It's sea shanty time again

Portsmouth Shanty Men on stage at the Stade

If you live anywhere by the sea, shanties are irresistible.  These folk songs associated with the sea and everything nautical - from sailing round Cape Horn to fishing in the Channel - with the refrains that everyone can sing along to, have a particular resonance when you're close to fishing boats and the beach.  

The enterprising Hastings Shanty Singers put on the first shanty festival last year, and repeated it this.  It started with a sing-along in the Stag Inn, in All Saints Street on Friday night.  The Stag's low ceilings and timbered walls are always atmospheric, and the shanty singers made the place their own that night - not only our own Hastings singers, but visitors from Portsmouth and Herne Bay, among others.  

I don't know much about folk songs, but to an impartial observer there does seem to be a no-nonsense let's- get-on-with-it approach, a distinct heartiness, that is very different from the wistful flutes of inland ballads.  Perhaps it's to do with the work association - the heaving of sails and the toiling at winches.  The singers themselves are pretty bluff characters, friendly and welcoming and quick with repartee.  As with all folk singers - am I treading on uncertain ground here? - there seems to be an abundance of facial hair among the men, and sartorial niceties don't figure.  

All of that is pretty irrelevant, though, once the singers get going.  What I found totally remarkable was their ability to keep in harmony without any instrumental accompaniment - true musicianship.  And the songs themselves, of course, take you back to an earlier age when people stayed at sea, in appalling conditions, for months at a time.  All power to the Hastings Shanty Singers for keeping the tradition going in such an enjoyable way.

Antony Mair