Bellow World
 Photo: Bryan Ledgard |
But in that time they’ve turned in enough rip-roaring performances – including a floor-breaking performance at Sidmouth and a set at Celtic Connections that’s already passed into the realms of legend – to win the best live act gong at this year’s BBC Folk Awards. And if anyone doubted their right to claim that award they would have been blown away when Bellowhead opened the ceremony with a big breathtaking brassy performance of Copshawholme Fair, incorporating clog dancing and rapper in a spectacular cameo from The Demon Barber Roadshow. After that the other nominees for best live act – Martin Simpson, Oysterband and Chris While & Julie Matthews – must have wondered why they’d bothered to turn up at all. There was also the five-track E.P.Onymous that, conceived as a demo to get them gigs, ended up with an almost embarrassing array of ecstatic reviews and selling by the lorryload to online fans. All this while all 11 members play with other bands and the two most recognisable figures, Jon Boden and John Spiers, have continued their own adventures as a duo, while playing a key role in Eliza Carthy’s excellent band, the Ratcatchers.
The simple fact is that amid all the chaos and an apparently random game plan, Bellowhead are not only turning this English music thing on its head, they’re throwing forward rolls, backward somersaults and a bit of tightrope walking into the mix too. An enthralling cocktail of styles, influences and effects, they seem to be skating on the seat of their pants half the time, but be it Boden’s increasingly Bellamy-esque vocals, Paul Sartin’s hugely funny MC technique, the volleys of brass raising the temperature at will, the decidedly oddball rhythms and percussive charges or the irresistible squeezebox forays of John Spiers, they are taking us all somewhere new. Nobody knows quite where yet – least of all themselves – but the journey’s already great fun and is likely to get a whole lot spicier before any of us is very much older.