london belongs to me

Yeah...He's bought his own gown, he's bought his own bell, and the man is now a rogue unit, an unaffiliated outlaw declaimer. The enterprising cryer even makes his practice self-funding by bringing himself up to date with 21st century news media, and selling ad space: When we turn yet another corner to see him in front of us once more - weird time-travelling bugbear, evil jester, that particularly medieval combination of bawdy jollity and menace - he is stridently alerting the townsfolk to the opening of a new travel agent; 'oh yea, and for a limited time only all customers buying flights from Exeter airport get a week's free parking, oh yea...'. Seriously, wouldn't it make a great TV show - 'attention all units, we have a maverick town cryer situation.'

We took refuge in the cathedral. From outside this fine building is a compressed cluster of spikes; from inside a vertiginous gormenghasterpiece of Gothic verticalism. Extended clusters of stone piping ascending to the vaults prompt anachronistic flash-forwards to HR Geiger's alien baby factories. I start to wonder what Dunwich cathedral would have looked like now.

Pevsner is unfairly sniffy about both external and internal décor (though not so much as he is of St Mary's of Penzance, whose altar, he says, 'smacks of the wurlitzer'). Actually, though there are no imposing gargoyles, there are some nice carvings. But Pevsner is particularly disappointed about the resolutely brutal modernist extensions added in the late 60s - jutting flat slabs and Corbusier-derived 'fashionable motifs' totally out of character with the original highrise barbs. But it's only right isn't it - cathedrals, like pyramids, are an enduring rebuke to modernity. They show us what we can no longer, by any means, achieve, what we've sacrificed. (quote k-P mark: "capitalism's scandalous wastage of resources means that six levels of managerialst meddlers/ 'quality co-ordinators' would @!#$ things up before the finance for the first stone could be agreed.")

Verticality has been succeeded, made impossible, snuffed-out, by a smoothly dysfunctioning horizontality. Even the tower block is stacked horizontality in its social and technical essence. 'Cos there's nothing up there any more, any more than there's solid ground 'down there'. Only lateral, levelling, procedural connections between beleaguered flatlanders. There's something right about the quarreling 'L', the perpetual incompossibility between the resolute mediocrity of the grey boxes on their stumpy concrete pillars and the vaulted magnificence, the awful belittling altitude, of the original edifice.

We'd hardly stepped into the cathedral when suddenly Ruth gets a vicious nosebleed; she puts it down to some sort of automated exorcism (wireless theocracy, spiritual Bluetooth). I remember that - and appreciate why - nosebleeds, these unstoppable apparently unprompted flows, were traditionally regarded as terrible omens.

One of the most beautiful tragic British traditional songs, The Drowned Lovers;, tells a tale typical of these sorts of songs (or at least those that are remembered and documented). The songs are always brutal and matter-of-fact in recounting the most horrendous deaths, as well as being innocently rich in psychodrama.

William, doubting his lover's fidelity, plans to cross the Clyde to call on her, against the will of his mother. Despite her entreaties and curses ('in the deepest part of the Clyde Water, drowned you shall be'), he defies her and crosses the fierce river ('Oh roaring Clyde, you roar so loud, your stream is wondrous strong / Make me your wreck when I came back, But spare as I'm going')

Whilst his lover Margaret sleeps, William is turned away in turn by her mother, who impersonates her and tells him tales of her many other gentleman callers. As William crosses despondently back, and verse by verse, by slow stages, is pulled from his steed into the raging torrent, she awakes from dreaming, discovers the truth from her mother, and inevitably follows William into the wild night ('and the louder that this lady cried, the louder blew the wind'). In she wades, verse by verse deeper into the river in search of him. The song ends with the tragic couplet: 'for you have had a cruel mother, Willy, and I have had another / and now we'll sleep in Clyde water like sister and like brother'.

The connection with the foregoing is that when Nic Jones created the definitive modern interpretation of this song (Nic Jones is a tremendously underrated artist, at least the equal of Martin Carthy, and is - or should have been - in a wider sense, as important a musician as for example Nick Drake, Syd Barrett. Jones created a unique style of folk guitar and singing that blended the faithful rendition of carefully-researched historical songs with a contemporary, highly individual guitar style that owed something to the lute, something to contemporary blues/pop/rock, and something to the innovative tunings he favoured. Almost uniquely in the notoriously patchy history of folk/pop crossover (but isn't folk always already a crossover? Folk singers who don't think so are kidding themselves), Jones' sound generated its own depth, intensity and authenticity without relying on a supposed historical fidelity or the ghastly 'updating' of electric folk/rock. Sadly when Nic was at the height of his powers, he was incapacitated by a car accident, and although he eventually recovered, never played or recorded since. Even worse, the guy who owns the rights to his early records refuses to release them, contributing to his undeservedly languishing in obscurity and relative poverty). Anyway, this is all a digression within a digression...when Jones adapted the song from the text, which I presume he or someone else found by trawling through the collection of Cecil Sharp, he chose to alter the lines 'Willy sits at his stable door, and he's combing his coal black steed / and he's doubting on fair Margaret's love and his nose begins to bleed' to 'his heart began to bleed'. Somewhat uncharacteristic of his approach - although he was never reverent, he usually preserved the essential plainness of the songs. And, I think, a mistake, because how much more powerful, disturbing, and germane to the story, is the image of the sudden burst of crimson from the nose, foretelling William's doom, than the asinine metaphorical platitude of the 'bleeding heart'.

And this in essence is what's wrong with bad pop the whole space-time continuum over, and inversely what's great about some folk songs; they have real red blood instead of faded purple metaphor.