Playing aweigh: Fisherman's Friends making Celtic Connections a port of call

Published on Monday 24 January 2011 19:08

Having sailed into the charts with their first album, Cornwall's ten-man choir are bringing their shanties to Glasgow for Celtic Connections, but be warned, the songs' origins mean the language is quite salty

• The ten members of Fisherman's Friends are not all fishermen, but they do have a strong connection with the sea in their native Port Isaac

LAST week it was announced that a humble Cornish male-voice choir who have been singing sea shanties for fun for the best part of 20 years have been nominated as Best Group at this year's Radio 2 Folk Awards.

Whether or not they scoop this prize, Fisherman's Friends will be going home with the Good Tradition Award, in recognition of the history-making performance of their current album Port Isaac's Fisherman's Friends, which became the first traditional folk album to debut in the Top 10 of the network charts. This caps a whirlwind year for the ten-strong group, who have been entertaining locals and visitors to their native Port Isaac – a fishing village about ten miles north of Wadebridge in north Cornwall – throughout the summer months for the past 15 years or so with their Friday night waterfront gigs.

The group had a couple of mail-order albums and a robust local reputation to their name when they were "discovered" at one of their regular sing-songs in 2009 by holidaying producer Rupert Christie and Radio 2 DJ Johnnie Walker. Within a matter of months, they were chart artists, packing them in at the Glastonbury and Cambridge Folk Festivals.

Jon Cleave, the burly bloke with the bald head, walrus moustache and booming bass voice, who stands stage right in Fisherman's Friends, is tickled by this upswell in notoriety. He jokes about their entourage of Fwags – fishermen's wives and girlfriends – but says "although we've been bracketed as folk singers, we're never sure if we are, to be honest. We're all working men – apart from Peter, who's retired – so we're not professional musicians."

The group actually has a clause in its contract that stipulates the amount of time the men will devote to music, away from their day jobs. Only three members of the ensemble – the brothers John, Julian and Jeremy Brown – are actually fishermen, but all the rest are current or ex-lifeboat crew, or auxiliary coastguards, and now own small businesses in the area.

Cleave, the group's designated spokesman, runs a gift shop in Port Isaac writes and illustrates children's books and is currently researching a book about rival Cornish pasty barons, as one does. At 51, he is the second youngest member of the group. They call him The Boy.

Like his fellow Fisherman's Friends, he has sung in local choirs and chorales for years. "We were all minded to sing but we weren't quite sure how to do it," he says.

It was the revival of gig-rowing as a sport and the social singing scene which sprang up around it which ultimately spawned the group. "The men used to separate off and sing these older songs. The ones we particularly enjoyed singing were sea shanties, because Cornwall's such a maritime county."

All the men live in the Port Isaac area and, with the exception of Yorkshireman John McDonnell, all are Cornwall born and bred but, despite cleaving to their geographical roots, only a few of the songs in the Fisherman's Friends repertoire are purely Cornish in origin.

Some are railroad and mining songs which floated back to the county from the United States, Canada, South Africa, Australia or anywhere that Cornish emigrants were employed. For their concert repertoire, they stick to shanties and other songs of the sea, not only reflecting Cornwall's maritime heritage, but also celebrating the multicultural nature of these work chants, created by truly cosmopolitan ships' crews.

"If you look at the text of Moby Dick," says Cleave, "you've got Queequeg from the South Seas, you've got Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Irish, Scots, people from the Americas, from the West Indies, so the work songs that they sang became big fusions of all the different cultures. I think it's fantastic how you might get a song with a Scots reel in it and an English folk lyric and maybe a West Indian rhythm."

Fisherman's Friends have been inspired to write a couple of their own maritime-themed tunes in the tradition, and are not averse to tinkering with the old songs just as the sailors would have done at sea.

"Sometimes it would take a crew the best part of a day to weigh the anchor aboard and so when they were singing these songs they needed hundreds of verses," says Cleave. "They would try and make up new verses the whole time, so to add new lyrics is part and parcel of the tradition."

The mechanisation of the sailing and fishing industries eventually eliminated the need for communal chanting to keep the workers hauling in time but wherever there is a fishing community around the British Isles, there are those who are passionate about preserving the hearty and haunting songs of the sea.

"The songs have an appeal because they are truly folk songs, they are truly worksongs," says Cleave. "They've not really been written; they have evolved. They are the people's songs really. It is estimated that 200 years ago around a quarter of the population was involved in waterborne activities and so I think anyone can look back in their ancestry and in all probability find people who have gone away to sea. That's an appealing idea that you can reach back 250 years or more and find a cultural lineage."

Fisherman's Friends may have hauled that lineage into the Top 10, but they still uphold their traditional Friday slot on the Platt at Port Isaac. For those who can't make it down to Cornwall, however, there is the opportunity to sample the choir's lusty bravura at Celtic Connections.

"We try to have fun with the audience rather than at them," says Cleave. "We tell them this is going to be bawdy and fruity and saucy, because a lot of these are very rude and profane songs. I think that almost takes us into the music hall tradition and I'm happy to sit there.

"We know we're not the best singers in the world but we strike a chord because it's as much about who we are and what we represent as the sound we make."

• Fisherman's Friends support Seth Lakeman at Glasgow Royal Concert Hall, tomorrow, as part of Celtic Connections.