Chris Wood is peeling back convention to expose the strength of tradition in one of the most maligned musical genres - English folk music, writes Siobhán Long
He trades in landscapes so bleak you'd be hard-pressed to find sanctuary in their midst; he mines the depths of English folk music's canon in pursuit of tales so ordinary that they can't help but share a common currency with the present; and he plies a fiery resistance to any hint of taking musical short cuts, opting instead for a road less travelled, which, incidentally, is often the one with the least signposts and the richest pickings by the wayside.
The fact is, Chris Wood is not your common or garden-folk troubadour, peddling three chords and some semblance of the truth.
"The thing that I find most attractive in music is authenticity," Wood offers, his words tumbling over one another with cautionary reluctance. Getting to the heart of music doesn't come easy though, he suggests, but still a worthwhile pursuit for anyone with an appetite for music with a shelf life longer than that of a sliced pan. "I don't think, in the Western world, that we're so far gone, that we don't all respond when we encounter something that we perceive to be authentic. People can tell the difference." Wood is convinced that we live in an age when fakery reigns supreme. Artifice and posturing are the stuff of much of popular culture, and longevity is its sworn enemy. Yet, while the business of much commercial music might thrive on the counterfeit, Wood suggests that anyone willing to take the time to drill beneath its surface will be rewarded with riches unimaginable, in a world where three-minute wonders hold sway.
"For me, depth is the most interesting thing," he declares. "Instead of things that I'm after being at the top, they're usually at the bottom, so authenticity is at the bottom. I'm not so much interested in breadth, because I think breadth takes care of itself. If you don't die, then you will be exposed to other influences and you will meet people, and so on. The thing that needs work, for me, is depth. It's not such a difficult thing to do either, I believe. If you take the idea of 'mind maps' and if you're lucky enough for music to be your life, then it's really not that hard to draw connections between different elements of what you do. Instinctively, I think it makes sense."
FOR A LONG time (too long, he reluctantly admits), Chris Wood hid behind his various musical identities, in particular behind his self-styled English Acoustic Collective. This cooperative is a fluid group of composers, writers and choreographers who share an affection for a common musical inheritance. Celebrating the inherent richness of vernacular or indigenous music, Wood is, in some ways, England's answer to Ry Cooder, although he's less inclined towards the kind of musical melding that defined the Buena Vista Social Club, and more drawn towards the intensity of burrowing beneath the surface of what is, to be frank, the much-maligned world of English folk music.
Wood's uncompromising approach to the folk music of his home place finds expression in his many albums. His sublime solo recording from last year, The Lark Descending (which was his first solo CD, but his 10th recording) offered the listener a peek into his tautly-sprung, jagged-edged world, where Keats's notions of truth and beauty not only collide but engage in artful debate. As well as his recorded work with Andy Cutting, Karen Tweed and others, Chris Wood's instinct is to question what it is to be English, and having inherited a treasure trove of music (some of which Planxty, The Bothy Band and others trawled to startling effect in such gloriously meandering travelogues as Little Musgrave and Lord Franklin), he is exploring what to do with it in a Blairite society jousting with the challenges of multiculturalism.
Wood also hosts an annual English Acoustic Collective Summer School in Gloucestershire, where participants engage in uncompromising and often personally challenging explorations of their own musical voice, which includes a questioning of how that individual voice relates to and reflects England's rich musical heritage.
Chris Wood's first solo Irish tour has grown out of his work in the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, where he has been guest lecturer on their MA courses in Music Therapy, Chant and Ritual Song, and Irish Traditional Music Performance. He nurtures a strong combative streak, which thrives on the question of why his home country staunchly resists any temptation to embrace (or even face up to) its own identity, while feverishly scurrying around in search of countless ways to accommodate any number of other cultural identities.
"I think the main reason we struggle with our own music is because of this world-power, English-empire nonsense," Wood asserts. "It's the question of how a country upon whose empire the sun supposedly never set can possibly hold dear to its heart the folk songs of people whom it never valued to begin with. We used to put children up chimneys, for God's sake. How can this music of the people be of any worth? But we're living through a time of change now, and the most obvious manifestation for this post-colonial guilt is the incredibly tortured political-correctness initiatives, which I think are risible. For example, people getting uptight about bin bags being black, in that it creates an association between being black and rubbish.
"In terms of the music, the way that culture works best is where you have two representatives from different cultures, who are equally immersed in and knowledgeable of their own culture, so that when they meet, what they produce becomes truly fascinating and truly rich and enlightening and human. In Britain, though, that's not happening. Immigrant communities have a very rich understanding of their cultural worth, of the trappings of their music, their belief systems, their dress codes, their stories. They cherish them. But what they find in England, by comparison, is a vast cultural void. So they can't engage English people on an equal footing. The indigenous culture isn't able to meet other cultures on an equal basis."
For all his bewailing of England's failure to mine the riches of its own folk music, Wood is quick to edit and shave, to cut and curtail some of English folk music's greatest songs, in order to make them relevant to a contemporary audience. His early experience as a jobbing musician with the Royal Shakespeare Company taught him much about the fine art of editing. That's why you'll encounter such musical icons as Lord Bateman in a significantly truncated form on The Lark Descending, while he makes no bones about his indebtedness to folk icon Martin Carthy in his tackling of another "untouchable" big song, John Barleycorn. Even Wood's choice of album title is a less than oblique counterpoint to English composer Vaughan Williams's lauded The Lark Ascending, a much-loved, celebratory composition that unapologetically drew its inspiration from English folk song. It's that mining of the tradition that offers such rich rewards, Wood insists.
"A long time ago I heard a radio programme," he recounts, "where this lovely old tabla player in India, talking about the evolution of his folk music, stated: 'Well, of course it all began with the Zeppelin.' It was due to the Zeppelin that people from the south of India could travel and meet those in the north. He went on to say: 'Tradition must be respected. Convention can be broken, but not until you know which is which.' I must have heard that 15 or 16 years ago, and every time I've had to reconsider it, I've found it absolutely watertight. The beauty of it is that you only know which is which on an individual basis. It's not about external definitions of what tradition is. It's not what 'you' think tradition is. It's what 'I' think tradition is. That brings us right back to this notion of depth. You've just got to keep going with tradition, until you begin to discover what is tradition and what is convention." One thing Wood has achieved in his inveterate pursuit of English folk music is a clear understanding of what he is, and, more importantly, what he isn't.
"I'm not a scholar, I'm not a collector," he insists. "I am a musician, so I try to make sure the decisions I make are those of a musician, instead of those of a cod scholar or a pretend collector, or an avant-garde, cutting-edge wunderkind. I try to approach each thing like a jeweller or a diamond cutter. They get a diamond in the rough, and they examine it, not to discover how they want to cut it, but how it wants to be cut. For me, the exciting possibility is that instead of me choosing the song, the song might in fact be choosing me. In some ways, you don't really have to worry. You trust the material and you trust yourself - and then you get to work."
• The Lark Descending, is on RUF Records. Chris Wood's first solo Irish tour starts on Wed in The Source, Thurles, and then tours nationwide
