Hoedown in the home counties
Call it ‘Anglicana', 'Americana' or even 'UK Americana', these bands are giving authentic country music a British spin
On a dark, dingy Sunday afternoon in a yet-to-be-gentrified enclave of east London, there is little sign of life in the nondescript pub next to a council estate. Walk inside, though, and the warm hum of conversation mingles with the twang of guitars, banjos and mandolins. Behind the stage, where a succession of musicians get up to play rootsy, country-flavoured tunes to an enthusiastic gathering, a collage depicts the pubs of Camden Town alongside the cactus-strewn Joshua Tree desert and the wilderness of the Rockies.
Come Down and Meet the Folks is a twice-monthly gathering that has become the epicentre of a scene with, as yet, no name. Some call it country, others roots or Americana; many have settled on the oxymoronic UK Americana.
Yet it has grown to the point where it deserves its own handle: Anglicana. For the twist in this tale is that all these musicians and fans, with their shared love of “real” country, rather than the glossy, Nashville version, are British.
All over the UK, there are club nights with names that evoke the romance of America: from The Lost Highway, in Brighton, to Outlaw, in Belfast, and West by Northwest, in Bury. Their audience is people who love country, but have no truck with Shania Twain or the Nashville superstars who have sanitised the genre. And as the roots music of America is discovered by a new generation here, a new wave of bands and singers is springing up.
It’s taken a while for our country singers to find their own voice. Among the first were the Rockingbirds, who actually made it as far as Top of the Pops in 1992, with Gradually Learning, and whose Alan Tyler founded Come Down and Meet the Folks way back in 1996. “When we started the club, there were not enough UK country bands to put them on every week,” Tyler says. “I always thought it was both an implausible and plausible thing to do. The roots of American folk music are in music brought over by the English and Scottish early settlers, so it’s not as odd as it might seem.”
The Rockingbirds were followed by the Arlenes, an Anglo-American couple from Camden whose song Springboard sang the praises of swimming — not in a mountain spring or a forest creek, but in the Gospel Oak lido. The genre grew gradually: Alabama 3, from Brixton, hit pay dirt when a song of theirs became the Sopranos theme tune, while Hey Negrita’s singer, Felix Bechtolsheimer, produced a 2008 documentary film called We Dreamed America, which featured several leading Anglicana bands, including the Barker Band, the Broken Family Band and the teenage siblings Kitty, Daisy and Lewis.
Now there seems to be an Anglicana band on every corner. In reality, they have, in many cases, been slogging away for years, like the Devon-based Peter Bruntnell, whose album Normal for Bridgwater may have caused confusion in the Midwest. We even have our own alt-country bands, such as Deer Park, who have what must surely be the only country song to mention a Gardai raid in Dublin (Just Because We’re Running), and Two Fingers of Firewater, whose singer, Jon Clake, has impeccable country credentials — his day job is on a farm, albeit one on the Surrey-Hampshire border.
The Winchester quartet Polly and the Billets Doux sing a harmony-heavy blend of country, jazz, blues, folk and gospel. “I don’t write about American things,” says their winsome stand-up-bass-playing singer, Polly Perry. “I can’t write honestly about America because I’ve never been there.”
A different take on country comes from Leicestershire’s own Man in Black, the cryptically named Mr Plow, whose quirky repertoire includes a Manchester jail ballad and a song about exploited cotton pickers, not in Tennessee, but in the Punjab. Also tapping into the “rebel music” end of country is Emily Breeze, from Bristol, who sounds like the bastard offspring of PJ Harvey and Johnny Cash. “My words are prime cuts of nihilism, cynicism and despair,” she explains. “Country music is a fantastic vehicle for those sentiments.”
The British are even making waves in the home of country. Jan Bell, a latter-day Loretta Lynn from a Yorkshire coal-mining background, emigrated to America in her teens. She leads an old-time trio, the Maybelles, and an alt-country band, the Cheap Dates, whose Songs for Love Drunk Sinners won best alt-country album at the 2008 Independent Music Awards. Her roots still show: her song Yorkshire Water catalogues the death of the coal industry, while Carried by the Wind is a lament for British farmers affected by the foot-and-mouth outbreak.
Bell likens the emergence of Anglicana to the 1960s blues boom, when British musicians created their own versions of American blues, then exported them back as heavy rock. “Some of our freest cultural exchanges, even across difficult political boundaries, take place through music,” she says. “There’s a beauty to that.”
Another person making waves on both sides of the Atlantic is Pete Molinari, from Chatham, in Kent, whose androgynous voice is eerily reminiscent of both Roy Orbison and Patsy Cline. He has just returned from recording an album in Nashville with Elvis Presley’s old backing singers, the Jordanaires.
Mark Whitfield, who has promoted the music for almost a decade though his Americana UK website, feels the first wave of British country bands in the 1990s struggled with authenticity. “Now they are finding their own voices. And there are more and more female artists coming along.”
A compilation of 15 Anglicana bands is about to be released on Danny Tipping’s new label, Clubhouse Records. “Ryan Adams made it okay to like country,” he says. “The simplicity and honesty of the music is its appeal — and you don’t have to be American to appreciate that.”
The day after my visit to Come Down and Meet the Folks, I complete my journey into the heart of Anglicana by driving down to the place that inspired the very lovely Streets of Our Time album, by Danny and the Champions of the World. There are no honky-tonk bars in the south London suburb of Carshalton, but for Danny Wilson, who grew up there and still lives there, it is a wonderland of dreams equivalent to his hero Bruce Springsteen’s Asbury Park.
We drive down the optimistically named Grand Drive, the featureless road that gave his first band its name, we follow the River Wandle and catch a glimpse of a swan (the subject of two separate songs), and we cruise the A217 to Sutton, immortalised in his earlier song The Famous Mad Mile.
“When we were teenagers, we’d sit in the back of our mate’s big brother’s car, like Wayne’s World,” Wilson recalls fondly, “headbanging to Black Flag, shotgunning 40p cans of Royal Dutch lager.”
It’s not quite the same as gunning the pick-up down a desert highway, swigging bourbon, but it definitely conforms to the veteran songwriter Harlan Howard’s maxim that country music is “three chords and the truth”. And the truth has no national boundaries.
americana-uk.com
Tim Cooper, The Sunday Times 07-03-2010