My Father, who has steadfastly refused to make the jump from Dos to Windows because he prefers to remain in control of his computer – and who can blame him – has taken a different route from me into the new millennium by buying himself one of those fancy set-top gadgets, enabling him to surf the Web on his television. Admittedly there are limitations with this system, particularly with screen resolution, and with most multimedia sites being virtually off limits. But he now has access to a quite astonishing amount of information, of varying levels of usefulness, from train timetables to what's on TV in Palm Beach, Florida. I'll leave you to decide which ends of the utility scale those examples are on – and to guess which he spends more time browsing.
But what I have found interesting – and I must admit it came as quite a surprise – is how boring it is watching someone else browsing. And I thought he was annoying when he kept switching channels with the remote. They were right when they called it surfing the Web – it is an activity that rather suits itself to solitary practice. And while I must admit it would even be a waste of time my trying to keep upright on a surfboard on my own, doing it while someone else was on there with me would be a disaster.
The trouble is, and I’m back to the metaphorical surfing now, we tend to read at different speeds and we are bound to want to go in different directions all the time. Surfing the Web is quite a solitary activity – like reading a newspaper or magazine – whereas watching the telly is more of a communal pastime. Even in Royle Family mode, where the dominant figure – usually male – takes control of the remote and uses it willy-nilly, the rest of the commune tends to go along with his selection. But it does not get a particularly valuable experience.
However, if you want to dip your feet in the waters of the World Wide Web without having to fork out the price of a PC or Mac, the set-top box has a lot going for it. But chose your sites wisely and take it in turns to hold the control.
Durty Linen are a Nottingham-based band specialising in Celtic folk, and their site, while obviously aimed at tempting people to hear them play, or into booking them for gigs, has some very useful links, particularly for lyrics and tunes. Multi-instrumentalist Ray Chandler, based in Shoreham, runs two sites, one for his solo talents, the other as one half of The Rude Mechanicals. His solo site offers a gateway into the world of delights that is the Banjo Revolution Web Circle.
A somewhat more unusual of Web space can be found on Wendy Grossman’s site. Wendy is now a well-known journalist, whose articles appear regularly in computer magazines and newspapers, and who runs an online forum for journalists. But in the late Seventies and early Eighties she sang and played around the world, from Philadelphia to Fylde, performing a mixture of British and American contemporary and traditional songs on a variety of instruments. Read all about it, perhaps remember a gig were you heard her sing, and even download MP3 files of the songs on her one and only LP – which by the way are worth listening to.
Clive Williams runs a couple of sites from his home in Chertsey, Surrey. He is among the extraordinarily talented line-up that is GIG CB! – in other words Rosbif at Gas Mark 5 – who play ceilidhs and dances around the south of England and the north of France. The GIG CB! site has details of gigs and recordings and a link of course to the slimmed down version in which Clive also plays, the trio Vivant!. Clive even manages to find time to play with On Bouge, a French traditional dance and music club at the London Welsh Centre. The On Bouge Web site is maintained by Chris Walshaw, of whom more in a moment.
While preparing this article, I was reminded, thanks to a timely e-mail, of Richard Robinson’s Tunebook. A regular contributor to the uk.music.folk newsgroup, Richard Robinson is among other things a clarinet player who plays traditional Scots, Irish, Scandinavian, English, French and Balkan tunes. He admits the clarinet is not the “proper” instrument for this, but insists, and who can argue with him, that as he’s been doing it for 25 years, it’s now traditional. And for the past nine years, in the true tradition of the cyber-folk process, he has been putting the tunes he has learned up on the Web in a format known as abc. Not surprisingly, this format uses letters of the alphabet to represent musical notes, but its special charm is that as well as being able to be read quite easily off the page, it can be processed by computer into either standard notation or audible sound. There are more than 2000 tunes on the site, and as far as I can see (I haven’t checked them all!) they are also available as .gif images. Ultimately you will want to click Richard’s link to the abc Home Page of Chris Walshaw (remember him? Small world, wouldn’t want to paint it) where there is an explanation of the notation, with links to even more thorough explanations, an enormous list of abc software packages, and an even more enormous list of collections of tunes.
A good place to look for general folk music related information is Hugh Blumenfield’s About Folk Music Web site. There are many sections with subjects including different artists, genres, songs and politics, as well as sources of lyrics and MP3 sound files. Paul Castle writes a regular page of UK news for the site – Across the Pond – in which at the time of writing he was telling the thoroughly heart-warming story (you should be able to find the article in the archives) of Martin Carthy’s surprise appearance on stage – singing Scarborough Fair – with Paul Simon at the Hammersmith Apollo in October.
At last the UK folk scene can have closure.
