Salut! Folk

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Colin Randall writes: memorably described by the late music writer Colin Irwin as “proof that outstanding contemporary songs are still being written”, Maggie Holland earns Salut! Folk’s Album of the Month accolade for Bones. Released in 2007, this 24-track compilation assembles material from the period 1983-1992 ...

As I wrote in a message to this consistently impressive English singer-songwriter, we’ve been neglecting her at this site and its Facebook group. That said, I had to check the track list of Bones to ensure that one exception to that neglect was included. It is.

A Proper Sort of Gardener is my favourite song of hers. I raved about it in our Cover Story series, observing that it was one of few songs that June Tabor sings only to be bettered by another artist.

Maggie Holland wrote the lyrics in about 1989 and they describe with affection and nostalgia Mr Harding, a kindly neighbour from her Hampshire childhood. Jon Moore composed the wistful melody and it really is a work of beauty from an age that was, or at least seemed, gentler.

Mr Harding, as will have been guessed was an old-school gardener, as green-fingered as they come.

Once he caught young Maggie picking the brightest flowers she could find. When her mother apologised on her daughter’s behalf, Mr Harding, the song recalls, simply smiled and said: “She’s just a little child; I knew that she’d be picking them for you.”

Bones reflects a change of direction in Holland’s career. She had started out, after cutting her musical teeth in local folk clubs, playing bass and later singing in the blues and goodtime duo Hot Vultures with Ian A Anderson (the fRoots one, unconnected to Jethro Tull). This grew into the English Country Blues Band, then Tiger Moth.

From Tiger Moth days, 1983. Photo: Weydonian

Although she eventually branched out into solo performance, it was not 1987 that she began writing songs for herself. Several composition, all her own work or written with Moore, with whom she had played in Tiger Moth.

There are other memorable tracks, self-written or covers, on Bones. Levi Stubbs’ Tears is a splendid song written by Billy Bragg and inspired by the Four Tops singer’s life.

Holland’s own A Place Called England feels all the more relevant amid Reform/Tommy R-fuelled flagwaving xenophobia dressed up as patriotism.

Mr Harding fits into Maggie Holland’s notion of another England. This verse presents other aspects of the country that give her pleasure, comfort or pride:

For England is not flag or Empire, it is not money, it is not blood.
It’s limestone gorge and granite fell, it’s Wealden clay and Severn mud,
It’s blackbird singing from the May tree, lark ascending through the scales,
Robin watching from your spade and English earth beneath your nail

There are also covers of songs written by Richard Thompson, Bob Dylan, Robb Johnson and Bruce Cockburn.

Most of the album is delivered in Holland’s characteristically understated vocal style – sometimes regarded as an acquired taste, though certainly to mine – with effective but unintrusive accompaniment. But she can also startle us, getting angry and loud. With Cockburn’s If I Had a Rocket Launcher, we are left in no doubt that she, like the song’s author, would have pointed it in the general direction of the murderous 1980s Guatamalian dictator Efrain Rios Montt.

Bones is an excellent reminder of – or introduction to – the work of a highly versatile artist of substance and originality.

And Mr Harding? He would later tend the graves of Holland’s mother and the man she thought until recently was her father*, and is himself now buried in the same graveyard.

• From Maggie Holland as I wrote this article: “DNA reveals that my biological father was not ‘Dad’, who brought me up, but my godfather, also well known and very dear to me.”
• Do visit the Salut! Live Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/groups/2902595146676633.
• Bones, track by track

1	A Place Called England
2	Levi Stubbs’ Tears
3	Mad Lydia’s Waltz
4	Black Crow
5	Most of the Time
6	Living a Lie
7	No Good at Love
8	Bye Bye Bohemia
9	A Proper Sort Of Gardener
10	Sandy Hill
11	If I Had a Rocket Launcher
12	Vandy
13	Coshieville
14	Locks & Bolts & Hinges
15	The Great Valerio
16	Never Too Late
17	Banks of the Nile
18	Perfumes Of Arabia
19	Change in the Air
20	Time to Kill
21	Overnight
22	Homunculus
23	Look Up Look Up
24	Old Man