Category Archives: not a folk song

I got this one from… well, where do you think?

As I wrote somewhere else a few years ago, when someone was soliciting Maddy Prior stories:

After I’d complained about the wallpaper in my room for some time, my parents agreed that I could strip it and repaint, during the next school holidays. Since the paper was now officially condemned, I felt free to add an extra layer of decoration, mainly consisting of lines from favourite songs in laborious swirly lettering.

Pride of place, though, went to a single word in six-inch capitals, placed there remind me of something truly extraordinary that I’d recently seen on Top of the Pops. It was a remarkable performance of a unique piece of music – at once pure and raw, intricate and earthy, delicate and strident, and made up of nothing more than the human voice. There were four voices interweaving like the threads of a tapestry, and above them there was a a fifth voice rising high and clear, sounding like moonlight through a monastery window. It was unforgettable; it still is.

And so I went up to my room and wrote on the wall, in capital letters six inches high:

GALDETE!

(Yes, well, that’s what it sounded like, OK?)

Four-part harmony, as written, with a couple of extra voices in octaves (towards the end), plus a bit of whistle.

Not a folk song in any shape or form; not really a song at all, just two and a quarter verses with a recurring last line. To put it another way, it’s the theme from Joss Whedon’s daft, doomed, brilliant space western series Firefly.

What’s it doing here? Consider if you will the folkloric identification of Hughie the Graeme as a border reiver, a savage outlaw operating on the fringes of English settlement; and who were the Big Bad in Firefly?

That’s circumstantial, admittedly, but then look at that recurring last line:

You can’t take the sky from me

and remember what H. the G. says to his father:

Though they bereave me of my life
They cannot take the heavens from me

Coincidence? I think not.

Also, I really like the song. Theme. Whatever.

Well now. In the glorious period just after punk, I wasn’t into folk music. What I was into was the glorious period after punk, when it seemed as if the music scene as we’d known it was being replaced by an upsurge of spontaneous creativity and communication. Anyone who had something to say could say it, by getting 500 singles pressed and sending them out to be sold at 50p a time – and everyone had something to say. It was an exhilarating period, and one with massive potential for both artistic and political radicalism: for a while, the idea of selling out for major label deals and TOTP slots seemed to be irrelevant, and that meant that musicians could start making their own language.

Nobody did more to open up the idea of self-made music than the Desperate Bicycles (more on them another time, maybe) – and nobody did more to follow it through than Scritti Politti. On Scritti Politti’s second or possibly third release you can hear this song: one of the most powerful expressions of the ferociously determined radicalism with which Green Gartside approached his music, and – sadly – the corner into which he painted himself. Spend too long making your own language, after all, and you end up with no one to talk to. As I wrote on my other blog:

Green has dismissed the recordings of this period as “some anti-produced labour of negativity, kind of structurally unsound and exposed, by design and default … evocative of extraordinary times and a bit winceworthy”. For all that he’s the artist, that seems more like a list of symptoms than a description of the condition. I think something like “Hegemony” is best seen as the product of an attempt to fuse three things – the music, the politics, the personal sense of urgency and wrongness – which didn’t really belong together and certainly didn’t fit together.

So what’s this song doing here? Listen to the tune and all will be revealed. The title should give it away: this isn’t a new song at all, but post-punk Gramscian remake of “Lemany”. It turns out that the anxiously self-deconstructing racket of Scritti Politti’s early work was built on a long familiarity with English folk music, the work of Martin Carthy in particular.

After the post-punk project had gone off the rails, Scritti Politti re-emerged as exponents of a kind of machine-tooled white soul; it’s a shame they didn’t go the other way, retracing the bash and clatter of songs like this back to their macrame beat origins and beyond. “Green sings Anthems in Eden” – that I’d pay to hear.