Anyone who has had the pleasure of seeing June Tabor perform live would have noticed she doesn't easily suffer the smug complacency of inattentive paying customers. There's an edgy intensity to her concerts that complements the regular white-knuckle-ride content of her songs, and if you're not listening, then more fool you. On her new album, Aleyn (Topic Records), June has opted for essentially live recordings. No studio edits, effects, or drop-ins, but exactly what the audience heard on the night. "I've listened to tapes that people have given me of my concerts," says June from her sitting room in Lower Panpwnton, near Powys, Wales, "and I felt that when we were getting it right there was something missing from all the recorded work I'd done so far. Because of the way you spark each other off, and the adrenalin flows between you and the audience, I felt I wanted, just once, to capture that feeling on a record. We've tried in the past to have that in the studio, but it never gave us the elements we experienced at concerts. It's great to have an edge in a performance. I'm extremely happy with all the studio records I've done in the past, but I just wanted to do it live." Following extensive rehearsals, June and her band recorded four concerts in March, chose the best performances from these, and mixed them in the studio in the normal way. The results far exceeded the hopes of those involved, aligning the singer with the audience, and creating the thrill of singer/performance dialogue.
"It can be magnificent when that happens. I never expect it, but I always hope for it. What we do is very much dependent on a listening audience, of course, and the understanding on the part of the audience of the words of the songs and what we're actually trying to do and say. It's also a total matter of a rapport between the audience's comprehension of the song and of their experiencing - I hope! - some of the emotions the song has engendered in me. That's very much a two-way thing. It's not just me giving and then receiving - it's when they give something back to me. When that works really well, it's like nothing else. It's probably one of the main reasons why people carry on performing." Although June is highly regarded by her peers, fans and critics as the prime female voice in British folk music over the past 20 years, she (like many other people in these days of multi-cultural crossover) is disdainful of the way she is continually pigeonholed as a "folk" artist.
"Folk is where I started," she allows, accepting with resignation the term as a necessary marketing evil. "On this album, in particular, it still plays a large part of what I do - half of the songs are `traditional'. Yet I don't think of them specifically as folk. Yes, they have come from a traditional background, but I don't think the way they're performed or the way they're arranged is especially `folky'. These are just good songs, wherever they happen to have come from, performed in my own inimitable fashion." Typically, on Aleyn, June emphasises the strength of the songs' lyrics. The arrangements are quite minimal (and in the case of A Proper Sort Of Gardener, suffused with an uneasy sense of foreboding) but deliberately designed to highlight the spirit of the words. Her attitude seems to say, "I've chosen the song on the basis of the lyric in the first place, so why hide it?"
"I don't think of myself as a folk singer. I'm a singer of songs that tell stories, and if some of them happen to be traditional songs, then that's fine. Where I learned how to sing was from traditional singers, and I have a life-long abiding love of traditional music, but I think it's much wider than that." Does June mean the stereotypical early 1960s-based perception of folk singers as (generally) bearded men in sandals and woolly jumpers singing Cyril Tawney and Clancy Brothers songs?
"Well, apart from the fact that Cyril Tawney wrote some very good songs, yes, but I know exactly what you mean. Folk music is part of that perceived image, but I would hope that my music is considered to be somewhat more wide-ranging than that." Another stereotype, this one emanating from the bedsit era of the late 1960s/early 1970s, is the perception that anyone who plays an acoustic guitar is by common consent a folk singer.
"Yes, that's the other one! It's possibly even more prevalent than the previous one we talked about. I once did an interview with a Swansea-based newspaper, and the photographer asked me to pose with my guitar. I said I didn't play a guitar, but he said couldn't I just hold one for the photo? I politely declined." In the late 1990s, is there such a musical development as traditional folk music? "Not in its purest sense any more. I don't think there can be, except that which is maintained by people who do it purely from the point of view of looking at it as a museum piece. There are people who think like that. Preservation is an important part of the cultural heritage of traditional music. If people didn't record songs and keep them safe, then you wouldn't have them to refer to, or to take on in your own way and make music of your own time. But virtually everyone who is performing traditional music these days is doing it rather more from their own point of view than from a slavish copying of how it was done when it was first recorded. That's not a bad thing, though. The music is still being kept alive, except in a more individualistic way."
Ultimately, June Tabor sees folk as a music of the people rather than of one particular person, a malleable entity that should be shaped and formulated to suit the times we live in, instead of something that adheres to a rigidly defined copyright.
"With a traditional song," she says with obvious empathy, "you feel, to a greater or lesser extent, that you can play your own part in the altering of it here and there. You can carry it on with you, so that it's still extremely relevant. There's a lot to be said for the relevance of traditional music to contemporary life. You can look at it from the point of view of it being a museum piece, which is very interesting, but it's effectively gone when you do that. In a most personal way, the best of it is absolutely timeless."
Tony Clayton-Lea's new music magazine programme on Radio Ireland goes out on Saturdays from 9 a.m. to noon
Fact File
Past: June Tabor was born on December 31st, 1947, in Warwick, England. Regarded by many as one of the finest interpreters of both traditional and contemporary British folk music, she has collaborated with several pivotal members of the UK folk hierarchy, including Martin Carthy, Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span's Maddy Prior, The Albion Band, Danny Thompson, and The Oyster Band. She is also highly regarded by the more astute members of the rock fraternity, in particular Elvis Costello, who has already custom-written two songs for her, All This Useless Beauty and I Want To Vanish: "He came up to me after a gig I played in Dublin, and said he liked my music, but why wasn't I doing any of his songs!"
Present: She has just released a new solo album, Aleyn, a superb record, full of dramatic, live interpretations of what 1990s folk music should sound like.
