We’re now in the middle of 2008 and AUK has its festival garb on as we either bask in the sun or get soaked wet. In May Maurice Hope visits the Kilkenny Rhythm & Roots Festival featuring Tim O’Brien, Sam Baker, Chuck Prophet and Malcolm Holcombe. July finds Paul Villers digging the Warwick Folk Festival, a lower key set up while Jeremy Searle revisits the Cambridge Folk Festival seeing k.d. lang, Allen Toussaint, Martha Wainwright and Laura Marling. Just sneaking in before autumn sets Jason Walnut goes to the Green Man Festival in Wales where he encounters James Yorkston, King Creosote, Drive By Truckers, Richard Thompson and Spiritualized who play a song called ‘Death Take Your Fiddle’ which I’ve just Googled and it’s as spooky as any old delta blues song.
Aside from festivals there’s a host of live reviews. In our scopes are the legendary Johnnie Winter with our reviewer not too impressed by the frail guitar slinger, Jason & the Scorchers in fine form in Glasgow, an early glimpse of The Felice Brothers which finds our reviewer Alan Taylor saying “This bunch of whiskey-fuelled hobo troubadours are bound for bigger things – catch them while you can.” Andy Riggs goes to The Emirates Stadium in London to catch Springsteen in action and it’s fair to say he’s not actually enamoured of the experience. While the Boss seems to have provided the goods our Andy is pissed off by being “surrounded by hordes of ‘rock twerps’ unfamiliar with most of the songs but waiting for a recognisable chorus to sing along with” before closing with this diatribe, “On the way home there were many police cordons to prevent fans using the side streets and we were herded down to the Holloway Road and the tube station by an army of police. You would have thought we’d been to see a bunch of foreign prima donnas kicking a ball around.” Mike Ritchie captures a young Justin Townes Earle in Glasgow and also gets to see the fabled Tom Waits in Edinburgh concluding that Waits is “the greatest entertainer on Planet Earth.”
On the interview front, AUK talks to blue-eyed soul singer and ex Doobie brother Michael McDonald, Jesse Malin, Sam Baker, Gary Louris and Justin Townes Earle. Unfortunately all links to these interviews via the Wayback Machine are dead so we don’t know what words of wisdom were dropped.
It’s a similar tale when it comes to news items although we did manage to unearth one which is worthy of a red top rag when it comes to our headline… DOLLY PARTON HELPS A BALD EAGLE. We go on to report that “The eagle was blown from its nest several weeks ago in Florida. On Thursday, it was returned to the wild by the American Eagle Foundation, which is based at the 62-year-old singer’s Dollywood theme park. Before she helped open the cage and watched the bird soar away, Parton named it “Liberty.” “I thought that sounded better than Baldy,” she said.” Oh well, at least we weren’t hacking Dolly’s mobile phone.
On then to the Friends of Americana UK CDs which gather a selection of songs from albums AUK reviewed from April to August of 2008. It’s the usual mish mash of well known names and many long forgotten. Steve Wynn kicks off the May edition and he’s accompanied by John Hiatt, Sebadoh and Jesse Malin. June has Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Willard Grant Conspiracy, James McMurtry, Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle and, somewhat surprisingly Scarlet Johansson (her song, ‘Green Grass’ is actually quite good). The July disc is much less star studded with only My Morning Jacket, John Mellencamp and Chip Taylor likely to be well known but August blasts back with songs from Randy Newman, Daniel Wylie, Jackie Leven, Matthew Sweet and The Avett Brothers in the mix.
[Editor’s note – it’s wonderful to see this album by the band Great Lakes at the top of our chart back then – I cannot recommend it highly enough if you want to seek it out, it’s a hidden gem which I have never tired of listening to].
As ever, part of the joy in revisiting these relics is in discovering lost gems, or, if not gems exactly, a couple of songs which deserve to be unearthed here. There’s the swamp rock dredged up by The Grand Opening on the sluggish ‘Chainbreak’ and then, on a totally different tack there’s the woody and dreamlike sounds of Kathkuda on their song ‘Beneath The Broken Sea’. It’s a lovely piece but unfortunately googling it doesn’t come up with any links even with different spellings of the name. If anyone can find this online, drop it in the comments below. Chris Brecht delivers a glorious, Dylan tinged, slice of folksy country rock on ‘Readin’ My Mind’ and I was immediately in love with a song which featured on the August disc, a mesmerising Klezmer like number by Anna Kashfi, a Manchester band named after a starlet who was once married to Marlon Brando. It’s called ‘Things Get Said’ and it’s quite glorious. Steve Wynn opened the May disc and he returns in August in the guise of The Baseball Project, a mini super group of sorts and their song here, ‘Satchel Paige Said’, is well worthy of a revisit.
As for our editor Mark’s bonus tracks, May features Badly Drawn Boy’s ‘Spitting In The Wind’, a song which kicks off as finely buskerish but is then drowned in keyboard washes and studio effects. The Gin Blossoms kick up a fine racket on’ Memphis Time’, a fine pedal steel fuelled country rock song which graces the June disc. Crowded House entertain us in July with the soft rock of ‘She Goes On’ while it’s the finely chiselled Chris Isaak who croons us into the night with the neon slicked break up song ‘Graduation Day’.
And just because we can, here’s Randy Newman’s song which featured on August’s disc. It’s fairly topical…
You can still be a friend of Americana UK in this digital age and, amazingly, it’s now cheaper to do so than it was in 2008. All details here.
Vintage screenshots grabbed via The Wayback Machine.
