Fishermen’s Friends: other lozenges are available
When someone says ‘sea shanty’ to you what comes to mind? EU cod quotas? Booze cruises? Rick Stein? Well, what Universal records want you to do is dip in your pocket and fish out yer pieces of eight for their album Port Isaac’s Fishermen’s Friends. Yes these singing trawlermen have been belting out keel-hauling chorale for the second-homers and tourists of north Cornwall since 1899, sorry 1999. They’d recorded several raw but heartfelt albums on a budget and sold locally until big money came calling last year. The result was a million ££££ contract and a new album. Now I was under the impression that the shanty was an essentially unaccompanied ensemble singing piece, perhaps with a little pipes or squeeze box, there not being room for a backing band on the heaving deck of a man o’ war. You’d probabaly record it with stereo mics in a nice sounding space, flogging the jack tars through takes until they gave a suitably convincing performance of call and response and harmonised vocals. More fool me, as their video shows, the Fishermen’s Friends have been plonked in front of expensive Neumanns and tracked separately into a digital rig.
They have then been obliged to follow backing tracks played by session men paid to create that Captain Pugwash feel. Every yo ho ho cliche has been thrown into the mix, and as their previous CDs featured the odd stumble and rough pitch and this doesn’t, can we assume Uncle Antares has stowed away? Supposedly they used the same old church as a recording venue; why? There is a tiny bit of stoney ambience in the vocals but what’s wrong with Abbey Road? This is not authentic group singing in any way, why try and keep a pretence up? As for the compressed faux-folk rock music, it’s awful, sounding like a bad copy of the Men They Couldn’t Hang, except “Union Of Different Kinds” which is a bad Strawbs, and “Haul Away Joe” which is a bad Pogues. Only the mercifully stark “Cadgewith Anthem” hits the target. As an example of throwing the baby out with the seawater it can’t be beat. Still, it went gold in the UK so that counts as a success in this dying music business.
Apropos of nothing here’s my own brush with piratical punk, the very fine Sex Pirates live at the Fox in Twickenham (RIP).
