As If…

British folk’s most prominent close harmony trio, Coope, Boyes & Simpson are veterans of the excellent Blue Murder (with assorted Carthys and Watersons), collaborators with Michael Morpurgo and were Q magazine award-winning singers of Coal Not Dole back in the early 90s. (How far away that brand of fighting talk sounds now in the age of global warming.) You get the feeling they could sing the birds from the sky with the supple strength of their harmonies. Robust, but capable of holding a delicate weave, as they deliver their first new album in five years with some strong originals alongside covers of Richard Thompson’s ‘Keep Your Distance, the opening ‘Now is the Cool of the Day’ by Jean Richie, and an epic version of Robbie Burns’ ‘Slave’s Lament. Jim Boyes provides up-to-the-minute political satire in ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes, which gets into the same kind of territory explored in Show Of Hands’ recent award-winning album. Written in a classic broadside tradition, it has plenty of verbal attack and sharp rhymes: ‘here’s to the gambler who spotted the plot/Short sold the tailor and cleaned up the lot/He’s sipping martinis on board of his yacht’. It’s well matched by the more cynical line in Lester Simpson’s closing ‘We Got Fooled Again’, an answer, 40 years on, to The Who’s epic battle cry, ‘Won’t Get Fooled Again.