The Real Fisherman’s Friends
Forget for a moment the 2009 headline in The Sun, ‘Fishermen Net One£Million Record Deal!’. Forget all the TV appearances and radio shows and magazine articles, and forget the top ten hit. Forget the ten albums. Or is it eight albums? I forget.... Forget the documentary, the book, the TV advert for frozen battered cod fillets (not fishfingers). Forget the audiences of twenty thousand at the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury, fifty thousand at Proms in the Park, and eighty thousand at Twickenham, even though each was an entirely unforgettable experience. Forget the sell-out appearances at the Albert Hall, the Festival Hall, the London Palladium and all the fabulous old theatres and opera houses and festivals up and down the land. Then, to boot, forget the movie, sorry movies, and the musical, and the BBC Folk Award of 2011 for upholding the Best Traditions of Folk....
Have you forgotten all that? I know, it’s hard, but only if we do that can we start to understand just who are the real Fisherman’s Friends.
The group of old friends first came together in a sitting room in Port Isaac late in 1990. The men who turned up that night, mostly in their early thirties or thereabouts, were all involved in singing in various local choirs and at folk events, pilot gig racing regattas and the like. The common thread was that they were all from the same tiny Cornish fishing village of Port Isaac, and all enjoyed singing songs from the ‘Cornish songbook’, songs like Little Lize, Going Up Camborne Hill, Lamorna and of course our national anthem, Trelawney, and they wanted to be able to sing the songs right through, not just conking out after the first verse and a chorus!
What was notable that evening was that within this group there was a range of voices sufficient to cover all points of the vocal compass, from top tenor high up in the north, down to true bass deep in the south. This facilitated the adoption of natural, freewheeling harmonies very much in line with traditional Cornish singing practices, as noted by the Reverend Hawker back as far as the early 1800s, where participants would congregate in a semi-circle and ‘strike sound’. In addition to this, the combination of their voices produced a muscularity which seemed to suit the genre of both sea shanties and songs of the sea, rooted very much in the labour-intensive seafaring traditions of crews of working men. Within the ‘Cornish songbook’ there were a few of these songs, such as What Shall We Do With The Drunken Sailor, Sloop John B & South Australia, and these seemed to resonate perfectly with their heritage.
The die was cast, and in the most outrageous act of piracy committed since Blackbeard at the height of his notoriety, the group embarked on collecting a repertoire of nauticalia (now numbering nearly two hundred songs), and began to perform them locally and at charity events around the county. Popularity grew, as did the crowds, who began to gathering increasing numbers for their performances on Friday evenings down by Port Isaac harbour throughout the 1990s and onward.
At the inaugural Falmouth Sea Shanty Festival back in 2004, unexpectedly the group gathered an massive and hugely appreciative audience on Custom Quay.Their dear friend the late Trevor Grills, the sweetest-ever tenor on the Cornish side of the Tamar, was heard to modestly remark‘Here, we might just be better than we think we are.’
Prophetic words indeed. Five years later, whilst minding their own business singing on the Platt at Port Isaac, they were rudely interrupted and discovered and, as they say, the rest is history. With the addition of some instrumentation (and it must be said youth) from a couple of mates from just down the coast in Padstow (itself a town long-steeped in musical tradition), they embarked on their momentous and well-charted voyage.
It is a voyage that, like their songs, has been a heady mix of emotions, triumph and tragedy, joy and despair, amusement and bemusement, but always above all else it has been blessed with the power of friendship and community. It is a voyage that has led them to be here with you tonight to share in their unique brand of entertainment.
Oh, and the name? Well, it’s got nothing to do with the sweets, delicious though they are. At that first meet-up in that Port Isaac sitting room back late in 1990, the old mates sat around on sofas and yearned about what they wanted to sing and how they wanted to do it; there were four fishermen and an ex-fisherman, various life boat men and coast guards, and a marine engineer for good measure; fishermen and their friends. It was there that The Fisherman’s Friends were born.
What else could they possibly have been called?
