The main attraction was elsewhere, somewhere down by the bars and the cluster of people, just in sight of the main stage, easing back into the cracked grass to receive the tightly wrapped cigarette papers. I was among the outskirts. Just me and a couple of dozen other keen souls, entrapped by the stripped back sound of hard heels on wooden floors.
At the end of the set the two lead singers, sisters, came down amongst the crowd and autographed copies of their albums. I handed over seven quid for a copy of their debut and they duly scrawled their names on the front. I walked away starring down at its strangeness. Written in tight red biro, as though from a scratch, needled in between the half cut face of the artwork, it said: ‘To Dave, love Rachel and Becky’ as though it was a joint present from my sister and an ex-girlfriend.
The dice haven’t chosen that record. They’ve chosen the one which was the reason I was there in the first place: Rachel Unthank and the Winterset - The Bairns.
It’s another folk record, but a very English one. Or, to be more precise, a Northumbrian one. The songs resound with the north-east’s lost past. They echo a clichéd mix of abandoned mines, coasts where the wind could carry you out to sea or crash you against the footholds of a castle and gruff hardy types who like a drink and the things that are best left to the dark. In many ways, everything about them is deeply unfashionable. The girls in the group refreshing defy the televised notion of a female music star yet still there is something beguiling about the Unthank sisters. The flushed out toned down photography of Becky Unthank stiffly seated in what could be a corseted reinforced dress atop a renaissance chair reflects the music they make: Beautifully aching music filled with remote longing.
The album is filled with songs of domestic violence and lost virginities; stories woven with sex and the demons found in drink, all sweetly harmonised over piano, fiddle and the occasional rhythmic stomp. These are songs with subject matter timeless and sung in voices that sound like they come from beyond, but are simultaneously lush and hallowed so they could be either from above or below. They are mixture of whole songs and concocted lullabies, snippets of traditions caught on a dusty old tape on the final breath of the drunk in the corner by the fire.
The only girl group thing about them is that they mainly play cover versions. Or, to be more accurate, aside from two group compositions, one written for them and a cover of Bonnie Prince Billy, the rest are traditional folk songs arranged by the group. Reinterpretations of songs sung for generations, but not as radical reworkings as, for example, the Pogues did to Irish country music. The songs are still grounded, still sunk deep into the earth. Rather than gut, they remodel with craft, they restore glory. They inherit.
Indeed why should they feel the need to write new material? When the music is as rich, unexplored and deeply satisfying as this, there could well be no other songs ever crafted than the fifteen on this album. All music, in the end, derives from itself. It’s all just progression built upon what has been before, all the way back to sticks on stones in the dust.
Classical literature tradition also suggests that all narrative comes from itself.
After all, there are only seven truly original story types. Not plots, but pure story types: The Quest; Voyage and Return; the Rebirth; Comedy; Tragedy; Overcoming the Monster; Rags to Riches.
A touch simplistic? Well, maybe, and certainly comedy and tragedy are pretty wide spheres. Aristole defined comedy as showing people to be worse than they are and tragedy as showing them to be greater. PG Wodehouse’s books are called comedy not just because it is hilarious, but because they on focus Bertie Wooster’s failings, even though in doing so they accidentally reveal his strengths too. Victor Hugo’s Les Miserables is a tragedy because Valjean, when he strides through the barricades to catch the collapsing world, is more than we could ever hope to be.
But still, these are building blocks rather than absolutes. We can blend recipes to concoct new dimensions of the originals, yet the core remains. The irrefutables.
These are the parts of life worth writing about.
Let’s take some random examples from my bookshelves:
William Boyd’s A Good Man in Africa may be very funny, but technically it’s a rebirth story – taking the central character as broken as they can possibly be and allowing that moment of epiphany when they start to return. Anne Enight’s The Gathering is a probably a tragedy, but it could also be a voyage and return. The family spreads far and wide and only stumbles home in mourning. Graham Greene’s the Power and the Glory is a quest for salvation. The whisky priest grapples with his own soul over that of his nation. Will Self’s Great Apes is an overcoming the monster tale, only in this instance is the beast within. Michael Chabon’s Kavlier and Clay, despite its flaws, is a rags to riches and back down to the gutter and finally up to the spires again story with doses of comedy and tragedy to boot.
Curiously, browsing through my books for this exercise I notice a couple of things. Is it just me or have rags to riches stories gone out of fashion in the Western world? Or, at least, outside of America? Is there so little mileage to be gained from people inching from one level of comfort to a slightly more squidgy version? Or have we decided that writing about wealth and the acquisition of it is nothing more than crass? I suspect that this is more a British embarrassment over discussing wealth. We’ve too much of a tendency to be equally jealous of those both above and below us, too focused on illusionary green grass, to consistently enjoy such stories.
I appear to own a prevalence of rebirth novels, which possibly reflects my own interests and writings. The novel that I can currently touting around is a rebirth of sorts. There’s certainly the crushing finality of realisation where we all went wrong. Or at least, I hope there is. The work that I’m trying to cultivate into something greater, an action that appears to be tragic in itself, is perhaps a mix of rebirth, voyage and return, rags to riches and overcoming the monster. Perhaps one will exert its dominance over the others, but which will only come clear in the writing of it.
Short stories are, perhaps, harder to categorise. Their brevity, their necessary focus on the moment, the turn, means that they struggle to take more than one story element and indeed there is insufficient space for enough emotional development to take on the entirety of, say, a quest story. All they can do is hint. Paradoxically bigger more complex works fit more easily into one of these silos.
But maybe that’s the big bluff. Maybe the complexities are just in our imaginations; what we expect from two hundred plus pages. Once you strip out the narrative twists, the self-consciously stylised imagery, the slight-of-hand literary thesis all we’re left with is the story. One of the seven moulds, waiting to be cast; to be turned into something new. Strangely, despite all the traditions bled into The Bairns, it is on the composition written especially for them that I found the most emotionally satisfying. Fareweel Regality is perfectly placed as the penultimate track. It follows on the back of the dusty wail for Ma Bonny Lad. There’s a half breath of a pause and then an almost, dare I say it, gleeful in its own melancholy fiddle strikes up before Rachel raises her head from the beaten ground and softly sings something new from something familiar.
Posts
No comments:
Post a Comment