The video for my labelmate Felix Hagan’s song “My Little Lusitania” is now online. In it I guest as a Bronson-esque pugilist loner. It was a lot of fun to make!
I wrote a little article on the project shortly after the shoot. That can be read here.
Scarecrow
It is one of the great pleasures of my life when other people sing the songs I write.
I am absolutely in love with Bridie Jackson & The Arbour‘s recording of “Scarecrow”. The subject of the song suits Bridie’s voice so well – far better than mine!
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My background is in folk music. Mostly Scottish, Irish, English and North American. They all have their moments of singular beauty, particularly when they overlap, Irish immigrant songs about travelling to America are a good example of this. Tunes about uprooting oneself carry so much emotion, there is a mix of nostalgia for the past and expectancy/optimism/fear for the future. A sense of place is very important, but also placelessness.
When I wrote the song I wanted the geography to be detailed but simultaneously nonspecific (even confused), or possibly a homogenized location drawn from elements of all the aforementioned countries. There are mentions of plants that do not cohabit (fern and long-leaf pine for instance). Fern is special to me as it holds early memories of my grandfather’s house on the Isle Of Skye, where I’d wade through acres of the stuff as a child, its rough leaves coming up to my chest, as exhausting as walking through deep water. Long-Leaf pine is significant as it’s what poor people’s coffins were mostly made out of in the USA at the end of the nineteenth century (I did quite a bit of reading into this while fact-checking my metaphors!). The seasons are also mixed up (it is simultaneously winter and autumn). In the song we find the lost soul of a young bride looking at a scarecrow dressed in her wedding gown. I figured both time and place probably get confused when you’re dead.
The most important thing for me was to write a story where there was no story. Too often folk songs feature characters who are the victims of extreme circumstances, but too often in real life we are the victims of a complete lack of extreme circumstances. This dead narrator was not killed by a jealous lover or a sinking ship or an ancient prophesy or a war. She’s just one of those people who dies of nothing.
I had a school friend who died suddenly aged eighteen. No one knew why. It happened instantly – there was nothing to blame, nothing to hate. It had a profound effect on everyone in my school year. Retrospectively it is where I draw the line between my childhood and adulthood. The moment I heard the news is one I have revisited many times in songs, in all sorts of ways, some direct and some less so. This is the most recent example.
I can’t imagine any singer who can pack all that into a single vocal delivery better than Bridie Jackson. I am very lucky.
Long Black Veil
The Bedlam Six and I have been holed up in our studio house for a week now, making good progress on the new album and having a lot of fun at the same time. I’ve been keeping a daily diary of our work over on the band blog if you’re interested in the process.
During a break in the recording we jammed out this old classic. No matter how loud we can get on stage, our roots are squarely in folk music!
The Difficult Second Album
In late 2007, a year after the Bedlam Six was formed, we started recording an album called Found Drowned. The line-up was a little different then, the dominant sound for much of it was a string section provided by Hannah and Georgina from The Moulettes (a phenomenal band that you should investigate forthwith if you’re unfamiliar with their work). In total there were over a dozen players involved (plus a twenty strong choir of drunks that features on a couple of tracks).
We bit off way more than we could chew. For a start we had no real idea of the kind of band we were then or how we’d evolve in the subsequent years (we were very much a folk band with traces of rock and swing rather than the other way round) but also (and this is the really important bit) we didn’t actually know how to record an album. We recorded thirteen tracks over ten days in the Withington house I used to share with Cleg the Bedlam guitarist (twelve made the finished record). It was a wild and confusing time, very much a do-as-much-as-you-can-and-we’ll-sort-it-out-later process. I remember spending weeks with Dan (our engineer and bassist) chipping away at the post-production, trying to find the songs among the confusion of noises. I think it sounds remarkably good considering our inexperience and the rather impoverished set-up.
But since then we’ve been trying to perfect the way we record. Trying to catch the live chemistry whilst simultaneously adding the kind of subtlety not available when stomping about on a stage. We’ve used professional recording studios and we’ve recorded live concerts; both have their charms and advantages but neither are ideal when attempting to make something a bit, well, special.
Last year we decided to go back to basics and follow the lead of our heroes The Band, creating our very own Big Pink – a house on the south coast of England far away from the distractions of our Manchester lives, a place we could all live and work in, somewhere we wouldn’t have to watch the clock, where we could relax and focus solely on the project at hand. That’s where we recorded our EP “Memoir Noir”, in my opinion the most honest record we’ve ever made. It is what I think all records should be: a moment in time.
So we’re going back there. Indeed, we are back there now. Today is the first day of a three week stretch in which we intend to record our difficult second album, five years after our debut. We know each other a lot better now, I’d even go so far as to say we know ourselves a lot better now.
There’s a lot of debate about the relevance of albums now that the way in which people consume music is changing so much. But as long as there are people who still favour the Long Player format then we’ll keep making them. I like albums. Everyone in the band likes albums. There is a peculiar majesty to a good album that exists far outside a simple arrangement of songs.
So now we’re locking the doors and closing the curtains on the outside world, when we come out again we’ll hopefully be clutching a piece of work that we all really like. And hopefully you’ll like it too.
You can follow our daily progress on the band blog at http://www.bedlamsix.tumblr.com (we’ll be posting photos, video clips and a diary of sorts). Here’s a video montage from last year’s recording session…
New Article: “Music As Currency Not Culture”
Last month one of my articles was published in The Cultural Value Initiative. It wasn’t until they got in touch that I realised “Cultural Value” was a subject I’d been writing about regularly since 2010 (I just thought I was venting some spleen).
Maybe the reason that particular article was picked up was because I finally found the courage to talk about the internal battle raging (in varying degrees of fury) inside all professional and semi-professional musicians: Art versus Money.
