Cyril Tawney
Album: Navy Cuts: The Songs Of Cyril Tawney
Label: Talking Elephant
Tracks: 16
Website: http://www.talkingelephant.co.uk/

There can be few if any singers (outside as well as within the folk circuit) who don't have at least one Cyril Tawney song in their repertoire. Such is the stylistic diversity of his writing that his songs have been successfully covered by performers ranging from The Corries through Peter Bellamy to Martin Simpson, from Hissyfit and Emmylou Harris & Dolores Keane through to any number of shanty crews both at home and abroad. Within Cyril's enormously varied corpus, each individual song (perhaps surprisingly, you might think) lends itself to a wide gamut of potential interpretive and expressive approaches, sometimes involving quite different tempos or rhythms from those Cyril himself originally envisaged and (interestingly) without necessarily sacrificing their intrinsic character. The appeal of his songs is universal despite the at times relatively narrow perspective of the actual experience depicted. As an ex-serviceman in the late 50s, Cyril's early successes came with singing songs of his native West Country, with an easy and effortless style of delivery inspired by Burl Ives, but he was soon to display a definitive talent for writing songs which documented aspects of life in the Royal Navy in a refreshingly different, non-jingoistic way, making great use of the colourful vernacular in a well-crafted manner that was totally instinctive and anything but exclusive or inaccessible. Even the most ostensibly downbeat reminiscences or vignettes are laced with delicious tots of humour and ironic perspective, and the language and imagery is (invariably) both colourful and highly memorable. John Tams, in his insert note, rightly dubs Cyril a "lyric poet", for he understands and communicates real life in all its contradictory moods.

It's no exaggeration to say that a great many of Cyril's songs have truly become part of the tradition. All the acknowledged classics are here, boxing all points of the compass between broad comedy and poignant nostalgia - Chicken On A Raft, Sally Free And Easy, Grey Funnel Line, Five-Foot Flirt, Sammy's Bar, Diesel And Shale, On A Monday Morning, The Oggie Man, Six Feet Of Mud ….. together forming a generous, and representative, selection that's effectively a "best of" as well as a brilliant primer - and yet in the end very much the tip of the iceberg (me, I'd like to see the whole of the Tawney tape collection available on CD, but I can dream I suppose!…)

It goes without saying that Cyril's own performances are virtually matchless, and not only as an authoritative interpretive benchmark. The superficially simple nylon-strung guitar accompaniments conceal much artistry, while also making the whole listening experience an intimate and compelling one. Oh, and this superb release is capped with two contrasted bonus tracks (a harshly realistic portrayal of The Drunken Sailor and the compellingly heartrending Reunion, Cyril's swansong) which, although not listed on the cover of the original issue did actually appear on the disc itself. I've long thought it odd (and frustrating) that Cyril's own seminal recordings had, at any rate prior to Navy Cuts' original release, mostly only been available primarily in cassette tape format (this medium being perennially notorious for its awkwardness of access to individual tracks and its annoyingly high susceptibility to stretching or breaking), so this compilation did much to satisfy what at the time was a huge demand for the availability of definitive "his master's voice" performances of the songs in the far more user-friendly format. The recordings were drawn from the original tape releases, lovingly remastered for ADA (but not tinkered with in any way!) by Oliver Knight and John Tams, emerging from the process clear and characterful with plenty of immediacy. And they sound no less persuasive in this Talking Elephant edition - so I can't detect whether any further remastering has taken place. This Talking Elephant reissue is very welcome, for the disc's original ADA-label incarnation has long since been unavailable. It reproduces Cyril's own notes to the songs in full, together with brief but perceptive appreciations from Messrs. Carthy and Tams and the indefatigable Mick Peat (who masterminded the compilation's original release back in 2001). And of course it sensibly updates us by noting Cyril's untimely passing (April 2005). Even more than before, I'd term this re-release an essential acquisition.

David Kidman