Linda Thompson, one of Britain's great living singers, has just released her third solo album since her return to recording with 2001's Fashionably Late.
"I’m up to my ass in traditional songs," Linda Thompson says in the extensive Q&A published today on theartsdesk. When she talked to me she also discussed her early adventures in traditional folk music. "I was already interested in folk singing in Glasgow," she said. "Great people like Archie Fisher. When I came to London I got friendly with Sandy Denny, who was singing at The Troubadour. I’d been singing seriously since I was 18, in folk clubs, with Martin Carthy, Norma Waterson, all those people. I really liked the music.
Showbiz is a cruel and mysterious cosmic code that can grind the artist down, before he comes close to cracking it. That’s the message behind the Coen brothers’ elegy to the Greenwich Village folk scene of 1961. Llewyn Davis (Oscar Isaac) stands bruised and baffled at its heart.
Four days in Norway’s capital attending Folkelarm, the festival of Nordic folk music, raises the perennial and always knotty question of how far music can move beyond the traditional yet still be labelled as folk? With the charming and reassuringly old-fashioned accordion- and string-driven dance band the P. A. Røstads Orkester there’s no such problem. But Slagr, despite the presence of a rootsy Hardanger fiddle in their ranks, are closer to the drone of La Monte Young’s eternal music and could never liven up a Saturday night dance.
The Full English album and live tour is the stage and studio result of an ambitious project from the EFDSS (English Folk Dance and Song Society), drawing together songs from the early 20th-century collections of songhunters including Lucy Broadwood, Percy Grainger, Frank Kidson, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Cecil Sharp.
It's only the truly great albums that usher you into a sound-world that is entirely sui generis. And so it is with this second chapter of jazz sax player and composer Matana Roberts's Coin Coin project, a vast musical work-in-progress exploring themes of history, memory and ancestry.
If it seems mythical that a singer-songwriter in his early seventies has made an album this vital yet so timeless, then it’s worth pondering that Man & Myth is Roy Harper’s first for 13 years. In 2011, he celebrated his 70th birthday on stage but in the decade before his profile had been low, with time in his Irish home seemingly filled by anything that wasn’t creating new music. It might be making up for lost time, but Man & Myth’s 23-minute closing epic “Heaven Is Here”/“The Exile” is a career highlight.
Ed Askew’s singing voice is made for melancholy. When not carrying a melody, his reedy vibrato becomes conversational, telling of a turtle laying her eggs, a baby crying in a cradle, a boy arguing with his girlfriend. The graceful, harpsichord-like tone of his Martin Tiple – a plangent, 10-string ukelele-sized instrument – makes the whole all the more wistful. Askew’s haunting, minor-key contemplations probably aren’t going to win him a wide audience but this, his sixth album in 45 years, brings Marc Ribot and Sharon Van Etten on board as collaborators.
The Green Note had put up a Sold Out sign on Monday night when Josienne Clarke and Ben Walker stepped in to play a sometimes mesmerising set on the little stage by the door.
In a world of reality television show winners and interchangeable flash-in-the-pan singer-songwriter critical darlings, Frank Turner stands apart as the real deal. Over the past 18 months, you’d have been forgiven for thinking that Turner had appeared as if from nowhere and his name was suddenly everywhere.