Joe Danks - Seaspeak

The Guardian 0

(English Folk Dance and Song Society)
This well-crafted collection of seafaring songs inspired by a residency at the National Maritime Museum misses a trick

One of the more bizarre results of lockdown was a TikTok-driven craze for sea shanties, bringing millions of hits for antique tales of whale-hunting and sail-hauling – easy, communal singalongs to alleviate gruelling work. There are, alas, no shanties on Seaspeak, the result of Joe Danks’s 12-month residency at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, though there are instrumental hornpipes, quadrilles and step dancing. Elsewhere, Danks’s sturdy, melodic voice is variously joined by guitar, bodhrán, fiddle, accordion and harp.

The album’s 10 tracks offer a slice of maritime history, though one skewed away from hardships well documented in folk tradition; tedium, scurvy, press gangs, cruel captains, capricious mermaids and angry whales. Instead, we are served John Masefield’s soft-centred poetry, Ewan MacColl’s Sweet Thames Flow Softly, and hunters’ favourite John Peel, which was sung on Shackleton’s Antarctic expedition but sits oddly here.