The Ballad of Britain | Will Hodgkinson | Published 2009
Stumbling across The Ballad of Britain while researching a potential project felt fortuitous, providing a much needed spark of inspiration. A drunken conversation about the unique traits of British music leads journalist Will Hodgkinson on a merry jaunt around the Isles, in an attempt to document and understand it contrary, awkward personality. Armed with a humble recording device called a Zoom, Hodgkinson emulates folklorists Alan Lomax and Cecil Sharp through field recordings of gypsies in Sussex, Jarvis Cocker and Richard Hawley in Sheffield and James Yorkston and King Creosote in Scotland.
“The cash-rich era of the music industry was over and a new haphazard model was taking its place. We could be returning to an age where the pub and the church become the temples of the land once more, where people were rediscovering the simple joys of singing together, of making music for its own sake, of representing the reality of their lives through song.”
Cate Le Bon recorded a song for The Ballad of Britain in Dyfed, Wales
What’s most interesting about Hodgkinson’s amiable travelogue is how tied to the landscape British music is. It’s an essential document of the lives of everyday people. Gruff Rhys found his musical voice in the culture of the slate-quarry town he grew up in, where hippy dropouts “introduced freaky music to the industrial workers and the Welsh speaking population, and filled the charity shops with records […] like the Velvet Underground and Neil Young”. British music constantly shifts because our culture does, integrating whatever comes its way.
The fact that British music is impossible to precisely define and categorise is exactly what makes it exciting: Hodgkinson comes across many differing attitudes to the notions of folk music and tradition. Beyond the manufactured mainstream and flailing record industry, there are endlessly strange, surprising and beautiful songs that exist for their own sake, songs that will potentially live longer than their creators and inspire new work.
A selection of The Ballad of Britain’s field recordings were released on Heron Recordings and are available on Spotify.
Next up on my music reading list is Rob Young’s Electric Eden.
