Goodness, has it really been ten years? Longer in fact, if I consider that Sweet England, the album on which this arrangement originally appeared actually came out the previous year. I remember the praise and the excitement it received. This was the 'future of folk', or some such similar nonsense. And consequently hated by those who feel affronted by a difference to their fixed ideas of how folk music should be performed. It was certainly innovative, in his melding of traditional songs and tunes with ambient electronic soundscapes. Only it falls apart at the end for me with the one rather plaintive original, backed only with the piano.
I actually prefer the live performance here to the original that's on the record. It preserves most of the icy chill of the arrangement (that opening solo violin) with an added forcefulness when the drums come in, provided here by two static drummers, both rooted to the spot behind the main performer. What really lived in my memory though, was the eccentric backdrop playing behind the musicians.
Here, memory has clearly betrayed me somewhat, as the camera focuses on it for relatively little of the performance. Instead, we get rather more of Jim Moray's rockstar posturing than I remembered. Which is understandable: the performer is what we want to see after all. Still, we see enough to get a clear sense of what was shown, and it's not as though it's anything particularly complex.
The backdrop is, as I said, the element that's really stayed in my mind from when I first saw it:
The backdrop is, as I said, the element that's really stayed in my mind from when I first saw it:
An autumnal forest, much like that which appeared on the album cover and inside sleeve. In fact, I imagine it's the same image. On the cover, Jim Moray appears asleep, lying next to an electric guitar and several books. One of them looks like an old fashioned kind of exercise book, while the other is a cloth bound hardback, missing a dust jacket. In the background, gazing at him, there's a black dog. The dog reappears on the inside sleeve, as part of a digitally manipulated series of images of the musician. Behind his pensive looking self he appears holding a crow on his left hand; two versions of him are investigating his - sleeping? - self; he gazes at an open book whilst the back of his head bursts into flame; he holds a rose, while his head spins so fast that it's become a blur; he stands proudly next to himself, bound to a tree, whilst another self takes a photograph of the two of them; finally, a tear falls slowly down his cheek.
We don't need to read anything specific into the symbolism here - I imagine that nothing specific is meant - but images of crows, roses, black dogs, of repetitive doubling of the self, have their own resonant meanings, if only ones taken from popular culture. It conjures up a vague sense of the occult: occultness if you like. The combination of a very modern looking guitar and camera means that the images enact a melding of the past and the present which the music also works to self-consciously create: very old songs treated in a most up to date manner.
The performance backdrop achieves something else. Whilst the musicians play, the initially empty forest scene is slowly populated by their doubles, only in the backdrop they are wearing costumed animal heads. This is achieved by what looks like a very cheap effect, akin to the blue screen of an earlier era, as though their human figures have been pasted onto the image. The final figure to appear, and here I'm grateful that my memory hasn't completely betrayed me, is of a drummer wearing a badger's head. Or so it looks to me.
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