MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JUNE 2025

 

Having reviewed tracks by former Quads members Josh and Terry (Johnny) Jones, I’m completing the siblings set by drawing your attention to lead guitarist COLIN (Jack) JONES who has several numbers up on YouTube (www.youtube.com/@colinjones9700).  As If (You Can) is a midtempo West Coastish ballad with a lilting melody, I Think I’ve Learnt My Lesson a more driving rock number with his distinctive chiming guitar making its presence felt while the climate change themed  Scared! is a moodier slow chug with samples from two Greta Thumberg speeches. The Quads have become something of a cult, but the three brothers deserve to be also feted for their current music too.

Celebrating the first anniversary of his The Promise Of Spring breakthrough album, GEORGE BOOMSMA has now released The Promise Of Spring Live recorded at two shows at the  Green Note and The Regal Theatre in Tenbury Wells backed by Will Looms and electric guitar, bassist Bart Debney Davies  and drummer Ally McDougal to bring a much fuller (listen to the percussive textures of Open Curtain) and at times, as on Johnny Walker Guy, rocking out sound.  As well as all the songs from the album (How High The Mountain having been revisited from his self-titled 2016 album) save for Fallen, there’s also live recordings of two others,  the ironic Streets Paved With Gold from 2017’s sophomore  Do Something With The Night and the twangy chugging autobiographical My 60s Weekend, a brand new number that lays the ground for where the next album’s direction might lie. His musical development over the albums comparable to that of Chris Cleverley, his standing should follow a similar path.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MAY 2025

Longtime followers of the Brum music scene will have fond memories of THE QUADS, formed by brothers Josh, Jack (Colin) and drummer Johnny (Terry Jones) with bassist Jim Doherty,  whose 1979 Big Bear debut single There Must Be Thousands’ became a Peel favourite (he declared it his single of the decade) and a minor hit, reaching 66. Sadly, none of the subsequent releases fared as well, but they were all impressive and distinctive New Wave numbers, especially characterized by the unique echoey guitar sound of  ‘Jack’ Jones the likes of which I’ve never hear since.

After four further singles, they eventually called it a day in the mid 80s following Doherty’s departure, briefly reforming in the 90s and recording a  series of tracks for Don Arden that were never released.

However, I learn they are in fact actually available via  Bandcamp (https://joshjonesnz.bandcamp.com/album/the-quads-ep) where they surfaced in 2019 as The Quads EP, four tracks that open with the hazy ballad It Will Be Alright that builds to a slightly psychedelic feel. The spacey narcotic Feel The Need For More follows along with the equally cosmic almost proto Stone Roses vibe of  the instrumental  Radically Free and finally the similarly inclined fuzz and feedback Night Into Day.

They’re posted via Josh’s New Zealand site where he now lives in Auckland  as an Anglican priest in which capacity he’s released Songs Of Grace, Hope & Lament which, as you might imagine, are deeply rooted in his beliefs and faith and that, however we understand the concept of  'God',  most   have a sense of the sacred and the divine.  There’s six tracks, built around guitar, drums and keyboards and ample evidence that his voice has lost none of its character or power and he can still knock out an infectious melody.  This Is The Day is a celebration of Christ’s birth,  with the strummed and simply picked Let Your Kingdom Be and its call for a better world,  the softly puttering bluesy folk Lord, Giver Of This Day while piano ballad I Am In Christ is pretty much a self-explanatory devotion.

Featuring violin and delicately played acoustic guitar and understated drums, Salt is a stunning near six-minute, slowly building epic while it closes with the anthemic, guitar chiming and very Quads-like (and early Psychedelic Furs) Lost In Awe And Wonder that should take hold of your whatever your faith may be.

What prompted these discovers was reconnecting with Terry John Jones who now lives in Stratford, where for six years  he served as a Town Host at the Stratford Business Improvement District  supporting local busker, and is now reviving his own music career. Last year he released the acoustic ballad You Are The Love Of My Life featuring Torie Rushton  on cello and Gracie Shepherd on violin,  and follows up now with You Don’t Believe that, as Josh has observed, while a new song, might have written a whole different story for The Quads had it been the follow up to Thousands. 

It’s about time the band were accorded the respect and audiences they’ve always deserved and perhaps Terry’s re-emergence might just be a spark that lights the flame. Now, what’s Jack up to?

 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN APRIL 2025

Two years on from Walk In Shadow, CERI JUSTICE returns with the self-released Cut Loose,  eleven tracks that, written by Justice and Paul Johnson (who plays guitar, mandolin, bass, keys and drums), and musically variously aided and abetted by guitarist  Tony Kelsey, steel player DB Smith  and   Marion Fleetwood on strings, ably showcase her voice and stylistic range, from swaggering rock to blues and country. It kicks off in twangy style with the swaggering country inflected, chorus catchy  Show Me What You’re Made Of, slowing down for the steel-stained and steady drum patterned Americana-balladry Looking For A Lover, another with dramatic big chords.

Still with country roots, Got This Feeling has a poppier feel to its tumbling chords, Fleetwood’s violin bringing mournful notes to the folksier sound of the spare, hypnotic swayer  Fragments (Jeannie’s Escape) before Just A Fever taps into her bluesier rock groove with both Kelsey’s growling electric lead guitar and angsty acoustic, heavy drums, wailing fiddle and a steady steamrollering ebb and flow rhythm.

Switching the mood, Miss U Mantra is founded on fingerpicked guitar before the electrics and heavy drums roll in and even a 60s psychedelic blues touch. Offering her quieter side, Love’s Let Me Down is an acoustic guitar, steel-stroked slow swayer that gradually builds into a soaring crescendo.

Opening with fingerpicked acoustic, bluesy country and a trace of Texas heat are the threads bringing the organ underpinned Sometimes I Wonder together before the title track brings her back to urgent blues and metal rock that melds Quatro, Raitt, Elles Bailey and Joanne Shaw-Taylor. There more big noise blues riffs and chords for the penultimate, handclapping power-burning All In My Dreams the  album ending with the near six-minute The 21^st  Day, a cinematic opening sweep giving way to resonant single picked guitar note and a feverish desert blues mood to the slow, steady snaking voodoo queen rhythm before it fades away into the trembling distance. There is, though, a bonus track, an inspired slow and acoustic cover the Eddie & The Hot Rods classic Do Anything You Wanna Do. As indeed she can.  Exuding a fierce confidence to match the heat in the music, to quote the Kenny Loggins classic the title evokes, it’s time for her to tear up this town and beyond.

When not playing his trade as an acoustic contemporary folk singer-songwriter, John Napier has a parallel musical identity as  frontman for Big Special-like (with Kneecap hood) punk-rap outfit THE LINE MANAGERS alongside bassist Andy Kearney and drummer Olly Forrester,  new single The Black Post  a rant against the stagnation of post-millennial culture set to a relentless punk, garage rock groove while If' is  a spoken word call-to-arms set to angular punk funk. (www.thelinemanagers.bandcamp.com/album/the-black-post

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN MARCH 2025

This month sees GERRY COLVIN release Past, Present & Crescent (Crocodile), a mix of, as the title says, old, new and songs from the  2022 Crescent Theatre show by The Gerry Colvin Band (Jerome Davies, Trish Power, Lyndon Webb and Marion Fleetwood) and The Gerry Colvin Big Folk Orchestra. It’s a new one that gets the ball rolling with Click Club Chair, a samba tinged la la la-ing refrain number about meeting wife to be Kathy at the legendary live venue run by Dave Travis, leading into the first recording of the melancholic circular guitar chiming The Forgotten Man, a song about a singer who’s faded from the spotlight which premiered in 2022 at the Kitchen Garden Café. Striking an associated note, another new one, with dobro, twangy guitar break, fiddle and mandolin, I’m A Songwriter Me is a wryly amusing number about the contemporary process,  tackling writer’s block with a dash of plundering musical history   for inspiration and looking for that elusive hook.

Kicking up the tempo, the accordion and fiddle-propelling five-minute A Folk Melody with its musically tumbling narrative of  the genre’s journey is another brand new song as is the breezy shuffling, jazz-tinged Inconsiderate Man with an acoustic solo from Lyndon and typically sharp Colvin lyrics about self-protecting misanthropy.  The final new number, set to a slight marching beat with mandolin trills and cornet, while the word title pun rather stretches grammatical accuracy, War Feats is a clever metaphorical anti-war protest number about a soldier who loses five toes – and comrades - in battle.

One of the oldest songs, dating from the Colvin Quarmby CQV album, the jaunty countrified social commentary  Crumbling Country Stand, about the ordinary working man upon whom the foundations are built, gets a new treatment with the band line but retaining mentions of Ikea,  Sky Sports,  Colonel Gaddaffi and Tony Blair while the final three are all culled from the Crescent Theatre spectacular.  Originally featured on Jazz Tales Of Country Folk, the bitter post-break-up  I Killed A Flower For You Today gets a rework with the  sparse, moody piano and upright bass-anchored arrangement now featuring brass and rounded out with a soulful closing vocal from Jackie Walters (formerly Jackie Clarke of Asia Blue). Finally,   there’s the fingerpicked acoustic love song delicacy of The Ocean and the eight minute plus closing audience-participation rousing   ebb and flow rhythmed Leave A Light In The Window with its brass and strings and big gospel vocals finale with Walters, Jane Pearl and Jennie Williams. This year marking the 30th anniversary of  founding ColvinQuarmby and his first recordings after the demise of Terry & Gerry, while he may be winding down the number of live shows, it’s clear his consummate genius as writer and vocalist remain undiminished, with the intriguingly titled Festina Lente Lives likely on the cards this summer.

Of Black Country roots and now ensconced in Shropshire, Mick Butler aka  SICKY continues to bang out albums that would, in another universe, be staples of the indie charts and feature regularly on mainstream rock shows. His latest is Trouble In Mind, a collection of a dozen tracks that opens with the keyboard hum of Billy Cousins before turning into a swaggering drums driven marching rhythm and distorted vocals that, an ironic track about    escapism, an imaginary superhero you can pretend to be when you find yourself doubting everything, suggests what Roger Waters might have sounded like had he got into glam.

Indeed, glam is a prevailing influence here, most notably drinking deep from the T. Rex well on several numbers, first being the Blur meets Bolan seduction song whimsy of I’m Happy If You’re Happy, his two young daughters on noises and one of three with Jen Bone on double bass,  with its line “if you’re happy I am James Dean” and continuing through such foot tapping, infectious nuggets as  Ten Minutes with Bridgnorth’s

St.Leonard’s church bells and a  20^th Century Boy rockabilly urgency, the bass licks Bolan boogie of the  abandonment-themed  My Girl’s Gone  with its sample from Quatermass And The Pit, the cautionary waring of destructive habits that is Slide  and the rumbling slider  shuffle of Money For The News, a critique of modern media if you hadn’t  guessed that features the sliding doors of a Stourbridge shopping centre 

There’s nothing here over three minutes and, following the stuttering slow chug and crooning harmonies of  Life In A Jar, the next three are all under two, but it’s the quality not the width that counts on the slow, bluesy Songbird, The Hill (apparently inspired by a punishing charity walk) and the human frailty, lounge organ backed Bowie-cabaret of Mankind with niece Rebecca Butler on vocals. Calling a halt with the breathily sung and longer Just Me with an intro and chorus that sounds like Bolan taking on a Dimitri Tiomkin Western score and has a spoken passage towards the abrupt close. 

Filtering the sparkle of 70s pop with the sour of 21^st century life, this is his best yet.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN FEBRUARY 2025

While they had 10 Top 40 singles, including Blackberry Way going to No1, between 1967 and 1972, despite releasing four albums in the same period THE MOVE only ever had one Top 75 album, their self-titled debut which peaked at No 15.

Quite why they never caught the album-buying public’s interest is a mystery, but seems likely to have been the disconnect between the pop sound of the singes and the more aggressive heavy rock they favoured for the albums, the debut being the only one to include any big hits, though 1970s Looking On did feature Brontosaurus.

Their final album was Message From The Country, recorded due to a contractual obligation with EMI, with most of the band focused on the debut Electric Light Orchestra album. It’s now been issued in an extended edition by Cherry Red, or more strictly reissued and remastered from 2005 which piles on the final singles Tonight, Chinatown (and California Man and B-sides Down On The Bay and Do Ya (a great crunchy rocker with a The Beach Boys break that was the A side in America and subsequently a hit for ELO) alongside alternate versions of the latter, Don’t Mess Me Up, The Words of Aaron and My Marge.

Given nobody’s heart was really in it and musical styles were all over the place (see Presley pastiche Don’t Mess Me Up, a precursor to Eddie and the Falcons perhaps, and Johnny Cash parody Ben Crawley Steel Company, both sung by Bev Bevan) , numbers like the title track,  the muscular boogie Ella James (ELO orchestra rock evident, the experimental psychedelic chamber folk  No Time with Roy Wood on recorder and  the surely Pepper-era Lennon-influenced Words Of Aaron are more than simply filler and deserve a full reassessment. The reissue also comes with new, detailed liner notes by Mike Barnes.

While I suspect it’s unlikely to prove representative of the forthcoming The Awful Truth album (“a modern mutant music hall interpretation of the day’s news, a haunting jolt into realism narrated with all the angst of an insistent, slightly dishevelled late-night newscaster”), THE NIGHTINGALES are at their most immediate and accessible with The New Emperor’s New Clothes, a crank it up loud, driving rock n roll blast of thundering drums, pounding piano and ringing guitars aptly tagged as  Velvets meet Fairport Convention in a crowded boozer.

KATHERINE PRIDDY’s second winter-themed collaboration with Poet Laureate Simon Armitage, again written for the project, the slow swaying ‘Daybreaker’ (Cooking Vinyl) dreamily embodies the thaw after the freeze, a reemergence into the sunlight  carried by the gently rippling guitar pattern as her pure voice floats on the breeze as it builds to a swelling, keys and strings euphoria. (www.katherinepriddy.bandcamp.com/track/daybreaker)

A prelude to their third EP, Solitude, THE MISSED TREES, guitarist Joe Peacock and violinist Louisa Davies-Foley, release ‘I Am Water’. Their most immediately accessible and radio friendly track to date, it’s inspired by the story of  Manfred Gnadinger, a German hermit who dropped out and went to live on a beach in the Galician fishing village of Camelle, where he was known as Man, creating sculptures (“in splendid isolation”) out of things that washed up and living in tune with nature until an oil spill from the sunken Prestige tanker covered his sculpture garden and he died, ostensibly of a broken heart. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JANUARY 2025

Released via Bandcamp towards the end of last year, EP2 is the second live in rehearsals set by ROB PETERS & THE SLAPDASH COWBOYS, recorded in the run up to the Alive album. Kicking off with the brief strummed sway love song to his wife, This Is Love, it gives way to the surging drive of  Jesus In The Parking Lot with its punchy drums and dirty electric guitar, slowing down again for  the sparsely accompanied Alive from The Moon That Thought It Was The Sun. It ends with the eight minute Finger Rain, originally from A Copper Heart, with its psychedelic swirl and George Harrison nods. A third is due later this year.

A taster for his upcoming Troubled Delight album, SICKY aka Mick Butler releases  I’m Happy If You’re Happy, a jaunty, upbeat little number about  seducing someone’s heart, which, Jen Bone on  double bass, scuffed percussion, a broken violin,  ukulele, glockenspiels, bells, drums,   mouth organ, random noises and backing vocals from daughters Lily and Scarlet, has the lazy purring feel of  vintage Britpop and most definitely has the effect the title suggests.

Looking ahead, having not released anything since 2023’s sonically experimental Dissolution II, KATY ROSE BENNETT is working towards a new album featuring settings of poems by  Scottish poet  Donna Ashworth, terrific early unaccompanied  tasters of which can be heard on the YouTube videos  for When I’m No Longer Here (www.facebook.com/watch/?v=1051695302724019)  and The Stars Called You Home (www.youtube.com/watch?v=n6MuAnRBeXg)

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN DECEMBER 2024

 

 

A  belated eulogy for ANDY LEEK who passed at the start of November.  Starting his musical career while still at school fronting the Wailing Cocks, releasing two singles (“Rockin' Youth and Listen To The Wailing Cocks) via Birds Nest in 1979 before the tragic death of guitarist  Alan Boyle cut things short. That October he joined  Dexys Midnight Runners,    playing on  Geno and four other tracks on their debut album Searching for the Young Soul Rebels, but, uncomfortable with the famous, quit to go and work in a mortuary just before Geno hit No 1. However, this exposure led to Beggars Banquet licensing two songs he’d recorded with the Wailing Cocks as a double A-side, Ruben Decides and cult classic Move On (In Your Maserati).

In 1988 he reunited with fellow former Dexys man Kevin Archer as keyboardist in the Blue Ox Babes but  although they recorded an album for Beggars it remained on the shelf until he released it as Midnight Music on his own Undiscovered Classics label in 2009, although one song, Twist in the Dark, was, recommended to her by Kirsty MacColl, covered by Frida from ABBA for her 1984 solo album Shine. 

In 1984 he was briefly signed to Fascination Records, releasing two singles, Soul Darling with Specials producer Dave Jordan, and a version of ABBA's Dancing Queen produced by Tony Visconti. Then, in 1988, working with George Martin, he set Dylan Thomas’s  Come And Sweep My Chimbley to music, sung by Tom Jones for the EMI album The Music From Under Milk Wood - A Play For Voices. Martin, who was effusive in his praise, also produced his 1988 solo debut album Say Something   via Atlantic and featuring Steve Howe, Clem Clempson, Level 42’s  Alan Murphy,   Peter-John Vettese and a 36-piece orchestra , though, unfortunately, despite Martin  predicting at least four No 1s, none of the singles charted. That said, the title track was No 1 in Lebanon during the civil war.

Briefly released on Spanish label  Ouver  (though the track All Around the World was popular in Germany), Eternity Beckons followed in 1997 while, recorded in 2000 and self-released, Sacrifice And Bliss produced the singles   Forgotten People and Waking Up the World, with his last two albums being the remixed Say Something Revisited in 2010 and Waking Up The World in 2013, on which each song had its own counterpoint, giving rise to seven themes telling a story of youth, experience, realisation and return.

On his website, www.andyleek.co.uk,  there’s my review of Eternity Beckons:

He's possessed of a beautifully controlled voice that can soar like an angel or, as on Apple On The Bough, enfolds to embrace. itself in the sort of richly deep emotional drama that might grace a Les Miserables.

Although these aren't intended as comparisons, he's in the same sort of vocal league as Chris De Burgh, Paul Simon or Paul McCartney while Twistin' Turnin', a simple image of a bird in flight, evokes the fragile folk beauty of Nick Drake.

His delicate, intricate guitar work flows as effortlessly as his melodies and his songwriting craft is beyond reproach. Listen to the affecting sibling bonded Joined At The Hip or the simple classic choke in the heart voice/guitar love song that is So Blind or, for more buoyant moods, the very credible stab at a singalong world peace togetherness anthem that is Children Of The Sun, a companion piece to his homelessness single Forgotten People that manages to be guileless rather than naive.

The world has enough second rate karaoke turns who can churn out versions of Daydream Believer for the golf club dinner, buy this album, spread the word and make Leek the star he deserves to be. 

Quoted alongside MacColl and Martin is one of mine, “The greatest undiscovered talent in pop”.  The words still stand.

Another veteran of the scene, ANDY LLOYD has been busy assembling everything he’s recorded, albums, singles, etc.,  under  various guises and musical styles, The Bloomsbury Set (best known for his minor hit Hanging

Around  With The Big Boys, the EP now remastered and reissued) , Andy Lloyd & The Wedge (Living In America their best-known, the 12” extended mix with Laurence Juber from Wings on lead guitar reissued now by Sony), Food, Popman & The Raging Bull (his reggae years) and Sanctuary. There’s far too much to go into here but for archivists, collectors and newcomers alike, it’s well worth searching the streaming platforms such as Apple, Spotify, Soundcloud, YouTube and the like

More usually drawing on the retro sound of Led Zeppelin, Hendrix and Cream, Birmingham trio BLUE NATION have just released the all acoustic Cold Night EP, a live collection of  three tracks  in support of The Mental Health Foundation , These line up as the strummed title track, sounding  not too far removed from the version of 2018’s The Kaftan Society, the wistfully folksy, punchily building Thieves For Lovers  previously only to be found (as far as I can tell) on their 2021 Live From The Front Room  and the terrific, soaringly anthemic fingerpicked and chugging, close harmony song of loss and remembrance Echoes, a number that builds with emotional force and ends the year on a monumental high note. With four studio albums already under their belt, the recent Ordinary People a riff-driven blues rock gem, and having already made waves in America, they really should be much better known 

 

Despite consistent sell-out shows and the fact that he’s one of the finest showmen and songwriters of the past 50 odd years, GERRY COLVIN’s not the household name or chart star his talent warrants. So, chances are while  The Last Christmas Needle (Crocodile Music) contains re-recordings of past releases, notably off the limited edition Gerry’s Christmas Baubles, for most  these are all ostensibly new. Which, for those willing to explore, will reward them with a seasonal album that isn’t another churning out of the familiar carols and cheesy Christmas songs that turn up with dispiriting frequency from an array of country stars, but, rather, mostly originals that range from the delightfully playful to the piercingly poignant.

The album featuring his regular backing musicians of uptight bassist Jerome Davies, accordionist Trish Power and Lyndon Webb on guitar, mandolin and violin with various contributions by Marion Fleetwood, Paul Johnson and Stuart McLeish, it opens with the self-penned One More Sleep, an a capella intro giving way to a bustling capturing of the anticipation and preparations of Christmas Eve. 

That’s followed by a new, slightly longer version of the title track, quite frankly one of the best and most emotional seasonal songs this side of White Christmas and Fairytale Of New York as, backed by Power in the final stretch, he sings “when the last Christmas needle falls from the last Christmas tree, you will still be holding hands with me”. Pausing to wipe away a tear, Joni Mitchell gets a co-credit as he borrows the opening lines from River for the gently circling fingerpicked wry Coming Up Christmas, that transforms it from a lament for a lost love to one for a lost Christmas spirit, wishing to return to “where before it all began before Christmas became the Christmas that it’s become” with its emphasis on commerciality where the only river is Amazon.

There are a few evergreen covers given the Colvin touch, the first being a dreamy, bass-led shuffle through  Jerome Kern’s I’ll Be Home For Christmas, famously recorded by Bing Crosby and equally famously banned by the BBC who though it would be demoralising for the troops. Elsewhere, backed by accordion, he gives David Essex a run for his money on a sadness soaked A Winter’s Tale and delivers an inspired slowed down, fingerpicked reworking of Mike Batt’s slightly retitled Wombling Gerry Christmas. 

Naturally, there’s a carol, not one from the well-thumbed songbook but his own The Shakespeare Carol which, featuring his late musical partner Nick Quarmby, is supposedly based around the bard’s own words as it calls on the men of Arden’s Grafton, Wexford, Marston, Bedford and elsewhere to come together in St Andrew's Church in Temple Grafton, reputed to be where Bill and Anne tied the knot, to celebrate, be they Jew, Muslim or Christian. In similar traditional vein, The Parting Pint On Saint Nicholas Night is the Scottish parting song with two final lines to pin it to the December 6 celebration, while   Saint Stephen’s Day is his own fingerpicked waltzing ode to the Feast of St Stephen  complete with accordion and tinkling chimes and an invitation to break bread and take wine in the woodlands and dance with the dryads as it breaks out into a  Celtic military marching beat and the strains of Auld Lang Syne.

If you want melancholy, then there’s the accordion-backed Winter In My Heart about a lost relationship, or by contrast he can be exceeding playful, rewriting his own ‘ohnny Cash Shirt with a festive twist as he jingles all the way through the country clopping Santa Claus Hat (“I got this merry festive suit when Santa Claus fell off my roof/Been eating venison since that day”).  It ends with one final cover, looking to put the grey skies of winter behind with a breezy, bass twanging, guitar strummed shuffle through the Morecambe & Wise immortalised Bring Me Sunshine. He most certainly will. 

 

Putting the Chris into Christmas, named after the iconic Manhattan Cathedral, and his first new music in two years, In The Shadow of St John The Divine (Opiate Records) has CHRIS CLEVERLEY again weaving his characteristic experimental style with a trademark sweet voiced intimacy and inviting melodies as the songs put a personal spin on the usual festive fare that blends joy and wistfulness in the seasonal cocktail of often contradictory emotions, love and grief.

It opens with Kelly Oliver duet The Ringing Of Bells, a retitling fuller production reworking of his Christmas 2016 release Ring O Bells, a reflective fingerpicked swayer about being apart but with the lyrics serving a prophetic foreshadowing on the lockdowns to come (“In a year's time this could all be fine…The silence in the room will be over soon… So there's this Christmas card rhyme and the scent of the pine needles lying around, that will always remind me/Of those years past, when we were raising a glass/Toasting/Hoping for better times”), that now also has Kathy Pilkinton on vocals and Katie Steven playing clarinet.

Pilkinton’s also to be heard on For A Winter Angel where she’s joined by her Awake Mother partner Minnie Birch, a song, which has swaying melodic echoes of The First Noel and chiming bells,  about supporting a loved one through a period of declining mental health (“It’s the first year in a while/As Christmas approaches you’ve been able to smile…in that glorious way/I remember you used to before life went astray”) with the prayer “I hope that someday things will shift in your mind/And you find it within you to leave the worst of this behind/And I really don’t need anything more from you/But just to keep on here fighting until the winter is through/And I will put my arms around you, I will love you in ways/That I’m pretty sure aren’t even possible to say”.

They both also feature on  the pulsating Vespers, which gives  the EP’s title as two former lovers meet on Christmas Eve in the cathedral’s shadow to say their goodbyes in the   candlelight to the strains of  the Midnight Mass (“It’s an odd time of year for saying goodbyes/For starting all over, drawing a line/Sip at the coffee, stare at the walls/Trying to make some kind of sense of it all”) as the arrangement swells to a finale and the lines “You say “let’s light a candle for peace on Earth/It might not make a difference, things may/never change/But just think where we’d be/Without the faint light of that flickering flame”.

There’s a definite Simon & Garfunkel  undercurrent to  the synth-rippling folk of Snowfall, My Evergreen, a story of a snowman that offers a bittersweet allegory for the ambiguities and often transitory nature of love (“You built me out of ice/Kept me around for a while/Gave my face an expression…Thank you my love/For bringing me to life…Today was the best day ever/But I’d rather melt away, than be here when it’s over/Today was the best day ever/Cause for a moment there I knew I was alive”).

It ends with a five minute plus rearrangement of Sufjan Stevens’ Sister Winter and its mingling of melancholy and whimsy, Tim Heymerdinger on drums with harmonies from Pilkinton and Graham Coe who also provides cello solo, ending with the apt words “I've

returned to wish you a happy Christmas”.  This is definitely one you want to find in your Christmas stocking.