Feeling Bellow

THINK you know folk music? Well, unless your image includes the spectacle of an 11-piece band, sending crowds wild with blasts of brass, string, squeezebox and kazoo, the chances are you haven’t yet been struck by the full force of Bellowhead.

Doing for traditional folk what punk did for rock, this 22-legged, blowing, plucking, squeezing, singing monster is one of Britain’s most dynamic bands. Which is why they have found themselves on the bill of the country’s best festivals – cropping up at this summer’s Glastonbury, Latitude, Summer Sundae, World of Music and Dance (WOMAD), and Truck festivals.

Incredibly, the seeds of this force of nature were sown well over a decade ago, in East Oxford’s Elm Tree pub, where Abingdon melodeon master Jon Spiers began jamming with fiddle player Jon Boden.

Since then they have released a string of albums, both as duo Spiers and Boden and with the extended Bellowhead family, picking up armfuls of awards and winning over crowds everywhere from the proms to Cornbury.

I caught up with John earlier this week, minutes after a live performance recorded for the BBC by himself and Jon was broadcast on Radio 4, and asked how things are going for Britain’s most unusual band.

“Things are going great,” says the father-of-two, who lives in Wootton.

“I can’t complain about not being busy. We are playing festivals every weekend – there’s barely a weekend off.”

Did he imagine, when he started as a fresh-faced Cambridge University genetics student, that his passion for folk – inspired from an early age by watching his dad, Abingdon Morris dancing legend David ‘Stan’ Spiers’ performing – would lead to stardom?

“I totally didn’t expect it,” he laughs. “The whole thing has been slow and steady. Nothing has come as a shock and growth been very organic.

“It’s interesting to go back to the places we used to play. Our memory is that they were all really big, but now they appear quite cosy. We are now thinking of audiences in the thousands rather than the hundreds.”

The current run of festivals follows the release of last year’s Bellowhead masterpiece Hedonism, and comes as the duo launch The Works – an album of re-worked tracks from earlier Spiers and Boden albums, featuring contributions from Martin Simpson, Eliza Carthy and Oxford musician Ian Giles of Magpie Lane.

So does he prefer performing as a duo or as part of Bellowhead? “I like both as they are both completely different,” he says.

“Nothing can beat the buzz that comes from Bellowhead going full-throttle and with people dancing around you. But it is very intensive and very dramatic.”

“When we go on stage, attitude is everything. We don’t take ourselves very seriously; well, maybe Jon does! It’s important to have fun - but then that’s the sentiment behind all good folk music. We want to enjoy it as much as the audience.”

Spiers and Boden remain the core of Bellowhead. Jon says the two have played so many shows they have a bond that is almost telepathic.

“We have been playing so long the two of us can give each other a particular look and change an arrangement. Our favourite trick is when someone is talking in the audience. We give each other a look, stop in the middle of the track and stare… without any conversation. Of course we don’t do that if it’s a rowdy gig though.”

That’s good news for festival-goers who will be treated to the force of Bellowhead at WOMAD, Summer Sundae, and Truck.

“We love Truck,” says John. “It was one of the first indie festivals we played as Bellowhead and we didn’t know what to expect. We had played lots of folk festivals, where people were converted already – so to play Truck and for it to go down as well as it did was perfect.”

Their WOMAD date will see the band share a bill with some of the biggest names in world music – acts such as Mexico’s Rodrigo y Gabriela, New York’s Gogol Bordello, Ethiopia’s Dub Colossus and Senegal’s Baaba Maal.

“Some people think you should play folk like it was played in the early part of the century when the first recordings were made, but it doesn’t occur to them that it sounded very different 100 years before.

“It is always evolving and we are just a part of that. We don’t want to take folk totally away from its roots, but we don’t want to copy anyone else either.”

* l WOMAD runs from July 28-31 at Charlton Park, near Malmsbury. Tickets are £135 for the weekend for adults. Concs and day tickets start at £25 for the Thursday (womad.org).

l The Summer Sundae takes place in Leicester from August 13-14. Other acts include Reef, The Maccabees, The Bees, Teddy Thompson, McFly, Example and Graham, Coxon. Adult tickets are £115 for the weekend (summersundae.com) l Truck runs from July 22-24 at Hill Farm, Steventon. For details see opposite