Rachel & I do some big ones in harmony - it's something that's evolved quite naturally between us over the years, such as Child #102: The Birth of Robin Hood (track #4 on our Myspace Page) which I set to the medieval melody of Adam de la Halle's Bergeronnette Douce Baisselete (from Le Le Jeu de Robin et Marion) 20 years ago, and to which Rachel added her harmony 10 years ago. It's a very different discipline to singing on ones own - in many ways with two voices the narrative serves to make the dynamics all the more intense as other considerations come into play. Somewhat more strident is our take on Child #6: The Witch Mother, aka Willie's Lady, which we call The Wax Baby (track #6 on the above link) which I set to a traditional Scandinavian lullaby, rather than the more usual Son Ar Chistre (the work of the wonderful Ray Fisher of course!). Rachel added her harmony to this in singarounds, so it evolved as a duo piece with a similar regard for spontaneous dynamics inherent in the narrative structures of the song.

Truth to tell, I actually prefer singing ballads with Rachel doing a harmony part - it provides a much needed tension that pulls the thing into a much sharper focus which is essential to my personal understanding of the structural dynamics of the narrative, and what might be discovered therein by way of image, joissance & the collective necessity that has brought these ballads into being. We can never own them, but our response must, I feel, be respectful of their status as being a whole lot more than the bain of revival singarounds. This tells us more about the nature of the revival than it does about the ballads which are both bonsai soap-opera and reductions to the very essence of ritual drama, and, in both cases, very potent indeed. In both these ballads the outcome is the birth of a child - a tranfigurative nascence with prefigures a glorious happy ever after; the language of both is utterly exquisite, even to the point where I must remove myself to a certain extent during performance least I burst into tears.

Also worth noting is that neither of these songs, as far as I'm aware, are associated with traditional melodies; thus there are no traditional precedents for their performance. I took both from written sources, and though I was aware of Willie's Lady from recordings made by Ray Fisher & Martin Carthy, I only recently heard another version of The Birth of Robin Hood. What emerges are, therefore, tentative reconstructions by way of a more creative musical archaeology but which aren't too hung up on Early Music Authenticity as such. I might use the term Ante Folk to describe this, even though, ultimately, the performances are very much of the moment.