15 November : Mr Fox

I first heard Mr Fox some time in the early eighties when a friend played their second album The Gypsy, the title track of which made quite an impression on me. I blogged about it in early 2014 (Moorland Before Me Stretched Out Like a Dream). I also blogged about them earlier this year (Malcy’s Big Day) referring to a track from this, their first album.

The great folk-rock scare of 1969-71 produced all sorts of bands, some of which achieved popular acclaim; most were more appreciated by folk audiences. Mr. Fox were of the latter variety, more’s the pity. Their roots weren’t in the south of England, though, as so many were. The band, essentially Bob and Carole Pegg, barely lasted more than a year, but they left behind two fine, if idiosyncratic, albums.

The Peggs came out of the Derbyshire/Nottinghamshire borders and ended up in Leeds. The songs they wrote were influenced by chapel music as well as the traditional village band music of the Yorkshire Dales. There’s a Morris influence, particularly on this first album, but not the Cotswold Morris that influenced, for example, The Albion Band, but rather North-West (processional) Morris. They also had a way with dark and macabre lyrics,

Waking in the forest, beneath the spreading pine
I saw my body hanging like a shirt upon a line
The vines crept up my fingers where they had come to rest
And in my open mouth the wild beasts came to build their nest

 

Walking a valley that never saw the sun
Step by the stones where the icy waters run
Stand in a church where the village choir once sang
And run along the pathway where the dead man used to hang

(The Hanged Man)

Their debut album was released in November 1970. I’ve mentioned many times here the problems with genre definitions and the particular difficulties this presents with ‘folk’ music. Although they had been performing ‘traditional’ material, there is none on this album at all; the songs are almost all by some combination of Bob and Carole Pegg, with contributions by Ashley Hutchings and a song by Dave Mason of Traffic.

Yet all are unmistakably in the ‘folk’ idiom, with overtones of the methodist chapel. If Bob Pegg’s strong, confident delivery grounds the songs in tussocks of sedge, Carole’s equally confident, slightly piercing soprano, is one to rise above the self-conscious murmuring of a meagre congregation on a wet Sunday in February.

And if they’re not ‘folk’ as such, neither are they ‘folk rock’ in the Fairport Convention mode. Although they come close sometimes to what their contemporaries were up to, and there are drums and electric bass, they claimed an influence from the Velvet Underground, the Doors and Moby Grape.

The songs, mostly in major keys, have that trick of sounding joyous and real even as the lyrics travel in a different direction.  In the midst of life we are in death, goes the old prayer, a sentiment the Peggs took to heart, I feel. There is something life-affirming about this set, even if it is a life dominated by work, dance, shape shifters and the macabre. The lyrics are often bleak, resonant, wind-swept, emerging out of the fog like stunted hazel bushes clinging to the side of a beck. Wonderful stuff.

I listened to the compilation CD Join Us In Our Game (I’m listening again now), which comprises their only two albums. The compilation is available on Spotify. The album alone is available as a YouTube playlist and it’s also up on Daily Motion (below)