Megson - Con-tra-dic-shun (2019)

It’s a good time to be a duo in the world of folk music. In the last few months there have been stunning albums by such illustrious pairs as Gilmore and Roberts, the Brothers Gillespie, and Jimmy Aldridge and Sid Goldsmith. Megson aren’t exactly new to the party – their first album, On The Side, came out in 2004 – but they are still amongst the most exciting and accomplished musical partnerships around.

One of the things that sets Megson apart is their sheer range of ideas, their willingness to try something new, even nine albums and fifteen years into their career. They are equally adept at updating well-known traditional material and composing their own sharply observed and often politically astute songs. Previous releases have included an album of children’s songs (2012’s When I Was A Lad) and a collection of songs from the last 250 years of North East England’s musical history, released to coincide with the pair’s wedding. Another secret to their success may be the fact that they keep everything in-house. Contradicshun (Con-tra-dic-shun), like many of their previous albums, is released via their own record label, EDJ Records, while Stu Hanna handles production duties himself. This allows a degree of creative autonomy you’d normally associate with Bandcamp’s bedroom-pop revolution and allows Stu and Debbie’s highly original take on folk music to bear fruit.

Contradicshun’s opening track, Are You Sitting Comfortably, is a bittersweet paean to domesticity and the drudgery of the modern working week. The back-and-forth of Hanna and Stu’s vocal interplay is quietly stunning, and their ear for a telling phrase is as sharp as ever. It is a folk song in the most contemporary sense – its characters scroll through phones, take the car to the garage, try to ignore the mounting pressure that life brings. And in a way it is a political song. Not overtly, perhaps, but both personally and universally political nonetheless. It has a sad beauty heightened by recognition.

It is followed immediately by the title track, a little-known song by the nineteenth century Geordie concert-hall singer Joe Wilson. It is carried along briskly by Stu’s sprightly mandolin, and again shows the pair’s innate ability to put across messages of lasting importance with seeming ease. In this case, the message is one of cooperation, of the need to act together in a world where morality is being split along ever more polarised lines. This polarisation is explored further in The New Girl, which discusses the difficulties that have been faced through time by immigrants. The duo’s lyrical skill is once again to the fore – here they demolish the logical fallacy of people who claim that they have a right to a particular place with the line: ‘before the very first new girl there was no-one here at all.’

Voice Of The Nation is a historical curio – a song from an obscure collection of Northern songs from 1812 whose writer’s identity remains unclear. It is, however, an impassioned call for political reform and also an important document of a difficult period in Britain’s history, and it is sung with piercing clarity matched by Stu’s bright, bold banjo. Toast: Jackey & Jenny is one of a number of songs here that examine a story with two sides. Here a traditional drinking song is played off against a composition by James Rewcastle, a leading light in the North East’s temperance movement in the nineteenth century. It’s presented in such a way that neither option seems any better or worse than the other – a clever way of advocating both moderation and diversity. It also provides more evidence of the ‘Contradicshuns’ that are present everywhere in life as in music, and which always make things more interesting.

The album’s tenderest moment comes with I Drew My Ship Into The Harbour, a traditional song beautifully sung by Debbie. Her melancholy delivery is given ample space by Stu’s sympathetic production and is echoed by his high and lonesome fiddle. Sometimes the less well-known folk songs provide the biggest emotional impact, and this is certainly the case here. It is proof that for song collectors and performers hard work pays off, and that there is still a rich seam of traditional material to be mined. Megson should be given credit for bringing these songs to our attention and doing so with such skill that they are sure to stand the test of time. The Keach In The Creel, by contrast, has been performed regularly by some of the most highly-regarded artists in the history of folk music, from Ewan MacColl to Jean Redpath to various members of the Waterson:Carthy family. Here it is given a lively, fast-paced, almost jubilant rendition that revels in the bawdy humour of the words.

Two Sides In Every Conversation is the most explicit examination of the album’s themes of duality and difference. Its twin narrative strands allow it to be both funny and sad – a difficult feat to pull off, especially in the confines of a single song – and the duet format allows the pair to show off the vocal understanding they have developed in a decade and a half of recording together. Barrington Judo Club is another highly impressive original song, lyrically pitched somewhere between the Village Green-era Kinks and Belle and Sebastian, but with a kinetic strum of mandolin and more of that excellent vocal reciprocation that is the hallmark of any Megson album.

Contradicshun ends with A Week Away In The Caravan. It is a celebration of small and very British joys, a kind of Mike Leigh film in song form with an added hint of music-hall humour, which both skewers and celebrates its subject. It is a move typical of an album that thrives on quiet paradox, whose binary motives turn in on each other to create a perfectly unified piece of art. It is no overstatement to say that Contradicshun is a masterpiece of shared creativity, the fullest flowering of a partnership that has been nurtured for fifteen years. It is Megson’s most complete album and their best to date.