Tim Hughes joins an packed house at the New Theatre, Oxford for a homecoming show by the most bombastic and imaginative of English folk bands
THEY insist it was a coincidence, but it all seems just too good to be true.
Bellowhead, the country’s greatest new-folk band, are performing in the city in which they were born on the Saturday night of our biggest celebration of folk music.
The show by the self-proclaimed prog-folk 11-piece may have had nothing officially to do with Oxford Folk Weekend, but their presence a few doors up from the festival’s OFS HQ, added gold-plated clout to what was already a pretty impressive feast of music.
Tonight’s show is all about latest album Revival, and kicks off in typically lively style with Let Her Run – the band leaping around a stage fitted out with live trees and the kind of red leather sofa which wouldn't look out of place in the Garrick Club. Animated frontman Jon Boden holds court like a circus ringmaster, as the spontaneous magic unfolds around him – members of the collective musically, and physically, bouncing off each other in constant movement.
“Hello... it’s good to be playing our hometown!” Jon tells the equally excited crowd, who have packed out the venue – before confessing that a few other places also share that honour - and the band burst into their trademark torrent of brass, strings, melodeon, percussion and soaring voices.
It was the Folk Weekend’s predecessor, Oxford Folk festival, that Jon and fellow founding member (and Folk Weekend: Oxford patron) 'Squeezy' John Spiers, assembled this folk supergroup, inventing in the process an entirely new genre – one overflowing with bombastic big band instrumentation, rousing choruses, punked-up vocals, and anarchic stagecraft – layered around a kernel of traditional folk.
“It’s nice to be back at home,” Squeezy John tells us, his fluid melodeon introducing the lilting and relatively restrained Betsy Baker – “a song of unrequited love from Swindon, which everyone knows is the worst kind of unrequited love!”
Tunes from Revival, such as the sea shanty Roll Alabama, Gosport Nancy, Fine Sally and Greenwood Side, show Bellowhead ramping up the rock in their punchy folk brew, but it’s the old faves which have us on our feet and dancing in the aisles.
Jon has us joining in the hand movements for the rousing anthem London Town - a charming tale of a “hapless young boy from Blackbird Leys who goes to London to get ripped off... by a prostitute,” he tells us. That’s followed by The March Past, the frantic acid-polka of New York Girls, and, for an encore (there was really no doubt), rousing worksong Roll the Woodpile Down and the turbo-charged Morris tune Frogs Legs & Dragons' Teeth.
Bellowhead are never less than entertaining, but this eagerly-awaited homecoming show took it to another level in sheer energy, dynamism and virtuoso musicianship. No one else comes close.
Folk frenzy: Jon Boden joins session at Folk Weekend: Oxford. More here...
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