Steve Logan

Deliverance (MOONDRAGON, 2015, CD)

Steve Logan, a Welsh singer-songwriter long resident in England, may have lost the accent but not the power to project. Deliverance is his follow-up to last year’s Signs and Wonders. The debut release was a pared-down, all-acoustic set, enriched by support from Kimberley Rew (ex-Katrina and the Waves). On this new album he broadens the sonic palate, adding a full rhythm section and switching between acoustic and electric guitar with a dab of harmonica, much like his avowed hero Neil Young.

Logan once fronted a tribute band, Free Again, and you hear Paul Rodgers in his vocal style. As a songwriter, his tastes are more Laurel Canyon – clear from the outset on the attractive opening track, ‘Deliverance’. But Logan’s his own man, a man audibly at ease with himself. Moments of tenderness, often directed at his “wife and muse” (‘Just The Way Your Heart Beats’), bump up against hard-rocking numbers (‘Didn’t Even Listen To Myself’). Active as a poet for the page as well as a songsmith, he turns in a distinctive lyric, whatever the medium.

Welcome as they are, one or two songs outstay their welcome, clocking in at over five minutes. But that’s nothing that can’t be fixed.

www.stevelogan.co.uk

Nick Drake - footnotes

THE PINK MOON FILES

Jason Creed

(OMNIBUS)

ISBN 978-1-84938-658-6

Softcover. 230 pages

When Nick Drake died in 1974 at the age of 26, he left three exquisitely crafted albums and a host of questions. So many questions. How to interpret that death: suicide or an accidental overdose? Just what sort of live performer was he: charismatic or shambolic? What of his love life?

In the late 1990s, Drake-enthusiast Jason Creed published an important fanzine, Pink Moon, which explored these and other questions. Now, gathered between covers here are reprinted contributions, together with new material. In transcribed interviews or personal memoirs we hear from producer Joe Boyd, arranger Robert Kirby, friends Iain Cameron and Robin Frederick, Island press officer David Sandison, not to mention his sister and parents. An excellent piece by the late Scott Appel unpacks his guitar tunings for the specialist reader. There are chapters on live performances, rare recordings, TV documentaries, and reprints of original album reviews. (Pity the NME reviewer in 1969 who compared Drake unfavourably to Peter Sarstedt!) Also included is Jerry Gilbert’s heroic write-up of the only interview the monosyllabic Drake ever gave.

It’s good stuff, handsomely bound and presented. If I have a reservation, it is that there’s potential for an even better book inside here: a comprehensive source-book, a book that would be fully annotated, preferably with an index. As an editor, Creed is rather too hands-off, with the result that errors and conflicts of evidence are allowed to stand. Using the original Pink Moon as a primary source may be a constraint. Speculations dating back to 1997 by a third-year undergraduate about the clinical nature of Drake’s depression might be fine in a fanzine or discussion forum but sit ill alongside the memories of those who actually knew the man.

Reservations aside, this is an indispensable resource for every Drake fan.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel) May/June 2011

=====================

Grantchester Meadows

Last year (2014) marked the fortieth anniversary of Nick Drake’s death. It didn’t go unrecognised, of course. Uncut magazine carried a piece by John Robinson and interviews with the ‘usual suspects’. For a while I was in discussion with an editor about writing something myself. Searching for a ‘new angle’, I even did some field work by visiting Carlyle Road in Cambridge. This is a row of Victorian terraces where the undergraduate Drake found lodgings after moving out of college for his second, and as it turned out, final year at the university. According to biographer Trevor Dann, he soon fell out with his stiff-necked landlady and relocated round the corner to 65 Chesterton Road. It’s just a short hop, I realised, from there to The Boathouse pub where modern-day troubadours are to be heard plying their trade every Wednesday evening. People say ‘River Man’ was conceived around here. I searched in vain for the genius loci. Betty, I decided, was more likely to encounter the River Man in Grantchester Meadows, later commemorated in song by Pink Floyd, amid the white cow parsley and the plash of oars wafting up from the Cam. But I hadn’t the faintest idea whether Drake ever strayed this far out of town.

In fact, after thrashing around for a while, I had to admit I had nothing new to say. “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent”: Wittgenstein was right about that. Actually – if we’re being philosophically precise in use of language – it’s not true to say I had nothing. I had some small footnotes to offer to the Drake industry. And even footnotes to the footnotes. Since they can’t be inflated to bulk out another unnecessary article, I offer them here instead.

That breakthrough gig

In December 1967 our man was on the bill at the Roundhouse in London. The event was ‘Circus Alpha Centauri’, one of a series of benefits in aid of underprivileged children, compered on the night of Saturday 23rd by Jimi Hendrix (dressed as Father Christmas, according to legend).* No one seems quite sure how Drake landed the gig, which proved so decisive for his career, but I have a theory. At the bottom of the original flyer I notice the production assistants listed as “Victoria and Louisa Ormsby-Gore”. Drake, we know, hung out with the Ormsby-Gores, a Chelsea set of socialites and debutantes he had met in his gap year.** Fairport Convention were also on the bill and, at some point in the evening, Fairport’s Ashley Hutchings spotted Drake. “I thought he was terrific”, the bassist told Uncut, “the guitar-playing, the songs. People would later say he had no stage presence but what partly drew me was that aura.” Hutchings engineered an introduction to producer Joe Boyd. Well, you know the rest.

But does anyone really remember his live performances?

As a teenager, Ian Anderson, now editor of fRoots magazine, came across him at Les Cousins, the Soho folk venue: “It would be very easy to not remember seeing Nick Drake,” he told me. “I saw him do floor spots on Cousins all-nighters and most people fell asleep. Whatever you think of his records, he really was a dreadfully dull live performer with absolutely nothing memorable about him at all, other than not being very good. I'm sure I was only awake because I was either MC-ing or waiting to play!”

He was so deep!

Drake-heads get very excited by the so-called ‘Far Leys monologue’. It’s certainly a document of interest as being the only extended record of his speaking voice, a sort of audio letter to we-know-not-whom taped in the summer of 1967 after his sojourn in Aix-en-Provence. Returning drunk from a party in the small hours, he switched on the family tape recorder and rambled. Forty years later, the languid public-school accent defeats some of his unintended listeners.*** For example, in her book about Pink Moon, Drake's final album, US critic Amanda Petrusisch turns a platitude into a Zen insight. She has him say: “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the doorknob before one goes to bed…” What he actually says is: “I think there’s something extraordinarily nice about seeing the dawn up before one goes to bed…” Indeed, anyone unaccustomed to self-deprecating irony and the studied evasiveness of the buttoned-up Englishman is liable to hear profundity where there is none; or none on the surface, anyway, where self-revelation is nowadays expected to lie.

There’s a line in the ‘monologue’ that always stuck in my mind because it invites earnest over-interpretation of this sort. It’s where he says, in mock-serious tones: “One forgets so easily the lies, the truth and the pain”. It felt like a quotation, but I couldn't place it. Then I happened to reread ‘The Old Vicarage, Grantchester’:

Say, is there Beauty yet to find?
And Certainty? and Quiet kind?
Deep meadows yet, for to forget
The lies, and truths, and pain? . . . oh! yet
Stands the Church clock at ten to three?
And is there honey still for tea?

Rupert Brooke’s evocation of Cambridgeshire village life was a staple of school poetry anthologies and would have had particular resonance for someone about to read English Literature at Cambridge. Big abstractions are acceptable to the pragmatic Anglo-Saxon mind if they’re safely enclosed between quotation marks. As Patrick Humphries observes in his biography of Drake, there are similarities between Drake and Brooke, two golden boys born generations apart who died young. Both were looking for a place of refuge from the risks of saying too much: Drake found it in songwriting. In May 1904 the schoolboy Brooke wrote to his cousin:

When I say what I mean, people tell me ‘O Rupert, what delightful nonsense you talk!’ and when I venture on the humorous, I am taken seriously and very promptly and thoroughly squashed for ‘saying such strange things’.

Drake, according to his friend Beverley Martyn, “would occasionally say something witty, but very rarely”. I suspect there is a serio-comic timbre in Drake if we’re attuned to hear it.

=====

*This is the advertised date for Fairport’s appearance at the Roundhouse in Chalk Farm. However, other sources list the band as playing at Middle Earth (in Covent Garden) on that night. Conversely, Drake’s biographers agree that headlining on the night Drake appeared were Country Joe & The Fish. The ‘stop press’ on the flyer announces them for Thursday 21st.

**Strictly speaking, not a ‘gap year’ as is conventional nowadays, but a gap nine months. In those days, Oxbridge candidates generally stayed on for an extra term in the Sixth Form to take the entrance exams for Oxford or Cambridge. If successful, they would “go up” the following October. (Drake, having left school in summer 1966, took the Cambridge exam at a crammer in Birmingham.) For the overlap between ‘Alpha Centauri’ and the ‘Chelsea set’, see this interview with Abdalhaqq Bewley.

 ***It’s striking how his English accent rings through, even when covering American material. On ‘Cocaine Blues’, one of the early home demos, he gives the title word a curious pronunciation. It sounds more like ‘cockaigne’, the land of plenty in medieval myth.

The Razorbills

The Razorbills have just released their second album, Like Everbody Else. Expectations are high, but before I give it a spin, this might be a good moment to dig out my review of their 2012 debut...

To Hell With Youth And Beauty (Lost Wasp Records)

The clue is in the album title. Scottish ‘indie-folk-pop’ band The Razorbills are not chasing the teen market. They’re making music for grown-ups.

It’s primarily an acoustic line-up, with prominent banjo and mandolin from Harry Thomson and violin from Michelle McClure. But the sound is infused with an electric energy and unpredictable quirkiness that steers well clear of the over-praised Mumfords’ territory. 

Alan McClure, lead vocalist and chief songwriter, is a distinctive talent, sometimes reminiscent of fellow Scot Mike Heron. As a lyricist he’s a master of the witty put-down. (‘It’s not my job to think on a global scale | So kindly shut your gob’ may not be everyone’s idea of an eco-anthem.) But he can do serious as well: ‘God Forgotten’ meditates on the disillusionment following a religious upbringing. With one ear cocked to his folk heritage, McClure adds catchy, danceable tunes, and, deftly supported by the rhythm section of Jon Noad and Richard Ipaint, the whole thing takes off.  

I first discovered The Razorbills through their friendship with 1960s folk icon Shelagh McDonald. Appropriately, much of the music here – ‘Flower In The 60s’ an obvious example – sounds like a creative engagement with the past. Definitely a band on the up.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel). Look out for my review of Alan McClure's solo album in the current issue.

Shelagh McDonald interview

As comebacks go, this one takes some beating. In the late 1960s and early ‘70s, Shelagh McDonald was one of the most respected singer-songwriters on the folk scene. After migrating south from her native Scotland and making a couple of impressive albums, she’d been hailed by Melody Maker as ‘the new Sandy Denny’. Then, in 1972, she simply vanished. For over thirty years, rumours of her whereabouts circulated. Finally, in 2005, with her back catalogue now attracting attention from a new generation, she resurfaced, to tell of a catastrophic experience with LSD that had caused her to quit the music business. Her voice shot, she’d spent the intervening decades travelling, often living under canvas. Happily, that velvety voice has now returned and Shelagh, confidence restored, is performing again.

This interview was conducted in July 2013. We spoke shortly after she’d played a rare London gig, supporting Mike Heron and Trembling Bells.  

You've said that female folk singers were unusual on the club scene in the ‘60s. Did you find it a welcoming environment?

From the moment I decided to take music seriously, I strove to be accepted as a musician, pure and simple, and the guys in the business have consistently paid me the compliment of treating me as one of them. They’ve been great... never patronized, nor let me off the hook if I’d done a rotten gig.

I love your guitar style. Must require a lot of practice. Who were your masters in finger style?

My guitar heroes?! How long have you got! The very first influence was Bert Jansch, whose albums I wore down to within an inch of their lives to learn exactly what he was doing with his fingers. Would like to say I did the same with Davey Graham, but his Arabic cross-rhythms were totally beyond me. (I have played his guitar, though! Broke a string one night in Cousins and, while fixing it, became aware of a pair of hands clutching a guitar as he gently lowered it down on my shoulders... felt as if I’d just been given the Order of the Garter!). My friend Keith Christmas also helped steer me away from the strict folky fingerstyle I used for traditional stuff and, like many in the folk scene, Joni Mitchell solved the problem of bringing colour to one’s guitar sound without breaking your finger-joints... thus began my addiction to open tunings.

You started (am I right?) by singing trad material and other people's songs. When and how did you start writing your own songs?

As with guitar playing, so with songwriting... Joni’s first album was the one that broke the mould for me. Sure, there were loads of good songs being written, but for me they lacked the introspection I was after. I’m a great one for the ‘stream of consciousness’ school of songwriting, because complete honesty is a prerequisite for any art form and songwriting is no different. The only problem with this is, of course, that you can only be as honest as your self-development will allow and I now look back on my early songs as being rather like reading Adrian Mole... or should that be Ariadne Mole?!

Several of your songs from the ‘60s are about named individuals - Rod, Liz… That's rather different from, for instance, Sandy Denny, who wrote about her friends but concealed their identities in opaque lyrics. Any thoughts on the relative merits in lyric-writing of telling it straight vs wrapping up one's meaning?

I’ve always had very laid-back friends... always told them I was writing about them and felt that if I’d disguised their names they would have been a bit miffed.

At the two gigs I've been to you haven’t revived your old self-written songs. How do you feel about those songs now?

My personal favourites are those I played piano on, and of the others, I would say that ‘Odyssey’ and ‘Peacock Lady’ have stood the test of time.

When and how did your voice ‘come back’? Was it before the events of 2005 when the press rediscovered you?

Having read in the Scottish Daily Mail in 2005 that my albums had been re-issued I thought I’d better see if my voice (which I’d completely given up on) could be cranked up to an acceptable level in case anyone asked me to sing for my supper! Gordon [her late partner] and I were living in the middle of a forest at the time and I would start with little ten minute sessions singing anything that came into my head. At this point my throat was still seized up and it could be a bit painful. Each day I’d sing for an extra ten minutes and after about nine days my throat started to relax. From then it was a simple matter of gradually increasing the volume till I was able to really feel what was happening to my vocal cords and regard my voice as an instrument to be played seriously rather than being picked up and strummed to pass away a few idle moments.

Does the music business seem a totally different place now? If so, what are the biggest changes you've noticed?

The music scene is unrecognizable but the audiences are the same. I think that’s what keeps us all going. It’s the old story... the digital signal has changed everything, particularly the legal side of things, and I’m not alone in referring to this as a minefield. Back then, a folk concert in a proper concert hall was regarded as a mega event. I got my first professional gigs by using the ubiquitous door-stop sized ‘Folk Directory’ and writing to every folk club in the country and people would book you without having heard of you. Anyone who was daft enough to travel from Scotland to Devon for peanuts was good enough for them because we were all part of this mad family! It goes without saying I wish there were more folk clubs and that they met more than just once a month. However, I applaud the trend in combining folk with story-telling, poetry, stand-up, etc.

How has your own songwriting changed?

I’m aiming for a more open-ended approach. After a while the whole idea of sticking rigidly to one verse, followed by a chorus to be repeated between successive verses is like putting music into a straitjacket. Would like to think I’m playing around and experimenting more, and hopefully taking more risks.

What's next? Can we expect a new album? I hope so!

Next gigs on the horizon are the Wickerman in Dumfries and Galloway, the Oran Mor in Glasgow, then on to the Sidmouth Folk Festival. Am really looking forward to all of them and to starting my first album for (don’t remind me how many) years next month. Around autumn I’ll be working with an amazing songwriter, Nigel H Seymour, who I would urge folks to listen out for.

(Cheeky question but…) how do you plan to vote in the Scottish referendum?     

Am torn here, firstly because I have a much loved relative (alas, no longer with us) who was a prime mover and shaker in bringing the SNP out of the backwoods and if I opted for the status quo he might turn in his grave. On the other hand, he might be equally mortified if he knew that our oil revenues continued to be controlled, not by Whitehall, but by the major oil companies operating from London if we voted for home rule. I will take my cue from my adored relative and vote consistently where my conscience dictates.

[This interview first appeared in part in R2 (Rock’n’Reel), September/October 2013. Thanks to editor Sean McGhee, to Heather Maxwell McLennan for permission to use her photograph, and of course to Shelagh herself.]

Michael Arlen

Michael Arlen (1895-1956) was a literary shooting star among the smart set of the 1920s. Born to Armenian parents as Dikran Kouyoumdjian, he migrated to London during the First World War, changed his name and reinvented himself as a dapper man of letters. Determined to be more English than the English – or ‘every other inch a gentleman’, as a joke of the time had it – he became the self-styled chronicler of the Mayfair set, publishing a string of short story collections and novels, none more successful than The Green Hat in 1924 (later filmed with Greta Garbo). If you don’t know the name, this excellent short piece by Christopher Fowler in The Independent will give you the facts.

I first encountered him in the pages of Claud Cockburn’s Bestseller (1972), a survey of ‘the books everyone read 1900-1939’. Cockburn had little time for Arlen or the celebrity that he so studiously cultivated: ‘[he] was, I believe, the only novelist to have his trouser-buttons torn off by mobs of fans on the quay at New York.’ He dismissed the baffling plot of The Green Hat as ‘a hurriedly constructed though highly painted vehicle in which the reader is to be taken on the conducted tour through an imaginary England’. And how right he was. The book is a farrago of improbabilities, of fatuous dialogue and rhythmic, empurpled prose. Let me take a passage at random, this from the narrator’s first encounter with the enigmatic, hat-wearing heroine, Iris Storm:

Her eyes were stronger than mine, even as wind is stronger than air, and always in them was the magic of wide open places. I looked down, and far below, like two pearls in the dust, shone two ankles clasped in silk the colour of daylight. I thought of her fate and of her. I thought of corruption, of curses, of death, of life, of love, and of love’s delight. I took hold of the sword in my mind with both hands, but was not strong enough to lift it. I thought of the limbs of Aphrodite, of the sighs of Anaitis, of the sharp cries of love’s delight. I thought how charming men would be if they could misbehave outwardly as prettily as the can in their minds…

Whether two ankles, however comely, could possibly inspire this stream of quasi-philosophical speculation in an attentive young man is anyone’s guess. Somehow it didn’t matter, for what Arlen gave his readers was the illusion of reading about fashionable people leading ‘racy’ lives, all evoked in a language of baroque ornamentation – a winning formula that made him a millionaire, at least until taste started to move away from him in the 1930s. In his own first novel, Burmese Days (1934), George Orwell conjured up an image of Arlen’s typical reader in typical reading posture:

Elizabeth lay on the sofa in the Lackersteens’ drawing-room, with her feet up and a cushion behind her head, reading Michael Arlen’s These Charming People. In a general way Michael Arlen was her favourite author…

However unreadable his writings, Arlen interests me because he had all manner of connections to other people whose reputations have held up better than his own. A friend of DH Lawrence, he turns up in Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) as the playwright Michaelis. One of the many lovers of Nancy Cunard (she nicknamed him ‘The Baron’), he vied for her affections with Aldous Huxley, who as early as 1915 was writing in a letter of Lawrence’s plans to decamp the ‘deserts of Florida’ with an ‘Armenian’. Later, Huxley speared Arlen in print as a character in Those Barren Leaves (1925). Lightly disguised as ‘the swarthy Syrian with the blue jowl and the silver monocle’, he ‘never lost an opportunity of telling people he was a poet; he was forever discussing the inconveniences and compensating advantages of possessing an artistic temperament’. (Cunard, I should add, is supposedly the model for Iris Storm, although the wife of our esteemed Chancellor also stakes a claim for Idina Sackville in her book The Bolter (2008)).

   

Arlen influenced the young Scott Fitzgerald, too, an influence that Ernest Hemingway deplored. He bankrolled the first production of Noël Coward’s play The Vortex (1924). When Anthony Powell came down from Oxford, he was naturally drawn to lodge in Shepherd Market because that’s where the seduction scene in The Green Hat was set (yes, those pearly ankles again). Rebecca West spent General Election Night 1929 in Arlen’s company at an all-night party at Selfridge’s, although she was later to write sniffily of his work as ‘a mixture of the genuine article and advertising copy’. 

  

Surprisingly, there is no biography of this once all-conquering novelist.* A good friend of mine is a relative of his, and with her help, I nosed around the possibility of attempting one. Arlen’s son (a rather better writer than his father, if truth be told) is still alive and resident in New York, where Arlen père moved after a final snub from the English society he so longed to join. Michael J’s response to my approaches was to advise that everything he had to say about his father he had said in his own memoir, Exiles (1971). A very fair response: it’s a fine book and paints a memorable picture of the ageing novelist in ‘retirement’, now forgotten by the public and afflicted by writer’s block:

…from downstairs, just below my room, from the library I’d hear these footsteps. Footsteps pacing. Back and forth. It was a small room really, the library. I don’t know how many times he must have walked around it. The big desk up against the curtains. The paper laid out for him. The pencils. His favourite pen. The books all around…

Perhaps, instead of a biography, there is an essay in the history of the taste waiting to be written. How do the ‘books everyone read’ ninety years ago become the books that no one reads?

*Harry Keyishian’s volume in the Twayne’s English Authors Series (1975) is primarily a work of literary criticism, although it contains much useful biographical material and remains the only book-length study of this author. 

Josienne Clarke

One Light Is Gone

(Hatfish, released November 2010)

Josienne Clarke is an emerging talent on the London folk scene. Although she took classical singing lessons as a teenager, hers is a voice free of contrivance, husky in its upper register, well suited to the singer-songwriter terrain she now occupies.

On this, her debut album, she’s accompanied by Ben Walker, a guitarist with a technique to die for. He studied classical guitar before moving to folk fingerstyle in the manner of Jansch or Renbourn. As well as doubling on mandolin, he supplies discreet string arrangements on several tracks.

Sometimes – ‘Midnight Moon’ is an example – Clarke can sound like the omnipresent Laura Marling, but in general her sympathies, and her careful diction, are closer to the 60s and 70s sirens she admires. I hear Linda Thompson; I hear Shelagh McDonald. 

She has trad songs in her repertoire, but this debut album is all her own compositions. The title track is a wistful ballad vaguely reminiscent of the Thompsons’ ‘Dimming Of The Day’. ‘Done’ circles round unassuming guitar arpeggios. In contrast, ‘All My Truth’ is jaunty and bluegrassy, evidence that Clarke is no one-trick pony.

I know her to be an engaging live performer. This album can only win her new friends. 

www.josienneclarke.co.uk

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Mumford & Sons

I sense the start of a Mumfords backlash, so it’s a good time to take stock…

Mumford & Sons sound like someone you’d expect to find in Yellow Pages. A firm of monumental stonemasons, maybe, or long-distance haulage contractors. In fact, they are not a family firm at all, even if their brand of infectious bluegrass-tinged folk appears so organic that they might have sprung fully-formed from some musical dynasty in a dustbowl state. In truth, they are four gifted young Englishmen from the London area whose live shows are selling out wherever they play (I know – I’ve tried booking.) Shortlisted for the BBC Sounds of 2009 Poll alongside such media darlings as Florence & The Machine and Little Boots, Mercury Prize nominees in 2010… Heck, the Mumfords even duet with the sainted Ray Davies on his latest album.

Formed in late 2007, they came together originally at the Bosun’s Locker, a now defunct cellar bar on the King’s Road where Marcus Mumford and banjo-playing schoolfriend Winston Marshall were promoting country nights. The two hooked up with another old friend, Ben Lovett on keyboards, and after adding Ted Dwane on upright bass, they had a band. And what a band! Their debut album, Sigh No More, released in October 2009, is an impressive record of how far they’ve come in a short time but could never quite convey the manic energy of their stage presence. A typical M&S number begins quietly, then builds into a catchy, rollicking hoe-down as Marcus takes lead vocals and guitar duties while somehow managing to play bass drum and tambourine with his feet.

Last year, the album release imminent, I snatched a few words with the band’s amiable frontman as they were on the road from Newcastle to Aberdeen. How did they find their sound, I ask. All four band members have a broad range of musical tastes, he tells me. Ted Dwane is “into blues”. Winston Marshall is “all about bluegrass music”. Ben Lovett shares a love of jazz with Marcus. As for Marcus himself, he admits to “lots of guilty pleasures” but singer-songwriters come high on the list. “When we came together,” he explains, “we found ourselves bringing together bits of those influences. But we’re developing. I don’t think we’ll ever stay in the same place for too long.”

Marcus has obviously had his moments with music journos who slap labels on what they do, so I skirt this issue with caution. “We’re not really ‘new’ folk,” he says. “We’re just copying everyone else. I wouldn’t really claim to be very original. People try and compliment you by labelling you in one way and actually it’s the most offensive thing they could say. Meanwhile they think they might be giving you a label you wouldn’t like and it’s exactly what you want!” His favourite description of the band was “London hillbillies”, yet “a lot of people would see that as an insult!”

It was my nieces who first told me about the Mumfords, long before the bandwagon got underway. It’s important to know what twenty-somethings are into, and I respect their tastes and thank them for the early “heads-up”. But if I’m honest, I don’t really think these boys are the great white hope of British music. Flicking through the current NME, I read that the likeable Marcus has just been anointed one of the “50 coolest people in music”. Yup – this is the point where I usually disembark from any bandwagon I happen to be travelling on.

Over on the fRoots forum there’s been a long-running and sometimes enlightening discussion of the Mumfords’ case, prompted by the editor’s assertion that he’d never give them house room in his journal, because they have no “roots in a tradition”. “Coldplay with a banjo”, peddling “epic faux-downs” – sums it up. I, too, find something inauthentic about their work, suspecting that it was all done a lot better forty years ago. And I’m puzzled by the fey religiosity of their lyrics. I wish now I’d asked Marcus what he means by “grace”, a word that occurs in more than one song. If I’ve got St Paul right, this is the notion that God’s forgiveness is not dependent on human virtue, but rather on a free outpouring of divine love for the human race, regardless of our moral rectitude or turpitude. Is that what we’re jumping up and down to?

Part of the above first appeared in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)

Sam Sallon

Fresh from supporting Rodrigo y Gabriela on tour, along comes Sam Sallon on a wave of expectation.

As a teenager he was listening to Snoop Doggy Dogg, Prince, David Bowie and the Red Hot Chili Peppers (“just the coolest band”), none of them much resembling the thoughtful singer-songwriter style he has now developed. At gigs people tell him he reminds them of Cat Stevens or Jackson Browne or Paul Simon: “People who don’t write music think there’s nothing odd about going up to a musician and telling them who you sound like to them. They say it because it’s a compliment, comparing you to someone they like”. Sallon is clearly flattered by all this, but also, I suspect, a little fazed. Probably because he worked out his own solutions to musical problems and only started listening to these big hitters when the comparisons came rolling in.

At school Sallon learned trumpet. Now, however, the guitar is his weapon of choice. Over the years he has finely honed his finger-picking style. I asked him who his guitar heroes were, expecting a roll-call of the acoustic maestros of the last fifty years. Instead, I learned that he’s largely self-taught and his style self-invented. His earliest songs, like ‘Keep Moving’ and ‘Give’, written when he knew little about technique, can be played with two fingers. Later he progressed to using five, until he realised you don’t need the little finger. “Along the way I’ve come up with some nice happy accidents!” he reflects. David Watson, the sharp-eared producer whom Sallon namechecks with reverence, helped him refine his style by listening to other guitarists who achieved similar effects but with less effort.

His technique requires acrylic false nails, the ‘Sallon talons’, which he has renewed every three weeks at a local shop. “I don’t meet many other people who do this, but it’s the closest I can get to a natural extension of the hand.” The manicurist may suspect him of being a ladyboy, small children may be afraid to shake his hand, but his girlfriend “doesn’t mind” and the thin, tough nails enable him to maintain the sharp, clear tone he wants.

“What keeps me up till 3 in the morning with friends is trying to get some sort of handle on life,” Sallon tells me. The outcome of those late nights of existential rumination is a bunch of songs in a highly melodic, aphoristic style, free of pretension. Each one is “more of a question that’s being asked than a statement being made,” he explains. “When I sing them I do feel that there’s a sense in them, and it’s not always the same one each time”.

He cares more about the songs than about any way of recording them. So he encourages remixes of his work. “Some people say they only listen to electronica,” he says in bafflement. Well then, fortunate that Edmund Squeeze has remixed ‘You May Not Mean To Hurt Me’ as electronica, which Sallon hopes will take the song to an audience he wouldn’t otherwise reach.

His debut album, One For The Road, is set for release later this year – by which time he expects to have “all of his ducks in a row”, as he puts it. At a superb gig at the Luminaire in Kilburn, North London, I heard him run through the entire material accompanied by the musicians featured on the album, including string section. It’s sounding good to me and I confidently predict this young man will be playing the festival circuit near you before the year’s out – with his ducks neatly in a row.

First published in R2 (Rock’n’Reel)