Online review by World Music
The Great Folk Jukebox was billed as “A Tribute to Singing Englishmen with Marc Almond, Bishi, Green Gartside, Bella Hardy, Robyn Hitchcock, Lisa Knapp, Oysterband & June Tabor” (with, as the Oysters’ John Jones quipped, “the beast that is Bellowhead” – nine thereof – as house band). The ‘Singing Englishmen’ part was a doffing of the cap to a Festival of Britain concert held on 1 June 1951. Although there were allusions to Bert Lloyd’s The Singing Englishmen – a slim songbook published to coincide with the St. Pancras Town Hall concert and its six themes of freedom; courting; “On the job”; seas, ships and sailormen; “Johnny has gone for a soldier”; and “Life, Liberty and the pursuit of happiness” – in truth, this was more like a gathering of the tribes.

The link to the 1951 songbook was tenuous and stylistically a few miles short of a million from the Workers’ Music Association’s original event. Crediting Pete Bellamy (Gartside), Martin Carthy (Hitchcock), Shirley Collins (Bishi) and Anne Briggs (Hardy) as influences pointed to the place of folk revival singers in today’s appreciation of folksong. Almond prowled and commanded the stage with Reynardine – all florid gestures and torch song mannerisms – to fashion a bravura performance. Bishi’s Flash Company for “all the pretty flash girls” with mandolin (played by Bellowhead’s Benji Kirkpatrick) and cello (Bellowhead’s Rachael McShane) supporting her minimalist sitar felt more lived-in and flowed more freely than her Salisbury Plain. Hitchcock ‘in’ matching shirt and guitar ripped the guts out of Sam’s Gone Away. In those three cases, it became the singer not the song – and far from that implying in a bad way.

Divers And Lazarus – it had actually figured in the 1951 choral performance – from the Oysterband and Tabor put the song first. Talking in the intermission to a Marc Almond devotee, the performance that had touched him the most was June Tabor’s unaccompanied delivery of The Blacksmith. That made two of us.


Online review by The Guardian
On 1 June 1951, the folklorist AL Lloyd organised an evening at St Pancras Town Hall in London, as a contribution to the Festival of Britain. The Singing Englishmen concert featured the Workers Music Association Choir and a brass band promoting British traditional music at a time when it was highly unfashionable.

Nearly 60 years on, that event was celebrated with a very different, brave but curiously titled show (why "jukebox"?). It only included two of the songs featured in the original concert, but seven very different soloists, mostly backed by the versatile house band, were an impressive reminder of how folk is now flourishing and providing the basis for musical experiment.

The results were occasionally triumphant, but included one real horror: Marc Almond's tuneless and ridiculously over-theatrical treatment of Reynardine. Green Gartside did better with a respectful Lemady, Robyn Hitchcock made a brave stab at Martin Carthy's electric guitar style with Cold Haily Windy Night, while the wildly original Bishi provided a personal, Indian-edged treatment of Flash Company.

It was a good night, too, for Bella Hardy, with a subtle, string-backed version of Blackwaterside, and for Lisa Knapp, whose shanty Leave Her Johnny built to a rousing climax, helped by Hardy's additional vocals, strings and brass. Best of all was headliner June Tabor, with a compelling, unaccompanied treatment of The Blacksmith and then a reunion with rousing folk-rockers, Oysterband. They have just recorded their first joint album in 21 years, but the gutsy, confident treatment of Fountains Flowing and Susie Clelland made it sound as if they had never stopped working together.