The Imagined Village

Did you see 'Later... with Jools' on Friday night? It was a good selection of music but I was particularly taken with The Imagined Village collective - whoever thinks folk is boring clearly needs to see that performance of 'Cold Hailey, Rainy Night'. I was most impressed with it and immediately had to download it and listen to it on repeat.

A six and half minute song is a bit unusual on any music show (as Jools noted) but it's more than worth it, mixing the fiddles and voices of traditional folk with sitar and bhangra beats creating a wonderful melange of sound that had me gawping at the telly with eyes and ears wide open. You *need* to see it. Watch with an open mind and prepare to be amazed.



Now, that's what I call a performance and a half! It's great to see Eliza Carthy bouncing round and that's a marvellous duet on voice and fiddle with Chris Wood.

The blurb on The Imagined Village site tells us that it's:

A daring mix of ancient and modern, The Imagined Village fuses fiddles and squeezebox with dub beats and sitars. To do so it has gathered an extraorinary array of talent: Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy, Sheila Chandra, Billy Bragg, Paul Weller, Tunng, Transglobal Underground and Benjamin Zephaniah among others.

Emmerson has a history of ground-breaking fusions, as founder of jazz-soul group Working Week and The Afro Celt Sound System, and as a Grammy-nominated producer of world acts like Manu Dibango and Baba Maal. After travelling the world I thought it was time explore my own roots, he says Simon, to look at the earth under my feet.

The resulting album is arguably the most ambitious re-invention of the English folk tradition since Fairport Conventions Liege and Lief back in 1969. Favourites like John Barleycorn and Cold Hailey Rainy Night are given radical new soundscapes, the magical ballad Tam Lyn is retold as a tale of urban clubland amid a parade of great voices and wonderful playing. Paul Weller duets with Martin Carthy and Tunng bring their quirky inventive young folk sound while Sheila Chandra sings a heart-breaking ballad with beauty and elegance.

Martin Carthy: "The only harm you can do to traditional music is not to play it or sing it."

Simon Emmerson: "Englishness is the final frontier of world music."

Billy Bragg: "In any village theres a meeting between the custodians of the past and the architects of the future, and The Imagined Village reflects just that"

I have, naturally enough, ordered the album. You should do the same.