Interesting article on national identity and music in the Guardian yesterday(Fri Feb 15). Various singers were asked to select a song that expressed Englishness. The two folkies asked were Eliza Carthy and Seth Lakeman. Their two very contrasting answers to the qwuesation are worth a read, so here they are:

Eliza Carthy
Half Man Half Biscuit: A Country Practice

This is from their album Four Lads Who Shook the Wirral. More than Anne Briggs, Ian Dury and Queen, who I'm a massive fan of, this makes me think of Englishness. It's incredibly wordy and conversational, with Nigel Blackwell talking over beats and making up almost nursery rhymes. In this song, Blackwell goes all over the country to pick apart English people at our basest: trying to be famous or making money living on the streets rearing fat cows. Then at the end, there's a little old lady in front of the TV watching the millennium fireworks. As Sting plays on the roof of the Barbican, she dies alone because there are no hospital beds for the poor and she's got no family. The song seems over-clever and flippant, but it's bitter and very funny, which is very English: pathos disguised by wit and emotional detachment. It's like a camera flying over the country, zooming in and out; like watching a film of England.

Seth Lakeman
Richard Thompson: Bee's Wing

It's an amazing story about "a laundry girl"; a great English working-class narrative that sums up a lot about England in the past, but it works for any era. It's timeless, despite the girl being a Gypsy, "running wild". It's a lovely story of heartfelt longing, capturing the romantic side of working-class England. Richard Thompson is very English in the way that he sings, and he's got a distinctively English way of playing guitar. I'm trying to keep this tradition alive. There a lot of people doing it: myself, Kate Rusby, Eliza Carthy; a new generation of folk musicians exploding across the country, telling their own stories and narrating their own concerns.