SUITED and BOOTED
THE MALKIES –
‘SUITED AND BOOTED’
New Album Out Now on Limbo Music (limbolabel 0020)
and available by mail order from the online shop on this website.
Alistair
Hulett:
Lead and
harmony vocals and acoustic guitar
Phil
Snell: Mandolin,
fiddle, lap steel, slide guitar, electric and acoustic guitars
Hugh
Whitaker: Drums and
percussion, backing vocals
Hugh
Bradley: Double bass
and backing vocals
With very
special guests, Rachel Goodwin on harmony vocals (* denotes the tracks
with Rach) and Gavin Livingstone on vocal harmonies on tracks 4 and 11.
BUY US A
DRINK (Alistair Hulett PUB.AMCOS)
OUT IN THE
DANGER ZONE * (Alistair Hulett PUB.AMCOS)
HIGH GERMANY
* (Traditional - from Frankie Armstrong)
PLAYING FOR
THE TRAFFIC (Alistair Hulett
PUB.AMCOS)
QUITE EARLY
MORNING * (Pete Seeger PUB.FALL RIVER MUSIC)
ARE THERE
HONKY TONKS IN HEAVEN? * (Alistair Hulett PUB.AMCOS)
THE WIFE OF
USHERS WELL (Traditional - from Hedy West)
THE ROAD TO
DUNDEE (Traditional - from Norman Kennedy)
PASTURES OF
PLENTY * (Woody Guthrie PUB.LUDLOW MUSIC)
THE OVERGATE
(Traditional - from Davie Stewart)
THE DAY THAT
THE BOYS CAME DOWN (Alistair Hulett PUB.AMCOS)
THE
INTERNATIONALE * (Pottier/Degeyter, Arr. Hulett PUB.AMCOS)
All songs
arranged for this recording by The Malkies 2008
Produced and
Engineered by Phil Snell at Limbo Studio, Otley, West Yorkshire England UK.
www.limbocreatives.co.uk
Song Notes
by Alistair Hulett:
Buy Us A
Drink is loosely
modelled on those Mummers Play ‘Calling-on Songs’; a kind of hedgerow actor’s
musical introduction and statement of intent, traditionally performed by
wandering bands of peasant thespians in rural Britain during the seasonal pagan
rites of the Winter and Summer Solstices. Rather than stick with the usual ‘God
bless the Squire and give us a bucket a cider, please’ type of thing, we’ve come
up with our own, somewhat less compliant and amenable take on this ancient and
venerable folkloric form.
The next
song, Out In The Danger Zone, was written a while back, after reading a
newspaper article denouncing a spontaneous uprising of the urban poor that
seemed to me quite an understandable response to the sustained attacks on living
standards being meted out by the Tory Government of the time. ‘Blame the victims
and give them a good thrashing!’ has ever been the favoured riposte of the
ruling class under threat, so far as I can see. ‘Tumbrel for Pinkerton-Smythe!’
would get my vote for a suitable comeback riposte anytime.
The oral folk
tradition has regularly produced songs denouncing wars from the point of view of
those most likely to be adversely affected by them and High Germany is
one of the best of these from late18th Century England. It takes up
the old ‘join the army and travel the world’ lure that still continues to prove
effective for our armed forces recruitment departments even today and eloquently
reveals it for the cynical entrapment that it is. I learned this song many years
ago from a live recording of Frankie Armstrong and Louis Killen. ‘Cursed
be the cruel wars that ever they should rise.’ Indeed.
Playing
For The Traffic is set in
Sydney, Australia and was based on the personal experience of seeing a fine old
street musician finish off a day of slim pickings by foraging around a bus
shelter at the shabby end of town for whatever the litter bins might have in
store. We can all draw our own conclusions from this, of course, but here’s
where I’ve drawn mine.
Pete
Seeger is a much
venerated, left-wing folk musician and peace activist who took a principled
stand against the FBI and CIA led ‘McCarthy Witch Hunt’ in the USA during the
late1950s - and almost paid the price for that with a two year prison sentence.
Pete, who only narrowly escaped going to jail on a technicality, wrote Quite
Early Morning many years after that ordeal was settled, but some of the
despair and apprehension he must have felt during that dark time seems to me to
echo through the lines of Quite Early Morning. It’s a wonderful song of optimism
and defiance in the face of adversity and I love singing it.
Are There
Honkytonks In Heaven? asks some of
the big, existential questions that sometimes creep through the mind in
unguarded moments. Why are we here? Where are we going? Should we bring
sandwiches? If Heaven means spending eternity with the ‘upright and godly’ who
currently shape the British and US American Governments’ foreign policies, who
in their right mind among us would really want to be there?
Folk song
collectors in the early part of last century were astonished to discover ancient
narrative songs, known as ‘ballads’, which had almost completely vanished from
the musical landscape of Britain since their European high point in the medieval
period, still flourishing among the so-called ‘hillbillies’ in the Appalachian
Mountains of North America. This elegant version of The Wife Of Ushers Well
comes from Hedy West of North Georgia, who learnt it from her
grandmother.
The Road
To Dundee belongs more
to the music hall and parlour song traditions than to the world of genuine folk
music, but many old song-carriers had a version of it in their repertoires. It’s
a pastiche, but a very lovely one, nonetheless. The great Doric balladeer
Norman Kennedy has even been recorded singing it, but I picked this version
of the text up by osmosis, way back when I first got hooked on the indigenous
music of Scotland in my early teens. The obvious musical affinity the song bears
with American Country & Western was just too seductive not to work into the
present arrangement, I’m afraid. Bob Dylan used this old Scots tune for his
borstal song The Walls Of Red Wing.
Woody
Guthrie wrote his epic
dustbowl ballad, Pastures Of Plenty, during the Great Depression of the
1930s. His depiction of migrant workers who ‘come with the dust and go with the
wind’ remains one of the unsurpassed jewels of modern American political
songwriting. It’s worth noting, I think, that migrant workers in the USA are no
longer huddled in the hobo camps of old, but very recently staged one of the
biggest civil rights demonstrations ever seen, in several of that country’s
major cities. ‘We stand in the fight and we fight till we win’ from the
penultimate verse of Woody’s song has indeed a prophetic ring to it, nowadays.
The
Overgate comes from the
singing of a Scots traveller by the name of Davie Stewart, who was finally
tracked down after much searching by the folksong scholar and poet Hamish
Henderson in the late 1950s. Davie played his accordion and sang in the
flamboyant, declamatory style of the Travelling People he belonged to, and
worked his way for years around the markets and hiring fairs of Scotland and
Ireland, picking up songs as he went. His frequent run-ins with the ‘polis’ as
he was going about his daily business lend this version of a well-known bothy
ballad quite a singular twist, although his close relations and fellow
travellers, The Stewarts of Bairgowrie, also have a similar take on the story.
This Malkies version here is an early foray into what I’d describe as Pictish
Blues.
Our
penultimate song, The Day That The Boys Came Down, was written in
Australia as a piece of fiction that eerily and tragically came true about a
year after I first recorded it. More accurately, events bearing a remarkable
similarity to those described here happened in the predominantly Aboriginal
community of Redfern in Sydney in 1989. Members of the Special Weapons and
Operations Section (SWOS), a highly dangerous wing of the NSW State Police, shot
and killed Mr David Gundy in his home in the early hours of a morning in April
that year, while supposedly seeking to apprehend another person altogether. Mr
Gundy’s only ‘crime’ was a shared Aboriginality with the wanted man. The
individual they were looking for had indeed killed a prison guard during an
escape from Long Bay Jail, but his relationship to David Gundy was merely one of
passing acquaintance, a fact most certainly known to the police officers
involved.
It seems to
me there’s no better song to finish off a folk music hullabaloo like this than
that old battle hymn from the barricades, The Internationale. Written in
1871 by Eugene Pottier to celebrate the Paris Commune, then set to music
a few years later by Pierre Degeyter, it’s been translated into almost
every known language and sung everywhere that ordinary people get together to
fight for the better world we know is possible. This particular translation into
English of three of the original five verses in French is by Ian Birchill
of the Socialist Workers Party (UK). ‘Comrades come rally and the last fight let
us face’. Venceremos!
Alistair
Hulett,
March 2008