the times | Saturday November 14 2020 1GR saturday review 11

When we got down there, there was no

sea anywhere

All we saw was miles and miles of mud.

Denny insists, though, that he is not just

interested in preserving museum pieces.

While this brand of music may have one

eye on the past, he emphasises that it is not

just documenting a lost world. “It’s a living

tradition,” he says. “People think of folk

music as just old stories. But old stories

can inspire new art. You can revisit old

culture and create something new, some-

thing that people can feel a part of. It’s

what’s missing in a lot of today’s music.

People in this current climate are looking

for something authentic.”

Strikers’ anthems and dispatches from

the barricades are an unmistakable sign of

the disc’s political leanings. Fifty-six-year-

old Denny, a former Morning Star journal-

ist, edits the in-house journal of the RMT,

the National Union of Rail, Maritime and

Transport Workers. The album is spon-

sored, moreover, by the General Federa-

tion of Trade Unions, which provides

educational courses for members of

smaller specialist unions.

Still, the best of the music in the set tran-

scends politics and ideology. Ewan Mac-

Coll, the grandfather of the traditional

British folk scene, may have been an

unrepentant communist, yet he was also

responsible for some unforgettably tender

music, from The First Time Ever I Saw Your

Face to the ballad that is featured on Work-

ing River, Sweet Thames Flow Softly,

beautifully performed by the duo of Jolene

Missing and Joe Hymas.

Denny, whose own contribution to the

set is an original song about a 19th-century

smuggler, Elizabeth Little, began planning

the album about 18 months ago. He

jokingly describes the business of record-

ing the songs as being “an Alan Lomax

experience”, a reference to the American

musicologist celebrated for making field

recordings in far-flung parts of the US. Of

the 21 songs in the collection, 12 were re-

corded specially for the project; others

were made by the musicians themselves.

In keeping with the traditional DIY spir-

it, the album was a word-of-mouth enter-

prise. Denny knows the musicians. Two of

them — Kate Waterfield and Charlie Skel-

ton, composers of the instrumental Lap-

wing to Shore — had played at his wedding.

Lockdown and social distancing added

complications to the recording process,

but the finished product at least begins to

fill the vacuum left by the closure of so

many clubs during the pandemic. Folk,

after all, is the most communal of forms;

bringing people together is its raison

d’être. The river’s connection to the wider

world is reflected in a cover of London is the

Place for Me, the calypso sung by the

Trinidadian performer Lord Kitchener

(alias Aldwyn Roberts) when he arrived at

Tilbury Docks on the Empire Windrush

in 1948. Working River is not a

multicultural project, however. Instead, it

reflects a more homogenous white work-

ing-class ethos.

It’s all about roots. Denny, who is consid-

ering making a second album of river

songs, argues that the local clubs that he

frequents offer a more authentic form of

music-making than are found in more

fashionable venues. “Real folk music is still

in the clubs,” he says. “A builder can turn

up and sing a song about his job. That’s

where it’s at. We’re not looking for a virtu-

oso out of music school. It’s not about

people noodling.”

Working River is the fruit of that philoso-

phy. The songs are as timeless as the river

itself.

Working River: Songs and Music

of the Thames is available from

folktreerecordings.bandcamp.com

Real folk

music is

still in the

clubs. A

builder can

turn up and

sing a song

about his job

T

he story of the River

Thames runs through

the heart of British

history: children learn

about the signing of

Magna Carta at Runny-

mede, visitors to art gal-

leries admire Turner’s waterscapes. Yet the

figures who once earned their living on the

water are usually invisible. Charles Dick-

ens sometimes gave them a voice in novels

such as Our Mutual Friend, but more often

than not they have been overlooked.

Here they are at last, eager to tell their

stories in a new collection of folk songs,

Working River: Songs and Music of

the Thames, a time capsule that ranges

from ballads about the lost profession of

the lighterman and bargee to female fact-

ory workers and footloose characters on

the razzle.

It’s a delightful journey. What gives the

songs extra resonance is that the perform-

ers are not starry names from folk music’s

aristocracy: instead the disc’s curator, the

journalist and part-time performer Brian

Denny, has assembled recordings made by

amateur musicians who turn up to

perform at clubs as intimate as the Hoy at

Anchor in Southend.

The aim, Denny says, was to document

working people singing songs about work-

ing people, and the result is an album that

brings the river back to life. I happen to live

on a narrowboat on the Thames, on the

picturesque stretch made famous in The

Wind in the Willows and Three Men in a

Boat. The river can be an unruly beast here.

When there are days of heavy rain my

neighbours and I have to be careful to keep

loosening our mooring ropes.

And in the depth of winter there are

often weeks and weeks when the current is

running so fast that we can’t go out on the

water. (That may not sound like much of a

hardship, but bear in mind that we have to

think about how to get to the local marina

to have waste tanks pumped out once a

month or so. Sit down with a boater and

talk of toilets is never far away.)

When I open my hatch doors in the

morning I might see a passing gin palace or

yet another paddleboarder going for a

jaunt. (During the lockdown summer

the river became a mini motorway,

crammed with boards and marauding

kayaks.) But working boats are a rarity.

Every now and then the supply boat

bearing sacks of coal comes looking for

customers, and there’s the occasional

dredger. My Thames, though, is some-

thing of a backwater.

Yet when I listen to Working River while

I’m walking along the towpath, dodging

hikers and rogue dogs, I’m reminded that

the Thames was once a very different

beast, particularly when it passed through

London and made its inexorable way to

the sea. In the 19th century the waterway,

crowded, polluted and restless, was the

beating heart of an industrial superpower.

All human life was there.

And even when it was dolled up in gaudy

recreational colours, the river could still

be an unforgiving place. One of the songs

on the album, The Wreck of the Princess

Alice, is an account of the sinking in

1878 of a paddle steamer near Woolwich

that resulted in the death of about 650

day-trippers in sewage-clogged waters.

The disaster has been all but forgotten

today, but it prompted reforms in the

policing of the Thames and the disposal

of sewage. We are, in short, a long way

from the sedate world of Jerome K

Jerome’s waterborne idlers or Kenneth

Grahame’s cuddly creatures messing

about in boats.

Amid the hardships and the striker’s

anthems, there is humour too. Day Trip to

Southend tells of a group of hardy souls

who discover that the Thames Estuary is

not quite the Riviera:

Let’s take a day trip to Southend on Sea

Mother said the air would do us good

music

A soundtrack to my watery back garden

Times theatre critic

Clive Davis, who lives

on a houseboat on the

Thames, writes in

praise of the music

inspired by the river

river folk Ewan

MacColl and Peggy

Seeger in 1971. Top:

Clive Davis on his

houseboat on

the Thames

TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JACK HILL; ITV/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK