Ewan MacColl With Charles Parker & Peggy Seeger - The Ballad of John Axon

The very first of the Maccoll/Parker/Seeger radio ballads for the BBC, commemorating both a railwayman who died trying to stop his runaway train, and British railwaymen in general. The production itself more or less required them to invent their techniques on the fly -- there was originally no intention of using the field recordings as they were, nor was there any particular intent of using folk ballad musical forms, and so down the line to the post-production phase, which saw Charles Parker coming up with entirely news ways of approaching the art of tape editing and creation audio montages. Read More