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| n Navigation: Home Page n Ewan MacColl n A.L. Lloyd n Harry Cox n Sam Larner n The Coppers n Walter Pardon n Paddy Tunney |
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The styles & the sourcesexamined by Karl Dallas |
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| Note: Opening sequence of extracts features EWAN MacCOLL: Round Cape Horn, A. L. LLOYD: Farewell Nancy (both from Topic TSCD499), HARRY COX: The Bold Fisherman (from Topic TSCD651), SAM LARNER: The Sailor's Alphabet (from Topic TSCD662), and PADDY TUNNEY: When a Man's in Love He Feels No Cold (from Topic TSCD651). Peter Bellamy's voice taken from interview with Karl Dallas, November 5, 1990. With the exception of the Copper, MacColl and Lloyd extracts, the other items are from The Voice of the People 20-CD set, and may be ordered from Amazon by clicking the links. For complete list of the set, click here. Other Bellamy soundclips from the archives of Nigel Schofield.
Click on each of the pictures below for more information on each influence on Peter's singing.
As was said in the notes to The Electric Muse compilation some years later, Peter insisted that the Young Tradition "were really a pop group, not a folk group". But he complained when the notes continued: "It was, he said, the power of their performance which disqualified them from being folk in the old traditional sense." He felt that singers like the Coppers of Rottingdean, whose rather churchy harmonies have had such an influence on young citybillies like the YT, had just as much "power" in their performance as any young upstarts, and of course he was right: perhaps he would not have quarrelled with the note if it had spoken of their difference of attack, which was electric rather than acoustic: "So a group like the Young Tradition could be folk rock even when they sang a modern composition without instruments, when they appeared to be, on analysis, neither rock nor electric nor folk". To compare Peter's singing of a song from Harry Cox's repertoire like Pretty Betsy the Serving Maid is quite a salutary exercise in re-evaluation. Not only does Peter turn the 5/4 of the original into alternate bars of 2/4 and 3/4 (a problem with "irregular" time signatures which even affected the classically-trained Dave Brubeck, whose Take Five is nothing of the sort, as Joe Morello's drum solo reveals), but his approach to the song is fundamentally different. Bellamy was no conservative when it came to singing style. No fleshly phonograph, he worked and reworked the songs until they accorded with his musical vision, by Ewan MacColl out of Robert Johnson. The MacColl comparison is not made idly, because Peter made it often himself. For like Bellamy's reinvention of himself as the Nigel Kennedy of the traditionalist revival, Jimmy Miller, the Salford-educated son of a Scots iron moulder, graduate of Joan Littlewood's Theatre Workshop, had reinvented himself as the expressionist playwright and folk mannerist, Ewan MacColl. And, like MacColl, Peter became identified with the traditional wing of the revival in spite of having virtually created his style from whole cloth. (One had only to compare MacColl's singing with that of his mother, Betsy Miller, to distinguish the difference between his style and the tradition from which he had sprung.) The remarkable thing about Peter Bellamy was how mature was his invention of himself as early as those mid-Sixties years when he burst upon the Soho scene with all the force of a blazing Roman candle. Listen, if you will, to the earliest recording on our first CD: two shanties (significantly, from the repertoire of MacColl and Lloyd, though not emulating their singing in fifths) sung with his college friend, Tony McCarthy. Most of the time, McCarthy takes the lead, but there is no mistaking the second voice. Anyone with half an ear would identify it as the same Cockermouth Folk Club singer performing On Board of a 98 in January 1991, a few short months before his death. Yes, in those nearly three decades his style had developed and matured (and grown its own favourite mannerisms), but the voice is demonstrably the same. If you compare, for instance, Butter and Cheese and All and Yarmouth Town on his Mainly Norfolk first solo album with their reprise on the live Won't You Go My Way just three short years later, the development is truly astonishing. There is a tentativeness on the first that is entirely absent on the second. Of course, one is a studio "quota quickie" on Nat Joseph's budget Xtra label, the other a live show shared with his long-time friend and sparring partner, Louis Killen, and the empathy between them is very perceptible. (Click HERE to compare Peter's two versions of the song with Sam Larner's original.) One thing is certain: Peter Bellamy did not subscribe to the misconception that folksong is necessarily unsophistiocated and unconsidered. He was aware of his influences and how he had used his knowledge of "whom to steal from" to make his style unique. |
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eter Bellamy did not spring fully-fledged on to the scene, without forbears or previous influences. He was very much a Norfolk boy, and at a time when the Singing Postman was the sole media representative of East Anglian culture, and most young singers were trying to sound like Leadbelly or MacColl (or, often, an unlikely cross between the two), he brought a whiff of the fens into our smoky dens and clubrooms.