Late March 2009, St Albans and a little bit of news !

We have a wee while now before our next commitment, so we decided to spend a Saturday looking at some new material. We are working on two songs in particular. The first is one that has its origins in Broadstairs last year. In our ‘downtime’ there, Rob and I investigated the second hand bookshops in the town. I’m afraid I can’t recall the name of the shop now but there is one in Broadstairs which is quite amazing, with books of all sorts and about anything and everything, loosely available throughout a very sizeable two storey building. Browsing in there, I came across a book called The Resurrection Men about the practices of the body snatchers. The book contains the tale of Helen Torrence and Jean Waldie, accredited as being amongst the first true body snatchers in Edinburgh – who murdered to get the corpses to sell to the anatomists. The fears and contradictions around the sale of bodies – wanting and needing scientific advances but clearly not wanting to have oneself or one’s loved ones operated upon – are really very interesting. So, I have written (and put my own tune to) a song about Nellie and Jeannie. I have another more general song in progress about ‘night gardeners’ and the strangeness of their crop. One of these days I’ll get chance to finish.
I have also been putting together a new set of words to a French Canadian song recorded by Le Vent du Nord. Having recently read Suite Francaise by Irene Nemirovsky, a French authoress murdered by the Nazis in the death camps in 1942, I was deeply affected by her description of the travails of the refugees leaving Paris ahead of the German advance on the city, and the chaos, the comfort of strangers, the speed of unexpected violence, their doubts and concerns over loved ones, and their uncertainties about the future. There are probably too many songs glorifying heroes and too few relaying the harm that ensues from ‘the arguments of kings’ – an everywhere and every epoch issue.
The little bit of news we have had – well actually we have known for some time but were asked to keep it under wraps until the details were fully worked out – is that we have been asked by the Cambridge Folk Club to play their tent at the Cambridge Folk Festival. We are deeply grateful to the Cambridge Folk Club for this honour. This is an event of national significance and we are very very excited at being allowed to be part of it.