Please note this is an old page and Fly Global Music has now moved. Please follow this link and search for the entry in the new site.

The band’s singer and songwriter Steve Knightley investigates the dressing-room fridge, takes out a bottle, pulls a face and embarks on a tirade against mediocre lagers: “It’s the one thing we insist on. It’s got to be Czech or German… it’s the principle that if all the Smarties are the right colour, it’s all going to be okay,” he adds smiling.

“I think singer-songwriters have shot themselves in the foot by being ‘me, me, me’ all the time”

Double bassist and singer, Miranda Sykes is brewing fresh coffee from an immaculate machine she takes out of its flash carry case — and which is carried from show to show and given utmost respect. “It’s better than Nero,” she offers up to the room in general, challenging any of the band to contradict her, “isn’t it?” No-one dares.

As for multi-instrumentalist Phil Beer, the only thing, apart from echoing Knightley’s distaste at the venue’s poor choice of drinks, he says is an aversion to overly orange processed cheeses. The lager is left in the fridge and the coffee machine put to good use.

The Spinal Tap element of the backstage routine is lost on no-one, but when talking about the music, it is clear Show of Hands are entirely serious.

“I think singer-songwriters have shot themselves in the foot by being ‘me, me, me’ all the time,” Knightley tells me when I ask him about the story-telling element in the songs on latest album Witness.

“On the record, there are only a couple of songs that are ‘me’. The rest are in character and dip into narratives. People do that in folk songs without thinking,” he continues. “I like that Springsteen thing of being other people.”

“I expected wilful misrepresentation towards ‘Roots’,” Beer adds. “It doesn’t seem to have come.”

However, of the songs on Witness some of the most standout, set against the narrative numbers, are those that are most personal. An example is their most popular live numbers ‘Roots’, a song about loss of British identity, the need to reclaim it from the far right, and the strangulation of live folk music. Emotive stuff and fairly open to misinterpretation I suggest.

Beer takes the thread: “There’s a good reference to this in the songs of Springsteen, for example ‘Born in the USA’, that people don’t listen. Like the Bush administration, who obviously only listened to the chorus.”

The Republicans (as well as, incidentally, the Democrats) were famously turned down by Springsteen when asked if they could use his song about the bad deal Vietnam veteran’s got returning from the war in their election campaigns. The Boss then took his stance a step further, actively campaigning against the Iraq war.

“I expected wilful misrepresentation towards ‘Roots’,” Beer adds. “It doesn’t seem to have come.”

The same was true of ‘Country Life’ the title track of Show of Hand’s previous studio album, which also gets a strong reaction from the crowd at the Bloomsbury.

“I can’t get sparked up by the usual themes. The audience already agree with it, they already know it.”

“At the time we started singing that three years ago foot and mouth was more a topical issue,” Knightley says. “You found people at our gigs who had lost their livelihoods, their homes. They found they had a voice all of a sudden that wasn’t the Countryside Alliance.”

However, the new media age has brought surprises in the breadth of people interested in their music, as Beer asserts: “We’ve had countryside agencies use ‘Country Life’ for campaigns. People are using songs in sermons and multi-media presentations, and you don’t expect that. You don’t expect your career path to be through people in government institutions, but it’s all good.”

I ask the pair what gets them fired now. “I can’t get sparked up by the usual themes”, Knightley replies. “The audience already agree with it, they already know it. They’re a generally libertarian, humanitarian audience so to tell them what’s bad is not the way.”

This search for thought provoking themes he said had most recently led him to a new song ‘Poppy Day’ which he plays when taking a solo turn. The new track, which is officially launched on Remembrance Sunday at their gig at Warwick University, ties the heroin trade in with Remembrance Day, using the image of soldiers in Afghanistan walking through fields of opium poppies against that of soldiers walking through the poppies in Flanders fields.

Knightley says he enjoys connecting different themes that move people and giving them a view in contrast to that of the mass media, finding an angle the audience might not have considered.

It is noticeably the protest-type, contemporary and emotionally charged songs that get the best reception and really get the crowded theatre going, definite proof that Show of Hands have their fingers firmly on the pulse.

Show of Hands play London’s Albert Hall on 8 April and a fundraiser at Hall For Cornwall on 2 December. For further tour dates (and there are plenty in there) check out the tour dates section of the Show of Hands’ band site.

Links:
Show of Hands website
Jackie Oates website