John Renbourn's Ship Of Fools: Renbourn went back in time even more than normal for the title of his album and band: Ancient Greece. It was Plato who first coined the metaphor of a 'ship of fools', meaning a group of people adrift without a proper leader, although knowing his love of all things Medieval John probably discovered the phrase through the paintings by Sebastian Brant (from whose work the album cover is taken). At first this wasn't meant to be an album or even a proper band, but John was invited to perform a set for an outdoor festival in Central park and figured he needed some amplification. The friends who took up John's invitation included old hands from his solo and 'Group' days such as Tony Roberts, Steve Tilston and Maggie Boyle, who all had their interests in John's favourite era of music. The concerts were well received and led to a tour, which was also well received and led to this album which features the usual mixture of traditional tunes from the Middle Ages along with three new John originals. Though Maggie Boyle is no Jacqui McShee, she is thank goodness a Maggie Boyle - another one of a kind singer with a delightful warm and velvet tone that coats an iron fist, closer in style to Maddy Prior or Linda Thompson than Jacqui's purer style. She's a good fit for these songs as is the rest of the band.
The fuller band sound makes it one of John's more interesting and unusual albums, with a sound quite unlike his usual guitar-based albums and with its more traditional players doesn't sound like the folkier John Renbourn Group either. At times this is to the album's benefit: 'Searching For Lambs' works well with four contrapuntal parts weaving around each other with the vocals on top, while 'I Live Not Where I Love', a very 1960s ballad about loss despite written closer to 1460, is one of John's prettier arrangements. And at other times its the loss: John's playing is hard to hear under so many extras and at times he really takes a back seat to everything else going on, which just makes this another exercise in re-creating old music without the usual Renbourn magic ('Lark In The Clear' for instance is mainly a flute solo without the song). What pushes this album over the edge into being one of the better albums of Renbourn's career is the emphasis on actual songs for a change rather than just instrumentals.
The title track, for instance, is a poetic take on the old story about a rudderless craft, more interested in description than allegory ('Rainbow colours that befell from stem to stern entrances me so'). John's regular 'Traveller's Prayer' also makes the first of several appearances, here as a pure Madrigal sung by four voices which is a hymn to the moon that's very atmospheric, praying for salvation and help for those suffering a lonely night in distress (it's an insomniac classic!) 'The Martinmass Wind' (celebrating a pagan day dedicated to the coming of winter, held on November 11th) is a much overlooked song too, a gorgeous song about loneliness and wishing you were home, the narrator fearing their love is broken by the geographical distance between when a tree snaps from under them. Though the more traditional songs aren't quite up to this high standard, the three new songs alone make this one of Renbourn's most interesting albums, perhaps his best of the post-Pentangle records. Far from being a ship of fools, Renbourn has rarely been surrounded by players this good and this is perhaps his greatest band following Pentangle. A shame there wasn't a sequel. From: http://alansalbumarchives.blogspot.com/2016/10/pentangle-sololivecompilationreunion.html
