The People’s String Foundation may not stay Cornwall’s best kept secret for much longer, if the performance of the jolly consortium of top-end musicians who played to wild applause in Penryn this Saturday is anything to go by.

Ben Sutcliffe and Zaid Al-Rakabi’s classical/prog rock baby (or whatever you care to call music that, in the best music-journo tradition of trying to explain a new band with an unlikely fusing of two old ones, we’ll say for the time being sounds like the Penguin Cafe Orchestra popping in for tea with 65 Days of Static) is already a major festival standfast and someone who’s someone is going to have to notice them soon.

31 year old Ben met Zaid, who’s 27, two years ago as they both played out solo at jam session nights in Falmouth and Perranporth.

Professionally trained, they sought out other musicians who shared their goals and could keep up with playing seven gigs a pop in one festival weekend and came up with violinist Clare Tomlinson, who studied at Truro College, jazz trained Chris Jones , an alumnus of the Birmingham conservatoire who teaches bass in Falmouth, and Truro-trained drummer Harry Harding, 23, from Bristol.

The result is a lush, multi-layered explosion of hooks in what I dimly understand to be counterpoint, (could be the wrong word, but you’ll know roughly what I mean if you check it out), over a faultless rhythm section.

Which is nice – as indeed are the band members, who can’t, and have no wish to, contain the obvious thrill they get out of playing together.

They’ve been enjoying success across the country as they build up a following but bassist Chris Jones says Cornwall will always be “The home of ‘The strings’”.

The 27 year old from Falmouth told us: “We’ve been a band for about two years.

“Ben and Zaid met in Cornwall, they were playing solo, at jam sessions in Perranporth and Falmouth.

“They started writing and initially the People’s String Foundation was just those two: it was a very organic thing – gravity pulled us together.

“Ben and Zaid have a very firm grasp of what they’re doing and what the next two albums are going to be and I’m happy to go with it.

“They’re all concept albums. We played a whole album out at the Falmouth Poly

“They decided to put on a massive show and we wanted to play there to raise money for them because Falmouth needs Iranian cinema -we’re totally into that.

“We’ve played Glastonbury this year, and ended up doing about six gigs, one on the Chai Wallah stage and a load of others.”

“And when we go to a festival now we try and play two or three stages, make everyone jump around a lot, and head off and play again.

“Festivals are great for spreading your sound around. We’re hoping to do small theatres next – like Peapods but with a bigger capacity.”

“We’re likely to head to Bristol next to look for gigs but Cornwall is where our heart is: this is where we had our first gigs.

“Clare lived in a boat in Ponsharden, Ben’s from Perranporth.

“Everyone always remarks on how smiley Ben is on stage and I think that’s something about Cornwall and about the positive attitude we have.

“We played the Eden Cafe last night and there was a lot of people who had seen us for the first time, so hopefully it’s onward and upward.”

“But we’ll always be staying in the South West – that’s the home of the ‘Strings’.”

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The other day, at one of the many Car Boot sales my substantial positon of wealth and power within the Duchy demands that I attend, I picked up a Barry Manilow album, at the not unreasonable price of 15p.

Unscratched and boasting a fine picture of our Baz in full make up and medallion on its beige-tinted cover, this 33rpm blast from the past includes such classics as Cocacobana, Could it be Magic and ‘Mandy’.

They’re all good songs. You can sing them, your Granny can sing them, your niece can sing them. Mandy in particular is a classic example of how to write a pop ballad.

Writing a pop ballad is not rocket science, once you’ve got a bit of a name for yourself and some agressive PR or supersonic self-fulfilling kudos, the three latter being by far the rarest ingredients required for success.

To write a pop ballad, start in the key of your choice with one major chord. Now lower the bottom note of that chord one tone, but keep the top end of the chord in play. Now move progressively, or randomly, down five keys, all the time keeping the top half of your chord in place, until landing in the complementary key five notes down for resolution.

You may now move up or down scale or in and out of different keys using the same formula, and with the option of a chorus, and stay safe within the indomitable confines of a surefire singalong hit.

If you don’t believe me, try it at home. John Barry’s You Only Live Twice, David Bowie’s Life on Mars (recently voted the UK’s favourite pop record of all time), Paul McCartney’s Let It Be – and of course, Barry Manilow”s ‘Mandy’ – they’re virtually the same song if you play them in the same key.

Now there are shades of grey in these various artistic conformities. Let It Be, Life on Mars, You Only Live Twice are all written to formula, but some trademark of their authors still leave them with an edge: McCartney’s Let It Be sounds so sincere it’s more like a hymn than a pop song, Life on Mars has a load of cat-in-coitus wailing all over it and Mick Ronson’s wild fingers conducting the string arrangement, and John Barry can’t go two minutes into anything without throwing in his unique spine-tingling off-note and dischord: the real reason, I’ve always suspected, for the amazing success of the James Bond films (not to mention The Ipcress File or Out of Africa).

Barry Manilow just wrote ‘Mandy’, according to the instructions, which is why ‘Mandy’ is crap, and the other three are good. Nothing to do with Barry Manilow being a tit and the others having kudos – John Barry was considered cheesy once, but he lived to fight another day.

It’s the music, stupid.

All of which brings me on to James Morrison, and why he’s doomed, unless he assiduously makes the most money he possibly can right now while he’s still pretty and while building a base career on the sly to fall back on, or else works very, very hard indeed at acheiving Manilow-like mass appeal. Because having a couple of platinum albums is one thing – many are the platinum discs that adorn the walls of rural hoteliers and small businessmen and women in their latter years – but it’s surely just your first scouts badge on the way to becoming a fully fledged star, and I don’t see why James Morrison shouldn’t become one – (a star not a scouts badge, before my English teacher emails in to complain).

I’ve never heard anything by James Morrison that’s been either original or to my admittedly slightly eccentric taste musically appealing, and the obvious truth his mirror on the wall is unlikely to tell him any morning soon is that he can’t stay cool forever, and he has to decide at some point if he’s going to retire gracefully or become Val Doonican.

As far as I can tell his many fans are chiefly girls – and of course that’s no doubt rather jolly for him, to say the least. The question he wants to be asking is, do I want to grow old with these chicks,and sit out my middle age Tom Jones style with them throwing their baggy knickers at me until I’ve enough wrinkles to be adopted as an icon by their grandchildren – or do I decide there are other things in life and make some decent music?

Now from a selfish point of view, you’d choose the Tom Jones option any day. I mean, what a life. But it’s all rather depressing isn’t it, when My Elvis Blackout can’t make it, and Phaked Soundsystem is still stuck in Far West Cornwall, but James Morrison, after torturing Porth beachgoers incognito for years with his campfire busking, now gets to do it on GMTV and Loose bloody Women.

But there I suppose you have the answer to all my pretentious questions: because just because James Morrison isn’t John Barry doesn’t mean he’s an idiot, and you wouldn’t play prime time ITV unless you had a practical grasp of your talents.

So good luck to him I say, and long may he continue to be a nice man and have a jolly life pleasing the general public with cliched chord progressions. No-one could ever accuse him of being unpleasant, and coming back to Cornwall to raise cash for a local charity is thoroughly laudable, and he deserves respect for it: but I don’t have to lie and say I think he’s any good, and until someone breaks me the news that something interesting has happened in one of his songs, I won’t be listening to any more of them outside the call of duty, because I honestly think I have a fairly good idea of what they’re all going to sound like before the first chord is strummed.

But then who am I? Just a fat, whingeing old would-be aesthete who children point and laugh at in the street. I’d rather be thick-necked, tone deaf nice man James Morrison surrounded by hot blondes any day.

To see just how bad James Morrison was at the Hall for Cornwall, scroll up to this fan-shot of him playing You Make it Real at the Hall for Cornwall (by Morrison fan Elizabeth Robynn) and click in and out of the Manilow himself banging out ‘Mandy’ in his prime.

Now tell me I’m wrong.

Lots of Love

Ed Hunter

The teenage female exclamation AAAAAIIIEEEYYYY translated into English means:

1. Nipple piercing really hurts I’m never going to believe anything that Kelly tells me every again
2. Mother, my poster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer has gone and I have just found it in my brothers’ room why is it all damp
3. I appear to be within actual visual range of Mr Paolo Nutini

Yes, when you see superwealthy festival Godfarmer Michael Eavis skip onto the Eden stage and announce to a crowd of screaming but well-behaved young girls largely accompanied by their parents that ‘The find of the Summer is here’, you know you’re not in for many musical surprises. And Paolo, bless his gleaming pearly whites and his studied just got out of bed in a sundrenched whitewashed cottage overlooking a small Italian harbour and found the vicars inaccessible daughter in bed with me look, did his best not to surprise. A full acoustic band, happy clappy pounding reggae-echo beats, and a lot of jumping around ensued, and great fun it was, and everyone had a lovely time, and surely only a tortured bitter deliberately misanthropic and confused soul could possibly not have the time of their life – which brings me on to Martha Wainwright.

I like Martha Wainwright. Pretty much on the basis of her Eden gig – as I had, prior to attending, absolutely no idea who either Martha Wainwright or Paolo Nutini might be, except that one sounded like a ceramics teacher in the Archers, and the other some rising Tour De France rider sponsored by a Hazelnut spread. Paolo Nutini may wear Morrisey’s shirt, but Martha Wainwright carries his torch, in a kind of kinky French-Canadian way. She swears a lot, but I’ve always found that terribly engaging, as long as the blasphemer’s not wearing a tracksuit and toting a can of cider. It wasn’t very convincing swearing – the famous musical prodigy of a famous musical family surely can’t have that much to swear about – I mean, it’s not proper John Lydon swearing – but it’ll do. And there is something about Martha that rather grabs you. I don’t really care that she’s well to do, or out of touch with what it means to have to work all day in a factory for years, because she makes up for it by at least being honest. Whining about whether she should be ‘fucking all night’ and screaming again and again about ‘arseholes’ – to rapturous applause, naturally – may be a little self-indulgent, but it’s not pop, it’s not fake, it’s not made up, and the worst you can say about it is that it’s self indulgent, which is forgiveable in good art. On which note, it’s worth pointing out that she can pitch a tune. Also her band all look cool, and one of them’s about fifty, which is nice, and made her all the more reminiscent of the fanstastic and much lamented since she inevitably and completely disappeared up her own behind PJ Harvey. Harvey was always at her best surrounded by a thumping tight indie band, and Martha Wainwright has backed herself with a good bunch of musos too – which brings me on to Ruarri Joseph.

Cornwall has an eccentric and in a way an unhappy history of musical prodigies. Let’s be honest, as far as the rest of the world is concerned, the bloke that sang the Laughing Policeman was Cornish, and after that, there wasn’t really anyone until the Aphex Twin, who shuns publicity, lives in a tank, and spends all the time he has left over from circuit bending with his teeth deliberately antagonising record producers by accepting fantastically large cheques for work he subsequently ensures is simply dreadful. No doubt there’s some tremendous moral of how money can’t buy you talent there, but much as punters like you and me are bound to love him for such cheeky antics, obviously the music industry is just going to blacklist him over champagne and cocaine at Soho House, or whatever bores do now. Ruarri Joseph, who’s as Cornish as a 4ft tall 5ft wide miner swimming to safety out of a flooded tin deposit by using his three foot wide pasty rind as a float, was signed to Atlantic in 2006. And rightly so. Tales of Grime and Grit came out in 2007 and was great, and then – with typical Wild West contrariness – Ruarri signed off, and pretty much offered up the next album, Both Sides of the Coin, from his shed. Good luck to him – except that his luck changed rather seriously not long afterwards, as traumatic real life events necessarily eclipsed his career plans. Family man Ruarri, as you’d expect the best of us to in the same circumstances, put the entertainment business pretty much on hold while he had to deal with his eldest son undergoing major brain surgery, at a time when his wife was also pregnant. So for those following his progress, it was all the more welcome when a couple of months ago out of Pip Records – the shed venture of afore – came Shoulder to the Wheel – a very grown up and soulful offering that won yet more plaudits. Guess who’s back? – as that bloke named after the chocolate covered peanuts would say. Ruarri’s back, we all cry in reply.

And so it would seem he really is: on stage at Eden, the Newquay boy rocked: the friendly aura he shared with the local crowd – strumming away in bare feet, working up a singalong, dedicating numbers to his wife – all belie the fact that here in our back yard we have – yet another – massively talented, homegrown professional, knocking out nice original tunes that get lucky national critics who are sent his records going but never quite get their hook into the music-buying, tune-humming public. You don’t watch many male vocalists who aren’t famous get through a track in acappella without sounding uncomfortable, and our Ruarri did that and more at the last Eden Session. He’s got 200,000 followers on his MySpace – so why hasn’t the wider world hasn’t heard more of him?

Personally I think there’s a curse on the county and the only possible solution is for Tim Smit to lobby central Government to pay Ed Prynn, druid extraodinaire, millions of taxpayers pounds to lift it.

Now Ed Prynn I would like to see on stage at Eden. As MC for Jericho Soundsystem.

So that’s next years sessions sorted then.

© Cornwall Community News. Words and pix. No thieving.