To the casual observer, Surrey and Greater Manchester might not seem like hotbeds of folkloric activity, but this current edition of the Ceremonial Counties is one of the strongest – and strangest – yet, proving that England’s weird underbelly can be exposed wherever you take the time to peel back the surface. Surrey is tackled by the Bohman Brothers, Adam and Jonathan, a pair of sound artists who are known for their idiosyncratic take on the avant-garde, inspired by the Fluxus group and various other merrie pranksters of the twentieth century. Impressively, they have taken their mixed media mischief to revered venues like the Tate Modern, the Royal Albert Hall and the South Bank. Their contribution to this series concerns St. Ann’s Hill near Chertsey, a wooded haven concealing an ancient hill fort, a lost chapel and a well (which, from the photographs I have seen, looks like a large and ancient version of Duchamp’s famous toilet). The piece mixes elements of the ‘traditional weird’ with found sounds: funereal piano chords soon give way to yapping dogs and distant traffic, an echoey spoken word segment plonks you down right in the heart of the landscape, then some doomy, culty synths darken the atmosphere. After that, things get really weird: electronic chirrups abound, the spoken word gets more abstract and some heavy industrial sounds battle for primacy with the field recordings of birdsong. For the finale, a chiming, bell-like passage coalesces into something like melody. It crams an awful lot into fifteen minutes and ends up sounding like the perfect primer on how to create weird, place-specific atmospheres.
For the second part, we have something a bit different. For one thing, all the Ceremonial Counties releases up until this point have consisted of two halves of exactly fifteen minutes each, but Jennifer Reid’s Greater Manchester: Homely is allowed to stretch to twenty. She certainly earns her extra five minutes. Reid, who is a researcher and performer of songs in the Lancashire dialect, is perhaps most famous for her role as Barb in Shane Meadows’ excellent adaptation of Ben Myers’ Gallows Pole. Here, she contributes a combination of spoken poetry and singing, covering subjects like working motherhood, the weaving industry, homebrewing. The infectious chorus of Collyhurst Road, I Am Forsaken, is particularly winning. Everything is sung unaccompanied and performed with Reid’s usual mixture of righteous anger, tenderness and humour, and forms an illuminating snapshot of 19th and early 20th century working-class Manchester. She is a truly engaging performer, and has tapped into a tradition – performance by working-class women – that has been unfairly marginalised in the past. This little pocket of songs and rhymes is more than a historical document, it is folk music as a living tradition, as entertaining as it is political. Reid is one of the very finest exponents of the form, and this twenty-minute slot provides an intoxicating distillation of her talent.
Note on the Series: Each tape can be collected individually each month or as one entire subscription and they are available via Folklore Tapes direct at www.folkloretapes.co.uk or via their Bandcamp page at https://folkloretapes.bandcamp.com/ and via selected independent record shops.