It's hard to conceive in the polite British Folk Scene of 2009 that being a folk singer could ever have been considered a radical and dangerous pursuit. But in the Chile of the late 1960s and early 1970s it most certainly was. Victor Jara was a teacher, poet, theatre director and popular folk singer and songwriter who, as part of the "New Song" movement, advocated revolutionary cultural and political change under Salvador Allende's democratic government. Allende's power was short-lived, however, and in a 1973 military coup, backed by the US Government, thousands of his political supporters were rounded up into stadium buildings, where they were tortured and murdered. As a prominent musician, his captors reserved particular attention for his guitarist's hands, which were mutilated before his death. He was 38 years old.

More than 35 years after the event a 53 year old former soldier has been charged with his murder.

You can see and hear Victor Jara singing here

And you can hear one of my own folk heroes Dick Gaughan singing a song in his memory. The song is written by Arlo Guthrie and Adrian Mitchell. "His hands were gentle, his hands were strong."

Ah ... lured you in eh? Been watching it too? Hoping we can extract together some meaningful observations upon modern Europe as a result?

Let's see.

Israel's entry is a duet between a beautiful young Jewish woman and a beautiful young Palestinian woman called "There Must Be Another Way". What can I say? Yes, there is. Tony Blair will fix it.

Portugal's entry sounded nice and Portuguese. That means they've nae chance.

The Ukrainian singer mortgaged her flat to create a set that looked like a posh hamster's cage. And she sang "You have nice bum".

I quite liked Estonia. And the lead singer had lovely shiny hair.

Hora Din Moldova? Now that made me chuckle! I mean this woman could clearly sing. She's probably a quite brilliant traddy singer just judging from her opening vocal ornamentation. So let's say next year the UK packs Julie Fowlis into a lammy frock and asks her to sing a song written by Gary Barlow but with a Gaelic chorus and The Demon Barbers rapping in the background, for an extra confusing ethnic dimension.

How on earth can Ronan Keating get away with writing the entry for Denmark? He shouldn't have bothered.

Now you might be forgiven for thinking that Albania's stage production was compromised by the fact that it's one of the poorest countries in Europe and didn't have much of a budget. The poor girl had to sing whilst encircled by Stevie Nicks' hair and an extra from a 1970s episode of Dr Who.

But then Germany. One of the wealthiest countries on the continent. A huge budget. Dita Von Teese guesting on stage. And ... still utter dross. Silver lycra just doesn't look good on anyone. Especially not below the waist.

Holy smoke! What was Seth Lakeman doing singing for Norway?

Kind of sweet to see neighbours voting for neighbours. Montenegro and Croatia vote for Bosnia-Herzegovina. Latvia votes for Estonia. Andorra votes for Spain (no-one esle was going to). And then I think supposing all the countries of the UK had separate entries. Can you imagine it? Scotand votes for England ...

Hah! I jest.

So my point?

There is no point is there. It's just total pish.




 

I hang my head in shame and confess (as I've confessed before):

I watch American Idol.

Every week.

Now I can't be bothered with Pop Idol and its lame British corporate equivalents. But there's something about The American Dream thing that's quite captivating from the outside. And a little more maverick and emotionally compelling than is possible here.

I watch "Idol" in the considered knowledge that it's pretty much the antithesis of everything my own wee corner of the music world represents, with its global sponsors and its skilful manipulation of musical tastes, and its beautiful people and staged controversies. It's not a folk festival open mic is it?

In distinguishing between most popular music and the trad end of folk, Bellowhead frontman Jon Boden talks of the difference between "me songs" and "we songs" (and check out his recent album "Songs From The Floodplain" for some of the most moving new "we" songs you'll hear all year). Of course, the pop and rock mainstream, and what most folks understand as the musical world of "singer-songwriters", has a lot to say about "me". And it's a not wholly unjustified tarnish. The "me" factor has never specially turned this "me" on. I've always preferred the storytellers, the creepers inside of other people's lives, to the emoters.

But sometimes that line is awful blurry.

Anyway it was down to the last three in American Idol. Three lads.

There's a clean cut, humble and undeniably likeable lad from Arkansas called Kris. Normally I'd know just by the look of him that he's not my cup of tea. You'd guess he was a wee bit wet. But he turns out to be a very fine musician and has balls enough to sing a Kanye West song in the last three face-off accompanied only by his own very able acoustic guitar. He's musically astute and totally level. I dare say I wouldn't buy his records but I have to give the guy credit for being his own man.

Then there's the flamboyant and dramatic Adam, a bit like a flashback to the fellow that used to front The Human League. Remember them? From a Scottish living room it seems remarkable to me (and cheering) that a pretty, stylised and obviously gay young man has been getting so much support from middle America. Til my Canadian husband points out that most of the screaming women, young and old, probably have no idea that he is. I hope this isn't true. Still he's very clever and musically crafty and chameolon-like. But a bit of a starlet. Technically proficient, an actor. Shouts and poses a bit much for my tastes. And is rather too much laying on the line the emotion I'm supposed to be feeling when he sings, rather than just feeling it in him and so making me feel it too. It's like musical semaphore.

And then there's Danny. Lovely Danny Gokey. Och I've had a wee crush on this one the whole while. Man he can sing. And when he does it right I believe every word of it. It's added to by a weighty back story, certainly, in that he lost his young wife last summer to a chronic heart condition. His prime motivation for singing, he says, is to raise money for a trust in her name and to rebuild his own life. But without this knowledge I think I would still have sensed something emotionally honest and more than just a little raw in his own performances. With the right song, truly he sings his own heart out.

Of course, the human story is so much part of it all now. Not just the song, for its own sake, as the folkies would prefer it, but the singer and his tale too.  I've done enough interviews at my own modest level to know this is true and to sort of wish it wasn't. But then where would that leave me with blogging? Who would care? Indeed, who does?

I confess to my Idol indulgence because in the multi-billion dollar world of corporate music making and taste shaping I'm chuffed that it's still possible for people like me to respond to real human emotion in song. And when we do what might otherwise be considered "me" music becomes "we" music. 

Dick Gaughan said to me once: You have to decide if you're the kind of singer and writer who wants people just to listen to you OR if you have something to say that demands folks listen to it. I know where I stand on this. I think lovely Danny does too.

Still they kicked him out this week. Idiots!

But whilst handsome Adam might have the "wow" factor and cute Kris the teenage "whoa" factor, it's the smiley, beardy, good guy old Danny that has the "we" factor.

For Charles Darwin, who sat with his 10 year old daughter Annie in the days before her death after a long period of illness in 185l, an event which, painfully, cemented his views on the cruel struggle for existence underlying all life and all beauty. Annie's death caused Darwin also to lose any conventional form of faith, though his wife Emma never lost hers. He never lost his sense of joy and awe.

Darwin wrote in his notebooks about “the dreadful and quiet war in the peaceful woods and smiling fields”.  His sister-in-law, Fanny Wedgewood, was with him on the day of Annie's death and wrote "The sky a livid iron-grey and overcast. At twelve o'clock came a peal of thunder and we heard her breath her last"

This is my first reply to a long distance co-write idea sent through by the lovely Nova Scotian songsmith Dave Gunning. And even if it evolves into something else across the Atlantic (as would befit it!), I think this first answer has something in it.

WE'RE ALL LEAVING
 
There is thunder on the skyline
And it tears her breath away
Like the twilight takes the day
 
A father’s kind hand could not command her
To return to him once more
Like a soldier from the war
 
CHORUS
We’re all leaving
Even the ones who stay behind
We’re all leaving in our own time
We’re all leaving in our own time
 
Each night surrenders to a morning
And beneath the April sky
He can hear a quiet cry
 
On smiling fields there's a battle raging
And for every bloom he knows
Another flower never grows
 
We're all leaving ...

BRIDGE
And he has no Ark to bear him from this Flood
Just a broken vessel wrought in flesh and blood
And though riptides pull him under
He will not cease to wonder
At the beauty of it all, at the beauty of it all
 
He brings her mother to the church door
And while she prays for what will come
He walks those woods alone
 
And there he builds his own cathedrals
While on every whirring wing
He hears the whole world sing
 
copyright Karine Polwart / Dave Gunning 2009

When I was twenty-one, the shrunken body of my lovely Grampa Peter Quinn finally gave out for good.  The evening before his funeral, a friend dropped through my letterbox a tape called “Handful of Earth” by a singer I’d never heard of before called Dick Gaughan.  Well, the emotional intensity of that album blew me away, and it remains one of my all-time favourites to this day. In particular, it includes a version of “Now Westlin Winds” that’s as moving a performance of a Burns song as I think I’ll ever hear, and indeed one of the most powerful and poignant songs in any genre that I’ve heard yet.  With its gorgeous dense natural imagery and its musing upon the myriad ways in which we human beings inhabit the landscape of this world, it manages to say something intimate and huge at the same time.  It’s a love song and a massive metaphysical statement too, and made me realise for the first time that Burns was about so much more than waspish young girls with coy voices clasping their hands in gutless, Jean Brodie-esque renditions of “Ca The Yowes” at the annual school Burns song competition.

If “Now Westlin Winds” started something for me that evening, then my Grampa’s choice of “Ae Fond Kiss” as the parting piece of ceremonial music at his funeral the following day nearly finished me off.  Even played by an indifferent undertaker on a cheesy Casio keyboard it socked me right in the belly that morning.  Though I’d sung that song to myself countless times, indeed it was one of the few songs I’d ever sung in public too, “fare thee weel, alas, forever” took on an entirely different meaning for me in that moment.  And that’s the thing about a truly great song, that it’s big enough and spacious enough to accommodate a thousand meanings and never lose its relevance.  And Burns has dozens and dozens of those songs.  It’s remarkable.

There are other personal connections: my granny chose the same song for her parting, my dad opened my own wedding ceremony with “My Love is Like a Red, Red Rose”, and I sang a duet of "The Learig"with my mum at my brother Steven's wedding, but as a songwriter myself, my enthusiasm is deeper and wider than that.  I’m the same age now (well I was when I wrote it!) as Burns was when he died.  To consider what he created in that short life makes me aspire for just one ounce of the empathy of “The Slave’s Lament” or “My Tocher’s The Jewel”, the earthiness of “Wee Willie Gray” or “Brose and Butter”, the wit of “Holy Willie’s Prayer” or the wisdom of “A Man’s A Man For A’ That”; and the same length of time again with which to create a single song that might speak to someone else the way so many of his songs speak to me.

I wrote this short piece for Andy Hall's beautiful book "Touched By Robert Burns", commissioned to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the poet's birth in January this year. Since writing it, "Ae Fond Kiss" (and the beautiful "John Anderson My Jo") has appeared at yet another family funeral, and that one long, long before its time. And Burns will be at mine too whenever the time comes.

Shortly after Jenny-The-Orang-utan first arrived at London Zoo in 1837, causing her most eminent possible visitor, Queen Victoria, to exclaim that she was “most painfully and disagreeably human”, Charles Darwin slipped a harmonica, a sprig of verbena and a bag of peppermints into his overcoat and stopped by to see her.  It seems, according to his notebooks, that she liked whatever it was he played on the moothie (and how I wish I knew!) and was quite fussy for both the taste and smell sensations he brought with him.

This scene makes me chuckle. It makes me think of my dad, a man who has been known to lie flat out on a bustling Edinburgh High Street in order to get just the right angle for a photo and who, at one point I seem to recall, had a notion that the undersides of windowsills held secrets for those bold enough, and sufficiently un-embarrassed, to look there.

If you thought Darwin was some kind of cool, emotionally distant scientist, think again. Having immersed myself in books by and about him, radio and TV documentaries (and isn’t David Attenborough just a total dude?), as well embarking on an Open University course in Evolution (heck, why not eh?) what’s as striking as the importance of the ideas Darwin cultivated and those developed since, is his humanity, empathy, tenderness, humour and decency. Irrelevant, you might say, to the subject of science? But not so, it seems to me.

A man who didn’t play with his (many) children could not have made parallels between the emotions and behaviour of apes and other animals and human beings, at a time when humans were considered a separate and higher order of life.  Nor would a cultural snob have found his way into the rank London slums of his day to question pigeon fanciers about their selective breeding methods (and so fallen for the art and the creatures themselves that he bred around a thousand birds himself subsequently with his daughter Etty). And a man with a less acute sense of fun might have found other ways to test the hearing capacity of earthworms than by asking his son Frank to play them bassoon solos. They don’t, incidentally, hear at all.

But, most poignant of all, his theories about the centrality of death, extinction and the struggle for survival to the evolution of life, based as they were on his own experiments in his home and garden, his tropical travels on The Beagle and a mountain of careful correspondence with botanists, geologists, dog breeders, farmers, sailors and adventurers (some 15,000 letters remain) acquired a harrowing personal significance with the illness and eventual death of his beloved eldest daughter Annie at the age of 10.

My admiration and affection for the man is growing by the day. And for someone who hasn’t studied biology since she was thirteen I’m really enjoying (and beginning to understand) the science too. So I feel I’m doing my own wee bit to prepare for a week-long writers residency in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth (I doubt if it has passed you by), organised by Shrewsbury Folk Festival, and due to start in three weeks time. I’ll be holed up in a house outside the city where Darwin was born with, amongst others, Chris Wood, Emily Smith, Jez Lowe and US singer-songwriter Krista Detor. The residential project culminates in a gig at Theatre Severn in Shrewsbury on Thursday 19th March. Maybe see a few of you there for some brand new just-out-of-the-bag songs.

And maybe, just maybe, one inspired by the curious fact that Darwin was born on exactly the same day as that icon of American history Abraham Lincoln. “The Ballad of Chuck and Abe” anyone?

Well a serious unexpected dose of English snow meant me and my fella Mattie didn't make it down to London for the annual UK folky party fest that is the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards. Instead Mattie cooked a smashing big chicken, sausage and honey roast parsnip tea at our house for my lovely band mate Inge Thomson and her other half Martin Green, one third of Folk Group of the Year,  Lau (hurray, hurray much deserved for the lads!), all of whom likewise turned back home yesterday.

On the subject of Lau, me and Inge and our pal Corrina Hewat spent a day earlier this month adding some vocals to their splendid new album "Ark Light". They're actually my favourite band, even if they are my pals, so it was great to help out. More info on their myspace - follow my top friends.

Folk Awards kudos this year go to the excellent maverick Mr Chris Wood, Folk Singer of the Year and Album of The Year, and, by all accounts, speech of the year too! The fella can talk, I tell you. I'll be writing with Chris next month in the Darwin Songhouse in Shrewsbury, a residential songwriters project to celebrate the bicentenarry of his birth (indeed I've just signed up for an Open University Course in Darwin and Evolution to prepare myself), and touring with him in rural Gloucestershire and Leicestershire in early April.

It's been a full on month of musical extremes. I visited The Arctic Circle for the first time, which I fear does my green credentials no good whatsoever, in vain hopes of seeing the Northern Lights in Norwegian harbour town Tromso. They were not to be seen but I did fetch back some nice cheese and a very fine green hat, which in yesterday's blusteriness, was most useful.

It is a very expensive place to buy a beer ...

That gig followed on the heels of the debut show for The Burns Unit, a new collaborative genre hopping band project (with six other Scottish songwriters and my fella Mattie on drums), at which I myself played drums, if you can believe that (the proof will be on their page - again follow my top friends). The project is two thirds though recording an album, which will encompass Indo-Caledonian political dancefloor action, Jacques Brel-esque torch music, Nick Cave meets Tori Amos murder balladry, and cheesy eighties pop. Brilliant fun!

My old bandmates Malinky had a ten year anniversary show at Glasgow's Celtic Connections the following night: a show at which I forgot the words to one of my own songs (mortifying) but after which the expanded ten piece managed to convince a Festival Club full of less than sober young folks that we were in fact a party band, rather than a posse of ballad singers. Also a lot of fun!

I arrived back from northern Norway in time to catch a lift to two shows that same night, the first of which, at Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall, celebrated the 250th anniversary of the birth of Robert Burns. I was privileged to watch one of my all-time musical heroes, Dick Gaughan, sing perhaps the finest song he has ever sung, Burns' "Now Westlin Winds", a poetic metaphyisical musing on humanity's place in the world (for good and ill). A great song.

I hot-footed it down to Burns' birthplace Alloway immediately after for a Burns Supper before Scotland's high heid yins, including the country's First Minister Alex Salmond and classy, sassy newsreaders Kirsty Wark and Sally Magnusson.  I have a lot to say about Burns himself and will post that in another blog. But I was quite honoured to be involved if the truth be told.

Next night was another Burns related adventure. I've done more than a few collaborative shows over the past few years but singing the Burns classic "The Slave's Lament" with Jamaican dub-reggae legends Sly and Robbie has to top the league of bizarre gigs so far! I mean these guys made records for Bob Dylan, Grace Jones, Sinead O'Connor.

Sly is very, very wee. And smiley. And plays his kit slung low to the ground.

Robbie is very, very big. You would not fight with him. His bass was so powerful I had to walk away from side of stage at one point because I thought my body might erupt into an uncontrollable judder.

One to tell the grandkids I think.

Last gig up this past month was my own solo show at the sumptious and elegant City Halls in Glasgow, normally reserved for the BBC Symphony Orchestra. It was a double header with lovely Northern lassies Rachel Unthank and the Winterset and featured not only regular KP trio compadres Steven Polwart and Inge Thomson but also fellow Burns Unit collaborator Kim Edgar on piano and vocals and the lovely Jenny Hanson on violin and viola. I made it an occasion to play some songs I had never or seldom played live before, including the brooding ballads "Wife of Usher's Well" and "Death of Queen Jane" from trad album "Fairest Floo'er" and oldies that have been getting a bit dusty like "Faultlines", as well as a wee improvised community harmony singalong.

It was a delight to create something spacious and elegant and a bit different in the venue.

And, bold or wreckless, for the first time ever, no "Daisy", no "I'm Gonna Do It All", no "Rivers Run" and no "Sun's Comin Over the Hill"

And no riot! Indeed just a lovely warm glow in the place. So enjoyable.

Anyway, bit of non-discursive, descriptive blog this time but that's where I'm at. More coming on Burns, Darwin and the ethical dimension of songwriting ... but before that a huge pile of washing and a Ready Brek encrusted kitchen floor to contend with.

I live just outside a village of around 1000 people or so. On December 30th, our local music collective (which I'm part of) hosted a family ceilidh for a few hours in the afternoon. The house band included my husband Mattie Foulds on drums. Also on drums, at fag and tea breaks for Mattie, and a wee bit more extravagantly than M (as befits the fine fellow!) was former BBC Jazz Award winner and Kidsamonium creator Tom Bancroft. Meantime Tom's brother in law and fellow jazzer Tom Lyne was on stand up bass. Esteemed bagpipe maker, Indian music specialist and new village resident Nigel Richards was on cittern. The front line included Lau's wonderful bendy accordionist Martin Green, ace trad fiddlers Amy Geddes and Jenny Gardener and Shooglenifty banjo player Gary Finlayson. ..boards was Foss Paterson, who's been touring recently with John Martyn. Foss's sixteen year old daughter Jo played a lovely set with her pal too.

On tea and biscuits was Tom B's partner jazz singer Gina Rae, occasionally assisted by Tom B and myself, and indeed by Gillian Mackenzie, of the splendid Gaelic sister trio Mackenzie (which includes the fab Fiona Mackenzie). On front door was the lovely jazz singer Sophie Bancroft, sister of Tom B and partner of Tom L. In the audience with their bairns was my regular touring buddy and musical multi-tasker Inge Thomson and my old Malinky bandmate melodeon and whistle player Leo McCann. At the door was my farmer neighbour Jim and his teenage son Scott, both of whom, on a weekend, play accordion and piano in very good ceilidh dance bands indeed.

Village baker stalwart, and eclectic songwriter and swing guitarist Sandy Wright (who's been covered by the likes of Eddi Reader and Kris Drever) would have been there but he had a gig up north. Tom and Sophie's brilliant saxophonist brother Phil Bancroft was on holiday.

No wonder, my pals ace harper and singer Corrina Hewat and acclaimed jazz pianist David Milligan (whose trio includes Tom B and Tom L) are fixing to shift up this way.

Oh and I forgot to mention Jenny's partner Tim, who did a wee stint as a clown!

And that's without including a few more who couldn't make it, like Andy, who's a DJ and recording engineer, Althea, who runs a local college music course, Sarah and Joey, who're just five minutes away and play fiddle and everything under the sun it seems.

Jings.

I'm feeling very lucky to live in the kind of place in which a New Year's party includes an aforementioned jazz pianist on rather tasty triangle, a certain harper on glockenspiel, accordion and cajon, and everybody in the room at some point on a beautiful crazy Indian percussion instrument called a "hang", which Nigel entrusted to our artless drunken hands.

Head of the Path. And Centre of The Universe. I love it.

K xx

1.
The first voice has an almost giggle
in it, as it always has.
A nervous flutter sounding like it might have done
when it was
breaking
first
forty years ago and more.
Bewildered.
And in between.
It does not know how the words should fall on this occasion,
so as not
to say
what remains
to be said.
It adds, "This sounds strange"
And it does.

The second voice is broken.
Clean.
Politely crushed.
It was not always so.
Never a voice to say too much
too fast,
it tells me,
please,
what I should do.
It would be most obliged.

2.
Strange news is come to this door
Strange news and stranger still
In boots and a bobble hat I hap you up from the morning chill

One brother makes another call
And one brother lets it ring
At the head of the path you laugh as a lone blackbird begins to sing

Strange news arrives unbidden
Strange news and stranger still
There are plastic strings of gold and ice cold beer on the windowsill

A mother does just what she must
And a father comes undone
In the not yet snow we wave and shout hello to a welcome sun

Strange news is at this table
Strange news and stranger still
There's glitter on the dirt road, a light slung low on the hill

Somewhere a boy is asking when
And somewhere a woman why
In the field out back we wait for the crack of wings in a winter sky

3.
By the river where the woods walked
you stalked a beam of light upon a bough
and caught it ,
luminous and green,
not evergreen.
I know this now.


For EP

My apologis for being so quite lately and not responding too well to email ...

A few of you might have heard my "Well For Zoe" at a live show or in its demo form as a free download from this very site. It's now graced by the resonant vocals of the wonderful bluegrass singer/multi-instrumentalist Tim O'Brien and the superb fiddling of Stuart Duncan and available free from http://compassrecords.com/multimedia/

The song opens a new CD on Nashville based Compass Records in aid of Irish-Malawian rural water development organisation WELLS FOR ZOE (http://www.wellsforzoe.org) The CD features tracks also from Sinead O'Connor, Crooked Still, Paul Brady, Salsa Celtica, Heidi Talbot, Kris Drever and others.

All in a good cause! Enjoy!