Louise Fuller, English Root
Well-assembled compilations give me a queenly feeling. Think of it. People spend months and years, perhaps a lifetime, gaining their expertise - all that time listening to hours, days' worth of music, probably plenty of it bad - and then coming together, choosing discussing, arguing, biting their pens, lowering their eyebrows, shouting across the table - No! Not over my dead body are we putting that woman in there! - passionate, desperate, panting, all so that I can get Rory McLeod's 'Be my rambling woman' stuck in my head and walk around the house carolling, "Dee da RAMBLING WOMAN, da dee da da RAMBLING MAN. We'll da dum dum ..." bringing Horror and Despair to everyone within earshot.
Rory comes from The Rough Guide To English Roots Music. The rest of the compilation is a collection of pipers, a capella singers, folk bands and fiddlers. I like the Rough Guides. They're bold enough and smart enough and - best of all - they trust in their listeners enough to include songs that wouldn't make it onto less ambitious compilations. Trust is a wonderful thing, a gift. In English Roots it is personified by Louise Fuller, whose untrained voice is edged with such an unsteady quaver that the first time I heard her sing I felt a thrill of tension wondering if she would make it to the end without toppling ham-footed onto the wrong note or breaking down altogether.
Her song is called 'Hopping down in Kent,' and it is the musical equivalent of an album of holiday snapshots introduced by a returned traveller who had a bad bad, time and would like to warn you not to take the same flight he did, or stay at the same hotel or indeed, in the same country. In this case the narrator's working-class city family travels to Kent for the summer and spends the time picking hops. They discover that the pay is pitiful, they get woken early and have to buy themselves food - bacon and "a pound of mouldy cheese" - and they get called "Dirty old hop-pickers" at the end. The singer wishes she'd "never gone a-hopping down in Kent" and ends with one of those nonsense refrains that fill in time and don't mean anything; they're there to round out the sound. "With my tee - aye - owe - tee - aye -owe - tee -aye - ee - aye - ee - aye - oh." It's a more sprightly folk equivalent of pop singers who chant, "Baby baby oh baby baby oh" to keep their songs alive between verses. Think of Kylie Minogue singing, "Na na na. Na na na na na," and walking in the footsteps of ancient traditions, swivelling her gauze-wrapped arse. I wonder if Louise Fuller ever wrapped any part of herself in gauze. I wonder what she looked like. Something about the sound of her voice and the history of the song tell me that she's dead. I don't know if this is true, but it feels right.
She carries the song alone, which makes her seem vulnerable. She sounds like your next-door neighbour singing while she hangs out the washing. Next to the practiced voice of Norma Waterson on Waterson: Carthy's 'Claudy Banks' and the well-produced sounds of the professional bands on the other English Roots tracks she stands out like a shrill but brilliant light. The first time I heard the album my brain smoodged through the other tracks only half-cocked, one-third listening (ah, oh, nice, OK, what I expected) - until this wobbling Louise Fuller quail-noise began and I stopped - hey now - and went searching on my floor for the CD cover - who was this again?
They put her up next to Billy Bragg, with his international career, and the polished Oysterband, who have been playing since the '70s, and "the best squeezebox player in Britain" John Kirkpatrick, and the renowned Billy Pigg, who came first in so many piping competitions that he had to be barred from entering so that someone else could have a chance at winning. She deserves the honour. No one else on the album does what she does. None of them could. Their professionalism has banished them forever from the ranks of the amateurs, like Lucifer taking the base matter of an angel and becoming something similar but different. For two minutes and three seconds she rises above them with her voice firmly raised in a sawing rhythm. It's a startling plainspoken sound and one you don't hear on CDs very often: the sound of an unprocessed human.
