Category Archives: Indigo

Week 9 has been a long time coming – sorry about that. Hopefully normal service will be resumed for week 10. (The 52fs week runs Thursday to Wednesday, so it won’t take long to find out!)

This week and the next couple of weeks I’m going to be dipping into the repertoire of songs on Napoleon, perhaps with a couple on Nelson for balance.

The Grand Conversation on Napoleon is an odd song, as wordy as the title implies but with a distinctive (and fiddly) tune spanning two octaves. After the song – backed with a Bontempi drone – I play through the tune on flute, then run it into a version of the dance tune “The cuckoo’s nest”; they’re closer than might appear.

Plains of Waterloo looks, indirectly, at the human cost of the events described in the previous song. (It’s also one of the songs that the Grand Conversation tends to spark off in singarounds.) It’s unaccompanied, and very much in the footsteps of June Tabor.

Two gallows songs this week, following on from Lord Allenwater last week, plus a third song which is… connected.

Hughie the Graeme is a Child ballad commemorating the execution of a border outlaw and his defiance on the gallows. My arrangement derives ultimately from MacColl’s, but it’s heavily influenced by Tony Capstick – a really great folksinger in his day.

Sam Hall is from the other end of the country and the other end of the social scale; it’s an eighteenth-century broadside ballad in an odd sort of mock-heroic style. The old songs don’t wear their emotions on their sleeve; there’s horror and ridicule in this song, but they’re not spelt out.

As for Serenity… ah, Serenity. Check it out.

Week 7, and the first week of the Indigo album (a theme may be emerging). The plan for this album is to release the tracks week by week, and release the album as a whole – complete with extras and hidden tracks – at the end of the seventh week.

FS07 is Derwentwater’s Farewell: a poem written in 1807, to a pre-existing tune, in the style of the real Lord D’s last words before his execution as a Jacobite. You can hear more about the execution in Lord Allenwater, a heroic account of Lord D’s last ride and his defiance on the scaffold. Danny Deever, finally, is a poem by Rudyard Kipling set to the tune of Derwentwater’s Farewell by Peter Bellamy; the setting works remarkably well, as Bellamy’s settings often do.

The second and third of these are unaccompanied as per usual, but Derwentwater’s Farewell features whistle, reed organ and a great deal of messing about with Audacity. I think it works rather well, particularly the beginning and end (the middle is mostly just me singing, which is less interesting on a technical level). See what you think.