Riding the Waves to Eternity

Eliza Carthy

I finally managed to get to see The Imagined Village last night, in Glasgow, as they kicked off their tour in support of their new cd Empire and Love.   They were on great form and I enjoyed it, although there was an element of the “first night” about it and some aspects of the pacing of the show as a whole didn’t quite gel I thought.  They didn’t play anything at all from the first album except Cold Haily Windy Night and the band is now more tightly focused with no guest vocalists except on The Lark in the Morning by Jackie Oates who was also the (very good) support act.

Chris Wood, Martin Carthy and Eliza Carthy were all on fine form though the latter was slightly low in the mix at times.  Sheema Mukherjee’s sitar was well to the fore and I think I appreciated for the first time what she brings to the party.

Sheema Mukherjee

I bought the new album last Monday so had a good idea what to expect.  The new material stood up well and on a couple of occasions was stronger live than on the cd – Eliza Carthy’s performance of Seeger and MacColl’s “Space Girl” in particular.  Conversely the reworked Byker Hill worked better on the album I thought.  The arrangment of Scarborough Fair with Mukherjee’s sitar and Chris Wood’s vocals was outstanding as was their reworking of the Napoleonic War song “My Son John” to encompass Iraq and Afghanistan.

Their encore (just before midnight) was Martin Carthy’s world-weary reading of Slade’s Cum On Feel The Noize which turned into an audience singalong of genuine warmth when it could have been cheesy and it obviously took by surprise anyone who hadn’t heard the new album.

It was a very good gig (although Tam Lyn would have been nice).

Chris Wood

The bonus was picking up a copy of Chris Wood’s new cd Handmade Life which he has been selling at gigs but which isn’t available in the shops yet.

Those with relatively short memories will recall that I had his last cd, Tresspasser, in my top 10 cds of the last decade: this one is well up to the same standard with beautifully crafted songs about, well, just about everything.  And just when you think you are in the territory of a contended man writing about his life and his Englishness, he slides the scalpel in.   In one song he muses on the occasional sound of Spitfires heard from his garden, then muses on their adoption as an emblem by the cretins of the BNP and others before recalling wryly that

when I hear them Merlin engines in the white days of July/ It’s the sound/ they sing the song of of how they hung a little fascist out to dry

Hollow Point has been playing for a couple of minutes or so before you realise that his subject is the killing by the Met. Police of John Charles de Menezes.  Parliamentary expenses are metaphorically skewered in Caesar (There’s no more mandate for your soiled institution/We’re all praying here for Divine retribution…) and the origins of the collapse of financial institutions are pinned where they belong (And don’t forget “The Iron Lady” as if we ever could/ The vicious old spiv who taught us how greed was good/ How she sold off our nation and how she started this nonsense/ How you bowed down and worshipped her avarice and her ignorance./ Now let the grand correction begin).

An outstanding album
ps, all photos by me!