Two More Sea Shanty Records

The Keelers Tyne & Tyde (2013)
Johnny Collins, Dave Webber & Pete Watkinson Songs of the Sea: a Collection of Sea Shanties (1998)

Avast there mateys, the bosun has ye well shanghaied for more shanty action.

I have previously mentioned going to see the Keelers supporting the Unthanks playing out in Bray. There my beloved bought a copy of their record Tyne & Tyde. The line-up is the same as that of Farewell to the Master but the instrumentation is a bit different - as in there is any. This time some of the songs feature concertina, whistle and tambourine, but it is mostly still just vocal.

The stand-out tracks on this are probably the same ones I mention in the live concert review. 'Old Billy Blue' (an original composition by the Keelers' Peter Wood) tells the story of Admiral William Cornwallis, who commanded the British fleet blockading Brest during the Napoleon Wars. He was so good at doing this that he acquired two nicknames - OId Billy Blue and Billy Go Tight. The song tells of how he could never be got away from his station and of how other admirals would always link up with them if they had mislaid a French high-seas fleet. It has this great chorus:

He's Old Billy Blue and he's Billy Go Tight.
He's always on station by day and by night.
What do admirals do when bitterly pressed?
They fall back on Cornwallis at Brest.

I find it hard not to join in with this one.

The other corker is a tune by one Mike O'Connor called 'Carrying Nelson Home', in which Nelson is being carried home after Trafalgar (he was killed there by a French sniper; I have always wondered whether the sniper survived the battle). The song imagines Nelson in his bucket of rum still giving orders to the sailors on his last voyage home, and is very poignant, for all that Nelson is not my national hero.

The other tunes are not entirely nautical, including ones about building railways (the trad. arr. tune 'New Railroad'), emigration and nostalgia ('Black and White') and that universal theme, lusting after the daughters of pub landlords ('The Landlord's Daughter', not the tune from The Wicker Man). George Unthanks' 'Tar Barrel in Dale' also makes its way onto record, so if you want to be extra ready for joining-in at an Unthanks concert then buy this album.

I should also menton the production on Tyne & Tide. Shanty records generally sound like they had no production at all on them and they are not obviously the worse for it. This one, though, was produced by Adrian McNally (Rachel Unthank's husband and the Unthanks' keyboardist). The production is great - it was recorded in a church and makes great use of the place's acoustics to give us a most atmospheric sound. And at no point does Mr McNally go down the bad producer's road of deciding to add in a bit of piano or Hammond organ to songs that are best left as unadorned as possible. But it still sounds produced, and produced well, thanks to the adroit sound engineering and sue of the sound qualities of the recording venue.

Songs of the Sea (by Johnny Collins, Dave Webber and Pete Watkinson) is a record I have had for ages, but my sudden burst of shanty interest caused me to dig it out and add it to iTunes. It is a somewhat un-curated collection, barely naming the artists involved and providing little or no supporting information. I had rather assumed that it was a collection of tunes sung by fairly anonymous singers. But not so. While using Google to spell-check the name of Jim Mageean from the Keelers, I found a YouTube recording of a young Mageean singing with Johnny Collins of this record in a context suggesting that Collins is someone known for knowing his shanties (and if Mageean is deferring to him then this really must be the case).

The record features more hot shanty action, mostly or entirely without instrumentation. 'Blood Red Roses' makes its obligatory appearance, but what is most striking to me now is the closer - the 'Farewell Shanty', a tune about sailors getting ready to sail away, and a tune that I remember from the last session at the Unthanks singing weekend.

Some links:

The Keelers and the Unthanks live in Bray

Tyne and Tide image source

Wikipedia page for the late Johnny Collins

Two Sea Shanty Records

The Keelers Farewell to the Master (1993)
v/a Sailors' Songs and Sea Shanties (2004)

Ahoy there shipmates! Cast off and join me aboard the good ship Shanty. Little Jim the cabin boy is ready to make you right welcome. So splice the mainbrace, cut loose the port sheet, and up the lanyard for the masted doubloon.

I have always had some interest in sea shanties and songs of the sea, but going to the Unthanks singing weekend in January pushed into overdrive. As you will recall, Jim Mageean of the Keelers introduced us to a load of nautical tunes, both work songs and songs that seemed more like the kind of thing sailors would sing for entertainment. There were CDs being sold as we were leaving the weekend, so I picked up a copy of Farewell to the Master, an album of shanties presented as a tribute to one Stan Hugill, an old sailor who collected shanties during his many years at sea and was the last living shanty man of the Royal Navy. It begins with a tune composed by Alan Fitzsimons of the Keelers specifically to honour Mr Hugill, before launching into a succession of shanties sun acapella. They are here grouped by type, with halyard shanties followed by cotton trade shanties, maindeck capstan shanties, pump shanties, and so on.

One recording decision listeners might or might not take issue with is the grouping together in single tracks of several different tunes - so the halyard shanties track goes on for over 8 minutes and features all three of 'Shin-O', 'Tiddy High-O' and 'Blood Red Roses', the last a song that by law must appear on all shanty records. This grouping business does not bother me while listening to the record but it might annoy me in the future if I wanted to include anything from here on an end of year compilation.

Some of the songs feature lyrics that are a bit ribald. I get the feeling that some of the sailors in the songs have intentions towards ladyfolk that are not entirely honourable.

In Edinburgh we went record shopping and found in Fopp a couple of old sea shanty records. Rationing myself, I went just for a collection called Sailors' Songs & Sea Shanties: A Classic Collection of Sea Songs and Shanties. This features songs sung by A.L. Lloyd, Stan Kelly, Ewan MacColl and some others. There are sleevenotes describing the history of the songs and explaining nautical terms and the like, but there is nothing saying when they were recorded, which is a bit annoying.

Unlike the Keelers record, this does feature instrumental accompaniment, generally of the squeezebox type. It ends up being a bit reminiscent of the music in Bagpuss, which is not surprising given the folkie chops of that programme's musicians.

Two songs stand out on this for me. First of all there is 'Away Haul Away', sung by Stan Kelly, which sounds like a tune the musical family of one of my mother's friends used to sing. Another is 'Do Me Anna', sung by A.L. Lloyd. On one level this is another saucy sailor song in which a sailor impersonates a rich townie in order to shag his lady friend (something that in our politically correct era would get you sent to jail and put on the sex offenders register for life), but what makes it appeal to me is the mournful and almost otherworldly tone of the piece - it keeps sounding like it is about to turn into a ghost story or some such, even though it never does. Perhaps it needs new lyrics.

Links:

Sailors' Songs & Sea Shanties (an interesting website on this record)

Stan Hugill

Farewell to the Master cover image source (with opportunity to buy this record)

Keep coming back to Inuit Panda for more shanty action soon!

The Unthanks and the Keelers - live in Wicklow

Folk sensations the Unthanks toured Ireland recently. Although they played a concert in the Pepper Canister Church in Dublin, I did not go to that; nor did I go to see them in the Pavilion Theatre in Dun Laoghaire. No readers, I made the long trip all the way to another county and saw them play in the Mermaid Arts Centre in Bray, Co. Wicklow. And I did so because this was the only date on their tour where they were going to be supported by the Keelers, the Geordie folkies in whose ranks are found George Unthank and Jim Mageean (who had taught us loads of great sea shanties at the Unthanks singing weekend), as well as two other gentlemen most skilled in the arts of singing. I think we were hoping the Keelers would include 'Chicken on a Raft' in their set and so we would be able to astonish other members of the audience by joining in with the chorus.

As it happened, there was no 'Chicken on a Raft' to be had, but there were a number of other top nautical and landlubber tunes, many of which feature on the new Keelers album. The two of these that most stuck with me are the one about some admiral who commanded the fleet blockading Brest during the Napoleonic Wars, who was well known for always being there to stop the Frenchies busting loose, and a song about Nelson's corpse being brought home pickled in rum after Trafalgar, with the conceit being that the dead admiral was still giving orders to the crew as they brought him to England for the last time. I have no more fondness for Nelson than for anyone who fought well on the wrong side, but there was a poignancy to the tune that sticks with me.

At the interval I sent my beloved to buy a copy of the Keelers album and then hid from the Unthanks in case they had all been practicing Finnish Sailor Wrestling since the weekend and were determined to now administer to me a sound thrashing.

Musically the Unthanks were playing with a somewhat stripped down line-up (though I only know this because they said so - I can no longer remember what a full and unadorned Unthanks line-up looks like). They played a variety of their folkie tunes but what I really found noticeable on some original compositions was a distinct influence of contemporary classical - in particular minimalism. If there is some kind of Unthanks-Reich team-up in the near future I would not be at all surprised. They also played many folk-tastic songs (of which the one whose lyrics are the 19th century testimony of a woman coal miner was particularly poignant) and their endlessly moving cover of Robert Wyatt's 'Sea Song'.

For the grand finale they were joined onstage by the Keelers to sing 'Tar Barrel in Dale', George Unthank's song about a bizarre folk custom in some Northumberland locality whereby people bring in the new year by going around with barrels of burning tar on their head; I think this is in a region untouched by modern health and safety legislation. The song has become something of an Unthanks anthem and we knew it well from the singing weekend (and from being made to sing it at previous Unthanks concerts), so we were able to join in. Huzzah!

After the concert I did not wait to say hello because I am shy and because we had to run to catch the last train out of Bray, lest we end up staying overnight in that Wicklow town.

Unthanks singing weekend: part 1 and part 2

Chicken on a Raft

Keelers image source

Unthanks image source