MIKE DAVIES COLUMN NOVEMBER 2026

ROB PETERS is making all his Wafer Thin label  recordings available online, kicking off with 1993 label debut EP Something's Going On by WE’LL ALWAYS HAVE PARIS, the folk-pop duo he formed in 1990 with  Della Roberts on vocals, comprising the title track, Me And You, All Change and a live recording of  the prog rock feel of   I’ll Remember You. The second is the duo’s less tentative sounding full length  album Lost In The Fields Of England. Released in 1994 on cassette only it has four demos with new members  Steve Shaw on violin and Micky Harris on bass and four live  recordings (including the stand-out six minute Now Or Never) from Cambridge and Birmingham.

Thirdly there’s the Faith And Meldoy EP featuring the rhythmically scampering Long Road Home recorded at UB40s Dep International Anthony Coote on guitars and 

Rob Tyler on organ plus three Wafter Thin studio demos of which Melody and Amelia are both particularly well worth the unearthing.  More will follow over the coming weeks.

Kings Heath-based shanty folk duo  David Fisher and Evan C. Ritchie aka KINGS HEATHENS return with their third album, Us Old Relics, again mixing  self-penned and traditional material. It opens with   Fisher’s Living The Dream’, written when he was torn between pursuing his travelling lifestyle or settling down   and a sequel to ‘Girl From the Mountain Town’ from both his solo Busking Beyond Borders and their debut 2022 EP. 

The first traditional, rewritten and sung unaccompanied by Ritchie, Eliza Lee is the first of three numbers about ships, this one being the clipper Margaret Evans, described as  a vessel of the Blue Star Line although it sank fifty years before the company was incorporated. With references to Texas girls (Ms Lee being one, I’d assume), Cornish copper  and Wadebridge Town, it’s fair to say it’s a rover of its own.

Chronologically displaced, that’s followed by a  new version of Girl From The Mountain Town’ in turn thematically offset by Ritchie’s Forever I’ll Stay, a song in the rambling folk tradition inspired by seeing fog on the Severn and written for his wife  as he was learning to be comfortable living in England.

Set to music by Fisher, who takes lead and plays a lyre harp, the strummed sway along We Will Be Free was a poem by George Loveless, one of the Tolpuddle, combined with verses from pioneering sociologist Harriet Martineau’s 1832 political reform anthem The Gathering of the Unions, the title here coming from the repeated refrain. 

Farewell To The Highlands is the Robert Burns lament, set to music by Ritchie who sings lead, returning then to traditional shanty sources as Ritchie renders an a capella Old Maui. Again with Ritchie on lead and bodhran and Fisher on lyre harp and well as banjo, an album standout, the second song about a ship is Captain And The Queen, written by Nova Scotia’s Dan McKinnon telling of the Bluenose, the Canadian racing ship and fishing schooner, which, sold to the West Indies Trading Company in 1942 and converted into a coastal freighter struck a coral reef off  near Haiti in 1946 and was abandoned, and sung in the voice of its late captain.

It’s back to the traditional canon with Fisher on lead and banjo for a five-minute plus Willie o’ Wins bury, this version and its lyrics a cobbling together of various recording and with a splash of bluegrass thrown in. Staying traditional, with Ritchie accompanying Fisher on bodhran, The Blacksmith is a familiar lament (here drawing on the Steeleye Span version) about a  faithless lover, the reference to the hammer in his hand surely euphemistic.

No folk album’s really complete without a murder ballad, the box ticked here by Ritchie taking lead on Willow Garden and telling of a maiden, one Rose Connelly, being poisoned and then stabbed by her sociopathic lover while she lies sleeping, her corpse thrown into the river, he then facing the scaffold while his father weeps for him.

Tune Set is a rousing  instrumental gathering of  ‘Off We Go’, ‘Kesh Jig’ and ‘Miller’s Maggott’, the album ending with the third ship tribute, Old Polina, Ritchie on lead for the traditional number about the titular whaler, the pride of the Dundee Seal and Whale Fishing Company which sank  in 1891 in the Davis Strait., the track fading out towards the close. It’s slightly disappointing that there’s not more of their own songs this time, but these old relics can still sing up a storm.

The cover featuring Simon Berger’s photo of an old red British telephone box standing in the sand dunes at Studland Peninsula in  Dorset, Kaarman is the latest cinematic  opus from zen rock instrumental duo Paul Kearns and Steve Peckover aka ARMCHAIR GODS. Divided into five Articles, it opens with the portentous drums and multi-part arrangement of  Trickle Truth culminating in  an  electric guitar storm before the drum lead it away. Second up is the Floydian-styled Rubicon which, with its allusion to Julius Caesar’s river crossing as a metaphorical point of no going back, opens with a building swell of keys before the drums ride in, structured into moments of reflective pause before the pace moves inexorably forward.

Nudging nine minutes, conjuring the Middle-Eastern images of the title,  Damascus  builds  tension as it unfolds and the tempo gathers with waves of sound and percussive underpinnings, big dramatic flourishes fuelling a  faster, more furious and urgent move to its climax. Opening with an almost Krautrock synth motif and wordless Gregorian-chant-like vocals, handclaps punctuating the atmospheric ascent,  Traverse Of The Gods was inspired by  Heinrich Harrer’s The White Spider and the psychological commitment summoned before stepping onto one of the Eiger’s most exposed climbing traverses after which the track is named, the swirling musical motifs capturing the danger and the ever changing weather conditions.

It ends, floating clouds of keys and Spanish guitar notes,  with the suitably cosmic and ethereal Vista Artemis, inspired by an image of astronaut Christina Koch gazing back at Earth from the Artemis II spacecraft, a majestic meditation on the expanse of space and our place within it. Best experienced in a darkened room and preferably on headphones, it’s a stunning journey. 

Drummer Paul Johnson augmenting the regular line up of double bassist Jerome Davies (who also plays trumpet), accordionist Trish Power, guitarist Lyndon Webb, and Marion Fleetwood on strings, GERRY COLVIN returns with Festina Lente Lives (Crocodile Music) a classical Latin adage meaning "make haste slowly. Inspired by a London cabbie’s remark, the album gets underway with the briskly shuffling All Men Are Fools, a witty observation of male idiocy (“All men are fools/We’re just made that way/We know the righteous path to choose but we always stray/We make our own bed in which we lie/Hide under the duvet of denial… The only single saving grace is that some of us know our place/But it’s just a matter of time before we blow it all on a tissue of lies”).

Colvin has a knack in unearthing little known stories and turning them into songs, case in point being the guitar shimmering double meaning titled Model Of A Man which, according to the notes resulted from finding an unopened Christmas present from 1964, an Airfix kit of a Spitfire, research revealing the pilot was modelled on Axel Svendsen, a Danish airman with the RAF base in Ibsley who, barely 20 and only having been with the squadron for three weeks, was shot down over  Northern France and killed in April 1942. Poignantly, the song tells of him “hanging on the wire in a bedroom sky/Immortalised in plastic paint and glue…a personal memorial for what he gave for us all”.

Equally rooted in real events, burnished by trumpet The Last Days Of Tryweryn recounts the flooding of the Capel Celyn valley in 1965 to provide Liverpool with water, submerging the last Welsh speaking community in North Wales sparking a  fight for national identity still remembered in the Welsh graffiti ‘Cofiwch Dryweryn’ (Remember Tryweryn!). Set to a steady walking rhythm, it speaks of local characters  and the impact on their lives (“Mrs Jones played the harp but was drowned by the dam machines…Mr Jones-Parry took the last post to the sole surviving farm/To the testing screech of the flood alarm”), the song celebrating how, reborn and galvanised, “Wales took its coat off rolled up its sleeves”.

Given a suitably Eastern European feel, My Name Is Nestor is a riposte to the racist flag wavers and hoisters decrying immigrants, a reminder that the UK’s patron saint, Saint George, was actually a Turk named Nestor who found Christianity and served as a Roman soldier, the lyrics wryly noting  “years from now they will hang my image on the wall/And I will saintly giggle and say ‘That’s not me at all’…I am the living embodiment of fake news from the fourth century”.

An encounter during a Christmas shopping trip to London inspired the brass swaying jaunty and delightfully whimsical The Priest Of Carnaby Street about an oddball Soho character, “the Spirit of a time gone by”, who “wore a Lord John hat Canary Cravat/Long frock coat and shiny spats” who, sitting a coffee shop, made “little ships from serviettes and discarded butts of cigarettes/And sunk them all in a sea of spilt coffee”. Complete with a na na na singlong refrain, it comes with name checks for Mary Quant, John Stephen and The Kinks.

On a  more serious note,  sung unaccompanied with a gospel tenor, The Absolution Boat  is about taking responsibility for our transgressions, adopting the metaphor of rowing across the river to salvation in “the land of faith and hope”, each stroke taking away a sin, it carries the punchline “the evil that I carry with me you’re gonna need a bigger boat”.

Having alluded to a certain Starford bard in the lyrics, Nestor makes a return for The Poet and The Saint, written for Shakespeare’s birthday celebrations on April 23, the same date as Saint George’s Day (“One wrestled with dragons one stories told/Each connected in mysterious ways…One lived by the sword, one words flowed from his quill”), the song raising a toast to  “this sceptred isle, this throne of Kings/This little world, this other Eden” with not a little irony in the lines “we happy breed a future do forge/Tempered in fire as brothers we band…Cry havoc and let slip the dogs of peace”.

Inspired by a visit to The Black Lion Hotel in New Quay Wales,  The Tragical Conceit of Captains Milbank and Kat appeared on 2017’s  Back And Forth album (reworked from  The Ghost of the Black Lion from the QVC album) telling of the fictional doomed romance between a naval captain and a she-pirate, fated to be always together but always apart.  Now, with a reference to Amazing Grace,  comes the sequel with the similarly shanty frisky seven-minute The Return Of Cutlass Kat, here sung by the  First Mate of  her ship the Harridan telling of  the survivors of its sinking (and the one thrown overboard as the Jonah), their rescue by and commandeering of a Lisbon slaver, and the return of Kat to 

New Quay and Captain Milbank (“broken blind and a shadow of what he had once been”) and while “neither recognised the other, nor recalled their history.. a light did shine in each of them, what little life was left to send both baptised of all their sins at peace eternally”. Or it might just be a tall tale to earn a jug, but, hey, that’s how legends are born.

The last of the studio tracks is You Me And The Apple Tree, a lovely spare fingerpicked simple love song about what binds hearts together (“I went to carve our name into the bark/You looked up and started to smile/Said ‘It would be like hurting a friend’…This tree became our family our home our church our sanctuary/Shade or shelter rain or sun/Let there be trees like these for everyone”). 

It’s rounded off with two live recordings, Tunnel To The Moon, about  the Nazi factory where the V1 and V2 rockets were build using slave labour overseen by the same scientists that put a man on the moon, and Broken Man, about his secondary school experience in the early 1970s, both recorded with  the Gerry Colvin Big Folk Orchestra at The Stratford Playhouse.  A true national treasure. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN OCTOBER 2026

Potentially the band’s final album, DEXY’S MIDNIGHT RUNNERS sign off with Love, Kevin Rowlands once more joined by Sean Read and Mike Timothy with Jim Paterson providing three cowrites. Lightly coloured by strings and horns, as the title suggests love in different forms is the main concern, although  the bookending  My Life In England, served in two parts, reflects on childhood memories of growing up in Wolverhampton after arriving from Ireland with his parents (“ I thought they said  meet when the schoolkids called me mate”), though Part Two has him launching into an invective about the state of the world as he spits out  “This world’s so fucking crazy, and innocent people being starved. We’ve got to stop this madness; it can’t go on no more. Our humanity is dying while they suffer over there. People being slaughtered, our governments don’t care . . . Rise up people in England”. 

All that vented, it proceeds through the piano-backed swing-jazz grooving You’ve Got The Love which basically just repeats the title over and over, the poignantly tender stripped back soulful Once A Man, Twice A Child about reconciling with and caring or his father in his final days and, voice soaring,  the 60s soul influenced You’re Alright sending a message of love to his grandchildren telling them to be good to themselves and be kind. You could heard Tom Jones sing this.

Underpinned by swirling  organ and steady walking drums, I Want To Be Holding You is his Christmas love song while, a lament for a lost love,  the cello pulsing  I’ll Always Love You comes on like a  Bond theme song.

Electric piano guides a dreamy bluesy Van Morrison shaded cover of Tim Buckley’s Strange Feelin’, relocating the lyrics to London and Wolverhampton, coming to the end with the beats-driving, tempo-shifting  falsetto-voiced soul (Northern and Detroit) of  It’s Over Now which feels more upbeat than the lyrics would warrant. Finally, prior to the England reprise, is Old Love, a wistful piano-led, strings tempered slow walking rhythm musing on growing older (“l hate getting old/It happened so fast; where did it go?/They don't see me/They just see my age”) while feeling the same inside (“I know I look different/But I feel the same inside/I have the same insecurities/ That I had when I was a child”), pondering on love in the autumn years, reflecting how, when he was younger, he wondered if oldies “fancy others their age”.   He concludes, “I don't want to think of myself as an age”; looking back over his career I think the better word is timeless.

JOHNNY FOREIGNER venture into concept album territory with  the typically sonically chaotic Forwards! which, taking Birmingham’s motto as its title, puts the city’s often controversial history and heritage under the lens, from the Lunar Society and Priestley Riots, through post war brutalist redevelopment, to the current era of strikes and misguided patriotism, drawing then and now comparisons with a wider national perspective.

Throughout the album punk trio  Luxury Nan Smell take on the role of The City Elders with backing vocals that interrupt, question or comment on the songs Bryn Bowen, appears as The Lords of Change, embodying the landlords, lawmakers and civic powerbrokers who shape the city.

The brief piano jabbing Foreword with semi-spoken words and background tumult sets the scene as they sing “I am riding Watt’s engine thru ragged centuries of progress… These machines don’t work for us, they work us, furnace fouled by rust, alive between the diamonds and the dust, this town never trusted us…I’m the last of my line still holding/My last name on a blue plaque on the crumbling ruins of the wrong building/I sleep to the sound of hammers, but in the end, the Rea will rise again”.

Battering the ears and mentioning St Martins, Deritend, Digbeth and Great Hampton Street, The Remnants of The Lunar Society leans into the chaos, more musically complex than it initially sounds, setting up the events of  the clamorous The Sacking of Fairhill House which addresses the Priestley Riots of 1791 directed against religious dissenters and sympathisers of the French Revolution that the home of Dr Joseph Priestley.

Opening with whistling,  urgent and pulsing, The Concrete Collar takes its title from a 1970 tabloid quote  about the brutalist Manzoni redevelopment of the city centre  (“Bulldoze the bits that the Luftwaffe missed”),  regarding it as a choke hold and which obliquely also pertains to Spaghetti Junction, wittily nodding to the criticism of the former library, famously referred to by the then Prince of Wales as a ‘carbuncle’.

The drum-belting ‘The City Elders Refrain mentions suspicions fires burning down listed buildings (“they’ll say it was kids but we know better than that”), notes of optimism sounding on the intricately picked  and, initially, musically calmer The Rea Will Rise Again, Kelly Parker singing in the voice of the river (“I brought the boats and the boats bought the factories and the factories bought the industries and the industries buried me …Some day the Rea will rise again.”).

The tumult in which that ends carries over into The New Navigation, which steals from the  18th century song, Birmingham Lads and, addressing the bankruptcy in “the city of a thousand cuts’ with no light ahead “where everyone who can afford to lives, when everyone who can afford to leaves” while “the banking clans…take a museum, add a station./Fast train back to the capital with the fire-sale rights to it all/Leave us betting on the guilt, but that line ain’t getting built” and, born into debut, you’ll be paying it off until you die

The stabbing propulsive The Great Work  turns its attention to thuggery in the name of patriotism, “ the frightened mob with a Union Jack” as they rail  that “normal men don’t siege hotels, form faceless flag cop street patrols or go shout at boats again”, repeating the concrete collar metaphor as  “the Rea runs red with rust and shame”.

It ends on hopeful notes with Our City Elders Reprise that simply repats the lines “When we build again, we must learn from our mistakes, build a city that makes our grandchildren proud.”, musically moving from lower to upper case vocals. It ends with the brief calm, soft and simple acoustic strummed  yr ideas  that takes the form as a semi-spoken love letter from the city to those who can revive the glory days “I was yearning you would move here. …all the debt don’t bother me, if you still believe in big dreams/I would build a factory, and fill it with yr machines/I love you, and yr ideas”. Ever forwards.

THE TWANG tease next year’s album, Bring Yourself, with the somewhat Oasis-sounding Something To Someone’, sounding a call for self-belief (undoubtedly fuelled by singer Jon Watkins working through the loss of his wife to cancer and a subsequent break up with fellow writer Phil Eltheridge that almost led to the band’s collapse) in its soaring chorus “Don’t try to be everything to everyone/Take it from me, it’s a waste of time/Just trying to be something to someone like me”.

DAN WHITEHOUSE  is in meditative mood for Only Love (Want To Know), a stripped to basics album about fatherhood, absence, and presence recorded live with no overdubs with  jazz pianist David O'Brien reharmonising and reshaping as they went, never playing the songs the same way twice and mostly written in Minatomirai, a hyper-modern district on Tokyo Bay in Japan where Dan spends 90 days a year on a tourist visa to be with his son.

It opens with the tentative piano notes of  Bird of Paradise which uses a flower as a metaphor for commodified intimacy (“I tried to be discreet, parked in another street …  

Just another lonely soul you welcome in”), exploring loneliness and  finding peace in what the arrangement brings (“No matter how many lies/I hope you realise/Behind the vice/You’re my bird of paradise …and for a moment there I found some peace in war”.

The title track is inspired by what he calls the boomerang  relationship with his son (“Only love leads me away from you/Only love guides me back") but applies to any relationship where distance divides, capturing the experience in the existential yet physical poetic image “I carve your name onto my forearm/It’s a performance no one likes/You say you love the taste of my blood/And we both know this to be a lie”.

The album features two covers, the first a sublime, melancholic reading of Harbottle and Jonas’s Wild Goose , transforming its call to seek  freedom and dreams into  willing his son towards wildness and self-expression. The second cover, Spaces, is by his manager Katie (no relation) Whitehouse, a song written for her daughter as a pledge of support in troubled times of mental turmoil that translates perfectly to  his feelings for his son.

The longest track at five-and-a-half minutes, A Thousand Lives shares a similar sentiment in as much as its about freeing yourself of fears, doubts and depression and being in the moment (“There’s nothing here to be afraid of/These people they have my back/And my fears don’t jump out of the bushes/As they once did /Yeah I’m pretty sure I’ve cleared my path /Of any and all obstruction/And I can share and celebrate what is happening now …and I can smile with you again”), the lines “ He knows where I am/He can hear my voice/I won’t lay awake I made my choice/We can dance through the night a thousand times” again relating to the album’s father-son bedrock.

Taking inspiration from Phillip Glass,  whom he follows on social media, the instrumental  Mina Glass, built around stillness, repetition, and quiet awe, arose from noting a post by the composer from Minatomirai, the view from his window looking almost identical to his own, the title nodding to his name but also the character in Dracula, Glass having composed a new score for the 1931 horror.

His 90-day annual reunion inevitably is shadowed by the realisation that he will eventually have to leave and  fly back home and, written in Tokyo,  Every Brick confronts that pain  and speaks of acknowledging rather than distracting himself from that grief  and plays as a tender love letter to his son and a hope for a future forged from their experience ("I hope that someday you will see the light and find the house that all this built/It’s got your name on engraved on every brick/And you can be yourself, whatever the hell that is” as he vows “I will watch I will wait/My shoulders broad I’ll always carry you/What you give me I can take/I know we’ll find a way to bury this”.

It ends, by way of a somewhat thematic departure with Are You There? a song inspired by a real murder, the ghost of the dead father vising his child on their birthday  (“I’m sitting next to you, and asking how do you feel?/So blow out your candles, on your special day/Make a wish and I will always stay…She made me an angel for you - now I’m always there (watching over you)”) but also reflects on the darker sense of  feeling like an observer in your own life.  There’s nothing here to have you singing or dancing along to,  but in touching the heart, Only Love’s labours are most definitely not lost.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN SEPTEMBER 2026

Currently based in  San Francisco,  MATTHEW EDWARDS  pays tribute to his roots with  The Small Heath Book Of The Dead (Too Good To Be True) charting   hardships, lost friends  and mythic landscape variously accompanied by Isaac Bonnell on keys and electric guitar, drummer Paul Comaskey, Daniel Fabricant on upright bass. Tom Heyman on pedal steel, percussionist Andres Reyes Gomes, Karina Denike  on  backing vocals and Charith Premawardhana  and Diane Grubbe on viola and woodwind, respectively.

The John Betjeman Blues  (“Disheveled, dyslexic, dirty and damned/We couldn’t get on so we started a band/I played the Heretic harmonium/And all of the cool kids thought we were dumb”) opens in a claustrophobic bluesy rock mood, again vocally sounding like a fusion of Bowie and Roy Harper, then, Angeline Morrison on backing vocals and pedal steel keening, Old Albion is a slow walking country-coloured number about antipathy (“There’s nazis in the shopping mall/So put the kettle on…we’ve hung up our principles on the washing line…all along I think we’ve known what’s wrong/But we’ll sit in our bedrooms and put some records on”).

A brief acoustic and pedal steel number, New English Library (publisher of such counter culture books as Chopper, Suedehead and Mama) marks a furtive budding sexual awakening through the pages of books and nudie  magazines , declaring “from Geoffrey Chaucer to these annuals of savagery/Each page is delightful, deliciously doomed/Look out world I’m arriving there soon”.

A woozy swayalong The Redgraves   presumably has nothing to do with the acting dynasty (unless a reference to Vannesa  and her brother’s anti-war political activism) but the line lifted from to the satirical military protest song Bless ‘Em All hints at it being about a veteran  with PTSD  (“He’s been drinking since Christmas 2004/As it helps with the tyrants, it helps with the bores”).

 Another bluesy Bowie-esque strummer,  Bad Timing is another about someone with a  fucked up life (“He married well but they had bad timing…and it followed them around…a slow divorce and his bad timing/And he knew it all along”).  Katie Chan on saxophone, the clipping percussion-driven title track nods to the punk era with lyrics that namecheck iconic venues (the Jester, The Jug of Ale, The Nightingale, The Viaduct) and “the sound of life underground” embodied in such clique local fashion legends as “Jane and Patty and Mike and Carol/All of them dressed in immoral apparel”.

Haunted by  the ghosts of Sgt Pepper, Experimental Theatre is wry lament about losing a girlfriend to an avant garde art troupe and the narrator developing an existential crisis as a consequence , so take a bow if you recognised Jarre, BS Johnson and Romain Gary as cult artist who came to tragic ends. 

Moving with a Latin sway and woodwind frills, Harriet High is basically a love song  (“I’m sick of them looking through you/So come to bohemia with me”)  thought how romantic running away to Dolgellau in Wales is open to debate.

 It ends with the barroom piano boogie and  boxing-themed metaphor of the lyrically tumbling  speak-sing Matthew Edwards vs Himself  (“A title fight for the middleweight belt…so, take a seat at ringside/Because the only one that’s losing is me/It’s Matthew Edwards Vs the past/A brighter lad of working class”). As musically accessible and engaging as it is often lyrically obscure, its been described as “diaristic glam-folk with a strong emotional core and compelling narrative bent”. Seems fair.

Titled for the iconic Birmingham landmark, BONFIRE RADICALS are in fine fettle for their third full-length self-released album Spaghetti Junction (with their trademark mix of mesmerisingly chaotic but highly discipled  instrumentals that see a wide spectrum of world music styles colliding. 

Sporting the Eastern European colours you’d expect from the title,  Pete Churchill and clarinetist  Katie  Stevens knocked out Balkan Replacement Service over a lunch hour between workshops, the track featuring Pete’s new acquisition of  a cherry-wood Italian accordion (apparently bought with money earned from his solar panels). The shortest track at just over three minutes,  it opens with a brief drone before rattling along like a bus driven by a dervish, taking bends on two wheels and, taking a break from Ilias Lintzos’s clattering drums,  briefly calling into the depot for a  woodwind whirlygig solo.

For Im Tocht Lang Tae See Dee, violinist Sarah Farmer (her last album with the band and now replaced by Emily Dawe|) gathers together three traditional tunes   from Shetland's fiddle tradition, Dus Bun Lang Awa Am Im Tocht Lang Tae See Dee., an untitled reel learned from Kevin Anderson of Fiddler’s Bid and  the traditional-styled Willie Be Wast Da Loch composed by  Gideon Stove.

After that little mouthful, the longest track  is the tempo and style swerving six-minute plus  Northern Lights which, to quote the notes is a Norwegian/Swedish sandwich with an  afrobeat, South African highlife and Ethiopian inspired 6/8 groove filling peppered by a Sub-Saharan clave.. 

World music buffs will of course know that Der Heyser Bulgar is a 19th-century dance tune made  famous by clarinetist Naftule Brandwein, here repped by Katie, though back then nobody ever thought to  flesh it out with a doom-rock middle section and a closing accordion-led wonky waltz. 

Michelle Holloway’s recorder dancing along and the bass pulsing, Green Fingered Hector has its origins in guitarist Emmar Reading’s first gig with the band were she realised to her horror that she had no idea how to play the next track on the set list  and comes with a virtually Wagnerian wordless vocal, the percussion freaking out on either side.

Originally commissioned by composer Sid Peacock for his Surge Orchestra, Krims Krams Rŭčenica lets Katie loose for her take on a traditional Bulgarian waltz, Krim Krams a colloquial German term meaning "knick-knacks" " and Rŭčenica that aforementioned waltz, this version opening on melancholic notes and climaxing with a drum n bass finale.

North East Brazil is the port of call for Mara anchored by Maracatu rhythms, Katie providing the drum clattering opening Jig For Mini  in response to some guitar loop pedal noodling by Emma and the second, Bog an Lochan, one of the earliest strathspeys  in the Highland manuscripts, giving percussion its head before closing with The Ivy League Set taken from the repertoire of 19^th century piper Phillip Goodman with Katie on whistle. 

Like the opener, the title track was the result of a Katie and Pete dare, resulting in  a lurching frolic lifted from an unperformed tune he’d written for a Sardinian band they’d once both been in and comes with a mock-opera choir singing the title before it seems to come to a wheezing halt only to burst back to life with a brief flurry of da da das

 It ends with another local nod with the bonus track, the only actual song,  the slow swaying, phone lights aloft, Birmingham Rain, an American folk-tinged hometown heartbreak anthem (“Driver stops by me, I get in by his side/What can I tell him don’t want to explain/Tell him my tears are  just Birmingham Rain”) written by local singer-songwriter Barbara Norden, wistfully sung by Michelle backed by the Choir with No Name  Birmingham, the city's choir for people affected by homelessness of which she’s a volunteer, Pete the musical director  and Katie playing in its band. Well worth navigating. 

One of John Napier’s many music projects, an angular punk-funk trio with Olly Forrester and Andy Kearney also behind the head sacs, THE LINE MANAGERS return with New Lines Of Enquiry via Adrian Goldberg’s label Jenny's Feather Factory (named for a great aunt who died in the Holocaust), kicking off with the abrasive chugging bass staccato but catchy False Starts, a surging Welcome To The Real World follows (Stranglers influences sparking away) with its slowed down mid-section and freak out ending. 

Opening with a pulsing electronic beat, the vocals initially back in the mix, Algorithms  is a slow-paced rap on similar lines to Big Special that heads to a clattering drums ending, giving way to the pop funky riffs and rhythm of Big Surprise. It ends with, first, the bass burping, drum thudding  guitar stabbing Dead Horse Theory with its catchy chorus hook and then, with a spoken chatter intro, the environmental-crisis themed Fundamental with its lengthy choppy, drum drone and prog-rock  guitar scraping instrumental build up to the vocals and hood refrain before it vanishes into the ether.  As a bonus, there’s a live version of The Black Post with its rant against the stagnation of post-millennial culture and which surely owes a debt to Blue Oyster Cult as much as The Fall. 

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN AUGUST 2026

Most recently seen playing with or supporting Rob Peters, HANNAH BROWN returns to  her own music with the self-released I Found Myself. A moody keys, guitars and drums arrangement with a dank forest folk feel she says it “speaks to my awakening beyond societal expectations and criticism, unleashing raw, unfiltered expression from the heart. Eyes wide open whilst venturing deeper into the depths of who I am.” Or to quote the lyric: “I found a path that looked so dark… it felt lonely at first/I found a path and it felt like heaven”.

Becoming increasingly ubiquitous, KATHERINE PRIDDY’s just released Secrets Still Remain via Bandcamp, her fingerpicked atmospheric and spookily sung theme tune to Radio 4’s podcast Uncanny Cold Cases,  her soaring ethereal and  ghostly vocals set against a   stormy soundscape that soars to a dramatic   climax before fading to a whispered ending. 

For her contribution to this year’s sports-themed 21st Century Folk for BBC Radio 2, she’s also just released  The Long Way Home a nimbly fingerpicked, featheringly sung folksy song with puttering drums  about Hannah Lancaster  who was an elite cyclist and her sister’s carer  before sustaining a brain injury in a crash. Now recovered, she’s  training to be a fire-fighter and Priddy says the song is her attempt to capture the young woman behind everything, discovering herself on her path to recovery.

And continuing the cycling theme, the lyrics capturing the rhythm and pressure of the race, Cyclone, is a standalone non-album single from DAN WHITEHOUSE with Dave O’Brien to commemorate   Marshall Walter "Major" Taylor. An American sprint champion, born in 1878, he set more than 20 world records despite enduring relentless racism and segregation both on and off the track making history as the second Black world champion in any sport and the first African-American to achieve a world championship in cycling. In his notes, Whitehouse wrote the song inspired by Taylor’s self-belief after learning that, at just 18, he was  only Black competitor among   28 riders who participated in the Six Day Race at Madison Square Garden, completing 1732 miles on the 0.1 mile track and sleeping only one hour for every seven, all while being pushed and pulled by the other riders and taunted and jeered by the crowd. (www.dan-whitehouse.com)

Dan’s also the driving force behind The Wall People,  a community songwriting and storytelling project based at The Priory Community Centre in Dudley. In similar fashion to his project about Stourbridge’s glassmaking heritage, this explores  the everyday culture of neighbours (especially  those of  the Priory and Wrens Nest housing estates) gathering informally on garden walls, front steps and local shops - where conversation, humour and mutual support continue to shape community life in the absence of the  pubs, venues and shops that have closed down. Featuring song and spoken word, it was  inspired by oral histories and memories of life in the Black Country from residents, among them local butcher Roger Beasley (Williams The Butchers) and  salon owner Sharon Haywood (Sharon’s Salon), the project also features new music created by students of St James’ Academy and young people working with hip hop artist Marik Erskine.  

 It opens with the project title, written by Dan who adds guitar and vocals with Gustaf Ljunggren  on piano, mandolin and bass and  community voices (Dan’s parents Pete and Brenda included), providing the backing.   He’s is also the vocalist  and lyrics writer for  the semi-spoken Any Old Iron, Williams The Butchers, Sharon’s Salon and Follow Your Star (co-written with  Adam Bradley) and co-wrote  the rather lovely Bromley Bridge, the vocals here by Jenny Sunter.  The strummed Corsican Pine is written and sung by Alex Jones while, feature rap from Erskine, Beautiful Town and Dudley Kingdom write written and inspired by students of St James’ Academy. Finally, with looped spoken word sample from Shane Stevens,  Dan’s son Taiga Mori-Whitehouse provides the strings for the spacey beats-led Split An Atom.

The past few years have seen THE LOST NOTES ride an ever-swelling wave from singing  at open mic sessions to selling out the 280 seater Jennifer Blackwell Performance Space at Symphony Hall. And it here that, on Feb 4, they recorded Live at Birmingham Symphony Hall, the album capturing the warmth, energy, musical diversity, wit and finesse of their celebrated live shows. The regular full band line-up of  Ben Mills (vocals, guitar, harmonica, trumpet,  piano), Oli Jobes (vocals, guitar), Lucy Mills (vocals, ukulele), Max Tomlinson (drums) and Pete Churchill (double bass, accordion) was augmented on some numbers by acclaimed jazz pianist Piera Onacko, Rebecca and Simon from opening act The Rosellys on banjo  and fiddle and the massed voices of The Choir With No Name.

Mixing material from their three albums alongside songs as yet to get a  studio treatment, it opens with familiar set favourite Holdin’On, starting with a slow strummed guitar before breaking out into an up-tempo flurry guaranteed to get the crowd roused. Whisky For Breakfast takes thing in a  slower, bluesier direction with Ben on harmonica before Don’t Try It On Me showcases their harmonies and Americana colours. Nudging seven minutes, Lucy on lead, Done With The Waiting with its Anadalcuian guitar intro and Latin jazzed urgency marks the first piano solo showcase appearance by Onacko before Oli takes over for the acoustic swayalong folksiness of  A Fool Once Told Me.

Oli again on vocals, the first of the ‘new’ songs comes with the fingerpicked Head Over Heels, another folksy track, followed by the second with Lucy on  the smokey jazz bar piano blues of  her self-penned Heartache.

Returning to familiar ground, the CWNN joins proceedings for  the sha la la la folk pop of Slow Down with its unaccompanied refrain before kicking the pace back up with the swaggering, trumped-coloured country romping Wildman showcasing Churchill’s double bass. .Audience whoops welcome another set favourite with Simon Rosselly joining on fiddle for  the bluegrassy galloping Run Like A River, an outlaw on the run after shooting his unfaithful wife and her lover number   before committing suicide.

Switching the mood comes the fingerpicked guitar and close harmonies of the glorious Pieces Of A Star, followed by another highlight staple with Ben on peak form for the building bluesy ballad God Loves A Sinner. It’s back to piano for another new number, Ben on lead for the slow and melancholic, gradually swelling We Don’t Need Another Love Song, Lucy showcasing on the addictive toxic relationship  number Mine Is The Heart with its   melodic and thematic echoes of Diamonds & Rust. 

Churchill’s bass get prominence for the jazzed boogie of  Hey Maloney with its  call and response vocals, another new number the lyrics of which feature the title of their last album, Good Luck Shoes. That album’s the source of the penultimate anthemic front porch country ballad No Place Like Home with its  resonant fingerpicked guitar, Onako, The Rossellys and the CWNN returning to the stage for the rousing audience handclapper, all join in seven-minute staple  closer Take My Hand.  Sadly missing from the night’s set are All At Sea,  I Got Time, actual closer Run Free Right Now and  the encore, Green Grass, but that’s a  bit like a glutton complaining the feast didn’t have enough cream cakes.  With a new studio album lined up before the year ends, it’s surely only a matter of time before they’re back to sell out signs on the main stage too.

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Based in Stourbridge, THE CLARKES & Co  are Stephen  and Sue Clarke, he on guitar, she  English concertina, their music acoustic and at times pastoral folk with  wry, sometimes witty lyrics about matters of the heart, passing time and, occasionally, politics

The ebb tide of the years is the theme for Save the Pangolin and Nine Other Love Stories’ opening musician-themed circular fingerpicked June Moon Spoon   with its talk of  youthful self-destructive tendencies (“Climbed the tree for fun/Then you sawed off the branch/The one you were standing on”) and .family fragmentations (“You married your sweetheart, raised a family/Your wife she flew left the nest but your kids are yet to leave”), although it ends though with the positive thought that while the “there’s still time to call the tune/To find the rhyme for June and Spoon”  rather than just “howling at the moon in a garden on the edge of town”.   

 Given a choppy rhythm,  Starlings sketches a long-lasting romantic bond though the image of a pair of perching birds “ while, opening with concertina, Coming Home To Me  is   about finding yourself in memories of the past  after losing direction.

The sort of title track, the close harmony fingerpicked ‘Pangolin’ (a scaly ant-eater if you didn’t know) opens with an image of a clay model made by a friend and moves to talk of conservation and potential extinction with it hunted for its meat and medicinal scales.

Another with a circling guitar pattern, the title of  the bluesy folk Car Park D (For Chemotherapy) tells its own story with its hospital visit observations while The Man It Happened To takes a similar look at potential mortality (“You won’t see it coming/You won’t hear those blaring horns./It’s too late to get the warning”) with a stiff upper lip response (“When the sky comes down on you/Put on your hat and walk on through…Though you know you’ve lost the game/You go and play it anyway”).

A troubadour Americana number, Rockabye Lullaby is an at least partial post-recovery celebration (“Now the meaning of good news/Has been redefined/Not what we would choose/But I’ll make them friends of mine”) just as Dancing Backwards is about being grateful for what you have and the time you’ve had it. It does though  carry hints of a break-up … (“you’re not coming my way/I’m headed for the street/Like that bird on the wire/I think that’s how I tend to feel/The only thing I know for sure/Is who got the better deal”), a  suggestion that carries over   into the nimbly picked and discordant concertina Between The  Thorn And The  Rose (“She packed a suitcase, all memories and tears/The worst and the best thing that she had done in years/That’s the way it goes”).

It ends with another realistic but optimistic note with On We Go as Stephen sings “what you get is what you see/It’s getting better for you and me/Books and covers are all on show/Turn the page and on we go…we can grow old now, down by the sea/Watching the boats come in/Watching them sail away - building our stone tower to the toppling sun”. 

Exclusively on Bandcamp, Maggie de Monde, aka SCARLET FANTASTIC, is releasing Without Summer Remixed, headed up by a stripped back voice and piano version alongside  a New Order-flavoured dancefloor remix by Cold War Cowboys capturing the Balearic club spirit from the late 1980s while Montjuic taps into summer sunsets for a spacey chilled out downtempo poolside mix.

MIKE DAVIES COLUMN JULY 2026

 

Over the past 20 years, singer, songwriter, music teacher and, briefly, my landlord, JOHN NAPIER has released, physically and digitally, a vast number of singles, EPs and albums, variously under his own name or as part of an array of stylistically diverse collaborations such as Waler, The Line Managers, The Snowflakes, The Midworth Ramblers, Jeremiah Weeps and Italo Disco outfit Real Velour.  To mark the anniversary, he’s now released ‘White Elephants – A Compilation MMIII – MMXXIII’ featuring ten of the one and ten of the other.

In solo terms, featuring Becky Pickin’s electric piano and Andy Miles’s guitar, it opens with   slow walking ‘White Elephants’, an ineffably sad  number about a father’s sadness that his children, his white elephants,  are unwilling or unable to leave the nest  and have lives of their own, achingly captured in the lines “Well I'm proud of my sons/But it hurts to have lived with them alone for so long/I wish they'd move on… I'm out of ideas/And I've tried to look out for them for so many years/As time lingers on/Despite my best efforts, they're no further on… They're bold and devoted, gentle and kind/Made of only the best parts of me/But each day they're wasting away on the vine”.

Rather more upbeat is the optimistic note of the folksy picked flickering campfire singalong ‘I Don't Know How I Know This’ (“Things may get much worse but someday I can tell/The world is going to wake up to itself/And be at last in perfect health… When all of those who've tried to drive us back/Will suddenly run out of track”) as he sings “I believe in paradise, here on earth not after life/And isn't that worth sacrifice/To see the best of us revived?”

With a guitar line that evokes ‘I Want To See The Bright Lights Tonight’, the title track is about falling short of  your expectations (“Faith tells me there is something more to me/But fate has not dealt me the hand I thought I'd see”, but still holding fast to a determination make it so (“Well I may not be the man I thought that I was s’posed to be/But I still believe the answer lies in me/Cause I made a vow so long ago that I intend to keep/And I won't give up until the world has seen/Oh, the man in me”).   He sings “What makes you think that you are special?/What makes you think you are the one?/When there are millions more just like you/Who think the world has got it wrong”, with the observation that “You don't deserve it and you sure as hell ain't earned it/Perhaps it's time you moved along”, but it comes with an implicit faith in the capability of the individual to do something bring about some kind of revolution because “change/Is never gonna happen without me”, even if you don’t yet know how. 

That’s followed by the fingerpicked and harmonica colours of the gentle McCartney-bruised title track of ‘Human After All’ while, from ‘Things Are Much Worse Than We Had Thought’,  the whistling ‘Heard It On The Radio’ is another cheery little number about infringement of liberties as he sings “we are not blind, were just not tough enough this time”, of replenishing empathy with apathy because “our hearts’ not big enough this time”.

Of a rockier persuasion with chiming guitars, the patriotic (in a good sense) ‘The Beauty Of England’ was the B side to ‘Over The Hills And Far Away’ (and also on the Waler EP ‘England Now!’),  the strummed, brass tinged ‘False Economy’ was a 2020 single, the same year producing ‘I Don’t Mean To Sound Cynical’ with Selina Blakeney on backing vocals  from ‘Tombstones’, the Laurel Canyon-flavoured ‘Here I Am’ dates from 2022, with a Streets-styled spoken verses and a country romping chorus ‘Living On The Cutting Edge Of Retro’ was a 2021 single with The Humdrum Express, though I can’t find the source of  the chugging country swaying ‘Annie’  but it’s 2006 or earlier. I’m surprised though that he didn’t include either ‘Not Your Enemy’ or, to my mind one of his best, ‘I’m Going Out For A While’.

The collaborations kick off with The Snowflakes’ moodier 70s Beatles rock feeling ‘Regrets’, followed by Waler, his electronic alt-folk duo with Vincent Gould, and the Spaghetti-Western flavoured ‘One Horse Town’, and then  punk-rap outfit The Line Managers  alongside bassist Andy Kearney and drummer Olly Forrester  with  The Black Post  a rant against the stagnation of post-millennial culture set to a relentless punk, garage rock groove. The Midworth Ramblers are a duo with  Mike Nicholson and ‘Apple Trees In Bloom’ is a hypnotic funky folk steady rhythm groove from 2023. Real Velour contribute the bubbling electro ‘Let Me Know Tonight’ and the disc’s rounded off with the doomy strummed, droning ‘”The Death Of The West’ by Jeremiah Weeps, of which I have no background info, and John on vocals for The Dissenters’ slow 70s cosmic psychedelic ode to ‘Mushy Peas’. (www.johnnapierbandcamp.com)

An early taster for October’s ‘Surface, Echo & Sound’,  EDITORS release ‘Rush’, a surging number which frontman Tom Smith, who plays mandolin on the single, says has two people in a bar talking about life, drinking and reflecting on its highs and lows (“we talk about religion, swallowed up by a bar scene/I'm not walking on the water, illusion of the light/When you learnt to meet my gaze, there were halos in your eyes”) and explores the "idea of finding comfort in people close to me".