Anglo-Scottish cross-border band features acclaimed musicians Nancy Kerr, Findlay Napier, Tom Wright, Alex Hunter and UK folk legend Martin Simpson
The Magpie Arc
at the North Wall Arts Centre, Oxford
on Saturday, April 19
Review by JON LEWIS
Songs of Real Life
Making their debut in Oxford, Anglo-Scottish folk band The Magpie Arc entertained an Easter weekend audience with their Americana-infused set. The band consists of Radio 2 Folk Award winners Martin Simpson and Nancy Kerr, Scottish guitarists Finlay Napier and Alex Hunter, and Devonshire drummer Tom A Wright.
Three songs demonstrate the band’s musical diversity. Napier’s Tough as Teddy Gardner, a folk-rock piece, is named after a Hartlepool boxer of the 1930s onwards. One of many numbers taken from the band’s 2022 album Glamour in the Grey, the song was inspired by a visit during the miners’ strike to a miners’ café in Easington as part of the Hartlepool Folk Festival. Napier’s lyrics recall the police goading the hungry miners by waving pay slips at them, shouting that the overtime they were doing would pay their mortgages. One of the miners was beaten up by the police after responding to the jibes as if he were in the boxing ring.
In Kerr’s rendition of the traditional folk song The Cutty Wren, her violin dominates the guitars and drums from the rest of the band. The lyrics are symbolic and perhaps relate to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381. The attempts to kill the wren are not literal. What makes this a fascinating rendition is that the lyrics are completely divergent to other recent recordings such as by Mawkin: Causley which are more military in their imagery. Kerr’s version is pastoral, and more about hunting. This version is beautifully rendered, melodic and questioning.
Simpson, who loves to provide a detailed context for his songs, has selected in Pans and Biscuits a song about a poorly educated farmer working in the cotton fields, leaning against a tree, his children gone. It’s a wish-fulfilment about hunger and poverty with the farmer dreaming not only of biscuits but also of bowls of gravy, affordable if he can be paid properly for his labour. The song is simple in its structure, Kerr’s violin providing the central country music melody that veers into gospel. Like many songs in the gig, it’s a story from real life.
A superb concert.
