Jesus ear-fucking Christ this fucking hurts to listen to.

The Willow Garden is a song I first came across as a b-side to Where the Wild Roses Grow by Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds.  I didn’t know it was a traditional song at that point, but I didn’t care where it came from.  I didn’t even know who Warren Ellis was, but the fiddle playing on the song was some of the best I had (and still have) ever heard.

It’s amazing – managing to sound mournful, morbid and creepy all together.  Like a lot of Warren Ellis’ stuff it is really quite horrible and utterly beautiful at the same time

Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds – The Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Anyhow, at some point I twigged that it was actually a traditional tune, probably when I was browsing through eMusic’s amazing collection of stuff from Smithsonian Folkways.  This kind of horribly macabre tune suits that style perfectly.  Nothing quite seems to deliver the gleeful brutality of old folk and fairy tales quite like the screech of those pre-war folk voices, and the harsh, sawed violin which tends to accompany them. It fits well with Ellis’s approach to the violin as well actually, and to The Bad Seeds’ approach to folk songs and murder ballads: they revel in the discord, the casual malice, the horror, the almost cartoonish evil of it all.

Hobart Smith & Texas Gladden – Down in the Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

One thing a lot of this old music doesn’t fit too well with, however, is soft pop.  Sam Amidon, for example, is hardly hard on the ears, but his voice has character, and where Cave and the like bring cheerful brutality, Amidon brings a lovely sense of empathetic sadness.  The intensity of the emotion is still there of course, and it is always a rather grim emotion to embrace.

I have heard these songs sung with a degree of beauty however, and sometimes it works.  Kind of.  Robin Pecknold from Fleet Foxes snuck a couple of covers onto MySpace a few years back under the name White Antelope.  They were simple recordings, and although they were pretty unembellished I really quite liked them.  I find his songwriting rather boring, I have to say, but he has a lovely voice and I really enjoyed hearing his versions of songs like Silver Dagger, Wild Mountain Thyme and things like that.

White Antelope – Wild Mountain Thyme

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

And then this fucking happened.  Jesus donkey-fucking Christ, what an awful, awful thing to have heard.  I should have known better, frankly.  It was fucking stupid of me to click on the link anyway, to be honest, but like a Presbyterian surfing child porn on the internet all day, I knew just what I was going to get and a large part of me was just dying feel the outrage.

Bon Iver’s first album For Emma, Forever Ago wasn’t too bad.  It had a couple of nice tunes, and the minimal arrangements suited his vocal delivery, making it seem ghostly rather than just weak.  The new album was a fucking awful soft-pop horrorshow though.  The lush, utterly objectionable arrangements were abysmal enough in themselves, but they made his voice turn from lip-wobbling emotion to a sort of pathetic, needy bleat.  And now he’s taken to giving The Willow Garden the mother of all public shamings with this dreadful, wan, weak, lifeless version.

Is it fair to call the Chieftans the Elton fucking John of folk music, given the sheer number of people they’ve collaborated with?  I know that collaboration and cover versions are a central part of the folk tradition, but honest to God I wish there was some way I could unhear this fucking song.  And to make matters worse, I keep playing it again and again, just to remind myself that I am not exaggerating the scale of the horror.  And if you’ve got the Bad Seeds’ version, and that gorgeous old version by Hobart Smith and Texas Gladden in your head already, it sounds even more utterly abominable by comparison.  Sing with some fucking spirit man.  Sing as if something, anything, depended on it for the love of fucking God!

Justin fucking Vernon & the Chieftans – The Willow Garden

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Red Six. Who was he? What was his like motivation, hm? Who really cares? Well today Song, by Toad cares. Today it is all about Red Six, or that poor anonymous Lieutenant in Star Trek – the one you can be absolutely certain isn’t going to survive the episode. Does anyone else remember Porkins from Star Wars with such affection as Mr Toad? This haven for losers, wastrels and ne’erdowells embraces Porkins, the only fat, bearded star fighter pilot in the universe, and today we dedicate some tunes to him. Or, at least, to his sort: the selfless, silent assistant, the unnamed extra, someone as crucial as, but far less celebrated than, Chewbacca the Wookie, someone without whose presence an album would never be as good as it is and who needs to be mentioned by me because no-one else is going to give the little trooper a pat on the back.

In other words, today at Song, by Toad, we will be celebrating the little man whose contribution to a song makes the music what it is. I don’t mean someone like Joby Talbot of The Divine Comedy, who is clearly crucial to Neil Hannon, because I just don’t know enough about music to directly discern his contribution. I’m talking about people like Bobby Valentino (who? I hear you ask) who played fiddle for The Men They Couldn’t Hang and never gets a mention. How about Steve Wickham – who was he? Well he was the brilliant fiddle player on Fisherman’s Blues, The Waterboys’ phenomenal late 80s folk explosion. He is relatively well known and respected in Ireland, incidentally, but not in indie-pop world, despite his contribution to one of the all time great folk-pop albums. And then there is Warren Ellis, who also plays the fiddle, this time for Nick Cave. And Dave Woodhead, who doesn’t play the fiddle, but the trumpet. Who was Dave Woodhead I hear you ask? Well you’ll find out.

Bobby Valentino – Shirt of Blue
Steve Wickham – We Will Not Be Lovers
Warren Ellis – The Willow Garden
Dave Woodhead – The Saturday Boy

More seriously, I always wonder how much of a contribution these guys actually make. Warren Ellis is the most well known of the bunch and as a bona fide Bad Seed I assume he is pretty central to the group, but what about the other guys. Billy Bragg had a few absolutely iconic trumpet solos in his early songs, so how did it work? Did he whistle it first, like he does at his gigs, and Dave Woodhead then played it? Or did Dave write the whole thing – in which case these lads are far more important than they ever get given credit for.

And as for the bloke who wrote Porkins’ Wikipedia entry, well firstly how did you manage to garner quite so much information from two or three seconds of film, and secondly, YOU SAD FUCK. Christ, imagine having that level of detailed knowledge about a minor character in fucking Star Wars, don’t you have any friends to spend your time with for Christ’s sake? Fuck me, that’s almost as sad as knowing the name of the bloke who played the fiddle for The Men They Couldn’t Hang. Eh? Oh.