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New section: The Thoughts of Chairman Dai (David Jandrell's wry look at the ways of the world)
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Jon Airdrie as a folk musician
The reasons for this site, now
Things slow down. Things take longer. More forethought and, perhaps, too much deliberation. The gain of egocentricity is to vent the raw soul. The gain of ignorance is to weave unique patterns. Wondering if life-coherence is the price to pay for on-going freshness: thinking of Yeats, ouija and Crazy Jane; thinking of born again Dylan. The song that is best thought through is prosaic. Instead, what makes the song start to tick is fleeting image, a first phrase and a glut of feeling.
When younger - but still for segments of time - there was a different consciousness. Something effused the writer: the smell, the look, the sound of all things. Rarely now. (But recognising that the song is not all. The song is not all at all. There are basic things to be done, and why on earth should he impose his song on those who have no song at all, or - and he is yet to hear it - their own song?)
Highlights
The album release (‘Unsuitable’) at the start of the year. All very last minute. Photos of Cemetery Road and the tower of the dilapidated church. All homemade. Concerns: would they go? They have. Some nice – and perceptive – reviews . All very amateur: keep the spirit of this alive!
The gigs. Not (really) a bad one. Amazing! Jon M arriving from East Anglia the day before Llanover Hall. Knowing the songs. Getting the Gretch to sing! Nic with enthusiasm, candour and (in the rehearsals) some useful reductionist thinking. Gerry…being Gerry...Marvellous!! Appearing again at St. Julian’s…with Jem in the audience…salutations to the past, together with an insistence to get on with the future…before it’s too late!
The encouragement from Music Nation to become a New York band. Really grateful for your persistence (and apologies for my computer ignorance). Again, helpful, positive feedback from you American (or Canadian…if you DARE to describe us as ‘an English band’!) folks.
Lowlights
Illness. Lack of time, especially time to bring ideas together, to move towards coherency, to finish recording the new songs. This is how it is however.
Folk music can come in a number of guises. Too often it is what is believed to be a simple perpetuation of the songs, tunes and sounds of the past, ‘faithfully’ regurgitated. There can also be an open hostility to musical exploration that moves beyond what is considered the traditional idiom, despite much of what is regarded as ‘folk’ having gone through many adaptions and transformations, and the idiom itself being based on the resourceful and invention of those who practised within it.
That’s not how I see it, and I felt it might be useful for ourselves as well as for you (esteemed reader!) to collect together a number of ideas of how I would define the sort of ‘folk-ethos’ my notion of being a ‘folk musician’ rests upon. Some of these ideas are drawn from current thinking about folk art, which I would see as a much more inspired source, as it includes the notion of forward movement and innovation.
Some of my thinking involves folk music as
· Generally ‘untutored’ – based on intuition, the exploration of ideas without suppression, with a minimum of formal musical training and reliance on ‘musical principles’.
· Resourceful – drawing on anything that is available in terms of subject matter, physical (i.e. musical, equipment-based) resources, people and so on.
· Bringing out an idea of the larger picture from an exploration of the smaller
· Being (sometimes intentionally!) naive.
· Having an attitude of innocence, childlike curiosity and wonderment about a whole load of things. This, in contrast to the over-erudite, ‘sorted’, ‘muso’ or ‘music biz savvy’ attitude that is easy inculcated in this line of ‘work’.
· Being wary about anything ‘corporate’, whether the ‘corp.’ is a sizeable formal organisation (e.g. a promotion company) or an informal group or trend.
· Being generously open-minded
· Drawing on the locale in terms of resources, but also…
· Making links with others who carry out similar with their own locale
Raison d'etre - why this site now
“ Why? To propagate ideas, inviting critical comment and possible collaboration; to share the process and outcome of therapy; to see what-happens-if; to self-advertise, not for the purpose of acclamation (for that, for me anyway, tends to be self-defeating in terms of innovation) but for that of opportunity; to lay what I do bare, without the talents, styles, directives and perspectives of others.
“Why now? A dearth of ideas, the best of them seeing the glass as more than half empty: any fullness being the result of a trick of the (half) light! Now: a need to collect together all this and move on, move out, away from the soul-waste and towards the idiosyncratic eye looking outwards. However, most of what will appear on here will necessarily be of the soul-waste variety.
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“What will you find on here? To begin with, a scan of the past and this present, with snippets of myself and of others with whom I have collaborated in some capacity.
“And what led to it all – I mean, the music/creative thing as a whole and in the ontological sense?
Þ The need to make myself heard, feeding back to me and out to others; to give little me – with my own strange motivations, and the incongruent and misled thoughts and beliefs that we all have instilled in us and/or self-feed – a little voice. To give a platform to this idiosyncratic eye. That is not to proclaim the experience of 40 years. Indeed, I suspect I have encountered a greater share of confusion, uncertainty, misapprehension, misjudgement, and a copious number of other pathologies, than have most Nevertheless, there seems need to let this experience of often unregulated and irregular reality have an airing. Certainly early on, it was the surrender of more regulated and regular thinking that allowed the creative act to take place – putting aside critical and self-conscious thinking and letting implicational/emotive thought to govern.
Þ the need to capture the strangeness in what I saw about me. That is, the human strangeness – the unfathomable depth of a mindset and a motivation: the being someone else.
Þ To communicate a similar sense of strangeness, beauty, longing, apprehension, fear, disdain etc with regard to place and time.
Þ The primary need to make emotional sense of what I have heard, seen, dreamt, imagined.
Þ At some point, a compulsion to do all this.
Þ A love of sound
Þ A love of fiddling with words
Þ A feeling for ‘nature’ that was at one time overpowering.
Þ The wish to have fun, especially with regard to making new things with others.
Þ To communicate the hiraeth that seems a vital aspect of who I am.
"My poems are the product of a relationship between a side of my mind which is conscious, alert, manipulative, and a side which is as murky as a primeval swamp" Andrew Motion, in The Observer, 17.09.06
I liked this description.
Almost always - and certainly with the best of what comes out (the most sumptuous of the manna that is to be returned to heaven) - the initial thought, or, because 'thought' is too clinical a word, apprehension, comes from the swamp: a phrase, an emotional reaction, a concept, a conceit and, at the very best of times, a sublime 'insight' (though, of course, often lacking insight in the commonsense). More these days a piece of language than a piece of music. Again at the best of times, the music will reveal itself as a companion of the words.
To get here, at the best of times, no drug, no forced rapture, just openness and silence, pain and joy, deep regret and childlike hope, stark reality and unfettered imagining...and then let the conscious mind come in.