England gets a sense of tradition

Traditional music in England is quietly gaining an unlikely cachet with a younger audience. The new generation of musician carries less cultural baggage, writes Aengus Collins.

In Ireland it is easy to take the thriving traditional music scene for granted. It is part of our social and cultural fabric. The same is not true in England. Traditional songs and music exist there of course - there are rich traditions - but they have no resonance at all for the vast majority of people. Nor is it a matter simply of disinterest. Traditional music is routinely scorned, its listeners ridiculed.

But these are interesting times for traditional music in England. Traditional songs, tunes and sounds and have begun quietly to acquire an unlikely cachet in recent years, particularly among younger musicians and listeners, many of whom might previously have been expected to dismiss it as irrelevant. In part this is a cyclical thing, a short peak of interest that for many will fade to nothing. And in part, too, it's a faddish thing, a borrowing of traditional motifs and idioms by more popular musical forms, rather than a significant increase in the popularity of traditional music itself.

But while there may be caveats, something of substance is happening. A new generation of young traditional musicians and singers is emerging. There is real talent on show, and, perhaps crucially, there seems to be less of the cultural and ideological baggage that tends to dog English traditional music. There have been high-profile revivals before, but this time there is less of a sense of this being a movement, or of there being a cause to espouse or rules to adhere to. It seems a more natural thing - young people playing old music because they find in it depth and beauty and enjoyment.

JOHN SPIERS AND Jon Boden are two of England's most successful traditional musicians. They're still young at 30 or so, but in the five prolific years they've been playing together they've imposed themselves as seasoned veterans on the traditional scene.

They make great ambassadors. They play beautifully and their energetic love of the music is infectious. Live, they are consummate. But they are candid in their acknowledgement of the underlying weakness of English traditional music, its lack of a real base of talent beneath the professional level. They look to Ireland to illustrate England's problems.

"Traditional music in Ireland is far more developed than it is in England," says fiddle player and singer Boden. "For one thing the educational structures are far more advanced. They don't really exist in England, beyond a few bodies that organise workshops.

"Musically, too, things are more sophisticated in Ireland. You go to Ireland and there are five-year-olds playing better than . . . well, me for a start. Your average Irish fiddle player is just a better player technically than your average English player. And part of the reason for that goes back to the structures you've set up within which people can work at their music and achieve things.

"In England, amateur musicians don't know what they're supposed to achieve. So the tradition over here is all over the place. It's great as a professional musician because it gives you a lot of space to work in, but it's rubbish in terms of getting a lot of people to play - which is what traditional music should be about."

The two seem struck by the casual breadth of Irish traditional talent. Melodeon player Spiers sings the praises of an Irish box-player in Leamington Spa. He's not a professional, "just a bricky with hands like bloody spades", who happens to be a great musician with an amazing box technique.

"We go and play in sessions with Irish musicians," continues Boden, "and you find yourself thinking: 'Bloody hell, they must be in some really famous band or something. But it turns out that they work in the supermarket, and that they have no conception of earning a living out of their music because they're only the 10th best fiddler in their town."

They say the fact that traditional music can live and thrive in Ireland suggests that it's not ridiculous to hope for progress in England. But when asked why English traditional music is such a narrow niche interest, Boden is damning.

"It's about knowledge to a certain extent," he says. "But it's more a matter of English people's attitude to traditional music. It's not so much that they're ignorant of it, which they are. But that's not the real issue. It's that they're proud of their ignorance. You get people saying 'I'm not interested in folk or traditional music. All of it's rubbish, I know it is and I don't want anything to do with it.' And they're proud of it, proud of the fact that they know nothing about the music."

It seems to be an English problem rather than a generally British one. In Scotland, traditional music is much more grounded in the broader culture. When 23-year-old Julie Fowlis sings on her wonderful album Mar a Tha Mo Chridhe she seems more naturally at ease with the traditions she's working with than do many of her English counterparts.

And another young Scot, Alasdair Roberts, is responsible for some of the most arresting recordings of English as well as Scottish traditional songs in recent years.

Much of Roberts's work involves his own compositions, so he says he doesn't like to call himself a traditional singer. But his two albums of traditional songs, The Crook of My Arm and last year's No Earthly Man, are among the most compelling British traditional releases in some time. Roberts has a dark and distinctly modern voice, but he brings to the material a stark dignity reminiscent of some of the great British singers and guitar players of the past 40 years, such as Nic Jones and Dick Gaughan. His singing of Lowlands is a worthy tribute to Anne Briggs's haunting recording from the 1960s.

Curiously, Roberts has been lauded in the young and vibrant world of alternative music while remaining somewhat overlooked by the traditional community.

"I feel I'm a bit of an interloper between those two worlds," he says, in his quiet voice. "I have a foot in both camps, but I'm not really comfortable being categorised as one or the other. I don't really analyse it that much - I just do what I do. I have a great love for traditional song and music, but I'm not afraid to use it in a way that others might see as disrespectful."

This attitude is part of what's refreshing about the singers and musicians coming through now in Britain. Respect for the music isn't confused with preciousness or purism. In their very different ways, young figures such as Roberts and Fowlis in Scotland, and Spiers & Boden, James Raynard, Rachel Unthank, Eliza Carthy and Jim Moray in England have injected new life into traditional music. They retain and nourish the defining link with the singers and musicians who have gone before them, but they're not afraid to make the music new.

THIS HASN'T ALWAYS been the case, and the English traditional scene in particular has a purist streak that does it no favours. "There's a bit of snobbery in English traditional music," says Boden, "as if you're not playing the music properly unless you cut off all your fingers. There's a small section of people who think that any kind of technical ability is untraditional."

This is a view echoed by James Raynard, one of the current generation's most interesting singers, a man with a powerful and unadorned delivery, influenced by and reminiscent of the earliest of English songs. "To be honest," he says, "in England the perception of traditional music as being stuffy and formal is the traditional community's problem more than anyone else's. There's a tendency among some of them to put barriers up around traditional music, and to pretend that it's unconnected with other sorts of music."

At the moment, though, traditional music finds itself constantly connected with all kinds of other music. A surprising number of younger, alternative musicians have turned to traditional songs and styles for inspiration (see panel).June Tabor, one of the undisputed greats of English traditional singing, counsels against reading too much into these signs of traditional influence on other music.

"It's not that unusual," she says, "the adoption or pseudo-adoption of traditional elements into other music. It has been going on for a lot longer than people would think. But these passing inclusions of traditional elements generally miss the point, and have no real sympathy for what traditional music is." Tabor believes traditional music is "almost a lost music" in England, but that it has a "timeless beauty" that will always survive and that will be continually rediscovered.

For James Raynard, this rediscovery and renewal of lost traditions is at the heart of what he and other young traditional singers and musicians are doing. "Somewhere along the way," he says, "the chain connecting us to our tradition was broken, and part of what's happening now is that we're trying to get it back. Traditional music links us to the past and that's a very real and very positive thing. It may be old, and the modes of delivery may sound old-fashioned but traditional music is still about what it is to be human. The things that remain the same between then and now are much more important than the things that are different."