“Looking for material during the lockdown we were drawn to happy songs, as a sort of tonic” | Spiers & Boden interview

“I didn’t realise until we started recording,” Jon Boden says, “that there are no deaths on this album. That’s extraordinary for a traditional folk album.”

It is indeed, given the body count due to accident, murder and mayhem of the folk song canon. Nor do the songs on Fallow Ground involve the familiar trope of seduction (though the werefox in ‘Reynardine’ has this in mind) followed closely by abandonment. The title-track is a rare thing, a night-visiting song in which the young man calling on his lover is not only alive – these nocturnal visitations are often ghostly – but the couple do enjoy one another before the cock crows and he has to leave. “It’s all good,” Boden says. “It works out fine for them – which is unusual.”

Fiddle player and singer Boden met John Spiers, who plays an armada of melodeons, in a pub session in Oxford 20 years ago. They took the gutsy energy of the session – playing together for the joy of it – onto the stage, and their rise was rapid. They won the Horizon Award for Best Newcomer at the BBC Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2003 and the Best Duo Award in 2004 and 2006. They co-created the extraordinarily successful folk big band Bellowhead, and by the time they wound up the duo in 2014, they had won affection and admiration beyond the folk audience.

This was no ‘musical differences’ split; both pursued other collaborative and solo projects but planned to play together again. The lockdown, when live in-person performance became impossible, provided the opportunity. They reunited to make Fallow Ground, a glorious 13-track album of English (and one Australian) traditional songs and tunes, with some of their own.

During the COVID-19 pandemic a cultural hunger grew – for joy. It’s an appetite beginning to be satisfied as restrictions ease. “Looking for material during the lockdown we were drawn to happy songs, as a sort of tonic,” Boden says. “It’s more abstract with tunes, but there are a lot of joyous tunes out there.”

Spiers & Boden had not made an album of music researched or written by them since 2008, so Fallow Ground is an apt title. “When you are in the cycle of performing and touring,” Spiers says, “and you’re trying to find new material at the same time, it’s never as productive as when there is time, fallow ground. You need time to get comfortable with the material; most of the tunes here I’ve been mulling over for years.” Boden adds, “it’s also the approach to arrangements. You’re always looking for ways to make the arrangement interesting. That really benefits from a bit of time away.”

Spiers & Boden (photo: Elly Lucas)

‘Bluey Brink’, learned from Peter Bellamy, a great influence on Boden’s singing, is about an Australian sheep shearer with a prodigious capacity for work – and drink. ‘He could shear five hundred a day without fear / He could drink without flinching twelve gallons of beer.’ Such is his thirst and constitution that Bluey polishes off the sulphuric acid the barman cleans his counter with. And comes back for more. This is a song of astonishment.

‘Butter & Cheese & All’ is about a man who courts a cook. She feeds him well with her absent employers’ provender, stuffing his pockets with cheese and butter. Suddenly they return. He has to escape up the chimney, with, as the fire is alight, predictable results. This is a jovial, amorous scrape song. “It’s the quintessential sung-in-the-pub-unaccompanied-with-a-chorus type song,” Boden chuckles. “It hadn’t occurred to me that it could be arrangeable. But it came together really well, especially with the box John uses.”

“I’d never played such a fruity melodeon on any Spiers & Boden track before,” Spiers adds. “I’m constantly changing my… what’s the word?… fleet of melodeons.” It is hard to imagine Spiers & Boden taking these songs and tunes apart, working on them, trying different approaches. They sound complete, fully formed. Yet the musicians seem to be exploring the tunes as they play them. It’s akin to a familiar walk which, every time it’s taken, reveals something new.

“You have to be confident in a structure,” Boden says, “but you have to give yourself space to play about.”

Some of the loveliest tunes are their own compositions, traditional in idiom, but original. ‘The Fog’ changes constantly yet remains the same, the melody swirling gently, evoking the fog itself, the melancholy it induces and the hope that it might lift. “It was one of those unbelievably foggy days, midwinter, when the sun doesn’t rise until eight or nine,” Spiers explains. “If you are in a place like where I am, with fields around, you can’t see any of the landscape. You feel closed in… If you are in a town you can’t quite see the streetlights. It closes in again with the early sunset. There’s a Danish hygge sort of vibe… I’m just going to hunker down inside.”

How this finds expression in a tune is both intuitive and considered. “Like most of my tunes it came about from mucking around on an instrument until I heard something I’d not heard before. I wrote a line around these rocky accordion chords so that the notes in the chords only change by one at a time. That set up its own melody, that I copied on the right hand to start the first phrase. The rest is wrapped around that.” The only instruments on the album are Boden’s fiddle and Spiers’ squeezeboxes, sometimes vying with each other. Beneath lies a rich, textured bass sound.

“That’s part of the Spiers and Boden sound we developed early on,” Spiers explains, “by mic-ing my left hand, which has the bass notes on the melodeon, very closely. It’s like having your ear next to the instrument… So it’s not as you’d hear it acoustically in the room, but it has that impact, especially combined with the stomp box we use.” Boden chips in: “It’s a unique bass sound. Funky, yet fluid.”

There is a tune by Spiers called ‘Wittenham Clumps’ and another, by Boden, titled ‘Bailey Hill’. Both locations are marked by ancient human presence; iron-age earthworks at the Clumps in South Oxfordshire and a possibly pre-Norman motte-and-bailey castle near Sheffield. Wittenham Clumps has the oldest known planted beech trees in Britain. Bailey Hill is covered in ferns and self-seeded trees. Nature has reclaimed these abandoned places.

“Human presence is important,” says Boden. “I’m drawn to landscapes that aren’t completely natural, places that have had an element of human intervention, but have been taken back.”

There is mystery in the landscape and magic in the songs associated with it – such as ‘Reynardine’. The most powerful English contemporary writing explores these ancient presences in the land: the malevolent trickster spirit Dead Papa Toothwort in Max Porter’s novel Lanny; Rooster Byron summoning the giants in Jez Butterworth’s play Jerusalem; Ted Hughes’ spellbinding poem about a pond ‘as deep as England,’ home to immense, savage pike.

Boden’s own songs, on his recent solo album Last Mile Home [a Top of the World review in the May 2021 issue, #167], imagine our modern infrastructure, roads and cities, abandoned, greened over. Fallow Ground, though exuberant and happy, is also rooted in this unfathomable Englishness. “We always thought it worth focusing on English style, both in songs and tunes,” Boden says. “We started off playing Irish and French Canadian stuff, but quickly decided that… ”

Spiers interrupts, “When I started playing along, they sounded like Morris tunes anyway!”

The most infectiously joyous melodies on Fallow Ground, ‘Cuckoo’s Nest’ and ‘Valentine’, are Morris dance tunes. Spiers grew up in Abingdon, where in 1560 the church warden recorded expenditure of one shilling on 24 Morris bells. The dance continues there to this day. Spiers’ father is a Morris dancer. “I feel most at home playing Morris tunes,” Spiers says. “They’ve been a constant feature in my life and my playing. They were the first tunes I learned on the squeezebox and I always come back to them. They have lovely rhythms.” There are moments when, to allow the dancers to execute particularly impressive moves, the tempo of the music changes. Spiers and Boden aren’t playing for dancing, but nonetheless they honour these ‘slows.’

“The slows are a really interesting rhythmic device and allow you to put a different slant on the tune. If played with the right swagger you wouldn’t confuse a Morris tune with an Irish or Scottish tune,” says Boden. “It’s the claim we have to a unique style.” Playing in Canada and Ireland Spiers & Boden find people are intrigued by these less well-known English traditions.

Majestic, mysterious landscape provides inspiration. So too does a domestic ritual, just as mysterious to Spiers’ daughter witnessing it for the first time. This sparked his composition ‘The Ironing Board Hornpipe’, to whose smart rhythms you can dance and iron – at the same time. “My daughter was just starting school,” Spiers explains. “I got all her uniform laid out to iron it so it’s all neat for her first day at school. The ironing board was all set up in the sitting room and the iron was on. She came in and said, “Daddy... WHAT’S THAT?’.” The tune is Spiers’ response to his daughter’s reaction to a mysterious ritual, observed once and never again.

‘Life is too short to stuff a mushroom,’ Shirley Conran observed, sagely. Spiers and Boden feel the same way about ironing. “First day of school,” Boden nods, “and that’s it.”

“Yup,” Spiers agrees. “That’s your lot!”

Read the review of Fallow Ground in the Songlines Reviews Database 

This article originally appeared in the October 2021 issue of Songlines. Never miss an issue – subscribe today