. Most of my modern day acoustic heroes show no hope of breaking this tradition of doom and gloom with Damien Rice, another college drop out, forced to leave home by disappointed parents and the melancholy Ray Lamontagne’s poverty stricken childhood with a violent father and mother who moved him from pillar to post.

As a writer, I’ve had my fair share of creative melodrama. Call me a heathen, but right now I’m quite content to live happily amongst the trendy young things. But at least I have finally found an acoustic night in the listings for next week and it is a night which I have high hopes for – walking distance, well no, but it’s only a bus ride away!


>>> I was at my in-laws the other day when I heard the dull-sweet sound of Cat Stevens coming from my mum-in-law’s study. At least it sounded like Cat Stevens but I didn’t recognise the song. It was, of course, Yusuf Islam and his album ‘An Other Cup’. After converting to Islam at the height of his fame, back in 1977, Cat, now called Yusuf, waited nearly 30 years to release another ‘pop’ album back in 2006. Don’t think I’m out of touch, I realise the album was released nearly two years ago and at the time I followed Yusuf’s return to the music scene with excitement but for one reason or another, I just never got round to buying the album. Listening to it now for the first time I must say that in 30 years his style hasn’t changed much (apart from the odd references to Islam) but what I can say it that it is a most welcome return.