Spurred by Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown, this fairly rapid and, playing guitar, harmonica and cuatro, wholly solo follow up to last year’s The Winter Yards sees Knightley revisiting two of his formative inspirations, discovering The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan and then seeing Martin Carthy, namechecked on the album’s back cover, at Sidmouth Folk Festival the same year. Positively Folk Street, with its humble lower case me, is a tribute to both, a mix of six Dylan’s songs and six of Carthy’s arrangements of traditional numbers.
Specifically sparked by Knightley seeing the film, it opens with one by the former, a simple fingerpicked rendition of ‘Girl From The North Country’ which sets the mood and tone for everything that follows. A surging cuatro strummed take on the traditional ‘Broomfield Hill, in which a woman casts a sleeping spell on her suitor to win a bet, is up next, recorded by Carthy on his eponymous 1965 debut. The back and forth between continues with a moody, echoing vocals interpretation of ‘Senor (Tales Of Yankee Power)’, a minor key ballad that doesn’t often turn up as a cover giving way to mournful traditional murder ballad ‘Bruton Town’, featured on Carthy’s second album as was ‘Lord Franklin’, a Broadside ballad telling of the search for the North West Passage, here rendered unaccompanied save for a reedy melodeon.
One of Dylan’s tenderest songs, reputedly written for his son, ‘Forever Young’ gets a tender, lullaby treatment that carries even more of an emotional charge than the original. Completing the Dylan collection, he straps on the harmonica for ‘Don’t Think Twice It’s All Right’, the wistful broken love affair song that appeared on the flipside of ‘Blowin’ In The Wind’, fingerpicked relationship failing ‘Boots Of Spanish Leather’ and, from whence the album title comes, a strummed ‘Positively 4th Street’ which, uninvolved and lacking the original’s acerbic venom, is the only real disappointment.
The other traditionals line up with a brace of seafaring numbers in ‘Just As The Tide Was Flowing’ which as far as I can find, and I’m open to be corrected, Carthy himself has never recorded, and ‘Polly On The Shore, which he recorded on his1969 Dave Swarbrick collaboration Prince Heathen as was also the album’s closer , a rousing reading of ‘Seven Yellow Gypsies’, a variation of ‘Raggle Taggle Gypsies’, supposedly based on the story of how, in the 1600s, Lady Jean Hamilton, wife of the puritanical Earl of Cassilis, eloped with Scottish gypsy band leader John Faa, ending, though not in the lyrics, with his capture and hanging. Positively Folk Street is a stripped down return to Knightley’s late 60s folk roots, it’s positively well worth adding to the collection.
Mike Davies
Artist’s website: www.steveknightley.com
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