Faery Craft: Weaving Connections with the Enchanted Realm (34 page)

For more information, visit www.lindaravenscroft.com.

Linda Ravenscroft,
“The Queen of Leaves”

The Musicians

Where would all the Faery balls and festivals around the world be without the musicians and bands to dance our hooves off to? There are many wonderful bands and musicians in the Faery community, playing everything from gentle classical harp to heavy rock!

The Dolmen

The Dolmen are a familiar and welcome sight at most Pagan and Faery events throughout the UK and Europe, and they are also starting to become known in the US. They are famed for their driving rhythms and wicked piratical flair, playing an irresistible blend of folk and Celtic themes and original material with a hard-rock edge. The Dolmen consist of Tony “Taloch” Jameson on lead vocals and guitar (he’s also the songwriter); Keri Pinney on flute, whistle, and vocals; Kayleigh Marchant on bass guitar and vocals; Josh Elliot on guitar, mandolin, and vocals (he’s also a songwriter); and Chris Jones on drums. I caught the band after an exhausting night playing at the Three Wishes Faery Fest in Cornwall to find out what makes them tick. Though all the band were present, Taloch did most of the talking.

The Dolmen

How did you get started?

The original concept of the Dolmen was started a couple of decades ago, but it’s only in its current strength in the present lineup that we have now, because for the first time the whole band is gelling. The unison where everybody thinks together has brought the Dolmen back to a very organic performance onstage, which means that we don’t actually rehearse our songs. They happen live. Because the band has gelled in that way, we’re able to work it out as we go. That’s what the Dolmen is about.

Do you all share similar spiritual beliefs?

We’re very, very spiritually involved and always have been. We actually put on two of our own spiritual festivals per year—the Beltane Spirit of Rebirth and the Tribal Dreams Gathering. It’s a nice time at the moment, actually, especially in the UK, because you have this wonderful energy of Faery magic and the whole Faery spirit, which is a big part of what the Dolmen is about. The girls are very much into the Faery line, whereas on the male side, we’re pirates in a very spiritual way. These two things work brilliantly. Also, we’re allowed access once a year as the Dolmen into Stonehenge. They allow us to have two hours where we take in many members of mixed spiritual paths within the Faery Pagan concept…free thinkers.

Do you play all over the world?

We basically go anywhere! We have an extensive tour coming up next month, which takes us into Europe. Also, next year we have lined up some tours into the States, and we have a gig in Iceland, which is going to be quite nice, lined up for next year. As far as we can, we go!

For more information, visit www.thedolmen.com.

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry is an extraordinary woman with many strings to her bow…or, indeed, her harp. Not only is she a talented classical harpist, but she also runs her own filmmaking company, Chagford Filmmaking Group, in which she produces, directs, writes, composes, and performs the score, and even edits the footage! Her work has taken her to events all over the world. We had a good long talk about her sources of inspiration and how she got to where she is today.

Elizabeth-Jane Baldry and her harp, Oberon

Which came first for you, was it the love of music or the love of Faery?

I loved fairies right from as soon as I was born; I spent hours looking for them when I was a little girl! But I loved harp as well, and the two were completely, in my mind, connected.

How do you feel your harp playing connects to the land of Faery? Does it work on a personal level or does it affect others as well?

I think that the harp is particularly subtle as an instrument of Faery; the very sound of it seems to thin the veil between the worlds. It’s fascinating that in cultures around the world the harp has always been associated with the otherworld. For example, the royal harpist in Mesopotamia would actually be buried with the monarch—he’d be buried alive. In the Celtic lands, the chief would be buried with a harp at their feet, because it was considered a bridge between man and the supernatural. The tension of the strings symbolized the tension that we have as humans between our spirit and earthly lives. A few years back I did a course with a musical archaeologist at Cambridge University, and he said this was true. He had dug up many harpists’ graves, Anglo-Saxons, and the chieftains did have the harps at their feet, but what I learned from him was that the harpists themselves would be buried with the harp in their arms. We did reconstructions of Anglo-Saxon poetry with reconstructions of these harps with strings of plaited horse hair, a very similar sound to the gut strings of today.

Was your first experience of Faery directly connected to music?

That’s an interesting question! I remember as a child just lying in the grass and that feeling of absolute oneness with nature. The hours would just pass by; I spent a lot of time outside as a child. We did have a little house at the end of the garden that my dad said the fairies lived in, that he made. It was really lovely, it had mosaics in it. I was very lucky, my parents were imaginative and supportive. We had lots of books; I could read very early, from the age of about three or four. I had this huge great big book called
The Staircase of Stories
and I loved it so much, it was all fairy stories. I used to take it to bed with me instead of teddies. It was a bit worse for wear after a few years of that! We moved house when I was five years old and sadly the book got lost in the move, and I was devastated. I told this story to my friend Ari Berk, and he found a vintage copy for me! I remembered so many of the stories even though I hadn’t seen the book since I was five. It didn’t seem quite so giant though!

So Faery was always with you, and the music came later as a natural extension of that?

I started piano very early, at about five or six, but piano never did it for me—I wanted to play the harp. Finally, when I was fourteen, I started learning the harp. The sound was completely magical to me, it just transported me. There’s so many harps in fairy tales. Think of “
Jack and the Beanstalk
,” the talking harp who actually reveals the crime—it’s quite scary, the harp cries out! I loved that.

When you’re writing music, where do you feel your inspiration is coming from?

Usually, with the concert works, I just sit in a quite space and it comes. With the film music, I look at the pictures and it comes, it does just come. It pops into my head quite easily!

Do you have a muse or ally that you consciously work with?

I would say that in my inner world I have got quite a lot of imaginative friends, if you like, that I sometimes meet in dreams or meditation.

You mentioned your film work. When did you first have the idea to produce these films?

It happened by accident because my kids were bored in the holidays. There was nothing to do, so I said, well, let’s make a movie! I went over to the bookshelves—obviously it had to be a fairy film, because I love fairies and fairy tales. I pulled out the Grimm’s fairy stories and it fell open on “
Three Little Men in a Wood
,” which we adapted and made the first film, which we called
Woodwose
—made it much more wild, it’s a fun little film. Enormously good fun, I just loved it! I did everything on that film: I wrote it, made the costumes, worked the camera, did the cinematography, everything.

On the strength of that I got the bursary to make a second film, and I made a lovely little charming British fairy tale called
Pottle o’ Brains
about this wise woman and this fool. He goes to the wise woman to see if he can get some brains. It’s a lovely, sweet little fairy tale. After that, I established the Chagford Filmmaking Group as a nonprofit community group to bring people together, and we specialized in British fairy tales because they’re so rooted in the landscape we love so much.

There’s no profit involved in all this work that you do on the films, so what drives you—why do you feel it’s important?

It’s incredibly important to me that it remains voluntary and that nobody gets paid because it brings this very beautiful energy to the films, that everyone is doing it because they love the stories. Even if they don’t believe in fairies, they love nature, and the images of nature are very important to me. I really believe that these stories have a lot of wisdom in them, indigenous wisdom. They were our classroom for thousands of years, long before the digital delights of today, and fairy tales were for everyone, not just for children. This is how we learnt about ourselves and how we learnt the important lessons of life. The importance of sharing, the importance of truth, the importance of honouring nature…it’s all there in these ancient stories, everything you need to know to live a good life in the deepest sense of the word. It’s all there.

And courage, too. Courage to keep going, staying true even against the most terrible odds. That’s what all the heroes do. And heroines! I’m very drawn to stories with resourceful heroines who manage to take charge of their own lives rather than being just being a prize for a boy who has all the fun. There’s plenty of these stories about gutsy little heroines, but because they were all collected in the nineteenth century they were considered unsuitable for girls, so they’re stuck to the back of the anthropology section in libraries as curiosities! I do feel that they need to come out into the open…

What is next? How are you going to develop this even further?

My end dream is to produce a body of work of films of British fairy tales that will sell on DVD and generate an income that can be used for work with young people, arts projects, and conservation, these sorts of issues. I would hope that I can get a fair few in, and they will never go out of date. There will always be children, and there will always be parents who want their children to see things that are homegrown.

For more information, visit www.fairytalefilms.co.uk.

S. J. Tucker

S. J. Tucker is a modern-day troubador, part Faery, part pirate, part gypsy, and all talent! Her music has a distinctive folk rock style, sometimes catchy, often bardic, and is much loved around the world. She has produced a number of albums, both as a solo artist and with the band Tricky Pixie, and she often performs in both capacities at the most popular Faery events in the United States. I caught her in the midst of her usual whirlwind schedule to gain an insight into her wild and creative life.