Rod Stewart - Every Picture Tells A Story
Rod the Mod finds his solo footing, headed for stardom, with the Faces in his wake.
6:00 AM GMT 22/06/2011
Features Disc of the day
Shirley Collins
The Power Of The True Love Knot
(Polydor, 1968)
Out of the past, Shirley and Dolly sing to the love generation.
In her original liner notes for this mournful, soft-footed collection of traditional folk songs, Shirley Collins makes a strong case for the enduring power of the ancient, anonymous trad. arr. love ballad. "These songs survive," she says, "because they reflect an idea which is still evolving in our generation, the conflict between the ties of love and the ties of society... true love as a power outside society's control." Allowing for the romance of the flower-power age in which those words were written, there is a lot of truth in Shirl's words, but she overlooks two crucial factors as to why these tragic tales of scandal, shame, romance and ambiguity still retain their power: Shirley and Dolly Collins. Speaking to MOJO's Mike Barnes for his definitive 2002 Collins article in The Wire, Shirley considered her vocals on TPOTTLK to be "a bit rushed". Yet while there is an audible frailty to her delivery on tracks such as Bonny Boy and Barbara Allen it is only a frailty that the songs' bereaved, trusting and wronged female characters possess themselves. Collins inhabits these songs so perfectly that they sound like ghostly echoes from the hidden heart of nature, while Dolly's beautiful new settings - using 5-string dulcimers, 18th century cellos, a hurdy gurdy and Dolly's own modern reproduction of a miniature 17th century flute organ - recall the fantasies of 16th Century English composers, the melancholy silvery groans that may have emanated from the castles and country houses that overlooked these lonesome scenes of female longing, desertion, and death. As a result, TPOTTLK invests the lives and names bound up in these songs - Lady Margaret, Polly Vaughan, Black Eyed Susan and Lovely Joan - with a heartbreaking, ethereal immortality.
Andrew Male
Posted by Ross_Bennett at 6:00 AM GMT 11/12/2009
Further Listening
Shirley And Dolly Collins - Love, Death And The Lady (Harvest, 1970)
Lal & Mike Waterson - Bright Phoebus (Trailer, 1972)
Alasdair Roberts - The Amber Gatherers (Drag City, 2007)
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Causa Sui - Summer Sessions Vol 1-3
Epic Danish jams, for when the neighbours get you down.
6:00 AM GMT 12/05/2011
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