Jon Boden & The Remnant Kings
Poole Lighthouse
Thursday 23rd November 2017
LINE-UP:
Jon Boden – lead vocal, violin, guitar, melodeon, concertina
Sam Sweeney – drums, fiddle, concertina, vocal
Paul Sartin – oboe, fiddle, cor anglais, concertina, vocal
Rob Harbron – concertina, fiddle, guitar, vocal
Ben Nicholls – bass guitar, double bass, concertina
Richard Warren – lead guitar
+
strings (I think one may be different)
Kiki Chen – violin
Helen Bell – viola
Lucy Revis – cello
brass:
Toni Durrant- euphonium
Sam Fisher- Flugelhorn
Stage set before the show: Poole Lighthouse
SET LIST:
From Afterglow album *
From Songs From The Floodplain album
Rosin The Bow
The Rose In June
Going Down To The Wasteland
Moths In The Gas Light *
Afterglow *
Bee Sting *
Wrong Side of Town *
Fires of Midnight *
interval
All The Stars Are Coming Out Tonight *
Dancing In The Ruin *
I Want To Dance With Somebody (Whitney Houston)- Jon Boden solo
Burning Streets *
Yellow Lights *
Aubade *
Roll The Woodpile Down (Jon Boden & The Remnant Strings)
Beating The Bounds
Leviathan / Tombola
encore
Hounds of Love (Kate Bush)
All Hang Down
Some assumed that Jon Boden had decided to go solo because Bellowhead was too large a band (13) to be viable on the road. Not so … the Remnant Kings are about the same size (11) once augmented with strings and brass. They were formed in 2009, and then hibernated in the shadow of Bellowhead. Those who bought Painted Lady (2006) and Songs From The Floodplain (2009) had guessed the solo move was because he wanted to develop as a songwriter, rather than (or as well as) as an interpreter of folk songs. The new album Afterglow reinforces this, and continues the post-apolyptic theme of the earlier album. In Bellowhead style, the latest album dominates the show.
These people play together in various line-ups. Sam Sweeney & Paul Sartin of the Remnant Kings were in Bellowhead. Sam Sweeney, Rob Harbron and Ben Nicholls are in both Fay Hield’s Hurricane Party as well as in The Full English. Paul Sartin is also in The Transports tour.
This is a bold venture indeed. The show is based around the Afterglow album, and they play the lot in chronological order too, interspersed with the (virtually unrecognisable) solo cover of I Want To Dance With Somebody which fits into the theme anyway. Jon Boden uses narration to explain and link the songs. It’s boy seeks girl in a post-industrial society. Oil has run out (they still have barrels of tar though). It’s a celebration amid the ruins of the city, “Bonfire night or Diwali.” Hmm. The Hindu Festival of Light. Decide which. You don’t have to be multi-cultural in everything! Anyway, the boy is seeking the girl he met a year earlier at the same carnival. Towards the end he said:
It’s quite a big ask to play a whole album like this … but it only works like this.
And it is ambitious. I’ve had the album for a couple of weeks, and listened right through at least half a dozen times. Some of it has massive immediate melodic appeal, while others, like the closing two songs, are very different indeed. Undefinable as rock or folk. It’s a major undertaking, including set design and lighting (he thanked the same person who did lights tonight for both). It’s all based around Jon Boden’s concept, and sadly the hall was only half full, if that … it is a very large hall, but Bellowhead would have packed it with ease by their final tour. The solo focus was always there, so it’s only Jon Boden signing CDs (and tea towels) in the thirty minute interval, whereas other Bellowhead members used to sign too. I guess it’s his record. He worked his socks off at the signing. I bought the De Luxe edition of the CD and had it signed. I hadn’t known of its existence when I bought the original It has an extra CD of solo versions of the songs, well worth an extra £2.
Wisely he started with a few non-album tracks. Rosin the Bow (or Rosin The /Le Beau on The Basement Tapes) is a cracking lively folk classic which most fans would know.
The Rose In June (I think), iPhone, lo-res
They followed up with The Rose in June which Jon described as a religious song. He attributes it to Lou Killen, and he had sung it unaccompanied on his massive 365 song A Folk Song A Day project (downloadable only), for 30th June. It’s a long song, greatly enriched by the augmented Remnant Kings, and the string section of violin, viola and cello was already making itself known. I guess with three of the band as noted fiddlers as well, they didn’t need a string quartet. A big surprise for me was seeing Sam Sweeney on drums, as I’ve seen him as a violinist many times. He only played violin briefly in the closing tunes. A very good drummer he is too, playing very much for accenting the song rather than simply laying down a beat.
We had one more song before the album, the powerful Going Down To The Wasteland from Songs From The Floodplain. It’s a very good link. You could imagine Bellowhead choosing and performing both Rosin The Bow and A Rose in June easily. We needed a rocking link to adjust our mindset.
Then we’re into the album, played in exact sequence with explanations. The album had mixed reviews. I’m on the 4 to 5 star side of the line and it’s one of my “Albums of 2017.” One review heard Peter Gabriel era Genesis, with David Bowie and Kate Bush in the drama. I thought the more theatrical end of David Bowie, with a touch of Freddie Mercury in the drama and soaring vocals in places. Whatever, it’s not folk. It’s not folk rock either. It’s more prog employing unusual instrumentation … strings, euphonium, flugelhorn, oboe, concertina. Perhaps the Pysch-folk genre? ELO? Does it matter?
Moths In The Gas Light leads into it. Interesting rhythm, prominent lead guitar and for me the first earworm of the album … you should have a strong melody on track one.
Afterglow has an anthemic hook. I wondered if the shared title had reminded the reviewer of Genesis, not that the songs have any similarity. The other song that comes to my mind is The Small Faces’ song from 1969. There are many others, but there’s no copyright on titles.
Bee Sting has a lovely intricate guitar intro, played by Jon Boden. If I wanted to say “Listen to one song and buy the album” it would now be Bee Sting, though it was a builder rather than an initial impression. It’s the third song with a strong melody. The change with heavy percussion is very prog … the soft guitar intro then “here come the drums.” though they don’t continue from that point.
Wrong Side of Town showcases the power of that three piece string section as an insistent rythmic force, then lifting the song as well. Four strong melodies in a row, and it segued straight into Fires of Midnight to run to the interval.
All The Stars Are Coming Out Tonight started the second part of the evening. It’s the lead virtual single and video, (LINKED HERE) and according to reviews, the most “Bellowhead-like” song. Only on the chorus for me. Insistent crisp acoustic guitar from Jon Boden. We had much more guitar from Jon Boden this evening than I’ve seen before, even in Spiers and Boden concerts. I’d thought violin his first instrument, but he is an exceptional guitarist too. The horn section come into their own on the instrumental break.
Dancing In The Ruin is the most Bowie flavoured song of all. Excellent.
The radical rethinking of Whitney Houston’s I Want To Dance With Somebody got one of the loudest applause points of the evening. He did it solo with guitar. The explanation blended it into the storyline. I was reminded of his equally radical take on Janis Joplin’s Mercedes Benz on a Folk Song A Day.
Burning Streets has strong electric guitar from Richard Warren, and is the last of the conventional songs. It was slightly messy in sound, I thought.
Yellow Lights is the most unconventional song of the lot. It’s the longest track, the most innovative and the most orchestral. The melody and style is East European, pre-war Berlin, French café, Kurt Weill … only Leonard Cohen has explored this area recently, and then not this unusually. There is a strong Flugelhorn part, but then the variety of sounds cascade over each other. I’d bet this is a swine to play, I thought.
Aubade is a low key gentle and sweet closing song. It’s been a terrific presentation of the album.
Roll The Woodpile Down was just Jon on guitar with the string trio (The Remnant Strings) on a number very well-known from Bellowhead. Much as I loved the sound of just his guitar and three string players. I thought it an odd arrangement choice, as it’s the sort of song that benefits from the wall of sound ensemble particularly well. Other songs would have benefitted more from the line up to me. I guess it was just a tad low key compared to Bellowhead’s version.
Beating The Bounds is another strong track from Songs From The Floodplain. I was beginning to hope for my favourite tracks, We Do What We Can and Dancing In The Factory but it was not to be.
Leviathan
The main set ended with linked tunes (and introductions) with Leviathan / Tombola with Jon Boden on violin. Sam Sweeney stopped drumming for a section on violin too. These are such crowd pleasers with a large band and everyone sawing away on fiddles, that I’m slightly surprised that like Bellowhead and Spiers & Boden he doesn’t put another one in … but it’s an expected high energy main set ender.
The first encore was Kate Bush’s Hounds of Love. The band was the core original Remnant Kings … Jon Boden, Sam Sweeney, Ben Nicholls, Paul Sartin, Rob Harbron. All five were playing concertinas too. There’s a YouTube video of this arrangement, with The Remnant Kings, but recorded five years ago at The Shrewsbury Folk Festival 2012.
The final song, All Hang Down was announced as a Temperance Marching Song from the Salvation Army that got hijacked into a drinking song.
There is an issue with playing the whole album live, if, as he said It only works like this. What do you do the you have another album, or two, or three, out? Do you play all of it then? At some point selection will have to take place and break the concept. So, I’m very pleased to have seen it played in its entirety.
The lights and set design were first rate. Sound OK, but not great. Any amplified band finds Poole Lighthouse hard. Bellowhead found it very hard in 2013. This band had a lot less volume, but we saw friends in the interval, and their first comment was “messy sound, hard to hear the words.” Last time, like several bands in Poole’s hall, Bellowhead were too loud for the acoustic. Not so here tonight, with tiny practice amps mic’d into the PA, but while not loud, it was indistinct compared to what Paul Simon or Leonard Cohen achieved with large bands. Ben Nicholls is a great bass player, but the bass was indistinct … bass virtually always is in this hall. I’ve heard his bass as far more articulate in other venues and the bass has a lovely spring to it throughout the recording. Probably it was less distinct on bass guitar than double bass too and it mixed in with bass drum. They sensibly placed drums extreme stage left on a riser, eliminating the problem of drums bleeding into mics. The comment several made was they couldn’t hear the words clearly enough. For me Jon Boden’s mic needs to be higher in the mix, and there was (as ever) too much echo on the vocal. When you have such a live acoustic as a classical concert hall, you get enough echo from amplifiers into speakers without adding more. Maybe they didn’t add more echo and the hall is the only issue. I know people who say they’ve never heard an amplified band sound good there, but that’s not true. When they were having great jazz, the likes of the pretty loud and amplified Zawinul Syndicate got pristine sound.
They started at 7.30, right on time. They took a 30 minute interval … basically, if you speak to musicians on tour, the interval sales are a vital part of the financial equation, and then finished at 9.55. Virtually two hours on stage, and although he sounded as if he had a sore throat and looked a little tired, Jon Boden announced that they would be going to the bar afterwards and would be playing more tunes for anyone who wanted to listen. We couldn’t stay unfortunately. I guess that the arrangements of the album are complex and tight all evening, and the band enjoy letting off steam with some looser “tunes”.
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