poor old horse

sun this morning now clouding over. horsemouth is hiding out up in the forest and has fed the cat (and a very cat-shaped cat she is too). he is hiding out in a house with a sold sign on it.

last night he went out to see stick in the wheel play at leytonstone folk club - once again they were awesome - there was a time when horsemouth thought they were getting a little boring (too many short songs that didn’t develop, too many songs arranged in the same way, the permutations and combinations of the instrumentation exhausted) but now they seem to have hit a second wind.

there were two singer/ guitarists on beforehand - the first worked a dylanish/ donovanish thing (he joked he had studied with wiz jones but the songs were too complicated so he couldn’t learn them), the second horsemouth has seen singing backing vocals before and worked a comedy routine (though ended up singing long lankin).

to start their two song encore stick in the wheel got the audience singing poor old horse - one of those songs where a myth animal is boiled down to its bones and to glue. stick in the wheel sang the sea shanty version ('and we say so and we hope so') part of a ritual where after a month at sea a sailor would be taunted that his horse had died and a model of it would be thrown over the side.


there is a landlubber version (but it is less interesting).

this is how current events feel to horsemouth (suffering on an almost mythic plane), skip james speaks of hard times, of people going door to door, as a stick in the wheel do in hard times in old england.