Ian King
18th Jun 2010@ 18:45 Big Top
Already the subject of an fRoots magazine cover story some eight months before the appearance of his imminent debut album Panic Grass and Fever Few, Ian King now finds himself on the verge of ubiquity. Born in Yorkshire, a dry-stone waller by trade and a punk by nature, King is “a big fan of folk music from around the globe, what they call world music”. He maintains: “I might not be from the traditional English school of folk but I sincerely believe that all traditional music shares a common ground. My objective is to create a sound with broad appeal beyond just folk”. On Panic Grass and Fever Few – incidentally the title comes from a phrase in John Hersey’s war retrospective Hiroshima where the author refers to the green shoots of herbs that swiftly emerged from the ashes of that catastrophic event (King thought it juxtaposed rather nicely with the gentler folk sensibilities of parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme) – King has done much more than that: he’s created a musical landscape uniquely suited to the multi-cultured ether that surrounds us.
One of King’s all time favourite records is Bim Sherman’s Miracle and it was to the producer of that record – Adrian Sherwood – that King turned when recording Panic Grass and Fever Few. Of course Sherwood is more famous for his studio dub production with artists such as Sly and Robbie, Lee Scratch Perry and Primal Scream and you can hear Sherwood’s influence all over the album. You can also hear the influence of Skip ‘Little Axe’ McDonald a man who made his name as an integral part of the Sugar Hill house band but had previously worked with Sherwood and the industrial/hip-hop band Tackhead, subsequently becoming part of Sherwood’s On U Sound crew. Mix that in with world-beat percussionist Pete Lockett and a horn section about as far removed from the Floral Dance as you’re likely to get, and you can see why some people might think we’re not talking about a folk record. But then you’d be forgetting the fact that King has a huge folk heritage and that he spent hours of research at the home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society, Cecil Sharp House (and in particular the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library), a building that houses recordings of folk music going back hundreds of years. And it is here that he dug up some of the ancient treasures that make Panic Grass And Fever Few such a uniquely compelling record.
To extrapolate: Adieu to Old England was first published as a broadside c.1820 as 'The Transports Farewell' by T. Bachelor of Little Cheapside. Shirley Collins covered this a capella, King does not! Death & The Lady was first renditioned by Mrs R. Sage at Chew Stoke, Somerset 11th January 1907 but you can be sure she won’t have imagined it ending up like this. Black Eyed Susan was penned around 1723. Evil Eye (with excerpts from 'As I Walk Forth' (Robert Johnson 1583-1633)) is one of two-self penned numbers – the other, By George, is about King’s dear late friend Simon George Eckert who died of cancer in 2008. Four Loom Weaver is a 19th century broadside to which King feels some kinship - apart from dry stone walling, the only other job King held down in Yorkshire was operating machines much like the four loom weaver. Flash Company (the lead single) was/is a popular English gypsy song collected by Vaughan Williams in 1909, then called 'The Myrtle Tree'. Ah Robin, Gentle Robin is attributed to William Cornysh (1468-1523) and here is sung as a duet with Denise Sherwood. Take, Oh Take Those Lips Away is a sonnet from Shakespeare’s Measure For Measure, IV, 1, (yes really!) attributed to John Wilson (1595-1674) and How Should I Your True Love Know? is from Hamlet, Prince of Darkness, IV, 5 although the author is unknown. Isle of France is also known as 'The Shamrock Green' or 'The Convict Song' and was printed on various broadsides c.1800s - although as King points out this version was collected and published by W. Percy Merrick in 1912 when the Titanic sank and Barnsley won the FA Cup. The Old Miner is a well-known folk song (collected by John Moreton in the early 1960s from an unknown source) although when Sherwood commandeered Ghetto Priest to sing the haunting backing vocal it necessarily took the song to another level of hardship. Finally, The Jovial Broom Man (a wonderfully vague song that could be about a soldier returning from a hard battle at sea or a drunk telling tales about what he’s been up to) has been adapted by King (the words are from the Roxburghe Ballads and the tune from 'Jamaica' from Playford's 'The Dancing Master').
I’m not sure there’s a precedent for a record like Panic Grass And Fever Few. In the early 1990s artists such as Massive Attack and Portishead reconfigured electronic dance music and King has done something similar with the folk template. In recent years, bands like Bellowhead, Lau and even Noah and the Whale and Oi Va Voi have warped our expectations of what a “folk” record is supposed to sound like but none of them have stretched the imagination enough to make us wonder why we hadn’t thought of it all before. Panic Grass And Fever Few does just that. Medieval dub? It’s all you wanted and more.
