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The stock of Brit-Folk has rarely been so high. Salutary
re-appraisals of The Incredible String Band and Fairport Convention
abound, while the Witchseason productions of Joe Boyd are now the stuff
of legend. Donovan's late Sixties recordings sound fresher than
campside cooking, and with his electronic interpretations of ancestral
songs, 22-year old Jim Moray may even succeed in taking Folk
into the mainstream.
It's a good time for sexagenarian Julie Felix to step back into the
spotlight. California raised, but adopted as one of our own back in
Blighty, Julie Felix was brought to fame after a chance meeting with David
Frost. A veteran of the Sixties folk boom, her own
UK TV series, and the legendary Isle Of Wight Festival, there is plenty
of turf to reclaim. With the help of some heavyweight studio players
(Ian Catt, Danny Thompson and John Paul Jones to name but three), The
Rainbow Collection should be an unqualified success.
It's certainly difficult to argue with Felix's credentials for the
role of guitar-slingin' agitator. Returning to England in the late 80s,
Felix became a noted figure in women's gay rights and peace protests.
Her work for Latin American refugees is reflected in the many Spanish
language recordings on this collection.
Assembled from recordings over the last thirty years, The Rainbow
Collection is certainly beautifully played, not least by Felix herself.
But...but...but...The Rainbow Collection belongs purely in an alternative
world where Bob Dylan never played the Newport Folk Festival, where
the archness of Masters Of War and the hope of Children Of Abraham
would still sound like clarion calls-to-arms for earnest young liberal
types. There's no doubting the commitment, but there's something binary and
absolutist in performing straight such material in the twenty-first
century.
Of course, the modern world is in direr need of peace protests than
ever before (when isn't it?), but there's a homespun quality to the
material that is unlikely to inspire many to rage against that
ever-imperious war machine.
Perhaps part of the problem is that much of the record has an
unerring similarity to BBC Schools programming soundtracks from the
seventies. Guitars are plucked with primary-coloured heartiness, and Felix's
voice quivers throughout like a Play School Joan Baez. Dylan
standards such as Hard Rain and Mr. Tambourine are given a shrill reading
while songs like Woman and The Ballad Of Doris Kathryn Rodehaver are
well-meant but mawkish deliberations on femininehood and suffer from a literal
motherlode of sentiment. And after John Cale and Jeff
Buckley, does the world need another treatment of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah?
If there are brighter moments to this set, then the hoary treatment
of Wild Mountain Thyme, buoyed, rather than burdened by a choir,
provides the careful conflation of fear and reverence that informs some of
the best Folk. Half-Mexican herself, Felix brings informed authority to
Woody Guthrie's Plane Wreck At Los Gatos (AKA Deportee), and
indeed, Los Mananitas and La Barert De Oro, sung entirely in Spanish, have
a unforced intimacy lacking in many of the other recordings.
If good politics always equalled great music, the eternal verities
of humanity just might be resolved overnight (alright, maybe over the
course of a week...) As it rarely does, I guess those Masters of War will
be 'building their bombs' for some time yet.
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