I first met Jude Cowan during my adventures at Poets Express, the annual music festival near Bantry in Southern Ireland. Run by Dark World International, it’s an interesting festival aimed primarily at the spoken word and the different ways it can be interrupted.
The first time in 2009 I went down the previous year, I remember meeting a whole host of poets and artists and had a cracking time and if I am honest delivered one of my best even sets I have ever performed spoken word wise with or without a band.
The second time, this year 2010 was very different as well as a lot of poets and musicians, there was also a number of acoustic musicians and certainly the best among them was a young lady from London (but who I found out has links to my hometown, Manchester) called Jude Cowan who played a set I missed with an un-usual kind of ukulele that I had never seen before.
Luckingly I caught her at another gig before we both left and was totally spell-bound by what I was heard, and then got hold of a copy of her CD ‘Doodlebug Alley’.
I don’t have tons of details to hand with the CD, but the CD is certainly one of the most wide ranging CD’s I’d heard this year certainly crossing over a number of boundaries this year from folk, to spoken word, to Joanna Newsom with a less annoying voice (from one of my friends) to most memorably from another friend ‘This doesn’t sound like George Formby in the slightest’ – this is a CD that certainly is not a CD for everybody, but it was one I totally loved.
Favorite tracks for me was the Jack Kirby influenced ‘Alien Folk Valediction’ which was the most traditional folk based track of the CD but had some lyrics that were surprising certainly and ‘Remember Sinners’ a duet with Tom Fawcett which I read somewhere compared him to Tom Waits, which I think from my love of ‘Frank’s Wild Years’ from many years is very, very close there but most off all the spoken word mostly 'She sits at the window' which I wasn't sure to laugh at or cry, but thought it was brilliant!
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