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.
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