Whisky Galore!
As 2025 limped to a close, the usual muddy race for the Christmas No. 1 single took place and the winner turned out to be the subtly titled XMAS from the consistently unreliable, if well-connected, Kylie Minogue who has been troubling the charts with ephemeral pap for some time now.
Meanwhile, the top album was a 40-years-old relic from the Pink Floyd catalogue, the timeless Wish You Were Here, an LP winkled out by many a millennial and Generation X and Z kid from their parents’ record collections. As a forever Floyd fan, I happened to have bought it the week it came out, ditto another classic long player to which I would like to draw your attention. This has nothing to do with the recently passed festive season but looks towards the end of the first month of this new year.
It is Traffic’s John Barleycorn Must Die (Island), the connection being Burns Night, celebrated on 25th January by Scots and others amongst us in honour of eighteenth-century poet Robert Burns. Although Burns wrote the poem John Barleycorn in 1787, it was inspired and adapted from an earlier folk ballad.
The work is allegorical, John Barleycorn being a mythical figure personifying the whole process of brewing beer and distilling whisky or brandy. The barley is murdered – harvested, malted and brewed – in order to be reborn as these fine drinks, symbolising the cycle of death, rebirth, fertility and the pleasure alcohol brings. Until you realise this the poem, and Traffic’s song, whose lyrics stick faithfully to the original prose, can seem very brutal.
It begins with three kings in the east, perhaps parodying the tale of Christmas, making a solemn vow that John Barleycorn must die. There follow numerous verses of the way this happens, making it sound like a modern gangster film. First clods of earth were thrown at his head, then came the rain. Still alive “Sir John” was subject to all manner of torture via the use of scythes and pitchforks before the miller grinds him between two stones.
Yet ultimately Sir John is the winner as “he’s brandy in the glass”, a source of joy as a result of his rebirth:
“And little Sir John and the nut-brown bowl
Proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman, he can’t hunt the fox
Nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can’t mend kettle nor pot
Without a little Barleycorn”
This album marked an unusual break in Traffic’s brief but brilliant career. Their previous records had mainly been written by singer, guitarist and keyboard player Steve Winwood and drummer/occasional vocalist Jim Capaldi, as is the case with the rest of John Barleycorn Must Die. The title track seems a million miles from the rest of their material which opens with ‘Glad’, Winwood’s unmistakable piano instrumental taking the band in a funky, New Orleans-style direction aided and abetted by Chris Wood’s honking tenor sax breaks.
The third key member of the group, Wood was also an accomplished flautist, his ethereal flourishes punctuating other cuts like ‘Empty Pages’ and ‘Freedom Rider’, a superb example of rock ‘n’ roll style as well as attitude. Like many musicians of the era, Chris died tragically young at the age of 39, although not before sharing his talent on records by everybody from Jimi Hendrix to John Martyn and Free.
A fourth member of Traffic was guitarist and solo artist Dave Mason. He wrote early hits like ‘Paper Sun’ and ‘Hole In My Shoe’ but later became more of a freelancer, his material deemed by the rest of the band to be too commercial when compared to their pioneering approach to exploring new genres.
So, John Barleycorn Must Die, definitely an album to rediscover this month whilst enjoying your chosen whisky (Scotch, single malt or blended), whiskey (Irish or American bourbon) and even cocktails like a whisky sour. For those in need of further education, whisk(e)y is made from harvested grain, usually barley but also wheat, rye or corn. Single malt can only come from one distillery while bourbon, like rock’s adopted Jack Daniel’s, Wild Turkey and Jim Beam, is produced from corn.
While sipping your tipple, you may also want to check out the chapters on Pink Floyd musicians Dave Gilmour and Traffic’s Steve Winwood in My Life With Rock N’ Roll People, available here.
Without wanting to state the obvious who needs Kylie and XMAS when there’s so much teen spirit to look forward to in January? Those of us a little older may wish to indulge too!
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