Spiers and Boden and the meaning of Ballads

Seeing lots of live music gives you two really cool things:
1/ An excellent night out listening to brilliant music, usually involving pints of cider and jolly good company
2/ A chance to learn from the best.

Tonight's return to the Nettlebed Folk Club to see the most excellent John Spiers (rhymes with 'pliers') and Jon Boden provided an abundance of all the above.

First, I teamed up again with the lovely Ela and two of her friends visiting from Poland (her fiance, Stephen, dutifully eschewed the event so that he could attend his first Polish lesson - he reckons everyone in the class is there because they have a Polish girlfriend, as there's only one chick in the class!). It was my turn to drive, but there was still time for a cider.

Second, both Spiers & Boden and their big-band, Bellowhead, have new albums out, so there was lots to listen to both onstage and on my two new CDs. The more you listen to this stuff, the more you hear songs, or fragments of song, crafted differently. Things get put together with different tunes or lyrics, are connected up with other pieces of music, or played slower, faster, simpler, more trickily, so they don't sound like the same music at all. As long as you can say whose work you learned it from, or what fragment of manuscript it came from...

But my best bit of learning came from some of the lads' witty onstage banter. For years I've been shunning some of the older ballads as being super mawkish and, well, kinda cringeworthy. Until Jon Boden helped me understand: they're not supposed to be taken seriously.

"It might help," he says, "to understand a bit of what this ballad is about. A knight is riding through the woods on his horse. Past his girlfriend's house.
He says 'hi'.
She says 'hi. Fancy coming in for a bit?'.
He says 'no thanks. Think I'd best get home. To my wife.'
So she kills him.
And gets ratted on by a talking bird. As you do. And she gets hung for her sins. The end'

I get it now! Ballads are supposed to be comedies....