After 45 years on the road, the legendary Oysterband are calling time, and, as they say, put it, they are hanging up their travelling shoes. If you’re going to call time, you may as well do so with a big splash, and I’m pretty sure that news of Oysterband and June Tabor reuniting for a tour is enough to excite fans.
Aptly named “A Long Long Goodbye”, Oysterband will revisit some of their favourite haunts to perform a career-spanning set, including highlights of their collaborations with their longstanding creative compadre June Tabor. Alongside an appearance at this year’s Cambridge Folk Festival, the band will head out on a string of seven shows alongside June Tabor this October (details below).
In a statement about the upcoming tour, Oysterband said:
“We’re hanging up our travelling shoes, but we’re taking a year or so to say goodbye to our lovely live audience. And we mean to enjoy every minute! It’s been a long, tough, joyful journey, but the time has come. In the words of our own song “Granite Years”, we’re waving you a long, long goodbye… Come help us celebrate!”
Their collaboration with June Tabor in 1990 produced the cult favourite album Freedom & Rain, and it was renewed 21 years later for Ragged Kingdom’ one of the best-selling folk-rock albums of the new millennium. The album opened to Bonny Bunch Of Roses, which our Neil McFadyen described as galloping from the speakers like a messenger from the battlefield, giving us the first hint of the vocal explorations and engaging arrangements on offer. On that album, they also featured a cover of Joy Division’s masterful swansong, Love With Tear Us Apart. In our 2012 interview, John Jones told us:
“It was a song we’d wanted to do for some time. There’s a thread of Oysterband listening that’s outside of its own evolution, that’s into Tom Verlaine and Television, the Velvet Underground, a dark, hard, driven music that we’d also heard in Joy Division. We don’t play that music [live] but we like it. Just as we recorded Love Vigilantes by New Order, you hear something … something beautiful, bittersweet.”
Oysterband were one of our Artists of the Month in 2022 in the lead-up to the release of Read the Sky, a song collection no one could have predicted they would return with.
KLOF Mag’s Danny Neill caught up with John Jones to discuss that album. He also spoke about their early days and most treasured memories of Oysterband on stage:
John Jones Oysterband Interview (Extract)
So, what was your entry point with folk music?
I loved singing; I used to go to a folk club where they let you join in the choruses, and I just loved singing in the choruses. I already played the piano, and I thought, well, if I learn the accordion or the melodeon, I can get into this; I just went for it. I loved the stories. I loved the history behind the stories, and I like music with roots. Blues, soul and folk music, so I guess it was giving me my roots, and I just fell in love with the tunes and the stories.
You formed the Oyster Ceilidh Band and presumably had no idea it could turn into a long-running concern?
I think we got together so that we could make some money for the folk club, and we just enjoyed playing for dances with this incredible group of musicians. Canterbury was a very fertile ground for great musicians, Prog Rock and all sorts of things; you know, people stayed there. We had thirteen people in this great big ceilidh band just having fun playing at the weekend, then it became more serious, and we started to write songs. We had no idea, really, until about 1984-85. What happened was Pete Lawrence, and Martin Goldsmith started Cooking Vinyl; Pete approached me to be the first act on the label, then Billy Bragg put on a folk gig at the ICA and asked us to go on that with him, so a friendship began there. It just took off, and by then, The Pogues had arrived, The Waterboys too and we just knew that we wanted to make folk music as exciting as possible and to take it to as many people as possible. We were coming from the folk scene, and those bands were from the rock scene and embracing folk, which gave us the feeling that it was all possible. I remember the NME finally covered a folk band, polkas and leather jackets are a powerful combination! We were just rocking up polkas and going for it; it was plugging into something that was quite intoxicating really.
Oysterband performing ‘Here’s To You’ (1994).
What are your most treasured memories of the Oysterband onstage?
There are several, luckily most of them are good, there are one or two horrors. One in particular; a track of ours called ‘Granite Years’ we had the good fortune of having a radio hit with it in Spain, partly because it had on it a guy called Jesus Cifuentes from the band Celtas Cortos who became our friends, we did a sort of half Spanish half English version of it. So, there we are, we were in Las Palmas in Grand Canarias playing on the beach for Womad. They estimated there were thirty thousand people there towards the end of it. They stretched from the sea; in fact, they were in the water splashing about right in front of this promenade. We finished with the song, and they got right into it, we started this clapping, and it was just a sea of hands. Then I suddenly saw myself on the screen at the side of the stage, and I thought bloody hell, I want a bit of this! It was intoxicating, likewise just going over to Canada and playing the Edmonton Folk Festival, which is a huge festival, taking the stage there and seeing them get up. Sometimes when people are not really expecting what you do, and you just see that effect on them, I still love that. It’s so great; luckily, there are so many of them.
Oysterband at Edmonton Folk Festival (2015) performing Granite Years
Featuring John Jones (vox, melodeon), Ian Telfer (violin, keyboard), Alan Prosser (guitars), Sean Randle (drums, percussion), Al Scott (bass, mandolin) and Adrian Oxaal (cello, guitars), with June Tabor (vox); the full list of dates for Oysterband & June Tabor’s Last Tour Together can be found below.
OYSTERBAND & JUNE TABOR: ‘A LONG LONG GOODBYE’
Thu 3 Oct 2024 – Birmingham – Town Hall
Fri 4 Oct 2024 – Bristol – Beacon
Sat 5 Oct 2024 – Bexhill – De La Warr Pavilion
Sat 12 Oct 2024 – Manchester – RNCM Concert Hall
Sun 13 Oct 2024 – Sunderland – The Fire Station
Tue 15 Oct 2024 – Leicester – De Montfort Hall
Sat 19 Oct 2024 – London – The Barbican
Tickets are on sale from this Friday @ 10AM here:
www.alonglonggoodbye.live
