Birmingham Roots Music Connections, Steps on the Way to an English Cutural Revolution

I first posted this first video on Multiply earlier this year, back in the Summer when Multiply was still alive and well, before its accelerating decline and collapse into becoming a shadow of its former self and now soon to disappear forever.

My song from the shed features an elder statesman of the British folk music revival Martin Carthy, with his daughter Eliza Carthy and other members of the traditional music supergroup Imagined Village performing the old Slade hit Cum On Feel the Noize.  
This gig combines all of my favourite musical components which includes my fondness for small intimate venues (they don't come more intimate than the shed), an English folk style interpretation of a popular song, on this occasion the Jim Lea/ Noddy Holder 1973 Slade number one hit, which brings the whole thing back home to me.
Noddy Holder is a son of Walsall, a West Midlands town where I lived and worked for about ten years in the late 90s and early noughties.  Slade were from the area called the  Black Country and they formed in the town (now city) of Wolverhampton in about 1970.....all  local lads and part of the rich rock 'n' roll heritage of the Greater Birmingham/West Midlands area at that time .

In the mid 1960s Martin Carthy teamed up with Birmingham based fiddle player Dave Swarbrick, who was described by folk rock bass player, singer and founder member of Fairport Convention, Steeleye Span and the Albion Band...the ubiquitous Ashley Hutchins as "the most influential (English) fiddle player bar none."

These two musicians have collaborated for more than four decades making a huge impact on the British folk scene, but also influencing music from much further afield. Wikipedia points out that Martin Carthy "is an English folk singer and guitarist who has remained one of the most influential figures in British traditional music, inspiring contemporaries such as Bob Dylan and Paul Simon and later artists such as Richard Thompson since he emerged as a young musician in the early days of the folk revival.

He then sang in coffee bars. He became a resident at The Troubadour folk club in Earls Court in the early 1960s. He has been very much the unsung hero of the first 1960s British folk revival (except he was of course sung if not always credited for his arrangements)....it is only now in the second English folk revival of the early 21st century that he is becoming more widely known outside the esoteric folk music circuit, as traditional music gains wider audiences as a part of the rise of English national identity and a new appreciation of English cultural history.

Wikipedia notes for example that....  " Carthy's arrangement of the traditional ballad "Scarborough Fair" was adapted, without acknowledgment, by Paul Simon on the Simon and Garfunkel album recording Parsley Sage Rosemary and Thyme in 1966."   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Carthy

When I posted this video on Multiply I also posted with it videos of the original Slade performance and also a great version of the song by Oasis.  Instead of following the rock trail back to this song here I am going to concentrate more on the folk roots of this performance and particularly the origins of the folk scene in the English Midlands. The Birmingham based Ian Campbell Folk Group were one of the most respected and influential groups of the British traditional music revival of the 1960s.

 The group's line-up included Dave Swarbrick 1960 - 1966 who left that year to perform with Martin Carthy as a duo. From 1968 to 1971 Dave Pegg played bass with Ian Campbell - until he left to join folk rock band Fairport Convention.

I used to know Ian Campbell and his sister Lorna quite well from their gigs at the Birmingham Star Club (then owned by the Communist Party of Great Britain) on Sunday afternoons in the early 1980s.

The Ian Campbell Group formed in 1956 in Birmingham, as the Clarion Skiffle Group and changed their name to the Ian Campbell Folk Group in 1958, they disbanded 20 years later, but Ian and Lorna continued to perform working with a variety of musicians, including: Aiden Forde (banjo, mandola), Colin Tommis (guitar) and Neil Cox (guitar) as the New Ian Campbell Folk Group. In 1965, their version of Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a-Changin'" reached #42 in the UK Singles Chart.

Here is Ian performing at Birmingham's foremost outdoors folk music event The Moseley Folk Festival in 2008.
Ian here aged 75 sings one of his regularly performed songs a version of Robert Burns ballad Rattlin' Roarin' Willie (1787) that reminds me so much of those Star Club sessions and the fundraisers during the year long Miners Strike (1984-85).

Here Ian harks back to his Scots roots, he had moved with his parents from his home town of Aberdeen to Birmingham in 1946 and has been based there ever since.

   

 O' rattlin', roarin' Willie, O, he held tae the fair,
An' for to sell his fiddle an' buy some other ware
But parting wi' his fiddle, the saut tear blint his e'e
And rattlin', roarin', Willie, Ye're welcome hame to me

O, Willie, come sell your fiddle, come, sell your fiddle sae fine
O Willie come sell your fiddle, and buy a pint o' wine
If I should sell my fiddle, the world would think I was mad
For many a rantin' day my fiddle and I hae had

As I cam' by Crochallan, I cannily keekit ben
Rattlin', roarin' Willie was sitting at yon board en'
Siting at yon board en' and amang guid company
Rattlin', roarin', Willie, ye're welcome hame to me

Footnote:- Ian's sons Ali and Robin Campbell were founder member of Reggae/fusion band UB40 which now also has another brother Duncan as the band's frontman   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UB40