Folk singers travel well. And it’s often as ex-pats that they best appreciate their own culture. Martin Simpson, born in Scunthorpe, lived the life of a professional English folkie for 15 years before relocating to America. Although working the clubs as a bluesman he never lost his keen ear for his own roots music.
But success in Simpson's adopted home eventually gave way to homesickness, and his homecoming album, Prodigal Son, was released in 2007. If folk singers travel well, folk audiences often look more at home, at home. Folk is, after all, about people. And when folk fans gather there's a sense of community. So it was at last night’s Southbank gig. Part of Topic Records’ 70th-birthday celebrations, it knitted together a devoted crowd. A crowd determined not to be put off by the theatre setting which threatened to dampen the atmosphere in a set that charted Simpson’s journey from Scunthorpe to New Orleans and back again.
Simpson’s music may have meandered through genres over the years, taking in blues and ragtime and MOR, but right now it’s overwhelmingly traditional folk; not to be confused with folk rock, nu folk, or the likes of Damian Rice. For this audience it was actually some of the more accessible material that left them indifferent. Simpson kicked off with Blind Willie Johnson’s, Lord I Just Can’t Keep From Crying, singing in an American accent. Yet it wasn’t until the melancholy yearnings of One Day, about a Romany friend losing his son, that the audience seemed really to be moved, and not until Andy Cutting appeared alongside him with an accordion that the QEH was treated to a roar of applause. The first set comprised and compressed Simpson's varied career. The second showcased almost all his latest album, which mainly sees him on a traditional folk footing. Frequently enchanting, and with songs like Sir Patrick Spens surprisingly moving, it was, however, with some of the more "fun" repertoire that it became a more acquired affair. This was particularly true of Done it Again, a broadside against Tony Blair and the Iraq war cast in a nursery rhyme style with cries of “Humpty Dumpty’s done it again”.
But for all his possibly alienating genre-specific stylings, Simpson kept winning back this potential sceptic with the sheer beauty of his virtuoso guitar-playing, plaintive baritone, and timeless melodies moulded, like the British landscape, by time and the weather. I may have had more difficulty than those around in losing myself in the music and being transported over time and place, but maybe I am just not ready for it yet. The audience was testament to the notion that it can take years of living to fully appreciate the music. At least with the encore, the blues standard Stagolee, when he really started to rock, I was right with him. We were all in a bar in St Louis and it was 1895.
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