Glad Christmas Comes

‘Glad Christmas comes’ is the opening line from ‘December’ in John Clare’s poem The Shepherd’s Calendar. Carthy and Boden sing it, unaccompanied, fulsomely, to a tune of their own, doing Clare’s poem proud. His magnificent celebration of the season includes village bells; ‘singing wates’ – carol singers; morris dancing; a mummers’ play; wassailing and holly. As if they take their cue from Clare all these feature in Carthy and Boden’s selection of songs. ‘Ashen Bowl’ is a wassail; Boden’s ‘The Good Doctor’ works through the narrative of a mummers’ play; Carthy’s fiddle interlude in ‘The Holly and the Ivy’ conjures the pealing of bells.

‘The Holly and the Ivy’ is one of several familiar songs offered in less than familiar forms. ‘Mount Zion’ is ‘While Shepherds’ but to a tune sung in The Royal, Dungworth, a pub where the Sheffield carol singing tradition thrives. ‘Fairytale of New York’, the most ubiquitous secular Christmas song, becomes a morris tune (it works).

Carthy and Boden augment their considerable vocal and instrumental resources with Backstage Brass – wonderful in ‘I Saw Three Ships Come Sailing In’ and all New Orleansy in ‘I Want a Hippopotamus for Christmas’, the voices of Emily Portman and Tim van Eyken, salting celebration with an intimation of mortality in ‘Remember Oh Thou Man’, and some sonic morris dancing from Ewan Wardrop.

Carthy and Boden are such forthright performers, launching into a song like a lifeboat down a slipway, that you doubt they’ve left themselves room to build, yet they do in ‘Mount Zion (While Shepherds)’, while in ‘Winter Grace’ they sing with touching tenderness.