The journalist and broadcaster Danny Baker recently admitted that, getting on in years, he listens to almost nothing these days other than country music. I can see the appeal. If the relentless artifice of most pop music doesn’t wear you out, its sheer unbridled energy is sure to. Fortunately, the term ‘country’ now embraces a remarkable variety of performers and writers, not all of whom customarily wear enormous hats. Instead both country and, in these islands, folk have become traditions on which people can draw while creating something new and distinctive of their own. Looking at my own playlist of the past few months, I see that I am starting to tend more to the folk side of things. Twiddly fiddles and Northumberland pipes have been resisted so far, but for how much longer? Underlying this development is my growing belief that the acoustic guitar holds more secrets to happiness than the electric guitar turned up to 11. Perhaps I have always felt this way. With age comes enlightenment, as well as the inability to eat pizza after sundown.
It’s also approaching the time when people start nominating their albums of the year, so let’s begin with Christy Moore’s Burning Times (Columbia/Newberry). This actually came out in the autumn of 2005, although I didn’t buy it until this February, but who cares anyway? The best music seeps slowly into your consciousness, or at least it does into mine. Moore is a cantankerous Irish singer of folk roots and inclinations, whose records have never quite lived up to the reputation of his barnstorming live shows. I have many of his albums: one or two are overproduced, and several are woefully underproduced, as though he has spent the best part of 30 years grasping for a modus operandi that remains forever out of reach. Well, no longer.
Burning Times enjoys the musical accompaniment and direction of Declan Sinnott, whose rich mix of multi-tracked acoustic and electric guitars somehow manages to be unobtrusive and hugely enjoyable in its own right. This leaves Moore to sing the songs, and what wonderful songs they are. One Dylan, one Richard Thompson, two from the Handsome Family, a Morrissey, a Joni Mitchell (‘The Magdalene Laundries’: very nearly as bleak and lovely as the original), a Phil Ochs, a Natalie Merchant, several Irish songs I had never heard before, and his umpteenth rendition on record of the title track, a typically impassioned lament for the millions of women who died accused of witchcraft in the Middle Ages.
Some listeners might find this passion, indeed this Irishness, hard to digest, but I’d take both any time over the callow showboating of so many current singers. I think it’s a glorious voice — warm, kindly, furious, utterly of itself — and he has that rare and precious ability to make other people’s songs definitively his own, mainly by singing them in his unreconstructed brogue, and adjusting them to fit. Burning Times is the belated realisation of a singular talent.
My other two recommendations are both from 2004, and both acts have released albums since that I haven’t yet bought. (What’s the hurry? Ask me again in two years’ time.) Kirsty McGee is a very special folk singer/songwriter with an astounding melodic gift, and Frost (Park Records) is perfectly named, a delicately pretty collection of her songs, deftly produced by Boo Hewerdine, once of the Bible and now a prolific songwriter for such as Eddi Reader. McGee sings in a warm contralto which reminds me of someone and I have spent all year trying to think who, but finally have had to acknowledge defeat.
The Broken Family Band are a bunch of layabouts from Cambridge who sound like a country-music Pulp: their Welcome Home, Loser (Track & Field) is full of good-time twangery with an irresistible undercurrent of wit and bitterness. No Americans could make music like this: again, its deceptive simplicity draws you in, and the substance of the songs keeps you there. The final track, ‘Coping with Fear’, is startling, raw and unexpected, and shows how effective it can be when an essentially quiet band makes an extraordinary amount of noise. They are good at album titles, too: their new one is called Balls, and I am seriously hoping it isn’t.
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