Treacle & Bread

On the sleeve of this marvellous album there’s a picture of Rod Stradling playing his melodeon and beaming. He’s smiling not just with the pleasure of playing, but the joy of the dancing his playing ignites. Through skiffle, then folk clubs, Stradling found his way to English dance music and the melodeon and fell in love with both. His exuberant, rhythmic playing powered Oak and The Old Swan Band, two highly influential groups. Then he ‘went electric’ with Tiger Moth, at the forefront of new wave English country dance music, and the marrying of this and reggae in Edward II and the Red Hot Polkas.

This is a selection of English dance tunes – polkas, hornpipes, Morris and step dance (with the odd bourée, and piffereo from elsewhere) – that Stradling made with these outfits. It’s chokka with gems such as ‘The Sportman’s Hornpipe’ which Stradling says he could go on playing for ever (it does indeed fade out); ‘Walter Bulwer’s Polkas Nos 2 & 1’, a wall of sound with hammered dulcimer, sax, and drum; Tiger Moth’s coercion of ‘Speed the Plough’ into a three-minute single; and ‘Highland Mary / Old Tom of Oxford’, Morris tunes from Bampton – throughout it all Stradling has played for Bampton Traditional Morris Dancers. This being world music from the Cotswolds, Treacle & Bread has a fitting subtitle: Five Decades of the Melodeon That Shook the Wolds. Making this marvellous music for people to dance to – that’s a wonderful way to while away half a century