Welcome to a bumper sampler across the full range of our work - folk,  country, Americana, indie, rock, ghazals. (We are busy little bees and played and sang everything except - Guest guitarist on "The May Queen" & "The Ballad of Sir Robert Walpole": Warwick Jones. Sax on "Come All Ye": Johnny Davies.) These are either our own knockout favourite tracks and/or ones which have  clocked up over a thousand plus worldwide.

Fill Your Head With Peacock

62 Januarys today the Beatles were on their first proper tour, a gruelling 5 gig winter whirlwind through Scotland. The first night (January 2, in the Highlands) was cancelled by arctic weather. The second was in an L shaped room in the Two Red Shoes Ballroom, Elgin, Morayshire in which some of the dancers couldn’t even see the pre-Fab Four on the stage. The third - Twelfth Night 1963 – was in the Museum Hall, Bridge of Alan, Stirlingshire. The final night of the tour, on the day the decorations come down, was in the Sea Beach Ballroom in Aberdeen.

They thought they were doing well....

This EP tells you what happened next. From our LP https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-60-years-ago-today-lp

It Was 60 Years Ago Today (The Beatles story)

This will always remind us of being locked down in shared isolation during the first wave of Covid 19. We started making and recording music together - and walking our local version of Middle Earth (the Barrow Downs in N. Norfolk) during the days - and streamed the TV show The Detectorists in the evenings. All three things came together in this early venture.

https://youtu.be/x-75upWjwzM

Will you search through the loamy earth for me?
Climb through the briar and bramble
I'll be your treasure
I felt the touch of the kings and the breath of the wind
I knew the call of all the song birds
They sang all the wrong words
I'm waiting for you
I'm waiting for you
Will you swim through the briny sea for me?
Roll along the ocean's floor?
I'll be your treasure
I'm with the ghosts of the men who can never sing again
There's a place, follow me
Where a love lost at sea
Is waiting for you
Is waiting for you

The Detectorists

Leila means 'the dark one' or 'daughter of the night' in Hebrew and Arabic. (Coincidentally,'Melanie' - Maz, who is singing here, also carries that meaning in Greek.) 'Majnun' means crazed in Arabic, in this case crazed with love. Leila and Majnun is a Persian romance of permanently parted lovers. Their love intensified after their enforced parting. Leila's foot bled when Majnun's foot trod upon a nail 100 miles away. The Indian spiritual master Meher Baba (a Zoroastrian by birth and of Persian ancestry) references the story as an example of how such self-consuming love is a kind of divine madness that leads one to God.

We tell the story via a ghazal - in English but following a formal Persian metre-  (sung twice) then a sonnet, then a coda. The story of the parted lovers Majnun and Leila  is a recurring reference point in the collection of poems these lyrics are taken from www.sheriarbooks.org/product/6-degrees-of-separation/, their longing love agony leading ultimately to a self-transcending union with the All in all. As befits the ghazal form and the consuming Taj Mahal intensity of the love between them.



O Majnun, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You’re stripped of even your held breath and kiss what God alone knows.

This Leila I love is a chantress, her mouth like a painted rose,
Her ringed hands fly out of time's rut and pluck my harp of its woes.

This Leila I love is a dancer, unfastened hair like a tide,
Her body held in a soft flame of stillness, freed in a pose.

This Leila I love is a priestess who trails her heaven scent
To hell and back round a navel the musk-deer endlessly roves.

This Leila I love is a goddess, whose neck is softer than sky,
She turns to me like a planet, and everything else explodes.

O Majnun, this quest is your own end, you're lost and that's why you win,
You’re stripped of even your held breath and kiss what God alone knows.

(repeats )


Our lips blown apart on the wind like a bee
From the flower’s haven, he lives, eats, drinks
And solely breathes and as sleeplessly thinks
Only of me for whose rival he’d die,
If wedding that rival made me happy -
Happy alone in this cleaving that links
Our broken heart as punctured souls wince
In divided union’s bliss agony.

But when his prayer is crushed between our lips
And kisses come inside me like a bee's
And draw my honey from me, every drop,
A stillness comes upon me as of ships
That tall and stately slide beneath the sea's
Uncharted depths. "Oh God," I whisper, "stop...."



Forbidden other half, who elevates
My depths and takes my breath,
Elusive scent I seek through scorching
Desert day and iced night-ravine,
Up precipice and swirling peak
To fall and breathe my last at last –
Her Everest source in Me. (‘The Musk Deer.’)


 
credits
from Arti (EP),  released February 24, 2024  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/leila-and-majnun
Maz- vocal
Gaz- Voices, bass, tabla, percussion, harmonium, harp.

There's a music video using images from our pilgirmage to Meherabad in India with our then 8 year old daughter in 1994 (and my earlier one in 1989 where I first came across the  ghazal metres which have fascinated me ever since). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1lWCd1cbogg

Leila and Majnun

Alison Krauss sings a stunning version and the song itself was a stand out track in the "Oh Brother" movie.

As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the star and crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O sisters let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
O sisters let's go down,
Down in the river to pray.
As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O brothers let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
Come on brothers let's go down,
Down in the river to pray.
As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the robe and crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O mothers let's go down,
Come on down, don't you want to go down,
Come on mothers, let's go down,
Down in the river to pray.
As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the starry crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O fathers let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
O fathers let's go down,
Down in the river to pray.
As I went down to the river to pray
Studying about that good old way
And who shall wear the star and crown
Good Lord, show me the way !
O sinners let's go down,
Let's go down, come on down,
O sinners let's go down,
Down in the river to pray.
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), track released September 7, 2021
Down to the River to Pray lyrics © Hal Leonard LLC
prior to 1867 when it was published in "Slave Songs of the U.S."
(from the best description on its historyhttp://www.choralnet.org/view/257262 )

Pic of Ladywell, Sedgeford, Norfolk by Bhas Allan.

Down To The River To Pray

From our Beatles celebration album https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/it-was-60-years-ago-today-lp 

Pic is a screengrab from our music video of the track- https://youtu.be/mexXmD1aOsg

Lennon was definitely the Joker in the pack of the Beatles and - as when he introduces an early song as "You've Really Got A Hold On Me, Mother" - the jokes are often as dark as they are brilliantly funny. Circumstances probably made this musical joke at the establishment's expense darker and angrier than it might have been. 'Walrus' was the first project the Beatles undertook bereft of their manager Brian Epstein ("We've had it now," he predicted with some perception of the gradual drifting apart of the Four for All and All for Four after 1967) and the last line Ifrom the live feed of 'King Lear' on the Third Programme at the end is Oswald's "O untimely death'. The track was released on December 8 1967, 13 years to the day its composer would be shot dead in New York.

The mysticism of the opening line ("I am he as you are he as you are and me are all together") (like "one thing I can tell you is you got to be free" in 'Come Together' ) glimpses what the rest of the song rages that we don't see with him. Lennon along with many other long summer dreamers was spending a lot of weekends through the looking sky-diamond glass with Alice at the time. 
lyrics
I am he as you are he as you are me
And we are all together
See how they run like pigs from a gun
See how they fly
I'm crying
Sitting on a corn flake
Waiting for the van to come
Corporation T-shirt, stupid bloody Tuesday
Man you've been a naughty boy
You let your face grow long
I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob
Mister City policeman sitting
Pretty little policemen in a row
See how they fly like Lucy in the sky, see how they run
I'm crying, I'm crying
I'm crying, I'm crying
Yellow matter custard
Dripping from a dead dog's eye
Crabalocker fishwife, pornographic priestess
Boy, you've been a naughty girl, you let your knickers down
I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob
Sitting in an English garden
Waiting for the sun
If the sun don't come you get a tan
From standing in the English rain
I am the egg man (now good sir)
They are the egg men (a poor man, made tame to fortune's blows)
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob (good pity)
Expert, texpert choking smokers
Don't you think the joker laughs at you (ho ho ho, hee hee hee, hah hah hah)
See how they smile like pigs in a sty, see how they snide
I'm crying
Semolina Pilchard
Climbing up the Eiffel tower
Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna
Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allen Poe
I am the egg man
They are the egg men
I am the walrus
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob
Goo goo g'joob, goo goo goo g'joob, goo
Joob, joob, jooba
Jooba, jooba, jooba
Joob, jooba
Joob, jooba
Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper (jooba, jooba)
Umpa, umpa, stick it up your jumper
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)
Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper)
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)
Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper)
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)
Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper)
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)
Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper)
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)
Everybody's got one (stick it up your jumper)
Everybody's got one (umpa, umpa)

(from 'King Lear') O untimely death
I know thee well
A serviceable villain, as duteous to the vices of thy mistress
As badness would desire
What, is is he dead?
Sit you down, Father, rest you
credits
from It Was 60 Years Ago Today (LP), track released February 10, 2023
Lennon-McCartney (and Shakespeare).
The poems sampled are Edgar Allan Poe's "From Childhood" and Lewis Carroll's "The Walrus and the Carpenter" (which was performed by Tweedledum and Tweedledee in chapter 4 of "Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There")

I Am The Walrus

This song appealed strongly to both of us. The supercharged emotion conveyed through a storm of many vivid details (like an imagist or concrete poem) each detail sparse and understated but diamond clear, the plucked heart not given to displays of emotion here shattered by heartbreak recollected in tranquility; the hard glittering edges of naked female vulnerability; holding a smashed mirror up to Dylan and giving the counter story to the one we usually hear. 

"You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes, I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid"

plus of course the throat-throbbing Baez vocal. The two protagonists were both brilliant performers and the rapport they still had together in the 1974 rematch (Baez managing to be even cooler than Bob) after their glorious early 60s partnership is well worth looking up. Apparently she has performed the song every decade since - including a fabulous recent reinterpretation with Judy Collins (both still sound amazing) - but has decided to stop updating the "Ten Years Ago..." once she got to "Fifty Years Ago...".

Maz's first venture into finger plucking guitar.


Well, I'll be damned
Here comes your ghost again
But that's not unusual
It's just that the moon is full
And you happened to call
And here I sit
Hand on the telephone
Hearing a voice I'd known
A couple of light years ago
Heading straight for a fall
As I remember your eyes
Were bluer than robin's eggs
My poetry was lousy you said
Where are you calling from?
A booth in the midwest
Ten years ago
I bought you some cufflinks
You brought me something
We both know what memories can bring
They bring diamonds and rust
Well, you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes, the girl on the half-shell
Could keep you unharmed
Now I see you standing
With brown leaves falling all around
And snow in your hair
Now you're smiling out the window
Of that crummy hotel
Over Washington Square
Our breath comes out white clouds
Mingles and hangs in the air
Speaking strictly for me
We both could have died then and there
Now you're telling me
You're not nostalgic
Then give me another word for it
You who are so good with words
And at keeping things vague
'Cause I need some of that vagueness now
It's all come back too clearly
Yes, I loved you dearly
And if you're offering me diamonds and rust
I've already paid

Diamonds And Rust

At the end of Abbey Road was a crossroads. John turned left; Paul turned right; Ringo turned back and George...kept going.

But being Love’s music, it plays on from heart to heart, and each new generation catches it and sings along. It was rock n roll, the heartbeat of the Sixties, the catchiest art music ever. It did not set out to be Shakespeare. But then neither did Shakespeare. It was beat music with a State School education. When Sinatra takes his trilby off to it – the “greatest love song” of his fifty years – and he sang a few - you know they had that Something She didn’t even know She had until He Held Her Hand and told her.

This incurable Beatlemaniac never stopped hoping Cindy would turn up at my door, just as I never stop hoping she'll come to one of these shows. (Not today.) But in the end (along with the love you take being equal to the love you make) I have learned to Let It Be. Johnny went West and Cindy went East and and maybe She ( and Love) is still there. The world is full of heartache but the radio is full of love songs. A blackbird sings in the madhouse grounds, heart overflowing in the evening quiet. Imagine it’s Eden because oh boy when that bird sings, it really is.

'All You Need Is Love' was probably John's last mainstream Beatle hit. However competitive Paul was ("They weren't collaborators" said George Martin "but competitors") he was generous enough to recognise that John had written the better zeitgeist for the BBC satellite broadcast of England's choice for the One World project than 'Your Mother Should Know' his own typically charming but much slighter effort . George also paid homage to this ultimate hippy hit 'All You Need Is Love'. Indeed, he spent most of his subsequent solo career writing and singing his own versions of its message, including an open homage to it on 'All Those Years Ago" '. If Paul followed his usual mutual practice of competing with John, he certainly didn't manage to match 'All You Need Is Love's' singalong mix of heavy gravity, anthemic cogency and sheer uplift with that Winged wonder 'Silly Love Songs' but he may have done with the Beatle album track 'The End' - not a hit single but a worthy and self-conscious valediction to the Beatle career and, as the climax of 'Abbey Road,' a different kind of hit probably played as much as most Sixties singles.'The End' is a beautifully constructed epitaph - or devout eulogy - to the same steadfast Beatle hippy faith. 

Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
There's nothing you can do that can't be done
Nothing you can sing that can't be sung
Nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It's easy
Nothing you can make that can't be made
No one you can save that can't be saved
Nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It's easy
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love
All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

Oh yeah, all right
Are you going to be in my dreams
Tonight?
And in the end
The love you take
Is equal to the love you make

from It Was 60 Years Ago Today (LP) https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/all-you-need-is-the-love-you-make3

All You Need Is The Love You Make - 31:01:2025

It Was 62 years ago today, Hard Days taught the band to play. On February 11 1963 , after an eight days a week schedule of hard day’s nights across the north of England (including their first out of town gig at the Oasis Club Manchester,) 4 likely lads from Liverpool went in to Studio Two EMI Studios London to record a fabulous 14 track debut album. They could only afford to book the studio for one day so the whole thing was recorded in 24 continuous hours. This track (originally from our album " It Was 60 Years Ago Today" peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/track/beat-music) tells the story of that moment.

Once upon a time there was darkness. The repeated
hitting of a metallic object: at first without
rhythm, then attaining rhythm. A train-rhythmic bell-
beat of hard docky places.

“Beat music. Music of the beaten. Only we weren’t
beaten. We beat. Where are we going fellers?”
“To the top, Johnny, to the top.”
“And where’s that fellers?”
“To the toppermost of the poppermost.”

The beat was seized from the heart of darkness and
brought in chains down rivers of blood. It came back
to haunt the harbours of Slave City. It was unloaded
in the cargoes. It broke out of caverns and
warehouses, out of steel and stone, off wharfs and
docksides, out of ships from America. It scraped its
feet across concrete. It ran wild in young bloods and
cool cats in the corridors and cul-de-sacs of
Liverpool...

“We quarried the beat from metal and stone.”
“We called ourselves the Quarrymen.”
“We hammered it into life and shape.”
“We called it - The Beat-alls.”

When George joins, they start going places, like the
Oasis Club Manchester. When Ringo joins, they start
rocking the world. Whoops of joy in 4 part harmony. 3 cool cat choir. Cavernous drum. Great clunking guitar solos. A HAND FULL OF PERFECT NOTES.

Holding hands that wash
dishes, hands that cup faces. Hands flung at
diamonds, hands ringed with dreams, shake-it-up baby
faces, sweet little teens. Anything that you want.
We. Can. Do!

Peterborough:

"The exciting Beatles rock group quite frankly failed to excite me. The drummer apparently thought his job was to lead, not to provide rhythm. He made for too much noise and in their final number 'Twist and Shout' it sounded as though everyone was trying to make more noise than the others. In a more mellow mood, their 'A Taste of Honey' was much better and "Love Me Do' was tolerable.

Abergavenny, Aston, Middlesborough, Newcastle, Leeds,
Norwich, Great Yarmouth, London...
“Doesn’t it worry you that teenagers are imitating
you by wearing Beatle wigs?”
They’re not imitating us because we don’t wear Beatle
wigs.

Paris...
“John, the French haven’t made up their minds about
the Beatles yet. What do you think of them?”
“Oh, we like the Beatles. They’re gear.”

Windsor:

And which one are you? I'm the one with then big...fringe.
Oh haw haw haw.

New York, San Francisco, Sydney...
Nice feller Sidney.

Detroit….
“John, there is a Stamp Out The Beatles movement
under way in Detroit. What you going to do about it?”
“We have a plan to stamp out Detroit.”

Dallas.
"John aren't you ever afraid of getting shot."

"More so in Dallas than other places..."

There are places I remember...

Beatlepus Rex. The Fab Force. Conquering the planet. Saving the city. And getting the girl.

Everywhere. For three screaming years...

Even Nowhere.

Beat Music (The Story of the Beatles)

The Beatles' ultimate take on the essential story of the 60s (and they wrote a few) - the generation gap - written with rather more empathy than most for then 'other' side and eloquently setting both sides of its emotional debate to heart plucking music but still firmly in tune with the new age. McCartney could certainly compose an incisive short story with modernist economy and force in words as brilliantly as he could compose a sumptuous and yearning melody. We've applied the stripped back minimalism to the music as well in our version (and set it all in context with our performed extracts from my novel "Sergeant Spectre's Lonely Rubber Soul"  which tells the magical realist 60s Beatles fairy tale of a Cinderella She who was the She of She Loves You)

You can hear a few more extracts from our musical storytelling of the Beatles fairy tale here https://soundcloud.com/gareth-calway/sets/it-was-60-years-ago-today-the

The music video responds to the minimalist short story/ classical music quality of the original Beatles song, beautifully composed by McCartney and set off by Lennon's edgy acid asides. Imagine if you will a 1967 art or music college in that flower powered gap between generations as our setting for this performance.

https://youtu.be/Z9p9tpucPnc

She's Leaving Home

Amsterdam's own version of this song is an incredibly moving mighty roar of human anguish and glory from the Mersey. Christy Moore's completely different version is an Irish whisper of grief and grit. Somehow we seem to have channeled both takes in our version without realising it as we went through the entire process without realising we were each drawing on our favoured versions.

Mckenzie's soul lies above the ground
In that pyramid near Maryland
Easyjet is hanging in the air
Taking everyone to everywhere
....Whoa
See slave ships sailing into port
The blood of Africa's on every wall
Now there's a layline runs down Mathew Street
It's giving energy to all it meets
....Whoa

Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside
Whoa
Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside
Whoa

Alan Williams in the Marlboro Arms
Giving a story out to everyone
Famine boats are anchored in the bay
Bringing the poor and deperate
....Whoa

Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside
Whoa
Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside

Can't believe what those children done
Guess theres a meaness in the soul of man
Yorkshire policemen chat with folded arms
While people try and save their fellow fans

Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside
Whoa
Hey, does this train stop
Does this train stop on Merseyside
Whoa
Hey does this train stop
Why don't you remember
Yeh...Yeh...So why don't you remember
Yeh...Yeh...Why don't you remember
Hey does this train stop
Why don't you remember

Does This Train Stop On Merseyside?

Humanism raised to the level of sacred ("words of the prophets written on the subway wall") In another age, Paul Simon would have been Bach or Allegri. We used to sing this in the car on long road trips; never thought we'd actually record it. The three knells/chimes in the 'mortal man' verse took longer to get right than the basic track! The angel wings are Maz's harmonies.
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), track released May 12, 2021 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untied-states-of-americana-lp
Maz - lead vocal, harmony vocal; acoustic guitar.
Gaz- backing vocal, acoustic and electric bass, djembe drum, Spanish dancing shoes, industrial triangle.

Words and Music by Paul Simon

Thanks as always to Warwick "Just Around The Corner" Jones.

Slip Slidin' Away

This song is as old as us! Dusty Springfield's sprightly country folk version with the Springfields was the first British single to reach the top 20 in the American Billboard chart in 1962 (over a year before the 1964 British invasion). youtu.be/uz6HB9HYQz4 Written by Jack Rhodes and Dick Reynolds, it was first recorded by Wanda Jackson in 1956 and covered by Linda Ronstadt in a kick-ass country rock version in the 1970s. youtu.be/pmQpYSBkwag
Not to mention Dolly Parton's happy honky tonk take on it youtu.be/VO4SYPRa3pI
Ours is nearer the much slower, much sadder version by Sandy Denny on her 'Rendezvous' album. If the lyric really does have an arch reference to the recreational drug use of the rich ('silver threads' 'golden needles' 'dare not drown my sorrows in the warm glow of your '"wine"') it rejects it (along with all the other consolations of money) as actually solving anything. Only 'the love you promised' can do that.
lyrics
I don't want your lonely mansion
With a tear in every room.
All I want's the love you promised
Beneath the haloed moon.
But you think I should be happy
With your money and your name
And hide myself in sorrow
While you play your cheating game.
Silver threads and golden needles
Cannot mend this heart of mine.
And I dare not drown my sorrow
In the warm glow of your wine.
You can't buy my love with money
Cause I never was that kind.
Silver threads and golden needles
Cannot mend this heart of mine.
...
Silver threads and golden needles
Cannot mend this heart of mine.
And I dare not drown my sorrow
In the warm glow of your wine.
You can't buy my love with money
Cause I never was that kind.
Silver threads and golden needles
Cannot mend this heart of mine.
Silver threads and golden needles
Cannot mend this heart of mine.
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), released September 8, 2022
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untied-states-of-americana-lp
Songwriters: Jack Rhodes / Dick Reynolds
Silver Threads and Golden Needles lyrics © Campbell Connelly And Co. Ltd., Campbell Connelly And Co.ltd.

Maz - lead vocal, acoustic guitar
Gaz - bass, bass drum, hi hat, tambo, tom, floor tom, bells, backing vocal.

Silver Threads and Golden Needles

This was performed by a gospel duo called The Two Gospel Keys - Emma Daniels (vocals and guitar) and Mother Sally Jones (vocals and tambourine) - and released on 78-rpm in 1948.

It was subsequently performed and recorded by such reverend gospellers as Sister Rosetta Tharpe (1950) the Original Five Blind Boys of Alabama (1953) the Hightower Brothers (1956) the Reverend Gary Davis (1962) and an English gospel choir called The Rolling Stones -whose version we follow here. (1971).

This was the first song Gaz ever sang in public and he did so at Meher Baba's Tomb in India in 1994, exquisitely backed with a vocal and instrumental brilliance comically out of all proportion to his efforts by a professional American guitar player and singer (who learned her version from a Black female gospel singer).
lyrics
You gotta move
You gotta move
You gotta move, child
You gotta move
Oh, when the Lord get ready
You gotta move
You may be high
You may be low
You may be rich, child
You may be poor
But when the Lord get ready
You gotta move
You see that woman
Who walks the street
You see that police
Upon his beat
But then the Lord get ready
You gotta move
You gotta move

from Untied States of Americana (LP), released September 8, 2022
Songwriters: Gary Davis / Fred McDowell
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untied-states-of-americana-lp

You Gotta Move lyrics © Sony/ATV Music Publishing LLC, BMG Rights Management

You Gotta Move

A very sad song but a joy to play
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QEc86iXAMHo

Same recording technique and target sound as Pallet On Your Floor.
lyrics
Chère 'tit zozo quoi t'apré fé?
T'apré sauter, t'apré chanter
To pas connais n'a p'us Marie
Marie mouri, Marie mouri


'Tits herbe tout vert, 'tits herbe tout moux
Faut p'us to fais un lit pou nous
To pas connais n'a p'us Marie
Marie mouri, Marie mouri

Quand jou fini n'a p'you soleil
Quand nuit fini n'a pas sommeil
Quand monde content mo p'us ca ri
Marie mouri, Marie mouri
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), track released January 24, 2022 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untied-states-of-americana-lp
Maz - guitar, vocal;
Gaz - drum & bass.
A David L. Greely song which we learned in the version by Linda Ronstadt/ Anna Savoy.

Marie Mouri

Included in 'Canadiana' Video- youtu.be/1187UwXjRqI

McGarrigle is of Irish-French Canadian background who, with sister Kate established themselves as folk-musical royalty: her children Martha and Rufus Wainwright continue the tradition..I'd sooner exile myself to outer space than make a partner feel like Anna does here, but despite the numbing sadness it's a joy to play and sing.
lyrics
Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it, you can't mend it
But my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
When harm is done no love can be won
I know it happens frequently
What I can't understand oh please God hold my hand
Why it had to happen to me
And it's only love and it's only love
That can wreck a human being and turn him inside out
Some say the heart is just like a wheel
When you bend it you can't mend it
But my love for you is like a sinking ship
And my heart is on that ship out in mid-ocean
credits
from Untied States of Americana (LP), released September 8, 2022 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/untied-states-of-americana-lp
song by Anna McGarrigle


Heart Like A Wheel

​ @PeacocksTaleMusic  

Beltane is an ancient festival, the word is Gaelic in origin,  celebrated with fire and dancing on May 1st which survives in our Mayday.  It means "Bell's fire" and may have some roots in Baal worship but it is significant in Celtic festivals ('tane' is Gaelic for 'fire' which is very close to the Welsh word for it - 'tan'.) In the midst of the surge of life as summer dawns, there is a remembrance of  its opposite, death.The rise of the subtitle ("Rise of an April Leaf") implies the fall and in this poem the leaf at its unfurling nervously considers its mortality and all the things that can go wrong. The second voice representing all the things urging it on - sun, spring etc - riffs on  the old moral 'he who saves himself loses himself'

Puckered,
Helpless,
Grizzly,
Clenched
Ugly as a newborn face;
Scared to let myself go:
And where can I go
Except towards death?
And what if I grow
In the wrong directions,
Abnormal or twisted,
And how do you do it anyway?
Thoughts crumpled,
Feelings crushed.
Perhaps I’m not even a leaf?
Just scared to stand out
From the crowded branches?
So what am I? – yellow?
Or just painfully shy
Soft virgin green
Closed against the urging sun?
Do I have to do anything?
Will I just become – me?
Or do I have to force myself out?
Safer to sit tight;
But then I get scared
The rest of the branch
Which had seemed so wooden
Is unfolding faster;
Best to let go then;
But what if my flower
Hardly out of bud
Gets pollinated?

The May blossom light
Of the still warm evening;
The birdsong high
Above distant traffic:
The Sun become mild
And expansive, beaming:
The breathless wind:
All give their answer:
He who saves his dances

Will never be a dancer.

© Gareth Calway and first published in 'Encounter' Magazine in April 1987.
Watch the video on YouTube https://youtu.be/0K8LiK9rFlA

Beltane

Traditional folk but also a deconstruction of it, as is Rusby's thoroughly contemporary way; the 'female' side of all those 'heave away, haul away' shanties, revealing a tender human story of cruelly divided lovers.
lyrics
Cruel were my parents, to tear my love from me
Cruel was the pressgang that took him to the sea
Cruel was the little boat that rowed him off the strand
And cruel was the big ship, that took him from the land
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away, boys, haul away

Cruel was the water, that ship it sailed upon
Cruel was the fair wind, for now my loves he's gone
Had you blown a roaring gale they'd have left him on dry land
Where he would walk besides me and I would hold his hand
Haul away boys, haul away
Haul away boys, haul away

The ring beneath my pillow, is the ring he gave to me
I'll wear it on my finger, for all the world to see
But cruel was the captain, the bo'sun, and the men
For they didn't give a farthing if I saw my love again
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away boys, haul away

Cruel were my parents, to tear my love from me
Cruel was the pressgang that took him to the sea
Cruel was the little boat that rowed him off the strand
And cruel was the big ship, that took him from the land
Haul away, boys, haul away
Haul away, boys, haul away
credits
Maz- lead and harmony vocals, acoustic guitar
Gaz- bass, percussion, backing vocal.
from Poachers on the Common (LP), released September 8, 2022  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/poachers-on-the-common-lp
Song by Kate Rusby

Cruel

Live except for the harmonies, which are existentially impossible for Maz to to sing at the same time as the melody.

Everything else was sung, played, recorded and produced in one go, with amps, speakers and mics etc placed around the room in advance to get the sound picture of the folk tale (three sisters and a riddling geezer). There are only two of us!

This is our first Child: Child Ballad 1. Not the 'Cruel Sister' version by Pentangle but the 'happily married' 2013 version by Anais Mitchell and Jefferson Hamer.

There were three sisters in the north
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
And they lived in their mother's house
And you'll beguile a lady soon
There came a man one evening late
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
He came knocking at the gate
And you'll beguile a lady soon

The eldest sister let him
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
And locked the door with a silver pin
And you'll beguile a lady soon
The second sister made his bed
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
And laid soft pillows 'neath his head
And you'll beguile a lady soon
The youngest sister, fair and bright
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
She lay beside him all through the night
And you'll beguile a lady soon

And in the morning, come the day
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
She said "Young man, will you marry me?"
And you'll beguile a lady soon
He said "Yes, I'll marry thee
Lay the bend to the bonny broom
If you can answer this for me:
And you'll beguile a lady soon
The answers to the riddles are: envy, flattery, rumour, regret, love.
from Poachers on the Common (LP), track released July 3, 2021 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/poachers-on-the-common-lp

Riddles Wisely Expounded

Video- youtu.be/Q7h3TATTn0E

If Wordsworth had had the decency to die at a respectable Romantic age, ie under 30 and before his 1807 poems were published, he would have been the undisputed Hendrix of the group. He was as Radical as Blake and even more engaged (he travelled to France to join in the French Revolution and described it as "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive/ To be young was very heaven)" as passionate as Byron (he'd had a love affair and a daughter out of wedlock with a French girl while there) as visionary brilliant as Coleridge (they'd co-written the lyrical Ballads and its seismic Romantic manifesto together in 1798) as strange and gothic-beautiful as Keats (Wordsworth's definition of poetry as 'the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' is sometimes attributed to Keats) and as anti-establishment as Shelley (while Shelley was sent down from Oxford, Wordsworth simply walked out of Cambridge believing he could learn more from Nature and a walking tour of the continent.) The 1798 poems arranged here - part of 'The Lucy poems' and described as 'experimental' at the time - are perhaps the greatest achievement of this early 'disturbed' Wordsworth.

We reproduce below the original versions as taken from three of these Lucy poems. (Strange Fits of passion; She dwelt among th'untrodden ways - which was titled Song - and A slumber did my spirit seal"). They are a masterpiece of Romanticism: as sharp as a drystone wall; as fluent as a mountain stream; as clear as a March morning ; as wild as a upland wood.

His other definition of poetry "emotion recollected in tranquility" defined his later work but Wordsworth never really lost this visionary wildness. In old age he declared he loathed the Whigs but still "have much of the Chartist in me" and he must be the only Poet Laureate who secured an agreement not to actually write any laureate poems. But these dazzling early pieces can get lost behind the later establishment figure. We try to recreate their weird and experimental first appearance for a modern audience, performing over a nervous contemporary beat.

The simple folk ballad metre was a rootsy innovation at the time, reversing the classical formality and by then tired artificiality of the previous ('Augustan') age of reason and 'art' which Wordsworth and Coleridge helped to blast open with feeling, folk-magic and nature. The language is not 'Poetic' but that really used by ordinary people, the imagery sparse (when used at all) and when used natural and simple ('fair as a star when only one...') yet vivid and original ('a violet by a mossy stone'). But the most powerful thing about these love poems is the colossal emotional charge handed to single rhyme-emphasised words - 'trees', 'me', 'be' (such a tiny word conveying such enormity) at the end of lines and verses; not to mention that impossibly expressive 'oh'. There is nowhere in this naked language for a performer to hide. 

That's a real peacock adding its tale at the start and recurring.
lyrics
Strange fits of passion have I known,
And I will dare to tell,
But in the lover's ear alone,
What once to me befel.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.

A violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
—Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

credits
from Poachers on the Common (LP), track released September 30, 2021 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/poachers-on-the-common-lp
Lake District photography by Bhas Allan

Weirdsworth's Lucy

I got my entire black hole gap year into this poem: Weymouth in and out of season, in and out of seasonal work and very much not the family caravan holidays of boyhood.
lyrics

The white hot swans of summer
are melting out of the bitter glare
which I, a boy with iced dreams,
held them in.

I spray my eye with Right Guard
and promenade
upon the esplanade.

Bikini'd housewives
sun for their lives

The sand is seen
as pastry with too much margarine.

This girl on my arm
where she's been since October
buttons her pink heart forever away.

I am in a black hole
of this past still-winter

(supplementary benefit spent
on a Romantic education,
Chatterton-teethed heating
soul food, ghost rent)

so very far away from the thing I burn for,
I can almost touch it.

© Gareth Calway 1975, first published in his not so slim as it used to be volume Exile in His Own Country, Bluechrome 2006.
credits
from Fill Your Head With Seaside Rock (EP), released July 18, 2022 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/fill-your-head-with-seaside-rock-ep
Maz- guitar
Gaz - voice

Weymouth Boy

https://youtu.be/ajVfKAQeLWg (second half)

A comedy song with a howl at its heart ("we're anchorless and quite alone") and some scholarly research into an obscure period, 14C Hanseatic Lynn. 

(spoken at start) I send ambassadors to scold
The Grand Teutonic Chief
And stops all England trading till
Lynn funds that royal brief:

It’s trade that makes the world go round:
Their timber for our wool;
War by another name, not love,
Who dreams it's love's a fool.

He’s 5 times Mayor, the Merchant Prince,
Twice MP of his town;
He’ll rope you in, he'll haul you up,
Make waves where others drown.

He represents His Majesty
Against the Prussian threat;
Their ships attack ours over there,
We make theirs pay the debt.

We're anchorless and quite alone,
Is all he says to me;
I say we're washed in Jesu's love,
He says we're all at sea.

I hear the angels’ soaring song
In whipped sails and Wash gulls;
Their wings in trade winds fair and foul,
The bumping of the hulls.

The privateers and pirates steal
Where merchants wheel and deal;
Our Hanseatic treaties keep 
A kind of even keel.

We're anchorless and quite alone,
Is all he says to me;
I say we're washed in Jesu's love,
He says we're all at sea.

The biggest fish in Lynn's great pool,
Lynn's news, its Public Face;
It all comes out, or in, his Wash,
His Tuesday Market Place.

“It’s trade that makes the world go round:
Their fish and pitch; our salt;
War by another name, not love,
Who dreams it's love's a dolt.”

We're anchorless and quite alone,
Is all he says to me;
I say we're washed in Jesu's love,
He says we're all at sea.

“You can't wed Jesus, daughter dear,
Unless you are a nun,
There's plenty more fish in the sea
With a house and shop to run.

“It’s trade that makes the world go round:
Their furs; our cloth and grain;
War by another name, not love,
Who dreams it's love's insane.”

Margery is usually portrayed as proud of her merchant prince father, Richard III's royal agent in the then premier league Hanseatic port of Lynn and - by contrast - highly critical of her less high-ranking burgess husband There is certainly no explicit antagonism in the Book towards her father and plenty towards the husband who got her pregnant 14 plus times in 20 years. If in  "The Book of Margery Kempe" Book 1 Chapter 46, she sounds proud of her husband, it is surely only because she is emphasising the respectability of her kindred under threat of prison.
So if we can perhaps question the father pride too. True, she doesn't disparage him elsewhere in the text as she does John and the common people of Lynn; but she doesn't show much interest in him either. Except when she drops his name in a tight spot, the autobiography is silent about the father who, under Richard III, was the prime mover and shaker in one of the biggest ports of the Hanseatic world. Margery's two efforts at business - brewing and a horse mill- both failed dismally and seem amateur. She doesn't seem to have been prepared for anything except marriage and endless childbearing.
Tune by Andy wall. This track imagines her dreamy-teen thoughts about her very worldly father. Pic is Maz at Brandon Creek, source of Lynn's prosperity.

The Ballad of John Brunham

"The priest who wrote down this book (The Book of Margery Kempe" pictured, in the British Library) , in order to test this creature's feelings, asked her questions many different times about things that were to come - things of which the outcome was unsure and uncertain to anybody at that time - asking her, through she was loath and unwilling to do such things, to pray to God and discover when our Lord would visit her with devotion, what the outcome would be, and then truly, without any pretending, tell him how she felt, or else he would not have gladly written the book....

And so this creature partly compelled by the fear that he would not otherwise have follwowed her intention in writing this book, did as he asked her and told him her feelings as to what would happen in such matters as he asked her about, if her feelings were true. And in this way he tested them of their truth. And yet he would not always give credence to her words, and that hindered him..." Book 1. Chapter 24.

Note the nervousness of her amanuensis and their uneasy relationship, asking her to ask God (for example) whether people who seemed plausible in the present would continue to be so in the future, much against her inclination. She reluctantly divines how a plausible young man will betray the trust he currently enjoys for this purpose, rather like Miss Marple on a high-powered interview panel correctly advising against the dodgy candidate to whom the experts gave the job.

The recurring qualifications in the text, that she saw God "in her soul", "in the city of her soul" that He spoke to her "in her mind" that her tears make her weak "in her bodily strength" perhaps reflect the tension of the enterprise. While such qualifications sometimes advocate her genuine credentials, (look, she said this would happen and it did) they often they seem to be steering her though potential heresies and gaffes as well ( as with all the potential Lollard assertions about not needing to confess sins to a priest in this track.) It's like writing a book with a canonical lawyer, meticulously underwriting your vision. 
lyrics
I cut a dash through Bishop’s Lynn,
Proud daughter of its Mayor,
My cloaks with modish tippets slashed,
And gold pipes in my hair.

I burned to die, I sinned a sin
That’s never been confessed
- Except to God - a Lollard sin
To hold it in my breast.

This Book I weep in blood
Up from the heart’s deep well
Would drown the earth in heaven tears
And church the tongues of hell.

But hearing heaven’s Song of Songs
I shun the gutter’s Ouse
And though you rule me, husband, priest,
A single life I choose

And every pilgrim step I trudge
From wedlock’s grave mundane
And married flesh and churchman’s plot
Is singing with God’s name.

This Book I weep in blood
Up from the heart’s deep well
Would drown the earth in heaven tears
And church the tongues of hell.

I bend my will to holy men,
Confessors clerks and seers
Yet drown their prayers and sermons in
A Noah's Flood of tears.

I wash away my sins with tears
That heaven and earth should meet.
My heart is bleeding as I kiss
His tender face and feet.

This Book I weep in blood
Up from the heart's deep well
Would drown the earth in heaven tears
And church the tongues of hell.
credits
from A Mass of Carols For Margery, released December 25, 2022
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mass-of-carols-for-margery  Tune by Vanessa Wood-Davies arr Peacock's Tale. Words © Gareth Calway 2016.


This Booke I Weep In Blood

A ghost story from our home village of Sedgeford. The tale of Susan's death in the terrible storm of 1819 made the national newspapers. We performed our memorial and a dramatic recreation of "the fatal thunderstorm in Sedgeford" on her 200th anniversary there at 9 pm (see pic). 

‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’

A gone-tomorrow full-moon face
In bonnet and Sunday best;
A goose ran up and down my flesh,
My hair stood stiff as a crest.

‘I’d die to hold a girl like you,
So fashion-hungry thin
But fear there is no heart behind
That sly come-hither grin.

‘There’s maggots in your Sunday best,
Your bony heroine chic’s
A shade too grave about your mouth,
Your vulture-grinning beak.’

‘I’ve been Death’s bride two hundred years
And much too young to die,
Let me take you back to 1819,
The Fifth Day of July.’

The Squire rode down my father’s door
‘All hands to the pump!’ honked he.
‘Sir, I’m weary from working your bone-dry fields,
‘My family hath need of me!’

‘You’re weary from working my golden fields
But my House expects a neighbour
And my Stream has dried in the lower field
And my Pump demands your labour.’

Our childish shrieks filled the heaven-blue
Played hide and seek round the paves
Laughed under the leaves of Eden-green
And kiss-chased through the graves.

The tardy teacher at the gate,
Seized my pretty lobes,
My spray of pretty graveyard flowers:
‘You’re a hell child, Susan Nobes!’

The sunlit schoolroom candle burned
A flame that barely lightened;
A stroke before the clock struck nine
It devilishly brightened.

A growl and rumble at the door,
As dark as pitch in the room,
A sizzling hiss, like a snake on the roof,
An ear-exploding boom.

‘Prayer,’ scorned the teacher, ‘is stronger than rain!’
The dark began to splinter
In lightning tongues as bright as noon,
It grew as cold as winter.

‘God save us!’ screamed the children all,
The teacher tore her gown,
The rain came down in ice and hail,
The sky turned upside down.

A stained glass window-angel smashed,
I kneeled and tried to pray,
A fiery crack of sulphur took
My girlish breath away.

The flickering lightning licked the tower,
Scorched a yard-wide hole in the wall
And from where my Saviour hung on high
Great blocks began to fall.

‘O Robert, our Susan’s lost in the storm.
What kept you away so long?’
‘The Squire needed water, he got his wish,
But where is our daughter gone?’

‘I sent her to Sunday School, oh Robert,
And I fear my choice was cursed.
For none alive has seen such a Flood
Of gravesoil in the church.

He forged the cross under baked Dove Hill
Its Wash rolled like a tide,
He climbed over hill to the rain-drenched crowd
And took the teacher aside.

‘Where’s Susan?’ he said, as quiet as Death,
‘I believe she is with her Saviour.’
‘You left her alone in the schoolroom and fled?’
His question got no answer.

He waded past the porchway Flood,
The font they’d named his daughter
And into a schoolroom as chill as the tomb
Awash with blocks and mortar.

He found me lifeless upon the floor,
My temples charred with flame,
He clenched me in his arms and wept
A tide he’ll never stem.

‘Come out in the dark lane, lonely boy,
Leave your laptop and play with me.
Leave your father and mother and holiday home
For my wildwood and wicked sea.’

Historical and other details here - https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/edit_album?id=3169869118

The Ballad of Susan Nobes

A new recording for the 80th anniversary of VE Day of this remembrance anthem for a "brave, loving and unselfish" youth late of this parish. 

 Flight Sergeant Pilot Lancelot Percival Williamson, 1920-1945, died  aged 25, on Friday July 13 1945 after five years service in the RAF fighting Fascism on two major fronts of the Second World War. He joined the RAF in 1939, aged 19. He was agonisingly close to surviving the entire war when he died in a plane crash on a solo training flight above Little Eaton in Derbyshire just after his last home leave in Norfolk.

Lancelot 'Percy' Williamson is the last name on the unbelievably long roll call of Sedgeford war dead from two world wars called out (across the village green where we live) every Remembrance Sunday. My ear was always struck by the Arthurian resonances, not just Sir Lancelot the greatest knight but Percival the purest (and finder of the Holy Grail). Maz and I have the honour in absentia familias of tending his grave at Fring and also of occasionally remembering him at the church with this song or the poem.

He hailed from Eaton Farm Sedgeford, North West Norfolk. went to school in Fring, sang in Heacham church choir, played cricket for Sedgeford a week before his death and is buried next to the small grave of his 'older' (10 year old) brother at Fring All Saints.

The tune is a traditional folk song about a good young man cut down in his prime. The aircraft you hear at the end of this film was flying over as we finished recording so we left the mikes open. The same thing happened when I was recording the poem in the graveyard.

I landed a crocked plane, when still just a fitter,

5 years derring-done, never shot down in flames,

In a cloud of unknowing, I flew for the sunrise

And came down to Earth but lived up to my names.


Six knights of Logres to carry my coffin,

Six Logres ladies to walk by my side,

Through hellfire and slaughter to a wheatfield of poppies

And a home hedge on Friday the 13th of July.


Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes only,

Play up the dead march as we go along

And bring me to Fring All Saints and lay me down easy,

I lived in the free air that breathes through this song.


Instrumental break


Repeat first verse.
credits

Lyric © Gareth Calway 2023

from PEACOCK'S TALES (The Sapphire Wedding Album)  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/peacocks-tales-the-sapphire-wedding-album
Percy's gravestone has recently been cleaned and made much more legible, as you will see in the final frame of the film (see link below). Our thanks to Carol Townsend of the Commonwealth Graves Commission who carried out that excellent work as well as to Tim Snelling Sedgeford village historian whose diligent research gave us many of the images and press cuttings you see on the film and which gave us the material for our song.. youtu.be/j3LRhwEYIsA This film gives you a bit of the poem as well.

Bring Me To Fring All Saints (new recording for VE 80th anniversary)

What happens

The grail knights ascend to the sixth heaven, to attain mastery of the heart, (ie the second aspect of the mind - feelings.) They endure an agony of bliss. All that is left of them is an inner Eye consumed with the fire of love. The crashing of their Lancelot vessel (the highest craft of all) in the searing fiery gale (the Beloved's revealed Face/ the Sun) occurs not at the end of the heaven but is itself the heaven. Now only a lover's leap remains between them and the God that fills their Eye, but they cannot leap themselves to do it.


Form and technique

I started writing formal ghazals (in English) when I found out that they were Meher Baba's favourite poetic form.  A ghazal is a classical Persian lyric poem - typically describing a state of mystical love - believed to be the ancestor of the sonnet. Both ghazal and sonnet are love poems that  combine lyrical abandonment with tightly controlled rhythm, rhyme and line organisation, a balanced tension of heart and mind forces. Only, where a sonnet moves forward in time, the ghazal stays in one place, both metrically and in terms of thought. The sonnet is an argument; the ghazal is a meditation. The sonnet chats; the ghazal chants. 



Ma darpiyalih ak-i rukh-i yar didih im
Ay bikhabar zi lazzat-i shurb-i mudam-i ma (Hafiz.)
'We have seen the face of the Beloved reflected in the (heart's) cup
O ignorant one, no notion have you of the bliss we imbibe therefrom.'



This face that burns upon my Eye in searing fiery gale:
More clear than any seen on Earth or heavenward trail.

The Lancelot shot down in flames, the highest craft of all:
Conception deconstructed lifting Guinevere’s veil.

‘I see your face in everything, but cannot leap the gulf
Between belief in what I see and being what I fail.’

It’s Leila’s I-consuming, never-ending, parted love
For Majnu, her sole bleeding where his sole trod upon a nail.

He feels his wreck in her, a bliss that pierces his heart
And bleeds from hers like wounds of Passion’s holiest nail.

The agony of longing long, the ecstasy of pain
In hearts that See their grail through golden bars of a gaol!

Your Sun is Everything and there is nothing that is not the Sun:
My black hole All-consumed in one whole - yet shadows prevail.

In sainted flames of love, with nothing else it can see
It burns away in grief, this Eye that can’t have the Grail.

O Heart of Hearts, her Absent Heart is All to you now.
She’s in the Seventh Sun, where Lovers leap and visions...fail

©Gareth Calway 2016 published in "6 Degrees of Separation; 7 Degrees of Love" (Sheriar) http://garethcalway.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/6-degrees-of-separation-7-degrees-of.html
Track art by Isla Rafferty.

This Face That Burns Upon My Eye in Searing Fiery Gale

I wasn't exactly on this track (despite the exchange with Maz at the start) but I was in the next room (and later ate some scouse therein with the two performers) while it was recorded. This Warwick Jones track from our Done Different double album deserves a bigger limelight than it gets there.  Never mind that the strutting Peacock's only contribution (albeit a significant one) is Maz's lovely vocal: Warwick our musical friend around the corner, conceived, wrote, composed, played, sang and produced this little masterpiece of Norfolk lore. Curiously, it still fits the Doin and Done Different brief exactly - a folk ballad that tells a tale from our story-haunted chosen county of residence.


Composed, played, sung and produced by Warwick Jones. https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-lady-of-shereford-warwick-jones
Maz: lead co-vocal

Pic by Pat Jones

The Lady of Shereford starring Warwick Jones

"Skirting Heresy" is the title of an epic play by New York author Elizabeth MacDonald which I edited for a production in Lynn Minster in 2018, mainly adding several existing songs from a previous play of my own which which you'll find on the Peacock's album https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mass-of-carols-for-margery and - in different versions - on the album the Penland Phezants ( Andy Wall, Vanessa, Melanie and me) created for the Skirting Heresy show.  Andy and Vanessa wrote the folk tunes; I wrote the lyrics and the beat-based rap and chant bits.  The "Skirting Heresy" score is collected on https://thepenlandphezants.bandcamp.com/album/songs-for-skirting-heresy-the-life-and-times-of-margery-kempe 
This track "Skirting Heresy" using the title of the play as a refrain was written by Andy and I to cover a lengthy curtain call for the epic cast of 70 and to tell the whole story of the Book in a summary form. We both rather extended ourselves and we were all still performing it about 4 minutes after the epic curtain call ended! I recall pointedly singing "You're a menace to churchman but a mystic to me" to possibly the least facilitating churchman ever to host a play about one of his most famous ancestral parishioners.  
This is the abridged Peacock version. The full Peacock version is here- https://soundcloud.com/gareth-calway/skirting-heresy-in-full
The lovely upbeat Andy-led folk performance is on the Phezants album link above. This version features the three other performers on that track (adding   Vanessa's beautifully measured harp to our usual Peacock duo) taking it somewhere more mediaeval.


('Born before your time
It would take an eternity
To redress their abyss,
Skirting heresy.

'They would fetter your soul
With wedlock-maternity,
Apron and stain,
Skirting heresy.

'You fore-saw what the spirit
Of a woman could be
And clothed your flesh in it,
Skirting heresy.'

'In the arms of your soul
You may take me as boldly
As a good wife her spouse,'
Skirting heresy.

The sun of love in your heart
Burns so hot and fiercely
It scares you to life,
Skirting heresy.

'This vestment of heat
Is the heat of the Holy.
It will burn away your sins,'
Skirting heresy.)

Magic water, magic sky,
What land appears to be,
Shift across your vision -
Skirting heresy.

On Lynn's ebb and flow,
Dock and dreaming friary
Unravel like wool -
Skirting heresy,

As England revolts
In Plague and Lollardy,
Old habits cleave -
Skirting heresy.

Margery of Lynn - author, pilgrim, mystic -
Saw things that weren't there, spoke heresy
But the Heresy She Spoke and the Things That Weren't There
Were a vision of a future reality.

The Lord Jesus spoke to her like a Song in her heart:
Andy only:
'Though a menace to churchmen, you’re a mystic to me,
There is none so pure as the mother who gives
This world to so many and her soul to me.

Your unsung fishwife Word,
Your un-nun livery,
Your Magdalene hair-shirts,
Skirting heresy,

Chat to God without a priest;
As His Mother in Galilee,
Nurse and feed Him like a Babe,
Skirting heresy,

In the dance of the Hanse,
Out of step, off the quay,
Walk on water like the sun,
Skirting heresy.

Margery of Lynn - author, pilgrim, mystic -
Saw things that weren't there, spoke heresy
But the Heresy She Spoke and the Things That Weren't There
Were a vision of a future reality.

The Lord Jesus spoke to her like a Song in her heart:
'Though a menace to churchmen, you’re a mystic to me,
There is none so pure as the mother who gives
This world to so many and her soul to me.

Skirting heresy.

Gaz - lead and harmony vocal, bass, harmonium, tabla
Maz - lead vocal
Vanessa Wood-Davies - harp
Pic is of Maz playing Margery at Elsing Church, Norfolk.
 
from A Mass of Carols For Margery, released December 25, 2022
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mass-of-carols-for-margery

Skirting Heresy (featuring Vanessa Wood-Davies, harp)

A complete introduction to Margery Kempe, housewife, mother, author of the first autobiography in English, pilgrim  and Visionary of Lynn, in one song. The title and refrain is from a play by New York author Elizabeth MacDonald to which composer Andy Wall and lyricist Gareth Calway (me) contributed this song for an epic prodiuction at Lynn Minster in 2018. This is the last song Andy and I wrote together and perhaps the crowning achievement of our work on Margery. 

Margery of Lynn - author, pilgrim, mystic -
Saw things that weren't there, spoke heresy
But the Heresy She Spoke and the Things That Weren't There
Were a vision of a future reality.

The Lord Jesus spoke to her like a Song in her heart:
Andy only:
'Though a menace to churchmen, you’re a mystic to me,
There is none so pure as the mother who gives
This world to so many and her soul to me.

'Born before your time
It would take an eternity
To redress their abyss,
Skirting heresy.

'They would fetter your soul
With wedlock-maternity,
Apron and stain,
Skirting heresy.

'You fore-saw what the spirit
Of a woman could be
And clothed your flesh in it,
Skirting heresy.'

Margery of Lynn...

'In the arms of your soul
You may take me as boldly
As a good wife her spouse,'
Skirting heresy.

The sun of love in your heart
Burns so hot and fiercely
It scares you to life,
Skirting heresy.

'This vestment of heat
Is the heat of the Holy.
It will burn away your sins,'
Skirting heresy.

Margery of Lynn...

Magic water, magic sky,
What land appears to be,
Shift across your vision -
Skirting heresy.

On Lynn's ebb and flow,
Dock and dreaming friary
Unravel like wool -
Skirting heresy,

As England revolts
In Plague and Lollardy,
Old habits cleave -
Skirting heresy.

Margery lf Lynn...

Your unsung fishwife Word,
Your un-nun livery,
Your Magdalene hair-shirts,
Skirting heresy,

Chat to God without a priest;
As His Mother in Galilee,
Nurse and feed Him like a Babe,
Skirting heresy,

In the dance of the Hanse,
Out of step, off the quay,
Walk on water like the sun,
Skirting heresy.

Margery of Lynn - author, pilgrim, mystic -
Saw things that weren't there, spoke heresy
But the Heresy She Spoke and the Things That Weren't There
Were a vision of a future reality.

The Lord Jesus spoke to her like a Song in her heart:
'Though a menace to churchmen, you’re a mystic to me,
There is none so pure as the mother who gives
This world to so many and her soul to me.

Skirting heresy.

Gaz - lead and harmony vocal, bass, harmonium, tabla
Maz - lead vocal
Vanessa Wood-Davies - harp
Pic is of Gaz and harpist Vanessa Wood-Davies performing Margery's story at the Hanse House as part of Lynn Heritage Day 
 
from A Mass of Carols For Margery, released December 25, 2022
peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-mas…for-margery

Skirting Heresy (in full) with Vanessa Wood-Davies

Featuring John Charlton on assorted support vocals and first bass.  As the first phase English Civil War Battle of Edge Hill (1642) petered out in an uneasy draw, Parliamentarian King's Lynn had been fortifying for some time against the arrival of 'foreign forces' and the fear of mercenaries enlisted by the Queen landing at Lynn in support of the King. In the surrounding countryside the royalist gentry, with Sir Hamon Lestrange of Hunstanton (eluding an arrest ordered by Lynn's council ) the main mover, were slowly gathering strength, famously building and stocking a magazine at Sedegford for the purpose. The Lestranges also contacted and lavishly funded royalists in the town. Susan Yaxley's account (The Siege of Lynn, Larks Press, 1993) notes that "a civil war in which Norfolk was dominated by his political enemies might well mean that the Lestranges faced financial disaster."

Intriguingly, the Sunday cannon ball which blasted through the stained glass window of St Margaret's (now Lynn Minster) at the best of Colonel Cromwell causing consternation to the minister and flock within, is chronicled on Sep 3 1643. September 3 spookily recurs throughout Cromwell's career. He was at the Siege of Drogheda on Sep 3 1649. He won the decisive Battles of Dunbar (miraculously) and Worcester (more predictably) on September 3 1650 and 1651 respectively. And on September 3 1658, sick with a urinary tract infection and heartbroken for his recently deceased daughter Elizabeth, he died. Knowing him, he probably still regarded it as his Lucky Day.

The Cavalier adventures of Roger Lestrange, joining the King in his new capital of Oxford after the defeat at Lynn, and finally arrested at Appleton after a madcap scheme to retake Lynn for the king, make up the rest of our tale.

My father leapt upon his high horse
And galloped it hard into Lynn,
“One seizes this Parliamentary town,
Declares it for the King!”

“You have no mandate!” cried Mayor and MPs
Laughed Dad, “Arrest those knaves!
Cavalier bravado has come to town
Which you from yourselves I’ll save.”

Though Cromwell’s preachies at the Gate
Of Lynn as at Heaven knock,
Our stained glass windows shoot all to hell,
Our royal passage block,

We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'.
Now it's weeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh laugh is on...me.

Say I “Great king, your royal East
And loyal Lynn, I’ll re-seize ’em,
They’re rebels for Your Majesty
And I’m the man to lead ’em!”

The king he writes a broad letter
And thrusts it into my hand,
“Roger L’Estrange shall rule in Lynn
With forces I command.”

We live and die a chevalier’s life,
Have it all and spend even more
On a falconer, fool, on a fowl-mouthed fop’s
Black marble stable floor.

We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'.
Now it's weeing down with cannonballs
And the laugh laugh is on...me.

From Oxford Town to Norfolk woods
The four winds see me ride
And show my fine letter to a Jack
His poor coat to turn or bribe.

‘Captain Leaman’ is that seaman,
Cries he, ‘Er, we’ll talk anon,
I must now to Lynn awhile but will
Return here to Appleton.”

He rides to Colonel Walton and brings
Six redcoats in disguise,
“Show us His Royal Traitor’s hand!’
They pinch me as a spy.

We are the laughing cavaliers
And we need a royal 'we'.
Now it's weeing down with cannonballs

from The English Civil Wars and other Nursery Crimes., released August 22, 2021 peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-e…sery-crimes
John Charlton wrote the first melody. Ours is the "Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall" bit. The lyric was published in my book of folk ballads 'Doin Different' https://garethcalway.blogspot.com/p/doin-different.html
PG Wodehouse's views on the English Civil War are probably best summed up by Bertie Wooster who once twittered that "one man's caviar (Cavalier?) is another one's major general."

The Backwoods Cavalier featuring John Charlton

As with other duets on our record https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-english-civil-wars-and-other-nursery-crimes, the idea of this 'canticle' is to dramatise in counterpointed melodies the conflict of two Englands.

Statues like any work of art can capture something divine in time and preserve it there. 
Banbury was famous for its rich stone mediaeval crosses on its steep hill. Also for its 16C Puritan zealots (its football team is still nicknamed 'The Puritans', a name doubtless dreamed up in a pub.) During the Civil War, Banbury MP Sir Anthony Cope led 150 men to destroy the crosses and Puritans also gave thanks to God, when the church spire fell, that 'their god Dagon is fallen to the ground'.

'She shall have music wherever she goes' is a reference to High Church music. There was a Puritan music but it tended to emphasise simplicity and sincerity over decoration, the word leading the sound, the emphasis more on meaning than on ravishing the senses and, as for dance music and secular festival, well, one Cavalier joke was that Puritans banned conjugal relations standing up because it might lead to dancing.

In the Puritans' defence, Court music, art and and theatre under Charles I had become cavalierly indulgent in every way, in its bid to ape the sumptuous French court and Charles wanted to overtax an already stretched country to pay for it. Cromwell was a generous patron of music during the Republic and his fellow Puritan John Milton's father had been a chorister at Oxford and it has been noted how big a debt the music of (blind) Milton's words owed to his father's musical compositions. The Restoration had Purcell whose glorious music definitely revels in the new Royalist freedoms but the Lutheran tradition did no harm to Bach.

Ride a cock horse to Banbury Cross:
A fine lady upon a white horse.
With rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
She shall have music wherever she goes.

Cope's Puritans smashed up as idolatrous
Banbury's rich High, White and Bread Cross.
'Painted Church with her robes, rings and bells was a Whore,
The less Babylon she, our Bethlehem more.'

The first verse is the traditional nursery rhyme As I Was Going To Charing Cross ; the second a summary of the apocalyptic events supposed to have occurred around the king's execution, arranged in the same pattern.The counterpointed melodies of the third verse repeat the dramatisation of an England at war with itself.

The country was as divided about the execution as it was about everything else. The official hangman Richard Brandon refused the job of chopping off the Head of State. Many Parliamentarians devoutly believed they were doing God's work but only 57 MPs shared Cromwell's determination to see it through in this case. The nursery rhymes and the events reported suggest there were mixed reactions in the audience too but also that it was a solemn, deeply shocking and uncomfortable occasion.

Charles died well and his stubborn conviction that there was divinity hedging about a king sanctified in royal eyes all his double dealing with mortals while Van Djyk's superb painting (the Good King Charles Interpretation of History) helped to make the 'Evil Necessity' Cromwell lamented seem pretty much the Death of Christ to others.


As I was going by Charing Cross:
A black man upon a black horse.
They told me it was King Charles the First.
Oh dear, my heart was ready to burst.

From the skies above Whitehall there tumbled a star:
Dover beached a whale the same hour.
'A death fit for a king,' a tearless man scoffed,
Whose eyes the crows pecked, from his round head, aloft.

youtu.be/rKDIJGQYUAY

English Civil War Nursery Crimes

Featuring (I think) our only recorded guitar duel.

Alexander Leslie (an experienced continental campaigner already knighted by the Swedish king for bravery in the Protestant cause in The Thirty years War) is the 'crooked man' of this nursery rhyme. He walked the 'crooked mile' of the Anglo-Scottish border and of the torturous twists and turns in Anglo-Scottish relations throughout the 1640s, changing allegiances - and paymasters ('the crooked sixpence') - one minute following the Charles who ducked and dived between deals he had no intention of honouring, another making deals with the new powers in England. (In return for his first change of sides, Charles I knighted Leslie and made him Captain of Edinburgh Castle in which capacity he would later receive his defeated King and subsequently hand him over to the Roundheads.)

So the 'crooked' Leslie began fighting for Scotland against England (for a good deal of money), then switched to Royalist England and for Charles (for a good deal of money) until 1644 when he helped the Parliamentarian general Fairfax crush the Royalists at Marston Moor (for a good deal of money).

Nothing defines a nation so much as a border, the self-affirming sense that 'beyond that line is what we are NOT'. The winding geographical and historical border with Scotland is a kind of dialectic: two 'home' nations defining themselves AGAINST each other (witness their irespective national anthems) despite being as economically, scientifically, theologically, imperially and militarily entwined as 'Boswell and Johnson' (no relation) for half a millennium.

A different kind of North-South border was the one across Europe at this time; the one dividing Protestant northern Europe from the 'ancient menace' of Catholic Spain, Rome and France. Charles I was married to France, had flirted with Spain and was a little too south of that border in his suspected religious allegiances. (eg Charles returned to Irish Catholics, Highland Catholics, and specious offers of help from Spain and the Papacy, rather than deal with the Short Parliament, Apr-May 1640, which was willing to fund a campaign against the Scots in return for a lot less concession than the Scots were demanding. Not that Charles, as crooked as Leslie in his higher way, would have kept any word he gave them.) 

There was a crooked man
Who walked a crooked mile
He found crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile.
He found crooked sixpence
Upon a crooked stile.

He bought a crooked cat
Which caught a crooked mouse
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.
And they all lived together
In a crooked little house.
credits
from The English Civil Wars and other Nursery Crimes., released August 22, 2021 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-english-civil-wars-and-other-nursery-crimes
Bhas's picture seems to capture the opposed soul music of Puritan and Royalist (the former's instrument so pure it remains unstruck) co-habiting uneasily together in their crooked little house.

youtu.be/rKDIJGQYUAY

There Was A Crooked Man

Continuing our series of nursery rhymes that have hidden historical meanings, (from our The English Civil War and Other Nursery Crimes album https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-english-civil-wars-and-other-nursery-crimes). Our version of Hickory Dickory Dock uses the well known classic verse usually interpreted as referring to Oliver Cromwell's unsuccessful heir Richard ('Tumbledown Dick') and adds a second in the same structure about Henry, Cromwell's fourth child. Henry, an impressive soldier in the Civil Wars and a successful ( in the circumstances even a  popular) politician in Ireland during the Commonwealth may have preserved both republic and/or the House of Cromwell and completely changed English history if he'd stepped up in his brother's place.

Cromwell's daughter's body remains to this day in the tomb of Henry VII and his wife and son Henry (among many others) were allowed to live on unmolested in private retirement after the Wars because of their merciful treatment of Royalists during the interregnum. Rather less respect was paid to Cromwell's embalmed body which was exhumed, hanged, drawn, quartered and beheaded. The head was placed on a pole atop Westminster Hall for 25 years. Its story is told on track 21.

'The Merry Monarch' came back because Cromwell's son did not have the respect from the Army and Parliament which his father had commanded and some kind of workable 'legitimate' succession was required. It was not because Charles II had distinguished himself in France except by his whore and rib of beef lifestyle. The Restoration was sold to the nation as an antidote to the lack of laughter, festival and fun of the Puritan years and Charles II certainly brought these back for himself, his five mistresses and his luxurious court.

Hickory dickory dock.
The mouse went up the clock
The clock struck one. The mouse went down
Hickory dickory dock
Tick tock, tick tock, tick tock, tick tock

Henry was of the same stock.
The first but the fourth of the flock.
He would have done well,
Should have been the Cromwell
When the monkey king* turned back the clock.

*Charles II, a bit of a monkey in both his appetites and appearance.
credits
from The English Civil Wars and other Nursery Crimes., released August 22, 2021
https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/the-english-civil-wars-and-other-nursery-crimes
youtu.be/rKDIJGQYUAY

Hickory Dickory Dock

Supposed to have been composed by King Henry VIII for a youthful beloved. Our version dramatises an unrequited love of Jack Green for Miss Scarlet in a Cluedo  scenario staged at Cock Hall in which her father Squire Robin Peacock has been murdered as investigated by Norfolk detective Ken Hill.

Alas my love you do me wrong
To cast me off discourteously;
And I have loved you oh so long
Delighting in your company.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves
I have been ready at your hand
To grant whatever thou would’st crave;
I have waged both life and land
Your love and goodwill for to have.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves
Thy petticoat of sendle white
With gold embroidered gorgeously;
Thy petticoat of silk and white
And these I bought gladly.
Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold
Greensleeves was my heart of joy
And who but my Lady Greensleeves?

From our Norfolk noir album Who Killed Cock Robin? https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/who-killed-cock-robin-a-norfolk-noir

Greensleeves

The King Arthur legends are closely associated with May. Arthur is sometimes known as the May King (his coronation was May 1st) and Gwalchmei (Gawain) is the Hawk of May as Gwalchaved (Galahad) is the Hawk of Summer. Mordred - Arthur's shadow, the winter king, was born on May 1st (Beltane). Gwenhwyfar is Arthur's May Queen and the Grail Maiden brings in the May when she manages to enchant and become pregnant by Sir Lancelot ( a derivative of Llugh, the Celtic god of Light and fertility)

One of the paradoxes of the King Arthur legends (which thrillingly combine Christian mysticism with an older Celtic mythology) is that Lancelot's infidelity with the Grail Maiden (magically disguised as Guinevere) in quest of the Holy Grail conceives the Grail Finder. When Galahad comes of age he replaces his father as the Best Knight, finds the Grail and the Wasteland becomes fruitful again.

This tale of tragic adultery (and in thought at least also an infidelity to the King by his most faithful captain Lancelot) is brought to you by an old faithful married couple. But Lancelot and Guinevere and courtly love in general, may be enjoyed as myths of true marriage: the lifelong quest by each partner truly to find the other.

‘Come hither, Captain,’ the Grail Maiden sighs,
‘Thither away with me
To the rich wooded valley and holy well
My Waste Land dies to be.

‘Look! into the burning wilderness sun
Above the shadeless tree,
The high hawk of summer, hovering still,
The shadow of what will be:

‘The Shadowless One who waits above
To be born to you and me,
A Knight of Truth out of traitor arms
And infidelity.

‘Galahad the Pure, God-armed and winged
To bless our impurity
Unbearably born to steal your quest
And all of your shining glory.

‘Come hither, Captain,’ the Grail Maiden sighs,
And turns him a face so free:
His forbidden love, the queen of his dreams,
The end of all Chivalry.’

A faithless false knight in a failing light
Fallen under a spell to see/ be
A Knight of Truth out of traitor arms
And infidelity.

Says he, ‘My heart is set on the grail
And wholly raised above!’
Says she, ‘It’s broken, and half is set
On your true adulterous love.’

‘I am her champion, she is my king’s,
I am their faithful knight!’
‘The Grail can’t be had for half a heart,
You can have that queen tonight.

‘Whisper my name, any name you like,
Any lover you want me to be,
A night of Truth in my traitor arms
And in fidelity.’

‘Come hither, Captain,’ the Grail Maiden sighs,
‘Thither away with me
To the rich wooded valley and holy well
My Waste Land dies to be.

from King Arthur and Me: The Opera, released May 1, 2024  https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/king-arthur-and-me-the-opera
That's a King Lang Tantric horn at the start, recorded in India.
Galahad/Gwalchaved means 'hawk of summer'.

Watch the music video on YouTube - youtu.be/CiUjHIbDHFY

Lancelot and the Grail Maiden

This track bears the heavy imprint of an arts and history/archaeology collective in which I piloted and performed quite a few of the Doin Different ballads prior to their publication. 'Diggers' achieved considerable things in its one year life through 2012, a sell out gig at Binham Village Hall on July 7 celebrating Boudicca’s Country from the Bronze Age to the Ballad Age combining practitioners in archaeology, theatre, folk ballads, music and visual arts and with a launch on the nearby Bronze Age barrow known as Fiddler’s Hill probably its apotheosis. ( See DD1 track 1). We even published a touring book combining visual art, history and a dramatic monologue the following September, the first (and as it turned out last) of a planned series. The troubled life and fabulous stormy times of this magnificent, doom-haunted ‘Notre Dame of Norfolk’ - Binham Priory - is a fitting memorial for the starry project’s Icarus-like ambitions, the unachieved parts of which the Doin Different project went on to achieve ( or not) with different personnel.
lyrics
The Ballad of Binham Priory

Call their names from the rubble: Alexander de Langley,
Mad as a scholar – ‘here’.
William de Somerton, William Dyxwell,
Priors and bad boys - ‘here.’

A mad monk in solitary, buried in chains,
Tortured to brake his devil;
Alchemy funded by holy sales,
Double and bubble and trouble;

Monks eating bran and drinking rain
Till King John raised the siege;
A wanderlust prior, administ-truant,
Deposed and then reprieved.

Chorus
‘As the green of summer breaks in spring
From hedgerow, field and tree
So let our souls in freedom burst
From the walls of this Priory.’

The peasants were revolting here
In 1381
When Master Lister led the charge
That started all the fun.

‘Enough!’ he cried, ‘of fattened bishops
Fed on Priory rolls,
Enough of tenants, rents and lords
And serfdom’s heavy loads.’


The old order stood another six generations,
Its dead Norms carved in art
Then the ghost of Lister came back to haunt
The Priory’s stony heart.

‘Whitewash these saints from the walls of the nave,
A clear new page for the Word,
Your bishops’ bank is ruined now
There are no serfs to herd!

Chorus

This high Notre Dame of Norfolk shrunk
To a nave-sized Parish Church,
Abandoned wings sold off for stone
To men scarce more than serfs

But when Paston quarried the haunted pile
To build a house in the grounds,
A wall killed a workman and none to this day
Will build in Priory bounds.

Three miles to the West, Roman relics and smoke
Rise again from Celtic Earth
Like the re-appeared saints whose rooted gaze
Reclaims the walls of this church.

‘Let the holy rain of autumn fall
From the solitary tree
And the grass grow wild and the four winds blow
Through the grounds of this Priory.’

© Gareth Calway 2015, first published in the Poppyland volume Doin Different.
credits
released October 31, 2023
Words and music by Peacock's Tale

From our album Done Different https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/done-different

The Ballad of Binham Priory

The fire’s flames flee    from dark’s dagger drawn,
trees’ twigs tremble       my blood runs cold,
death-dread from deeps            from hills, from hollows,
through night-silence numbs     my axe-aching arms…
Now darky-feet drumming        sheep-feet, horse-feet,
wolf-howl, bear-roar,       rain-start and rain-stop;
today’s crop of slaves      stir by my lord’s boat,
the half-clearing crowds            with ghosts from bad dreams;
no light now but starlight          fierce as gods’ faces
to kindle my blood       or make sure my sight:
a witch of a watch         slumped in snake-fern
and no song of heroes    to cheer my chilled cheeks.
When I boast man’s beard        I’ll bear with my kin     
the boat-gorging wave-road’s     spite-spitting storms
and go from this fell ground     back to the fatherland.

Fro our album https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/a-halloween-playlist

Wicked Fen

"History is written by the vicar" was a running gag in "Arthur Britain's Making/May King (geddit?)" our Arthurian Edinburgh fringe show from which this is taken (and also its sister show abut Boudicca) and is a malapropism/quibble on Churchill's famous "History is written by the Victors." Churchill obviously has a point, as most world war films for 20-30 years after 1945 attest, though I wonder if it would be more accurate to say "history is written by the present" which selects and retells it for its own ever-changing purposes,. But, in the case of both Boudicca and Arthur, the only history being written down post Romana, the only people able to write at all, were monks who weren't keen on our action movie Celtic British heroes, writing misogynistic accounts of Boudicca and largely airbrushing Arthur out of history altogether. (The Anglo Saxon Chronicle has only two Arthurian mentions - the Battle of Badon in 515 and Camlann in 539). Historians remain monastic in the sense that while history is made in the dangerous hurly burly of life, it is chronicled (or mind-gamed) in a very different place. Or, if that makes no sense, people actually lived, loved and died so stop putting them into your history books like they didn't.

Blood on the corn
Like poppies, like sails,
Blood on the dawn
In the cornfield of Wales.

A land can’t exist
By elegy alone
But now even that ‘workshop’
Has been closed down.

“The Celts were invented
In 1700”
(It seems) when Scotland
By England was plundered.

Once Romans slaughtered
The druids of Mon;
Once Cymru’s death-foes
Carried it on,

Goddesses, heroes,
Fell from a trance
Into knights and ladies
Of French romance:

Essylte prayed
For a night-black sail;
Boudicca rode,
Gwenhwyfar failed,

And now Mr James’
“Atlantic Celts”
Have finally Westered
The Westering Welsh

Blood on the corn
Like poppies, like sails,
Blood on the dawn
In the cornfield of Wales.

It doubtless comforts
The butchered British
Of old to learn
That they never existed.

Myths are carved out
By the hunted killer
But history (it seems)
Is penned by the vicar

In the schoolman English
Of monastery Mon
And the schoolgirl French
That turned us on:

Of Britain’s reforging
In the semi-detached flames
Of ironic suburban
Mr James.

Blood on the corn
Like poppies, like sails,
Blood on the dawn
In the cornfield of Wales.

We should be singing
Our bardic song
In seas of corn,
Our voices strong,

Of Drustan’s truth,
Essylte’s love,
Of a black despair
In a sail of dove;

Of Britain’s remaking
By the King of May
From the broken sun
Of Boudicca’s day;

Of Britain’s Making -
The Arthurian sequel
To Britain’s Dreaming
And its visionary equal -

Being eagerly composed
While detained all day
By a Person on business
From a local LEA;

Of the red-crests’ defeat
By oak-druid seers,
Of King Arthur’s reign
For two thousand years…

But in Roma’s Mona,
In Angles’ sea,
In middle England
We’re history.

Blood on the corn
Like poppies, like sails,
Blood on the dawn
In the cornfield of Wales.

from King Arthur and Me: The Opera, released May 1, 2024 https://peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/king-arthur-and-me-the-opera
Watch the music video on YouTube youtu.be/J3xbUFiGEUE
license

Blood on the Corn

 @PeacocksTaleMusic  for all our music videos.


Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I will give to you summer wine
Oh, oh summer wine
I walked in town on silver spurs that jingled to
A song that I had only sang to just a few
She saw my silver spurs and said let's pass some time
And I will give to you summer wine
Oh, oh summer wine
Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I will give to you summer wine
Oh, oh summer wine
My eyes grew heavy and my lips they could not speak
I tried to get up but I couldn't find my feet
She reassured me with an unfamiliar line
And then she gave to me more summer wine
Oh, oh summer wine
Strawberries cherries and an angel's kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I will give to you summer wine
Mmm-mm summer wine
When I woke up the sun was shining in my eyes
My silver spurs were gone, my head felt twice its size
She took my silver spurs, a dollar and a dime
And left me cravin' for more summer wine
Oh, oh summer wine
Strawberries, cherries and an angel's kiss in spring
My summer wine is really made from all these things
Take off your silver spurs and help me pass the time
And I will give to you my summer wine

Originally the B side to Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood's single "Sugar Town" in 1967  its lyric in the old tradition inhabited by Keats La Belle Damme Sans Merci and Coleridge's Christabel. Our filmed recording of our version coincided with the brief heatwave of June 2024 which might turn out to be the summer. Get it while it's hot!

Watch the video here - https://youtu.be/jUR2NX3kCh8

Summer Wine

From our album peacocks-tale.bandcamp.com/album/for-t…-of-england

They have no real foundations so they're building thick and vast,
Want to bury Freeborn England, petrify it like the past,
Turn our halfdays into Domesdays, burn our livings into dust,
What have the Normans ever done for us?

Come to Ely all you outlaws, discontents and dispossessed,
All you harrowed freeborn Herewards and Sweyns and Aethelreds,
Come you Morcar, Harold's brother, in a Saxon Earl we trust,
What have the Normans ever done for us?

Come to Ely, island-fortress in impenetrable fen,
Though they ship their French priests in to be heads of our churchmen
We'll return them, ducked in sea and sacked, by 'Iron' Brumannus
What have the Normans ever done to us?

Come to Ely all you outlaws, discontents and dispossessed,
All you harrowed freeborn Herewards and Sweyns and Aethelreds,
Come you Morcar, Harold's brother, in a Saxon Earl we trust,
What have the Normans ever done for us?

(Come to Hereward, loved in Ireland, son of sea air and free Bourne,
With a magic suit of armour won in Flanders and a sword
Of Cornish giants; from Scaldimariland his horse.
What have the Normans ever done for us?

Come to Ely, island-fortress in impenetrable fen,
Though the Nose guards try to catch us, they will fail and fail again
Though their towered witch cast evil, curse and moon us, ass and cuss,
What have the Normans ever done to us?)

From our show "As free as the waters that flow through the fen- the true story of Hereward the Wake."

Come To Ely

A new version to be performed at a special morning service on Percy's 80th anniversary at All Saints Church Fring with guest Vanessa Wood-Davies on harp.


I landed a crocked plane when still just a fitter
Five years derring done never shot down in flames
In a cloud of unknowing I flew for the sunrise
And came down to earth but lived up to my names.

Six knights of Logres to carry my coffin,
Six Logres ladies to walk by my side
Through hellfire and slaughter to a wheatfield of poppies
And a home hedge on Friday the 13th of July.

Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes only,
Play up the dead march as we go along,
And bring me to Fring All Saints and lay me down easy
I lived in the free air that breathes through this song.

Instrumental

Repeat first verse.

Lyric © Gareth Calway 2023

Melanie Calway  Lead vocal, acoustic guitar
Gareth Calway  Bomber bass, drums, backing vocals

Vanessa Wood-Davies - Gypsy harp, harmony vocal

A Poppy for Percival

We performed this at our recent summer solstice party expecting our pagan friends to know it and join in. They didn't and didn't, citing a Christian-indoctrinated primary schooling. My class in Milk St Primary School Frome (the one before the 11 plus year) used to sing this with hip, miniskirted Miss Millington who possibly got it from the Pete Seeger version and worldview. Seeger was deeply involved in the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King and no doubt enjoyed the progressive implications of the song, the keeper freeing the doe into the woods (among the leaves so green-o) rather than killing her or holding her captive. In the early 70s, as the English folk rock band Steeleye Span took Irish Republican folk songs like "All Around My Hat" ("I will wear a green willow) and McCartney singing "Give Ireland Back To The Irish" up the charts, I assumed "The Keeper" was a similarly progressive song about the changing relationship between England and Ireland. It could be though I'm not sure it started out like that. Apparently, it's just one of those eternal hunter/hind songs about sex, "under his cloak he carried a bow for to shoot a merry little doe."  I prefer the green 1965 version with miniskirted Miss Millington where, despite our incipient pubescence and a propensity for innuendo, Class 7 thought it was about a keeper hunting and then releasing an elfin doe among the trees into a semi-magical wood, like the ones we knew in Somerset. (It was a progressive school but also marked by the limitations of its time : when the whole year group sang together, the 'remove' class was always and only given the percussion instruments.)

Pic of me as the Keeper by Bhas Allan.

THE KEEPER

The song was written by the poet Elvis Costello and appeared on his corruscating third album "Armed Forces".

There's a smart young woman on a light blue screen
Who comes into my house every night
She takes all the red, yellow, orange and green
And she turns them into black and white

[Chorus]
But you tease, you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it

[Post-Chorus]
Better cut off all identifying labels
Before they put you on the torture table

[Verse 2]
'Cause somewhere in the Quisling Clinic
There's a shorthand typist taking seconds over minutes
She's listening in to the Venus line
She's picking out names, I hope none of them are mine

[Chorus]
But you tease, you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it

[Bridge]
Never said I was a stool pigeon
I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion
But you don't wanna hear about that

[Chorus]
'Cause you tease, you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it

[Post-Chorus]
Better send a begging letter to the big investigation
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?

[Chorus]
You tease, and you flirt
And you shine all the buttons on your green shirt
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it
You can please yourself, but somebody's gonna get it.



It's a brilliant lyric. Describing a female newsreader distilling all the impossible conflicts of the world (red, yellow, orange and greens- note the Irish reference of the last two colours) into an acceptable BBC 'black and white'. Then the green shirt which is both the British army and the Irish Republican one. But it's also seething with sexual energy; the news a kind of flirtation with a gagging public. Plus he puts this poem - which I prefer to almost any actual contemporary 'proper' poem - to blistering sound-poem music. That classic Buddy Holly channeling Costello combination of a ravishingly melody with an infuriatingly teeth-clenched delivery.

duplicitous vocals, bullet bodhran and punk harp - Gaz

Green Shirt

We get together with our old band and soulmate to play this homage to a young man from our village of Sedgeford who spent his 19th to his 25th year flying and fighting above the two main fronts of the Second World War (Europe and Asia) before dying in a tragic crash trialling an advanced training plane at home a month before the hostilities finally ceased. Our hosts and most of our audience were already born and have lived the entire 80 years since, grateful for the many young men like him who risked (and lost) it all on a wing and a prayer.

I landed a crocked plane when still just a fitter
Five years derring done never shot down in flames
In a cloud of unknowing I flew for the sunrise
And came down to earth but lived up to my names.

Six knights of Logres to carry my coffin,
Six Logres ladies to walk by my side
Through hellfire and slaughter to a wheatfield of poppies
And a home hedge on Friday the 13th of July.

Beat the drum slowly and play the pipes only,
Play up the dead march as we go along,
And bring me to Fring All Saints and lay me down easy
I lived in the free air that breathes through this song.

Instrumental

Repeat first verse.

Tune traditional,. Lyric © Gareth Calway 2023

Peacock's Tale and a Pixie Harpist

A marriage (and we are actually married, 45 years so far) of melody and rhythm. We do folk, indie, Americana, Norfolk noir, beat poems &  ghazals. Traditional tunes with contemporary beats. Music videos  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCb8wV0-DNiFs1R5G2VSytBQ
Maz lead & harmony vocals, acoustic guitar. Gaz vocals, voice, bass, drums & percussion, harmonium, recorders, lyre harp, field recordings.

Peacock's Tale Musical Storytelling

Pinned to spotlight

Popular tracks