All quotations are from interviews with June Tabor unless otherwise noted.

CD A

1 The Seeds of Love

“It’s the first song that Cecil Sharp collected, though not quite in this version because the tune isn’t the same – and I’m not sure quite where I got that tune from – though I think it’s based on a Warwickshire version that Pete Coe gave me. I don’t know if I learnt it or remembered it wrong, so it’s undergone the odd transformation. It’s one of those songs that everybody knows. You don’t learn it consciously. It becomes part of what you’ve absorbed about folk music. At some stage it must have part of my repertoire, possibly as part of the unaccompanied repertoire, but more likely just one of those songs that I knew. I hadn’t learnt it and I wasn’t necessarily intending to perform it, but it was in there. It was definitely an osmosis job. “As I often do, when I was looking into my memory of songs and wondering whether there was something in there that I hadn’t thought about for a while or something new and good and interesting that we could bring to a song that I knew a long time ago and hadn’t done for many years, “The Seeds of Love” came out. Again, it’s quite formulaic, like the ballads, but it’s so much about getting things wrong in relationships, but not being cast down by it. It sets the scene for many concerts about love-gone-wrong. But it does say that I’m not going to give up, I made the wrong choice this time, but the grass that oft-times has been trodden underfoot, given time, will rise again and I’m not going to let it beat me. So often in songs of absolute emotional despair – “Must I Go Bound” is another fine case in point – where the floating verses of disaster and emotional agony are put together, the singer says, ‘But I will find somebody who is going to love me and I won’t let it keep me down!’ That’s phenomenal, expressed in the most glorious language of the English love lyric. ““The Seeds of Love” is a wonderful way to begin this set because of all those things that are special about it. It’s the sort of song that cries, ‘Look again at it!’ It’s very easy to dismiss songs that you’ve known for a long time or that you think are too commonplace. It’s easy to miss the good stuff that is in there. This is a fine example of just such a treasure.”

2 The King Of Rome

David Sudbury: “In a glass case in Derby Museum there’s a pigeon called ‘The King of Rome’. In 1913 it flew from Italy back to its home loft in the West End of Derby. The Old West End used to be the rough side of town and Charlie Hudson, the man who bred The King lived there. I wrote the song because it’s about the kind of place I came from and the people I knew there.” (From the original press release for The Rough With The Smooth (1987)) June: "It was – and still is – an amazing case of a song finding me. That does happen. That came from that song contest, Songsearch, at Kendal. As did “Seven Summers” and “Where Are You Tonight?” from the following year's competition. But "The King of Rome" was just there and I knew I had to sing it. Rather like “The Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’” which also found me. That's a nice thing that happens: when songs find you and you think, ‘I’ve just been sitting waiting for you. And now there you are.’ “It’s not every modern song that requires accompaniment but they do mostly. That one was written with a folk background as a folk-oriented piece of writing so it was more likely to work being sung unaccompanied, although he accompanied it himself. I was dying to sing it. I sang it to Martin [Simpson] in a car park somewhere in South Yorkshire and said, ‘What do you think of this?’ He said, ‘Go on! Go back in the second half and do it.’ So I did. In live performance I've always done it unaccompanied although having said that I really liked what Dave Bristow did in terms of putting in the colours behind the song on Aqaba. That’s beautiful. That’s real Ridley Scott stuff, Hovis advert-type of stuff when I think of that particular piece of accompaniment.”

3 Hard Love “On the second Silly Sisters tour the chaps in the band were doing a solo piece each. Dan [Ar Braz] had come across this song and loved it so much that he did it as his solo. That was the first time that I’d heard it. As soon as I heard it, I knew what Dan meant when he said, ‘You think you know all the songs that can written about love and what happens when you fall out of love, but then a song comes along that says something that you knew you’d been waiting for in a song.’ “It’s about all the mistakes that you make. All those things you wished you had said when you had the chance and didn’t say and all those things that you did say that you wish afterwards you could unsay and take back. Yet it says, ‘This is what makes me the person that I am. I’ll acknowledge them as part of what I am.’ It’s a fantastic piece of writing that you can keep seeing new things in.”

4 Casey’s Last Ride “I don’t know what made me think of doing this song with the CJO. Suzie Adams had done a version of it on a single that she brought out that Andy Cronshaw produced. It had Suzie singing with a big chorus on the B part of the song. That was obviously somewhere in my head in between the original version and doing it myself. I was thinking of songs to do with brass. Bill Caddick’s “The Writing of Tipperary” was one and “Casey’s Last Ride” was another. It’s a song of such heart-wrenching desolation and an oblique story. What is really happening in this song? I know how I interpret it, but I don’t know what Kris Kristoferson had in mind when he wrote it. “I sang it to Huw and Huw went away and came back with this remarkable arrangement. We would have put it on the Quiet Eye album, but we couldn’t get a good version of it in the studio. Some of the original brass players couldn’t do the album. The tour had been a funded project, with Arts Council and National Lottery funding. We never quite recaptured the feeling on this particular song, so I was absolutely overjoyed to find that we had a good live recording because it was so special. “When Martin Simpson and I were rehearsing for the BBC 4 Sessions programme, I played him this recording when we had finished. I sat him down and put the headphones on him. He gave a cry of recognition when he realised what the song was going to be. About halfway through he was in tears and he had to go out in the garden for about 20 minutes afterwards. It’s one of those songs.”

5 What Will We Do? “I have a real fascination with songs collected from Gypsies. They are so often reviled for all sorts of reasons and so seldom given enough credit for being the guardians of so much of our traditional music. You only have to look at the great figures of traditional music and how many of them are Gypsies or Travellers: Jeannie Robertson, Belle Stewart, Davey Stewart, Jasper Smith and on and on. So often they proved the final guardians of traditional music. When other people didn’t think they wanted it anymore or needed it anymore, these Travelling People kept singing the songs and kept it safe for us. “This little piece that Maddy and I sang, collected by Mike Yates from the singing of Mary Delaney, is quite light, quite insubstantial in a way, but it’s very real. It’s talking about begging, keeping on the road, keeping going no matter what happens. It’s a lovely piece of Silly Sisterness.”

6 Skewball“In my record collection, which is not large, was the first Topic sampler. On it was Bert Lloyd singing this version of “Skewball”. It’s about a talking racehorse, a most attractive proposition.”

7 While Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping “Nic Jones, poor chap, had to put the accompaniment to “Gamekeepers Lie Sleeping” afterwards on Airs And Graces and he managed it! That was the only way I reckoned I could cope with it to start with. I was so used to singing songs unaccompanied. That was the beginning of learning how to sing with accompaniment. And then realising how many more possibilities accompaniment offered in terms of song choices, because not every song can be sung successfully in an unaccompanied way. “When I finally acquired a dog of my own, then I would dedicate “Gamekeepers” to him because it begins, ‘I’ve got a dog and a good dog too.’ I would say, ‘Like the dog in the song, my dog does chase hares, but he hasn’t caught any yet because he’s a dachshund and he’s only got little legs.’ On the occasion of this concert at the Jesse Boot Centre, Nottingham University – at a Cronshaw gig which I was part of – we had Flynn with us because there was nobody to look after him. I thought it would be nice to perform this song and have Flynn on stage at the same time. So a ‘registered dog-handler’ brought him out on a lead. I held the lead and started singing the song. Flynn had never been on a stage before and he got bored after about three verses. He started to pull and I was being pulled further and desperately trying to stay on-mike and hang onto the dog. Eventually Laurie Harper appeared, who Flynn knew, so he was happy to go to Laurie. Laurie relieved me of Flynn and I managed to finish the song. Which is why right at the end, you hear me say, ‘Thanks Flynn.’”

8 The Week Before Easter “The closest I got to recording “The Week Before Easter” was “The False Bride”. Again, it was the wonderful imagery of that song and those verses of the impossible which are a common feature of the English love lyric. ‘The men of the forest they ask it of me/How many strawberries grow in the salt sea?/I answer them back with a tear in my eye/Aye, as many ships sail in yon forest.’ I love those wonderful antitheses that crop up to express how absolutely impossible something is.” Andrew Cronshaw: “June came up to Edinburgh with the Dransfields around 1970. The first time I saw her she was like a creature from another planet. She had an orange wig and green make-up. She looked great, inhuman, as she would be the first to agree. It was only when June took that make-up off that we realised that she was a pink person underneath.” June: “I’d forgotten all about the wig. For a laugh, I did buy a red, curly wig which Andy remembers being orange. I’d always had dark hair and never did anything about making it any colour than it was. I probably fancied a change of personality or something without too much angst. That would have been the first time I saw Dick Gaughan sing and Aly Bain play as well. This was the summer of 1970 at the Edinburgh Festival at one of the folk events on the Fringe. I think Robin and Barry Dransfield just went up to some spots at various Fringe events to get better known, I suppose. An abiding love of Dick’s music was born then – he’s one of my favourite singers of all time.”

9 Strange Affair “It was at the point when I was looking for new songs. Paul Brown said, ‘Richard’s written this song,’ – because he knew that I liked Richard’s work – ‘and I think this one might suit you. Have a listen.’ It’s based on a Sufi poem, but it was one of those delightful, oblique songs. It’s about finding God. It’s about thinking that you’ve come to the end of everything and, if you look again, you find that God is there. Not that I’m a religious person: I’m not. But it says a tremendous amount for me about coming to the end of your tether and finding that there is someone there to help you after all. That’s my interpretation. “It’s a very beautiful song. Each line’s a gem. There’s no fillers in that song. Every single line, each juxtaposition of words means something. It’s one that endures.”

10 Sir Patrick Spens “One of the all-time sea-dramas. They’ve made it across the North Sea; are they going to make it back? ’Fraid not, lads, bad mistake to sail at the wrong time of year.”

11 Gypsum Davey “You can lose yourself just following a path, thinking how that’s interesting or why did that change? People sang songs to suit themselves. That’s why place names and circumstances change and people who had no business to be there. But whoever was singing it wanted to anchor it in their own locality and reality. That’s one of the things about ballads: that’s why they change. People relate it to their own circumstances and that’s one of the great beauties of it all. “Everybody says there’s no historical basis for this song. Wherever this story came from, just by telling it and retelling it and singing the song for 400 years, it has happened now. By doing that, we ‘believe’ that it happened and so we’ve created something an historical fact that wasn’t but is, just by singing this song. That’s one of the great wonders and strengths of the ballads. It never happened, but now we’ve made it happen.”

12 Buried In Kilkenny “In “Buried In Kilkenny” we are matched in the phrasing absolutely. I seem to remember consciously imitating how its source singer sang it. Mike Yates collected it from a Traveller at a Travellers’ camp under the Westway [in West London]. We stayed faithful to every little nuance, but we’re doing it together. I was amazed that we’d got it that close when I listened to this recording again.”

13 Behind The Wall “As everybody else did, I don’t doubt, I watched the Live Aid concert. Out stepped this young Black woman and sang an unaccompanied song. It was just amazing. I thought I had to learn that song so I did. I used to put it in performance alongside Bill Caddick’s “She Moves Among Men (The Barmaid’s Song)”. Two writers looking at the abuse of women from what should be two very different points of view. They are. One is a young Black woman and one a White man who can see so clearly into the mind of a woman. And I found the juxtaposition of those two songs fascinating. I only sang “Behind The Wall” for a very short time.”

14 Zaida’s Poem “There are two parts to talking about “Zaida’s Poem”. One is the actual history behind it. The man who wrote it – Morris Stock – was born in the Ukraine in a place called Verchneprovsk in 1892. He was abandoned as a very small baby. His mother brought him in a covered basket to the rabbi’s house, said she’d come to speak to the rabbi and was going back to pay the cab, and never came back. He was passed from family to family as a foster child and had a very hard early life. He nearly died from neglect and frostbite. In the end he made his way as foundlings have to and he came to the UK just before the First World War. He anglicised his name from Moyse Stocklinski. He became a shopkeeper and had a family. His children married and had children. Eventually – and this is how the poem came to me – he wrote the first volume of his autobiography, which he wrote in Russian. He showed it to a friend who said it was too good to lose. His friend translated it into English and it was published by Andre Deutsch in 1971 as Parents Unknown: a Ukrainian Childhood. The family lent me their copy. “My friend Joan was friends with one of Morris’ grandchildren. When he died, they were tidying up his house and hidden in a drawer they came across a poem which they called “Zaida’s Poem” because zaida is Yiddish for ‘granddad’. It was treasured in the family and they shared with Joan. Joan put that poem amongst some other things that she thought I might like. Quite some time afterwards I came across it again and I loved it so much. There’s so much hope in it. It’s somebody who’s coming to the end of their life but not seeing it as an end. I felt that I should perform the poem in some way but I didn’t want it set to music. I discussed it with Huw and he came up with the setting. I speak the poem but the music responds to the various stages of the poem. To a degree it’s improvised. As the words change, the music changes too. We performed it as the third part of a trilogy about the life of Jews in the Western world. We started with “Mayn Rue Platz” – about sweatshop workers in New York – and then did Andrew Cronshaw’s “A Smiling Shore” – about the experience of the Holocaust and how you make a life after the total abrogation and denial of life in the camps. We finished with “Zaida’s Poem” which is an expression of hope and kindness.”

15 Young Johnston “Peckinpah out of Kurosawa.”

16 Mississippi Summer “"Mississippi Summer" was one I'd had on the backburner. Found it when I was at a friend's house in Los Angeles. I wanted to do it but I wasn't sure how. I took that one along to the session and it worked out very well.”

17 A Place Called England “This one was bound to find me because I’d already embraced Maggie’s “A Proper Sort of Gardener” with a very whole heart. Maggie doesn’t write songs easily – she’ll be the first to say that – but when she does…! She was on her way to a gig in Aberystwyth and stayed the night. I asked her if she’d written anything recently and she played “A Place Called England”. I laughed and cried and shouted at the end because it was so good. “It is an anthem. It says all sorts of things that need to be said about the destruction of the countryside, the need to embrace everyone that lives here. As Maggie says, ‘As long as you love the English earth,’ it doesn’t matter where you come from, it does not matter what colour, what religion you are, then this is now your country. And it says, ‘Don’t let what is so special about England go. Don’t let it be destroyed and trashed by people whose only motive is profit. You’ve got to stand up and say that this is worth preserving.” A politico-horticultural antecedent might be Voltaire’s “Gardener’s Catechism” from his Philosophical Dictionary which takes the form of a conversation between the gardener Karpov and the Pasha Tuctan.

CD B

1 I Never Thought My Love Would Leave Me “It felt right as soon as I heard it and I knew I wanted to sing it.”

2 Beat The Retreat “It's from a collection of people singing Richard's songs on an album titled Beat The Retreat. I did "Beat The Retreat" with Martin Carthy, Danny Thompson, David Lindley on slide and D J Bonebreak on drums. I also did an acapella version of "Genesis Hall".”

3 Fine Horseman “I’ve always loved the mystic side of Lal Waterson’s writing. This, in particular, is all dream sequences. The way I found “The Scarecrow” Bergman, “Fine Horseman” is Bergman too. It has very strong images. The weather is very Bergman. Very Japanese cinema too. When we were doing this version, we came to the line, ‘This is no time for a farming man’ and it was during the time of foot and mouth. It’s a somehow prophetic song. What did Lal see when she was writing these lines?”

4 The Overgate “Having acquired the Anne Briggs EP [The Hazards of Love, currently available on Anne Briggs: A Collection, Topic TSCD504, 1999], it set me on the way of singing unaccompanied from discovering what the voice could do and learning from copying Anne meticulously. I drove my mother crackers for weeks as I learned how to do this decorated style – which I’d never heard before. I then acquired Topic’s Stewarts of Blair album on another trip to Collet’s and Dobell’s. And discovered another wonderful way of singing, the Scottish Traveller style. I thought the delivery, the timing and the great swoops in the voice that seem to be characteristic of female Traveller singers were wonderful. I learned all the songs on that record too. Eventually the singing style evolved as a combination of the two things. I think all singing styles are a matter initially of imitation. You hear something that appeals to you and so you work out how to do it and once you have worked out how to do it you don’t just take that as your only influence – well, I didn’t – and then you work out when not to do it. Not doing it is as important as doing it. “Belle Stewart [1906-1997] was tremendously important and I was very lucky to meet her. A very tall, very stately woman in a long plaid skirt, with white hair and an erect, very regal bearing. She must have been around 80 when I met her and I feel very lucky that I did.”

5 The Fair Maid of Wallington “Maddy found this song, though I don’t know if we ever did sing it together.” Just as Steeleye Span’s name derives from a character in the traditional song “Horkstow Grange” – although the alternative title “Harkstow Grange” better captured the Lincolnshire vowels of Percy Grainger’s original informant, George Gouldthorpe – this variant of “Fair Mary of Wallington” (Child 91) provides the source for “silly sisters”. “When Maddy and I got to do the album, Silly Sisters was Maddy’s suggestion for the album title. Inevitably, we got called ‘the Silly Sisters’ though that wasn’t the intention. It is the album title of the first one.”

6 Geordie “This version which I came across in the Oxford Book of Ballads always made much more sense somehow. It’s not the ‘stole sixty of the king’s royal deer’ version and ‘sold them in Boeny’ version. It was a nice song but it didn’t have any power to it. This one is the resourceful woman and the handsome but stupid husband. He gets himself into another pickle and she’s determined to go and rescue him. When the king says he’s going to hang him, she produces rather a large number of her husband’s kinsmen who admittedly do contribute the ransom. But you get the feeling that they’re holding rather large swords in the other hands.”

7 All This Useless Beauty Elvis Costello: “…“All This Useless Beauty” and “I Want To Vanish” were both originally written for that great voice from English folk music, June Tabor. While the first song was delivered with more anger than on my version, June found the black humour in “I Wish To Vanish”.” (From Costello’s notes to 2001’s expanded edition of All This Useless Beauty) He had earlier performed Andrew Cronshaw’s “A Smiling Shore” in concert, clear evidence that he had been listening to Abyssinians – since that was the only source for the song. One thing led to another, in their case to him pitching her songs. June: “I said to Elvis, ‘I hope I like it.' He said, ‘So do I. But don't worry if you don't. I've been writing songs for people for years and they don't necessarily use them. I still haven't got it right with Bonnie Raitt.' There was someone else he wrote a song for and he saw that it had turned up on this person's album – I can't remember who it was – and when he listened to the album he didn't recognise it at all. They'd completely altered it. Altered the words. Altered the tune. I presume he got a royalty for it. I left his entirely intact but it was a chance to take because it might not have been right.” June’s take on “I Want To Vanish” appeared on Against The Streams (1994).

8 Illusions Another side of June’s musical character – the Marlene Dietrich diva one. Any musician worth their salt will have repertoire items that go in and out of live performance or are ou(s)ted from their repertoire. It may be because songs need to lie fallow. Songs such as “Illusions”, Woody Guthrie’s “Plane Crash At Los Gatos”, Anna McGarrigle’s “Heart Like A Wheel”, Natalie Merchant’s “Verdi Cries” and Grace Slick’s “White Rabbit” represent sides of June’s musical character that she has kept geschminkt (covered by make-up) periodically. This English-language song, like its companion piece “Black Market”, originally appeared in Charles Brackett’s film A Foreign Affair (1949), a drama of lost and reinvented lives set amid the reconstruction of post-1945 Berlin. It entered her repertoire via Pyewackett via Mark Emerson. A studio version of “Illusions” was recorded for Angel Tiger (1992) but, like its versions of “Don’t Think Twice, It’s Alright” and “As I Roved Out”, went into the great tape locker (though the Dylan song did appear on a Cooking Vinyl sampler). “We had too many tracks. We recorded 15 and we had to abandon three because Martin [Goldschmidt] at Cooking Vinyl said 12 was enough.”

9 Love Henry / The Cherokee Shuffle “I’ve often found it amusing and disturbing the way the great ballads metamorphosed when they crossed the water. Something as disturbing as “Young Hunting” with its supernatural references, with the corpse bleeding when the murderer approaches and the real weight of horror that is in that tale of murder and the attempted concealment by the former true love turns into a kind of Disneyfied version that becomes “Love Henry”. And yet it still has so much strength. Now I appreciate much more the strength of the Appalachian versions, whereas I might once have said, ‘Yes, but it’s not as good as the original.’ This once sneaked through because it’s got so many good lines in it. Particularly the lines, ‘Then up and spoke a pretty little bird/Exceeding on a willow tree.’ You’ve got to sing a song with that in it! The bird flies away into the sunset to star in the sequel, while everybody dies unhappily ever after.” Mark Emerson: “Sometimes it's immediately obvious [when arranging material]. Sometimes it’s not obvious at all. Often she knows a song quite well before we’ve even attempted an accompaniment. It can be really quick because listening to her singing it’s just a matter of underpinning the feel that she has already. I suppose something like "Love Henry" is obvious.”

10 Four Loom Weaver “Andy was very much into music and asked me to sing a few songs. I think it was late morning when “The Four Loom Weaver” was done. I seem to remember it being quite bright daylight and just standing in the kitchen. And him pointing a microphone at me and off I went. I must have been singing it already [before singing it with Maddy Prior], as this recording points out. Andy and I stayed friends and eventually he produced Abyssinians and Aqaba and the second Sillys’ album.”

11 I Will Put My Ship In Order “It’s a night-visiting-gone-wrong song. Usually as soon as the parents have gone out, the young man is there persuading his young lady that what she should do is let him. This one doesn’t work out the way it’s supposed to. When she does go down and opens the door, he’s gone. When she finds him, she asks what happened and he says he’s not interested in her anymore, she’s too easy. Oh, the bastard! I put the last verse about the ripest apples in – which belongs in a song of its own – because it seemed so appropriate that that verse should come at the end. Long after having done that, I found another version of “Ship In Order” which actually had that verse in it. People think alike over the years. It’s fascinating how it comes back round.”

12 Cold And Raw “It’s from an early collection of songs collected by a chap called d’Urfey from Wit and Mirth: or, Pills to Purge Melancholy and the tune is in Playford called “Stingo”. I liked this song because it’s the usual pretty girl and the libidinous suitor but it’s a lovely antidote to all the songs in which the rich person does get his wicked way and the poor girl probably doesn’t get the money either. ”Having recorded it originally on Ashes And Diamonds I came back to it because it was such a jaunty song. This was the version that Andy Cutting and Mark Emerson came up with. It all worked so well that I think they’ve lifted the song even more than in the original version.”

13 The Nurse, Dorothy Nicol (Lyn McDonald) “I’ve long been an advocate of incorporating spoken word pieces into what is basically a singing performance. I came across Lyn McDonald’s book, The Roses of No Man’s Land [1993], which is a collection of testimonies of the doctors, nurses and VADs [Voluntary Aid Detachment] – the auxiliary nurses – that served in the front line hospitals of the Western Front. As with all Lyn McDonald’s work, it’s overwhelming. It’s the kind of book you can’t read in one sitting. You can only read so much because it’s so devastatingly affecting to read what it was like to be there in the trenches whether a soldier or in this case as the people who were trying to put the people back together again. This particular extract of Dorothy Nicol’s testimony did incorporate in it, because it was what she had been listening to, the song “The Long, Long Trail”. “I wanted to do it as a performance piece: to read Dorothy Nicol’s words and then go into the song. At the end of it I used to put Bill Caddick’s song “The Reaper” which he’d written for a brief series of performances at the National Theatre of readings and music associated with Flora Thompson’s Lark Rise. I sang some songs at it and Bill had just finished “The Reaper” and he gave it to me to sing. It just fitted so perfectly after Dorothy’s words and “The Long, Long Trail”. “We actually performed it at a concert in Portland in Oregon and there was a review of it that then got reproduced in my newsletter. It came to the attention of Piet Chielens who says it was one of the things that got the Passchendaele concerts going. Piet is now the director of the In Flanders Fields Museum in Ypres in Belgium [ hyperlink "http://www.inflandersfields.be/" www.inflandersfields.be] and the motivator of what has now become a series of peace concerts involving musicians from all over Europe.”

14 The Band Played “Waltzing Matilda” “That song found me. It was a turning-point for me. I heard that song in a singaround in the Packhorse, a pub in South Stoke outside Bath. As soon as I heard it, I knew I had to sing it. The girl I heard sing it, whose name was Jane Herival, she’d learned it from Eric Bogle and said she didn’t know if she could give Eric’s songs to anybody. She said, she’d have to ask him. So I learned the song but I did not sing it until I heard from Jane that she had been in touch with Eric and he said it was alright to give it to somebody else.” Eric Bogle was born in 1944 in Peebles, then in Peebleshire, south of Edinburgh, but left Scotland for New South Wales in 1969. This insightful song, written three years later, relates an ANZAC (Australia New Zealand Army Corps) veteran’s experience at the ill-starred Gallipoli debacle in the Dardanelles when the Turks threw the Allied expeditionary force of Australian-New Zealander, British, French, Indian and even Assyrian Jewish servicemen back into the sea. The song is suffused not only with an Australian character but a genuine universality. ”I hadn’t been doing it for very long when I suddenly got to do a John Peel session. Tim and Maddy were supposed to be doing this session. Tim rang up and said, ‘Maddy can’t sing. Can you come down and do it with me?’ Tim said that he would do three songs and I could do three. I asked John Walters if there was any restriction how long the song could be, because my only experience of radio up till then was Radio 2 and ‘Keep it short and bright and nothing over three-and-a-half minutes!’ John Walters said, ‘Well, I think the longest we’ve had on has been Tangerine Dream and it was about thirteen-and-a-half minutes. Is it going to be any longer that?’ So I sang “The Band Played ‘Waltzing Matilda’” on that John Peel programme depping for Maddy.”

15 Maybe Then I’ll Be A Rose “Les Barker was one of the poets that Savourna Stevenson got in touch with to write songs for the Borders Festival project. I remember Les saying he sent Savourna a note which said that he hadn’t quite finished the first song so he was sending the second one. That was “Maybe Then I’ll Be A Rose”. It’s a poet’s response with a little bit of tongue-in-cheek to all the traditional ballads in which true love only gets worked out by people dying and then roses emerging from their graves. The roses eventually get to embrace each other, but it’s far too late for the people who should have done it. It says, ‘Seize the moment!’” Les Barker: “The original idea came from Savourna Stevenson. It was a project of updated border ballads. I think I did about five of which three went on Singing The Storm. I knew the basic ballad story of this one with two lovers dying and the rose and briar entwining on the grave. It just seemed a silly way round to do things! So I wrote a sensible version of the ballad.”

16 Meditation “This is one of the songs that I learned for Some Other Time. I picked out songs that for me had good lyrics. I love the kind of song that says, ‘I know you’re a complete bastard and I know this is going to end in tears, but I love you to bits and here I am on a plate.’ This is one of those songs. We’ve probably all done it. You can either take it literally as a heartfelt expression of love or you can take it slightly tongue in cheek. At the same time there is that slight note of hope that occurs so often in standards. There are certain standards that do have good words and the words are not purely there purely to keep two solos apart."

CD C

1 April Morning “Ever since I first heard Andy Cutting play at Nettlebed [in Oxfordshire] when he came along and did a floor spot, you could see he was good. Later I saw him play with Chris Wood at Sidmouth Festival. I really wanted to do something with Andy and incorporate him into the band. He joined the band for a short period of time. “April Morning” is a glorious piece of Andy’s lyrical playing. The song is another of those osmosis ones. I happened to be a John Jones’ house in the company of Rod and Danny Stradling and we started singing after dinner. This was one of the songs that we sang and somehow I knew all the words, although I’d never consciously learnt it. From that remembering it stuck in my mind and I knew it would be a perfect one for Andy and Mark to play. That’s how it got onto Aleyn.”

2 Johnny o’Bredislee - Glory Of The West “This is another of those ballads that tells such an incredible story of a boy who won’t take his mother’s advice and be a vegetarian. He has to have real meat and unfortunately he goes poaching. Then the silly sod falls asleep! “It’s the way the story builds. You think maybe he’ll get away with it. There’s no giving away the end here!”

3 Singing The Travels “It was everybody playing, with Martin Carthy playing a drum. We rehearsed it and he got the best results with playing the top of a stool with Johnny Moynihan’s plimsoll. [Gentle reader, hold that image.] Whether that was a drum borrowed from Aerosmith in the next studio next door, who knows? It wasn’t a tabor. That’s what I remember most about recording “Singing The Travels” is Carthy thumping the stool with a plimsoll.”

4 Waiting For The Lark “We’ve done a number of concerts at the Holywell Music Room in Oxford and on one occasion I was determined to finish with “Waiting For The Lark” as the encore. I did this big description of what it was about, about how Bill wrote it. Huw played the intro and I couldn’t remember the first verse. I could remember the second verse but not the first. He played through the intro a second time but it wasn’t coming. I’d given it such a big build-up that I stopped and said, ‘The worst thing that can happen to a singer has happened. I can’t remember the words of the first verse.’ Huw and Mark couldn’t remember either. Nobody in the audience knew. Then Huw had a bright idea: it was on the new album. So I asked the audience in general if anybody had bought Against The Streams. One chap had but he hadn’t undone it yet. There was an agonising minute or so while he wrestled with the shrink wrap. Eventually he got it off, got the booklet out, read out the first line and I said, ‘Got it: play the introduction!’”

5 10,000 Miles “Nic Jones did the classic version of this song, to my mind. This is what that line-up and those musicians, with no preconceptions about what traditional music was or should be, could do in terms of making a traditional song into another sort of classic. That love song can hold its own against all comers.

6 Hunting The Cutty Wren Les Barker: “I knew June liked doing the comedy stuff, so there was no great problem with that. When I decided to make Oranges & Lemmings it was a matter of asking who had been involved with the Mrs Ackroyd Band. June had done some live work with the band by then too. At that stage the Mrs Ackroyd Band was a fairly large ensemble. It was me, Lesley Davies, Chris Pollington and Alison Younger, on certain occasions Martin [Carthy], Norma [Waterson] and Eliza [Carthy]. When we did festivals I just grabbed anyone else there who I knew could do the job properly. June was certainly in one or two bands at Sidmouth. “I wanted to do “Hunting The Cutty Wren because the original was such a stupid song. Having Martin and June available it seemed a bright idea to get the two of them together to do it. Both of them had done comedy stuff live in the band and as long as they were happy to do it I knew they’d do a good job.”

7 Willie Taylor “This is the tale of the young girl when her true love is taken away to go and fight in the navy, and the usual story of the young woman dressing up as a man. As is compulsory in these set-ups she has an unfortunate accident with her clothing in the middle of the battle. Which rather exposes the fact that she’s not a chap after all.”

8 Bonny May “This was another one from Maddy. Maddy found it and we didn’t get around to doing anything with it. It’s another ballad – “Broom Of Cowdenknows” – and it’s another fairly resourceful woman’s song, which is why I was rather taken with it. It was a very spirited song. In this particular case the young man decides to do the honest thing, not common in ballads. “I remember wanting to do this song again and Martin Simpson saying he hadn’t a clue what tuning the guitar was in; he might know now. I did do a few gigs with Nic after Airs And Graces came out. They were Nic doing a third of the gig, me doing some unaccompanied stuff and doing some songs together. People often used to ask for it but Martin and I never came up with a successful variant.”

9 Anachie Gordon In November 1990 June and the Oysters were preparing to do a Peel session, when, Ian Telfer recalls, “A message came down from the producer John Walters saying, ‘Don’t they know anything but miserable old folksongs?’ We thought, ‘Sod ’em! We will do something other than miserable old folksongs!’ In the car between Bristol, where we’d been doing something for Channel 4, and West London, we reconstructed the words of “White Rabbit”, “All Along The Watchtower” and “This Wheel’s On Fire”. We had a go at “Anachie Gordon” too, the brilliant Scottish ballad. There’s a famous version of it that Nic Jones did it on The Noah’s Ark Trap [1977]. It’s difficult not to suspect that he may have reconstructed the song or at least edited it. Lots of people do that all the time, but it’s very wonderful so it’s difficult to do another version. It’s quite definitive what he did with that. We never liked [what we did] so it never got used for anything as far as I know.” June: “Not having done the Oyster version after that session, it still stuck with me what a good song it was. When Mark and I were looking for a repertoire to use in our duo incarnation, this was one of the songs that we thought we’d work on. He came up with the idea, since there’s only one of him, to use an electronic loop with a pulse going on underneath while he solos on viola over the top. It really did bring out the strength and desperation of the song, just as Nic’s version does in the guitar part. It’s the true stuff of tragedy, the way so many ballads are.” Nic Jones: “I found it in Christie’s Traditional Ballad Airs and collated verses from “Lord Saltoun & Auchanachie” (Buchan’s Ballads of the North of Scotland), “Young Annochie” (Murison MS), and “Lord Saltoun & Annachie” (Christie’s Traditional Ballad Airs).” (From the notes to his Unearthed (2001))

10 Aqaba A scene in David Lean’s Lawrence of Arabia provided the inspiration for this song. “The image that I have particularly in mind is when they’ve taken Aqaba and Lawrence and Ali – Peter O’Toole and Omar Sharif – ride down to the sea. The sun is going down and there’s a victory wreath of poppies floating on the tide. The rays of the sun are skimming along the water and the poppies are bobbing up and down on the tide, hence the line in the song about the poppies bobbing on the tide and the blood on the sand dunes. I gave that image to Bill and the whole thing about it being the turning-point in Lawrence’s career. He took it and turned it into the song we have now. “It’s another song about success and failure and not belonging that Caddick does so well with the dual imagery of the summer’s morning and of going to his death along the road, and remembering the strength and joy of victory in the morning. I should have put ‘Special Thanks to David Lean’ on the album sleeve! “I have a bottomless box of song words that songs go into. Things aren’t thrown away. Twenty years later I might think, ‘What was that song about…?’ I came across an early draft of “Aqaba” in Bill’s handwriting which in some ways in quite different at certain points from the version that is on the album. I remember we did do some work on it through discussion between the two of us, as to what the final form of the song should be. I think on this track you have the nearest I will ever probably get to songwriting.”

11 Reynardine “I’d done an Irish version of “Reynardine” on Airs And Graces, a version of this fantastic werefox tale. It has a wonderful mystery and otherworldliness about it. You step into the halfway world where animals and humans can change places. It seemed like a good idea with Maddy to go to the version that Anne Briggs had sung that we both knew and loved so much. It has a very otherworldly quality to it, particularly with Dan’s guitar, I think.”

12 Dashing Away With The Smoothing Iron “Dan said, ‘What is this sermooothing iron that I am having to play?’ It’s one of the joyous, very silly sister moments. I had forgotten how good that was. It’s very good to be reminded of things.”

13 Pharaoh “I first heard Richard play it in Edinburgh in about ’87 when he was doing a solo gig and I thought, ‘I’ve just got to have that.’ I love Richard’s writing anyway but some things just leap out and have my name written on them. Again it was the imagery, the use the language. It’s such a powerful song. Anybody who writes ‘Pharaoh sits in his tower of steel/ The dogs of money all at his heels...’ has got my vote. Richard Thompson for President, thank you very much. Oh, it’s fabulous.”

14 Belle Rose “One of the things that happens sometimes is you look at the material that you have that haven’t recorded and might want to consider recording. It just happened that there were a couple of songs about roses or had roses as a significant part of the song. I started to find more and Rosa Mundi became a deliberate possibility. Some serious research was done, largely in Shrewsbury Music Library, and once you start looking you find how important the rose is in all kinds of song fields, particularly in traditional music but elsewhere too. ”I like to draw a parallel between the courtly trouvère songs of Twelfth and Thirteenth Century and the chansons de rencontre, which is one of the song form that you find in the songs of that time, and “Belle Rose”. Because it’s the same set-up: the beautiful young girl, the hedgerow, the roses, the nightingale, the young man. In the trouvère songs it always goes along the lines of ‘Hallo, you’re very beautiful, have you got any money?’ She replies, ‘Oh yes, I am extremely rich and the King of France is my father.’ He’s says, ‘I love you. Will you marry me?’ They get married and they live happily ever after. “By the time this song reached the Channel Islands it’s changed a bit. When he says, ‘You’re 15, you better come and live at my house. You can sleep with my mother, except mostly you’ll sleep with me,’ she says, ‘I’m not going to sleep with anybody unless I’m married to them, so sod off!’ Off she goes down the road, because, it seems, the Channel Islands had embraced Calvinism with complete wholeheartedness and no sex before marriage.”

15 Will Ye Go To Flanders? “Piet Chielens put this to us as the first song of that first Passchendaele peace concert which was “We Died In Hell They Called It Passchendaele”. It’s a song originally of the War of the Spanish Succession [1702-1713], but it’s so applicable to the First World War. Two of the verses are contemporary to the Duke of Marlborough’s campaign and the other two were created later. It was the perfect song to start the peace concert. We recorded this version just before the In Flanders Fields Museum opened. It’s actually the first thing you hear as you walk into the museum.”

16 Shallow Brown “I do find with this magpie mind that I have stores up all sorts of information, useless and useful, that might come in handy doing the Guardian crossword or might come to my rescue at some stage. I’m just the same with songs. It might remain somewhere at the back of my mind/repertoire. I might love a song but not know quite how to do it. Or I may have an attempt at doing it but it isn’t quite right. So it’s left there to wait its chance. Certainly “Shallow Brown” was one of those songs. I’d heard it originally from Tony Hall when he was part of the Silly Sisters band. I remember Chris Coe doing a fine version and Martin [Simpson] and I had it in our repertoire doing it with a slide guitar for a while. One morning in the shower as I was singing it, it suddenly came to me that this was a perfect song to do with the line-up here, slowing it down even further and bringing out the sadness of this song. It started its life as a shanty but there’s a lot else going on. It has the sadness of parting, in this case because the two people involved are slaves and they have no choice. It’s such a wonderful farewell song. This version was recorded at the Viaduct Theatre in Halifax. Aleyn is a live album. It doesn’t say so on the album. It’s just that there’s no applause so you might be fooled…”

17 Now I’m Easy “Another Bogle classic. I seem to remember that Eric said that when he wrote the song, he’d met this old man and over a few beers they’d started telling each other their life stories. The way this song comes out is almost verbatim the way the old man told him. Those are his words and every so often he’d punctuate things with a ‘Now I’m easy’. It’s a lovely piece of writing. A very tender song. It’s the nearest I ever got to folk-rock at that stage.”

CD D

1 Mrs Rita Richard Thompson: “Oh kind Mrs Rita I never will tell The way you keep us poor girls in hell I never will speak to the News of the World Oh kind Mrs Rita Sincere Mrs Rita A friend to a stranger, a ma to a girl.” Ken Hunt: “Like The Iron Muse and Bonnie Pit Laddie, Hard Cash’s ripples will be felt for a very long time. It too deals with industrial relations and their human consequences and Ron Kavana’s words about his song “A Living Wage” could easily apply to the project as a whole. ‘It’s decrying the whole decline in the quality of life in Britain, the sell-out of people who gave their lives in two world wars for a better life.”

2 All Tomorrow’s Parties “We started discussing what possible songs we could do, sitting around Ian Telfer’s kitchen table when he lived in Canterbury and trying things out acoustically. We tried a few things that didn’t work. After that first session we had five songs, five songs we had a basic acoustic framework for. Only at that stage did we say to Martin Goldschmidt that we thought it would work. Up to then we weren’t going to commit ourselves. Although it was a good idea, it might not have worked out – in terms of not being able to agree about songs or not finding the right songs or not finding the right way of doing them. That day we came up with something very close to finished versions of “All Tomorrow’s Parties” and “Valentine's Day Is Over” – that was the very first one.” Christa Päffgen, reinvented as the impassively voiced chanteuse Nico, sang this song on the shocking debut album from the Velvet Underground. Velvet Underground & Nico (1967). A flavour of Nico’s Prussian-strength ice-maiden formality comes across in “All Tomorrow’s Parties”. In an interview with twen, West Germany’s hippest youth culture magazine of the late 1960s and early 1970s (its publisher pulled the last, May 1971 issue from distribution because somebody deemed it had gone too far), Nico chastised the interviewer for impertinently addressing her with the familiar ‘du’ rather the respectful ‘Sie’ form of ‘you’ in German. Ian Telfer: “June’s voice was great for that Nico spine-chilling kind of thing.”

3 The Wind & The Rain - The Falls of Richmond “There were lots of versions of that song about but Jody Stecher's on Going Up On The Mountain had a kind of immediacy about it. I like the refrain – probably it’s the English in me; talking about the weather – but it was particularly the verse about making a little fiddle out of her breastbone and how the sound would melt a heart of stone. I thought that was a really nice way of putting it. It told the story very strongly. It's a good one to do with voice and viola. Mark put a tune called “The Falls of Richmond” in the middle.”

4 Bonnie James Campbell “I see “Bonnie James Campbell” so clearly in terms of cinema. All the instructions to the director are there. There’s the riderless horse. That’s the constant throughout this very short piece of film. Then it cuts to the two women running from the building. There’s the horse. It’s ‘empty’, there’s nobody in the saddle and they’re crying because they know something terrible’s happened. It’s all in black and white. It’s very blurred. Then it cuts to him riding out that morning and they’re waving him goodbye. They don’t know that he’s not going to come back. Then it’s the horse galloping in an aimless way along the horizon. The last camera shot goes down to the blood on the saddle. “I found two tunes for it and neither of them was right for the power of those words so I had to knuckle down and write a tune.”

5 Joe Peel A Proper Sort of Gardener “It’s a series of sepia or newspaper photographs and that’s the way Peter Bond intended it to be. The miner in the bath, all black from head to foot, ready to scrub down, before they had showers at the pit. I see that picture. That’s an amazing tribute to somebody that you love. The person that it speaks of is a real person. My Uncle Spencer was very much that sort of person, always doing things for other people, cheerful, mischievous, jokey, and when he died it was a real hole not just in our lives, but in so many other people’s. That’s the connection I make when I sing that song. When you’ve had somebody special in your life like that, whether as a child or as an adult, when they do die, that song says so much about loss and remembrance. My Uncle Spencer was a gardener.” Ric Sanders: “If I had to choose my favourite track on A Cut Above, it would have to be Peter Bond’s “Joe Peel”. I think some of Dave Bristow’s accompaniment is just right.”

6 The Royal Oak “It’s one of those British-navy-in-a-rowing-boat-takes-on-the-entire-Turkish-fleet-and- wins-nine-nil songs. It’s a very graphic song about a sea battle against overwhelming odds, so we’re rooting for the underdog. It appealed to me, the way it describes the Turkish ships. It’s all slightly wrong. The Turkish ships have all got English names. Things have been grafted on. It’s a song with tremendous vitality. It’s incredibly jingoistic, but I enjoyed singing it at the time. I still sing it for fun sometimes while out doing the gardening or out with the dogs.”

7 False False “Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seeger collected “False False” from an Aberdeenshire Traveller called Christina MacAllister and published it in their Travellers’ Songs From England and Scotland [1977]. The imagery of the impossible is so strong, but there’s that little note of hope at the end.”

8 Roseville Fair “I first heard Chris Wood sing the original. Chris did “Roseville Fair” on that little tape that he and Andy Cutting did that was their first recorded output. When Les’ version arrived in his Irritable Bowwow Syndrome [1995] book, I knew had to do it. The thing I love so much about singing it is that the first half of the song is just as the original, so people think, particularly in America where it’s extremely well known, that you’re going to sing the original. Then it changes… I love what Les has done and it says a lot about banjos really. Except in the hands of a certain Mr Simpson.” Les Barker: “”Roseville Fair” was originally by Bill Staines. The first version I ever heard was by Chris Wood and Andy Cutting. It was a nice song but it seemed to suggest the ridiculous idea of hitting somebody over the head with a rosewood chair. The words fitted perfectly. But the idea of hitting somebody with a banjo seemed even better. “At some point after I’d written it, someone in the States put me in touch with Bill Staines. He liked it. The first time I ever heard June do it was at a gig we did together in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. She did a version of it for part of the Mrs Ackroyd Band’s Yelp! [2003]. She offered to do “There’s A Hole In My Bodhran” but when the package turned up there was a solo version of “Roseville Fair” too in case I wanted it!”

9 Eights And Aces “The song makes more sense if you know it speaks of the murder of Wild Bill Hickok. Hickok was playing cards in Deadwood and he made the mistake of sitting with his back to the door. When they looked at the cards that Hickok was holding when he was shot, he was found to have a pair of black aces and black eights which became known as the ‘dead man’s hand’.” (Jack McCall murdered Hickok in August 1876. The following year he went to the gallows for the crime.) “Like a lot of Richard Thompson's stuff, it doesn't tell you the whole story by any means. I like that. Bill's like that at his best. He gives you a few clues. Instead of saying the story started at A and it went through B and it ended up at C, you're told a bit about B, you have to infer A and you might guess what happened in C. Or maybe not. You're given parts of the puzzle and the rest is left to the imagination and yet at the same time the images of what you are given are so strong that that is enough to work on. I like that. "Eights And Aces" is like that. There's an entire lifetime in four verses, not to mention all the allusions. The strength of the visual image. In four verses there is an entire life. The betrayal and the internal reference to the murder, to the dead man's hand. Then he'll just throw in that last line about ‘Every stop is no man's land along the way.’ The echo of the First World War, not that it's got anything to do with that, that's just another image of desolation.”

10 The Baker “I’ve been very lucky in terms of the musicians that I’ve worked with, such as Martin, Huw and Mark – the regular partnerships – but also the occasional collaborations with the Oysters and with Savourna. Savourna and I encountered each other through Les Barker and Les’ opera The Stones of Callanish [1989] on which Savourna did the harp arrangements. I loved her playing and we promised each other that we would, at some point, work together. She was given a commission for the Borders Festival in 1995. Up to that point she’s only written instrumental pieces and so she decided that she would like to turn her hand to writing the music for songs. She asked a number of writers to contribute lyrics to do with women, creating new ballads with specific reference to women. This was how the album Singing The Storm came about. “Savourna approached the Scots poet and playwright Liz Lochhead and she sent this poem, “The Baker”. As Liz had it, it was a tremendous poem: Savourna made it a song and a remarkable song. The writing, the whole instrumentation underpin the words which speak of coming to terms with loss. Liz had written elegies for her parents and found herself at one point wondering why there couldn’t be the same kind of figure at a funeral as that of a sweep at a wedding bringing good luck and happiness. Why couldn’t there be a corresponding figure at a funeral who would bring peace of mind and acceptance of loss? Then she realised there was such a person, except he wouldn’t be seen at a funeral. He had played his part in the hours before and he was the baker baking the things for the funeral tea. Just as yeast must rise, so hope must return.”

11 This Is Always “I remember somebody calling out from the audience at the Acorn in Penzance, ‘Don’t you know any songs about love-gone-right?’ Whereupon I said, ‘Of course I do.’ And here it is.”

12 Queen Cruelty “I quite often say to Les Barker, ‘Here’s a fantastic tune and really it could do with some words.’ In this case it was “The Hawthorn Tree of Cawdor”, a traditional tune I heard Andrew Cronshaw play many times. I gave it to Les and he came up with this. It’s the ‘Scottish play’ [the theatrical nickname for Shakespeare’s Macbeth] in all its venom to this amazing tune. I don’t know why we stopped doing because it’s a very strong song. I think its time will come round again!” Les Barker: “It originated from Mark. He suggested I do a version of “The Hawthorn Tree of Cawdor” which is on The Andy Cronshaw CD [1989] [under the title of “Freumh as Craobh Taigh Challadair”]. I listened to the tune and it seemed like a good idea to write Macbeth.”

13 Joe Peel

14 All Our Trades Are Gone “The song’s introduction says it all.”

15 Virginia’s Bloody Soil “I found a copy of my notes for our American Civil War programme. A lot of it was information-heavy but back then it was long before that huge television series on the American Civil War [Ken Burns, 1990] and nobody in this country, except for the aficionados, knew anything about the war. We were partly trying to tell the historical facts of the progress of the war, but also things associated with it. Like the beginning of concentration camps, the role of black soldiers in the war and how they were viewed by both sides and how they saw themselves, the recurring theme of the war being over by Christmas and the impact of Reconstruction on the South and how it has echoes even today. ”Initially I wrote down key dates. I wanted to get it right for anybody who knew their stuff without it getting too overburdened with facts for somebody who was coming to it for the first time. I’ve actually got the piece of paper so that was a good aide memoire to what we had done. Sadly no intact musical whole survived.”

16 Hug Pine (Dudu Pukwana) “David Suff, who has done much of the very hard work on this collection, leaving me to do the fine tuning in terms of track selection, felt that Mark and Huw, my current and long-established accompanists should be represented in their own right. They always perform instrumentals. It’s an important part of our live performances. This was David’s choice (he has a particular fondness for the South African Township jazz of Dudu Pukwana). This is them off the lead.”

17 The Late Passenger / Unicorns "This was the very first piece of speaking and singing. David, my ex-husband, heard “The Late Passenger” on the radio on one of those Poetry Please programmes. He was driving along in the car and heard it. He came home and told me about it. Just him telling me the story made me cry and I thought, ‘I must try and find this story.’ I meant to write to the BBC and I didn’t. "I'd got a book of things about the unicorn that I'd picked up in America about 1980. Which I hadn't looked in properly. I was leafing through it one day and there was the poem sitting in the book. I'd had it all along. As soon as I found that – around '85 or '86 – I showed it to Martin [Simpson] and we both agreed it should be put together with the unicorn song. He started putting a guitar accompaniment behind the poem and it drew the two things together."