DONE DIFFERENT is a double album of new folk Ballads celebrating "Boudicca's Country" ( ie Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Cambridgeshire plus the East of England she once led to revolt against Rome). Like the book it's based on, (Gaz's 2015 Poppyland volume "Doin Different, new folk ballads from the East of England originally subtitled "Boudicca's Country,") this album celebrates the sung and unsung heroes and heroines of Icenia's history up to the present day, set to traditional or contemporary folk tunes, all performed and recorded by the Norfolk musical storytelling duo Peacock’s Tale. "Done Different" is the musical realisation of "Doin Different" in two one hour albums of 16 tracks each. Many tracks have music videos attached.*


These ballads have been performed live before audiences all over East Anglia, notably during a "Doin Different" tour that was launched on a Bronze Age barrow near Binham; (DD, track 1) then toured East of England folk festivals; folk clubs, libraries, arts centres, village halls, churches, historic houses, history groups, pubs and theatres. DD Track 7 (“Badass King John”) was probably its media high point when Gaz rapped it as part of a civic ceremony unveiling the statue of King John in Conduit Street Lynn, which headed the BBC Look East news programme that evening. DD 11 and DD 2 7 were high points of "The House of On The River", an earlier Norfolk and Norwich Festival show and East Anglian tour about the life of and times a Tudor merchant house in Norwich. A capacity Lynn Minster audience watched a 50-part choir perform the final track of DD2 in one medieval play featuring 5 other “Done Different” tracks as its musical score; while a packed Hanse House courtyard watched another. A "Doin Different" set played the Folk in the Town festival and Folk in a Field festivals and successive Lynn Heritage days.

The "Doin Different" tour even boldly ventured beyond the Waveney, regaling Suffolk history groups and festivals with stories about their county rivals while sharing stories about our common Celtic queen, Boudicca. It also took St Edmund to Bury, Hereward to Ely and Bourne, Boudicca to Lincoln and Cromwell to Ely.

Folk ballads (the Child Ballads are the classic example) are more literary than many song lyrics and tell 'news that stays news" stories of unaccommodated man and woman up against the odds and the elements. They tell of Sir Patrick Spens in all his glory going down beneath the foam of the Pentland Firth; of the May Queen in every village cut down like a rose in her prime. Ballads are elemental, primitive, urgent, earthy, spooky, haunted, both edge of nightmare real and cartoon-larger than life. They tell of murders and heaths and ghosts and riddles and magic and stark heroic defeats. Our generation may well have first met them in an ‘O’ level school book (like “The Poet’s Tale”) 50 years ago before hearing them anew on contemporary folk albums. These 30 ballads were originally published as poems, albeit poems that "tell a story" - just as the old ballads were.

Our interpretation of folk is the stories of the common folk, either about their heroes and heroines or about themselves; its music made by ordinary folk - sea shanties, work songs, chants, nursery rhymes, skiffle, rap and - with its emphasis on something urgent to articulate rather than the cleverness of the articulation- - punk. Apart from our beloved guest musicians of whom we are in awe and who are very virtuosic indeed, our instrumentation is simple, the mood direct and urgent, the ballad metres etched by percussion and bass; the words typically in a folk idiom: imagery drawn from nature and strong feeling in the manner of Wordsworth's "Lyrical Ballads" ie "language really used by men" - we would add "and women" - in heightened situations.

We like a drone - that oddly psychedelic feature common to folk, classical Early Music and the music of the East - and that is the main use to which the harmonium is put on this album. The alto recorder is used sparingly, as much birdcall/ wind/ghost sound effect as musical instrument (and our extremely modest contribution to its extinction rebellion.) Other than that it's just female and male voice, in lead/support, unison or harmony, drum and bass and occasional acoustic guitar and an emphasis on strong tunes and choruses - and, on the earlier tracks of DD1, on the spooky monks' chants that used to fill the churches and friaries of this landscape. A handful of the ballads are even left as spoken word with or without a setting, the art of the recitative than the aria.

All that said, Maz's voice rings out throughout like a song thrush on a May morning, which is a perfect fit for any 'folk' ballad. We're probably at our 'folkiest' on the real Robin Hood ballad (set to “The Lincolnshire Poacher”) and on the rousing closing track of each album.

Peacock’s Tale folk indie duo met, long before they ever thought about making music together, in 1975 at UEA, whose motto, following that of the Norfolk it stands on and celebrates, is ‘Do Different’. It seemed meant.


*That original book collected 39 new ballad lyrics together with assorted scores, chords, photographs of Norfolk heroes, heroines, places and the performers and composers
www.poppyland.co.uk/products/B79622
and remains a bumper resource of scores and chords for those wanting to play (or compose new settings) for the 39 ballad lyrics. The book has two scholarly introductions, one an historical, the other a literary, introduction to the folk ballad form, even including a brief consideration of the Norwich City anthem ‘On the ball City’ as an example of how community 'ballads' come to be written and developed (to wit, you can hear the Barclay End in full cry singing it towards the end of Done Different 2.)