When I Was On Horseback

We first heard this Irish folksong on Steeleye Span's Ashley Hutchings drenched "Ten Man Mop" album in the 70s and this is the version we follow here. For me its brooding atmospheric electric droning fiddle and thunder bass was like a folk track had strayed onto the first Velvet Underground album and I could never get enough of their version (Still can't.) Being a folk ballad, it speaks volumes by leaving a lot of the narrative unsaid and the suggestions of doom and betrayal amid the hybris of youth can be applied to many situations about the potential shortness of life and love. In our arrangement, we've veered toward the military suggestion rather than disease. (The obscure Steeleye cover notes about 'Another young man cut down in his prime... tasted and wasted.. sickness and disease pull you down" always baffled me but now I know what they might mean I wish I didn't.)

The Avatar ( the full mix)

Our musical evocation of hope in dark times.

A musical interpretation of "The Avatar" with added instrumentation 
a Discourse by Meher Baba (excerpts below but do read the complete thing) using harmonium, bass, drums, common flute, lyre, ocean recordings and, above all, Maz's voice singing the author's Name to His own tune. You can hear this divine tune (based in a morning raga) and the divine words He wrote for it sung by his women mandali here - trustmeher.org/meher-baba-places…/prayers-and-arti(see under Gujarati Arti)

"Avataric periods are like the springtide of creation. They bring a new release of power, a new awakening of consciousness, a new experience of life – not merely for a few, but for all. Qualities of energy and awareness, which had been used and enjoyed by only a few advanced souls, are made available for all humanity. Life, as a whole, is stepped up to a higher level of consciousness, is geared to a new rate of energy. The transition from sensation to reason was one such step; the transition from reason to intuition will be another.

The Avatar appears in different forms, under different names, at different times, in different parts of the world. As his appearance always coincides with the spiritual birth of man, so the period immediately preceding his manifestation is always one in which humanity suffers from the pangs of the approaching birth. Man seems more than ever enslaved by desire, more than ever driven by greed, held by fear, swept by anger. The strong dominate the weak; the rich oppress the poor; large masses of people are exploited for the benefit of the few who are in power. The individual, who finds no peace or rest, seeks to forget himself in excitement. Immorality increases, crime flourishes, religion is ridiculed. Corruption spreads throughout the social order. Class and national hatreds are aroused and fostered. Wars break out. Humanity grows desperate. There seems to be no possibility of stemming the tide of destruction. At this moment the Avatar appears....

Peace will come. Joy will come. Light will come."

( meherbabainformation.org/what-is-the-avatar/)

Annunciazione

In celebration of spring, equinox and Annunciation, we sing you our setting of this exquisite 14th century lyric. Magical realism from the 14C where the magical is real and the real is magical.

I sing of a maiden
That is makeles;
King of all kings
To here sone che ches.

He cam also still
There his moder was
As dew in April
That fallit on the gras.

He cam also still
To his moders bowr
As dew in April
That fallit on the flower.

He cam also still
There his moder lay,
As dew in April
That fallit on the spray.

Moder and maiden
Was never non but the;
We may switch a lady
Godes moder be.

I Sing Of A Maiden: Magical realism from the 14C

I sing of a maiden That is makeles; King of all kings To here sone che ches. He cam also still There his moder was As dew in Aprille That fallit on the gras. He cam also still To his moders bowr As dew in Aprille That fallit on the flower. He cam also still There his moder lay, As dew in Aprille That fallit on the spray. Moder and maiden Was never non but che; We may switch a lady Godes moder be. In celebration of spring, equinox and Annunciation, and with the magic of the Middle English poetry as real as the real is magical, we sing you our setting of this exquisite 14th century lyric. Like our local church, this lyric is 700 years old and still singing. We sing it in a 14th century style and recapitulate in a 20th century version marking the genesis and septuacentenary of that (and other such) church. We wrote the Early Music style tune on the harmonium it's performed on and the Modern rock tune is built on an arrangement of the famous Jack Bruce bass riff on Cream's "Sunshine of your Love". The paintings are Fra Lippo Lippi's Madonna and Child, Far Angelico's Annunciation and Gustav Klimt's Mother and Child.

All You Need Is The Pancakes You Make A Shrove Tuesday Special from Mag...

Who Knows Where The Time Goes? (Sandy Denny song)

We've been rehearsing this fireside friendship/ love song about the passing and changes of time all winter and watching the birds circling in the evening over the woods across the way. In North Norfolk you're never far from heath, holt and wild water so there are a lot of birds, including the winter geese audibly referenced at the end of the song. We both love this song. 

Across the evening sky

All the birds are leaving

Ah how can they know

It's time for them to go?

Before the winter fire

I will still be dreaming

I have no thought of time

For who knows where the time goes?

Who knows where the time goes?

Sad, deserted shore

Your fickle friends are leaving

Ah, but then you know

It's time for them to go

But I will still be here

I have no thought of leaving

I do not count the time

For who knows where the time goes?

Who knows where the time goes?

And I am not alone

While my love is near me

I know it will be so

Until it's time to go

So come the storms of winter

And then the birds in spring again

I have no fear of time

For who knows how my love grows?

And who knows where the time goes?

Words and Music by Sandy Denny

Who Knows Where the Time Goes? lyrics © Fairwood Music (uk) Ltd., Winckler Musikforlag

The New Humanity (Love versus Great Forces of Destruction)

The snow-capped mountains, ice-capped seas, The rivers, forests, bees; Fjords and deserts, tropics and poles, The herds and flocks and shoals; Hear greed-is-God merchants of death At limits of all breath, Trump, “Follow Me Me to the end of the world! Come down into The Flood.” ("State of the Ark" © Gareth Calway 2024) The first tune we sing to is a medieval church scale melody in the Phrygian mode composed by Thomas Tallis, originally as a setting for Psalm 2, arr Peacock's Tale. Lead vocal, Echo Strum Acoustic guitar - Maz Lead vocal, voice, Alien Waves Bass, Drums, Harmonium, Recorder, field recordings - Gaz. The second part with the voice over is a Greensleeves rhythm section of acoustic guitar, drums, recorders, harmonium and bass The voice over is extracts from the writings of Meher Baba, a spiritual Master of of Persian ancestry born in Poona, India, a discourse he called "The New Humanity." We feel both parts of this track - the fear and foreboding for the planet and our species of "State of The Ark" and the sublime optimism of the Meher Baba discourse. As he puts it "Great forces of destruction ARE afoot and SEEM to be dominate at the moment." (our emphasis). The image is Hokusai's "In the Well of the Great Wave of Kanagawa" which seems to illustrate both the impending doom and the ultimate faith in humanity to overcome it.

New Lang Syne

This is the same live soundtrack filmed in    • Auld Lang Syne Live at Burns Night 20...   only with all the other instruments (harmonium, snare, bass drum, hi hat) I couldn't throw in the mix at the time as I had my hands and feet full. Surely the most popular parting song sung in the world with words written by Scotland's national (and international) poet Robert Burns, his canon bestriding both the 18C Enlightenment and Romanticism. It seems "Auld Lang Syne" (literally 'old long ago') replaced 'A Parting Glass' as Scotland's favourite end of evening farewell and that one takes some beating. We always sing it with the Ecclefechan Tarts Orchestra and Choir at the winding down midnight close of our annual Burns Night banquet of haggis, poetry and song by which time I am revealing far more inner thigh than is strictly necessary and one of us seems to think it's already the end of the year! Auld Lang Syne Words by Robert Burns [Verse 1] G D Should auld acquaintance be forgot, Em C And never brought to mind? G D Should auld acquaintance be forgot, Em C G And auld lang syne! [Chorus] G D For auld lang syne, my dear, G C For auld lang syne. G D We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, Em C G For auld lang syne. [Verse 2] G D And surely you’ll buy your pint cup! Em C And surely I’ll buy mine! G D And we'll take a cup o’ kindness yet, Em C G for auld lang syne. [Chorus] G D For auld lang syne, my dear, G C For auld lang syne. G D We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, Em C G For auld lang syne. [Verse 3] G D We two have run about the slopes, Em C And picked the daisies fine; G D But we’ve wandered many a weary foot, Em C G Since auld lang syne. [Chorus] G D For auld lang syne, my dear, G C For auld lang syne. G D We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, Em C G For auld lang syne. [Verse 4] G D We two have paddled in the stream, Em C From morning sun till dine; G D But seas between us broad have roared Em C G Since auld lang syne. [Chorus] G D For auld lang syne, my dear, G C For auld lang syne. G D We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, Em C G For auld lang syne. [Verse 5] G D And there’s a hand my trusty friend! Em C And give me a hand o’ thine! G D And we’ll take a right good-will draught, Em C G For auld lang syne. [Chorus] G D For auld lang syne, my dear, G C For auld lang syne. G D We'll take a cup o' kindness yet, Em C G For auld lang syne.

Come All Ye (A Folk Song)

We played this live at our local Burns Night Supper then recorded and the following morning filmed it on a mobile phone first take in our front room - a morning after with glorious winter sunshine streaming in. The first part of this video is that live studio first take. The second is the same film and same basic track but with all the sound overdubs we added over the next two days. Which do you prefer? Please let us know. Here's the press release. "This Hutchings/Denny number is the one that kicks off the greatest folk-rock album of all time 'Liege and Lief'. (1969, on the Island label. Essential listening if you've never heard it. ) "Part celebration of traditional English/British folk music and festival, part heart-singing pagan hymn (Oh Come All Ye Folkful?) but above all having some fun (mostly at our own expense) this is our BRAND NEW ONE, rehearsed and gigged and lived since the run up to Christmas and OUT TODAY. We've adapted two of the lyric verses to fit the instruments we have in our repertoire including on this occasion leader of the JD BIG BAND John Davies on sexy sax and his bonnie lassie Kathleen on guest drum roll on the drum verse. (They also have a little married duet of sax and drum roll in the play out.) It was an absolute treat to play live with them at Burns Night and to have their jelly roll jazz ( it's probably swing but you know where I and it's coming from) as part of our folk minstrel one. You can watch a film of us playing this track live with the JD Big Band and the Ecclefechan Tarts Orchestra and Choir last week at our annual Burns Night supper on YouTube film The Full Rabbie which recently premiered -    • The Full Rabbie  (International Burns...   " Come all ye rolling minstrels And together, we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky Those that dance, will start to dance And those who don't will stay In time to list our merry tune That we play for you today So, come all ye rolling minstrels And together we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky Our tooter, he just loves to toot Upon his common flute Recorder by another name Much better with a mute. So, come all ye rolling minstrels And together we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky Possessor of our sax appeal (see picture) And no old folkie he Folk is just some wayward notes Jazz a wayward key. So, come all ye rolling minstrels And together we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky Sound of beating on the drum Song behind you'll hear And to the rhythm of guitar We hope you'll lend an ear So, come all ye rolling minstrels And together we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky Well, the man who plays the bass does make Those low notes that you hear And the high notes come from you and me For we will sing so clear So, come all ye rolling minstrels And together we will try To rouse the spirit of the earth And move the rolling sky

Source: Musixmatch Songwriters: Sandy Denny / Ashley Stephen Hutchings / Dp Come All Ye lyrics © Warlock Music Ltd Comic adaptations to lyrics of verses 2 and 3 to fit our instruments (and in my case level of virtuosity) by Peacock's Tale.

PREMIERE The Full Rabbie (International Burns Nacht 2025) with the Ecclefechan T...

PREMIERES 7.30 PM TONIGHT. The Full Rabbie (International Burns Nacht 2025) with the Ecclefechan Tarts Orchestra and Choir. ..Burns Night January 25 January 2025. A celebration ( in Norfolk by four Sassenachs and two Germans) of the universal genius and geniality, in poetry and music, of Scotland's national poet Robbie Burns. Featuring  a feats of friendship and a banquet of traditional Scots fare, Selkirk Grace, The Address to the Haggis, The To the Immortal Memory of Rabbie Burns Lecture, the after dinner prayer,  My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, To The De'il, Elegy of the Year .. (updated to 2025) and other poems, Auld Lang Syne and other songs in the spirit of the great Radical Republican European Enlightenment Scots Thinker and Romantic. Lang may yer lum reek.

State of the Ark (In apprehension of a 'conviction' politician becomin...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-75upWjwzM

The snow-capped mountains, ice-capped seas,

The rivers, forests, bees;
Fjords and deserts, tropics and poles,
The herds and flocks and shoals;

Hear greed-is-God merchants of death
At limits of all breath,
Trump, “Follow Me Me to the end of the world!
Come down into The Flood.”

© Gareth Calway 2024

credits

released January 19, 2025
The tune is a medieval church scale melody in the Phrygian mode composed by Thomas Tallis, originally as a setting for Psalm 2, arr Peacock's Tale.
Lead vocal, Echo Strum Acoustic guitar - Maz
Lead vocal, voice, Alien Waves Bass, Drums, Recorder, field recordings - Gaz.
Track art is Hokusai's "In the Well of the Great Wave of Kanagawa".

Tony Book 1934-2025, King of Frome and Europe

In 1956, a 22-year-old Tony Book was playing at the top of my road for Frome Town in the old Western League. I never got to see him play in that unforgettably Somerset-muddied red and white kit because he moved up that year to the dizzy heights of his home town club Bath City. He was still at Bath in 1964 (aged 30!) by the time I was old enough to join The Badger’s Hill crowd. The crowd remembered him though. Then, as if by magic, in 1968 – one of so many other real-life British rags-to-riches fairy stories from those years - he was a star in the pages of my football annual as captain of a Manchester City team that had won the English football league and qualified for the European Cup. What’s more, his younger brother Kim had also risen significantly from Frome Town to be a football league goalkeeper at Bournemouth and Northampton. 

This was an age of miracles – free school milk, full student grants, no tuition fees, workers’ rights; a functioning national health service, public ownership of major industries; full public transport; Richard Burton, the son of a miner and a barmaid, playing Hamlet at the RSC; Glenda Jackson, the Birkenhead daughter of a bricklayer and a cleaner, getting to RADA and the RSC. Not to mention John, Paul, George, Ringo, (Harry, Harold, Alfie, Vic, Joe, Frank, Billy, Glenda, Mary Q, Cilla, Lulu, Sandy, Twiggy…) When you get all that in your first twenty years, along with a World Cup and George Best, it’s a hard act to follow. 

The Ballad of Sir Robert Walpole

On January 17, 1712, after a furious and partisan Parliamentary debate, the British Secretary of War in a whig ministry (Robert Walpole) was committed to the Tower and expelled from the House of Commons. The majorities in favour of the measures were narrow and a motion to overturn the expulsion was defeated by only 12 votes. The merchant whigs favoured the war with France because victory over such a world rival would benefit British trade, the tories were against it because their crypto-Jacobite squires were paying for it. Walpole stood accused of corruption in the matter of forage contracts. He said he had declared that he was reserving a part of the forage contract for the army in Scotland for his friend Robert Mann. The contractors paid Mann five hundred guineas, twice, not to accept the contract. Walpole denied that he himself had himself benefited and indeed there was no evidence whatsoever - either at the time or since - to prove that he had, or that he took bribes or percentages from the deals.  In a pre-democratic/post-democratic mirror reverse image of our own time, Britain’s future Prime Minster was imprisoned for corruption even though he wasn’t found guilty whereas the incumbent President of the United States (in Walpole’s time a British colony) hasn’t been imprisoned even though he was.

 “The punishment was out of all relation to the crime” wrote JH Plumb in his classic 1956 biography of Walpole (though noting the Secretary of War’s wealth had increased immeasurably during his office) and Swift at the time opined that Walpole’s prosecution was really “a leading card to maul the Duke of Marlborough” ie a part of a general attack on the war against France and its inconveniently glorious Commander in Chief. “I heartily despise what I shall one day revenge,” declared a beaten but unbowed Walpole. His incarceration in the Tower lasted six months and his disgrace and exclusion from the Commons for two years. The electors of Lynn in the by-election occasioned by his expulsion returned him unopposed, an act as potent as it was unconstitutional. On 18 March 1714 he returned to the House and made one of the most forceful and eloquent speeches of his career, attacking the ministry’s craven appeasement of France and of plotting for a ‘popish successor’ and made another full of zest and wit on 16 April which drew thunderous applause. With the passing of Queen Anne, Marlborough’s restoration to Commander in Chief and the arrival in England of a Hanoverian (King George I, securing a protestant, anti-Jacobite and whig succession, he could look forward (Plumb suggests) to “the profits of office and the prospect of revenge.” He wasn’t out of the woods yet, as it happened, - in some ways, even as Britian’s first and still longest-serving prime minister, he never would be - but the old survivor was back with a vengeance and, by 1721 the former Secretary of War and Lynn career MP (40 years) would  be presiding over ‘The Age of Walpole” and - ironically, given his former ministry - a long and profitable period of peace and national expansion.

“The Ballad of Sir Robert Walpole” was originally written to mark the bicentenary of Walpole’s return to Parliament in 1714 and published in “Doin’ Different”, a collection of new folk ballads about (mainly) Norfolk notables the following year. The book was the literary part of a project in which Norfolk-based musicians set our words and the ensuing collaborations toured East Anglian venues and festivals. The composer of the Walpole tune (and 5 others in the book) was Warwick Jones who plays it with us on this performance - Warwick has 4 composer and/or performer credits on the 2024 album of the project “Done Different.” This one in all its major-minor comic glory is an absolute treat to sing. Walpole was larger than life in every way, seeming to belong naturally to the Hogarth cartoons in which his era is preserved and extravagantly embodied in Houghton Hall, Norfolk, the immense and palatial neoclassical stately home – a “Neptune and Britannia Rampant Counting House as Castle” - he built in the West Norfolk woods.  We have tried to convey something of Walpole’s formidable largeness of life and Hogarthian cartoon spirit, the latter most especially in the choruses (which in the film the feminine side of our duo sings live to a bucolic audience of horned cattle in the January grounds of Houghton Hall.) 

Sing out the old, Sing in the new, a woodland carol for 2025

Singing in the new year for you all with this merry little carol steeped in winter glory.

lyrics

1 The holly and the ivy
when they are both full grown,
of all the trees that are in the wood
the holly bears the crown.
Refrain:
The rising of the sun
and the running of the deer,
the playing of the merry organ,
sweet singing in the choir.
2 The holly bears a blossom,
white as the lily flower,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
to be our sweet Saviour. [Refrain]
3 The holly bears a berry,
as red as any blood,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
to do poor sinners good. [Refrain]
4 The holly bears a prickle,
as sharp as any thorn,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
on Christmas day in the morn. [Refrain]
5 The holly bears a bark,
as bitter as any gall,
and Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
for to redeem us all. [Refrain]
6 The holly and the ivy,
when they are both full grown,
of all the trees that are in the wood
The holly bears the crown. [Refrain]

credits

released January 1, 2025
Maz - lead vocal, acoustic guitar
Gaz - support vocals, bass, percussion, harmonium