Colin Randall writes: I have said and written before that the two radio voices I find most attractive belong to Lauren Laverne and Cerys Matthews. I am grateful to both for this double edition of Salut! Folk’s long-running Song of the Day series...
Lauren Laverne and Cerys Matthews are both exemplary broadcasters, articulate and knowledgeable as well as multi-talented with sound histories of their own in rock.
Since Laverne supports Sunderland and has a captivating Wearside accent to prove it, she is marginally my preferred presenter though Matthews’s playlists are generally easier on my ears.
Last Sunday, Matthews played a delicious track by the original Carter Family, originally released one year short of a century ago. .
The Storms are on the Oceans is attributed to A P Carter and others but is based on an old Scottish ballad. AP, no less than Alvin Pleasant Delaney Carter, is the man you see in the 1927 photo, with his wife Sara (standing) and his sister Maybelle, later the mother-in-law of the country and western giant Johnny Cash.
The campfire simplicity and soaring harmonies of the Carter Family, even the odd little struggle with high notes, were an instant joy to hear and quickly found a home in my car’s music system.
Fast forward to the 1980s and a trip to Spain that led to a classic example of the raucously irresistible mayhem of the Pogues.
Lauren Laverne for once chose a track that made me want to stay on BBC Six Music rather than nip across to James O’Brien on LBC.
Fiesta was the product of a visit by the band to Almeria. Jem Finer, a multi-instrumentaiist and a prolific Pogues songwriter (he co-composed Fairytale of New York with Shane MacGowan), couldn’t get out of his head the Spanish fairground tune he heard relentlessly from his hotel room.
He adapted the refrain’s melody from Edmund Kötscher and Rudi Lindt’s Liechtenstein Polka. ‘The fairground cacophony got stuck in my head,” Finer said. “The choice was to inflict it on the rest of the world or go mad.”
Redadeg’s photo from Munich in 2011 shows Jem Finer on the extreme right, playing banjo
Fiesta appeared on the 1988 album If I Should Fall From Grace With God and was also the last Pogues single with MacGowan on vocals to make the UK top 30.
It is a glorious burst of feelgood music and I am not surprised that a snatch of it is sometimes played when Celtic score a goal (which, given the level of opposition they mostly face in Scotland, is often).
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