Fish Records - Bellowhead

01.	Byker Hill	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
02.	Old Dun Cow
03.	Roll the Woodpile Down
04.	10,000 Miles Away	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
05.	Betsy Baker
06.	Black Beetle Pies	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
07.	Thousands or More
08.	Dockside Rant
09.	The Wife of Ushers Well
10.	Whats The Life Of A Man
11.	Lillibulero	play pause stop Update Required To play the media you will need to either update your browser to a recent version or update your Flash plugin.
12.	Go My Way

Bellowhead’s brand new album ‘Broadside’. Broadside is a positive spectacular, taking some of the wildest, most joyous and iconic songs in the richly colourful canon of the folk song tradition… and turning them upside down and inside out with the unique sense of drama and theatre, instrumental virtuosity, verve, humour and blind cheek that has seen them spearhead the new folk boom. Their third album Hedonism was the highest-selling independently released traditional folk album of all time, yet the new one Broadside (a title that rather cunningly melds an early form of printed song sharing with an appropriate nautical reference to firepower) is surely set to eclipse it with its thrilling arrangements and non-stop party spirit.

Like Hedonism, Broadside is produced by the great John Leckie, who has previously done wonderful things with the Stone Roses and Radiohead; and he’s now effectively captured all the explosiveness that has established Bellowhead’s undisputed reputation as one of the planet’s most exciting live bands and replicated it in the studio. In this case that studio is Rockfield, where Freddie Mercury once held court. Indeed, at one point the massed vocals even evoke Bohemian Rhapsody and Freddie would surely have identified with the electrifying dynamism and sense of fun conjured up by this very special band. A couple of the tracks are based on songs that initially found common currency in the form of those printed broadsides – the gruesome romp Black Beetle Pies for one and the spooky ballad The Wife Of Usher’s Well – all death, ghosts and “earthly flesh and blood” – for another. Weirdness also abounds with Betsy Baker, a vigorous tale of unrequited love, while some of the most venerated songs of the folk revival – Northumbrian mining song Byker Hill, the Copper Family classic Thousands Or More, the rocking sea shanty Go My Way and The Old Dun Cow – the knockabout tale of being trapped inside a burning pub – are revived in startling ways. They may be familiar, but they’ve never sounded like this before. There’s even an irresistibly bonkers take on Lillibulero, a satirical song set to a tune attributed to Henry Purcell, on which the band flex their considerable muscles and gleefully explore their seemingly bottomless box of magic tricks, emerging with storming vocals, blitzing percussion, rampaging strings and mad, bad brass.

Bellowhead - Broadside

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