News Update - 19 February 2007
Click on each title to expand the news item
Click on each title to expand the news item
The Time Has Come
The
time has come… for two Harper-related releases
called
The Time Has Come to
appear on the record racks in the next couple of
weeks (if indeed there are any record retailers
left in the world). One is a 4CD
Pentangle box
set, the other is a straight reissue (albeit
remastered from its previous CD appearance in 1997)
of
Anne Briggs’ 1971
album of that title, both with lengthy CH
sleevenotes (but neither as lengthy as they could
have been). I’d wanted to call the Pentangle
set
The Guns Of Heaven,
from a line in their masterpiece ‘Reflection’, but
the then head of Sanctuary reissues was having none
of it. He’s now moved on from that position. I
guess his time had come.
There’s a bittersweet aspect to these releases for me. With the Anne Briggs one another writer, who’d apparently been offered the sleevenote job before me, and before the label decided that someone who’d actually interviewed the artist in question might have more to say on the subject, has apparently insisted on writing some kind of introduction; a similar thing has happened with the Pentangle set. In that case, Pete Paphides, a very fine writer with whom I’ve no axe to grind, was roped in late in the day to write a couple of thousand words of enthusiastic puffery by way of introduction to my apparently ‘downbeat’ 45,000 word history of the group… which has, itself, apparently now been edited in half. I wasn’t offered a chance to see the finished remnant before printing/manufacturing and I must admit to feeling very numb about that. A situation I will never allow to happen again. As much as I love the Pentangle’s music it has, I’m afraid, been the shabbiest project I’ve ever been involved in and I’m not sure I’ll ever read the version of the essay that has my name on it. But the band seem to have reunited for a last hurrah largely on the back of it and the press coverage, already, has been substantial with more to come (hats off to PR maestro Mick Houghton for that). So good luck to them, one and all. For me, on the periphery of this five-sided bandwagon, it was a particular joy to see Terry Cox back behind a drum kit on the group’s two song performance at the BBC Folk Awards earlier this month: the man is an unsung hero, and oozed positivity.
There’s a bittersweet aspect to these releases for me. With the Anne Briggs one another writer, who’d apparently been offered the sleevenote job before me, and before the label decided that someone who’d actually interviewed the artist in question might have more to say on the subject, has apparently insisted on writing some kind of introduction; a similar thing has happened with the Pentangle set. In that case, Pete Paphides, a very fine writer with whom I’ve no axe to grind, was roped in late in the day to write a couple of thousand words of enthusiastic puffery by way of introduction to my apparently ‘downbeat’ 45,000 word history of the group… which has, itself, apparently now been edited in half. I wasn’t offered a chance to see the finished remnant before printing/manufacturing and I must admit to feeling very numb about that. A situation I will never allow to happen again. As much as I love the Pentangle’s music it has, I’m afraid, been the shabbiest project I’ve ever been involved in and I’m not sure I’ll ever read the version of the essay that has my name on it. But the band seem to have reunited for a last hurrah largely on the back of it and the press coverage, already, has been substantial with more to come (hats off to PR maestro Mick Houghton for that). So good luck to them, one and all. For me, on the periphery of this five-sided bandwagon, it was a particular joy to see Terry Cox back behind a drum kit on the group’s two song performance at the BBC Folk Awards earlier this month: the man is an unsung hero, and oozed positivity.
Geoff Harden Archive
Things
continue apace with regard to the Geoff Harden
Archive: a stunning 1973 recording of
John Martyn in
concert in Kent plus four 1968 off-air radio
session tracks will appear as
The Battle Of Medway: 1973
in
the next couple of months on Hux Records. The same
label should also be releasing Geoff’s early ‘70s
recordings of
Robin and Barry Dransfield (two
solo concerts, with two duo concerts possibly to
emerge at a later date). Other recordings in
various stages of negotiation towards CD release
include the Ashley Hutchings/Shirley Collins
Etchingham Steam Band,
Steve Ashley’s
Ragged Robin and
Nic Jones.
At the not-for-commercial-release end of things,
the Arts Council of Northern Ireland’s hired
boffin, Tony Furnell, is doing a very fine and
punctilious job of digitising some of the
collection, starting with seven reels recorded at
the Pike Folk Club in Belfast in 1967 and moving
onto copies of BBC NI masters of Clannad, Andy
Irvine & Paul Brady and Bothy Band concerts
from the mid ‘70s. Tony is based, for the time
being, at the music college where I work as a
librarian and we’ve already established a ritual of
morning coffee with scones and badinage. I may even
have found Tony a singer for his band, Furnell –
who play, he assures me, ‘emotional melodic rock’.
Which makes me think of Barclay James Harvest, but
apparently I’m wide of the mark there…
Eurovision?
Finally,
I am, yet again, a
Eurovision also-ran.
Last year my two efforts into RTE’s search for an
Irish Eurovision entry made it to the longlist of
80; this year my one entry – ‘King Of The Sun’,
specially written/recorded with the pre-decided
performers, the Irish trad group Dervish, in mind –
made, I’m told, the shortlist of 33. So, hey, I
must be getting there: no longer an abject failure,
now a close-but-no-cigar merchant. But I was
thrilled to get a thumbs up, on a personal level,
from an ex member of Horslips, whose ‘Queen Of
Morning, King Of Day’ was a loose inspiration for
the lyrical conceit. I must say, it made feeling
like a loser a whole lot better… My friend Tina
McSherry sang on the demo, and did a fine job. I’ll
probably add it to the free MP3s page at some
point.
Tina McSherry
As
for ‘Project
Tina’,
I’ve bowed out – at least for a while (too much
going on, too much stress) – in a performance with
Tina and maestro Ali MacKenzie at one of Jules
Maxwell’s periodic ‘Red Room Sessions’ at Belfast’s
Old Museum Arts Centre at the start of the month.
Always an event, with three or four sound stages
crammed into a room with an arty café vibe to it
and a host of singer-songwriters and
instrumentalists performing ‘in the round’, our
performance was mediocre – albeit that we had Brian
Houston jamming on lead guitar and Leya’s Paul
Hamilton on drums - but the night as a whole was
tremendously inspiring, and yet another feather in
the cap of Jules’ enigma. Foy Vance, Duke Special,
Ken Haddock and Brian Houston, among others, were
all fantastic and I was almost convinced I should
tackle a
Wildlife Album 3 compilation
with a purely Northern Ireland artists focus.
Almost, but not quite… Sadly, it seems that the CD
is a dying medium. Single-artist CDs may yet have a
niche in the diminishing marketplace, but themed
compilations are sadly a very hard sell.
Wildlife Album 1 has
sold between 500-1000 units, albeit across 30
countries via the website, but
Wildlife 2,
a better album in my view, has probably done around
500 if that. Shored up by the various bookshop
concerts we’ve put on over the past couple of years
the project will probably yield not much more than
£1000 of pure profit for the charities at the end
of this financial year. That’s a hell of a lot of
effort for a very small reward. I wish it could
have been more, but – with Pat Tynan doing his
sterling best on PR and Market Square getting into
the retail distribution system - I just don’t know
what more we could have done. The retail end of
things has been very poor indeed, with most copies
selling directly via the website. Maybe there’s
just too many CDs in the world…
Brian Houston Boxed Set
Which
leads a nicely onto my current project, a
Brian Houston 4CD
box set – basically Brian’s first four albums (from
the ‘90s) plus extra tracks from the period. It’s
been fun to pull it together, and the finished
product should feature a 20,000 word CH essay
featuring loads of Houston interviews trawled from
oblivion, plus one new one. Brian’s an outstanding
live performer and a bottomless well of songs –
he’s on the rise in terms of media interest in
Britain, but he deserves much greater success. At
the very least, I hope the box set will delight his
fans and bring Brian a bit of a financial
windfall.