Terri Dunbar-Curran
THOSE mesmerised by the evocative music of War Horse will have the chance to relive the experience through An Evening with the War Horse Song Man, Bob Fox at Theatre on the Bay from today to Saturday.
Folk singer Fox will perform all of the songs from the production, which he was part of for three years, as well as some other material.
“In my role as Song Man I was used to link scenes and add to the story by sometimes only singing a line or two from the songs brilliantly crafted by John Tams,” says Fox. “I felt that the songs deserved to be heard in their full versions in a concert situation so I put this together and link the songs with snippets of the story.”
While the show will most appeal to those who have seen War Horse, it also gives the uninitiated a taste of what made it so popular. “My performance is totally acoustic, using only guitar and melodeon, and is very intimate, without any large- scale orchestral arrangements and with lots of opportunity to join in with the choruses,” says Fox.
As a teen, Fox was inspired by the likes of The Beatles and The Kinks to teach himself to play the guitar. He was raised in a coal mining town in County Durham in England and when he was about 18 he heard a song about a mining disaster in Nova Scotia and went looking for similar songs in his region.
“I found a very vibrant folk music scene where ordinary people sang exactly the kind of songs I was looking for and more, very left wing, protest, union type songs.”
That discovery drew him into the world of folk music, and before long he was performing at folk venues across the UK. “I like the fact that most of the folk songs were written by ordinary people without musical education but with heart and meaning, often telling true stories from a personal experience. A great friend of mine once said that the best songs bypass the intellect and go straight for the heart! That's what I like most about the songs that I sing.”
Fox’s involvement in War Horse began when Tams asked him to audition for the role of Song Man for the National Theatre’s London West End production. “Song Man is a spirit-like character, the soul of the Devon village and is invisible to the others in the story. He appears at the beginning and the end and at many pivotal moments in the play to link the action, drive the story, comment, indicate time passing and sometimes to make the impossible happen. I had not done theatre before, so it was a massive learning curve for me,” he says, adding that the opportunity to visit South Africa with the production was memorable.
Having played guitar from the age of 14, as well as taking piano lessons for a few years, Fox initially studied to become a music teacher. But by the time he qualified he was already in demand as a folk singer, so he decided to rather pursue performing as a career. “That was 1974 and I'm still doing it!”
His role as Song Man saw him learning to play the melodeon. “A very difficult instrument and I tell a bit of a story about that in my show. It definitely was not easy to pick up and although it makes a rather beautiful sound I was glad when my involvement with the production finished so that I could get back to playing guitar.”
When he first started to sing folk, Fox focussed mainly on traditional songs from old collections made by the likes of Cecil Sharpe, who travelled the country making recordings of old singers. “These songs enjoyed a great revival in the late 50s through the 60s and I think this inspired generations of new songwriters,” he says, adding that while he doesn’t write his own songs, he does collect from a wide variety of sources. The biggest development in his music has been moving from early traditional songs to those of contemporary writers. “I love it when I find a song about an interesting subject or that tells a great story, it's always lyrics first for me, a song has got to be saying something for me to want to make my own arrangement of it.”
Fox believes that folk music is “the music of the people”, that it is for all ages, religions and nationalities. “We all have the same emotions and feelings towards all kinds of human situations and hopefully will continue to be able to empathise with characters in the stories that folk music tell us.”
After his Theatre on the Bay run, Fox returns to touring the UK, and in January he’ll join three other singers for a themed tour dedicated to the life and times of the coal mining communities in the North of England, called The Pitmen Poets. He’s also working on another one-man show telling the story of Lord Franklin and his lost expedition to find the North West Passage.
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