Moments of pure wonder: Folk Weekend Oxford reviewed

Has any musical moment extended its tendrils in so many unexpected directions as the English folk revival of the mid-1960s? In its beginnings, it was a source of pilgrimage for Bob Dylan and Paul Simon, who pinched his arrangement of ‘Scarborough Fair’ from Martin Carthy way back in the dim and distant past when the Beatles walked the earth. It spread into progressive rock and heavy metal (the black metal musician Fenriz, of the Norwegian band Darkthrone, told me recently that he considered Steeleye Span to be an important band in promoting pagan traditions). As it evolved into folk rock, it laid down a path for rock bands seeking to avoid the conventions of blues-based rock music (listen to Richard Thompson’s guitar solo on Fairport Convention’s ‘Matty Groves’ and you will hear exactly what Tom Verlaine was trying to do with Television a few years later). You might say, even, that its resurrection of the myths of old Britain, weird Britain, can be traced indirectly into other art forms — the novels of David Peace, or films such as Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England.

And through it all there were the musicians who retained some fealty to the original impetus of the revival: the old songs, played freshly, but respectfully, for a new audience. John Spiers and Jon Boden are the figureheads of the current wave — Boden playing fiddle and singing, Spiers playing melodeon (and other free-reed aerophones) — not just for their duo recordings but for forming the folk supergroup Bellowhead. Their set on the opening night of Folk Weekend Oxford — a three-day event across multiple platforms, with the can-do air of a village fête on a rainy day — was a wonderful display of virtuosity and free from conceptions of cool in a way only English folk seems able to manage.