September 22, 2022
September 05, 2022
August 13, 2022
August 05, 2022
August 04, 2022
August 02, 2022
July 14, 2022
July 02, 2022
May 12, 2022
Lucinda (EP) by Peacock's Tale Folk Indie Duo
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/lucinda-ep
We were quite close to Lucinda Williams for a while. About ten feet for the duration of her concert at the last-but-one Cambridge Folk Festival before the pandemic in August 2018. This is because Maz is very nippy when it comes to pushing through a crowd to the front. It was a terrific gig (despite a profoundly pissed/off guy on the bus back into Cambridge haranguing everybody it wasn't) but we probably feel closest of all to Lucinda when joining in on her albums (Car Wheels On A Gravel Road; World Without Tears etc) on vocals and dashboard percussion on our way back from the Duck at Stanner in the car.
All The Way To Jackson. Lucinda's original interpretation cleverly hints that maybe she's protesting too much about not missing him. We've gone for a simpler 'yay I'm free of that schmuck' version.
Lake Charles. This elegy reminds us of an old stager we knew at folk clubs, now sadly passed away. We sing it in loving memory of him. We thought about singing 'He had a reason to get back to King's Lynn' but didn't. It might not stop us singing the famous Cash-Carter duet 'as I'm Going To Thrapston.'
Concrete and Barbed Wire. Lucinda's signature take on the self-imprisoning barriers men erect in their relationships with women, much more effective than stone walls (which, as the Cavalier Prisoner of Civil War Richard Lovelace affirmed to his beloved Althea 'do not a prison make'.)
April 06, 2022
Wordsworth Comedy Night
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/wordsworth-comedy-night AUDIO
Every month or so, a group of disreputable West Norfolk wits meet to get drunk and read uproariously funny PG Wodehouse passages at each other. In March, we made it a Wordsworth Comedy Night instead. A challenge as, for all his beauties and Miltonic grandeur, there are no jokes in Wordsworth.
No intentional jokes that is. His first draft of 'Daffodils' really wandered lonely as a 'cow' until Coleridge - "if I might make a suggestion, Sir"- recommended the more aptly sublime 'cloud'; and the hysterical measuring of a muddy pond and a weed in the notorious 'The Thorn' will bring a snigger to the stoniest face. If I've improvised a couple of parody lines, they are much in the spirit of these and not necessarily distinguishable from the Great Man's own.
Finally, he really did carry his sister rather than his bride over the threshold on his wedding day as she had fainted in church after crying throughout the ceremony and lived with them permanently thereafter (an unacknowledged researcher/co-writer of some of his most famous pieces) and if this isn't farce, I don't know what is.
This track is a sample of a rip roaring evening. We are only sorry we don't have a record of the 1950s comic turns, recitations, jazz poems, daffodil excursion (see picture) complete with tape measure and other treats. Not to mention the beef bourguignon. (I told you not to mention the beef bourguignon).
This track is a sample of a rip roaring evening. We are only sorry we don't have a record of the 1950s comic turns, recitations, jazz poems, daffodil excursion (see picture) complete with tape measure and other treats. Not to mention the beef bourguignon. (I told you not to mention the beef bourguignon).
lyrics
(mostly by Wordsworth)
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky!
So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
The child is father of the man
Is married to his sister.
I wander lonely as a cow
That floats on high o’er dales and hills
The Spring has sprung the grass has ris,
I wonder where the birdies is?
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.
And to the left, three yards beyond
On a moss hill half a foot in height
Not five yards from the mountain path
I see a little muddy pond.
I’ve measured it from side to side
Tis three feet long and two feet wide
And six feet deep and stood beside
A grave man looking like he’d died.
A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company
For then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.
Oh a slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears,
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.
With rocks! And stones! And trees!
She died alone and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be
But she is in her grave and oh!
The difference to me.
And when she was up she was up
On a hill above the town
She was three feet four, five stone, but now
She is six feet underground.
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky!
So was it when my life began
So is it now I am a man
The child is father of the man
Is married to his sister.
I wander lonely as a cow
That floats on high o’er dales and hills
The Spring has sprung the grass has ris,
I wonder where the birdies is?
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.
And to the left, three yards beyond
On a moss hill half a foot in height
Not five yards from the mountain path
I see a little muddy pond.
I’ve measured it from side to side
Tis three feet long and two feet wide
And six feet deep and stood beside
A grave man looking like he’d died.
A poet could not be but gay
In such a jocund company
For then my heart with pleasure fills
And dances with the daffodils.
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Hooray and up she rises
Ear-lie in the morning.
Oh a slumber did my spirit seal,
I had no human fears,
She seemed a thing that could not feel
The touch of earthly years.
No motion has she now, no force,
She neither hears nor sees,
Rolled round in Earth’s diurnal course.
With rocks! And stones! And trees!
She died alone and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be
But she is in her grave and oh!
The difference to me.
And when she was up she was up
On a hill above the town
She was three feet four, five stone, but now
She is six feet underground.
credits
released April 5, 2022
For a more Romantic view of Wordsworth, visit peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/weirdsworths-lucy
For a more Romantic view of Wordsworth, visit peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/weirdsworths-lucy
license
March 28, 2022
Waiting for the Man by Peacock's Tale
On the day I start getting my old age pension, a homage to a track I've loved for 50 years.
Premieres 9 am March 29 2022.
March 01, 2022
February 27, 2022
February 11, 2022
My Phoney Valentine
This song is as old as us! Dusty Springfield's sprightly country folk version of 'Silver Threads and Golden Needles' with the Springfields was the first British single to reach the top 20 in the American Billboard chart in 1962. Written by Jack Rhodes and Dick Reynolds, it was first recorded by Wanda Jackson in 1956 and covered by Linda Ronstadt in a kick-ass country rock version in the 1970s. Not to mention Dolly Parton's happy honky tonk take on it . Ours is nearer the much slower, much sadder version by Sandy Denny on her 'Rendezvous' album.
I was considering a change in the lyric from "the warm glow of your wine" to "your phoney valentine" of which there are so many on sale this weekend. Luckily, better counsels (ie Maz) prevailed.
Lyrics and further details here - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/silver-threads-and-golden-needles
February 08, 2022
In the golden footsteps of Wanda, Dusty, Linda, Dolly and Sandy....
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/silver-threads-and-golden-needles
In the footsteps of Wanda, Dusty, Linda, Dolly and Sandy... a song as old as us. It was the first ever song by a British act that got into the American top 20. We're hoping to crack Cambridge North with it...
Her Maz in Cambridge
February 02, 2022
January 25, 2022
Burns Night Medley
#BurnsNight #burnsnight2022 #Burns #BurnsSupper A brief medley to get the party started.
Click on the link above to access the fun!
January 24, 2022
Marie Mouri by Peacock's Tale folk indie duo
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/marie-mouri
A David L Greely song
January 06, 2022
December 31, 2021
December 28, 2021
Birth of a Human Being
Birth of a Human Being
My snow soul is slowly taking shape,
Falling from heaven to inherit the earth
And the family features of God and ape,
Angel out of my element from birth…
And this is me, this helpless drop of Man,
This perfect mould of bud and mineral,
Crawling, flight, and every earthly thing.
All of it – nothing.
Yet I’ll assert I AM
In time by striving upright endlessly;
Inherit here a kiss, to milk, like grist,
The love that made me, and by which I’m born;
The word that speaks its perfect mind, the fist
That grasps its imaged God; the whole torn
And bleeding womb of human history.
Note: 35 years ago today, in the Queen Elizabeth hospital King's Lynn, I witnessed my wife giving birth to our firstborn, still favourite (and only) child, Emma. Things started mid afternoon at a quiet and in my case traditionally bilious long school term post-Christmas get together with the neighbours at about 3 pm the day before and went on all night and all morning and just into the following afternoon. (I remember noticing that Norwich City won 2-1, wondering how such a remote event could register.) It was horrendous enough witnessing the birth. I am glad I never had to achieve the feat myself. But it was of course the ultimate labour of love and today, incredibly, our daughter is 35 years old. She has since extended the line by marrying our favourite son in law and giving birth at the same hospital (really nice Maternity unit btw) to two children herself, a daughter who will be four in February and a son who will be two in October.
35 years ago about now, I came home, wrung out by the experience, pranged the car reversing into the drive into a discarded dining room table I forgot we'd left there, and - exhausted, relieved, delirious - wrote , no, not this sonnet but a precursor of it called 'Animal'. A few days later, I picked my family up from QE and we started the greatest adventure, most important human activity and worst paid career of child rearing. Providentially it snowed almost as soon as I'd got them home and we were cocooned for a week, a much needed accidental paternity leave in the age before they gave you any. During that week in lieu, I wrote this sonnet.
Happy birthday Emma! XX
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