Fireside Stories with June Tabor and Oysterband’s John Jones

Back in the late 1980s, when folk was still a four-letter word, the stirrings of shoots and leaves in the undercover of the British folk scene were only just being seen and heard after a decade of steep decline. Sure, there were outliers, out on the borders – The Pogues, The Waterboys, Billy Bragg – but it would take a step change in how people envisaged music, after a bumpy ride on the long tail of punk, drum machines, Thatcherism and shoulder pads, before contemporary folk and a new acoustic wave broke across folk music, spurring a new generation of musicians to reshape what the 90s sounded like.

And key to the early-90s folk re-revival – one that has not ceased since – is the pairing of Oysterband, who began in 1976 as a DIY folk-punk ceilidh dance band from Whitstable before signing to Cooking Vinyl in 1986, and the standalone, stately and profound singer of traditional songs, June Tabor.

Tabor had been part of the Topic stable since 1976, with albums such as Airs and Graces and Aqaba, elevating her as one of the great singers of traditional song, a match for the likes of Norma Waterson and Shirley Collins. Her pairing with the high-energy folk rock of Oysterband was gloriously counter-intuitive, and exactly the shot in the arm folk music needed to bring it out of the doldrums into a protean, rapidly moving present.

“The initial idea came from a chance remark of [singer] John Jones at The Dove in Sidmouth in 1988,” recalls Tabor, 36 years on. “I’d bumped into them a few times at gigs,” she adds, “so we knew each other. I wandered in there and we got talking and John said how it’d be great if they could have someone with a voice like Natalie Merchant to float over the band and throw themselves about on stage. And I said, ‘I think I can do that – the singing anyway.’ And that’s how it all started.”

“It was followed by a great drinking session with lots of stories,” recalls John Jones, singer with the Oysterband from the beginning. “We knew each other’s reputations, but I guess there was a shared intrigue in each other as people. June turned out to be fun and a great raconteur and we discovered a shared love of The Velvet Underground.”

About a year after that drinking session at The Dove, pub talk turned into first rehearsals for what would become Freedom and Rain. “I travelled from Cumbria to Canterbury,” recalls Tabor. “Ian and Alan were living there in a big house, and we sat at Ian’s kitchen table with everyone, and we both came up with a list of songs that might be possible – I have John’s here in front of me – with what I was going to suggest on the back.”

“June introduced us to Si Kahn’s song ‘Mississippi Summer’,” recalls Jones, “and we were off. The rest is history, as they say.” And ‘Mississippi Summer’ would be the powerful opening track on an album that has remained a folk-rock classic for more than three decades.

“We started with ‘Valentine’s Day is Over’,” recalls Tabor of the rehearsals. “And we went on like that for the next day and the day after and came out with five songs that appeared on the album. We were looking for songs with strong lyrics, good visual images, songs that make you see them in your mind’s eye, and with the power of the Oysters.”

Recording over five days at The Yard in Southall (“I recall a samosa shop on the high street, and a constant stream of amazing fresh samosas coming out the kitchen and going out the door,” remembers Tabor), the three-way dynamic between the band, singer John Jones and Tabor’s vocals defined the music. “We found much in common but it was as much [as anything] the clashes of style and the pushing of our own personal and musical boundaries that produced the most startling results,” recalls Jones. “The restlessness of our approach and the stillness of June’s voice floating above somehow worked.”

No more so than on their version of Joy Division’s ‘Love Will Tear Us Apart’ (which appeared on their follow-up collaboration, 2011’s Ragged Kingdom). “I remember when that was suggested, and I sat and listened and said, ‘We’ve got to do that’,” recalls Tabor. “The words, the despair in that song, is like nothing else. And to do it the way we did it…”

And they’ll do it again, one last time, across nine dates, Tabor to sing with the Oysterband on their Last Tour Together series of shows. “Meeting June again to rehearse, it was a question of seeing what works, and starting again almost,” says Jones. “Amazingly most of it does work. It will be a long journey back onto the big stage one last time – but we are already on our way…”   

As told by Tim Cumming

+ Oysterband & June Tabor tour the UK, October 3-20. Oysterband continue touring the UK & Europe from November 4 until March 2025