Tras el éxito cosechado por Laura Marling, The Staves pueden ser la nueva sensación del folk británico. Ellas son tres hermanas, acaban de debutar con el espléndido “Dead & Born & Grow”. The Staves siguen la onda de The Civil Wars y bandas pretéritas como The Be Good Tanyas, pero con ese toque del folk británico de artistas de los setenta como Sandy Denny y Linda Thompson. “Esa es una buena descripción, mezcla de folk inglés y country americano, más la sensibilidad del pop. Somos inglesas pero nos atraen los sonidos americanos, y obviamente The Beatles, ese es nuestro grupo favorito”. No cabe duda que estar girando junto a Bon Iver fue una inmejorable tarjeta de presentación, la mejor promoción posible. “Estábamos en Birmingham tras terminar una gira que no fue del todo buena, y a eso que en el hotel nos pusimos a ver la televisión. Coincidía que era la gala de los Grammys, y vimos como a Bon Iver le dieron el premio a mejor nuevo artista. Al cabo de una hora recibimos una llamada de su manager, quería que fuésemos teloneras de su gira. De repente, empezamos a gritar y a volvernos locas, todo cambió en un instante; nunca lo hubiéramos imaginado”.
I'm going to go out on a limb then, and put it to you that theme' is more important, in the end, than style.' For the raesons already mentioned by T.W. and Andrew, style becomes counterproductive when wielded as dogma. So, consider that a dead horse that needs no further beating.I'm using theme' to mean aspects of a martial art that might seem superficial, since they don't have martial arts content per se. Theme is the story that a martial art tells about itself and that motivates its practitioners to put up with all of the discomfort and hassle associated with practicing it.So here, for any martial art of your choice, you can fill in the blanks as to what the origin story and theme of that martial art are. In the case of Bartitsu, the classic tag line is that it's the martial art of Sherlock Holmes. But since Holmes was a drug-addicted superman with no family life, that's not terribly motivating. A better theme, and truer to the reality of the people who hung around the Bartitsu Club, would be to say it's the martial art of Dr. Watson. Superficially Watson is a dull family man, a stodgy middle-class professional, but if you get to know him he's a man of parts, an Afghan war veteran with an old bullet wound, good at using his fists, handling various weapons in an effective but responsible style, and keeping his head in a crisis. With a few of the details changed, not that different from many men in my group. Which is why I think it might make an effective motivating theme, especially when style'-bound strictures are relaxed and the focus becomes about pragmatism and effectiveness. Keep the origin story and the ethos, make it welcoming to the many Dr. Watsons of the world, and take advantage of all that has been learned about martial arts during the last hundred years.