It’s been on my to-do list far too long, overdue to tick it off. Foot-tappin’ West Country folk ensemble, Billy in the Lowground released this album at the end of August, apologies for not mentioning it sooner, but it is worth mentioning, very worth mentioning….
Rather than baked bean stains halfway up most of my T-shirts, this seven track release Halfway Up the T-Shirt, refers to festival billing. “Whenever we play a festival,” they explained, “we always look for our name on the official merch, and after thirty-odd years, we’re finally working our way up, away from the bottom line.. Hooray!”
To be frank, we don’t care where any festival organiser places them on the T-shirt, with an appealing brew of weighty Scrumpy & Western barefoot fiddles and banjo shenanigans, they’ll lift any T-shirt to expose a rotund hairy belly of upbeat Irish folk, and we love them for that here at Devizine Towers!
Ambiguous is the name, a phrase in a poem about William of Orange defeating the Irish Catholic forces at the Battle of the Boyne, knee-deep in a river, most likely, but other suggestions, like the poem being a parody of Hamlet’s soliloquy, a folk song about William the Conqueror, even “Billy” being slang for a Yankee soldier in the US Civil War, have been passed about, but you didn’t need to know that! You only need to know Billy in the Lowground have been musically ploughing their field since 1991, and have consequently become hugely proficient at it.
Halfway up the T-Shirt is seven strong tracks of goodness, not quite an album length but longer than an EP, a novelette if it was work of literature. “Fact is, we could only afford to get seven tracks finished before we ran out of cash,” they said, so buy this if only to get them more studio time, because it’s a worthy seven tracks to leave you yearning for more.
Follow My Road is a ripping opening, with guest guitarist Rob Fawcett. It’s a hard rock groove, a blues theme, with the uplifting riff of The Levellers at their finest. All Hail the Clown follows suit, it rolls heavy with a healthy dollop of sublime fiddle. So the Story Grows, three tracks in, takes us in an irresistible, rootin’-tootin’ bluegrass melody. With Be It Good, Be It Bad the fiddles and twangy guitars of bluegrass continues, but this one really brings out the Dylan-esque rawness of Chris Hibberd’s gritty vocals, uptempo and reminding me somewhat of Subterranean Homesick Blues, if it was recorded live at County Louth’s Ti Chairbre. Unsure why, as the whole album has that raw energy; it’s a Billy in the Lowground trademark, and it’s beguiling.
The album is stylised and flows on a lofty level, given this, Billy should be at the collar of the shirt. Fallen Queen is a monster to hail along to, fire you up akin to The Pogues’ Transmetropolitan, but paced. The penultimate Part of The Show builds in layers unlike the others, and for this it’s the most epic. Already released as a single, the finale, No Chance for a Slow Dance does what it says on the tin. Billy in the Lowground at their finest, it bears all the hallmarks of a magnum opus. It’s rinsed with upbeat fiddle and banjo, it takes you on a journey similar to The Dropkick Murphy’s, and impossible to stay still to; yet the whole album is gold, sprinkled perhaps with some mud kicked up from the field you’re dancing to it in.
I saw them at the Bradford Roots Festival, in that purpose-built breezeblock beauty. The acoustics in there are incredible, but next time I see Billy in the Lowground I’d favour it being in an ancient west country boozer where the carpet smells of wet dog hair and the odour of campfires drifts through the windows. Where the cider is passed around a packed crowd of steaming boaters, the band play stacked on top of each other in an alcove, knocking brass plates off the wall behind them! That said, they are at The Three Horseshoes in Bradford-on-Avon on 11th October, not that I’m calling anyone names!
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