John Tams – The Reckoning
Topic Records – 5 July 2019
If asked when did you first come across John Tams, you will most definitely get a variety of answers depending on whether you have listened to folk music, been to the theatre or watched the TV series Sharpe.
If like me, you originally came across him in his singing mode, it may have been on June Tabor’s debut album Airs & Graces or as I did in the early iterations of the Albion Band and then in the Home Service. Latterly you may have seen him in The Proms’ version of War Horse. However, for a man of many talents and outlets, Topic Records have chosen to re-release his album The Reckoning as part of their 80th Birthday celebration Topic Treasures Series.
The Reckoning is the third of three solo albums released at the turn of this century: Unity in 2000, Home in 2002 and The Reckoning in 2005. The original tracks have all been remastered and illustrate very clearly some of the many sides to John Tams, as singer, songwriter and interpreter. The final three tracks on this version of the album are described as ‘an appreciation of John Steinbeck’ relating to John Tams’ involvement in productions of The Grapes of Wrath and Of Mice and Men.
His own songs tend to have an obtuse take on English folk-melancholy. Musically there is more than a hint of Americana though I am aware that this as broad a brush stroke description as ‘folk’ can be. The opening number, Written In The Book, on first listening has the feel, the sound of mid-to late-sixties mid-Atlantic, but listen again and take in the words and immediately you will see/hear John’s skill at matching the flavour of the notes with the flavour of the lyrics. Reflective, looking back perhaps on a lost youth (aren’t we all?), we are never too old to learn the lessons of life, especially those that are not taught to us until “some years later” when we see that “Somebody has changed the game”. However, John does not appear to be someone who shirks from the changes of games as long as he controls those changes – “It’s just me and me and me again”.
Such reflection and mulling, possibly contemplation, pervades The Reckoning, but you feel that it is done so in a warm way. There are no hard edges, the Safe House is welcoming and although the separation in Amelia is palpable, it is sad, not depressing. The epitome of this musing is John’s version, or rather re-invention, of A Man Of Constant Sorrow. Far removed from the up-tempo style of ‘I’m feeling pretty good even though I’m bad’ sort that you can pull off YouTube at any time, this pays more attention to the relationship between the words and the tune. This version is such a change that I had to listen to it immediately after first play to satisfy myself what it was – and it is just right.
The songs are not all from John’s own pen. Bitter Withy (Roud 452) has, in the tradition of the tradition, been ‘mended’ and comes out as something more measured, and again something that allows the listener to consume both tune and lyric. The other traditional songs appear as a set of four linked as The Sea: Pretty Nancy/A Sailor’s Life/One More Day/As I Looked East, As I Looked West, the latter reminiscent of times spent with the Albion Band. This set brings together words that have been around for a long time and are woven by John into four scenes describing the effects of The Sea upon young lives.
The sea is also the centre of a set of three songs, How High The Price?/All Clouds The Sky/St Hilda’s Waltz, about the fishing industry and the price paid in human life. They have “come for fish and fish need must be found” despite the fact that the “The reckoning sky calls down some heavy weather”. Probably no coincidence that St Hilda was the founding abbess of Whitby Abbey.
If you want to, you can pick out other themes, but the important one in the album is that relationship between the words and the music. John Tams has asked elsewhere if we have stopped listening to words, and whilst I fear that we have in some, or even many instances, through the use of wallpaper sound, banal repetitions and our listening brain busy on other things, it is albums like The Reckoning that help reconnect with the words as part of the whole. John’s skill at telling stories, making songs, is one of combining the right notes with the right syllables. His songs and his ‘repairs’ are designed for us to consume the whole. This is a skill that not everyone is blessed with. John Tams has it bucket loads and The Reckoning is as good a demonstration of this as you could find.
The Reckoning is released on 5th July via Topic Records
Includes 3 bonus tracks (2 previously unreleased). Plus 28-page booklet with new sleeve notes by acclaimed journalist/Sandy Denny biographer, Mick Houghton and new intro by John Tams.
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