Way of the Morris

Watched this new film, directed by Tim Plester and Rob Curry last night. It’s a beautifully made, often elegiac investigation of morris dancing, one that steadfastly refuses to trivialise or patronise its subject in that knee-jerk way most media do. The film is a personal journey for Plester, a thirtysomething who was born into a family of morris dancers in the village of Adderbury in Oxfordshire. That particular group was started in the mid-70s, reawakening a morris tradition in the village that died out after the First World War, when only one member of the original side returned from the trenches and couldn’t countenance the idea of dancing ever again. Plester, who never danced himself, gets drawn into the mystery, charm and camaraderie of the morris men (for men they are), and eventually steps, literally, into his father's old shoes.

The tone of the film has what you might call a 'hauntological' bent, with a voiceover edging on the rhapsodic and melancholic, visual allusions to films like The Wicker Man, and plenty of unearthed Super-8 footage and family Polaroids. The notion of morris as a ridiculous, embarrassing aspect of native English culture is dealt with and transcended within the first couple of minutes, and after that we're off on a serious, respectful, yet never sentimental exploration of the impulses behind the dance and the individuals who participate. Anyone who saw Gideon Koppel’s recent film Sleep Furiously, about a remote Welsh village, or older rural movies like Akenfield, will find much to enjoy here. At the same time it’s an interesting counterpoint to older folkloric films such as Peter Kennedy & Alan Lomax’s Oss Oss Wee Oss from the late 1950s, which treats the Padstow May celebrations as an utterly mysterious, alien ritual. Way of the Morris seems to me very much about coming to terms with and finding a place for the dance in a 21st century life.

There seems to be a small resurgence of interest in this baffling custom at the moment, from this comedic treatment to a BBC documentary which is currently in production. It's interesting to note in Plester’s film how many young people he encounters in the village seem to quite interested in the custom and express a willingness to get involved.

Way of the Morris is being screened this Saturday and Sunday as part of the Southbank Centre’s 5000 Morris Dancers weekend, based around David Owen’s extraordinary artwork (featured on an earlier post on this blog). I’ll be hosting a Q&A session with film makers Tim Plester and Rob Curry, and a couple of the Adderbury Morris Team, after Saturday’s screening – details here. It starts at 4pm and it’s FREE, with a small booking fee.

Folk-rock nation

Mark Sinclair on proposed changes to the design of the new UK passport – tapping yet again into the iconography of a rural, weatherbeaten, historic Britain. “The psychedelic village scene [on the opening page] might look more at home on the sleeve of a folk-rock album from the early 70s”...

Stravaig with gravitas

Reading and answering Qs at Green Man Festival this weekend, accompanied by Alasdair Roberts who seems to have worked up something special for the occasion. Literature Tent, Saturday 21 August, 2:30pm.

Psych Folk at Rough Trade

At Rough Trade East this evening to co-launch Electric Eden alongside Rough Trade Shops’ new compilation Psych Folk. The CD is a collection of tracks by current artists working in an acid/psychedelic/folk-rock vein, both in the UK and overseas.

Kicking off at 6:30pm with live sets from The Owl Service and Sleepy Sun, plus I’ll be spinning in some music between the acts. Full instore details here.

Bagpuss: some conclusions

My kids have suddenly become obsessed with the DVD of Bagpuss, which affords another chance to become immersed in this antiquey Smallfilms production from that interesting moment, 1974–75, when folk started to go all dusty and parochial. It's a series that's deeply saturated in ghostly echoes of the folk revival – full of songs, nursery rhymes and lyrics that are set to ballads and rustic old tunes. Each episode, in fact, turns on a story about an old item or fragmentary relic brought into Emily’s shop, at first unidentified, then gradually unravelled or mended by singing its history and identity into being – almost a metaphor for the whole process of folk revival itself.

Professor Yaffle, the ‘wise’ old woodpecker, purports to be the authority on all the antiques, but like many professional folk historians of yore, he often makes wrong assumptions about their provenance based on conjecture and his own self-importance. Bagpuss’s resident singer- storytellers, Madeleine the Rag Doll and Gabriel the Toad, are the ones who breathe life into all the broken fragments, and they were voiced by Sandra Kerr and John Faulkner, real life folkies who had been associated with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger's hard-line Critics Group in the 1960s. The duo have recently acknowledged the enduring affection for this BBC series and 'reformed', playing at this year's Sidmouth Folk Week among other dates.

What I notice and marvel at now, re-watching the series with a critical eye, is how subtly subversive it is, and how truly it adheres to the spirit of folk as an alternative people's history and mildly anarchic force, upsetting the normal orders of power and reversing stereotypical tales. Take for instance the episode entitled “The Frog Princess”: at the end the princess kisses her frog, he doesn't change into a prince but instead she is recast as a frog herself, to live happily ever after as a lowly beast, in renunciation of her royal status. In “The Owls of Athens”, the titular birds were great singers but became greedy to be rewarded for their talents, and have their singing voices confiscated by the moon. A cautionary tale, perhaps, for anyone seeking to make excessive cash out of the people's music (Steeleye Span, for instance, were enjoying their commercial, glam-rock-inspired high watermark at exactly the same timeBagpuss was transmitted). The episode also includes “The Bony King of Nowhere”, which paints a bleak portrait of a king driven to mad, aimless distraction by his powerful office. “The Fiddle” draws on the common folk tale of a violin that drives its player and audience into uncontrollable fits of dancing - a story also invoked by Kate Bush on “Violin”, from 1980'sNever for Ever.

And of course being an Oliver Postgate production it has an endearingly homemade, craft-y feel – the hand-drawn illustrations for the songs, for instance, are kind of rubbish in some ways, swashed-out watercolours and scribbles. But what a world away from kids' TV today, with its garish colour schemes and its sense – pervasive across all TV broadcasting these days, not just for children – that it has to clamour to keep its audience’s attention span before it wanders off somewhere else. The thought of anything aimed at today’s children with similarly encoded mild subversion is a distant dream.

Bagpuss’s sepia-toned bookend sequences are bang in tune with the retroactive mood of those times, the power-cut years in the immediate pre-punk era. Emily’s chant, to wake the sleeping cat – wise, sleepy demiurge of the old curiosity shop – recalls enchantments of other children’s fables, such as "Oak and Ash and Thorn" from Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill – a song arranged by that folky fan of all things Rudyard, Peter Bellamy. Bagpuss’s hermetic world of lost and unhoused objects speaks directly to that profoundly British obsession with the past and how to reconstruct it.

Hua Hsu in The Atlantic with a ruminative response to my Exotic Pylon chat with Jonny Mugwump and the wider idea of folk/authenticity.

Thanks to everyone who made it to Cafe Oto for my talk at The Wire Salon last Thursday. It was a great night, brilliant audience, and there was a good spirit to finally launch the book out in to the world. Made my night to discover that Mike Heron, Bobbie Watson from Comus, Green Gartside and Alex Neilson of Trembling Bells had all been in the same room!

Anyone planning to hear me read at the Big Chill festival on Sunday (8 August) please note the start time is now 16:50.

Some articles

The latest edition of The Journal of Music has The Incredible String Band on the cover and a piece by me in it. And here’s a link to my archaeology of ‘folk’ in The Guardian.

By the way, apologies for thinness of posts in the past week or so. I’m changing broadband providers and am not due to come online again until Wednesday 4 August. The book seems to have been getting out there already, and thanks to everyone who’s written in with a kind word recently...

Exotic Eden on Electric Pylon...

You can listen to the archived Exotic Pylon net radio show, featuring conversation between host Jonny Mugwump and myself, here. The show lasts 90 minutes and includes a selection of music from Talk Talk, Peter Bellamy, Steeleye Span, John Ireland, Dave Cousins, Archie Fisher, Mandy Morton & Spriguns, Robin Williamson and Alasdair Roberts.