A sort of stop gap until next year’s studio album, Songs of Love and War, CRAIG GOULD & THE NOBLE THIEVES release Live at Beckview Studios, a 6-track EP pairing three new songs with three fan favourites off their 2023 debut Songs from the Campfire, released in both audio and visual formats.
It kicks off with one of the latter, a near six-minute strum through Out Of The Woods, followed by two of the new numbers. The trotalong Old Days is a wistful reflection on getting older and wiser, disembarking from the “amber sea” as the narrator tells how he “ danced on bars and under stars” but also “slept in parks and back of cars/Been awoke by law/Been shown the door”. It’s a realisation that “I’m not without knowing, had to change my ways before I die” and that “I’ll never go/That way again”. Even so, while “Time, on my face is showing” there’s a sense of pride that “I’ve lived a life and not a lie”. The twangier country chug My Front Porch Neighbourhood is also reflective, looking back on a life looking for direction and a purpose (“all us kids born back in ’83/Made to pick a career at 15/Didn’t know what the hell we wanna be”) with a string of dead end jobs in the rearview mirror (I’ve been a builder, building things I’ve never built/Just watch YouTube videos that’s my skill/Attended lanes, fixed frames and tendered bars/I worked in science laboratories and condom packing factories/Been a ticketing guru, railroad big-shoe, crocodile making man/I met the queen and the duke, and delivered fresh fruit, to the 100s locked away/Dressed in style, for a while, swept cinema aisles, and fanned the flames of political game/Once a gold crown shaping, furniture creating, bin-man extraordinaire”), with music the rock (“Singing songs of love on our front porch neighbourhood”) even if “me and a guitar seems a world too far for philosophy to comprehend”, as he notes “ It worries me how you judge by employee/
When you can celebrate the songs that we sing”.
The two other Campfire tracks, Dreamers, from whence the band name comes, and the jaunty country romper Burned, sandwich the melancholic deep twang slow waltzer Red River, where Rosie Faith steps into the spotlight, a love song (“just believe me/Just run away with me!/Never let go, and run away/The dance never ending”) with Neil Young undertones. Fully capturing the fire and passion of the live shows, this radiates the band’s power and confidence, and cranks anticipation for the album to the max.
Following on from last year’s debut album, Old Tall Stories, KINGS HEATHENS - Evan C Ritchie and David Fisher, return with Of Wind and Tide, another collection of self-penned shanty and traditional folk, many numbers inspired by their trips to Cornwall
Fisher leads off, Ritchie on bouzouki, with the swayalong stomp Pilgrim Song, a tribute to all who undertake pilgrimages, be they of a religious nature or Harry Potter fans paying their respects to Dobby the House-Elf at the Freshwater Shrine in Pembrokeshire as he sings “So here's to the traveller, the ones who set out/To find and discover what life's all about /Here's to the wanderers, the waifs and the strays/And those who hold on to the old-fashioned ways”.
Swapping vocals, Ritchie’s first is Shantyman, a song in celebration of those who lead shipboard singing “to lift your spirits/And sometimes to make the capstan go” sung in the person of a master of his trade and with a definite wink in his eye as the crew go about their work (“You might think a shantyman would never strain his arms/But I'll tell you, they get heavy, boys, when I'm playing this guitar/So save it with your envy, there's a/Reason it looks like I'm living high/While you haul the ropes on by”).
The first of five traditionals, fuelled by urgent banjo, guitar and harmonica, Fisher sings Blue Cockade, the version here inspired by Frank Blair’s uptempo interpretation, while Ritchie takes charge of the sturdy strummed swayalong Maid on the Shore, the arrangement borrowed from the iconic Stan Rogers. It’s back to originals with Fisher on banjo and Ritchie on slide for his self-penned Liskeard Lights about an old salt who’s married the barmaid and settled down, his wife wise enough to give him space to go to sea when he feels the need, but always looking to return to see the lights of the title, even if Ritchie never has.
Written some years back, Fisher’s banjo bouncy Down By the River is, as you might guess, about the serenity of sitting on the riverbank (in Worcestershire here) and watching the world go by, then, sung unaccompanied with Ritchie on lead, Song of the Western Men is the unofficial Cornish national anthem, a stirring patriotic number with lyrics from a poem by Robert Stephen Hawker published in 1826 and set to music in 1861 by Louisa T Clare.
Another setting of a poem, this time by William Wilfred Campbell to a tune by Fisher who sings lead while Ritchie provides slide and whistling, the lightly fingerpicked bucolic domestic bliss Margery (“The cattle are housed in shed and byre/While singeth the kettle on the fire”) was originally titled Canadian Folksong with Campbell, like Rogers, hailing from Ontario.
Being inspired by Cornwall, there’s inevitably song about smuggling, this, titled for the cove in west Cornwall, being Ritchie’s Lamorna, the story of a man who finds escape from life’s oppression (“The price of grain is rising again/But no compensation for the hardworking men”) through smuggling and partially inspired by the history of the Carters of Prussia Cove.
There’s three further traditionals, first up, Ritchie on lead with additional vocals by Pete ‘Howlin’ Bush’ Smith, being the evergreen tale of a cannonball at sea tragedy Mrs McGrath, the second is the album’s sole instrumental Ievan Polkka/Newlyn Reel which mixes the Finnish former with the klezmer-like Cornish latter, while it all rounds off with the acapella Padstow Farewell Shanty. The remaining track, and arguably the album standout, is Fisher’s banjo-dappled tongue in cheek Generic Folk Song which, as you might gather, takes the piss out of trad folk cliches with May morn walking, false hearted pretty maids and a gallows (“And the sad end to this sorry tale/Is that everybody died”) as he invites “Come sing along with me/With a fol-a-lol-a-lol and a too-rye-aye/And without the copyright fee”. Definitely one to haul away.
