I listen to her stuff a lot while I sketch and I think there is a weird sense of emotional encouragement in her work. All this leaves the field clear for Perpignan, the combustible Catalans with a home record to die for. Finalists in 2003, they have already beaten three of their fellow French contenders in this season's domestic championship.Last eight tip: Perpignan, without breaking sweat.POOL 3Clermont Auvergne, Leicester, Ospreys, Stade Fran?sThe kind of "group of death" that might have tickled the fancy of Edgar Allan Poe, so tortuous is it in its make-up. "Since I've been back, I've worked with June Tabor, toured with Eric Bibb, recorded a BBC4 session with Dick Gaughan, been out with Martin Carthy - and it just doesn't get much better than that."Martin Simpson plays The Vortex, Gillett Street, London N16 (020-7254 4097) on Monday 'Kind Letters' is out on Topic. "It's a fantastic time for music," he says, remarking on the vitality of the British folk scene he has returned to after 15 years in the US. "The amount and the quality of texts is mind-boggling." Assimilating the song from different sources, he plays his way into its immensely powerful heart with the flexibility and intuition of a master accompanist, drawing out its essence with superb guitar figures that catch the song like a net.He is firmly of the belief that the folk tradition is not a museum but a living, evolving, habitat that you keep alive by playing it. Take "The Flying Cloud", an astonishingly vivid narrative of seafaring, slavery, piracy and the gallows, told with all the inexorable force, brio and body count of Jacobean tragedy "It's exquisite, massive storytelling," says Simpson.
"The best definition of this kind of music I've ever heard," says Simpson, "came from an 11-year-old in a school workshop, who asked me, why are your songs all about law and order and movement? And that's a beautiful way of describing that certain area of traditional music."It's a fair summation of much of Kind Letters, whose songs are full of flight and migration, and murder and transgression. There's a symbiosis between the two of us."The songs they choose are suffused with the mystery, magic and mayhem of the British tradition. I listened hard, and if she made a mistake, I would too, basically. A guitar player will put things in strict time, and with June you had to learn to do the opposite. If you add just a couple of extra words to a line, it can throw the whole nature of a song, and give it a very different feel. Having my first experience of that kind of thing, I'll never forget it. Tabor's new album featuring Simpson, At the Wood's Heart, has just been released."I learnt about flexibility," he says.
"When you work with a singer as good as June, you don't ask questions about when she's going to do something She had a total unaccompanied singer's approach. Their collaboration resulted in three classic albums through the Eighties - A Cut Above, Abyssinians and Aqaba - and the partnership was resumed on 2003's An Echo of Hooves. I felt that these were all avenues I could go down, and I could find more of myself in those directions."The song-collector Bill Leader released his first record in 1976, and the following year he walked away from a management deal with Tony Secunda, who had plans to make a guitar hero out of him, and embarked instead on a partnership with the great English singer June Tabor. "I was always being told to make up my mind about what I was going to do, either folk or blues," he says "And I said, I don't think that's true It's all the same music, just different angles of the song The songs started before the music. "Not in terms of being an impersonator, but I could take and represent part of the essence of what they were doing and capture the feeling without trying to sound like them."He sounded more like himself than anyone else early on, and quickly made a name on the circuit.
