The Spirit of a Troubadour: An Interview with Chris Foster
Chris Foster is an English folk musician and ballad singer who has lived in Reykjavík since 2004. Long established on the British folk circuit, Chris is also a founding member and director of the annual Vaka Folk Arts Festival in Akureyri, Iceland. His most recent studio album, 2017's Hadelin, was lauded by Folk Radio UK as “pushing the boundaries of traditional music,” and his song “The Life of a Man / Greensleeves” was nominated as best traditional track in the 2018 BBC Folk Awards. Additionally, as part of a duo called Funi, Chris performs intricate, old Icelandic music alongside his wife, Bára Grímsdóttir.
In the interview below, Chris discusses his upbringing in a small English town, his journey into traditional music, and his painstaking work to research the little-known Icelandic instruments called langspil and íslensk fiðla. You can visit his website at: https://www.chrisfoster-iceland.com/
Where did you grow up?
Well, you could say I’m still growing up. But I grew up in a smallish town in Somerset in the southwest of England called Yeovil. It’s a market town in a rural agricultural area. Basically, it was a very quiet place to grow up — and fairly boring. By the time I was ready to go to university, I was keen to get quite far away.
When did you start playing music?
I had piano lessons for a year or two starting at age seven. In grammar school, I took up playing the clarinet; I liked the instrument but wasn’t very good. Then I got interested in singing in folk clubs and singing folk songs, and obviously the clarinet is not a great instrument for that because you can’t sing and play it at the same time. So I sold the clarinet to buy my first guitar — I was about 16 or 17 at the time — and I’ve played the guitar ever since.
What was your introduction to folk music?
My parents were both involved in folk dancing. My dad was a Morris dancer and they used to go to a weekly folk dance club, so I got taken along to that when I was quite young. As I got older, I started dancing as well.
Then, when I was about 14 or 15, the 1960s folk revival started taking off. A group of four guys I knew started a folk club in Yeovil, and as soon as that happened I went along. The first time I went there I discovered that if you sang, you got in free — so the next week I sang. I had a couple of songs up my sleeve.
But I quickly realized that I couldn’t sing the same song every week, so then I had to learn some more. I just used to go there every week and sing all the time.
When I was first starting off, I was singing traditional songs. Part of what attracted me was the fact that the county of Somerset was where [the renowned folk song scholar] Cecil Sharp did a lot of his early collecting. These songs came from villages I knew well and were in the language that I spoke.
As I went on, I was also singing a few songs by Bob Dylan and a few by Paul Simon. Paul Simon came to the Yeovil Folk Club, actually. They paid him six pound fifty — well, six pounds, ten shillings in those days, before decimal money. That was just before his first solo album, The Paul Simon Songbook, came out.
I was also interested in blues and R&B — people like Muddy Waters and Howlin’ Wolf. When they came over on tour, I used to go see them perform.
A lot of white working-class kids in the UK really identified with black blues artists from the States: we had nothing whatsoever in common with them, but we felt some kind of fellow feeling. I think it had partly to do with the fact that they were second-class citizens, and we in a class-based society could relate to that — although our experience was utterly different and nothing like as bad. There was also something cool about what they did — larger-than-life characters, a lot of them.
But as I started to discover more about traditional singers in England, I learned that there were people doing the equivalent thing from my own culture, in my own language, which sat well in my mouth — whereas Americanisms just ended up sounding ludicrous. That was then the path that I started to follow.
I always related to the narrative element in the songs — the songs for me were about telling stories.
What gives a ballad its depth?
They deal with huge situations and big dilemmas, and they’re rich in that they’re open to multiple interpretations. That’s part of what I find attractive about them — and they’re certainly different from chart pop music, which is by comparison very shallow. Was then, still is. Almost without exception.
Once you left Yeovil, where did you go?
First I went to London University to study biology and chemistry, but I quickly realized that it wasn’t what I wanted to do. So I did five years of art school, and sort of fell from that without having to lift a finger into being a professional musician.
How did that transition come about?
A friend of mine, John Kirkpatrick, was running a folk club in London with his then-wife, Sue Harris, but shortly after I moved into London they moved away. So, along with a couple of other people, I stepped into running the club.
Meanwhile, a music agent came to the club to see a performer, Seán Cannon, who subsequently became a member of the Dubliners. That same night, Sara Grey — an American ballad singer and banjo player — was there, so this agent came to see Seán but got to see Sarah and me as well, and asked all three of us if we’d like to go on their books. I thought, “Yeah, got nothing to lose.”
This agent was working for names like Richard Thompson, Martin Carthy, and Boys of the Lough. I started out as the reserve player on the bench: if somebody was sick or couldn’t make a gig, I would be sent as a substitute. That way, I got to play in places that otherwise never would have heard of me or thought of booking me. But they didn’t have any choice, really.
I rescued them from failed nights — and then, on the strength of that, got asked back again. So that’s the way it went: I never had to try to break into some performing career. It just sort of happened to me.
What sparked your interest in Icelandic folk music?
Basically, meeting Bára [Grímsdóttir].
How did you meet?
I was working with Wren Music, a community music organization down in Devon rooted in the work of a particular Victorian-Edwardian polymath called Sabine Baring-Gould, who made a big collection of folk music in the southwest of England during the late 19th century and early 20th. We discovered that he had done a tour around Iceland in the 1860s and written a book about it — so knowing that there had never been, to my knowledge, any Icelandic folk music in any British folk event, we set about trying to find some.
Cutting a long story short, it wasn’t easy, but eventually a group of four people came from Iceland, of whom Bára was one. I expected that the music would be like Norwegian music, which I was familiar with — maybe with fiddles and such. But it was nothing like that at all. It was a complete surprise.
What was different about it?
The tunes and the modes of the tunes [were all different from Scandinavian folk music], and I thought, “Why is this not commonplace, because it’s so good and so interesting and unusual?”
And Bára and I hit it off. We had lots of things in common; we discovered we had similar album collections and things like that. But it wasn’t easy, because we were both already in established relationships with other people. In many ways, it was a pretty tough time. But we determined that we were going to get together.
How did you initially start researching traditional Icelandic instruments such as the langspil and íslensk fiðla?
Sigurður Rúnar Jónsson — who was in the group of four that came to England — had those instruments with him, and I was certainly intrigued. As soon as I saw the instruments, I thought, “There’s mileage in that,” and then, as you do, you find out more by actually trying to play them. You start to ask questions about how they work.
I’m just somebody who’s, I suppose, kind of nosy and curious, so I started digging deeper. The more I dug, though, the more I kept hitting brick walls. There’s not a lot of information available about these instruments: there are no notated tunes; in fact, there’s very little evidence of what people actually played. I still have big questions. Given what we know about how tough life was in Iceland, I wonder if there were ever more than half a dozen fiðlas. Certainly I don’t think every house had one. There are no fiðlas older than the beginning of the 19th century, and there’s only one of them.
There are archival photographs of an old woman playing the langspil in the 1960s, and recordings of her talking about playing, but no recordings of her actually playing. She was blind, and I have a feeling she wouldn’t or couldn’t play anymore. She was in her 90s. So she just posed.
There are no archived recordings of either instrument that we know of. And no instructions on how to play. But the instruments are there, so we do something with them.
You’re giving them new life.
