And the man played...

I remember when I went to my first ever Oxford Folk Festival, finding it absolutely hilarious that Eric Bogle albums were kept in the Scottish Music section of the CD stand. After all, the man who wrote songs like 'Now I'm easy' (an ode to a NSW farmer), or that great Australian classic 'And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda', well it doesn't matter where a man was born, he's an Aussie now, surely.

And yet, when you hear him speak, forty years after he left his homeland, there's no mistaking the soft scottish brogue and dry northern wit. As he stood up the front at Hitchin Folk Club joking with his old mate John Munro, the pair of them were pure Scots.

I didn' t dare miss this gig - Bogle's only one within coo-ee of Oxfordshire before I leave for Italy (and still nearly a 2 hr drive away!). It's his last ever tour of the UK - getting too old for the trip, he reckons, and heaven only knows when I'll next be home at a time that he's gigging there.

And he was brilliant.

It's always amazing, when you hear a voice so familiar from recordings, in real life for the very first time. Every intonation of every line is familiar, but richer than your CD, and ever so slightly different. Every old song he played was imbued with memories, wrapped up in Bogle's own stories of where they came from.

'Now I'm easy' is a song Ants and I learned in our early days - this night we learned it's about a NSW farmer Bogle met in a pub and, he says "we traded life stories. I was workin' as an accountant at the time, so his life story was a fair bit more interesting than mine". Another was of a bloke he met at a party in Adelaide "he said he was a merchant banker. I dunno if he was, but what he was, is a fair rhyme for that". I wondered how many people in the room would know that the two places he'd just mentioned were nearly two days' drive apart.

As songs we knew and loved mingled with songs we'd never heard, and with poignant stories and witty banter, we felt privileged to be there.

I'd not appreciated before just how strong is the anti-war theme in his music. Right throughout, his repertoire is rich in protest - anti greed, pro peace, pro environment, pro people. It's not just the waste of life in 'Wille McBride (aka 'The Green Fields of France, but titled 'No man's land' by its author!), or 'The Band Played Waltzing Matilda'. It's the lamentation of the death of the mighty Murray river, the disrespect shown to the hard living farmer. But his songs are also rich in celebration - of the lives of aboriginal people and beliefs in the Coorong, in songs like Lost Souls, written for a group of boys who took a handful of Coorong sand to a grave in Belgium, and brought back a lump of clay, so that after nearly 90 years, the spirit of their relative could find his way home.

Best of all, it was a folk club, not some big festival or touch-me-not concern. John Munro manned the CD stand at interval, and Bogle and Ants were about the only two smokers in the place, so when Ants went out for a fag at half time and after the show... there he was! We wandered up to say hello, and thank you, and to tell him his stories about Australia were making me homesick (which was true).

When all was sung and done, we collected the car from the parking spot we'd scored RIGHT in front of the pub, and started the two hour trek home, satisfied that every mile had been worth it.