Throughout my student days at Oxford I sang in various harmony groups with Caroline Jackson-Houlston. At one point we were a quartet with Jane Sinclair and Mike Eaton, but in my final year they had both left Oxford – Jane had graduated, and Mike was having a year abroad. Caroline and I carried on as a duo and, as I recall, it was only at this point that we adopted the name Flash Company. So this was our signature tune – and actually I think it was the only song in our repertoire that wasn’t unaccompanied.
At the time, if asked, I would probably have said that we sang Percy Webb’s version – the title track from the 1974 Topic LP Flash Company: Traditional Singers from Suffolk and Essex. But in fact I suspect that Caroline put the words together from various sources, and we were also almost certainly influenced by June Tabor and Martin Simpson’s recording, recently released at the time on their A Cut Above album.
When I left Oxford I found that the concertina accompaniment put it in a singable key for me, and as I’ve never had an enormous number of chorus songs in my repertoire, I’ve carried on doing it (occasionally) ever since.
Flash Company
Andy Turner: vocal, G/D anglo-concertina
A Folk Song a Week 