English duo pushing boundaries of the folk frontier

English folk might have stagnated since the days of Fairport Convention, but John Spiers and Jon Boden aim to reinvigorate it with their brand of 'funky folk', they tell Siobhán Long.

WITH ALL THE brouhaha that engulfed the world of Irish traditional music in the wake of Riverdance - the plethora of wannabes, the enormous increase in the music's profile and the unquestionable increase in the volume of musicians playing to a high standard - it would seem that the pendulum has begun to trace its path in the opposite direction lately.

These days, after years, if not decades of opprobrium, English folk music is enjoying a resurgence not seen since the heyday of Steeleye Span and Fairport Convention some three decades ago.

Dún Laoghaire's Tradition: DL festival plays host to one of England's most innovative duos next Friday when it showcases what has been variously described as the "punky" and "funky English folk" of Spiers and Boden.

Rarely will you hear the spare combo of fiddle and melodeon sound so visceral and earthy. Rarer still will you encounter two musicians with such a yen to drill to the heart of a story, recounting it with a brio that's more steeped in the drama of the theatre than it is in the intimacy of a back-room session.

John Spiers and Jon Boden have been at the receiving end of two BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2004 and 2006. Cleaving to a route beloved of naysayers and bolshie storytellers, such as Chris Wood and his English Acoustic Collective, they favour dissonance over soothing harmonies, jagged edged rhythms over somnolent meters.

Sharing a double-bill with fiddler Paddy Glackin in Dún Laoghaire's Pavilion Theatre, chances are they'll rattle and stir more than baste the sensibilities of their audience. Are they merrily flying high on the back of this English folk revival these days?

"I think a lot of these things are cyclical," says Spiers. "The press certainly has now decided that it's now a revival, the same as they've decided that it's now a recession! There was definitely a lull in the 1980s and early 1990s in terms of new acts coming through, but I think that was a hard time for live music in general."

AS WELL AS playing extensively as a duo, Spiers and Boden have been busily conjuring a musical alter ego in the shape of Bellowhead, an 11-piece big band of disgustingly talented multi-instrumentalists whose sound has been compared to, among others, New Orleans jazz and medieval spiritual music (if such a thing exists). Bellowhead's 2006 debut CD, the aptly titled Burlesque, has been mooted by Songlines magazine as the most important album of English traditional music since Fairport Convention's seminal 1969 album, Liege and Lief. Treading softly around the edges of their musical heritage is not something that this pair bother themselves about, and worrying about what others might make of their music is even less likely to feature on their radar.

"The thing about the English tradition is that it's far less easy for anyone to define what it is than it is for traditions that are stronger," Spiers insists. "A lot of English traditional music is guesswork anyway, so it's very difficult for people to be vehemently opposed to experimenting with it. Unlike the Irish tradition, our music was on the brink of complete obliteration, so there's been a relatively small number of people even playing it at different times. A lot of the guesswork we do, though, is through listening to recordings of people when they were 80 years old, and stylistically it can be quite hard to determine anything much on wax cylinder recordings.

"Certainly, there are always some people who will decide that anything new is bad, but I'm not sure that we've been that radical with the tradition either. For us, I think what we've been trying to do is to bring out the good things about the tradition that had been overlooked. As a duo, we're very much acoustic, and we just wanted to see how much more we could get out of the acoustic, which is a folk way of doing things anyway."

With early influences stretching from Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span to Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull, and later yielding to singers Martin Carthy, Peter Bellamy and Louis Killen, Boden adds his instinctive, almost declamatory singing style to ferocious fiddle lines. The telling of the tale has always been a magnet drawing him to the songs, he admits.

"It's the universality of the lyrics, I think," he says. "In popular music, it tends to be told from the first person, whereas there's something much more universal about telling a story in the third person. It can encompass everyone. The simplicity of the melodies also appealed to me, but once I started singing, then the visceral satisfaction of actually participating really appealed to me. What made me fall head over heels in love with the music was when I started playing it and singing it with other people."

Spiers's college DJing background hasn't been wasted on him either. In essence, in both dance and traditional music, his role is to get the punter moving, shimmying and sliding - wherever they happen to be.

"Whether it's DJing or playing the melodeon," Spiers suggests, "they're all about wanting to make people dance. I've always been very interested in how you can build music to be exciting."

SPIERS IS ALSO a self-confessed fan of Andy Cutting, a hugely innovative melodeon and accordion player who's taken some of the European styles of playing and integrated them into his playing with the English Acoustic Collective and Kate Rusby's band. But it was John Kirkpatrick, a quintessential traditional English accordionist, to whom Spiers looked for his earliest and most enduring inspiration.

"I've still got nowhere near playing like him, although I've listened to a hell of a lot of his music," Spiers laughs, "but he's a huge point of reference for me."

Spiers and Boden add liberally to the traditional canon with their own compositions. It's what Spiers considers essential to the future of the music.

"I think it'd be very sterile if you didn't add something to it yourself, and that's what people have been doing for years. Tunes don't spring from nowhere. They have to have had a source in a popular song or whatever, which might now be lost in the mists of time. But with new material, if it's any good people might keep playing it, and if it isn't, they won't. It's a bit like selective breeding really."

It's not every folk duo who sample Shakespeare in their repertoire, but that' precisely what Spiers and Boden have done on their latest and fifth CD, Vagabond, with The Rain It Rains, borrowed from Twelfth Night.

"The problem with a lot of Shakespeare's songs is that they're not in very folk-friendly meters," Boden notes. "They're often in a more Renaissance meter, which is much more melodramatic and doesn't really work, but there are a few where he's borrowed from the folk idiom, which work very well. And I suppose it made sense too for Feste, the itinerant jester character in Twelfth Night, to speak in that idiom."

Vagabond is united thematically by the lot of the outsider, the traveller who exists outside of the mainstream. They had good reason for choosing to link their tunes and songs in this way.

"What interests me about the outsider is that it tells the insiders a lot about themselves," Boden suggests. "It's a means of exploring yourself by looking at the opposite of yourself, if you like. I find it fascinating that there are an awful lot of songs that celebrate the itinerant beggar and his wonderful life, but there are also a lot of songs which demonise him as well. Historically, it's played on people's minds, and we felt that it's a sort of shadow of an ancestral memory of when we were all itinerants. That's what interests us - people who continue to live their lives like that chime bells deep down for us both."

As well as Spiers and Boden's opening concert on August 1st, Tradition: DL festival sees the Dublin premiere of The Frost Is All Over, Tony MacMahon's multimedia production with piper David Power and poet Dermot Bolger, and performances by Julie Fowlis and Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh, and harpist Michelle Mulcahy with flute player John Blake.

Tradition: DL Festival runs from Fri, Aug 1 to Sun, Aug 3 at the Pavilion Theatre, Dún Laoghaire. Tickets available from www.paviliontheatre.ieor 01-2312929