Ask someone what kind of music they like, and they will quite often start with genre. They like indie but they don’t like country. They love R&B but they can’t stand hard rock. And then, as the conversation develops, concessions are made. The hard rock haters love Led Zeppelin, it turns out, and AC/DC’s Back In Black. Nirvana’s Nevermind doesn’t count – that’s something else. And Metallica are awesome. Those who dislike country music make exceptions for Dolly Parton, Lucinda Williams, Willie Nelson. Taylor Swift was never really country. Johnny Cash is the coolest man who ever lived and sang Nine Inch Nails songs. In other words, the very best that any genre has to offer is among the very best music ever made. The cliché is that these artists transcend genre, but Shakespeare didn’t transcend the theatre, and Dickens didn’t transcend the novel. They didn’t need to.
My blind spot is English folk music. It always seemed to me phoney, with its reverence for a vanished country that even its inhabitants wanted to forget about. Folk music has always been tainted by those baffling people who booed Dylan when he went electric, and singers with their fingers in their ears, and a dark gloom apparently antithetical to a good night out. If you had told me that I would one day fall in love with a band whose vocalists LITERALLY CLOG-DANCED ON STAGE, I’d have presumed that I had been afflicted by some terrible neurodegenerative disease.
I can’t remember why I bought Here’s The Tender Coming, but buy it I did, at the very end of the era in which we spent good money on our music, as opposed to very little money on all the music in the world. It was almost certainly a review or a year-end list that got my attention: it was the folk album of the year in Mojo magazine, for example. And when I started listening to Mojo’s folk album of the year, I can remember thinking, with some outrage, This is actually a folk album! No genre-transcending here! The first track features two unaccompanied female voices singing in a regional accent! And yes, the voices, and the harmonies they weave, are beautiful, but even so: back then I loved D’Angelo and MIA, Wilco and the Drive-By Truckers. What did this have to do with me? But very quickly, the tempo changes – the song becomes slower, and other instruments, piano and strings, start to loop around the vocals, and the song swells and fades. Some of the influences come from outside the sometimes stifling world of English folk music: I got hooked in because of my love for contemporary classical composers, Philip Glass and Steve Reich in particular. But mostly what I loved was the sound of ambition, a band who wants to push their chosen genre as far as it will go without ripping the fabric. That, and an otherworldly beauty that makes you want to weep. The centrepiece of the album is ‘Annachie Gordon’, a Scottish ballad that was in Francis James Child’s nineteenth-century collection, and was almost certainly already a couple of hundred years old; the Unthanks dust it off to find the piercing heart of the story. The band’s painful, stately arrangement reminds you that this song, like so many folk songs, is about love and death, the biggest things of all. How can they ever become irrelevant to us, or lost in the mists of old tradition?
My favourite song is the title track, another traditional song that has been sung and recorded hundreds of times, but here it becomes hymnal – the lyric is about the press gangs that came to take young men to the French wars, but the Unthanks’ music is about everything sad, all the losses you have ever felt, all at once. (If you’re wondering about the band’s name, by the way: it’s literally a surname. Those voices belong to Rachel and Becky Unthank.) It’s an English blues, with a spiritually redemptive quality that only those who love and honour music would be able to uncover. If you haven’t yet completed your own funeral playlist, then I’d like to put this up for consideration. Here’s The Tender Coming is nearly fifteen years old, but its beauty will make you ache for the rest of your life. Great music is great music, whatever genre it might once have been.
The Unthanks are my guilty, (Folk), pleasure. I can honestly say that I'm an A-Z music lover - Abba to Zappa. And have to confess to being in a Jazz Rock band for several years! But Folk music... I never got it. Then I heard "Last" on 6Music one day and bought the album. It's a beautiful, ethereal - and still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.
I would also recommend The Imagined Village - who stretch the Folk genre significantly. Their album "Bending The Dark", defies pigeon-holing. Reminiscent of Caravan - maybe.
And I can't leave without reproducing the lyrics of "Last", below:
We are lost
We are lost
We are lost
On and on and on we go
But back and back and back we go
The wisdom thrown out long ago
The great unlearning has begun
And we are lost
Time will pass and soon we'll know
What sons and daughters have to show
For all our speed and all our waste
Do you have a nasty taste?
The frightened people still believe
In gods and heroes and pure blood
The blood still flows and mums still lose
Their sons and daughters in the fields
The fields will soon be under seas
Continue doing as you please
But we won't last
We won't last
We won't last
The girl from 22 is lonely
The boy from 23 is lonely
The girl from 24 is lonely
The girl from 22's moved out
She's moved into another town
She'll move into another street
Another street where she won't meet
The boy from 23, who's lovely
The boy from 23 is lovely
Cause we are last
The past is gone, we don't deny
Cold and cruel without a lie
But failure is a victory
If from it we all get to see
That we are lost
We won't last
Remember the past
And we might last
Remember the past
Man should be the sum of his story
Man should be the sum of his story
Man should be the sum of his story
Now, Nick, I know you're too much an audiophile to not recall it's AC/DC's Back IN Black, not Back TO Black. :)