Reviews
Artist:Spiers & Boden Album: Fallow Ground
Label: Hudson
Tracks: 13
Website: https://www.spiersandboden.com
Spiers & Boden are back! Not that John and Jon have ever really 'been away', but it is now thirteen years since the release of 'Vagabond', their fifth studio album together. They were, of course, also instrumental in the formation of Bellowhead, a theatrical musical juggernaut that, over the course of twelve years and five albums, re-defined British folk rock with a raucous blend of traditional dance tunes, songs and shanties. Boden then went on to write his Floodplain Trilogy albums, and Spiers joined forces with Peter Knight, performing both as a duo and together in the Gigspanner Big Band.
'Fallow Ground' arrives, therefore, as an overdue return to where Spiers & Boden began two decades ago - cultivating and harvesting collections of freshly discovered songs and tunes, combining them with original material and creating albums as fresh and tasty as the produce from your local farm shop.
The soil is first broken with 'Bluey Brink' a Peter Bellamy song, and the duo's first voyage into Australian folk. It is a cautionary tale of a hard-drinking shearer served sulphuric acid instead of beer. Unshaken by the experience, his only concern is that "every cough I take sets my whiskers on fire".
A spicy version of the epicurian classic 'Butter & Cheese & All' also arrives via Peter Bellamy, although is sometimes known by its alternative title of 'Cupboard Love' - perhaps in deference to the cook, whose ''want she did supply".
The lively trio of dance numbers that follows begins with the Morris tune 'Cuckoo's Nest', followed by 'Saltash' (of Cornish origin), and concludes with William Irwin's 'Modal Hornpipe'. In contrast, John Spiers' bleakly atmospheric 'Fog' was inspired by a persistent grey mist that formed one winter's day last year, and perhaps also provides a musical metaphor for the last eighteen months.
'Hind Horn' is a ballad that originates from Scotland, but is performed to a tune of French-Canadian origin. A further trio of tunes combine an elegant rendition of 'The Mallard' with 'Valentine' (another traditional Morris dance) and 'The Procession, a jig written by Spiers.
Another pair of tunes was found in Playford's Dancing Master of 1651, and includes 'Red House'. Several centuries later this would cross the Atlantic and become an advertising jingle for Pepsi-Cola. Here, it is performed closer to its original form.
The title track is sometimes prosaically known as "The Cock" (and also as, perhaps more romantically, 'As I Stood Under My Love's Window'). It is performed on 'Fallow Ground' as a satisfyingly pastoral love song. 'Giant's Waltz' was composed by Jon Boden whilst touring Ireland. His ''Ironing Board Hornpipe'' was allegedly inspired by an aversion to domestic chores.
Teeside folk singer Graham Miles originally wrote the melancholic 'Yonder Banks', and 'Funney Eye' was an unfinished tune by Oxford's William Henry Giles, completed by Spiers and paired with the 'Cheshire Hornpipe', to provide a uniquely snappy, instrumental interlude.
'Reynardine' is a traditional song borrowing from European folklore tales of werewolves, but was intended as a home-grown warning to the dangers of illegitimate sexual liaisons. Written at a time when death in childbirth was commonplace, babies born out of wedlock could be condemned to a lifetime of brutality within the poor-house system.
The collection concludes in much happier mood with 'Bailey Hill' and 'Wittenham Clumps' a lively pairing of tunes written individually by Jon and John, and bringing this collaborative opus to a joyous conclusion, John Spiers squeezing enthusiastically on his Welsh-made one-row-four-stop malodeon, one that he himself describes as "an absolute doozy of an instrument".
'Fallow Ground' successfully picks up where 'Vagabond' left off thirteen years ago, and reminds us of the treasures unearthed and harvested whenever this duo come together. Their passion for both recent and long-forgotten folk music, together with their own compositions and playing talents also make this 'an absolute doozy of an album",
David Auckland
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