As part of the Manchester Literature Festival, the performance space in Manchester’s Central Library saw the presentation of a concert by folk trio Faustus (Benji Kirkpatrick on guitar and bouzouki; Saul Rose on accordion; Paul Sartin on violin; all three share lead vocal duties) to celebrate the poetry written during the Lancashire Cotton Famine of 1861-65. This previously underappreciated and forgotten poetry, frequently written by workers in the cotton mills, has been the subject of academic study through a research project undertaken by Dr Simon Rennie, a Senior Lecturer in Poetry at the University of Exeter. Faustus have set four of these poems to music and the concert gave them the chance to air these sad and angry poetic works in a set which also contained folk songs drawn from their three-album strong back catalogue.
Before the band took to the stage, Rennie gave a brief talk about the poems to provide some context. During the American Civil War, the Union army blockaded Confederate cotton-exports from slave plantations which prevented the cotton from arriving in England to be processed in the cotton mills, many of which were based around Lancashire (and this included Manchester, which was nicknamed ‘Cottonopolis’). As a result, the cotton mills and factories were closed, and many workers found themselves out of work and in dire straits: often selling their possessions to buy food or begging for assistance from others. The poems, Rennie remarked, were important as they presented the reactions of the ‘ordinary’ working people (although one could argue that workers are anything other than ordinary as it is their labour which keeps the economy ticking over).
Faustus then took to the stage immediately launching into their opening number, ‘Cotton Lords,’ which is from a Cotton Famine poem called ‘Food Or Work,’ and featured strong harmonies from all three members as they intoned: “Cotton Lords! Lords of creation/Feed the slaves which made your wealth.” The music which accompanied the poetry was equally as stirring, with Rose’s accordion setting the rhythm of the piece. Next came a song from their latest album, ‘Death And Other Animals,’ called ‘Slaves’ and featured strident music by Kirkpatrick against a militant lyric written by the Chartist William S. Villiers Sankey, which decried: “Men of England you are slaves/Bought by tyrants, sold by knaves/Yours the toil, the sweat and pain/Theirs the profit, the ease and gain.” While the text predates the Cotton Famine poems by about twenty years, the song shared a strong kinship with the rest of the material the band performed. Kirkpatrick switched from guitar to bouzouki for this song and he would alternate between the two instruments as the set continued.
The band then presented their second ‘Cotton Famine’ song: titled ‘Starvation', it was taken from the poem ‘The Lancashire Operatives Appeal.’ Despite its clearly Victorian syntax and language, the sentiment of the song rang true. As the band sang “Pray help us, we are starving/And cannot work obtain/To go about a begging/Runs sore against the grain,” it recalled the workers of today who are stuck in insecure, temporary work and zero-hour contracts who are forced to turn to food banks to feed themselves and their families. The poem may have been speaking of issues in the 1860s, but the beating heart of the words rings just as true in 2018.
Rose then introduced the next song, on which he took lead vocal duties, a traditional song with music by him called ‘The Deadly Sands’, which, he reassured the audience, was “a folk song, so everyone dies.” As much as the band are passionate about the folk tradition, they are certainly not po-faced and have a charming air of self-deprecation. Kirkpatrick was back on bouzouki for the next song, the third of the Cotton Famine poems, which was called ‘The Lancashire Factory Girl’ and was a haunting account of a factory worker who had been forced to sell all their possessions for food. After that mournful, bleak song, came some ‘light relief’ in the form of a musical medley of three songs from the band’s eponymous debut album: ‘Next Stop: Grimsby / The Three Rascals / Aunt Crisps.’ These instrumental pieces rattled along at a great pace and certainly lifted the mood after the gloom of the preceding songs.
The band then gave the audience their take on ‘The Thresherman,’ a fragment from a longer ballad, which describes the hard work done by a thresher when he is forced to explain himself to his employer, a titled Lord, and then dedicated their next song, “Oh To Be A King,” to its composer Bill Caddick, who had died earlier in the week. This song, written in the 1970s, took a wry look at the life of luxury and was a fitting tribute to a well-respected folk song performer. Faustus then performed their final Cotton Famine piece, ‘Wrongs And Rights,’ a highly charged and angry work. Their set ended with a stirring rendition of the sea shanty ‘Og’s Eye Man’ before the band left the stage to prolonged applause. Faustus returned for an encore, a rural song of farm life, which rounded off a set full of anger, sorrow, passion, tragedy, and humour: truly, within these songs all human life was laid bare.
Faustus showed themselves to be one of the finest folk bands currently touring and their adaptations of the Cotton Famine poems should inspire listeners to find out more about these fascinating works. The band’s playing and singing was first rate and Faustus often came across as a group who are passionate about the folk tradition.
Reportage - Andrew Marsden
on - 21/11/18
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