Farewell to Oysterband: (1) great show, greedy aftertaste
The Grehan Sisters: a short rediscovery

Farewell to Oysterband (2) - and to June Tabor

Andrew Curry writes: I like Oysterband well enough. I think I first heard them playing Liberty Hall on a compilation called Square Roots, from Folk Roots magazine, which I bought from Rough Trade in around 1987, when they were still called The Oyster Band.

A couple of years later they appeared on the Cooking Vinyl compilation Hootenanny with Billy Bragg’s Valentine’s Day Is Over, a track from Freedom and Rain, their first of their records with June Tabor. Somewhere I have a copy of their hugely enjoyable Trawler compilation. I have sung along to The Oxford Girl in my kitchen.

But I’ll be honest: had it just been the Oysterband, I wouldn’t have been there. On the other hand, the prospect of seeing June Tabor singing with them was irresistible.

Not just for me, it seems, since the Barbican was sold out. We bought our tickets months ago and the best place we could get seats was in the Balcony, right at the top of the auditorium.

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(Photo: Andrew Curry, CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

I suppose I shouldn’t have been surprised. June Tabor is 76 now and she’s apparently retired from performing. She was back on stage for a few selected gigs in the Oysterband’s Long Long Farewell Tour. The chance to see her is quite a draw.

There’s a logic to all of this, of course. For my money, the two best records that the Oysterband made were both with Tabor—Freedom and Rain, in 1990, and two decades later Ragged Kingdom. (I’d say that Freedom and Rain is the better of them, although my son would disagree with me, and Ragged Kingdom won the awards.)

On the night, Tabor is introduced as a guest by the Oysterband, but she is onstage a lot—looking through the setlist she’s there for about two-thirds of the numbers.

And whenever she was on stage, Tabor lifted the whole place. It’s not just the voice, which for my money is the best folk voice in Britain in the last 40 years, but it was partly the voice. It filled the place, and most of the time cut through the sound of the band. She’s looked after it well: the range is still there, and the distinctive tone, and the control.

She also brought a charismatic energy to the stage, as she filled out some of the songs with stories. More than that: you could feel the energy in the audience lift every time she came on stage.

For her first appearance the Oysterband had already started the instrumental introduction to Si Kahn’s glowering song Mississippi Summer, the opener to Freedom and Rain, with its unforgettable driving beat and John Jones’s melodeon line, as she walked out onto the stage.

All Tomorrow’s Parties, the Velvet’s cover from the same record, followed soon after. The Lou Reed song is an unlikely cover for a folk-rock band, but for a song about Andy Warhol’s factory the lyric has some distinctly folk-like flourishes:

For Thursday's child is Sunday's clown

For whom none will go mourning

A blackened shroud, a hand-me-down gown

Of rags and silks.

Later in the same half, Oysterband generously left the stage so she could do a solo spot, a capella—her version of the late Les Barker’s comic take on the Bill Staines’s song Roseville Fair. She worked with Barker as part of his ‘Mrs Ackroyd’ shows at Sidmouth folk festival. In his adaptation, Staines’ romantic song becomes an unlikely murder ballad, in which the banjo that features large in Staines’s lyric ends up being destroyed as she kills her faithless lover with a chair. (As P G Wodehouse once said, ‘A gentleman is someone who can play the banjo but doesn’t.’)

Tabor told a story against herself in the introduction to Roseville Fair, of someone in the audience at one of the Mrs Ackroyd shows disbelieving that it could be her on stage:

“That can’t be June Tabor. I’ve seen her, and she’s really miserable.”

The idea for a collaboration came when they were both at the Sidmouth Folk Festival, now in its 70th year. Ian Telfer told us that it may have been in a pub called The Dove which had a strict ‘no music’ policy and which musicians used to go to after a few days at the festival when they wanted some quiet.

And the thing is that when June Tabor is on stage with them, the Oysterband sound much better.

This isn’t just about her gifts as a singer. Their lead singer John Jones has a fine voice, and plenty of folk bands get by on less. But with June Tabor their repertoire is broader, perhaps because she has never written a song and has always regarded herself as an interpreter. The musical range is more interesting. It made me wonder what happened when she was in the rehearsal room with them.

In the second half, among others, we got a set of songs from Ragged Kingdom. The half opened with Bonny Bunch of Roses, and included their version of Jeannie Robertson’s When I Was No But Sweet Sixteen, sung a capella with the whole band on stage. It’s about a young woman who becomes pregnant, and Tabor summarised it beforehand as “Oh shite, I wish I’d listened to my mum.”

There’s a stunning version of the Shel Silverstein ballad The Hills of Shiloh, in which Alan Prosser accompanies June Tabor on guitar while the rest of the band are offstage.

John Barleycorn—unrecorded, as far as I can tellcomes out in an arrangement that sounds almost psychedelic, thanks to the string arrangement between Ian Telfer on violin and Ray “Chopper” Cooper on cello, somewhere between Traffic and The Imagined Village. All it needed for the full early ‘70s experience was a burst of sitar.

And of course their cover of Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division, their most streamed song on Spotify, which Tabor introduced as the best “lovegonewrong” song ever written, and which seemed darker than the version on Ragged Kingdom.

The other members of the Long Long Goodbye Tour Oysterband lineup are Al Scott on bass, and Sean Randle on drums.

If I have some gripes about the show, there were a couple of places when the sound mix let the band down—this might have been because we were so high up in the auditorium, but that shouldn’t be a reason. On the ancient Scots ballad Son David and Dylan’s Seven Curses, which are both songs where the narrative matters, it was all but impossible to make out the words.

But that’s a detail. The concert was a highlight of my year—or any year.

See also: another view of the same concert

And: June Tabor on the singing and the songs.

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Comments

Seuras Og

Was it not Chopper on cello? Oxaal is becoming a rare member of the band. For the Farewell to the Festivals leg of this tour he was at Sidmouth but possibly nowhere else, the band going without cello for the dates he was absent.

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