Something to Declare by Cyclist

Chapter 46

So the circle is completed. We have danced till we dripped, drank till we were happy, sang till we croaked and played till we needed a cloth to hold a cup of tea.

We even went back into what they insist on calling the “Open Mic” competition, which always sounds to me like a friendly Irishman. MIKE for god’s sake!

We entered as a family, and lost out to another bunch of precocious little sods who must have started at the breast, but we consoled ourselves with the fact that we were old enough to drink smoke and shag. Well, except for Kelly, of course. And then none of us smoke. And I couldn’t actually shag, yet; but you know what I am trying to say.

We let down the tyres on their prams before we left.

It is one of the great things about the folk scene at the moment, the great wash of young talent coming through. I had made a point of hearing Calan , a young Welsh five-piece, who played on the “Village Stage” with a wind strong enough to make the harp strings sing on their own, and it wasn’t just the skill they brought, it was the fact that they genuinely seemed to be having fun as they played. I was different, much more intense, almost out of my body as I played, and as it was now Monday, we had a deal of playing to do. I needed to be at my best so as not to let Jimmy down. I dug out my lovely Green Dress.

We arrived early at the long bar to grab a good spot, and set up around a large circular table. There was an old man stretched out on the grass outside, cigarette in hand, pint beside him and cap over his eyes. Jimmy was relaxing in his own way, and I couldn’t blame him. The previous year, the session had gone on for four hours. Admittedly, the free beer for the latter part had helped ease the pain, though.

It was nice to see people I had been watching at the beginners’ sessions turning up to play, and I smiled at the memory of one of the “Irish” sessions at lunchtime. As two lads were screwing together the odd plumbing of a pair of uillean pipes, two members of a rather well-known morris side had started a tune on sax and trombone, and it was “Rule Britannia”

I don’t think the two pipers were impressed, but everyone else laughed.

We had come laden down with bags and boxes. I had my fiddle and mando, Geoff the bouzouki and octave, Bill both an English and an Anglo, Kell her clogs and whistles and Jan her bag of stuff and bodhran. I’d filched a copy of the tune book the festival had compiled, so that I would be able to lead some of the less confident for a while till I zoned out into that world of mine.

We got two drinks in each before the crush. I may have all sorts of personal problems, but stupid I am not! There seemed to be an inordinate amount of fiddlers, a lot of squeeze boxes, and two people with suitcases. Those proved to be almost full-sized harps, and later a girl with a ‘cello was to sit behind me and a man with a trombone in front.

I’d started by improvising on the mandolin to a group of American singer/guitarists, which was fun, and then one of the “beginner/improvers” took the plunge with “Winster Gallop”, possibly the simplest tune in the festival’s book. Slowly but inexorably the room split into two sessions, the other half seeming to have rather a lot of drummers. Now, the bodhran is actually a rather sophisticated instrument to play, despite being so simple in construction. It is an open-backed drum about three inches deep, and it is played upright on the knee. A right-handed person puts their left hand inside and flat against the skin, while their right holds a beater, usually double ended, rather in the manner of a pen. The beating technique, either double like mine or single ended, has both hands moving around the drum to get different sounds. Not just rim shots; the left hand can completely change the sound of the drum and make it “talk” The skill is to keep up a knife-sharp rhythm, emphasising the beat and pulse of the music, while letting the drum speak around the melody instruments.

Unfortunately, because it looks so simple, people buy them, and bang them, who have no discernible rhythm sense at all. Kelly talked of how she has the music in her soul, of how the dance lives in her hands and feet, and that can be magical. Give a drum to a more earthbound soul and….

I had duetted on bodhran in one of the lunchtime sessions with a left-handed woman who loved to syncopate, and we were exploring the different sonorities and tones of our drums to our mutual delight, when we were joined by a young lad with an amazingly complex beater technique. Unfortunately, he was one of the rhythmically-challenged. Oh dear.

Music is like a folk dance; it speaks to you, tells you what to do and when to do it, makes your feet want to move and your body sway, but only if you speak the same language. I am so very lucky, not just in the fact that can understand it, but that my whole family is the same. There is a joy in making melody that expands to some power of the number involved, and I have to be brutal and say that you either feel it, or you don’t.

The tunes got more complex as the younger folk drifted off to bed and the older ones came over for the serious playing, and there was a waft of stale cigarettes behind me as Jimmy slipped in.

“Let’s get it movin’ then, pet. We’ll de the Bottle Bank set”

And off we went into the “Marquis of Waterford”, “Bottle Bank” and “The Hawk”, all written by James Hill. Now stop me if I have told you this already, but Hill was an alcoholic, and the three tunes must be played in that order. Both of the end tunes were pubs, and Bottle Bank is the steep street between them. Once drunk in the Marquis, the only way was down….and they are nice quick tunes, with a lot of quirkiness, all triplets and double stopping. Good fun, and nicely absorbing. The ‘cello and trombone were giving us a nice bottom, someone had a melodeon with a brass effect, Jimmy was even managing triple stops and while Jan kept the beat all the more challenged drummers were either silent or elsewhere.

We finished on a flourish, and Jimmy handed a fiddle case to me as someone else took up “the Blackthorn Stick” and “Holey Ha’penny”. I opened the case to find something I had only ever heard of, and never actually touched: a Hardanger fiddle.

“D’ye fancy a gan on this, lass? Ah’ve given it concert tunin’”

It’s a Norwegian peculiarity; not only is it flatter than a normal fiddle, and so easier to triple stop, but it has eight strings. Four of them aren’t bowed, but lie under the fingerboard and resonate with those you actually play. Oooooooh!

It was weird, and my fingers fell oddly on the strings at first, but after a few minutes I launched off into “Fenwick o’ Bywell” and “Sir Sidney Smith’s March”, and wanted to keep it forever.

And I looked up from my ginger haze, and the beer had gone down to a pound a pint, it was twelve twenty-five and the whole evening was winding down. Jimmy suggested a slow one to close off with, and I knew which one would work with the exotic beast I had in my hands. I hit the first G-F sharp-E of ”Wild Hills”, triple stopping the first note just because I could, Jimmy danced round me as before, and the trombone and ‘cello laid down a neat pedal bass and….

I must have gone through the tune six times before Jimmy called out. The ornamentation possibilities were amazing, and I found myself gushing to him about how lovely it was to play, and…he grinned.

“Aye, lass. Noo gizz it back!”

There was laughter, and Kelly suddenly yawned, and that really was it.

Till next year. Next year with another piece of jewellery on my finger if I had my way.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJshThjqpJ0 Angharad, Patrick, Chris, Llinos and Bethan of Calan.