Albion Country Band & Shirley Collins "No Roses" (4*)

Having left Fairport Convention because he wanted to explore traditional material rather than attempt to recreate a traditional vibe through original material and been pushed out of Steeleye Span, the band he formed to explore that inclination when they elected to pursue a more obviously commercial direction it probably comes as no surprise to find Ashley Hutchings launching another project in the same territory with his wife Shirley Collins.

Fairport Convention had started life as an outfit blending American singer-songwriter material, along with original compositions along the same lines on Fairport Convention, What We Did on Our Holidays  and Unhalfbricking before veering towards traditional material when fiddler Dave Swarbrick joined the band for Liege and Lief. An emerging interest in traditional material had Hutchings searching through the material collected at the English Folk Dance & Song Society Library at Cecil Sharp House, and the research had driven the contents of Liege and Lief, and the electrified versions of traditional songs on the first three Steeleye Span albums (Hark! The Village Wait, Please to See the King and Ten Man Mop, or Mr. Reservoir Butler Rides Again).

A good ten years older than her second husband, Shirley Collins had grown up in an East Sussex family with ties to the area's traditional music, moved to London to attend teachers' college in the early fifties and through the early folk revival movement became involved with the likes of Ewan MacColl, who introduced her to American folk archivist Alan Lomax, in London avoiding the McCarthy era witch hunt in the United States. She’d collaborated with Lomax on the song collecting journey through the American south between July and November 1959 that produced the recordings released on Atlantic Records as Sounds of the South that went on to become a key ingredient in the Coen brothers’ film Oh Brother, Where Art Thou and once she returned to England recorded the jazz-folk fusion Folk Roots, New Routes with Davey Graham and collaborate with her sister Dolly (The Sweet Primroses, Anthems in Eden, Love, Death and the Lady) and the Young Tradition (Peter Bellamy, Heather Wood and Royston Wood).

The collaborations with her sister were built around Dolly’s pipe or flute organ with additional light and shade from the medieval crumhorns, recorders, sackbuts and viols of London’s Early Music Consort with 1969‘s Anthems in Eden featuring a twenty-eight minute song cycle about changes in rural England and destruction of ancient traditions that came about after the First World War.

After marrying Hutchings in 1971, the couple set about recording No Roses at Sound Techniques, and Air Studios in London, with Collins’ vocals backed by a selection from a core group that included Hutchings on bass, Richard Thompson and Simon Nicol on guitars, Roger Powell (drums), and Dave Bland (concertina and hammered dulcimer), with additional toning added by what must have seemed a bewildering array of twenty-plus other musicians in various permutations and combinations.

That wasn’t the way things were supposed to go, but as different faces appeared at the studio door, it probably seemed a pity to let what they had to offer go to waste. Apart from that core group, the album included vocal contributions from Maddy Prior, Royston Wood, Lal and Mike Waterson, and Nic Jones, who also played fiddle (as did Barry Dransfield).

Additional instrumental tones were added by Dolly Collins and Ian Whiteman (piano), Dave Mattacks (sticks and drums), John Kirkpatrick (accordion), Tim Renwick (acoustic and electric guitar), Lol Coxhill (alto sax), Alan Cave (bassoon) and Steve Migden (French horn) with more esoteric notes added by Northumbrian small pipes (Colin Ross), melodeon (Tony Hall), hurdy-gurdy  (Francis Baines), ophicleide (a brass keyed-bugle that seems to have been an antecedent of the saxophone, played by Alan Lumsden) and the more prosaic jaw harp (Trevor Crozier).

But it’s all about the music, and having worked through Anthems in Eden and Love, Death and the Lady what’s on offer here has a more contemporary feel, sounding like (as someone put it) Shirley Collins backed by Fairport Convention, which is close to the money, but not quite on it.

Collins’ vocals are as Albion as they were on the preceding recordings, the instrumental work has a recognizably Fairport orientation, but the more exotic sonic contributions take it a step away from the early seventies folk rock scene but not as far as the pseudo-medieval early music present on Anthems in Eden.

As far as the material itself is concerned, we’ve got the returning sailor the faithful girlfriend fails to recognise (much the same territory as John Riley) on Claudy Banks (from Sussex’s Copper family), Romany fortune tellers who end up with the well-born squire (Little Gipsy Girl, from Louise Holms of Hereford), rejected suitors deemed unsuitable by wealthy parents (Banks of The Bann, from Bert Lloyd), notorious killings such as the Murder of Maria Marten (from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), cautionary tales for would-be poachers in Van Dieman's Land (collated by Ashley Hutchings), returning lovers (Just As The Tide Was A'Flowing, from Aunt Grace Winborn, Hastings), cross-country hunting (The White Hare from Joseph Taylor of Lincolnshire), historical and mythical themes in Cornish mystery plays and spring rituals i.e. Hal-An-Tow (part of the May ritual in Helston, Cornwall) and the discovery and burial of unknown women (Poor Murdered Woman from Mr. Foster of Surrey).

All in all, the product of musicians with a deep love and understanding of the English music heritage and a desire to set the tradition in a more contemporary setting that works well provided you’re not put off by the breathy, slightly unearthly Collins vocal character, which may be a tad on the trad folkie finger in the ear style for some listeners.

Still, placing No Roses alongside the likes of Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief and Full House or the early Steeleye Span it’s an interesting variation on emerging themes. More obviously traditional than Fairport, not quite as rocky as Steeleye....

Having delved back this far, I’m looking towards the albums that followed, or those that are available through iTunes (The Albion Dance Band’s The Prospect Before Us, Shirley and Dolly Collins For As Many As Will being prime candidates).

Shirley & Dolly Collins “The Harvest Years” (Anthems in Eden, Love, Death and the Lady) (3.5*)

Here's a perfect example of how loose things were at the start of the rock music album era in the late sixties. It was a time when the major British labels were reefing in the big dollars through acts like The Beatles (Parlophone, part of the EMI Group), The Rolling Stones (Decca) and there was still room for independents and minor labels like Polydor (The Who, Jimi Hendrix, Cream) and Island (Spencer Davis Group, Traffic, Free, Spooky Tooth). There were different arrangements for American distribution, but let's stick with the British side of things for the moment.

There were also a number of independents which seemed to be doing quite well for themselves, thank you, including the British Immediate label and the American Elektra, which had, wonder of wonders, scored big time chart action with the Incredible String Band's The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter.

Those independents traded, to a large extent, on a hipness quotient that was probably best expressed in the roster of acts on the American Warner Brothers (Randy Newman, Ry Cooder, Little Feat, for example). Those acts mightn't have sold a whole lot of records but boy, were those labels hip!

Maybe the search for something similar impelled EMI to create Harvest Records in 1969 as an outlet for progressive music and competition for similar projects started by Philips (Vertigo) and Decca (Deram) along with the Islands, Elektras, Immediates and Warner Brothers. It was a fiercely competitive market, and Elektra managed to get The Hangman's Beautiful Daughter into the UK album charts for 27 weeks, peaking as high as #5, selling over three-quarters of a million copies over the years against fairly hairy competition including The Beatles, Beggars Banquet, Electric Ladyland, In Search of the Lost Chord, The Kinks Are the Village Green Preservation Society, Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake, A Saucerful of Secrets, Traffic and Wheels of Fire.

Well, if that could happen, why not put out a couple of albums of traditional folk tunes? Take one of the better traditional singers, back her with her sister's portative organ and the  viols, recorders, sackbuts and crumhorns of the Early Music Consort of London.

You never know. It might sell.

Harvest had acts on the roster that were likely to move large quantities of product (Deep Purple and Pink Floyd for starters) so the cash to pay for what might well be seen as an extravagance or two was probably in the coffers. And you never know. It might sell.

The result was Anthems in Eden by Shirley and Dolly Collins, an album comprising a 28-minute set of songs on the first side and seven individual pieces on the flip side. The version here on The Harvest Years pads out the original tracks with six more recorded in 1976 with a different lineup largely drawn from Ashley Hutchings' Albion Band that were subsequently aligned with the first side's song cycle and released as Amaranth.

That 28-minute set is a suite of traditional songs and a traditional tune with new lyrics that tell a basic story illustrating the changes wrought on rural English society and emerging folk traditions by the industrial scale slaughter of the First World War.

The song cycle had already been recorded as Anthems Before the Fall for BBC Radio in August 1968, and it’s fairly easy to pick up the plot line from the song titles. It’s not as if young girls watching young men go off to war is an unfamiliar theme, but there’s a twist towards the end of the cycle with a generation of young men were lost, and the memorial stone  rather than the maypole as the centrepiece of village life.

A Beginning / A Meeting (Searching for Lambs)/ A Courtship (The Wedding Song)/ A Denying (The Blacksmith)/ A Forsaking (Our Captain Cried)/ A Dream (Lowlands)/ A Leaving-taking (Pleasant and Delightful)/ An Awakening (Whitsun Dance, words by A J Marshall to a traditional tune)/ A New Beginning (The Staines Morris)

The rest of the album comprises a handful of songs drawn from the Collins' repertoire, most of them traditional (Rambleaway, Bonny Cuckoo, Nellie The Milkmaid, Gathering Rushes In The Month Of May, The Gower Wassail) along with Robert Burns’ Ca' The Yowes and God Dog, written by the Incredible String Band’s Robin Williamson.

Shirley Collins might not be entirely happy with the selection, but you’d have needed something to fill out the other side of the album. That’s not an issue in the era of the compact disk, but the alternative would have been to break the suite in two, which with the vinyl era need to get up and turn the record over wasn’t the optimal solution either.

Played as a whole in the digital download era the whole thing runs together seamlessly,  with the cornetts, crumhorns, sackbuts,recorders and racketts piping away over the harpsichord and portative organ in arrangements that influenced later efforts by the likes of Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span (who applied the concepts to a more electric folk-rock setting) and lesser lights like Amazing Blondel (whose stage appearances were likely to involve the use of up to forty instruments) and Gryphon.

That instrumentation gives a sense of timelessness, the sort of thing that was explored by those who followed, with Richard Thompson’s Henry the Human Fly being, to my ears, a prime example, but there’s the odd bit of electricity on Henry, whereas Anthems in Eden could have been performed at any stage back to the middle ages.

You could choose to simply look at the album as as a piece of musical archeology or a nostalgia trip but I’d see it as a defiant rejection of the rock'n'roll era, the march of capitalism, and conflicts on foreign shores from someone who’d collaborated with legendary ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax and studied the traditional forms at length.

The entirely traditional 1976 content (Fare The Well My Dearest Dear, C'Est La Fin/ Pou Mon Cuer, Bonny Kate, Adieu To All Judges and Juries,  Edi Beo Thu Hevene Quene, Black Joker/Black, White, Yellow & Green) fits well tacked on at the end of proceedings here, though they’ve managed to sneak regular drums (Fairport’s Dave Mattacks), electric bass (Pat Donaldson, Ashley Hutchings) and Simon Nicol’s electric guitar in there as well. That’s logical, since the second of the Shirley and Dolly Collins Harvest albums, 1970’s Love, Death and the Lady, uses a sparser subset of the instrumentalists who appeared on Anthems in Eden.

Playing through The Harvest Years, however, you get the decided impression that someone’s getting a little fast and loose with the sequencing. Put the extra material that was recorded a couple of years later at the end of proceedings, fine, but we’ve got extra tracks recorded at the Love, Death and the Lady  sessions that appears before the tracks that comprise the actual album. It’s one of those cases where the digital edition comes up wanting, but the reader, of course, has Hughesy and the consolidation of various on-line sources so who needs digital booklets?

So, recorded at the same sessions that produced what follows, we have Sailor From Dover, Young John, Short Jacket and White Trousers and The Bold Fisherman duly followed by Death and the Lady,  Glenlogie, The Oxford Girl, Are You Going To Leave Me? The Outlandish Knight, Go From My Window, Young Girl Cut Down In Her Prime,  Geordie, Salisbury Plain, Fair Maid of Islington, Six Dukes, Polly on the Shore and Plains of Waterloo

Cast your eye over those titles and you can probably guess what’s in store if Love, Death and the Lady hasn’t given it away from the start. Murder, rejected love, parted lovers and betrayal were, after all, meat and drink in the traditional canon. Here we have an apparently motiveless murder in The Oxford Girl (predictably, the lover dunnit, so you’ve got death and betrayal in the one parcel), a serial killer in The Outlandish Knight and parted lovers and a tragic death on a foreign field in Plains of Waterloo.

It’s not quite music to slit your wrists by, but it’s not all beer and skittles either and the ancient instruments creak away in the foreground, Collins sounds like the girl from the village down the road and the whole package sounds like it could have come from anywhere in the couple of centuries that preceded the last one.

Not, perhaps, everyone’s cup of tea but an interesting listen, particularly when you line it up alongside Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief and Full House or the early Steeleye Span up to Below the Salt. Those comparisons are quite deliberate. On Liege, Fairport had Sandy Denny, arguably the finest female singer in the English folk-rock sphere, while Steeleye’s Maddy Prior spent much of the seventies carrying traditional material as far as possible towards the middle of the road.

Shirley Collins, on the other hand, seems very much like the voice of the people.

Fairport Convention "House Full: Live at the L.A. Troubadour" (4.5*)

Thank you. This is our last number and it's called Sir Patrick Spens isn't the first thing you'd expect to hear on an album, but presumably it’s the only track from the first of three-nights that were recorded to have made the cut for the disk, so there you go.

In any case, if you’re into musical archaeology, House Full, as the only currently available live Fairport Convention album with Richard Thompson in the band, is probably required listening. There’s the small matter of Fairport’s influence on a group of young Angelenos of Mexican origin who morphed into Los Lobos.

Having lost singer Sandy Denny almost directly after Liege & Lief appeared on the market, Fairport had reshaped the vocal department with guitarist Richard Thompson and folkie fiddler Dave Swarbrick sharing the leads with assistance in the background from new bass player Dave Pegg, who’d been slotted in to replace Ashley Hutchings, who was en route to more traditional territory with his new missus Shirley Collins.

The new line up had recorded and released Full House, and were on the road behind the album (as the saying goes) when they landed in L.A. for a week-long gig at the Troubadour (opening, believe it or not, for Rick Nelson) that was legendary for a couple of reasons. According to Dave Pegg the band were doing a week's residency, two spots each night and three on the weekend for which we were going to be paid five hundred dollars. But when we went to collect our wages, we'd drunk so much we owed them fifteen hundred bucks. Impressive, even taking into account the possibility that the drinks in question were overpriced and the band were generous tippers where leggy waitresses were concerned.

The finer details of alcoholic catering may have had something to do with the related fact that Led Zeppelin were performing at the Forum and Robert Plant, John Bonham and Fairport’s new bass player were old mates from Birmingham. Dave Pegg invited the foursome to the Troubadour after their Forum gig at the Forum and when they arrived a dressing room consultation resulted in Page, Plant, Bonham and Jones joining Fairport on stage for a set that included Hey Joe, Morning Dew, Banks of the Sweet Primroses, Mystery Train and That's Alright Mama. While the mobile eight-track machine was rolling throughout the tapes (existence confirmed by Joe Boyd) are buried deep in the Polygram vaults.

But it seems they exist. In White Bicycles Boyd reminisces: the tape reveals Plant’s vocal being louder than any of the amplifiers, Page trying to keep pace with Richard on jigs and reels and Zep manager Peter Grant at a front table cursing and abusing the waitresses.

He also recalls Linda Ronstadt being invited on stage (another night, another distinguished guest) after Fairport had run out of encores for another forty minutes covering songs she had forgotten she knew.

There’s nothing from either night here, however. So what’s on the disk?

Well, for a start, there’s nothing that predates Liege & Lief (predictable, the infamous car crash would still have been relatively fresh in the memory), and the Liege and Full House material is fleshed out with traditional material, a World War I bagpipe lament and, on a lighter note, Yellow Birds (or boids, up high in banana trees).

Even if you’re not familiar with Fairport, those of us who went through high school in the sixties will probably recall Sir Patrick Spens from the poetry anthologies (I had the impression it was regarded as somewhere in the same postcode as iconic as far as medieval ballads were concerned), but don’t let that put you off.

Actually, while Sir Patrick Spens and Banks of the Sweet Primroses get proceedings off on a nice roll, there’s nothing there to suggest you’re in the presence of anything other than a fairly good folk-rock band, things change with the jigs and reels in The Lark in the Morning Medley, which may not be the fastest of their kind in captivity (that honour quite possibly goes to Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron or Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzies) the version here romps along at a merry clip, and like the later variations, is played with stop on a sixpence precision by an outfit with considerable instrumental chops (Swarbrick’s fiddle work might not quite rate as virtuoso, but it’s in an adjacent postcode and Richard Thompson is, well, Richard Thompson, enough said) and a rock hard, hard rocking rhythm section.

Those chops come to the fore again in twelve and a bit minutes of Sloth, and yet again in the play-out to Matty Groves, with the traditional Staines Morris wedged between them. The vocal department on Matty Groves shows what they lost with the departure of Sandy Denny, but there’s a rough-hewn rustic note to the Thompson and Swarbrick take that has its own charm, from where I’m sitting.

Jenny's Chickens / The Mason's Apron cart us back into jigs and reels territory, then there’s a stately take on Battle of the Somme, a piper’s lament that you might not expect to work in this setting but if you didn’t you weren’t aware of Thompson’s ongoing affinity with the skirl of the pipes.

Up to this point we’re revisiting the original House Full. The related release Live at the L.A. Troubadour gives us Bonnie Kate / Sir B. McKenzie's Daughter's Lament for the 77th Mounted Lancer's Retreat from the Straits of Loch Knombe, in the Year of Our Lord 1727, on the Occasion of the Announcement of Her Marriage to the Laird of Kinleakie, which predictably gets abbreviated to Sir B. McKenzies. Non-Einsteins will no doubt be able to figure out why, and proceedings are concluded on a lighter note with the old Yellow Birds.

In their day, the five man Fairport were, by all accounts, an awesome experience in a live setting and as the only officially released live recording of the lineup House Full, with that extra material from the cousin-brother Live at the L.A. Troubadour tacked on the end is close to essential listening for anyone interested in investigating this little corner of the folk-rock genre.

In summary, a crack five-piece outfit at the height of their considerable powers. I was, back in the day, highly impressed by Angel Delight, the studio album that followed this live excursion, by which time Richard Thompson had gone. Classic, exuberant British folk-rock from the best all-male lineup of a band that has gone on to become an institution (they’re still going strong with a 45th anniversary coming up, and there’ll be those who’ll rate a configuration featuring Sandy Denny as slightly better).

They never, as someone or other pointed out, made an album like this again, but then again, no one else did either. For $10.99 at the iTunes Store it was a no-brainer...