"Byker Hill" (what is he doing to that song?)

Oh God. You know what? I love that album to bits. It's like Carthy & Swarb had this chemistry going on that even to this just lights up my heart. They revisited it back in the 80s which was nice enough but lacked the youthful punch. It's like what Kipling says:

When your heart is young and gay
And the season rules it --
Work your works and play your play
'Fore the Autumn cools it!

Anyway, here they are doing it live in the old days:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M3dJHy7mDck

But then again I was introduced to this when I was 11 in some of the most truly bizarre circumstances I've ever found myself in, but even now I might listen to those early duo records and just howl at the moon. I feel the same way about most of the stuff I was turned onto back then - Hearken to the Witches Rune included.

I fell in love with June Tabor when she broke my heart with The Plains of Waterloo when I was 14 or so. I'll never forget that, even though (in the same gig) I experienced utter bafflement at how a song like that could be sung alongside such utter shite as King of Rome and TBPWM. Allowing for personal taste, I say utter shite purely as a measure of my personal hatred of these songs, and others like them, which has to include January Man though at least there I got so far as recording a version for the abandoned Landfill Project. It didn't make me like it though.

I too find Bellamy's lapses easier to forgive (Nostradamus & Death is not the End notwithstanding) and often find myself wondering how the Bellamy / Fairport band would have shaped up had it happened. To me the twin stars of Folk are Peter Bellamy and Jim Eldon - both embody the very essence of the muck, mire & stars which lead me hither in the first place; and even when Jim covers commonplace pop drivel it becomes transfigured into the pure folk-fertile earth. When he sings traditional songs, I know there is such a thing as arrival, and quite possibly God too; like listening Rahsaan or Rene Zosso or watching Pasolini's Canterbury Tales, it's real in a way so very few things are, especially in the fantasy realms of folk which attracts & repels in equal measure.

I was once playing a June Tabor album and my flat-mate at the time asked what I was doing listening to Victoria Wood. I think it was Unicorns or something... Fortunately, I fell in with her all over again when I she sang Fine Horseman on TV a few years back (JT that is, not VW, though one might well imagine...)