“The Snuff Taker” by Peter van de Bellman
Lord, I remember Peter Bellamy so vividly:  one foot on his amp, with his stubble-straw hair and his Rolling Stones T-shirt with the lolling tongue, bawling ballads.  You can’t air-flail a concertina:  you play it leaning into the wind and leather, fingering the keys like a skilled telegrapher, typing music like a dispatch.  It’s a clacks of an instrument.  Its music is carnavalesque, hence mournful.  As for Peter’s singing—his name was notoriously anagrammatized as Elmer P. Bleaty.  He’d a voice like a shawm, pitched somewhere between a jeer and apocalypse.  A voice like a goat cheese, like raw single malt:  you absolutely love it or you find utterly revolting.  The man with Laphroaig in his throat.  He sang his own settings of Kipling:

There was no one like 'im, 'Orse or Foot,
    Nor any o' the Guns I knew;
An' because it was so, why, o' course 'e went an' died,
    Which is just what the best men do.

Went:  he crossed that ford.

Damn it, he was 47.  It’s been thirty years since we lost him.  On Wednesday, a few of the musicians who love him—those he worked with and others who weren’t born yet—gave a memorial concert, “Tell It Like It Was.”

There were great sets from the compère, Mossy Christian, from Damien Barber, Brian Peters, and The Wilson Family.  It wasn’t all Bellamy’s material.  Gina Le Faux did a song of her own, called (I think) “Sweeting’s Alley,” about an 18th-century gender-binary flash lad. It wasn’t just comically donning a petticoat to befool Fielding’s gang:  at the shut-the-shutters-and-bid-them-goodnight moment, she said farewell to he.  Jon Boden did a spectacular performance of “The Land” (I love that song) and “Danny Deever.” Peter’s old comrade, the redoubtable Heather Wood, sang “Follow Me ’Ome,” as was her right.  She linked to Martin Carthy, who said he’d just had a knee replacement a day or two ago and was looking frail.  Bless him, he tried valiantly, but could not quite finish a song or a tune.  I fervently wish him a swift and perfect recovery.  He spoke beautifully about Peter and said that Norma was in the next room, but couldn’t speak of him at all without dissolving in tears.  The concert closed with footage of Bellamy from 1988, in full flight, and an exceedingly terrible striped shirt.

I’ve admired Bellamy for —great Boudicca!—half a century.  Back in (I think) 1971, my friend who would inspire Sylvie in Moonwise brought two LPs back from a trip to England.  These were the first English revivalist Trad I’d heard.  (I’ve never been any good at radio, so relied on happenstance and vinyl.) Both records were of unaccompanied voices.

One was Anne Briggs, who sang the first Tam Lin I’d ever heard, an eerie version from a Scottish Traveller :

And the Queen of Elven she called from a bush,
She’s red as any blood,
“I should have tore out your eyes, Tambling,
And put in two eyes of wood, of wood,
And put in two eyes of wood.”

Briggs sang like a bird in that metamorphosed tree, with a nest in the knothole where his sight had been.

The other disc was the Young Tradition:  Peter Bellamy, Royston Wood, and Heather Wood (no relation).  They dressed like foppish hippies, and sang like a late louche night in a dockside pub, circa 1840.  Eclectic music:  shape note, chanteys, the Agincourt carol, “The Rolling of the Stones.”   The harmonies go up your nose like quinine water.  They sting.

I loved it.

A decade later, when I was making yearly pilgrimages to the Whitby Folk Festival, I heard quite a lot of Peter.  He sang Child ballads via Appalachia, sea songs, cowboy stuff, his settings of Kipling (for that, he wore another T-shirt:  “Mr. Kipling Made Exceedingly Good Songs.”)  Some years, he did the daily newsheet, brilliantly:  artwork, puzzle games, jokes, mystifications. I wish I’d spoken with him more, but I was shy.  He was a terrific character:  brilliant, belligerent, witty, kind, mischievous, curious, passionate.

I’ve seen two transformative performances of his great ballad opera, The Transports.  In London in 1983, there was shadow-scenery, casting distortions of the singers all over the walls and ceiling of the QEH, and I had a vision of a great witch looming and scurrying.  That was Malykorne's creation.

At Whitby in 1992, the year after Peter’s death, Eliza Carthy took the part written for her mother, and it was heartbreakingly hopeful, a rebirth.

Late, late, the last night of the festival, I was coming up the cliff face from the glass-and-iron Spa, going to and fro on the path, in dark and silence but for waves, with the sea below me and beyond.  A shadow—a ghost?—came from behind me, and said softly:  “Peter wanted you to know that he loved Moonwise.”

Later I heard that his copy was full of annotations.  I’d give an afterlife to see those notes; and many afterlives to speak with him again.

Nine