Tim Hughes stomps along to an emotional last concert by folk big band Bellowhead - in the place it all began
 

  • Bellowhead
  • Oxford Town Hall
  • May Day

IT should have been a moment of great sadness... of wailing and gnashing of teeth.

Bellowhead, the absolute greatest live folk band, and one of the best live bands of any genre, had decided to call it a day, ending a 12 year-run which saw them taking their big, brassy, squeezy, fiddle-sawing roots-riots everywhere from Glastonbury Festival to the Royal Albert Hall. The decision by frontman and circus ringmaster Jon Boden to step down and concentrate on his solo career, prompting the rest of the band to put the project to rest.

They finished with a farewell tour, which Boden described as "not a wake but a lap of honour". And it finished at the place it all began: Oxford Town Hall - where they assembled for their first gig at the Oxford Folk Festival, booked by folk artist and enthusiast Tim Healey - son of the late Denis, who was there tonight to wish them goodbye.

I was expecting tears and choked voices from the start, but instead of melancholy there was sheer joy - just like every other Bellowhead show.

We stomped, jumped, waltzed and jiggled awkwardly about as the 11-headed folk behemoth tickled us with their trademark big band take on (mostly) traditional English folk forms.

Starting with Amsterdam and the sea shanty Roll Alabama, there was trad folk in the shape of Cold Blows the Wind (a song of obsession with a corpse), and frantic salty licks from Haul Away - all introduced by means of rambling, and very funny, preambles by rotating members of the band.

A real showcase of their output, the music swung from straight-up folk to post-rock (Fine Sally), to very eccentric deconstructed prog folk (Flight of the Folk Mutants and Rosemary Lane - an engagingly reimagined Scarborough Fair).

There were whoops for Sloe Gin and abandoned swinging to New York Girls, but then it was all over. Well, not really, there was never any doubt we'd get an encore, but as they trooped off there was the first glimmer that this was really the end.

Still no time for sadness though, with them marching back out for a blast of anthem London Town, followed by the brass-fuelled Morris rhythms of Frog's Legs and Dragon's Teeth, then off again - and then back for another career-defining epic, the rousing, melancholy Prickle Eye Bush.., its lyric "Hangman stay your hand, stay it for a while...." striking a particular resonance on this final night.

The band looked choked and emotional as they walked off - particularly from an Abingdon lad 'Squeezy' John Spiers, who along with Boden was a founding father and mainstay of the band.

We, however, were still grinning from the sheer exuberance of it all; the realisation that was the last we'd see of them not striking home until we walked into that soggy May Day night. Only then did the tears begin, only to be washed away by the cold spring rain. 

It was the end of an era. Folk music will never see the likes of it again, and will be infinitely poorer for that - along with live music as a whole. And that's no exaggeration.

Tim Hughes 5/5