I feel i am always rotatin too late in my own universe.
Two records fell over me this month- Steam Whistle Ballads, with Ewan MacColl and Peggy Seger
and Kirsty MacColls last ever recorded album she passed away 2000 in a car accident.
Tropical Brainstorm as its called is not a perfect album. Its odd and mainstream.
I like it though, like you fall in love with a cheap lamp from a supermarket.
I realized first after i picked up Tropical Brainstorm and googled a bit that she was not only the female voice on Pogues- Fairytale of NewYork, but also the daughter of the "Ewan MacColl", who is the man of Irish folk music. You might suspect its a bit ironic, but its less strange than you think. He was Scottish and the Scotsman tradition of music and "songs" has always been closer to Ireland than Wales or England and as a theater man who mostly made theater-music, and songs for different plays, his music was political in a time when many people died in mines and work places, poverty was everywhere in Europe, pop music or rock was hardly invented or spread. Not much is real tradition, its invention of tradition of course.
It was like the chanson in France. Many of the big names were "communist´s" like Jean Ferrat.
The avantgarde was socialist at this time so the music walked hand in hand with ideology.
I feel mostly awkward in front of some of it.
On the back of all Dubliners records are 2 or more songs from Ewan MacColl.
Its more authenticity in Brendan Behan, but MacColl`s songs are very "real" and folky which is ironic. Cat Stevens may have lended an ear.
Listen to -Paddy on the Railway- or -Dirty Old Town, and compare with Brendan Behans -Old Triangle.
It seems the tradition of folk music always had a problem with its own lack of real roots since the record industry started and the urge or need to invent the roots, time after the real train has passed by. To recreate authenticity is like inventing a perpetum mobile more or less a work for the myth makers not the musician.
söndag 9 mars 2008
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