The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff
The Traverse
This morning, during my weekly stint at Oxfam books, I put a Ewan MacColl LP Shuttle and Cage on the turntable. There’s a surprising amount of interest. “I thought I recognised the voice,” “I heard him sing with Peggy Seeger,” and, inevitably, “Dirty Old Town.” It’s a collection of British industrial songs, collected by MacColl and others, and at the Traverse I realise that The Ballad of Johnny Longstaff is very much within this tradition of songs celebrating work, conflict and community. It makes a great night out
Traverse 1 is packed for the show, a mixture of established Young’uns fans and people like me who liked the idea of the show but are new to the trio’s music. The Young’uns are from Stockton in County Durham, and are so called because as teenagers they started going to a folk club where everyone else was at least 20 year older than them. Then someone said “Let’s hear a song from the young uns.” Now in their 30s, Sean Cooney, David Eagle and Michael Hughes produced their first recording in 2008 and have been full-time musicians for a number of years, winning Best Group at the Radio 2 Folk Awards in 2015 and 2016, and Best Album, for Strangers, in 2018. They still sing some traditional songs, but now mostly perform their own music, written by Sean Cooney, often set to traditional tunes, folk, political anthems and the odd music hall number.
A few years ago, they were offered a challenge by a fan – to write the story of his father’s life. Johnny Longstaff, also from Stockton, walked to London on a Hunger March when he was 15, and after involvement in radical action there, went to fight in Spain in 1937. Based on the tapes which Longstaff left to the Imperial War Museum, the group wrote an album in 2014. This year with some newer material (two of the new songs are on the Strangers album) they developed a stage version directed by Lorne Campbell, which premiered at Northern Stage in Newcastle earlier this month.
The trio have an engaging stage presence, with brief, self-deprecating repartee. The recorded voice of Johnny Longstaff is interspersed with the songs. The first group of songs are unaccompanied close-harmony. Any Bread, is about the hunger that drove him to walk to London, and Carrying this Coffin, to the tune of John Brown’s Body, tells how the hunger marches were full of men who had fought in the War: “a land fit for coffins is what they should have said.” Longstaff says that he was uninterested in political activism then but joined the march because he wanted a job.
He stayed in London, got casual work, and gradually met more politically aware young people. Like Ewan MacColl (or Jimmy Miller, as he was then) Longstaff, who liked rambling in the countryside, took part in some of the illegal mass trespasses to secure Rights of Way. The next year, still only 16, he was in the Battle of Cable Street. By then, through his friendship with refugees, he knew about the dangers of fascism. The song Cable Street, is intercut with Longstaff’s voice giving his account of the action. Like many traditional songs of political action, the Young’uns songs often use the plural pronoun “we.” Here for the first time Johnny hears the Spanish Civil War slogan “No Pasaran.” He soon realizes that if he wants a better world, he has to accomplish it himself, “alongside all the other folk who wanted a better world.”
The songs, unaccompanied until now, have keyboard, accordion and guitar accompaniment as the action moves from England through France to Spain. The poignant Ta-ra to Tooting is Johnny’s reflection on leaving his friends to go secretly to this illegal war. He will “take this tiny picture so wherere I’ll be/ There’ll be Jim, and Jack and Ernie, Norman, Les and me.” It’s a lovely song, a farewell to youth as well as friendship. The stage design (by Kai Fischer, with graphics by Scott Turnbull, Emily Howells and Aaron Brady) really comes into its own in this song. A deceptively simple back drop of shawl-like fringed material falls at an angle across the stage. On this are projected images of each song, sometimes comic, stick figures or little puppets, but more often, drawings in lines and pastel shadings which come together as the song is sung. In Ta-Ra to Tooting the initial doodles gradually take on the outlines of the six friends’ heads, then the faces are shaded in. How young the faces are when we see the actual photograph at the end of the song!
The second half is entirely set in Spain. It is grim as he has been told. Hunger is if anything worse here than in Johnny’s childhood. The people have nothing, and the brigades fight on small rations. No Hay Pan is a slow song about this lack of bread. Black humour helps the soldiers to cope. In a parody of the parable of the loaves and the fishes, Bob Cooney, a commissar from Aberdeen, feeds 57 lads “from a loaf of bread and a tin of beef.” The soldiers reflect that “Jesus may have got more done/ but he had five loaves not just one.”
Lewis Clive, an Olympic swimmer, is given, tongue-in-cheek, super-human status in a catchy number which celebrates not only his medals in the San Francisco Olympics but also his swim back to England. Whether in the comic numbers or in the realistic and bitter Ay Carmela, with its Spanish rhythms, and Spanish style guitar accompaniment, the camaraderie of the men, “the lost sons of Albion” and their continued sympathy with the Spaniards shines through. Longstaff’s recorded voice recalls the desperate battles and the eventual deaths of his closest comrades. The drawings and bright pastels of the Spanish countryside on the stage projection act as a counterpoint to this. Despite the tragedies, Johnny later says that he would have liked to go back to live in Spain.
Instead, he fights in the Second World War (despite initial rejection because of his record in fighting fascism!) and goes home to a life in the Civil Service. David Eagle jokes that with six hours of tapes in the Imperial War Museum, anyone of us who cared to write a play could have a go: “There’s all the civil service years to cover.” He has his Spanish moment of glory when he and other British veterans return to Spain after Franco’s death, and are cheered as they lead a procession in Madrid. The show ends with the Civil War anthem “There’s a Valley in Spain called Jarama.”
We’re thanked for the standing ovation – “especially knowing how hard it is to stand up in these seats.” The old folkies and old lefties struggling up Traverse 1’s steep steps, and the young folks racing past them have had a good session with plenty to think about. Maybe it won’t be too long till the Young’uns next visit Edinburgh.
The show tours to Hull: 21st-24th April and Liverpool: 14th-16th May.
