Folking brilliant

I'm snowed under by marking, hence my (relative) silence, but I can't help enthusing about the gig I went to last night.

I was exhausted, yet thinking about staying in the office rather than go to see The Imagined Village, such is the pressure of work, but my colleagues insisted, so off I toddled. My seat at Birmingham Town Hall is one I've picked before - aisle, high up in the circle. The sound's great, the view's good and there's legroom. The way I felt, I thought I might fall asleep, but as I was on my own, it wouldn't have mattered much.

I've got The Imagined Village's two albums, but haven't had much of a chance to listen to the new one yet. I played it in the office and liked it - it's good modern folk - but thought it was a bit flat.

How wrong I was. Live, this supergroup are stunning. The full album lineup includes members of the Carthy family, Transglobal Underground, Billy Bragg, Benjamin Zephaniah and all sorts of other luminaries, but the touring lot were Martin Carthy, Eliza Carthy (swoon), Chris Wood, Johnny Kalsi (on dhol and many other Indian percussion instruments), Barney someone, a stunning sitar player, a drummer and a electronics guy, who did amazing things on his theremin.

I guess most people think that folk is mimsy rubbish about shepherds with an undertone of xenophobia. Last night proved how utterly wrong that view is. A big band sparking off each other and singing songs about the recession and dating aliens is something to behold: powerful, subtle, fun.

The thing about folk music is that at it's best, it's like good literature. We all know that there are very few plots (some say 9, others 7): it's how you make it your own that determines whether you're a good writer. With folk, the themes are often similar, and the tunes are a mix of new and inherited ones. The art is in taking the familiar and rendering it unfamiliar. The Imagined Village did this to stunning effect, particularly with the openers, Sweet Jane and John Barleycorn.

Part of the power of the gig stemmed from their palpable anger at the BNP, which is trying to attach itself to the folk scene. Martin Carthy read out the Guardian's account of Nick Griffin turning up at his daughter's gig to propose 'doing something': Eliza was visible horrified. The band are hugely proud of the contribution to their sound made by their Asian sitarist and percussionist ('the future of English traditional music', Martin called them). They called a temporary halt while they filmed the audience shouting 'Bollocks' to the BNP, something they're doing at every gig - apparently ultra-white Shrewsbury wasn't very enthusiastic the previous night.

All exhaustion vanished during the set. They properly rocked: I've never seen a cellist, a sitarist and a bouzouki player do the heads-down-in-a-circle rock-out thing while a theremin wailed and a sampler added instant extra musicians, but it made perfect sense. Last night destroyed for me the notion that folk is a conservative art form.

The night finished with two standing ovations and a mass singalong. 3000 people following Martin Carthy and (gradually) the rest of the band in what he introduced as 'a little folk song from Wolverhampton': Slade's 'Cum On Feel The Noize'. And away I went, proud to be a part of something so passionate and so meaningful.

Here's some video : the live Sweet Jane is great, though the clip isn't brilliant quality.