Chris Wood – Dulwich, 19th December 2008

Chris Wood is a rare thing indeed, an articulate English folk singer with moving songs and an approach that takes on many of the ills of the modern world from a radical perspective.

I was fortunate enough to have been given a double album of his two CDs, The Lark Descending and Trespasser. These are both fine records that examine what it means to be English in a much more sensitive way than the likes of Billy Bragg, mixing contemporary songs with traditional, with a slight emphasis on Wood’s home in Kent.

He began his set with a song called “The Grand Correction”. Without any fanfare, it starts with the narrator taking some basic steps to dealing with the current economic crisis, such as planting an allotment and eating pigeons. It ends advocating overthrowing the whole damn system. I knew then it was going to be a great night. He followed with plenty of other gems, such as the stripped down “sexy little folk song” “Cold Haily Rainy Night” that he has performed in an in-yer-face version with The Imagined Village.

Other highlights included “The Cottager’s Reply”, a Cotswold poem set to music, with updated prices, as the poet tells some rich folk down from London why he won’t sell his smallholding. “Walk this World” stakes a claim to music as belonging to those who sing it, and use it to mark the seasons and the changes of our lives. “True North” is about the peasant poet John Clare, who really was a peasant, and was declared insane at the time of the enclosures. As Wood said, “most English audiences know more about the Highland clearances than they do about the theft of our common land”. There’s a reason why English history is taught as kings, queens and the second world war, and he knows it.

He also sang a song, a truly powerful song, about Jean Charles de Menezes. I twigged about one verse in, but the clues got stronger as the song went on detailing an every day journey that turned into tragedy. When it finished, there was a momentary pause as people took in the strength of the story they’d just been told, its power and tragedy. The hush was broken by tremendous applause, unusual for the first hearing of a song. I think Wood’s real strength is the way he allows the songs to speak for themselves and in his clarity of voice.

That’s not to say his between song banter isn’t good; it’s funny and warm and sharply political. It shouldn’t need pointing out that our ancestors in these islands would have been burning things down faced with some of the nonsense the ruling class do.

He played his best known song, “One in a Million”, a retelling of the traditional folk motif of finding a lost ring inside a fish, set in a chip shop in Whitstable. He ended with his atheist spiritual, “Come Down Jehovah”, drawing on sacred music to mark out the sacred in everyday life.

I’m an internationalist, but I’m also English. Wood’s work is a reminder that Englishness is a contested idea and that there is a history we can learn from, if only we can find it.

Let’s go back to a time when there was no ‘England’ and there were no ‘English’. A class of people came along and decided they wanted to rule over this place and these people but before they could rule over somewhere they needed to give it a name. And before they could govern the people who lived there they had to give them a name too. ‘England’ and ‘the English’ were a necessary construction for a governing class and remain so to this day.”