Saturday 23rd January 2010 @ Colston Hall, Bristol
With Support From: Chris Wood

Any gig that has the audience shouting ‘bollocks!’ to Nick Griffin is definitely doing something right. Add to this the fact that many of those encouraged to joyously decry Nick’s recent appropriation of English folk music as an ‘alternative to the multi-cult junk played incessantly on Radio 1’, were kindly looking older ladies and balding gents, and you have a very magical experience indeed.

All those for whom ‘folk’ conjures images of rotund bearded chaps singing twee ballads about flaxen haired lasses however, have not encountered The Imagined Village. As the encouraging number of other youngens in attendance suggested, The Imagined Village, formed in 2004 as an endeavour to explore the identity of English music, is capable of attracting as diverse a fan base as the wealth of musicians who perform under its highly inclusive auspices (further from a BNP mentality you couldn’t get).

Tonight’s line-up, which constituted a delightful folk version of musical chairs, included folk royalty Martin Carthy, bhangra drummer Johny Kalsi, Afro Celt Sound System’s Simon Emmerson and Martin’s widely acclaimed daughter, Eliza Carthy, whose formidable fiddling was fused to sublime effect with Sheema Mukherjee’s mesmerisingly beautiful sitar.

My one gripe was that, when drum kit, guitars and bass were at full throttle, the endeavour to experiment with modernising folk led to a slightly too polished, homogenised sound, infinitely less interesting than the viscerally emotive scrape of a fiddle (and I’m no purist; my heart sank a little when the first lyric support act Chris Wood sang was ‘Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum…’). The slightly too flashy moments ultimately only served though to enhance my conviction that music doesn’t require ear-splitting volume and extensive production to be extremely powerful, and my enjoyment of the music’s subtler rhythmic impetuous and juxtaposition of styles. So, does such an experimental melting pot of musical traditions actually work? On the whole, a very resolute, bollocks-to-Nick-Griffin ‘yes’!

www.imaginedvillage.com

Jenny Roper