Cochlear Implant

When it takes you more than two hands to count the number of people in your band, you get a lot of room in which to try out different musical ideas.

Take the sharp-dressed British 11-piece folk combo Bellowhead, for instance, who are prepared to use... well, if not the kitchen sink, then at least a kitchen utensil or two to get the sound they’re looking for. Besides normal instruments like the glockenspiel and the drums, percussionist Pete Flood plays taxi horns, a coal scuttle, and various wind-up toys — and on “Jordan,” from Bellowhead’s debut album Burlesque, he added a frying pan to his percussion setup in order to achieve just the right industrial sound.

Founding band member Jon Boden laughs about the frying pan (and my persistence in asking him about it); he says they use the object in their live shows simply because it’s pretty easy to carry around. “I don’t want to make it sound like the pan is the centrepiece of our act,” he says. “It’s just one little thing. We use a lot of things for our sounds; we’re not the frying pan band from England.”

Fair enough. But maybe their willingness to throw a pan or two into the mix says something larger about Bellowhead as a whole. “We’re not like any other band I’ve come across,” Boden says with a self-assured laugh.

If they employ a kazoo or a whistle in a song, it’s not just an arbitrary way of mixing things up, he says; it’s a tactic calculated to keep people on their folk-music toes: “What range [of sound] allows you to do for a live show is to make sure that the audience never loses interest. You can always keep changing the sound. No matter how exciting a band is, most bands start sound similar after about four songs. It’s very nice having a band with this range of instruments. You can throw something totally different in the middle of a set, to kind of wake the audience up.”
Their slot at the 2008 Edmonton Folk Festival got them noticed by a few local music fans — with 11 members, it was hard to ignore them — but so far, their Canadian audiences aren’t as passionate or as large in number as their following in the U.K. But that might change soon: they have a dynamite new album, Matachin, in stores — and in North America at least, they still have the element of surprise on their side. “A lot of people in the U.K. have seen us already,” Boden says, “so they’re already kind of expecting the frying pan.”