Black Swan, York I always go to folk festivals with a notebook and the intention of making a writing a pithy comment about each band. By the time I get home, I find I have a reporters notebook with scribbled comments along the lines of: "Alex Something: Donovan (Sunny Street) -- Classical Brazillian?" So perhaps it is better to focus on individual moments; the narrative arc of the weekend.
Since I left York it has Transfigured into a Harry Potter theme park, because one of the medieval streets, the Shambles, looks a little like some people imagine Diagon Alley must look. There is a queue round the block to buy Potterist tat from the Shop That Must Not Be Named and an establishment, presumably selling milk shakes and slurpies, claiming to be a potions emporium. There's even a Potter themed hot dog concession on the railway station. The York railway bridge had a bit part as the Kings Cross railway bridge in the move, apparently.
Mercifully, the fifteenth century Black Swan Inn has not yet been reimagined as the Leaky Cauldron. It is now surrounded by concrete and glass offices, one of which has a sinister looking missile on display on the ground floor, which gives the whole thing a slight Mega City One atmosphere. The Folk Weekend has been renaned the Roland Walls Folk Weekend in honour of the founder who sadly passed away last year. It feels a little smaller than it did in the Before Times. There's a marquee in the carpark and a "rolling folk club" in the upstairs room; but no singarounds or sessions in the nooks and crannies of the 15th century tavern. The folk club nurtures talent, and the likes of Blackbeard's Tea Party and Joshua Burrell were sadly absent, but stalwarts like Three Black Sleep and A Stallion and the Duncan McFarlane were present and correct.. If I were to summarise the weekend from my point of view, I would say that the afternoons sessions were a bit singery songwritery worldy musicy for my taste; but the upstairs stream -- which was essential a four hour folk club sessions -- were rather magical. But not in the Harry Potter sense. Phil Cerny, who has been doing it forever and has authenticity tattooed in his veins did Whisky in the Jar and Liverpool Judies and Blow Ye Bully Boys Blow and left us in doubt that we were in at a folk festival. The reliably silly Duncan McFarlane does the fine old Rakish Young Fellow, objects to the fact that it's a folk song without a chorus, and interpolates a pirate-appropriate refrain which goes Yo, Ho, Ho, Ho, Ho. The audience wave their hands in the air. Just when everything is getting thoroughly silly, he calls for a moments silence in solidarity with Ukraine. There's a lady in the audience who has taken a refugee into her home, with whom she communicates via google translate. He's asked up onto the stage for a photo to send home. The next act Chechelele (Che-Che-Le-Le) are a world music choir in bright orange tunics and do a Ukrainian lament which they also dedicate to Oleg.
It's the Queens Birthday, apparently. Everyone keeps pointedly not singing Sweet Caroline, for reasons which have to be explained to me. The last act on Saturday, Judith and Trish ("wonderful songs and harmonies") finally cave in and do it. They also do a sweet version of Vinn Garbutt's What's the Use of Roots If You Can't Spread Them, which jerks tears in all the appropriate places
Two Black Sheep and a Stallion are a classic folk trio, singing shanties and harmonies with a some fiddle and guitar, much respected in the local folk community. A line about Queen Elizabeth gets interpolated into a sea shanty that was presumably really about Queen Anne or Queen Victoria, but by way of an apology they follow it up with "cast off religion and monarchy, it was written in Tom Paine's plan". We do not, in the event, dance in the oldest shoes we own; but another group, White Sails, have a self written number about how the world is going to be saved by singing and dancing and loving. Which are are all the same thing in the end. singing and dancing and music going to save the world, and refuse to stop singing it until everyone gets up and dances. I assume that all the Morris Dancers have been booked by the Platty Jubes.
Very courageously, Blonde on Bob, a band dedicated to doing covers of a certain Nobel Prize winning folk-Judas, open their set, not with Blowin' in the Wind or Girl From the North Country, but with I Cross The Rubicon. ("Three miles north of purgtory, one step from the great beyond, I abandoned all hope, I crossed the rubicon": it is not what you would call a crowd pleaser.) The main singer, Chris Eueden, (who covered John Prine and Merl Haggard in the club room) declaims everything with a bluesy voice and knocks Blind Willy McTell out of the park. He even countrifies Blowin' in the Wind. I think his Rubicon was actually an improvement on the one on the album. A distinct highlight.
And there was Sunday evening in the upstairs room. I think it was four years ago I heard a youngish chap called Tommy Coyle doing a sweet song about the Iraq war and making a mental note that he was One To Watch. "Ahmed had a dream last night and so did I: Ahmed don't deserve to be vilified." War��is a bad thing because people on both sides are really the same. Or, as Mr Coyle put it tonight: killing all those people wasn't fucking right. He was no Grace or Gaz, but he did say fuck a lot in front of a no-longer-young folkie crowd.
I don't quite know what to say about the rest of his act: it was the one time in the weekend when it really felt like a singer was saying something personal, taking a risk, even being a little dangerous. And he is clearly a very considerable song writer. But the material... He sang a piece about how fucking bad the government were, which is a sentiment I can fully get on board with. "I need a leader I don't need a liar / I need a preacher I don't need a pied piper". Warning bells started to get off when we got to the "I don't need a liar/ you don't need to call me a denier" part. He then offered one about being sacked from his job (in a chocolate factory -- they have those in York) for refusing to wear a covid mask. On "freedom day". And then one about how his girlfriend left him because of his medical preferences. "You're being a good little nazi/taking every little booster vaccine". "Powerful song writing there" said a nice elderly Scottish man (Eddie Affleck), before singing Bonny Ship the Diamond and that Joan Baez one about the Mary Hamilton. The evening wound up with a "folk slam" and a rendition of the Parting Glass. Like I say: moments.
"Black Swan Folk Weekend"
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