Strange how things come back. Got an email this morning from a friend asking if I knew anything about Tim Eriksen who's playing at The Betsey Trotwood with Steeleye Span's Peter Knight on the 20th July. Eriksen used to play in a band called Cordelia's Dad and he had a lot to do with the soundtrack to Cold Mountain. Now I just happen to have got a new hard drive and I've been moving loads of archive stuff off floppies and zip disks. And amongst this stuff was an interview that I did with Tim and Peter Irvine and Cath Oss in a cider pub in Bristol; it was cold and wintry so I reckon it was January. Anyway this piece never appeared in print and I'd forgotten that it was as complete as it was. This looks like it was ready for lay-out. So why not put it up here? Oh and by the way Cath Oss was there though she doesn't seem to have said anything and she's now Cath Tyler. So imagine yourself back in 1997 and take it from here:
In the wilds of last January I ventured to the nether regions of north-east London and a place called Highams Park. There, in an upper room. I saw three young Americans and an English friend mesmerise a bunch of middle aged unreconstructed folkies. They played a set of traditional American songs and tunes harking back to the nineteenth century, revitalising those tales of passion and intense emotion, gripping us with the starkness of their voices and the simple beauty of their acoustic instrumentation.
A couple of weeks later, at Bristol's Louisiana Club, the three Americans again mounted a stage, this time equipped for electric music. While the songs displayed unmistakably a traditional origin this was a set that was ragin' full on. Power trio stuff but with the poetry that only the finest protagonists aspire to; the balm inside the mayhem. Like Brass Monkey meeting Sonic Youth. In the hurly-burly of the extended 'Rapture Bird' my mind and my synapses were drawn back to the frenzy of Neil Young and Crazy Horse in Hamburg the previous summer as they deconstructed "Like A Hurricane". It was that good.
There are things we accept you can't do and so we don't even try them. It seems like nobody told Tim Eriksen, Peter Irvine and Cath Oss, or if they did they didn't listen. These guys have, in various combinations, been playing together as Cordelia's Dad since the late 1980s. Depending on where you see them, which records you get, they are a noise band, a folk band, a folk-rock band, a folk-noise band, a hard-core band or shape note singers. There's a dozen other categories, all as relevant and as meaningless. They're a band that has steeped themselves in the folk music of America and its English origins, they search out songs and variations on songs. The afternoon of the gig you may well find them digging in the local library.
For some years now they've been disconcerting the English folk music community, or the part of it with less catholic tastes, by presenting both sides of their coinage as Cordelia's Dad. They've now decided to be two bands. Cordelia's Dad for the acoustic shows and Io (pronounced eye-o) for the electric ones. It avoids confusion but lessens the surprise. From: http://bucketfullofbrains.blogspot.com/2010/07/cordelias-dad-interview-from-january.html
