Song Story: "Roll Northumbria"

How to Fake It 'Till You Make It

This band has always had a guiding principle: be punk, be edgy, be loud… but never disrespect the folk traditions you’re drawing from. In our humble, elitist, gatekeepery-than-thou opinion, just a few too many bands in folk-punk reduce the folk traditions they work with to stereotypes or gimmicks. It’s certainly not everyone, and it may have improved in the last 8-10 years or so, but it’s there.

This, by the way, is why we’ve always recruited top-notch folk players; Seamus O’Flanahan, The Dread Pirate Druzil, Wormley Wangersnitch, Aled from Smokey Bastard and our newest mandolin player “Steve”… all are masters at their instruments. You might think it’s super cool to pick up a fiddler who can’t play very well, maybe get someone to strum a banjo, and sing about drinking and being an idiot so that your band can sound “Irish”. But that, if you think about it, is pretty disrespectful to Ireland.

Gate: kept.

So when we decided to put out a sea shanty album, I was nervous, man. I knew there would have to be at least 2 originals on it. But writing original sea shanties or sailor’s songs is so daunting, very few people do it and when you have people like Stan Rogers, Stan Hugill, Ewen MacColl and Johnny Collins to stand next to, you can feel absolutely miniscule. There is no way to even approach these singers and songwriters.

So I had writer’s block. It was brutal. All the stuff I was writing sounded soul-less, hollow, unreal. I was cranking out standard melodies that were totally ripped off of older shanties, nothing original was coming. So I did what any self-respecting songwriter would do in this situation: I put a 12-string guitar in a super weird tuning and sat down with a six-pack to finally watch Game of Thrones so my friends would stop fucking bothering me about it.

Many beers later and well into season two at about 2am, my random distracted plucking happened upon a melody. I repeated it. It was good. I stopped the show, I recorded the melody on my phone. It was really good. I had a melody! Thank you, Dragons and Tits!

And believe it or not, I just dug up the recording I made on my Iphone 4 that night!

But what would the song be about? When researching River Shanties for the album, I had come across Woody Guthrie’s “Roll On, Columbia, Roll On.” I loved the cadence of that phrase: Roll On, Columbia. But what sounded like “Columbia” that I could use? I was stuck. Calabria? Caledonia? Brangelina? Nothing suggested itself. The idea went on the shelf; I had nothing.

Then, coincidentally, I heard in conversation of the Esso Northumbria, a nightmarishly large tanker that a family friend had served on. And the story of the Northumbria was fascinating. In particular, the boat very clearly had a symbolic status: they built it too big, it was always falling apart in some way or another, and they only built it because they needed to haul maximum amounts of oil around the horn of Africa to avoid the Suez Canal. It was like the story of modern empire in a nutshell: driven by the ever-expanding need for energy and competitive advantage, people get too ambitious and too greedy, and something goes wrong, every time. I mean just LOOK at this sonofabitch:

Fig 1: Are you sure you couldn’t have made it a little bigger? Jesus Christ.

Can you imagine living with that thing just down the block for six months?

But in the 60s, many workers and sailors looked at this monstrosity with pride. It was a symbol of British power and ingenuity, of the fading Empire’s ability to still get it done. I was fascinated by that perspective, and put it in the chorus:

One for the hot sun above
Two for the Empire we love

But of course we simply cannot go back to this perspective; too many of us know what that insatiable drive for power and consumption is doing to our world. There is always that fire, burning down below, driving people forward to an uncertain end.

CHEERFUL FECKIN’ STUFF EH??

But to return to the point of this essay: looking back on it, “Roll Northumbria” is something I am very proud of, because I proved to myself that I could write a real, interesting, modern sailor’s song without relying on noisy guitars to make it interesting. And that final verse is straight out of the Stan Rogers playbook, a celebration of the people “on the ground” who know what is really going on, and who are always the first to suffer when things go wrong:

So come all you good workers, beware the command
That comes down on high from the desk of a man
Who’s never held steel or torch in his hands

I have no idea how I managed to write that.

So imagine my surprise when I was sitting at my local pub here in NYC, with Brendan Behan, Ronnie Drew and Éamon de Valera staring down at me from the walls, and “Roll Northumbria” came on over the loudspeakers. That was a hell of a thing, man.