English folk music: drawing from the past, pointing to the future

Set against Scotland’s unbroken and thriving tradition and the reels and airs of Ireland, English dance tunes have been more or less drowned out by her neighbours. “Try anything once but incest and Morris dancing,” the old trope goes. But now it goes like this: in recent years, some of English folk’s best young players and new groups have sprung up to bow, squeeze and blow new life into the lost world of old English dances, freeing them from centuries of stillness in antique songbooks.
Traditional English songs have been kept at the forefront of contemporary British folk culture by singers ranging from the Copper family in the 1950s through to Sam Lee and Jackie Oates today. But it’s not until these last few years that the much more obscure English tune tradition is being revived and redefined by a new wave of groups, and now, some of those old tunes are beginning to move again, and in unexpected ways.
Acts such as Spiro, Leveret and Tom Kitching are all bringing a dynamic contemporary approach to English dance tunes that draws on jazz-like improvisation, world music influences, minimalism and systems music. For them, tradition is less about preservation and more about innovation and extension, of both the form and of the feeling.
Leaders of the pack are Spiro, the Bristol quartet who are currently touring their fifth album, Welcome Joy and Welcome Sorrow. Spiro create ecstatic, interlocking, intricate patterns that are as hypnotising, beguiling and elegant as the most complex Fibonacci sequences. Accordion, guitar, violin, mandolin and cello conspire to take 500-year-old tunes from their source without losing the emotion of the original. “Music taps into something fundamental to us all,” says mandolin player Alex Vann. “Instrumental music is particularly rewarding and meaningful because you don’t know why you’re feeling emotional. You’ve reached a place beyond words, the most amazing place that we all share.”

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