I have been writing a fair bit recently, just not here. Mostly, though not completely this has been for work. It has been enjoyable but obviously has kept me away from other stuff – like here.
I mentioned a few posts ago that I was toying with writing some fiction and I have, in odd moments, been working on that. Working on it has brought rewards as a substantial chunk of plot fell into place over the course of a single Saturday morning a couple of weeks ago as a newspaper article set of a chain of dominoes in my memory to give me both a MacGuffin and its backstory which in turn gives me the core narrative.
This is not sufficient of course, as the excellent Charlie Stross points out, the idea amounts to about 1% of the process, the other 99% being execution.
Nevertheless, researching that MacGuffin and working out the rest is an excellent way of occupying myself creatively. I am especially interested that it has taken me back to working out the consequences of a remembered comment from one of my old tutors in 1982 and my more recent interest in pre-reformation folk plays in Scotland.
Sorry if that is vague, but there we are.
Also, as I write, on my headphones Maddy Prior is singing:
She took him by the milk white hand, led him to the hall
Till they came to a stone chamber where no one could hear him call.
She sat him on a golden chair, she gave him sugar sweet,
She lay him on a dressing board and stabbed him like a sheep.
Out came the thick thick blood, out came the thin.
Out came the bonny heart’s blood till there was none within.
She took him by the yellow hair and also by the feet.
She threw him in the old draw well fifty fathoms deep.
They don’t write them like that anymore – which, given the history of the song, is just as well
In the seventies I used to really like Steeleye Span.
I probably got into them around the time of Gaudete and they used to be on TV a lot. While they weren’t my first introduction to folk music they were a formative influence as I started to listen more.
My stand out memories from the time would probably be Thomas the Rhymer and Alison Gross but I also remember when Now We Are Six and Commoners Crown got a lot of attention on the hipper radio shows as they were released.
In time I went off them, although my favourite single track of theirs is the Mike Batt produced “Fighting For Strangers” which was way, way ahead of its time in what it set out to do (link below).
After a while I stopped listening to them, as you do, although occasionally dipping into compilations and stuff. And some of their old TV appearances which appear on YouTube are pretty embarassing now so there was a kind of tacit aversion therapy underway.
But for some reason I started listening to their very earliest records on Spotify over the weekend and realised again why they had made such an impact when they did when they were still raw before their sound was locked in and they became famous.
I’m not fond of their later sound which became a bit too produced and structured for my taste but the early stuff is well worth a revisit.
Come the showers o’er the water
Wash the morning light away.
Who has seed to sow and scatter?
Who will walk the fields today?
In Canada the land is ready
Hungry soil where life is sown
Sow the seed and grow the seed
And lay the future down
Solan geese are diving, wheeling,
High o’er Assynt eagles soar.
Upturned keels stand cracked and peeling
Empty creels will catch no more.
Flanders’ fields are silent, greening,
Poppy flowers in France full grown.
Sow the seed and grow the seed
And lay the future down
Flow’rs o’ forests falling, weary,
Passion spent at Passchendaele.
Blackbirds feast on Rowan berries,
Corbies croak their autumn tales
of Alamein, Tobruck and Naples
– Harvest hymns to scythe and bone.
Sow the seed and grow the seed
And lay the future down.
Spindrift eddies o’er the machair,
White the coat of mountain hare.
Travelers’ tales and songs and laughter
Mem’ries now in fields of Blair.
To Canada and France and Burma
Alba’s seed was packed and bound.
Sow the seed and grow the seed
And lay the future down
On other soils the seed was scattered
Other lands with fruits endowed;
Crofter, Cottar, Fisher, Traveller
Faces stare from archives now.
Silenced now the glen and township
Dried the stream of living song.
Sow the seed and grow the seed
And lay the future down
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