UK ANTIFOLK FEST August 2005

When you’ve got plenty of time, you may like to visit  www.grouphug.org home to the splendid Delicate Hammers and their friends.  A stranger musical fusion you are unlikely to meet. The concerns of old Albion articulated in rap by a band fronted by a bearded ‘geography teacher’ and a young ‘bumpkin’.  Treemendous.  And funny what you stumble across these days in Highbury and Islington…  

The whole of last Sunday’s Antifolk gig at Islington’s Buffalo Bar was something of a revelation – Tim Tomlinson’s off key repartee about life on the ocean waves and Shakespeare, his delicate finger work on both guitar and squeezebox and plumby between song interjections prompted me to blurt ‘Is this some sort of ‘care in the community’ gig? But nothing could prepare me for his finale; an unaccompanied 30 second ‘jig’.  The crowd fell momentarily silent before breaking into rapturous applause.    

Tim Tomlinson’s eccentricity had led me to the point of Antifolk  - brilliant and unusually original acts who would receive lifetime bans upon taking the stage at any traditional folk club. Earlier my friend Kevin Twosheds had delivered some decidedly ‘off-kilter’ unplugged Brighton folkrock .  Kev is a Graham Coxon’esque tunesmith of the highest order and destined for cross-country greatness. I’m trying to bring him up to Hitchin if only Mark Astronaut will lend him a helping hand onto the Club 85 stage.  And then others will have the opportunity to hear folk music attaining contemporary greatness, particularly when placed in bed with Terry and June.    

And what of David Cronenburg’s Wife?   Or should I say wives? Four piece Fall tinged northern industrial acousticness fitting the ‘Antifolk bill perfectly. David Cronenburg’s wife make music in a place just over the pastoral horizon shrouded in dark grey skies and chimney smog.   

Which brings me back to The Delicate Hammers from Anglesey, via somewhere only they know…Manchorley.  Full on funk harmony to banging backingtracks, live guitar and bass and the all important corduroy and tweed frontsmen delivering perfect rap.  The look is country casual, the delivery, urban Bronx.  The use of  vacuum cleaner parts as instruments is gratuitous, the kazoo like meeting an old adversary.   The Delicate Hammers are fantastic.  Long live roc and rol…   

Antifolk…Where else than Britain could such artists thrive? (editor's note: uh...New York?)