David Carroll & Friends
Bold Reynold
Talking Elephant
20 January 2021
It comes as a surprise that despite a lengthy and distinguished period of involvement in music, David Carroll isn’t a household name, even to folk cognoscenti. His early tenure with folk band Spinning Wheel on the late-70s club’n’college circuit was succeeded by a long career as a fully qualified craftsman making and repairing stringed instruments, supplemented by a steady flow of session work – where over the past four decades he’s met, worked with and gained the friendship and respect of a large number of well-respected top-flight musicians from (mostly) the field of folk. Having appeared in that capacity on several recordings for other artists, David has spent the past few years gathering ideas to make a solo album in his own right while calling in the services of a whole cluster of those illustrious friends. By all accounts, all such contributions were most enthusiastically garnered. This comes through in the evident bonhomie – and natural-born expertise – of the playing (in other words, you don’t ever get the sense that they are just a competent, efficient bunch of hired session musicians). The positively ear-watering roll-call speaks for itself – two members of Fairport Convention (Chris Leslie and Dave Pegg), three from Gryphon (Brian Gulland, Dave Oberle and Graeme Taylor), and Tom Spencer (from The Men They Couldn’t Hang and The Professionals), plus fine vocalist Lucy Cooper.
David’s feel for creating interesting and innovative new takes on traditional material has clearly been developed through working with top-class musicians, and on this album, he introduces considerable originality and freshness to his chosen material (seven fairly well-travelled traditional songs and two modern compositions), taking a flexible and creative approach, particularly in respect of instrumental scoring. The arrangements, which feature such diverse timbres as bassoon, clarinet, cor anglais, crumhorn, harmonium, dulcimer and uilleann pipes alongside the more expected fiddle, whistle, mandolin, bouzouki, electric and acoustic guitars, bass and drumkit, bring something quite special and different to the oft-maligned folk-rock sub-genre while still respectfully observing its tropes and “conventions” (Fairport and otherwise!).
The disc’s opening salvo is a particularly impressive and ear-catching calling card, an expansive seven-minute interpretation of Andy Barnes’ poignant, heart-rending anti-whaling song, The Last Leviathan, which focuses its elegiac mood on the melody’s modal properties through a keening, undulating dulcimer figure and atmospheric low woodwind, all emerging as from the oceanic depths of a foghorn-like synth drone. This epic treatment would be hard to follow in any circumstances, and at first hearing, the gleefully boisterous quick-march and stirring massed vocals of Follow Me Up To Carlow may inevitably appear less weighty – but in any other context, it would more than pass muster, and maybe the best remedy for the listener is to take a lengthier breather between the two tracks to better appreciate the contrast. A gentle but charismatic retelling of the celebrated Surrey-located Broadwood-collected ballad Poor Murdered Woman brings the sweeter tones of Dave Oberle to the vocal forefront in a plaintive, shifting instrumental texture. This new version forms a valuable counterpoint to the more overtly dramatic Shirley Collins/Albion Country Band version (on the No Roses LP), which itself has come to be regarded as a benchmark rendition of this tragic true-life narrative.
The Napoleon-era ballad Banks Of the Nile follows at a broadly comparable tempo yet gains a different complexion from the stately Sandy Denny reading we know and love due to the matching of a freer-wheeling vocal line (the excellent Lucy Cooper in the spotlight here) with a busy upholstered rhythm pattern and a sensibly sparser instrumental palette (just bouzouki, fiddle and pipes, with a “dancing drum” providing the syncopated pulse-beat). A drum-beat links this track with an attractive new reworking of She Moved Through The Fair that, while taking a similar approach to the early-Fairport version in terms of mysterious eastern-inflected mood, here features the combined vocal talents of David Carroll and Lucy Cooper overlapping and harmonising throughout, giving the time-worn Irish ballad a rather different, more insistent and less hushed complexion; the coda builds on an instrumental reflection on The Skye Boat Song, which is both unexpected and curiously satisfying.
The rollicking jig setting for the piracy ballad High Barbaree holds forth in great style, with banjo, mandolin, whistle, bassoon and electric guitar lines all crystal clear in their enunciation and separation within the thickly-scored texture. This adventure is succeeded by the chunky, driving momentum of Poor Man’s Sorrow/s (aka I Was A Young Man), the arrangement for which perhaps owes a little to the stonking Little Johnny England version. Here, David C follows Tony Rose’s lead in restoring half-a-dozen more commonly omitted verses in order to better convey the protagonist’s bitter complaint.
The album’s penultimate track is its second non-traditional item, a fulsome presentation of Dave Cousins’ early-Strawbs epic The Battle (described as an allegorical representation of the struggle between black and white in the US civil rights movement couched in the language of the medieval battle saga and inspired by a cinematic game of chess), where the distinctive early-music colouring of various species of crumhorn gives way to a solid guitar-led progression that builds through a variety of instrumental textures to augment the narrative. For the disc finale, we discover the origin of the album title when the ringing, chiming filigree tones of dulcimer and bouzouki introduce the jaunty thoroughbred 5/4 metre of Gentlemen Of High Renown, which David first heard from the repertoire of the Copper Family of Sussex. This lusty tale canters headlong into a pell-mell linen-washing airing of The Foxhunter’s Jig for a suitably mighty photo finish.
Congratulations, David, on a fine and well-considered – if overdue! – debut offering. Trademark excellence and totally splendid musicianship abound on this album, which will surely (and immediately) come to be regarded as a folk-rock classic and a prime example of the very best the sub-genre has to offer.
Pre-Order Bold Reynold (20 January 2023)
Listen to a track on our Folk Show (Episode 127)