Sunday 15th October 2006
Observer Music Monthly ****
What a fine idea folk duo John Spiers and Jon Boden had in 2004. Stuck in traffic on the M25, the pair hit upon the idea of expanding their pared squeezebox and vocal revivals and forming a big band. Sometimes efforts to soup up folk can achieve their stated aim too well - i.e. you end up with soup; too many cooks too often spoil the broth. Thankfully that's far from the case here as the 11-piece group serve up a heady fusion over a baker's dozen tracks which transpose English folk to a myriad locations.
The opening 'Rigs of the Time' is a traditional song from the Napoleonic era yet, setting it in 5/4, Spiers and Boden manage to make it sound like Kurt Weill done by cabaret cranks the Tiger Lillies. 'Jordan' which follows is like a medieval spiritual, if that's possible, with a great unison chorus from the whole band, while 'Across the Line' has a brilliant flourish of a flute solo that reminds you just how English (not to say folky) Islands-era King Crimson sounded. And if ever Boden's vocals sound a little reedy, they are beautifully cracked and drunken on 'Flash Company', which pitches a traditional tune against off-kilter New Orleans jazz.
Add to that the township jive of old fave 'London Town' and the gypsy leanings of 'The Outlandish Knight', and you know you've struck gold. Bound to be a record of the year.
Recommended: 'Rigs of the Time'; 'Flash Company'; 'The Outlandish Knight'

Songlines Magazine
I’ll stick my head above the parapet for Burlesque: this is the most important album of English traditional music since Fairport Convention’s Liege & Lief. It’s even more significant. Fairport, with electric instruments and attitude, revitalised the repertoire. Nonetheless there’s an austere aspect to that groundbreaking record, a sense that, really, the song should not be performed so much as presented. Bellowhead disagree entirely and marshal their formidable resources to explore the musical, lyrical and theatrical potential of the songs and tunes. The group are described as a folk big band. Actually, they’re a huge band. Between them the 11 musicians play more than 20 instruments, and six of them sing. The horn section includes a sousaphone, the reeds a bass clarinet. There’s a frying pan amidst the percussion, a cello in the strings and, at the core, are the melodeons of John Spiers, Jon Boden’s fiddle (one of four) and his vibrant, not to say vibrating, vocals.
The arrangements and performances are stunning. ‘Death and the Lady’ encompasses both bebop and minimalism. ‘The Outlandish Knight’ expresses sonically the strange power of the words. ‘Courting too Slow’ is a triumph of melancholy, and the tunes such as ‘Frog’s Legs and Dragon’s Teeth’ are like a fine pint – delicious and satisfying.
A few days after Bellowhead appeared on the main stage, a friend who witnessed them take WOMAD by storm buttonholed me: they had the rich textures of a Cuban band, she insisted, the rhythmic dexterity of a Brazilian outfit and the melodic exuberance of an African combo. She was incredulous because this was, after all, English folk music. And English music can’t be world music, can it? Bellowhead have finally blasted that tired old prejudice into oblivion.
JULIAN MAY

October 13th 2006
THE SUN ****
If you thought folk music was all about earnest solitary figures with acoustic guitars, think again.
Bellowhead are an 11-piece folk “orchestra” who create riots of colourful sounds.  They are the brainchild of Jon Boden and John Spiers and Burlesque is their ravishing debut album.
Taking English folk as the template, they throw everything but the kitchen sink at this project – banjo, brass, bagpipes, and, er, a frying pan to name but a few instruments.  The result is that these reinterpretations of trad songs veer in all sorts of directions – decadent music hall, country barn dances, jazzy free-form workouts.
However, the highlight might just be Boden’s tremulous, lonesome vocal on Courting Too Slow

MOJO *****
Though only a five-track EP, the first offering of the Boden & Spiers big band is just too good to be allowed to skulk in the shadows. The likes of Paul Sartin (fiddle) and Benji Kirkpatrick (guitar/bouzouki) join a full ­blooded horn section to nudge the already formidable B&S energy quota to overload and they re-work Prickle Eye Bush and Copshawhole Fair, two of the best tracks on the Bellow album, into a thrilling frenzy. If this is a portent of folk music in 2005, then bring it on...”

fROOTS Magazine
We're not really looking for a review on this, we just thought you might like to hear it..." read the note from Mr Boden and Mr Spiers enclosed with this release, available only on their website. It is, after all, only an EP and some of the tracks have already been recorded, albeit in different form, on their last duo album, Bellow. Well, sod you Boden & Spiers, we are reviewing it. And what's more, we've invited all the neighbours along to review it with us. Except that they've gone straight for the sherry and were last seen dancing on the kitchen table.
Bellowhead are, of course, the new Boden & Spiers big band who blew away everyone I've talked to who survived Sidmouth 2004; with eclectic souls like Benji Kirkpatrick, Paul Sartin, Rachael McShane and Pete Flood beefing up the sound alongside an irresistibly vivacious horn section. The results are astonishing. Astonishing. By sheer energy, dynamic performance and a flurry of inventive arrangements, they blitz through five tracks - 25 minutes 30 seconds of them - with a bulldozing swagger that just leaves you breathless. "What the ferk was that? I'm breathless!" said the postman, who'd only popped in to give me a speeding fine.
I'd go further. I mean, I've had a drink (can't let that sherry go to waste) but this sounds to me like a landmark. There's so much going on in Rochdale Coconut Dance, what with counter melodies, alternative rhythms and clever allusions to the music of a thousand cultures, you haven't got time to dance to the thing. They similarly send the Playford tune Jack Robinson into orbit aboard a frenetic beat that suddenly, brilliantly, segues into a beautiful, yep beautiful, bagpipe break. It's clever, but it's instinctive clever, which means that it works on all levels of heads, hands and feet (though I'm not sure what you do with your hands).
Yet riding above all this are the three vocal tracks. Boden seems to have acquired an extra gear since the Bellow album, and two of the tracks on that album, Copshawholme Fair and Prickle-eye Bush re-emerge as whooping, hollering monsters. The other, The Rambling Sailor - like Rochdale Coconut Dance - previously appeared on the first B&S album Through & Through, but that version is a shrinking violet compared with this tour de force.
Like anybody who pushes the boat out in such cavalier fashion, Bellowhead will find plenty of critics and I can perfectly understand a mindset that rears up especially against Boden's marauding vocals, which are increasingly reminiscent of the stylisation of Peter Bellamy. But Bellowhead are taking the music forward with a flair and urgency rarely heard in these parts and I, for one, can't wait for them to make a proper album. “
COLIN IRWIN

Stirrings Magazine
In my review of the last Spiers & Boden CD I wrote: “I have seen the future, and it bellows”. Well, the future’s just arrived. e.p.onymous is the debut recording by the ten-piece band that has coalesced around S & B over the past year. The note accompanying it said: “We’re not really looking to get any reviews for this”, but such self-effacement cuts no ice at Stirrings Central. It’s only a five-track 25-minute affair (hence the punsome title; of course you remember EPs...); nevertheless these five tracks represent a quantum jump for Eng Trad music, and it’s our job to tell you about it.
How to describe Bellowhead? Imagine a parallel universe in which Brass Monkey joined forces with The Mothers Of Invention. That might give you some idea of the squeezy, brassy bedrock of the Bellowhead sound, and also hint at the bewildering Zappa-esque bricolage assembled on top of it. Eclectic is too pallid an adjective to describe this mighty babel of styles and idioms. No earnest multiculturalism here; rather it testifies to a shameless, maniacal glee at flinging everything within reach into the musical stewpot. So the Rochdale Coconut Dance (a title big Frank himself would have been proud of) opens with dark, industrial dissonances before breaking into a sort of New Orleans strut with Herb Alpert-style trumpet twiddles winding round the tune. Similarly, Copshawholme Fair kicks off in scratchy Café Gitane fashion but quickly summons to mind Wally Stott’s orchestrations for Scott Walker’s sorties into the Jaques Brel songbook. There’s a brass fanfare at the beginning of Prickle Eye Bush that comes straight from Billy Smart’s big top. Add to this a soupçon of Bollywood strings, thundering Bo Diddley drums, a blast of Blowzabella pipes... It’s a huge, heaving heterophony and sounds like nothing else on earth. And in the middle of it all, lest we forget, is the most dynamic, distinctive singer to emerge from the English scene since the Dransfields. Jon Boden is going for it harder than ever in unfeasibly high keys, hitting notes that will play havoc with bats’ navigation systems.
Already the new generation of Eng Trad is split into those who are in Bellowhead and those who wish they were. I have a dream: a nationwide package tour featuring this bunch along with Whapweasel and Tiger Moth, and, say, Paul Weller to pull in the non-folkies. Such a bill would utterly transform the public perception of trad-based English folk music. We’d never again have to suffer the jibes about Arran pullovers and fingers in the ear. The future’s here—and it’s heading your way.”
RAYMOND GREENOAKEN

The Observer
A mover and shaker on the folk scene, both as half of Spiers & Boden and as founder of the big band Bellowhead, Jon Boden salutes his teenage rock roots on this solo debut. That means bursts of clanging electric guitar to go alongside his more customary fiddle and concertina, and more tortured vocals for its all original songs than traditional material demands. Mixing tenderness and anger in equal measure, it's a vivid portrait of a compulsive but doomed love affair that is all drinks, tears and 'sleeping in a magpie's nest'. Occasionally raw, but a refreshingly original creation.

The Guardian
First he delighted the traditionalists with his fiddle playing in that much praised duo Spiers & Boden, then he helped to shake up the new folk scene as leader of the massed ranks of that rousing folk dance and brass big band, Bellowhead. Now, just to show what else he can do, Jon Boden has decided to release an album of his own songs (with one melody by John Spiers), in which he plays all the instruments himself, from fiddle and guitar through to bass, drums, banjo, harmonium and concertina. It's a work of remarkable confidence and bravery and, for the most part, it actually works. He is a versatile singer, best heard on thoughtful, sad-edged songs such as Blue Dress or the concertina-backed Broken Things, which reflect his love of traditional material. Elsewhere, he switches from grand or complex ballads to a less successful reminder that he used to be a rocker before discovering folk. No matter. Boden is a man to watch.

Musician
With Painted Lady, Jon Boden takes a sideways step from the traditional acoustic world into an eerie landscape of dark corners inhabited by unusual electronica, Indian harmonium and glockenspiel. Reminiscent of Elvis Costello circa Spike, these are challenging but extremely rewarding songs that conjure up visions of Victorian backwaters, odd but lovable characters and tales of lost romance. Jon’s voice is a gem that captivates the senses, and this CD marks him as the next big artist in the great English folk/pop/rock tradition.

fROOTS
So let's get this right. There's Bellowhead. There's Boden & Spiers. There's the Tunes album. And the Songs album. And all the gigs. And all those festival appearances. And the tours and recording with Eliza Carthy. All going on over the last year. So where the hell did Jon Boden find the time to knock out his first singer-songwriter album?
Given such an inventively prolific track record we shouldn't be at all surprised to discover that it is no ordinary singer-songwriter album either. No navel-gazing lovelorn stuff here, these are songs full of weighty darkness and sinister mystery, presented in a confusing cocktail of winding melodies and the occasional infuriatingly catchy chorus - play Josephine (Napoleon's Song) and Lemany at your peril for they will be spinning round your head for days.
Co-produced with Ben Ivitsky, there are some traditional reference points, both lyrically and musically (Boden himself plays virtually everything on it from electric guitar to glockenspiel to Indian harmonium) but this is a long way from folk music; yet neither does it draw on any conventional rock. Sure there are reference points - a Beatlesque chanty chorus suddenly bursts through the gloom of Drunken Princess, while the influence of left-field artists like Tom Waits and Nick Cave is felt in the more obtuse moments.
It's a challenging album and there are moments when the ugliest challenges like Pocketful of Mud sound impenetrably gratuitous, while his propensity to falsetto singing occasionally grates - Ophelia, for one, is irritatingly whiney. For someone famed for his eccentric vocal take on folk songs, he sounds remarkably restrained singing alternative rock. But when he gets it right - the untypically restrained vocal performance on Win Some Lose Some Sally over a pounding rhythm and ferocious staccato electric guitar outbursts - it sounds truly thrilling. And he songs themselves are constantly fascinating, provocative and deep, yet still inviting. Over an engaging tune, Blue Dress has a seriously disquieting lyric and how can you resist an opening line like "I went down to the Sally Gardens, Sally was waiting by the wall/With her long tall stockings and midriff working on a night shift." (Get A Little Something).
It may not be fully realised but it's still an astonishing album. Broken Things is perhaps the closest to what we'd normally hear him doing with its yearning melody and rumbling concertina accompaniment, yet I still has such rumbling passion it's not such a flight of fantasy to imagine Freddy Mercury performing it. Yet the real tour de force is the title track, the sort of simmering epic Rufus Wainwright would kill for, which segues seamlessly into a powerhouse electric guitar and soaring vocal as the rousing bloodletting lets rip on Drinking The Night Away. It leaves you a crumpled heap on the floor.

Time Out
Multi-instrumentalist Jon Boden is best know for his award-winning folk work with John Spiers, but here he moves out of his comfort zone to produce this superb collection of quirky, lo-fi and slightly skewed love songs, with more than a nod to Tom Waits. Styles range from the distorted guitar riffs of 'Pocketful of Love' to the chanson-like 'Broken Things' to the emotively sparse arrangements of the title track. But it's Boden's dark and brilliantly off-centre lyrics that unify the album.

New Classics Online
Jon Boden was born in 1977 and in his teenage years in Winchester listening to Led Zeppelin and Jethro Tull before Dave Swarbrick inspired him to take up the fiddle. He found inspiration also from Martin Carthy, Peter Bellamy and Eliza Carthy, developing an unusual and effective singing technique. He has steadily established himself as one of the pioneers of new wave traditional English folk music, often working with melodeon player John Spiers and the acclaimed eleven-piece ensemble 'Bellowhead', his new solo album features a collection of largely self-composed love songs. Painted Lady fuses his acoustic sensibilities with powerful guitar work and an eclectic range of instruments - including concertina, Indian harmonium, fiddle, cello, double bass, electric piano, glockenspiel and drum machine - to create a highly textured soundscape. This is Jon Boden's debut recording as a songwriter but the lyrical and melodic style is highly accomplished and his delivery wonderfully assured. Highlights include the Get A Little Something, the plaintive Blue Dress, Drunken Princess, Lemany (updating a tradition of love lyrics that dates back to the 11th century), the beautiful True Love and the final track, Drinking the Night Away (based on a traditional Cajun tune). These enjoyable and reflective songs are a revelation and the album, with its suitably moody sleeve photographs, marks another step towards greater recognition for one of the most charismatic and talented performers on the modern folk scene.

Financial Times
Jon Boden is one of the yeomen of the current wave of English folk music, a hardy, defiantly unfashionable perennial. He must be one of the hardest-working men in folk: he is half of the fiddle-and-squeezebox duo Spiers and Boden; he fronts Bellowhead, an 11-piece country dance band; he is one of the Ratcatchers, Eliza Carthy's backing group; he has just released a solo album. And in his spare time he is writing the scores for two plays.
"The biggest musical fulfilment, for me, is singing in a pub," Boden says. "Folk's utility is as social music. Twenty people sitting in a pub singing 'Spencer the Rover': that's as good as it gets. As soon as you put the music on stage, it's a bastardisation of that."
We talk about the incongruity of songs composed by agricultural labourers be-coming the province ofmiddle-class music students. "English traditional music is the inheritance of anyone who lives in England now," Boden says, although he agrees that the music is rooted in "a sentimentality about place".
I incautiously categorise Boden's work as "new folk". No, he objects: he is "old new folk" as opposed to "new new folk". New folk of Boden's generation is robust and physical: it concentrates on traditional songs about (as the title of Tim van Eyken's sprightly new CD has it) Stiffs Lovers Holymen Thieves. Violins and melod-eons abound; it's the English equivalent of oompah.
By contrast, the new new folk of artists such as Devandra Banhart tends to a precious ethereality. Confusingly, the patron goddess of new new folk is Vashti Bunyan, who is, historically speaking, old folk, but has the elusive, evanescent fragility of her modern-day admirers and collaborators.
Listen, for example, to Tunng's 'Woodcat': the acoustic guitars sound like folk, but the words are about drinking coffee, lying in bed watching TV, having a lovely time: not a wronged maiden in sight. You'd be hard put to ceilidh to it. And in the end, the laptop scritching makes it clear we are in a very modern world.
Boden nominates the Brighton-based singer Mary Hampton as a bridge between new new folk and old new folk. Her EP Book 1, homemade, its lyric sheet folded like origami, presents six "songs of refusal", barbed evasions and rejections. There's "Silver Dagger", in a quiet and sullen contrast to Dolly Parton's berserk Appalachian horror-folk reading of a few years back, and "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme", less carefree than Pentangle's joyous version. Hampton sings old new folk's material with new new folk's emphasis on minute sonic detail.
If folk is a big tent, many inside it are sneaking to-wards the exits. Boden's own Painted Lady, with its dark tales of leather boots and cigarettes, sounds more like Tom Waits than Martin Carthy; Jim Moray, once a cutting-edge reinterpreter of traditional ballads, has decided his future lies in torch songs; the folk darling Kate Rusby now steps out, musically speaking, with Ronan Keating.
It was ever thus. EMI have just re-released Donovan's Anaheim concert from 1967, and it makes a fascinating document. Donovan was on a cusp: a couple of years earlier, he'd been a wide-eyed Dylan wannabe, patronised on film by the original in Don't Look Back. In 1967, much of his repertoire was still folk, but he was sliding into a glam psychedelia. Half the material here sounds like a template for Nick Drake, the other half for Hunky Dory-era Bowie.
Does this mean folk exists in a permanent state of embarrassed self-negation? Boden says this, too, has always been the case. When Cecil Sharp, in the early 1900s, recorded the dying folk song canon, his elderly performers often preferred to sing music hall ditties and had to be coaxed back to the material he wanted. "Acoustic guitars aren't traditional. Harmony singing isn't traditional. Singing in tune isn't traditional," Boden says. Purity, in the end, can only be sterile.

PowPowPow.com
Why, you might ask, are we now being bombarded with a whole album-full of self-penned stuff from arch trad-folkie Boden (he of the superb voice and driving fiddle, one half of the celebrated and prolific Spiers & Boden duo, one of the prime movers of the mighty Bellowhead band and part-time Ratcatcher for the House of Eliza Carthy)? Well don't turn on your bootheels just yet, but listen on. For at the risk of waxing all nostalgic, this is just the sort of album I'd have delighted in, way back at the start of the 70s. A solo album from a performer you already admire and appreciate, and - importantly - can trust to deliver the goods while offering up a challenge to his listeners. A performer who's instantly recognisable even when departing from his "group" work so radically and innovatively as Jon does here. Producing an album which has an immediately unmistakable voice-signature and yet gives the listener a genuine surprise at every turn, with unexpected twists and turns (of melody, lyric and subject) and a constantly imaginative use of instrumentation. In no way am I dubbing it retro, but the best way I can describe the impact of listening to Painted Lady for the first time is that I get the kind of frisson I remember from first hearing a new Incredible String Band album at the tail-end of the 60s, that frisson of discovery that's as immediate as the creative act itself - or so it feels. Although you never quite know what you're going to hear next, or what exactly is going on at times, the whole experience is abundantly stimulating, refreshing and invigorating.
Jon's is a supremely inventive approach to instrumentation (and he plays everything himself - guitars, bass, drums, cello, Indian harmonium, banjo, electric piano and Moog, as well as his usual fiddles and concertina), with an acute ear for bold and unusual texturings that can be achieved through simple means (Ophelia reminded me of Robin Williamson's subtly rich layerings on the Myrrh album for instance); I'm sure that he can lay at least some of the credit firmly at the door of his co-producer Ben Ivitsky too. Jon's not afraid to plug in his electric guitar as fuel to propel a song along, as on Josephine, Get A Little Something and Win Some Lose Some Sally (clearly a technique honed in his teen-rock-band days in Winchester!), or to characterise the required glutinous, distorted grunge-techno ambience for Pocketful Of Mud. Jon's singing has a real commanding presence, whether full-throated or comparatively reined-in; he doesn't sing like a born-again folkie, though he clearly derives key elements of his expressive technique from both folk and rock disciplines and he sure knows how to put a lyric across.
And on the subject of lyrics, it's also real hard to believe that this is Jon's debut recording as a songwriter - so assured is his handling of imagery within his vivid and distorted take on conventional romantic songsmithery where he finds strange and often disturbing poetry in what might seem mundane detail, creating an unsettling mood through the juxtaposition of this poetry with sometimes almost queasily succulent melodies. The press handout's description of Painted Lady as "an eloquent album of distorted lo-fi love songs" is for once not extravagant but eminently truthful. Both music and lyrics are highly seductive and darkly sinuous in their own rather compelling and sometimes even confusingly wayward way. Blue Dress has perhaps the most overt (if contrarily understated) degree of sensuousness, while the album's title track turns out to be a torch song of a particularly potent kind, a cross between Jacques Brel and Rufus Wainwright maybe. Then again, Boden the chansonnier is strongly in evidence on the stark yet passionate Broken Things and the string-sodden trans-seasonal evocation of True Love. Elsewhere, Jon's proven understanding of, and intense immersion in, both traditional and contemporary song (and their modes) throws up and in all manner of knowing references, sly paraphrases and resonances with both a knowing wink or nod and a deep respect for the source (in a manner that recalls the recent work especially of Steve Ashley and the magpie minds of Messrs Williamson and Heron in those early years), a tendency or device that in the hands of a lesser writer might appear irritatingly self-conscious. For instance, name-dropping and tradition-calling Jon easily gets away with the opening line "I went down to the Sally Gardens, Sally was waiting by the wall", and the cliché-bending rhyme "Sing a song of sixpence, a pocketful of broken things; four and twenty blackbirds soaring high on paper wings", by developing these thoughts into superbly sharply-observed emotional commentaries. Arguably more oblique is the mix of dark-hued gospel ("I love you well, but Jesus loves you best") and catchy pseudo-late-Beatles choral interjection bidding his Drunken Princess goodnight, while the altogether gentler Lemany cannily updates the tradition of love lyrics concerning the moment of awakening. The album's finale (Drinking The Night Away), a somewhat "slewed, skewed and stewed" Tom-Waits-like deconstruction, nay distillation, from a traditional Cajun melody, complete with cocktail-glass glockenspiel tinklings, is perhaps the only track which doesn't quite bear the same level of repeated listening as the rest.
Take my word for it: Painted Lady is a brave and adventurous, if sometimes quite raw-edged creation that manages to be in its way both experimental and challenging albeit in a positive and even organic sense rather than espousing the deliberately provocative "for the sake of being different/show-off-just-because-I-can" agenda. It sort-of-draws on folk, alt and indie rock, yet in truth sounds like none of them. In short, it's unique, at times appealingly eccentric, and in the end something of a masterpiece I think.

The Glasgow Herald
The Garage, Glasgow
Folk big bands have been bursting out all over since the turn of the century. Scotland has its Unusual Suspects. France had, until its recent sabbatical, the truly wonderful l'Occidentale de Fanfare. And for the past three or four years, Bellowhead has been pumping a brass transfusion through the English folk song and dance tradition's bloodstream.
They do it so well, too. Coming on like a New Orleans-style marching band has staggered into a folk ballad workshop by way of the local Sally Army citadel, this eleventet add dark theatre as well as boisterous fizz to make tales of ye olde scams and sail-era seafaring come alive in the moment.
Not that – some might say – their opening number, The Rigs of the Time, needs much updating and Jon Boden delivers this nineteenth-century slur on trading standards as if he's just been short-changed at the local mall.
Boden, whose partner in the popular duo Spiers & Boden lends his muscular melodeon playing to the ensemble, really comes into his own as Bellowhead's frontman. Part Blakean spiv, part circus ringmaster, he declaims his songs with terrific gusto and introduces them with just a touch of John Cleese's hotel proprietor.
Arrangements are contributed from all sides, making great use of trumpet, trombone, saxophone and tuba, cello and massed fiddles opportunities and even an oboe-bagpipes interlude.
A rumbling sousaphone riff kicked off one dance set; gleefully clattering salsa percussion oxygenised another. And a lovely brass chorale emphasised the imagination as well as oomph on offer from a band that managed the considerable feat of having a Glasgow audience voluntarily cheering for eleven players representing England.