The Canadians win at music. We went to three things at the Canadian showcase: Hooded Fang (above), Slow Down Molasses, and Hot Panda, and all three were fucking great.  I know it’s a cliché to say that Canadians seem to be disproportionately good at music, but on this weekend’s evidence, they just are.  Born Gold to follow later tonight!

Brighton is an odd place. Seemingly designed around the car, with weird, three-lane roads running right through the middle of town and along the waterfront, and with the place centred on a series of huge roundabouts.  Inbetween all these incongruously large roads (particularly for a relatively small town), however, are rabbit warrens of tiny streets.  So you get used to ambling lazily around, and then IMMINENT DEATH, IMMINENT DEATH!

People are really, really nice.  I keep expecting to meet these music industry twats you hear so much about, and I still haven’t found them.  I know at our level of things you aren’t likely to meet a lot of industry twats, because they’re all chasing the money farther up the ladder, but this is a really big festival and everyone has been incredible.

Doing a seminar after three or four pints is a bad idea. I was on a panel about running independent labels, and I’d had a few pints.  So needless to say I talked way, way too much, swore like an angry sailor and contradicted everyone.  The one the next day about podcasts and alternative broadcasting was done stone-cold sober (well, it was at 11:30 in the morning) and was far more lucid and less annoying.

Buzz is an unpredictable beast. Fear of Men are pretty fucking buzzy band, to the best of my knowledge, but their set at the Amazing Radio thing was woefully under-attended. They were really good too, as were PINS, who played after them.  PINS are pretty damn buzzy themselves for such a new band (12,000 Soundcloud plays on one song), and while it was marginally busier for them, I was still surprised at the relatively modest turnout.  Mind you, I suppose the Amazing Radio showcase, whilst it had pretty much the best lineup of the whole festival, wasn’t listed in the official brochure, so maybe folk just didn’t know.

Jellied Eels are a fucking abomination. They just are.  Never eat them.  Ever.

I can be a right tedious cunt when drunk. I met loads of people at the end of the day yesterday, after a whole day of drinking.  Bad idea. Apologies are almost certainly due to Dani from Amazing Radio, Jake from Basement Fever, Matthew from the Pigeon Post, the drummer from PINS, most of Fear of Men, and that random guy who I thought was trying to start a fight with me, until he pointed out that it was actually me who had started it.

New music festivals are way, way better than music festivals. If The Great Escape ever gets big enough that they feel obliged to import shit headline bands to draw in the masses, then it will be a real shame.  Alright, they did have Gaz Coombes, Maximo Park, Mystery Jets and We Are Scientists on the bill, which was pretty fucking mystifying, but for the most part, these are all new and under the radar bands, and that made the whole thing far more fun.  Have you seen the lineup for Reading and Leeds this year?  Exactly.

Some of the venues are great, but some are atrocious. The Canadian stuff was help in the Blind Tiger, which was a great place.  Amazing Radio, on the other hand, had to make do with downstairs at the Queen’s Hotel, which was just weird, having all these bands play on conference centre carpet.  All we needed was a plate of little triangular sandwiches and a variety of biscuits and the oddness would have been complete.

I want to live somewhere with a beach.  And pubs. Pubs on the beach. The sun came out on Friday, and we had beer and grilled sardines on the beach. It. Was. Awesome.

People have sort of heard of Song, by Toad. Which is nice.  We met loads of ‘industry people’ who it seemed had actually heard of us, were aware of what we are doing, and seemed to like it.  This was a bit of a surprise, to be honest.

Be careful when crossing the road.  I think the people of Brighton actively try and run folk over.

Three days is about the limit. At SXSW this year, I hit it so hard during Interactive that I couldn’t really face seeing much during the music festival.  This is a colossal waste of time and money, so I am glad I managed to get out to see so much this time.  Credit must go to Ian as well, who rather bafflingly chose to get up incredibly early every day, and phoned to hassle me before noon and force me to come out to see things.

I was serious about the jellied eels.  Honestly, just don’t.  Horrendous things.

Zowie, these guys were fucking awesome!  I loved Hot Panda’s last album How Come I’m Dead, but I have to confess that I’d rather stopped thinking about the band in if I am being honest the only reason I actually saw them today was because I happened to already be at the Canadian showcase and I thought, oh hang on, why the fuck not, I liked their record.

And they were brilliant.  I know bands, and readers to an extent, hate the ‘imagine the lovechild of X and Y’ thing, but for those of you who have never seen Hot Panda live, imagining some sort of cross between Liars and Wolf Parade will more or less get you in the right ballpark.  Only with added awesome.

Looking at the band is pretty incongruous as well, as the drummer and lead singer look like the straightest, most sensible people around, and they are flanked by a couple of fantastically cool hipster types.  Until they start playing it looks rather like two different bands who have accidentally stumbled onto the same stage together.

Once things kick off, however, it’s pretty clear that I have been a total idiot for forgetting about this band for so long.  They are tight as fuck, and the perfect combination of weird, ferocious and hugely infectious.  At one point, the bass player is playing her guitar with one hand and a trumpet with the other, the lead singer leaps into the crowd and starts the next song from there, and the keyboard player leaps about the place like a man having more fun than pretty much any fun I have ever had.

Brilliant.  And then I had to run off and be a nice sensible person on a panel.

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Slow Down, Molasses are from Saskatoon, which is apparently a thriving town, but to my mind is for some reason just marginally more glamorous than Cumbernauld, but I am open to being corrected by anyone who actually knows.

We’re putting them on at Henry’s in Edinburgh next week, so I really shouldn’t have come to see them here as well, but umm… well, I didn’t have any better plans before my label panel and I happened to meet Tyson from the band the night before in London as well, so why the fuck not.

Anyway, they were excellent, so without wishing to be too much of a used car salesman, I strongly recommend you come to the gig next week.  And if you don’t live in Edinburgh, they’re touring the UK at the moment, so have a look and see if you can go and see them, because I recommend you do.

With three guitarists, two drummers and a keyboard player they can make a right racket when they’re in the mood. For all their songs have a sort of characteristic ‘Canadian alternative music’ vibe (and don’t worry, I honestly don’t know what that means either, but you’ll know what I mean if you see them play) but they build to rather splendidly epic crescendos.  Not all that proggy per se, but is nevertheless quite euphoric in a sense.

As much as the percussion is great, and the drummer and the keyboard player look like they are having The Most Fun Ever, I think the guitars draw me to this band the most.  They interact really well, and alternate between subtle, dreamy effects, and thumping away like bastards as the songs build and build.  Nice.  Sometimes you take a chance putting a band on, not knowing that much about them, and that’s kind of what I did here.  Seems to have been a really rather excellent decision.  Well done me!

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 I’ve heard bands complain about Glasgow crowds in the past.  In much the same way Glasgow bands tend to find Edinburgh audiences eerily quiet, a lot of Edinburgh bands can find gig-goers in Glasgow inattentive, particularly when the music in question is quiet.

Well, if you want quiet, brittle music, you won’t find much that is more so than Josh T. Pearson or Perfume Genius.  I have seen both in Glasgow in the last year and with both performers the audiences have been absolutely, completely and utterly silent, absolutely in thrall to the fragile music being played for them.

It can be a difficult thing, I assume, playing intense songs with quite difficult, personal subject matter to an audience of strangers.  One of my friends at the Perfume Genius gig at the Captain’s Rest said that she kind of wished he had played alone, instead of with a couple of extra players to add some minimal backing.  I can see what she means, but that would of course mean stripping away what little remains of the cushion between performer and audience, and whilst I can imagine that would make for a captivating show, I am not sure I could really ask any musician to open themselves up that much that regularly for the purposes of my entertainment.

As it is, you can tell Mike Hadreas is not at his most comfortable on stage.  His performance is absolutely excellent, but his one attempt to chat with the crowd showed that it wasn’t something that came all that naturally. It might have been a feeble attempt at chat, strictly speaking, but it was honest and without artifice, so however meagre, it still helped us connect with Hadreas as a performer a little better.

That was a relief, because given he was sitting down to play the piano at a venue with a very low stage, it was actually quite difficult to get much feel for him as a person.  Unless you were right up the front you really couldn’t see him at all, so the night felt just a little bit like a bunch of people standing in a crowded room to listen to the same record.

A little paradoxically, one of the other strange things to contend with was the very existence of performers playing the music.  Given how ethereal and elusive the Perfume Genius albums are, it seemed almost shocking to see three normal guys there in front of us playing, as if it were entirely unremarkable for them to be doing so.  And the Captain’s Rest seemed like an odd place for this all to be happening.  I can imagine the band playing an intimate house gig or in some stunning old edifice in Edinburgh for example, but a run of the mill, workaday gig venue in Glasgow just seemed a little incongruous.  Too normal, somehow.

And having said all that, you’d think I wasn’t that into the gig wouldn’t you, but that’s really not the case.  I really noticed these odd little things, but in general it was a cracking show.  The band may have numbered only three but they fleshed out the songs beautifully, and their restraint was a pleasure to witness; never trampling over songs which need air to breathe and silence to break.

I can easily imagine this being difficult music to translate to a live setting actually, but in this case it was gorgeous.  Perhaps less icy and mysterious than on record, but that was replaced by a warmth which I will confess I hadn’t quite seen there before.

Perfume Genius – Lookout, Lookout

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Perfume Genius – All Waters

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 After complaining last week about the continuing collapse of Edinburgh’s venues and the harm that does to anyone involved in music in the city, this remarkable gig came as something of a pleasant surprise.

Of course, if the currently proposed Public Entertainment License, which contrary to the impression you might get from the current discussion is not just restricted to Glasgow but in fact nationwide, comes into force, then gigs like this will become prohibitively expensive and awkward to put on and will therefore simply not happen.

And a good thing too.  One thing Scotland doesn’t need is eccentric bands playing intimate gigs in odd places. Bad Fun? Innovation? Pah! Balls to it.

Mary King’s Close, for those who are unfamiliar with the place, is part of the old town of Edinburgh, buried under the Royal Mile.  It was reputed to have been filled with the corpses of plague victims back in the Seventeenth Century and bricked over, with some of the wilder stories saying that many still living were bricked in there with the dead, but apparently these tales have since come to be regarded as ‘somewhat exaggerated’.  I am, of course, hardly an expert.  Certainly the tourist attraction the close has become plays heavily on ghosts and haunting and all that bollocks, and while that is a bit childish and gimmicky, there is no denying the creepy atmosphere of the place.

Paul Vickers and The Leg are an odd concoction as well.  It never comes across as ‘The Leg, but with some other bloke doing the singing for a change’ nor ‘Paul Vickers and his backing band’; there is a genuine meeting of minds here which, although it was less obvious the first time I heard their recorded stuff, is particularly clear when you see them live.

Unamplified, they gives themselves a few challenges, not least in robbing their cellist of his multitude of pedals, but it doesn’t harm the show in the slightest.  In fact the four of them, doused in flour and cackling at one another, could hardly have been presented in a more appropriate manner.

I have to confess to not being all that familiar with the band’s repertoire, so the performance was as curious for me as the venue, but there were some stonking tunes in there.  The maniacal glee with which they were delivered was an added bonus, not just by Vickers himself, but by the supportive screeching of various members of The Leg too.

It was odd, but it was a cracking evening.  We need more stuff like this around here.  Lots more.

 This, honestly, is a tricky review to write.  Mostly by coincidence, I’ve actually met Josh T. Pearson something like four times this year.  I wouldn’t for a second claim that means I know him all that well, as his demeanour is pretty impenetrable, but I do know that he wasn’t in the most amazing frame of mind before this performance.

It’s odd, but that knowledge makes it difficult to actually absorb a performance objectively. When we recorded our Toad Session with him earlier in the day he was as charming and accommodating as he has always been when I’ve dealt with him, but he was feeling ill, and after travelling up from Manchester had already recorded a BBC Radio Scotland session before our own, so he was pretty bloody tired as well.

Had I been entirely without this knowledge I would probably have just sat back and enjoyed the performance – a fantastic one, albeit perhaps a little less electrifying than his mesmerising turn at Homegame this year.

But with this knowledge it was strange to watch him play the intensely personal songs we all know from the awesome Last of the Country Gentlemen, all the while wondering if his mind was really on the material, or if he was just feeling absolutely fucked after a punishing year of touring, in which he has played hundreds of gigs, dozens of festivals and any number of internet sessions for even the most no-mark of bloggers (such as, for example, myself). His between-song chat, despite being as entertaining as ever, only reinforced this because he was clearly not all that happy with his own performance because of his illness.

I did ask him this at the Toad Session itself, and he did suggest that he feels it is time to move on and perhaps leave this material alone for a little.  Because it is beautiful, but it is dark and intense as well, and as such I suppose it must have a natural shelf life, if just for the performer himself, and his ability to engage with the songs in a spirit which will allow him to sing them with the depth, meaning and commitment they require.

Mind you, the other impression gleaned from one successful and one aborted attempt to interview the man is that the emotions confessed in these songs are never really that far from the surface, so no matter how shite he feels, it doesn’t seem that hard for him to drag it all back to the foreground and then out to the audience.

Certainly despite his protestations, this was another great show.  His command of silence exceeds almost anyone else I have ever seen, and the barest brush of the guitar strings is allowed to dissipate out into the air, making it almost impossible to not pay full attention.

Consequently as Woman When I’ve Raised Hell and Sweetheart, I Ain’t Your Christ fill the venue it is a rapt and silent Oran Mor which stares back up at him in silent awe.  Even with the flu his sheer personality fills the place, along with the silences he plays so well, and I suppose that’s how he can switch so swiftly from laughing and joking between songs, to suddenly dipping once more into the heartbreakingly serious music he makes, with the audience and the man himself seemingly oblivious of the tremendous emotional gear-change we’ve all just made.

He’s a curious fellow, that’s for sure.  And possibly Man of the Year for 2o11, in a musical sense.

Josh T. Pearson – Country Dumb

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 I’ve been to some very, very good gigs recently, but this was fucking incredible. Drew (Wounded Knee) put together an evening of bands to celebrate the release, on Gerry Loves Records, of his album House Music.

He was preceded on stage by The Wee Rogue, whose hunched playing style and gentle vocals we rather lovely.  Kittens, I wasn’t so sure about, I must be honest.  They were nice to listen to, particularly in the intimate environment of this particular gig, but I am not all that sure I would feel compelled to explore further.

The intimate environment was no accident.  The Iso Lounge is a small place, upstairs from the Isobar in Leith, with plenty of sofas and a nice, relaxed feel to it.  It was formerly the home of the much missed Leith Tape Club, and on Friday it was absolutely packed, taking the term ‘intimate’ to a subtly different level to that which was perhaps intended.

To reinforce the atmosphere he wanted to create, Drew also decided to play the entire gig without any sort of electrical assistance.  No amps, no mics, no new fangled-instruments.  In fact his own set, bar a couple of songs where he used an Indian instrument called a Shruti Box (which seemed like a wee harmonium in a handbag, pretty much), was entirely unaccompanied.  There wasn’t even any sign of the signature loop pedal he generally uses to layer vocals and build what most would recognise as the Wounded Knee ‘sound’.

I know a lot of people might find that kind of thing a little over-bearing and intense – just a little too in your face for those who want to come to a gig to relax, have a pint and enjoy themselves.  In fact, even if you’d told me in advance what the gig was going to be like, I think I might have been a little sceptical too. Tell you what though, it was bloody amazing.

Picking songs at random by inviting guests to ‘have a rummage in his bawbag’ for a numbered ping-pong ball, Drew perhaps got a little lucky with the fates, because the set was the perfect combination of folky and contemporary, sentimental and amusing.  Some song were singalongs (an invitation I declined, for the sake of my own dignity and everyone’s enjoyment), some were mesmerising laments.  There was an REM cover in there, versions of The Old Main Drag and A Pair of Brown Eyes, and a good mix of traditional songs and original stuff. I don’t know if the flow of the evening was down to the luck of the balls, or just the nature of the mix of songs he made available, but whatever the reason, it worked fantastically.

It helps that the man himself is a natural compere as well, chatting naturally, amusingly and with a very Scottish sense of self-deprecation between songs.  It was a favourable crowd, of course, and the perfect place to try something like this, but I was enormously impressed at someone able to so brilliantly keep a crowd, including myself, in the palm of his hand for so long and to produce such an absolutely mesmerising performance with nothing more than his own voice with which to do it.

I have still to entirely find a way of enjoying Wounded Knee’s recorded material, I have to confess and, frustratingly, this does kind of include House Music.  Particularly after enjoying this show so much I find that fact to be both annoying and a little bit perplexing.  Nevertheless, you can make up your own minds on that one, because the Bandcamp embed will let you preview the album in its entirety.

In any case, this live show was bloody brilliant – one of the best things I’ve seen this year.

 I remember the first time I saw the Twilight Sad.  They played in Bannerman’s in August 2007, with Popup and Dumb Instrument, and I remember bumping into at least half a dozen people from different bands, all excited to hear this new Scottish band who most of us happened to have heard about first from American blogs, oddly enough.

It was similar last night actually, in the sense that having gone along with Ian, we ended up bumping into loads of local music people. Clearly something about the Twilight Sad excites music people.

Before we get into that though, fucking hell, Adam Stafford! Now, I enjoyed his latest album Build a Harbour Immediately, but live was something else. And, without wishing to hurt anyone’s feelings, I can’t understand how it wasn’t utter shit.

This is a man building up his songs with looped and layered beatboxing.  He adds just a little guitar here and there, but for the most part the actual substance of the music is built from layer upon layer of… and I am going to have to say it again here… beatboxing!  To explain myself, beatboxing is a little like rapping, in the sense that the mere mention of it gives me the fucking twitches. I am sure that in the right environment, done by the right people in the right context, it can be awesome, but it is very much Not For Me.  I even get the cold shakes when Tom Waits mentions beatboxing, and he is a musical deity who can do exactly what he pleases, as far as I am concerned.

So if you had described a man in a shirt and tie layering (and I kid you not) bow-chkka-wow-wow and deedy-n-dee-diddy and stuff like that, there is nothing I can picture being made with those ingredients that isn’t utterly embarrassing, unlistenable shit.

But he was brilliant.

As I said, looking at the actual mechanics of what Stafford does, it shouldn’t be great, but it really was.  It helped that he played it absolutely straight, but more than anything, despite what they were assembled from, the songs themselves were absolutely great. The performance was fantastic too.  The whole thing was fucking awesome.  I have no idea how he did it. I have got to go back and listen to that record again.  And I am damned if I am not going to see him again tonight, with Jonnie Common at the Electric Circus.*

Adam Stafford – Shot Down You Summer Wannabes

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Anyhow, now for the Twilight Sad.  A new bass player and the added keyboard ensure that they sound a little different these days, but the cacophonous wall of ear-blistering noise hasn’t changed.  Neither has James Graham’s impassioned howl.

Watching Graham front this band is wont to give you the impression that songs were written by the devil, and the only he could think of sneaking them into heaven is to send them up through the soles of Graham’s shoes, twisting round his spine until he is so possessed he tilts his head back and bellows them into the heavens.

His tortured convulsions and menacing, delirious and yet oddly blank stare embody the effect on the listener.  This isn’t dance music, obviously enough, but it has a spiritual side to it.  It’s hypnotic, visceral and overwhelming.  Tonight, like the first time I saw them, all I could do was stand directly in the path of the deluge and accept the impact, tilt my head towards the sky and let them do their thing.

I do have to confess however that when, towards the end of the set, they played a handful of songs from their incredible debut album Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, I was reminded of the fact that they have yet to really do anything that has thrilled me quite as much as those early songs.  Mind you, live is often not really the right setting to judge new material, and with their promises that the new album is going to be unlike the previous two I find myself genuinely intrigued to hear what they are up to now.

The Twilight Sad – That Summer at Home I Had Become the Invisible Boy

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The Twilight Sad – I Became a Prostitute

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The Twilight Sad – Kill it in the Morning

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*Cue much I Told You So-ing from Peenko and Ayetunes.

 Unbeknownst to myself at the time, James Yorkston was the first Fence Collective artist I ever really, seriously fell for.

Back when he first released Moving Up Country I was pretty damn impressed, but when he then followed it up with the outstandingly beautiful Just Beyond the River a couple of years later I was entirely smitten.

For all that, however, it’s now been a good few years since I’ve seen him play, despite both he and I being at pretty much every Homegame festival for the last few years.  As with a lot of locally based artists (in particular the Fence Collective heroes, who tend to pack venues out) I’ve tended to skip his performances in favour of bands I knew less well and who might offer something a little new in a slightly less suffocatingly busy room.

Eventually, I ended up saying ‘yeah, but I can see James Yorkston anytime’ so often that I got to the stage where, almost accidentally, I hadn’t seen him play live in about three years.  Foolish boy!

I got to the venue a little late, and only caught the last few songs of The Pictish Trail’s support set.  He sounded really good with a full band. I saw Fence compatriot King Creosote play with a full band the other week at the Liquid Room, and to be honest, it didn’t really do it for me.

KC’s songs are a little more edgy, and the full band seems to smooth off those edges a little too much.  I’d say about ninety percent of his stuff is at its best with absolutely minimal instrumentation, so with a couple of exceptions the full band just added an unnecessary and fairly undistinguished pop rock sound to songs which are at their most captivating when they seem on the verge of either falling apart or just evaporating into the ether altogether.

The Pictish Trail’s stuff, on the other hand, is a little more robust and, little as I have to confess to having seen, seemed to rise to the full band treatment rather than be swallowed by it.

I have actually seen James Yorkston with a full band – a small drumkit, a piano and upright bass – but on this occasion he kicked things off solo and when he did add instrumentation it was fiddle, clarinet and harp, rather than a typical ‘band’.

His songs seem to have the countryside in them, with a gentle rise and fall, rolling fluctuations which recall either the swell of a calm sea or the modest yet lovely Fife landscape.

A friend of mine who was less entranced found that the set failed to hold his attention for the entirety of the evening, and with similar, soothing oscillations at the heart of most of the songs I can understand how that might happen.  In that respect a drummer and bass player to make an appearance here and there might perhaps have been able to break up what was a relatively uniform pace, and give the odd song a little more bombast or sense of urgency.

For my part, however, I thought it was fucking lovely.  Yorkston himself is an accomplished enough performer to easily hold the attention of the Queen’s Hall by himself and, in the accompanying hush, the surroundings lent even more gravitas to the emotional heft of his songs.

He can punctuate them with humour at times – in fact that seems to almost compulsory for miserable music in Scotland, lest you are accused of taking yourself just a bit too seriously – but for the most part his songs are weighty and serious.

This is the kind of thing X-Factor devotees might write off as depressing or boring, but as you will know all too well by now, it is the kind of music I find more rewarding than almost any other.  There is something indulgent and enriching about listening to slow, lovely morose songs and letting them wash over you.

Maybe it’s the luxury of being able to appreciate the intensity of the feelings without the burden of having to bear the damage.  Maybe that is a significant part of the appeal of sad music in general. The makeup of his band add a little to this, giving the songs a slightly more elaborate, intricate feel, reinforcing the impression that even the most intense of feelings are there to be welcomed and embraced, be they happy or sad.

Were I listening to James Yorkston’s albums I would do it late at night, when it’s cold, there are candles lit and no-one else around.  Despite a full Queen’s Hall, that is exactly what this gig felt like, somehow.  Bloody lovely.

James Yorkston & the Athletes – St. Patrick

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James Yorkston – Tortoise Regrets Hare

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Well well well, this was a bloody great event. Alan Lomax, for those of you who don’t know, is (to borrow from his own institution’s language) considered to be America’s foremost folklorist.  In normal English, he is a guy who went out and made hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of field recordings, documenting the folk culture of communities across the States, and later further afield.

The event at Word of Mouth just off Leith Walk on Wednesday was a screening of selected clips of unseen footage from later journeys where he was able not only to record the music, but to shoot accompanying video as well. It was hosted by Screen Bandita and thoughtfully introduced by Nathan Salsburg, who works for Cultural Equity, the association charged with preserving and disseminating Lomax’s work.

Now, I went to see the Sigur Ros film INNI a while back, and in all honesty I thought it was pretty fucking boring.  I enjoyed the music, and the visuals were nice, but that is a long, long way from being a compelling film.  I sometimes think that when people make movies like that that they are woefully underestimating the craft of a film-maker.  And, actually, of a good, brutal editor, which seems to me to be just about the most important role of the lot.

So, I was a little apprehensive when this started off and it swiftly became apparent that it really was just a collection of songs, rather like a stream of YouTube clips, rather than a single film in its own right.  There was no need to be nervous though, because the diversity of music and the fascination of some of the performances made sure this was utterly compelling from start to finish.

I was struck by so many aspects of these recordings, and I don’t want to write an epic here, but for the sake of it I did want to mention a few things.

1. The difference between the performances when being filmed and when simply being recorded seemed immediately obvious.  People acted up considerably for the cameras, in ways I strongly doubt they would have for someone with a tape recorder.  I’m am not saying this is a bad thing however, and when you are documenting folk traditions and folk music, showing the role of that music in the communities which created it made the feel you got for the whole infinitely richer.

2. Commercial and folk approaches to music are at pretty direct odds.

2.1 The old lie peddled by entertainment conglomerates that if we don’t buy their records then we will lose great art is clearly bollocks.  People make art because they are compelled to do so and they gain a great deal from doing so.

You can be sure that pretty much no-one covered in this series was making a penny, but the music was stunning, and it was pretty clearly a joy based on participation, not remuneration.  I am not saying that artists shouldn’t be entitled to their share of commercial exploitation of their music, but if people cannot make it commercially viable, we will still have plenty of great art.

2.2 The way copyright is being used to prevent sharing, copying, remixing and reworking is clearly and obviously detrimental to the fundamental culture of music.  Stopping Rihanna from nicking someone kid’s killer riff and warbling over the top of it without compensating them is a compelling case, but many of the rest are not.

Listen to the following clip of Little Margaret – these particular lyrics occur paraphrased and in fragments all over the place in folk music. This makes the music richer, not poorer. If you clamp down on this too much you throttle the creative process.

3. So many old people! The folk world may not be all that ageist, but the pop world is, despite the recent surfeit of ‘heritage acts’. I know wrinklies won’t sell Heat For Music NME quite as well, but the way the voice changes with age (and I mean proper old age, not just middle age) was wonderfully clear watching these performances.

The old voices we saw wavered with fragility or burst forth with surprising strength, but they all had tremendous character and impact.  More old fuckers  in music please.  No Noel Gallagher’s High Flying Turds, and not another cynical reunion back-slapping circle jerk-a-thon, but properly old people singing beautiful songs.

4. The ‘over-supply’ of music is not a new thing.  This is a common whinge of people who are sadly desperate to be an authority on All Of Music, and also of those who feel the need to be told what to listen to by experts, but honestly, grow some fucking balls, both groups of you.  But looking at these films, there is clearly music absolutely everywhere in these communities.

Now, clearly there are more ways to express your creativity and urge for social and cultural participation these days, but that would imply that, infinite wastelands of the internet or not, there should be less music not more.  It’s just that back then we rarely, if ever, had access to the grass roots community level music from a hundred miles away, so we got on with enjoying what was going on in our own communities, even if it was no more worthy than an old dude blowing a tune on a half-empty Pepsi bottle.

So stop worrying about listening to everything, it makes you look a bit silly. Enjoy what’s happening around, whether your community is geographical or virtual or a combination of the two. Yeah, you’re going to miss out on some stuff, dry your eyes.

5. Last, but very much not least: fuck me, some of this was bloody amazing. Remind me again, why does anyone actually watch the X-Factor? The Alan Lomax Archive profile already has seventy-eight videos uploaded to YouTube, so go and watch them instead.  And thanks so much to Screen Bandita (whose mailing list I recommend you sign up for here) and to Nathan Salsburg for an amazing evening.