Chris Wood is remarkable. There comes a character in every genre catalogue of music who truly is the whole package; musically talented, down to earth, interesting to speak to, socially aware, and ultimately, a pioneer to their section of their craft. In folk music, Chris Wood is your man. I had the pleasure of catching up with Chris last month before his show at Norwich Arts Centre…
His latest project – ‘Handmade Life’ – is an exceptional exploration of the issues associated with modern life, and the inspiration behind it shows a socially passionate man with educated and knowledgeable opinions to offer about all aspects of contemporary society. “I found out what ‘quantative easing’ actually is – they look at a spreadsheet for the country, then if they don’t like the figure at the bottom, they just change it,” he explains. “To change the figure in the nation’s spreadsheet is one thing, but then to carry on from that point as if that’s the real figure – that’s just too much.”
It’s these realisations that inspired and then led directly to the creation of ‘Handmade Life’. “Once you realise how virtual everything has become…I just needed my own kind of personal reality check. The songs [on ‘Handmade Life’] are about real things.”
A troubadour in every sense of the term, Chris credits much of his own work and the work of music as a whole to the idea of tradition, and values the traditions associated with folk as an important element of life and society. “What you’ve got in tradition is this incredible repository of our ancestors’ attempts to unriddle their universe. Now it seems arrogant to the point of stupid to just ignore that, and I think any time you do spend looking at that material, you will gather an incredible perspective of what it is to be a human being in the world,” he explains passionately.
Over the past eighteen months, music journalists – myself included – have exploded with terms, phrases and pigeonholes to tame the groups of new ‘folk’ artists emerging from London – from nu-folk to post-folk to alt-folk to anti-folk, it seems the idea of folk music is always pre-empted with another phrase these days. As it happens, of course, the musicians involved in making the music hate the titles, and Chris is no exception to this.
“It’s all bollocks,” he says unhappily. “As far as I’m concerned, you’ve got classical music, which I think is relatively easy to define – you tend to have a composer and then you tend to have a hierarchical structure which realises the works of the composer. Then you’ve got the ‘music industry’ – the Simon Cowell end of it, which really has nothing to do with music at all; for me, that’s not even on the radar. Everything else, as far as I’m concerned is folk.”
“I’ve been playing folk music for 35 years, and I’ve not yet found a name for what I’m doing,” he adds. “Go to America – look at their blues, their hiphop – it’s all folk. It’s all come from that.”
Interestingly, though, Chris has a theory about the renewed interest in folk and acoustic music. “There’s a cycle. Every now and again, the mainstream music industry completely runs out of ideas and basically it goes looking at folk music – ‘Could this be the next big thing?’” he explains. “They want to know if there’s any money in it, and there doesn’t seem to be, so they very quickly move onto something else.”
“However, the artists are getting much more savvy at connecting directly with the people. The question is whether the industry is leaning towards the folk music, or is it that the industry has slightly less control than it used to have, and now the people are deciding?” he muses with a cheeky grin. “As it turns out, what they’re interested in is this human level music where I sit down and sing you a song – no smoke and mirrors, no production team. If that’s what’s happening, then that really is a change, and it’s encouraging. It kinds of validates what I believe in.”
I spent a lengthy time with Chris and he was incredibly easy to speak to; as somebody heavily involved in music, you meet a lot of different personalities, but Chris was exceptionally interesting and exceptionally down to earth; the kind of guy you’d have a drink and a chat with at every opportunity at your local pub. The Blue Walrus will certainly be catching up with Chris in the future, and look forward to all he has to offer in 2010.
