Tag: better late than never

Based in Oldham, the dusty-voiced Ball has been knocking around the folk circuit for some 50 years, not to mention taking to the main stage of Carnegie Hall in 2008 and having one of his tunes covered Belshazzar’s Feast. He released an album as part of Flash Company back in 2000, but Better Late Than Never is his long-in-the-coming solo debut, a collection of tunes and largely story-based songs that reflect his traditional folk and blues influences.

It kicks off with the simply strummed tale of ‘John Phillips’, a farmer who packs his bags, leaves wife and two sons behind and heads off to Australia to prospect for gold, her words “All that glitters is not gold…the grass is never greener John, it’s not worth your life” ringing in his ears. Unusually for a folk ballad, it has a happy ending as, after a couple of years, he returns home having hit paydirt (“One Sunday morning, after church, when they were walking home/The boys were playing catch and chase, their ma walked on her own/A stranger sitting in the shade looked up and gave a laugh/He said come here, she said no fear, you stink and need a bath/She knew straight ‘way that it was John, though his beard was thick and grey/She looked him in the eye and said ‘I hope you’re back to stay’/’I’ve bought the farm John told his wife, with land and stock to keep’”).

That’s followed by the fingerpicked ‘The Ballad Of Elias Hall’, a fascinating but little known true story (also the subject of the play ‘Singers Not Sinners’) about how, back in 1701 England, Puritans still holding sway, women were forbidden by the elders to sing with men in church choirs. However, needing more voices “to lead the Easter praise”, Oldham choir master and Hall defied the ecclesiastical authorities and Richard Sugden, the vicar of St Mary’s, and after holding secret auditions, enlisted three unnamed women who, “hidden behind a screen they sang, surrounded by men/In their own parish church for the very first time”, causing all manner of consternation when revealed (“John Taylor [the headmaster] cried out ‘Blasphemy, it’s heresy, women singing is absurd’”) but, while “accused of witchcraft, casting demonic spells”, for the first time, in seventeen hundred years anywhere in the world “women sang where they’d never sung before”.

It’s followed by the first instrumental, ‘Jack Point’s Galliard’, a minstrel tune in waltz time named for a character from Gilbert and Sullivan’s ‘Yeoman of the Guard’ who dies from a broken heart.

Things take a more whimsical turn for the robustly strummed traditional-styled ‘Tall Tales’, a number about the fanciful yarns spun by a former sea-farer to his grandson (“A Sea monster attacked our ship/Eating nearly half the crew/We threw gunpowder in its mouth/Fired a shot and up it blew/Grandad is it really true/The sea monster you said you slew/It ate you up, but with a knife/You cut a hole and out you flew?”) but also about the power of storytelling itself and the legacy handed down over the generations (“Grandad left us, no more stories/I grew up and left home/Found a girlfriend, we got married/Now we’ve children of our own/Now I’m grey and in my chair/Grandchildren upon my knee/I sit and laugh and tell tall tales/Just like my grandad before me”).

The second tune is ‘Clockwork’ which, in 12/8 time, features wheezing melodeon, bass and, aptly enough a ticking metronome, then, departing from his own material, ‘Resting Place’ is his 60s folk era setting of a poem by West Yorkshire’s Philippa Atkin which, opening with airy woodwind and urgently strummed, is told from the perspective of an ageing horse hoping there’s an equine heaven where “the meadows are deep lush and sweet/With a shady spot under the oak trees/For old friends to nuzzle and meet…and when I am tired care-worn and weary/I’ll lay down my head and rest there”.

Again adapting a poem, back in 2023 he was asked to sing and play in a production of ‘Alice’ in Delph, one of the songs being Lewis Carroll’s ‘The Lobster Quadrille’. To which end comes the melodeon dancing 6/8 time ‘Travesura (Lobster Quadrille)’, the title being the Spanish for mischief and, hence, the Iberian feel to the music.

The final instrumental is ‘Pour Mon Ami’, another courtly minstrel-like waltzer with guitars, whistle, melodeon, and mandolin, the ‘Ami’ of the title being his late long-time fiddler friend Sam McGrady. It closes with, first, another Atkin co-write, ‘I Am The King’, which relates the story of how, in the mid to late 18th century, David Hartley led the Cragg Vale Coiners, a gang of counterfeiters based near Hebden Bridge, who, to supplement the meagre income from weaving (“There’ll be no hungry lasses, nor lads wi’out shoes/Sod the lawman, we’ll take what we’re due”), would “clip” the edges of genuine coins, leaving them only very slightly smaller, and collected the shavings which they then melted down to produce metal for counterfeits, with designs punched into the blank “coins” with a hammer and a “coining kit” before returning them to circulation. Betrayed by one of the coiners (“Broadbent the bastard, did see his king sold/To excise man Dighton, for his promise of gold”), Hartley was arrested and hung at ‘York Tyburn’ on 28 April 1770.

Finally, named for the Inverness village, the circling fingerpicked ‘Farewell To Clashmore’ (another galliard tune) spins a wholly fictional Scottish story set in an unnamed time about a man bidding friends, family and home farewell (“I must away and leave this all behind me/Our king he goes to war and I must with him go/With musket fife and drum, marching with my comrades/All to a distant land, to fight a foreign foe” with the parting words “Mar sin leabh and farewell, oh will I see thee again/Will my eyes behold beauty so true/Remember I’m yours, you forever will be mine/In my heart I will always love you”. It’s not traditional but you feel it really should be.

With Ian doing his own PR, Better Late Than Never is inevitably something of a low profile release, but word of mouth should quickly build and give it the exposure it deserves.

Mike Davies

Artist’s website: www.ianfball.bandcamp.com/album/better-late-than-never

‘The Ballad Of Elias Hall’: