Based in East Anglia, both singer-songwriter and author, Songs Like An Old Friend is Ward’s 10th album, one which is predominantly acoustic and embraces such issues as emigration, homesickness, fishermen and contemporary politics. Backed by trio regulars wife Lynn on accordion and recorder and Les Woodley on mandolin and double bass with piano from Ian Salisbury, it opens with the slow waltzing ache of ‘The Wind That Blows me Home’, the title of which speaks for itself (“There are people I need to see/Loved ones who miss me/It’s time to turn around/Retrace some old ground/Before we are all just a memory/I’m going back where hands will hold me/Going back where my name is known”).
Slightly more uptempo with bluesier country notes, the reflective ‘Sometimes You’ve Gotta Look Back’ again speaks of journeys but here in terms of how the miles takes are an impetus to keep following the road that lies ahead (“Sometimes you gotta look back to see how far you’ve come to see the strides you made and where you started from/Sometimes you gotta look back to see the miles you’ve done to draw your strength and hope from what you’ve overcome”) .
Taking a storytelling swerve, a woman leaves her intended and runs off with the a ‘Dockside Dandy’ on his Triumph Bonneville (“skirt hitched up, arms around his waist”), the title a reference to the young Lowestoft fishermen who, in the 1960s, adopted a distinctive sartorial style of tailored, vibrant suits, in bright colours and patterns. Her dad’s incensed (“With a belly of bitter that he’s got to his head/Says ‘if comes round here he’s bloody well dead/I could have the bastard easy’”) and town tongues are soon wagging (“her old teacher says ‘I could have told you so/She was a right little mare back then you know…And the girls at the factory all say with a tut/With their arms crossed tight, ‘she wasn’t raised a slut/Why go with him he’s all swagger and strut?’”), everyone firmly persuaded that such lads are just “a puffed up poser …with his creeper boots and his teddy boy suit”.
From fishermen to farmers, the slow, droning ‘Beast Of Burden’ may speak of the horse that draws the plough but it’s the man behind the harness and the inequity of labour that is its subject (“Beasts of burden yesterday and tomorrow/The landlord owns your day and you must pay what you owe…The fields that you are yoked to/Fill the landlord’s table/While you pay a heavy price for the straw you’re thrown”) expanding the commentary “To the blacksmith’s forge and/The miner at the hard face/To the frozen fisher hauling on the sea/To the souls in the cold call centre/And the factory line operator…They’ll work you ‘til used up then they’ll let you go”.
And from fields to the pits, the ambivalent six-minute ‘I Instead Of Us’ is not the familiar lament of their closures, but rather celebrating the rebirth of nature (“There’s a green hill where the slag heap used to stand/At the back of town and those scars upon the land/Are filled with flowers, dandelion crowns/Reflecting the clear sun undimmed by the sooty breath of man/And the river that ran with iron ore blood/Is alive with fish and when it’s in full flood/It seems to laugh now, there’s redshank on the shore/No more poison, rank and stagnant mud”). That, however, is offset by the socioeconomic fallout (“We do not mourn the dirty industry/Young folk trapped and bound to a foregone destiny/We do not mourn the choking smoke and dust/We mourn our community… We mourn the skills, we mourn their loss to history/We mourn the pride that made this town a place to be/We mourn the craic we mourn the comradery/We mourn the union, my neighbour looking out for me…Now we are I instead of us”), yet also observing how new industries grow up in place of the old (“the crowded dock where the dead fish used to pour/Where the thin crew pulled until their hands were split and raw/Now bobs with boats that ply the pleasure trade/As the empty sea comes back to life once more”).
Also pushing past five minutes, the circling fingerpicked ‘Cathedrals’ is, musically echoing Drake, Bunyan and Jansch, another awash with nature imagery (“The bindweed winds the rose stem round pulls the flower to the ground/Bramble bites and barbs the way, windhover falls upon its prey”), slowly revealing itself as being about mortality and ensuring the continuance of life over the ages (“We feed the soil and part the ground and gently place the sapling in/Future life will be bound to this chain of faith that we begin/As petals fall and flowers fade so each age will pass by/Who first breaks the ground will never see the cathedral rise to touch the sky/Someone else will seek the shade some summer’s day that lies beyond/The deed grown strong our names long lost/Time stands still, the days rush on”).
A simple, sparse leaving song, the emigration-themed ‘I’m Going West’ is followed by two barbs directed at today’s political leaders. In ‘The Clown’s The King At Last’ he sings “the king is praised for his sense of style though his pants are round his knees/And it’s praise upon his designer clothes though the label is all he wears/He doesn’t try to conceal the lie and the courtiers don’t care” in a world where “Cartoon capers come to life right before our eyes/A living breathing caricature is turning truth to lies/Or is it lies to truth it’s hard to tell, who knows the known unknowns?”, the line “if you don’t what’s happening here you better ask Mr Jones” a nod to Dylan’s ‘Ballad Of A Thin Man’. It’s hard not to think of Trump with lines like ‘we’re living in a satire we’d have laughed at in the past…We’ve walked right through the looking glass but it’s no wonderland…It’s just like every mad imagining, every sick joke that you heard/Leapt to life and now is normal when it used to be absurd”, though it’s clear Ward’s gaze has a wider popular culture perspective where “wannabees seek to scale the heights of mediocrity/You got to stoop so low to climb so high and if the jungle you survive/You may win an award as the best award show host on Channel Five” as we “shout hail to the jailer who builds a wall to keep you free”.
The second, titled for an old American expression meaning a con-artist, the bluesy chugging juke joint ‘Flim Flam Man’, Lynne on harmonies, is about all those political snake-oil sellers “selling salt to a thirsty man…a joking rogue with a nasty plan to pull that scam”, the grifters exploiting events to their own ends (“War or peace fire or rain doesn’t matter as it’s all the same/There’s green backs to be gained from either end”), the “self-serving psychopathic egocentric …charisma clad chameleon telling you you’re the special one/Standing on the podium with a raised up hand”.
Keeping a strummed rhythmic chug with a crowd-friendly chorus hook, ‘The River Is Rising’ sounds the warning siren that the metaphorical dam of tyranny will eventually give way to the metaphorical flood of change (“A whisper to a roar that is ocean bound/Coming down from the mountain with pent up force/Nothing can contain or change its course…The wall’s gonna fall the bank’s gonna break/An upturned land left in its wake/Pouring new life through that old river bed…The river is sorrow the river is grief/It’s defiance and injustice and it’s hope and belief/The river is rage it’s love and pain/The river is one and a million drops of rain”).
He stays with a note of hope on the lightly picked ‘It’s Not Dark’ and its encouragement to seek the light and not hide in the dark (“the shadows and the shapes/That make you feel afraid/From which you can’t escape/Are all made by your own hand/So try to understand/It’s not dark/You’ve just got your eyes closed”).
While Songs Like An Old Friend ends with a sparse, accordion and harmonica solo coloured eight-minute bonus cover of Guthrie’s ‘Deportees’, the album proper closes with the near six-minute title track and its message of the power of music to bring solace (“Far away from home and lonely/Sitting solo in a crowd coming down/No-one sees me here or knows me…Through the door there comes the sound/Of a lost refrain, stirs my heart to rise again… As I’m taken to another place way beyond/Like a friend long past to greet me/Words of comfort come to me”) as he winds up with a lengthy namechecking list of classics that includes ‘Still Crazy After All These Years’, ‘A Case Of You’, ‘Diamonds and Rust’, Green Fields of France’ Pancho And Lefty’, ‘Fall At Your Feet’, ‘Meet On The Ledge’, ‘Like A Rolling Stone’, ‘Homeward Bound’ and ‘Thunder Road’ (Though Tull’s ‘Dun Ringill’ is more obscure) and, of course, ‘Auld Lang Syne’. These are Ward’s old friends; you should make his songs yours.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.johnward11.bandcamp.com/album/songs-like-an-old-friend
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