Joshua Burnell – The Road to Horn Fair
Misted Valley Records – 15 February 2019
Imagine a group of minstrels dancing and playing their way across the countryside, add some rock riffs and keen Hammond organ and you have Joshua Burnell and his band. And this seems to encapsulate this latest album, The Road to Horn Fair. Joshua may be better known to audiences of live performances and you can hear that his music will go down well with the old tour T-shirts, the floppy hats and the artisan cider. It’s folk, it’s rock and it’s fun.
Well, actually its more than just folk-rock. It is a collection of variations of folk-rock themes. There is close-harmony singing in the opening track, Pastime with Good Company, yet another song attributed to Henry VIII, but come the third verse a bass line straight out of seventies pre-metal bounces in and we suddenly know where all this is going. Before we stop for breath it leaps straight into Berkshire Tragedy, a once delicate song driven at such a pace and with a mix of time signatures that as the liner notes point out, pretty impossible to dance to – so you might need that second bottle of apple juice to work it out.
When I read the track listing before playing the album, I doubted that I was going to like Cold Haily Windy Night. I have yet to hear a better version than Chris Wood and Eliza Carthy in Imagined Village but turn up the volume (as you should with all this album – no genteel folk here) and Joshua just about gets away with it. By the time you get to Plane Tree and Tenpenny Bit, you welcome the chance to leap about again and here we go with two bouncing tunes with a brief respite in the middle, that bit where you don’t really know whether to grab your partner or slope off to the bar – but no chance to catch your breath, off we go again.
Ah! Robin, Gentyl Robin from the 15th century to excellent 1960’s version. This is what Josh does so well, capturing the essence of the folk-rock psych sounds of the 60s and early 70s. Here we have the acoustic guitar, flute, pseudo ethereal voices and twangy electric guitar. You keep waiting for it to break out but no the flute returns and all is floaty and dreamy. Time to chill man.
The build-up to the next round of swirly dancing is controlled. The Knight and the Shepherdess starts gently enough but the underlying rhythm comes to the fore and the whole builds to a good steady and reasonable pace. But then Drowsy Maggie & Rakish Paddy come along and here is another pair to leap around to, this time in jig formation. All in true English folk-rock tradition heard from many bands from the late sixties (again) to now. You can’t help feeling that fun is being had.
As our minstrels near their destination, the Raggle Taggle Gypsies are encountered. I first remember this from my infant school, those far off days when music teaching was brought to the classroom courtesy of BBC on-air radio programmes for schools. (All of a sudden I’m living history!) The first verse is pretty much as I remember. Then, of course, it starts to bounce around the room and I can’t keep up but I’m sure it would go down a storm in Year 3.
We reach Horn Fair – to a tune by Jon Boden – and thanks to the excellent liner notes (once you have tuned into the Gothic font) there is a lot to learn about these meetings, not least of which is which fair is this song about? Probably doesn’t matter but something for the researchers to pick up later. In the meantime it is a delicate number, given its stablemates, that seamlessly morphs into a seemingly Stranglers inspired musical roundabout, The Witch.
And finally, as if to press home the point about the bouncing music, we end up with Cam Ye O’er Frae France & The Musical Priest – a chance to throw it all in: organ, guitars, flute and violin – oh, and to spill the last of what’s in the bottle.
What Joshua Burnell has done here is a homage to the sounds of the late sixties and seventies. Lots of musical echoes and just out of sight distant memories that make it sound at once new and comfortably old. For all the bounce and fun, he sails a tight line between folk-rock and prog rock and probably wins, though I have to admit that at times I did want to hear the band build on one or two of these numbers, remembering all those long extrapolations from the likes of Jethro Tull. Jolly good fun, lots of tongue in cheek but at the same time spot on.
Order The Road to Horn Fair (+ Bonus CD) here: https://www.joshuaburnell.co.uk/product-page/the-road-to-horn-fair-bonus-cd