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 driving force behind Bellowhead haven’t neglected their duo work by any means and Vagabond is a leap forward again from their last album in 2005, Songs.

The best of a good bunch is the piratical tale of ‘Captain Ward’, which romps through the adventures of a group of privateers led by the fearsome John Ward, pillaging and fighting their way across the raging seas. As with most of Spiers and Boden’s songs the majority are based on trad songs dug out laboriously like cockles from the rocks. And the digging was well worth the effort, after all why write your own songs when the well of cracking stories is still far from dry? The duo are the folk equivalent of the literati - would it be fair to call them a folkerati? - and are responsible for double handedly reviving a whole host of trad songs which must have risked being forgotten entirely, and reviving them in style unsurpassed today.

There’s a Shakespearean tinge to Vagabond as well, in the inclusion of a tune Jon Boden wrote for the RSC and the final song based on Feste’s song in Twelfth Night and - with all respect for Shakespearean directors - very few get the songs in the bard’s plays even close to sounding like proper songs.

At just under 47 minutes it’s a short album but each moment of it is worth clinging onto. When Spiers and Boden take the tunes on tour in the year go out of your way to see them. And then steal a boat and take to the high seas and have them sing songs about you - honestly, it would be worth the effort.