We went last night to hear Spiers and Boden at the Colchester folk club, which meets in the Colchester Arts Centre. I couldn't define a folk club, but using the elephant test that I know one when I see it, I don't think Colchester's is really a folk club, but a series of folk concerts put on between September and May with a couple of singers' nights thrown in. As a club it has some serious deficiencies, but they get some very good guests.
Spiers and Boden are excellent. They are an English folk duo, and they are on their tenth anniversary tour, so they must have started young as they don't look that old yet. Jon Boden plays the fiddle and the guitar, and sings. As an instrumentalist he doesn't have the showy, melliflous intricacy of a Martin Hayes (fiddle) or Martin Simpson (guitar) but he understands the rythmns of English folk and plays it with great energy and precision. His voice is warm and fairly deep and without the nasal, sheeplike quality of some folk singers, and his diction is fantastic. You can hear the words of songs you don't already know, a rare thing among folk singers, and difficult to achieve in the acoustics of the Colchester Arts Centre, which are rather muddy. Also he is tall with large eyes and a neat brown beard and an engaging grin, which all help, if you are going to be a folk superstar. John Spiers is shorter and rounder but with an equally radiant smile, and plays various squeeze boxes and sings backing vocals. His harmonies on the melodeon and concertina are complicated and unusual enough to be interesting, without leaving me with the distressing feeling that I must have strayed into a jazz club. As a duo they are great. On stage they have an easy line in chat, and come across as being two thoroughly nice blokes, but in the music it is the contained energy and controlled timing that does it for me. Folk music should be full of energy, which is not at all the same thing as playing it too loud and too fast.
I wish the folk club had the same perfect timing. Seats are not bookable, and the doors open at 7.45pm, but then nothing else happens for half an hour, so having arrived in time to bag a good seat you are left to make desultory conversation to your companion, or sit alone if you don't have one. The seats are stackable chairs, and while padded they are not that comfortable. I'm guessing that sitting on a plastic seat drinking beer out of a plastic cup in a converted Victorian church wouldn't be top of most people's lists of really fun things to do on a Monday night. At about 8.15pm there is sometimes a support act. Unfortunately the local folk scene isn't especially good, and I have only rarely heard a support act at the Colchester folk club that was any good either. Some of them are to be avoided at all costs. Sometimes there isn't a support act at all, and you spend the first hour listening to recordings of upcoming acts. At around 8.45pm the act you have come to hear is put on. They do a first set, then there is an interval to buy more beer and CDs and go to the loo, then a second half. It doesn't end much before 11.00pm, which is later than some people might choose for a Monday, with the rest of the working week ahead of them. I was absolutely knackered by the time I got home, given I'd got up at 6.00am and already done a ten hour day at the plant centre, and I would much rather the musicians I had paid to see simply started at 8.00pm, and then with a decent interval we could still all be away by 10.00pm. That would probably suit the performers better too, given that they are on gruelling tour schedules. Enough folk musicians have died or been badly injured over the years in late night car accidents after gigs, when they were driving dog tired and trying to get home, or on to the next gig.
To reduce the amount of tedious hanging about we didn't arrive until 8.15pm. There was a notice on the door saying that it was Sold Out, so it's just as well that after the Cara Dillon non-experience I had bought tickets. The only seats left were right at the outside of the south nave, which left me with a sinking feeling that I was going to spend the evening looking at a pillar, but once seated I found the pillar was safely to my left and I could in fact see perfectly.
Spiers and Boden have won all sorts of folk awards, which are richly deserved. They form two elevenths or thereabouts of folk supergroup Bellowhead, which I have not seen but aim to do so, if only once for the experience and because they are said to be so entertaining live. Bellowhead on the radio and TV go a bit too far down the folk-jazz-klezmer-Latin American fusion path for my comfort. Spiers and Boden play around with those influences in a subtle way, but no so much that they stray from the point. They opened their second set with their version of 'Rolling down to Old Maui', which is one of the best arrangements of a traditional song I have ever heard. They have slighly flattened out the tune into an odd minor key (if I knew any music theory it would help me understand what I'm listening to) and put a catch in the rhythmn. I've spent many hours in small yachts, rolling up and down and across the Thames estuary and southern North Sea, with a light breeze but a big swell, and Spiers and Boden have captured that slow swoop and catch and creak perfectly. I'm not surprised to read that Jon Boden studied compositon for theatre at The London College of Music. (He also has a degree in Medieval Studies from Durham, and John Spiers read genetics at King's College, Cambridge, at least according to Wikipedia. I always suspected that good musicians tended to be extremely bright).
You can find their website here.
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