On tonight’s show, Mike has the exclusive first play of Cold Blows The Wind, from the forthcoming Bellowhead album Hedonism. Percussionist Pete Flood has written to explain how they arranged it:
I think it’s a nerdy drummer thing, but I love jazz waltzes. For me they’re evidence that our appetite for musical complexity is much more sophisticated then we think. One way of looking at the jazz waltz is that it is dance music in 9, a meter so odd that it probably lives in a tumbledown house on the edge of music town, and gets pelted with rotten fruit by the rude little marches and polkas. I’d been thinking for a while that I’d love to arrange a brash, jazzy, waltz version of a traditional song, using some influences from my favourites: Van Morrison’s The Way Young Lovers Do, Charles Mingus’s Better Git It in Your Soul and Calexico’s Over Your Shoulder (strictly speaking neither jazz nor a waltz, but a relative of sorts). The problem was, which traditional song to choose?
For some people, Cold Blows the Wind – aka The Unquiet Grave – is one of the bleakest moments in a tradition which almost takes pride in bleak moments. But coincidentally, I was reading Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps, a great book in which there is an account of ritual mourning as an ecstatic experience – a wild ecstasy which is neither happy nor sad, but contains elements of both emotions. In my mind’s eye, the protagonist of Cold Blows… was instantly changed from a boring, drippy waif, to the kind of girl Captain Beefheart talks about (in Long Necked Bottles). I introduced a new melody, by cannibalising the Canadian version of The Dewy Dells of Yarrow and a new instrumental tag came to me while I was washing up.
By the time we got to Abbey Road to record Hedonism with the mighty producer John Leckie at the controls, we’d been playing Cold Blows… for over a year in our live sets. We’d been working harder than we ever had previously in the rehearsal process – picking the tune apart, asking questions, then reassembling it. I think we all thought that if Matachin was the album where we let it all hang out, we wanted Hedonism to be more focused and streamlined. And it was all working so well until someone let Jon Boden bring his musical saw into the studio…